skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Select a random number known only to you(r program). Seed your generator with it. Start randomly selecting sectors to write to (directly as a block device), writing a psuedorandom sequence based on your first number and the block identifier. Store a set of what sectors you've written to. (You can bundle them into arbitrarily-large contiguous chunks if this gets too large.) As you write, periodically randomly select a sector you already wrote to and verify that when read it returns the same psuedorandom sequence. I don't just read them back in order to prevent the "save the first few chunks" attack. This will slow down detection a bit, but if I'm working my intuition math correctly it doesn't actually slow it down very much, at the gain of making it impossible for a hostile firmware to know which sectors you're going to ask for.

Using this approach, you can write arbitrarily large of data to a drive with very minimal storage requirements on your end (well within even modern-day embedded RAM availability), while still being able to demand any sector back at any moment and verifying it is correct. Theoretically your psuedorandom number generator ought to by cryptographically secure, and given that you're probably IO bound here and they aren't hard to come by, there's probably no reason to use anything less.

I'm pretty sure the only effective defense against that is to actually store all the data. If you issue a predictable read pattern, you open an attack. If linearly-sampling your previously written blocks turns out to be undesirable you could tweak the sampling distribution, but I bet you wouldn't get much improvement.

Also, come to think of it, if the drive is honest this could be done non-destructively (assuming the undo process is allowed to run to completion) by reading the sector and XOR'ing it, so you could then undo it by a second XOR operation. Further cleverness could even make this reasonably safe to half-complete the undo, then finish later, if you work at it.
FYI: I created my gmail account on 8/28/04. And the other one I started receiving it on 11/13/04.
This is the kind of stuff I think will cause more damage, than do any good. Yeah ordering pizza's is funny, but when you start digging into someones family, I think it goes over the line. This is something criminal thugs would do. This isn't going to do their cause's PR any good at all, which perhaps I'm wrong, that their goal is to help support the "little guy" against the "big powers", to accomplish that, its best to get the support of the people, to expose corruption, not threaten people like this. Which, when this goes to national news, its going to look really bad. Not to mention, this is stalker grade stuff, which that freaks me out for some reason, I imagine socially dysfunctional people, looking for some attention sitting around thinking, Anonymous is doing it, people like them, I know... I'm going to go do something completely insane so people will like me. These sort of tactics can easily blow up in their faces, perception of the people is everything these days, stuff like this can make it real easy to look really bad.
I'm sure Jesus was against stealing, but as those words are normally used stealing is not violence.
They could make the token derived from user's password (e.g. Hash(host_id + Hash(password))), so when password changes, all existing tokens are invalidated.
I don't understand your question. Whats the issue here?
Odd - my two apps have identical .rvmrc files (both using the same interpreter and gemset). Even odder, the first app is now working, and I'm completely not sure why.
I tried with type hinting the clojure code, it was slower.

Startup time for the jvm seemed fair, because node has to start up as well. This should count into the overall time imho.
State intel and law enforcement agencies.
Conspiracy Of Hope
node has no jvm, node starts up in milliseconds. node _is_ faster
Uh, if it's slower you should probably look into that.
While I'm not myself Catholic... I disagree that celebrating hackers is "attempting to speak for them." Also, there are plenty of religious hackers, logical Catholics, Catholic hackers, etc. so your assertion of some sort of conflict between logical reasoning and the Vatican seems rather bigoted.
Disagree.. Having written both HTTP clients and servers, the SPDY spec is a breath of fresh air. Every packet has a predefined header length, and a clearly defined length for the trailing data - removes a heck of a lot of edge cases when implementing a parser.

Now if only TCP was message oriented... For that, I guess we have ZMQ.
In your message, you mention that "Gmail says joe.none & joenone are the same email addresses, but I can guarantee you this is not the case."

However, the experience you have described seems to prove that it IS the case - i.e. you are receiving messages sent to either address. The other person is attempting to reset their password every other day because they cannot login to your account (since they don't know the password for your account).

It seems to be a simple case of a user who does not know their own gmail address. Admittedly, this happens more frequently with aol users than gmail users.

Anyway, since you have all his personal (including his banking details) emails, it shouldn't be too difficult to find a phone number of physical address to contact him.

Just don't reference this link...if his first language isn't English, and he finds this information on a "hacker website", he may contact Google to reset YOUR password :-)
you should calculate the time within clojure and node and output it. This will take away the startup time. You should also warm up the jvm.

I may play with the type hints tonight if I get time. It shouldn't make it slower.
I see pure, unfettered democracy in action. It's ugly, but I love it.
So, it's equivalent to nabbing someone's session by capturing their cookie.

