skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's certainly not "logic," I wouldn't call it paranoia. Consider that some people just like to be more in control of their lives than they are, and they see that small bit of control slipping away every day. If you don't understand computers -- and, granted, if you're reading this forum, it's probably hard for you to put yourself in those shoes -- you're putting your life in the hands of a black box. Nevermind that you do it (unknowingly) all the time. Everything you touch is starting to become alien because it incorporates some crazy technology you've never seen before.

There's a great section in Neal Stephenson's Anathem where the science-y younger brother is speaking to his older sister, who's mechanically talented but not very techy. He says there's always a better way to build something, that you can always take the inefficiency out of whatever system you're working with. But she doesn't want that, because she wouldn't be able to fix it herself. That's how most people see technology, and to be honest, we see it similarly, because we can fix it, so it's not a threat. In 30 years, will we be able to fix the things that are running to world, and will we be as inclined to trust them as we do now?

I'm not saying it's logical, or appropriate, but it's a natural response to the situation. I think it's important to work with it rather than dismiss it.
It's a matter of fashion. Right now, bitcoin is new, shiny, and fashionable.
It won't last.
I predict that in a year, we won't hear about bitcoins anymore.
Can we please stop the 'is it really open?!' silliness that gets triggered after every such incident.

They specifically said that there will be a code drop, as for the app removal it's probably due to copyright owner request and they had to comply.
I've read that it's actually illegal for them to use your tax return as evidence against you in a criminal case, due to the Fourth Amendment.
People tend to read interesting content, and reply to sensational/controversial content. The two categories are often mutually exclusive.
If it's on the Palestinian dime I'd say they have the right to put conditions on that dime. And it's Stallman's right to either accept those conditions or not go at all.
I guess we have a winner. Now please bring the comment scores back.
There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes.

I will wage anyone that if all the cars on the road were computer driven there would be no where near 42,636 people killed per year.
HTC bootloader policy a very big deal to a small number of users
Unbelievable timelapse of the night sky in Atacama, Chile
Ehh, not really. It's not that "we're" interested in bitcoin, it's that "they're" interested in bitcoin. Remember, the sensible thing to do once you own bitcoins is to start spamming all your friends to tell them how awesome bitcoin is.

I'd be interested in seeing the stats on who keeps voting these bitcoin articles up, cuz I suspect there's an organized or at least self-organizing voting ring going on.
Not to be "that guy", but have you tried org-mode? It has an "effort estimate"[1] feature, which lets you estimate how long you think a task will take. It's also got good time clocking features, so you can compare how close you were. I don't use it to estimate my effort, so not sure how effective or useful it is in practice.

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/Effort-estimates.html
I submitted an article everytime I publish something I thought HN readers might like. I never submitted cartoons though. Also, it's not possible for me to figure out which articles get upvoted. Most of my articles don't made the front page anyway.

Bitcoin is fertile enough to have an entire magazine dedicated to it.
> Demonstrate a car smart enough to monitor its own brake pad wear, alert on burnt out bulbs, and provide a clear readout of all detected issues (i.e. not a coded blinking service light, or plug interface) before you start trying to make it drive itself.

I don't know about other cars, but all model Porsche's will do exactly this. Granted, it doesn't have as many sensors as I would like--leading to it only giving an 'engine warning' light for innumerable problems, but when it comes to breaks, oils, lights, etc. it has a pretty fine grained detection pattern.
The developer of PSX4Droid made it free but adsupported from his site. http://www.zodttd.com/wp/2011/04/psx4droid-3-0-0-is-out-down... I don't like the removals, but I'm happy I can still sideload them without any issues.
Adding support for other editors was something I am definitely mulling over, maybe version 2
Bitcoin is:

- cool tech

- anti-government

- geeky

- worth more if more people participate

There's quite a few, shall we say, enthusiastic people on HN. Things with Bitcoin in the title typically get upvoted to ~20-30 points, regardless of quality (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430652). I'm willing to bet they are collecting more and more flags, though.
Money is just a tool, and BitCoin is a particular variant of that tool. It has unique properties that can be used for lots of things. Therefore I wouldn't say that they are worthless.
I don't really care why people believe in their many gods. From one god to the next, the premise is still invalid for the same reasons. I don't take them any more seriously than I would a person suffering from a schizophrenic episode.

It's not like you seek out worshipers of Thor to find out why they believe that. Your hypocrisy in expecting people to listen to you would be comical if it weren't annoying.

Rewind a bit.

Do you know what epistemology is? If you do, then you know why the answer to the question doesn't change from one religion/holy book to the next and you're just trolling.

