skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The music industry is fortunate in that it has live shows and events to help support it.
Note that the chart uses a logarithmic y-axis, so it is most useful for relative comparisons. Don't try to get absolute data from it as our brains aren't built for doing exponential graph transformations.
50-53 growth is as strong as the general trendline. 90-91 is too small to tell.
That judgment is partly outside the more mechanical parts of cryptography. You have to see what your application domain demands.

OTR is just the first example I could think of, that gives different guarantees than most normal cryptosystems. I don't particularly recommend it for anything apart from instant messaging. And I wouldn't recommend implementing your own.

If I speak to you in private (and we know each other), you can be sure you are speaking to me, but you won't be able to proof to any third party anything I said. OTR can give you something like that. PGP can't.

For most application you will be well served with PGP or TLS. But be aware of what baggage they bring. For some areas losing deniability via PGP can be worse than plain text.
Been there: http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/07/netflix-closing.html
Does anyone know if The Art of Computer Programming will be released as an eBook soon?
A comment and a question:

1. It should be fairly trivial to test that your implementation is giving exactly the same output as the c libs (once you have chosen a particular random number that feeds into the algorithm). It seems like the trickiest part of testing will be ensuring that you are using the same character set everywhere.

2. Why is it important to have a "cryptographically strong" PRNG? Doesn't this just turn into a salt? Does a salt generator really need to be cryptographically strong?

Someone please correct me if I am being naive here.
No, not in this context. "Most iOS devices are not iPhones" is an accurate statement. It's also accurate in attempting to get the point across: iOS doesn't necessarily mean iPhone, and that iPhone isn't the only source of iOS platform that should be considered.

It's like the idea of significant. All too often, people confuse significant with majority. This is not the case. Significant rarely means majority, except when used in the all too cumbersome "significant majority".

Finally, most people would agree even a 5% different is a significant difference. =)
Japanese public debt is actually at ~200% of GDP. Australia is not seen as a particularly safe bond issuer, we could not sustain that level of debt.
This is a frequent recurring theme on daring fireball. Doesn't he know the Panic guys?

http://daringfireball.net/search?q=claim+chowder
Make sure that it can also divide. My favourite Coverity glitch is when it looked at some IPv6 code and announced "assuming i % 8 != 0" and "assuming i == 128" at the same time. (And then claimed that we would access ipv6addr[16].)
Those things are really scary. Perhaps ATMs should come with a smooth, polished slot where attachments are hard to conceal.
The Greatest Scam in Tech: Revisited
Out of six or seven wars, he picks the ones that make his case. This guy (and anyone tempted to draw any conclusions from this chart) should read A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
Just curious:
For a similar system to tarsnap where local data is encrypted via pgp and stored on a remote system, what extra benefit is there to use TLS for the data transfer/data i motion?
Not 300000 "Android devices" - 300000 Android "Phones". You are comparing Phones vs. Phones+Media Players+Tablets.
"Watching the Apple share price graph over the course of 7 days starting with Steve's step down announcement yesterday through the earnings call today is going to be a really interesting exercise on timing bad news."

Word on the street is that Jobs had already shown up less at Apple in the last few weeks, the announcement was obviously timed to coincide with a bank holiday.

But, if Apple's quarterly results turned out lower than Apple's guidance and the Street's expectations, I bet Jobs' sick leave would have been announced at an earlier date, so that the two shocks wouldn't have amplified one another.

(Instead, at today's closing bell Apple's stock was back to the level of a couple days a go. An hour later, when Apple's Q1 results were in, trading actually went up to an unprecedented height. So Apple's cunning plan worked out quite nicely.)
More before and after pictures from the Brisbane floods
That claim was also made during the middle of the holiday season. I'd wager activations have cooled off since then.
Visualize your commits - Code Swarm
Gnome 3 "Made of Ugly." How is it possible that the aliasing on those fonts in the example image is allowed on the front page of their marketing. Every third line is a different size and has a blurry appearance.
Xenix was not just internal, they also sold it.
In addition, in my case at least, it's causing eye-strain.
If you're trying to make something in pure Lisp, your odds of failure are less if you take an existing hashing algorithm (e.g. SHA-256) and just iterate it a bunch of times. Ironclad has SHA-256, so this is really easy:

(defun slow-hash (password salt &key (iterations 10000))
"Produces a 256-bit hashed value of password and salt, slowly. Uses
a tweakable number of iterations, which should not be less than
1000, and which defaults to 10000."
(let ((hash (ironclad:make-digest :sha256)))
;; First, hash the salt and password
(ironclad:update-digest hash
(ironclad:ascii-string-to-byte-array salt))
(ironclad:update-digest hash
(ironclad:ascii-string-to-byte-array password))
;; Repeatedly hash the hash, to slow things down
(dotimes (x iterations)
(ironclad:update-digest hash (ironclad:produce-digest hash)))
(ironclad:produce-digest hash)))
I think OP is confusing not charging for your app from day one with good testing with your customers. If the ultimate plan is to charge for the app, and you warn your users that you'll be doing that yes, you'll be getting some free feedback. You should have been doing this way earlier anyway, and probably could've saved yourself some time by releasing smaller bits earlier and often...er.