Problematic, but not horrifying - unless you think we shouldn't use cookies either. Though absolutely, changing the password should invalidate the old one. Without that, theres no way to stop the use of a distributed file.
This is a better essay than the title suggested it would be. Although it makes an interesting point, it seems somehow incomplete to me. There's an important distinction between beliefs that can be falsified and those that can't. Science, generally, should consist mostly of the former, and even though I may "believe" a certain set of scientific experts based on their authority, I also try to hold those beliefs lightly/provisionally, and open to falsification or modification in light of new evidence.
This works because Apple is in the reversing arms race. Does it make sense for Dropbox to go down this path? Note that Google and your bank don't.
Ahem, they tried to censor Stringer's personal information but they left the ZIP+9. You can get at least the address of the apartment block from that.
what framework did you use to make this? tornado?
Starting with the iPad and Thinking About a New Paradigm for Web Design
Very interesting... would be more useful if there were a way to filter it, however. And definitely lose the move-cursor if you can't actually drag the items to the watch list, I tried that a couple times before I saw the "click to add" text.
I am very excited to try this since XCode has really needed a suitable alternative for a while.
While not the same thing, the concept of increasing the degree of realism/getting away from things that are too regular reminded me of Perlin Noise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise
We haven't looked at Dropbox professionally; if tokens are valid after password changes, we'd flag that. I'm don't know enough about Dropbox to say whether they do or don't.

(I have Dropbox on my personal machine but not my work machine).
They can, but by being so highly variable, the cicada boom cycle becomes a less important survival driver than other factors, such as predator cycles, weather, etc. In a closely-paired ecosystem, with relatively few variables, you do see remarkable coevolution between predators and prey. When the prey removes their boom cycle from the dominant evolutionary stressors on the predator, differential survival of the predator will be determined far more by the dominant factors.

It's important to note that, for the cicada, they are not a staple diet but rather an opportunistic one that occurs only once in a few generations. This means that the predator's cycle would have to skip generations in order to be effective. This is unlikely, given that that cycle would have no evolutionary advantage in the intermediary, and would thus be diluted by more pressing concerns.
In the "2 wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner" sense...
Google Doc For Tracking Facebook/Twitter Shares for any URL
Hey Hackers,

I saw this thread a little while back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347428

Which shows a bunch of free API endpoints for tracking social media mentions (FB, twitter, linkedin, SU, reddit, delicious, gbuzz).

I'm not a serious developer so I coded up a Google Docs that can call the APIs for you:

https://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?authkey=CLbYuv0E&hl=en&key=tfYPkMHydrl5Xb9Ovn7TEcA&hl=en&authkey=CLbYuv0E#gid=0

(you'll need to be logged into Google, just click file -> make a copy and then you have a your own copy of the spreadsheet to use as you want).

I wrote up a few more details about the technique here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-track-your-social-media-strategy

Hope this is useful for a few non-technical hackers :)
Tom
Coco MoCA: The Museum Of Conan Art
Again, the machine ID is easily faked by an attacker.
This user doesn't have enough karma to post a real poll.
I assume this means product designers and is not explicitly just for graphic designers.

graphic design != product design

I'm excited about this fund, unless they are just looking for graphic artist founders explicitly.
Google begins tablet version of Chrome OS
Yeah, I'm not sure what the right affordance is to suggest that. I tried just a pointer cursor, but that's too noisy, especially in the presence of links.

I thought it would be better to risk some confusion if there's learning at the end, than to just have people be blissfully oblivious.. Do you think that's a poor tradeoff?
I believe Ed Catmull refers to this as 'keeping your crises small.' That is to say, it's much better to actively surface problems before they leave the shop than it is to ship with issues, and try to deal with implosions after the fact (ahem, Vista).

Here he is, giving a really good talk at Stanford Business School, in which he covers this (among other good ideas). About an hour, but worth much more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc

Interestingly, an ethos like this suggests that the fate of Microsoft is NOT inevitable. It's only becomes that way when you no longer care about shipping garbage. Exhibit B: Detroit in the 70's and 80's.
I think the "evil" that is alleged is that Sony is the type of company that is ruthless enough to do things like installing a rootkit on your machine to ensure that its copyrights are not infringed.
Ask HN: Please suggest me some good open source physics engines
I have to design a 3D world and a 3D robot in that world. I will have to write some programs to make that robot interact with the various objects on the scenario.

What kind of tool/programming environment do you suggest is the best for this ?

Please help.
There are software patents in Europe, but it's complicated. I don't know about the French office per se but you can get a patent from the EPO that nominally covers France. (Though you would then end up fighting for it in France unless EPLA has gone through).

The EPO's technical board of appeal have passed both business method and software patents, FWIW. See eg http://www.epo.org/news-issues/issues/computers/software.htm....

The important distinction used to be in where the so called "technical effect" lay but I know the law has moved on somewhat since I was familiar with it (Macrossan + Aerotel, EPLA?, etc.).