If you don't, you're just wasting both our time when you should be reading. MIT OCW isn't a bad place to start. Nietzsche's various works (Beyond Good & Evil, Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist, etc) are also good.
DroidDream was yanked, all though that was more malware.
nowhere really, I read it but so far no interesting submissions, just people reading the form and entering sillyness mostly.
My primary worry would be liquidity.

-Because the demand to buy bitcoin is low, the likelihood being able to sell the bitcoin whenever he wants (ideally at height of bitcoins worth) is also low. This is the same reason that penny stocks are difficult to make a profit it. While the value may go up significantly, you can't realize this profit until you find someone to sell it to (and in order for them to buy it, they have to think it's going to go up even further).

-Currently there aren't too many companies that accept bitcoin for products or services.

-Any currency is only as valuable as the people using it believe it is (ie. the dollar is only a piece of paper, but because the seller believes that its worth is equivalent to a candybar, he will trade it).

-Once people realize that they cannot use bitcoin for goods or services, the likelihood is that there will be a mass exodus, and the price will fall rapidly as people want to sell their un-useable bitcoin for a currency that still has value. With so few buyers, the discount will likely have to be pretty hefty in order to attract other buyers into a falling investment.
The karma threshold for downvoting comments is 500, iirc. That would make socking a fairly laborious prospect. As for meatpuppetry, if you're going to go through that much trouble just to downvote someone, then I'd suggest you have deeper issues.
i disagree on the screen color
A part of me thinks "Ey, he might steal any ideas that get put in there!"

Then again, ideas aren't that valuable.

Either way, I wouldn't worry too much.
I believe that parent's point is precisely that it is indeed unconvincing and so we should in turn be mindful that our own idea that the brain is a computer will, it is possible, given further technological advances, come to strike us as just as unconvincing as Leibniz' argument. Metaphors of the brain follow along with the state of the arts of technologies. For the ancient Greeks, the human composition (they didn't talk yet of brains and consciousness) was the city-state; for early modern natural philosophers, the mill and the like; during the industrial revolution, machines; and now, with us, computers and computation. It is unlikely that our current analogy is any more or less true than previous ones, that is to say, they may be illuminating in some way and not entirely useless in our thinking about brains and consciousness, but as it goes, they are not and cannot be true because the conjectures cannot even in the end be shown to be wrong. Consciousness and the brain may not be in the end inexplicable, but I very much doubt that we will find that the brain and consciousness are something else other than the brain and consciousness, like, for instance, a mill or a computer. It would be the most surprising thing of all were we to find out that evolution produced a kind of technology before in fact that technology as a human tool was ever produced -- but that is a different argument and I'm not even sure what I mean by it.
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Perhaps it's because software has an obvious history of being buggy. A web service won't be down for a while if this fails, hundreds of lives being at risk on a 24 hour a day basis. Maybe a little wait-and-see is a reasoned approach for a complex interactive dynamical system like this?
This isn't NSA-hard stuff; it's $500,000-contract hard.
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The fact that we know about this supports this idea. Apple is quite capable of keeping much bigger secrets than this when it tries.
Somewhat to my surprise, it doesn't appear that they've triggered the voting ring algorithm yet. (I remember that swombat's Twitter followers did trip it at least once - it can be tripped without scripting.)
I too can imagine the number dropping down far lower than that, even under a thousand, let's say.

I can then imagine the newspaper headlines the few times per year that computers do end up, for whatever reason, being responsible for a small handful of deaths: "COMPUTER GLITCH KILLS FOUR PASSENGERS IN HORRIFIC CAR ACCIDENT!"

Never mind that human "glitches" are responsible for dozens of such accidents every day at present. For whatever reason, I have a strong feeling that headlines such as those will scare people worse than the way things are now.
I flagged this, because what limited discussion there is about virtualized crypto is on this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596822

... and the poll does nothing but fracture the discussion.

(Also: "entropy testers"?)
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Who in the world actually still has their Facebook page still set to public?
There are a lot of raw resources that we have excess of; some call it reserve. To try and explain the reason gold is so much is a ridiculous task. Practical uses(better than copper in some applications) and non-practical uses(it looks good on me). To compare BitCoins to gold is a horrible analogy to even begin with.
Denver is fairly low cost, with a pretty strong tech market in Denver and a strong startup movement in Boulder. I moved here last year and love it.
I wonder if driverless cars could start out as a tool for people with disabilities. If such use were challenged, I can imagine the supreme court taking seriously a case by a person who is quadriplegic or blind demanding the right to use a self-driving car. If they can prove them safer, it will be hard to find a compelling government interest that could offset denying the use of this assistive technology.
They are in part. The comments are ranked by votes and time and probably some other mechanisms pg implemented. I think the reddit hot method might be better.
The issue here is that the author here used the emulator code bases (from the Snes9x project and others) and tried to profit from them, which is probably against the license of the underlying code.

