skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, it looks amazing! :).
Just a friendly reminder that string addition of salts in hash functions is a Bad Idea (tm), and that you should use HMACs instead.
Given the values that the United States was founded on, in the purest sense,

Why?
Pleasure.

Here's an example to help illustrate:

Discounted (future) revenues: $100
Discounted (future) ongoing costs: $20
Value: $80 ($100 - $20)
Acquisition cost: $60 (e.g. adwords)
Net Present Value (NPV): $20 ($80 - $60)

An NPV of $20 means you create $20 in value by acquiring a customer. That's what you were trying to say with "true" value / net gain or loss - but there's no such thing as "true" value - you're either working with value or you're not.

Note that revenue to date did not figure into any of the above - we're concerned with the future here, so the past is only useful in as much as it helps you with forecasting.

The wikipedia page on CLV is surprisingly good, have a look.
It is always easier to destroy than create. Soghoian is into notoriety. He could have gone to them and said "hey, I think you can fix this by doing X, Y, and Z". If ignored, ok, then go public.

He slags off PR guys, but his goal is PR for himself.
I believe that the main problem is we have spent the last 20 years "training our replacements" (i.e. selling off semiconductor tech, outsourcing) and not enough time training our children. Maybe if we spent a bit more time teaching our children instead of depending on the schools to do it for us things might be better.

Make time to make things with your children. Life is about more than money, your grandfather knew that.
Just as a random question: Why are people using hash functions designed to be fast for large file digests/etc (ie. SHA) for password hashing?

Isn't this what scrypt/bcrypt/etc. are designed for?
I don't get your point. Feel free to clarify. But, good for you.
It looks a lot like python + javascript.
How do you avoid hiring the wrong people for your start up?
Providence is a wonderful city for living. I spend more time there when I go out than Boston.But Providence is no place for young people to make a living. The state of Rhode Island has the oldest average age in the country and is one of the least business friendly states in the country. The best college, Brown, doesn't have a business school. Brown does have a decent CS department but it can't overcome the negatives in the state.
BTW, if you win, you have to pay the Diversity Visa Lottery fee $440/person
Rainbow tables don't really matter as much anymore when a consumer-grade GPU can calculate hundreds of millions of SHA/MD hashes per second. You're not really slowing an attacker down anymore.

Whenever this topic comes up, this link should be posted: http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
Puzzling, you make it sound like running a $2B business for 23 years is a bad thing.
> Intel's XScale processors were/are ARM-based

Intel actually sold off their license and XScale IP to Marvell a few years ago. I'm not positive, but I think they'd have to buy a new Architecture License to get back into ARM.
What are some useful lessons learned through playing StarCraft?
True. I think the best way to approach it is to acknowledge that there is no certain outcome, and that the best you can do is to maximise the probability of success. If it doesn't work then it doesn't, but that doesn't mean that you don't try at all.
That sounds like a really great place to work and a good guy to work for.
Lockitron (YC S09) Lets You Unlock Your Door With Your Phone
>Since airplanes typically cruise above 30,000 feet, the air pressure inside the plane is much greater than the pressure outside — and that pressure differential makes it impossible to open the door

Wait, what?
Be careful-- kaminari is much, much slower than will_paginate: https://github.com/amatsuda/kaminari/issues/37

will_paginate may pollute Array, but it's been a great solution, that has worked for a long time. Be wary of upgrading for the sake of upgrading, especially with that kind of performance degradation.
As soon as the door is opened to allow this for IP, everthing else will follow like a tidal wave.
I use two periods.
14nm, ARM, Tri-Gate would be interesting, and given Intel's competence in R&D they could easily leap-frog other ARM producers. The unfortunate thing is I don't see a new instruction set gaining new ground anytime soon outside ARM and x86 for consumer applications. I wonder what legal agreements Sun had in place for it's RISC based SPARC chips, and if it would have made sense for Intel to buy them to leverage their hardware division to make RISC chips for server and handset applications. (Also would've been interesting on the ZFS/SSD front.) (Of course Intel has never really be heavily dedicated to software, but buying Sun would've given them that power all at once.)
Re-read the last sentence of my post.

Also, rainbow tables do matter. If you don't protect against them, they immediately become effective again. Your argument is "bump keys exist for locks, better take them off the doors!"
I was beginning to think Valve's business model was to never ever get around to releasing the next Half Life. :)
Processing credit card payments with common lisp
To the ppl at Mailgun following this thread: I want to see you guys succeed. Please spend a portion of your funding on getting a better website design. The content of the site was enough to get me to sign up, but you'd be surprised just how much the look and feel of a site matter to some customers.
The tools are there for the properly motivated like they have never been in our entire history. The internet and social networking have made it so there is a forum for every trade, interest, or fetish. It is time to use it for more than just porn and gaming...not that there is anything right or wrong about either.