Your 2 specific citations look to be sound examples of the sort of thing that is patentable in the US (or was) but not in Europe. However with these things covering the ground necessary to inhibit a competitor can be just a matter of [very clever] drafting.
Banks absolutely do this once they have the ability to talk to the OS. I've built 3 banking apps for iphone/ipad now and client side verification was involved in all of them after first login.

The problem is browsers just don't have a good standard way of accomplishing this.
Which reminds me, Apple doesn't sell an iBox.
Quixey Raises $400K From Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors For App Search
No it's just doing simple polling. There was a thread about this last time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2302367. Since then I'm starting to see the use of a more efficient approach. If I poll more frequently there'll be fewer stories to update each time and people who're reading on the left column will be jarred less. So yes, I'm going to look into all the various polling approaches.
People say this every time Anonymous comes up, and guess what? They don't care. For the most part, the news media doesn't care either.

Credibility is becoming an outmoded concept.
I've wished many times for ReSharper-like refactoring in Xcode. Now JetBrains (the ReSharper people) have announced CIDR, an Objective-C IDE.

Apparently CIDR is still at an early stage (pre-beta even) and doesn't yet support debugging on a physical device, but I still take this as great news. I think allowing developers to download and try CIDR now will give JetBrains the feedback they need to deliver a great finished product.
Hypothetically, dropbox could install on the system a second, isolated authentication process, which generates a keypair for that machine, and hides it somewhere with an ACL that does not allow the normal user direct access. Then, upon login, the dropbox client asks the auth process to sign a nonce to login.

This would mitigate the problem to an extent; an attacker then wouldn't be able to succeed with just the user's data, they'd need to get administrative access to extract the authentication keypair as well. It would, however, require administrative access to install the authentication agent program, unless there's a suitable blind keystore in the OS already.
>> If you do the math its almost always better to
>> NOT hasten your own demise for an uncertain future.

In the short run it is always looks better to not cannibalize your products, and managers are driven mostly by short term objectives.

>> for an uncertain future.

If you don't cannibalize your products what is almost certain is eventual failure:

http://www.economist.com/node/14248815?story_id=14248815
All that to say, what direction do you see the mobile market going in the near-to-mid future?

I think we'll see a convergence of the web, mobile, and tablet spaces. Mobile is largely OS-specific at this point, but we are seeing a trend toward HTML5 apps. Same with tablets, where HTML5 was already popular, given the large screens and the fact that there were fewer OS-specific apps than with mobile. And with the web, the newest generation of HTML5-compatible browsers just launched, with FireFox 4 and IE9 joining WebKit. To design a new app today, particularly with audio and video, your best bet would be to go with HTML5 so you could kill 3 birds with one stone...you can reach the web, mobile, and tablets, without having to reinvent the wheel on both iOS and Android.
You've got to look at it from the other side too though, it only took a handful of people at SCEA to decide to make geohot's life hell.

There's a lot of general life getting in the way out there, how many people agree with a topic compared to how many will work their ass of to stop it?
How HTML5 will kill the native app
CarWoo already gave me a refund, so I'm not saying this as a disgruntled customer, just as an interested observer who happens to have tried the product.

They should fix their product before they pay any attention to conversion.

I asked for a car with an MSRP of $13k and got two offers (so far) both way above that price. The different price is because I was being offered a different car than I requested, but the offer didn't include any information about what the actual offered car was.

Here was the most outlandish example where the dealer claimed the sticker price was $200k and that I was getting a 91% discount.
http://imgur.com/99JcS?full

I see three bugs, two major.

- The dealer shouldn't be able to enter a sticker price that's 15x greater than the requested price. (minor)

- I should only see offers for cars that I would actually buy. This could be done quite simply by requiring that the offer be within a small window above or below the MSRP of my request. (major)

- If the offer is clearly for a different car, as was obvious by the offer price for both of the offers I've received, then the dealer should have to put in as much information about the car he's actually offering as I had to put in about the car I was requesting. (major)

I've contacted support a couple of times and the solution they say is coming is a reputation system. I already know the reputation of the dealers: they're scum. That's why I'm looking at services like CarWoo.

The way it is now just seems like the waste of an opportunity and of an otherwise well designed system. I like the hipmunk philosophy: they know that some flights are bad flights and just don't show them to you. I'd like to see a hipmunk of for car deals and assume nobody is better positioned than these guys. But they aren't there yet and aren't making noises like they even realize that.
It's easier for a man in the middle to change a 15-line text script than to change a binary. Lowering that effort = increasing the odds and incidence of attempted attacks.
Bigoted? I simply made an objective observation. None of the thousands of religions of the world stand up particularly well to strict logic and reasoning. The very nature of faith is belief without objective proof. I did not attack faith.

Hacker News is obviously home to a very large sample size of "hackers", and the poll I linked clearly appears to support my observation. I never said there were no religious hackers, just as it can't be said there are no religious scientists.