He didn't even release his source code, so he was in violation of the original license, but tried to profit from it anyways.
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The emulators were created with code that was stolen. Google is simply cracking down on licensing violations. They're not taking a stance against emulation in general, or anything like that.

I'm sure that if you submitted an emulator that you actually wrote, rather than stealing, and sold it, it would stay up just fine.
I suspect any system can be gamed for some reason or other. Equally, I suspect that making ever more complicated systems, to handle ever fewer edge cases, results in the system being less useful, not more.

Simple systems, like the current karma system, can certainly be gamed, but with each iteration general value is lost. Displaying comment scores (which I prefer) can be abused. So that's gone, and a data point with it.

Keep them, don't keep them, I don't think I'll lose much sleep either way. But as a general rule, removing data or functionality from the many, to try and prevent the excesses of the few always invokes the ire of unit ended consequences. It's almost never an improvement.
"...all N-Queen problem comes to mere 8 lines of code"

If you are optimizing in LOC, it can come down to basically a single expression; of course that's not a reason to write it as a one-liner:

def n_queen(n):
return (p for p in itertools.permutations(xrange(n))
if all(j-i != abs(p[i] - p[j])
for i in xrange(n - 1)
for j in xrange(i + 1, n)))
The thing that makes it most unique WRT jewelry is that it's pretty.

It's easy to make jewelry out of wood, glass, and lots of other things.
Or "nice paper" hard, really. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I could convince my advisor to let me work on such an attack, and I think I could pull it off in a couple of months. It's hardly novel at this point, though.

Good point, though; I've edited my comment.
Yes, but that's not what he was asking. The question is: do you know what your key differentiator is? If so, try to explain it to us here.

It's important to try to craft a "unique value proposition", and then make sure your page positions your product around that.
"Android is basically giving up their biggest competitive advantage to iPhone gaming? "

Emulation is a niche. Mainstream audiences want touch touch-enabled games, designed for small screens (no tiny fonts) at their native resolution without the hassle of finding illegal ROMs.
Just find a place where you will be happy for four years, and work and play hard there...and try not to overanalyze. If I had my education to do over, I wouldn't have worried about name recognition whatsoever (it's just not that important in the real world), and differences in what programs offer (or don't) are nothing compared to the drive to learn that you have (or don't).
> Cookiejacking Exploit Hits Internet Explorer, Targets Your Login Info

This makes it sound like they're going to be able to get your password... No major website will be storing your password in a cookie. At worst the attacker will have your session id meaning they can log in as you until you log out of the website in question.
I mean, this is clever and all, but what am I missing? Isn't this just an IE bug? That you can access cookie files as IFRAME targets? Is there some part of the IE architecture that depends on that functionality, or is Microsoft just going to patch that?

Because pretty much all the browsers, on a better-than-quarterly basis, fall victim to attacks that allow arbitrary web pages to upload code into their processes and run it.

Just not sure this needed the "attack class" name.
I'm coming from a background in massively parallel computing and financial services, both of which are heavy on security. Nonetheless, and even though I have been running cryptographically active instances on Amazon and Rackspace for a long time, I had honestly never thought about the RNG source on VMs.

That is my own failure, of course. I wonder, though, whether everyone else knew about the VM RNG issue, or if only I had missed the memo. If the majority of poll respondents have never thought about the problem at all, perhaps I should start an awareness campaign on wikis and forums.
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It has unique properties that can be used for lots of things

Well, no, it doesn't have any unique properties. For instance, as I've said before, I'm running an alternative currency called "bitcoin prime" which has these two properties:

1. Every string of bits that is a bitcoin is also a bitcoin prime, and

2. Every bitcoin prime extant as of April 1, 2011 belongs to me (all subsequently mined bitcoins prime belong to whoever mined the relevant bitcoin).

Mathematically there's no difference between bitcoin and bitcoin prime. And that's just one of an infinite number of possible bitcoin alternatives which can be arbitrarily declared, at any time, to exist.
> Thanks for the comment. I have added big red (orange ...) boxes to let the user know that it is considered bad practice

Guys, don't spread ignorance.

Implementation details aren't essential, therefore a "bad practice" in this respect is just an ignorance.

Once again: the difference between classical and prototype-based (delegation-based in this case) inheritance is _ideological_.

In first case (classical) we have systematized (classified) code reuse, in the later (prototypal) -- unclassified (or "chaotic") code reuse, i.e. "I reuse/inherit the behavior and state from that object from which I want".