I try to force myself to learn something new before I go do something for entertainment. I will watch one MIT video lecture on physics or something to that effect, or research something that I am curious about. Then when I am done I can go game or watch something mindless if I choose so.

It makes it hard when I have to explain to people that I am self employed and I do about 5-10 different things...just depends on what is paying...most people just don't understand.
Oh, yes. Intellectual Ventures was founded to game the patent system.
exactly. in a jury trial, it allows the patent owner to state, "look,all these other companies took a license (settled)", they all think the patent is valid.

...
I live with the founders so I've had Lockitron for about a year. in my unbiased opinion: it's absolutely amazing especially if you have a lot of house guests (hacker sleepovers).
His 18 year old son lived with him though, no? I know that when I was 18 I would keep a stash of porn readily available at all times, regardless of if my father was a religious extremist or not.
Pay Enough or Don't Pay at All
I think the evasiveness is intentional. With 25 million users (http://www.webpronews.com/dropbox-user-base-up-to-25-million...) I think Dropbox likely finds itself friends with govt entities that didn't previously care it existed and would encourage them to keep things the way they are as opposed to going the tarsnap route.

I know this comment could be dismissed as tin-foiley, but spending a week here reading stories on FBI wire taps or bills passing through congress and I don't think this is much of a stretch by any means.

I imagine this is a (necessity?) of modern day, massive-scale online services like this... or at least it becomes one once they hit critical mass.

For example, I would expect Facebook has a back-channel for law enforcement to view profiles unfettered by privacy settings. I'm not saying I have proof they do, but would anyone really be surprised if a service with 700 million users globally was in-bed with security agencies?

I suppose I just expect that now.
My bet is that the problem was much worse and more subtle than the other commenter's have noted. They posit a slight imbalance to due to rounding or PRNG characteristics.

I suspect that is it like the problem of choosing values randomly from a sparse hash table. Choosing a random slot and scanning forward to the next empty slot results in a bias where closely spaced entries have a much lower chance of selection than entries preceded by a wider gap.

It is easy to make that same mistake when trying to pick a random record number when record numbers have been assigned in chunks (like social security numbers).
I bought one for my father, who tends to be OCD about locked doors, and he absolutely loves it.
Mother Day Quotes | Ibra's Blog
It'll be interesting to see if the next round of investors bring up this blog post.

Its not really a surprise that when doing something you've never done before, your a little lost. Thats normal.

But the buying public dont want to hear that. It bursts their bubble about CEOs.
The Parrot AR.Drone
There are no valid software patents.
Will this also SMS me whenever someone opens my door? I think I want one.
Every plan of action is somebody's agenda[1]. Some are better than others, and whatever the best plan is, it's still going to be someone's agenda. Government can't exist without "pushing" some agenda.

[1] agenda - A list or program of things to be done or considered.
Funding is being allocated to the wrong areas. Therefore it is a funding problem.
Hmm this seems to me even more annoying than keys - why phone is bigger and more difficult to get out of my pocket.

On the other hand the little RFIDs are absolutely awesome to open doors with, try to use them instead (they are cheap enough that it doesn't matter).
We have logging, but alerts are a high priority! If you buy one I will build it for you :)
Lamborghini Sesto Elemento VS Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport Reviews 
Lamborghini Sesto Elemento VS Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport Reviews
We constantly ask ourselves the question, how can we make our fans happy every day, and what are the different ways we can do that.

Ship Half-Life 2 Episode 3 already, that's how!

edit: pstack makes an excellent point. Instead, perhaps I should say "Ship something with 'Half-Life' and '3' in the title already, that's how!" :)
Why Today's Developers Might Be Programming Themselves Out of Tomorrow's Jobs
This headline should be amended; this article is referring to New York the state, not the city. There are 19,541,453 New Yorkers, and more people live outside the 5 boroughs of NYC than inside.
In a monotonically increasing population, a monotonically increasing budget can still result in cuts in important metrics like per-pupil spending.
Soundmanager 2.0: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
The whole story is blown out of proportion.

You're putting your files online, and there's a Web interface to access them, and you expect them to be absolutely secure - really? Encrypt them with something really solid and don't put them online, if that's your concern.

You upload your files to the cloud, and then you complain when the company hands them over to the FBI - really? Bury the files in concrete at midnight, and kill all witnesses, if that's your concern.

The guy who is agitating the whole thing - I'm changing my mind about him. He did a good job with the whole Facebook / Google debacle, but now he's coming off as an attention seeker / karma whore.
Ask HN: Questions that should be in FAQ?
Hi HN,

There are some questions I couldn't find answers to:

1. Is it possible to have a more customized RSS feed? Currently there are a lot of submissions that have no comments, or are dead. I'd rather see only 10 or 20 a day with the most active submissions, for example.