Also, I would call "hackers see such and such" as speaking for, not celebrating hackers.
Neither of those two acts violate individuals. 'Property' is merely a convenient fiction.
Also, maybe b/c of a market of consumers who don't know what they're buying. I bet tech-savvy Chinese know where to buy safely. But maybe there are a lot of Chinese with poorly educations or orientation to tech, maybe just arrived in a city, or travelling there to shop. And they get stuck by this stuff, and maybe don't even realize it b/c they don't understand the gear, or because so much of it is banged up. (Maybe the camera is also faked.)

It wouldn't surprise me that if a shopowner _was_ eventually caught at this, they'd simply close up and just move somewhere else.

As a free market type, I have to admit that in those circumstances, I don't find this surprising. The "market response" here is for consumers to become more savvy and cautious, but the population posited here wouldn't have resources for that response. And they're forced to choose between wariness, and participation in this new economy with all this neat stuff. And that participation might be the only path out of poverty and ignorance.

It's a crummy choice, and one that is likely to lead to all sorts of bitterness and suspicion of the merchant classes. It founds a similar ethic in the buyers, once they figure out enough to become sellers.

The likeliest defense I can imagine for my free markets is, China isn't really a free market. Its development is artificially stimulated and guided by government policies, which are pushing investments at levels that aren't sustainable, and into projects that probably won't return. A less hyper development might give consumers more opportunity to get up the learning curve, and lower (and probably more realistic) expectations of what they can afford.

Wow, tldr: Govt. accelerated hyper-growth pushes innovation faster than the least informed consumers can manage.
Not specifically related to this article but Id like to give Ars major props for following all of the recent Anonymous actions so throughly. Their articles on HBGary were fantastic and they seem to be keeping up well.
I can understand your disappointment but at the time of your posting it was barely the 7th. It seems you have already discounted yourself long before today happened... which is a shame.
Installation wasn't easy or slick here:

*** Installing local configuration files...

/Users/bonaldi/Library/Application Support/Pow/Versions/0.2.2/lib/command.js:50
throw err;
^
Error: EACCES, Permission denied '/Users/bonaldi/Library/LaunchAgents/cx.pow.powd.plist'
Democracy will always be the tyranny of the majority.
This is definitively a great game. New twist on the old light cycle game.

As far as I know, molehill, adobe's 3D engine is not yet released so I don't think it's fair to talk about WebGL vs Flash yet. We will have to see if molehill can solve some of the issues that WebGL is dealing with (old cards, missing opengl drivers, inconsistent features available on GPU preventing the use of important extensions ...) My bet is it won't have more luck without resorting to software rendering in many cases.
I like the Top 10 by Day view on that hckrnews site.
I agree with you Peter. I came to C after a decade using Pascal (assembly, "systems" languages before that). It was like going from programming in a straitjacket to running shorts and a T shirt. The freedom was wonderful. And programming in C is like learning to ride a bicycle. You never forget. My first love.
Microsoft's software runs on a billion computers. The alternative is to choose whose money they're going to reject in the next version.
"But I need those emails to the other person to stop"

The dot is a distraction in this case. He is passing out your email address, thinking it is his. When he does this, you get emails intended for him. This is not a technical problem, and doesn't really have a technical solution.
Why is this comment being downvoted? He's not being rude or off topic or spammy. Are we dumping on people simply because we disagree with them now?
I'm a Catholic hacker. Apparently I
am a rare breed around here.
The value proposition is extremely compelling (especially for someone like me who is still procrastinating filing...). Take a picture and have a professional do the work?! Yes, please.

That being said, I need to know more before committing. Who are these professionals? How much will it cost me? Am I guaranteed the max allowable refund? I applaud you for bringing simplicity to a field as complicated as taxes, but the devil is still in the details.

Overall looks great though! Let me know if I can help test at all, emails in my profile.
When the founder starts with an innovation in user experience, good things usually happen.
Yes I've some doubt about the best move to do. Thanks for the availability, by now I've talked with different startups who get in in the first cycle.

Now I'm not in, I'm in the process of selection, but with good chances...
Eventbrite's 1st open source library (finally): Zendesk API Wrapper for Python
First things first, mobile is not dying out. It will be an increasingly large portion of application development for a long time, all of the major players are deeply committed to mobile.

I would not worry about gaining 'unusable' experience. Working in IT/Development means you need to be constantly learning. Gaining experience with the hot platforms (iOS/Android) now will only make it easier to adapt to future mobile advances.

Like I said, the mobile market will only increase in the near to mid future. Anyone entering the mobile space will need to be aware of how to more effectively server their users/customers in a cross-channel and cross-platform way. I believe you can't go wrong with focusing on becoming a mobile expert, if you are passionate about what it offers.