There are no other differences. The implementation details are derived stuff. Moreover, the same implementation can provide both, classical and prototypal _approaches_ of a code reuse (good examples: Python - prototype-based language, CoffeeScript, JavaScript, etc). Because a "class" isn't a syntactic construct, inst' some specific implementation. It's the _ability to classify_ objects. And this ability can be achieved in different systems regardless an implementation.

So if you need a classical code reuse with predefined "shapes" of your objects - you build a classical system reusing the code form linear ("tower") chain of inheritance. If instead you need just reuse a small functionality regardless of the classical hierarchy -- you use prototypal inheritance, that is delegation based traits/mixins/prototypes. And JS has both of them -- classes (without sugar) and prototypes -- and they both can be used when needed, there is no "bad practice" in this case.

Regarding classes and their kinds (that's why Python is also prototype-based langauge with "classes as sugar", the same as in Coffee, the same as is planed for ECMAScript): https://gist.github.com/977034

You may find additional info on common theory of OOP and in particular in ECMAScript with all details in "ECMA-262-3 in detail. Chapter 7.1 / 7.2".

Dmitry.
Agreed. This is a one-off bug and certainly not something warranting its own term, since we're unlikely to ever see something quite like this again. Definitely a clever attack, though.
I have no idea, but you'd be surprised how little silver a Honda can actually carry.
So how does hacking work anyway?
I am more of a web designer/front-end developer with a little experience in everything else. However I realize the potential of programming languages but I have never quite figured out or grasped how they go from writing a nice little web app to the drastic other side of breaching a web site, climbing into their databases, hacking their email, etc.. Can someone explain (and I'm sure someone on here can) how it all works? It seems to be a big secret but I want to know.
You mean like write(2)? :)
Entropy testers:

Robert Brown's dieharder: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/dieharder.php

NIST Statistical Test Suite: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/index.html

Fourmilab's ENT: http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/
Buy food with Bitcoins
In Chicago, there was a case some years ago where a woman was pulled under a train by a door.

She was carrying a very expensive violin. She got off the train and the doors closed between her and the violin, with the strap around her shoulder. Because the strap was thin, it didn't activate the door's obstruction detector.

Because the violin was so expensive, she didn't want to lose it, so instead of crawling out of the strap, she stood there and waited for the conductor to notice her. One of his jobs was to verify visually that there were no problems in the station before the train started moving -- but he didn't do that. She was dragged under the train and the wheels sliced off her legs.

Point being, those people are likely serving an important safety function. The conductor didn't do his job on the Chicago train and so a woman lost her legs. But a system with no human conductor would be an unsafe system by design.
You did not miss the memo. Crypto on virtualized cloud platforms isn't trustworthy. But it's a grade of untrustworthy several steps higher than "exploitable SQL injection", so people don't think about it, talk about it, or take it seriously.

The poll, though, is unnecessary and I flagged it.

Meanwhile, you brought up:

Robert Brown's dieharder:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/dieharder.php

NIST Statistical Test Suite: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/index.html

Fourmilab's ENT: http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/

You noted that people could run these on their CSPRNGs to check randomness. No, they can't. These are all useful tools indeed; pentesters use them to check cookies and crypto tokens. But they can only tell you whether bits are correlated. It is very easy for an uncorrelated stream of bits to be terribly insecure: they simply have to be seeded from the same source.

It is not a good idea to suggest people test their RNGs with things like "ent". In "ent", Ruby's insecure rand() can appear competitive with /dev/random.

There's also the obvious confounding issue with testing an entropy pool by depleting it.
As a web developer, I got started by being passionate in my field. I have never gone to college though, so my advice is somewhat limited.

If I were to go to college today then I think I would either skip CS and go into something like statistics or do something like a double major. My choice would depend on how long I would have to spend in school vs. how quick I could get out into the wild.

The idea here is that programmers who have some sort of niche specialization are more valuable than those who are only programmers. If I'm passionate about CS, then I can learn some of the subjects taught in CS on my own. Something like statistics is not the same case, I would probably benefit from the more structured framework.

Given a choice between self teaching a major, I would probably try teaching myself the subjects taught in a CS major. Programming by itself is much more vocational (and likely easier to self teach as a result) than something like statistics. Programming is also relatively easy to prove competency through publishing written code, working on open source projects and building a reputation. I know that CS is a lot more than programming, but I think learning the programming portion is good enough when combined with another major.

I'm not sure about specific schools. I get the feeling like there are a certain number of schools where the name will help sell its graduates and then anything below that level is just relatively more money and not necessarily more return. Another twist is that entrepreneurs and start-up workers may never get asked about college degrees. Personally, I have never been asked for a resume or college degrees.
We (emacs) already have like 5-6 ack modes, I beg of you, don't add to the list. Just find which one you like best and offer improvements.