2. What does the "average" in one's profile mean? Is it the average karma per post? Is it a moving average (past X days)? Exponential moving average? How does it work?

Thanks!
It seems like you're not very familiar with Gary. I've been following him online since mid 2008 back when he had maybe 13,000 followers. He relentlessly hustled online to get where is today as an "internet celebrity." By putting out videos on a regular basis, responding to an insane amount of tweets, doing live video streams, TV, and keynotes, each of those built him up to a credible social media voice.

It's also not fair to compare him to celebrities like Trump or Lohan. They were already famous when they joined Twitter. Gary started at the bottom. I have no idea what he's done for clients with social media, but in terms of his own personal brand, he has crushed it (pun intended).
Did someone say logs?
I'm not sure what founding values you're talking about. A cursory reading of the founders plainly reveals they viewed America as a nation of and for Europeans. Immigration policy for most of American history explicitly excluded non-whites, and often sought to exclude southern and eastern europeans.

I'm not advocating a racist immigration policy, as the US was founded on, just one that serves the people living here. After all the purpose of the constitution is to "secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity". That means the country is for citizens and their bloodlines, not foreigners.
I think the better point here is:

Bump keys exist for locks, lets not rely on them as a strong point for security.
Doesn't the theory of infinite collisions existing, require that you are nit restricting the file size? The combination of "the hashes match" and the file sizes are roughly the same would seem to go beyond a reasonable doubt.
Yeah Tri-Gate on ARM and you have the best of both Worlds, they would have a great USP inside the ARM Market.
Wow. 2% of Google comes from MIT! Google rocks!!!

...

Bravo, Google, but it's a bit obvious :)
Nemerle's coolest feature(or most evil, depending on your perspective) is its macros - it's one of the few modern languages that support them.
I've seen it happen twice - once just after a series A, and once after a company made it incrementally to good profitability. Both had headcounts in the 20-30 range, and still considered themselves to be startups.
I wouldn't call it a vulnerability. The only way it could be abused would be tricking someone with the file into calculating very specific hashes and giving them to you.
Like any good conspiracy theory, this starts valid (Amazon to build Android devices) and ends misinformed (Fringe Field Switching isn't e-ink, but "normal" LCD) and out of sync with reality (Mirasol isn't ready for prime time yet.)
Sorry you feel lectured buddy, was not my intention. And you're right, I did make unfounded assumptions about you.

Anyway, they did not overlook the oldest security technique in computer history (encryption/cryptography) without reason - and you gotta give those fuckers credit, those mountain goats gave the most powerful military in the world a run for its money for a decade.
What I love about Valve is how little bullshit comes out of there.

Gabe's talking about how much everyone loves working at Valve, and what a great environment it is, and with so many companies you'd know that was just spin for the interview. Having involved Valve in a few things I've done in the past, their staff really are loving their jobs, and everyone I've dealt with there, from support technicians up to executives, just lets that fact leak out of them, all the time. It even makes it enjoyable to work with them.
That's delusional and never going to happen. Companies don't just give away money.
Cake Health Wants To Be The ‘Mint For Health Insurance’ (Beta Invites)
This app is brilliant! Congrats guys.
it's nice to see a larger company not being so terrible :-)
Not really. Let's use for example a 256 bit hash and a 1KB file. That means you have about 2 ^ (1024 * 8 - 256) collisions that are the exact right size. Close enough to infinite for any file that's at least a hundred bytes. The more pressing concern is how hard it is to fake a particular hash.
I found an article on making Ruby call Python: http://www.decalage.info/python/ruby_bridge

Maybe they'll go out and one thing will lead to another.
I'm surprised this doesn't mention blood donation as pay-for-blood schemes have been shown to reduce donations. This is the primary reason I'm aware of this effect.
OpenVoice - A GoogleVoice clone developed in Rails.
Good for you. Are the American people better off thanks to you and your mother's presence here? Or would they have got along just as well without you? That's the salient question.
Namecoin: Distributed (p2p) domain registration system based on bitcoin
Ok I will play.

Firstly, to get this out of the way, your attitude doesn't really belong on HN and these petty arguments don't contribute to the discussion.

Let's look at how I believe it is revolutionary for the Chinese restaurant.

* They now have an easier, more convenient and better way to contact and be in constant contact with their customers.

* They have pretty good data on their customers. Their ages, their genders, their education status and more.

* Easier transition to online business. If they decided to provide an online service they already have an attentive customer base to work from.