Not only that, as igrekel already pointed out, all the feedback you DO get has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Thanks folks. Trunk.ly was launched 33 days ago right here on HN. Here is the original link when we announced that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567

There are still tons of works need to be done. Our viral co-efficient is too low, new user orientation process is horribly missing. But it's been a great ride so far.

we're currently seeking angel investment - if you like what we've achieved so far and are interested in finding out more, then contact us at tim@trunk.ly and we'd love to share our plans and goals and see if we can work together.
The value of college
From those stats we don't know, but app developers do know. I would say there are actually significantly more ipod app sales than iphone. It depends on the app, but the app developers that I hang out with tend to have more sales on ipod devices.
"I am starting to think make a site to solely catalog and score predictions by analysts would be a pretty popular public service."

Philip Elmer DeWitt at Apple 2.0 already has you covered, every quarter he rounds up all the analysts' predictions and after actual results are announced, he writes about the outliers. He also tracks how often the analysts are right/wrong.

Apple Q1 2011 earnings preview: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/18/apple-q1-2011-earning...
The one day per hour isn't "without being able to power through it" it's for "without a noticeable difference". It's 8pm right now and there's no particular reason I couldn't still be going fairly strong by 4am (if sufficiently motivated), but I will not be as awake as someone adjusted to my 4am being around noon or so. In other words, it's a way to estimate when there will be no tired phase to power through. That said, yeah, an hour a day is a wimpy pace - people modestly used to switching sleep schedules can easily flop much more and be fairly unaffected by crossing the atlantic after a day or two. Being used to it and age both make a big difference. Those who are unused to it or older switch much slower (that would include me at 15 v me at 30). How much the sun matters can also depend, I grew up in near complete darkness during the winter and near 24h sunlight during the summer. My daughter and wife (used to the US continents stable cycle) found that incredibly hard to adjust to, even with dark rooms to sleep in.
It does say "alpha version".

The concepts look good, lets hope they sort out these details.
Sure, but the Android tablet + media player market has been generally a giant bust thus far. A tonne of vapor, but very little action. I think that was a strategic failing on Google's part, as they intentionally kept criteria that crippled those markets while iOS was spreading far and wide (and that's all that really matters to a game developer).
Hollywood will inevitably make the same mistakes, like Blockbuster before them, that the music industry did. The publishing industry seems likely to follow in the coming decade. Big business seems unable to make the swift and radical change that is required in these innovative times. Can an industry entirely change itself in a few years even with extremely strong incentive? I think not- but that strong incentive is capable of doing the task very quickly indeed.
>Creating a new manufacturing industry is very expensive.

:)))

man, you just don't get how Russian nanotechnology business works. It uses completely different technological process. Let me explain step-by-step:

step 1: i invest into your venture 1B of government money i manage

step 2: you transfer back to my personal Switzerland account (not to my government fund) 500M.

Repeat until there is government money available.
Microsoft's used the tool internally for years. Hard to believe that the first paper on attack surface measurement (by Jeannette Wing, Michael Howard, and me) was 8 years ago ...
I can handle the truth. I'm quite a bit more skeptical about my insurance company, big pharma, and the other "players" in an already gamed system.
Hotfile, 1000 Users and PayPal Named In Piracy Lawsuit
Also very expensive (350 euro? wtf). You can get an OpenRD for $250, or a Guruplug for $100, or the tiny little Gumstix Overo and a breakout board for something in between. They're all ARM, they're all decent, they all ship with Linux.

Of course, you can still buy SPARC and POWER systems from Sun and IBM, respectively.
I did. Like I said, shows you who is in the know, and who isn't. Some are good, some are bad. I'm not childish enough to think that they're all completely stupid/evil.
> Gnome 3 really highlight the disadvantage that a bunch of spare-time developers

You do realize you are criticizing the topmost user interface details of a theme of an extensively themable early release. I think those "spare-time developers" have been focusing their attention on the API changes that the Gnome 2 to 3 transition impose and the new concepts introduced by the shell. The core seems very good. What you complain about is usually addressed in the configuration files for the theme and the names of the shortcuts. Multi-lingual support will bring some additional problems that should be addressed in the coming weeks. There are many dozen different themes that are compatible with Gnome. All those will have to be tweaked to look right.

Have a little more faith, for just about every computer that is responsible for your internet access runs on top of software written by people you would call "part-time programmers".