For what it is worth, I do think most "social media experts" are full of waffle.
hi, it's http://snapplans.com. Let me know what you think.
Good data, thanks. What kind of small items are you using if you don't mind me asking?
Other links of interest regarding Namecoin:

http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2011/05/12/namecoin-a-dns-alter...

https://github.com/vinced/namecoin

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=6017.0
The similarity between the messages from Drew, Arash and the spokeswoman Julie Supan mentioned in the article is unfortunate. It makes me wonder if there isn't some memo they're circulating over there, listing all the talking points to hit when talking about this.
10^11m, assuming 0.1mm thickness of a single sheet.
A yubikey and master password is pretty much the same as this, if not more secure due to needing a physical token?

Both Lastpass and Passpack currently support Yubikeys.
Mixpanel is looking for engineers who want to scale real-time data analysis
I love the idea, but I don't think I could trust myself with it. Generally my phone will still have a healthy chunk of battery left at the end of the day, but fairly often, if I'm out of town for a day for meetings or whatever, by the time I'm back home I will have spent so much time on calls that it will have completely drained my battery.

One feature I'd love to see is connecting it with the doorbell, then I would forget about my battery worries and go straight for it. Would come in occasional use for if someone you're happy to let in arrives while you are out, but would also be great for day-to-day use. They press the buzzer, you get a phone call to talk to them followed by the option to let them in or not. (Where I live right now, my office is two floors up, it's pretty rare that I can hear anyone at the door.)

edit: The FAQ page is a bit vague about international orders due to "latency issues", any chance of some expansion on that? To my mind, a long distance (say, UK to California) is adding less than a second of latency, and I wouldn't have any problem if the door took a couple of seconds to unlock. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem latency causes?
Really cool idea, but I think any system like this needs to have a fail-safe option, for when your phone runs out of batteries.
From the article: "So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get Dota 2 for free, because of past behavior in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice."

Wow, if this gets successfully implemented I can't wait! Especially the part about a jerk having to pay an extra hundred bucks for voice! haha
Really killer for things like providing access to Airbnb guests without having to be there.
Will do! Do you mind if I contact you in private regarding specific design issues you'd want to point out? My email is in my profile.

Thanks.
and, as I understand the overall issue to be, the concern is that DropBox may at some point "hand over your files" to (I assume) The Feds -- should they come knocking?

No, the concern is that Dropbox led people to believe that by use of encryption, Dropbox was preventing user files from being accessible to anyone except that user, which isn't actually true, and that Dropbox gained unearned competitive advantage because of that untruth.

Technically-savvy users who know (or more to the point, care) how Dropbox works behind the scenes may be able to figure out that user files had to be accessible to Dropbox (the "but how could they de-dupe files?" argument). Bully for them, but the fact that some people understand why an advertising claim is misleading doesn't make it okay for that claim to be misleading in the first place.
Not as clear cut as rural/urban. The definition of urban there is not more developed, its more dense in population. The semi urban areas have huge populations, plus the population sympathizes with them - city folk hate these guys.
static typed python+javascript
Hidden services in Tor:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en

There are other projects, like I2P and Freenet, but they aren't as widely used and they are slower.

There are tons of hidden services in Tor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion

EDIT: There's also namecoin, that someone submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546815

EDIT2: And the MafiaaRedirector Firefox extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-re...
Uhh, it uses a standard key as a failsafe.
There might be more to selling ads than initially meets the eye - the ability to connect specialized products and services with interested audience can help drive all sorts of innovation quite unrelated to social media. Many of these projects may never take off without advances in targeted advertising.

Indeed better segmentation and the abiolity to get real time feedback could bring about some rather fundamental changes to the very nature of the consumer economy and the way demand is estimated and prices are set on a very broad range of products - full consequences are not easy to appreciate.
You are off by an order of magnitude: a single GPU can do billions of hashes per second.

HD 6970 = 5.5 billion MD5/s
http://golubev.com/gpuest.htm
Facebook is now a massive company with businesses, both big and small, signing up at an incredible rate. While I believe a lot of hype surrounds "social media", I think that it can be used correctly to a businesses advantage.

There's no reason to be embarrassed btw.
This is true, your phone is also a physical token. I just like the fact that I can use something I already have instead of having to buy a yubikey.
It's strange that nobody already mentioned Tor and its hidden services:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en

I2P and Freenet aren't as widely used (AFAIK) and they are slower.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion

EDIT: There's also namecoin, that someone submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546815

And the MafiaaRedirector Firefox extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-re...
Ask HN: Why no innovation in Read Later tools by adding comments?
Neither of any available Read Later tools that can export to a Ebook Reader are able to also include comment or is there one that can add comment also. Why is there no innovation ? Instapaper, ReadLater etc.
Google Accepted Ads From Unverified Pharmacies, a Firm Says
That's obnoxious. Just down vote his comment.