I'd trust their work over the one from Microsoft's full-time employees anytime.
Now only if they would add in the on-the-fly diff view, as well as a real in-browser editor widget instead of a simple textarea
Ugly Fonts Help You Learn and Memorize
I haven't read it, but I'm familiar. I'd say it seems spot on.
IntelliJ - best Java IDE, InfoWorld 2011 award
(You need to enable JS to get the joke.)
The far more substantial commentary by Zaddie Smith (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generat...), which the author refers to a few times should really have been the article linked. The author's entire point is much more eloquently made by the original.
Finding a bug in tarsnap is something that might be worth considerably more than your bounty to the highest bidder.
Startup Visa Canada launched today – your support is needed
Harmony Of My Dreams
In the last quarter, 375,000 iOS devices were sold a day. Are you saying 75,000 Android media players and tablets are sold a day? Otherwise, Android is still not growing as fast as iOS.
A logarithmic graph of money! A newspaper (book?) that actually gets it. It's astonishing how many linear graphs of money exist - and they are all worthless and misleading.

And if you need proof that linear graphs of money are misleading then compare:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Components_of_US_Money_sup...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Components_of_US_Money_sup...
One problem is that you log in and you have nothing to look at. You really want to have something for new users to get a great "out of the box" experience and they'll be more motivated to come back.
The problems are severe and fairly widespread across academia, although the liberal arts (including the sciences) may be worse off than professional programs (with the exception of law, which also suffers from degree overproduction and a tight job market).

Here is a view from the world of chemistry:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/01/07/the_phd_prob...
I'm reminded of the Romanian revolution in 1989, when some of the 2nd tier of Communist leaders started calling themselves the "National Salvation Front" and stayed in power.
Top Ten Web Hacking Techniques of 2010
Offline jQuery document browser for Vim
They do security research. Furthermore, they practice responsible disclosure principles (sometimes). That is pretty much the definition of a white hat hacker.

I think using professional to describe them is a stretch, but classifying them differently because you think they are icky is childish.
> Besides, truncation in OS X is much much smarter:

Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around while everybody else can just cross-license with their own silly little patents. It may be possible they simply cannot afford the risk of doing the obvious thing.
> It will be interesting to see just how much influence he's able to have.

The giovernemtn have said there will be democratic elections within 60 days. If they renege on this, it would probably make sense for him to resign, lest he be seen as a collaborator with the old regime.

> Just having a Pirate Party member in government is pretty significant, IMO.

He's the first Pirate in government, as far as I know.
Super Angels And The Startup Bloodletting Of 2011
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/011811-feds-hackers-at... this is the article that matches the headline, the current link is about the IETF
Which other relatively long or expensive wars are missing from this?

Wouldn't the length of a war be difficult to estimate at the outset, and hence be priced in to stock market growth over time? In my economics class they taught us that war is bad for the (real) economy because the country is relatively more invested in the engines of destruction than production, and thus productivity growth in things that make life better is lower. The conclusions of this chart stand to intuitive reason based on that teaching, but I'm by no means an expert.
I love the data export/aggregation.
Escalators on the move
For a lot of people, Justin Bieber is a great musician. Popularity is not a trustworthy indicator of artistic merit.
It would be nice if the author would have acknowledged a reason for not sharing more about the product. Readers might get over not knowing WHAT, if they had a little of the WHY explained to them.
One simple way to figure out the correct way to create a CSS hierarchy is to avoid using physical descriptions entirely in your tags, and focus on "content" descriptions. Your classes should not ever be called "green", "absolute", "underlined", "float-right" etc. They should be called "main-menu", "primary-container" etc. This carries over into using javascript to control the look of the page: your styles that will be swapped should be called the state of the object, not the physical change (ie: call it "active" not "enlarged").

This may seem trivial/obvious, but if you are working on a large site, or a front end intensive site, it's pretty important and there is a lot of this, even in otherwise clean codebases. If you create lots of subclasses (like "absolute", "red" etc.) you tend to couple the styling of the page with the content in a really messy way (if you go to update the styles of this page you will have to do a lot of html editing as well, which defeats the purpose of external CSS).
Ask HN: Taxes and Consulting
Hi HN,

I do not usually consult for pay outside of my full-time job; however, I helped out a buddy this year and did a little contract work (web development) on the side. Thus, this is all new for me (consulting/taxes).

I got paid in checks directly from the company with no tax withholding (federal, social security, etc.).

What's the protocol for handling taxes in this case? Should I contact the company to get their tax ID and file myself, or are they supposed to or required to create a W-2 for me? Are there any additional IRS forms needed (federal level)?

Thanks in advance!
I like the question you raise here. Similarly: we learned today that there were 160M iOS devices out there. What year were there 160M Windows machines?
> Where was the social media?

There's been quite a lot of coverage on Reddit, e.g.:

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/f3zyh/new_governm...

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/f42mk/arrested_pi...

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/f4jdq/new_tunisia...

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/f4nvx/israel_drea...

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/f4lpn/juan_cole_t...
I think you're missing the post's author's point. He isn't saying "after wars the DJIA goes up", he's saying "after periods of inflation, the DJIA goes up" (see the title of the graph).

Note he still doesn't mention 1929-1933, which seems like a big omission, although it doesn't directly contradict the assertion.
Reasons Tumblr went down
Quite likely. But fortunately for me, most people get nervous at the idea of negotiating with organized crime syndicates.
Stable software or a beautiful website... Tough choice when you have limited resources... I'm glad their priorities are right.
We had one of those pen holding robots in infants school (5-10yrs)

I vaguely remember telling it to leave the classroom and run off down the corridor.
If they didn't want to invite criticism, they shouldn't have release screenshots of a product they don't want criticism of, complete with breathless captions about "beauty" and "usability."

Furthermore, I have better things to do with my time than spend time mucking around with configuration files and theme settings. Back in high school I had the time and inclination, and in fact I did so; now that I run a business, I'd rather spend that time doing actual development. Not to mention the moms and grandmas of the world who don't even know what a theme is. I, and they, need a UI that just works out of the box.

And finally, just about every computer that is responsible for my internet access runs on top of software written by large corporations who have hired people to develop for open source bodies. Let's not forget that it's for-profit companies with full-time programmers like Red Hat, Canonical, IBM, Intel, etc. that are more than partly responsible for the relatively wide enterprise (and desktop!) adoption of Linux today.

I'm not out to bash Gnome, Linux, or open source; I use Ubuntu on my work laptop every day. I criticize out of the desire to see the open source movement develop something better, and that means not patting everyone on the back just for "working hard." It's precisely that kind of "gold star for effort" attitude that lets crappy software exist.
Totally agree - we're rethinking that first experience at the moment so that you go through a more guided process. The intent is to send you to connect your social networks, then fill out your profile, then send you to the home screen. With a priority queue for new users, we should be able to get you to a home page that is full of your links by the time you first see it.
Show me a study that proves that men and women think in exactly the same ways and that there are no biological differences in their programming.

"The following specific differences in behavior are attributable to biological differences between male and female: _____" is a rather different claim from "There exist biological differences between male and female." I believe the former claim is the one being challenged. Disproof of the latter claim, while sufficient to disprove the former, is not strictly necessary.
Could probably find the domain for $200 =)

http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-whois/?email=ac6994646bd3...
Yeah. This one's pretty slick. But dude has a bunch more here that are a bit scarier.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/all-about-skimmers/
Popularity is not a trustworthy indicator of artistic merit.

How else would you define it?
Not the way it's used in day-to-day casual language.

If your boss told you that you would be getting "not all, but most of your bonus this year" and you got half plus one dollars (or whatever you're paid in), chances are you'd be feeling cheated, no matter how 'technically right' your boss was.
Mysterious new location-based startup debuting at SXSW 2011
I am glad to see Trunk.ly get this kind of attention.

I contacted Alex and Tim last month to see if there was anything that I as a novice programmer could do to help them with their suddenly overwhelming workload. I was seeking just a little bit of work as a learning exercise, and these guys asked me to write an RSS connector for them. It was the most effective learning experience I've had, ever.

I am very happy for these guys. Two class acts who gave me the chance to actually get some code put into production. (AFAIK they're still using the RSS connector I wrote, with some adaptations and what have you I didn't know to include.) Kudos, guys.
My #1 tip is to use a CSS grid system such as 960.gs - http://960.gs/ or Blueprint CSS - http://www.blueprintcss.org/

You'll solve so many headaches with layout, at the cost of having ugly CSS class names.
Build enough traction on a project that a) It generates enough income. 2) Someone will invest in it.

Then jump ship.
Alluding to this Aristotle quote, which I recall being quoted in one of Steve Jobs' speeches: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/we_are_what_we_repeatedly_do...
AFAIK, whatever income you get you are responsible for declaring it. You could either declare it as Misc Income in your return or if this is a continued relationship with the said company, they can issue a 1099 for you as a consultant.

There is plenty of information on the IRS website regarding this.

I hope this helps.
Well I was fooled. It's hard to tell these days.
I read in the past that the bank ATM security guy says if even a single call goes to them that there's potential tampering with ATM, they will immediately shut it down and go down there.

The ATM skimmer described sounds amateurish compared to the wireless skimmers: http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100820/bc... Pinhole camera device records pin + Skimmer records card (number or strip?).

http://www.snopes.com/fraud/atm/atmcamera.asp
zoom:1;
You should mention your platform, but in general, no. Email clients are in a perfect storm of unsexy, mostly solved, and difficult to make money from.
Is there a simple explanation for non-economics types like me of why the linear graph is misleading and the log one is not?