skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone mentioned it looks a lot like basecamphq.com. But you should rip off the most important thing they have done which is put sign up front and center.

1. Change the "See how it works" button to "Pricing and Signup" and link to your pricing page.

2. Make the entire graphic above the button clickable and also point to the pricing page.
I emailed you asking for professional help in reviewing the security aspects of Arq. I'm not an expert, and I'd like to get it right. If anybody else has the expertise to do this review, please email me at stefan@haystacksoftware.com.

One way or another I want to get this right.
I don't think these situations are parallels.

Clones were a bad idea because they diluted Apple's brand and cut way into their margins (Apple is a hardware company and makes money from that).

As for cheap phones, Apple now sells the 3GS for $49. I don't think this is an example of the naysayers being right, it's just Apple having their cake and eating it too.

The point is not that Apple should do the same thing as everyone else to succeed at the web. It's just that they've been trying one thing over and over again with no success. They have to change something.
And yet if you zoom out just a little, people seem to be buying more and more equipment from Apple to produce and consume the "amateur" content of the web.
How about when it can reliably do finger tracking?
I kind of need exactly the opposite of this. I'm an engineer that's on the market again and being contacted by scores of companies, etc. I need a convenient way to manage all of them.
Awesome! I emailed you. Also I'm happy to pay for a review. I just want to get it right.
I've programmed computers at a low level, and lifted weights for the past 21 years (and in fact, read some actual papers about weight lifting, and failed to make the aforementioned complaint). The Eleikos of today feel basically like the Yorks of yesteryear.

On the other hand, the processors of 2000 are quite a bit different to the processors of 2011, and anyone who thinks that they can prove that this is irrelevant to the experiment in question by pure reasoning (rather than experimentation) is a moron, plain and simple.

Having tracked individual embodiments of algorithms over architectures from the P4 to Sandy Bridge, I can assure you that tradeoffs between particular approaches on an given problem vary wildy based on changes in microarchitecture.

Overall, there's a steady improvement and perhaps these languages are all gaining exactly the same (despite a substantial improvement in effective ILP from P4 to Core 2)... but I don't know that for sure and neither do you, despite your sophomoric self-assurance.

If only they could do the experiments on a processor from the last 5-6 years...naturally someone else could do the work for them, but why bother?
I found the 'How to Node' blog to have the best examples that actually contained working code (Express and other sites' example code doesn't seem to be updated or work): http://howtonode.org/

I also stumbled upon this node project on Github and was learning from how he put stuff together: https://github.com/kelper/Poll
Beneath the cruft (i.e., Apple products should have less polish, Apple hates amateurs), I think there's a kernel of truth, especially related to their approach to social networking. Can we expect Kayne West to use Ping like Twitter? Probably not, but it's an interesting thought.

Do remember that many of Apple's products (e.g., iMovie, iWeb) are designed for everyday people to create content that is fairly professional-looking. I'd argue that, to a certain degree, Apple has done more to raise the bar of content quality than Instagram or YouTube (which have lowered the bar to entry). Those aren't exclusive approaches, merely different value propositions.
In general, if you're an indie developer and you're doing custom crypto stuff, I'm happy to do a consult free of charge. You'll probably find other software security firms are similarly willing to do that kind of stuff, just like the good law firms will tend to do up-front consults for free.

Full-on software reviews, particularly by consultants competent enough to review crypto, are very expensive. You can probably get away without doing one, as long as you get good advice and have people to bounce ideas and problems off of.

Karmically, being someone to bounce ideas and problems off of has paid off for Matasano dramatically, so, anyone else reading this thread, consider this an open invitation.
If you're new to Blueprint, it's an open-source tool for reverse engineering servers. Detects packages, file changes, source installs and bundles everything up into a reusable format - a blueprint.

Blueprint I/O is a transport tool for blueprints, all of the configuration information and file tarballs can be sent to other servers for reuse. We think it's a no-fuss way to get started in configuration management. No DSLs, no extra servers and no workflow changes.
Btw., they only used their homemade submarine to tow the rocket platform at the first launch attempt (last September).

This time around they decided to enable the rocket platform to sail on its own: http://politiken.tv/nyheder/videnskab/article1298751.ece
A Ponzi scheme has no business other than selling ahead

Charles Ponzi arbitraged postage coupons (and resorted to selling ahead when that failed to turn profit). Strict application of your definition makes Ponzi's scheme not a Ponzi scheme.
That's pocket change for Apple.
LuaJIT for ARM now in Git head: benchmarks
CYBRA Corporation Hires Michael J. Shabet
Erdös also said: "Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems."
Going Digital: Editor Josh Quittner Leaves Time Inc For Flipboard
The paper uses wc -l (probably because sloccount doesn't handle go and scala?) to count the lines of code.

Here is the output of sloccount:

SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)
595 java_pro java=595
591 java java=591
488 cpp cpp=488
328 python python=328
0 go (none)
0 go_pro (none)
0 scala (none)
0 scala_pro (none)

generated using David A. Wheeler's 'SLOCCount'.

Compare it to the paper.

Benchmark wc -l
C++ Dbg/Opt 850
Java 1068
Java Pro 1240
Scala 658
Scala Pro 297
Go 902
Go Pro 786
This is an issue that doesn't seem to be getting much play in all of the discussion about Groupon's financials - for every $2 that comes in the door as revenue, $1 of that immediately is booked as a liability as well. I am far from an accountant or all that familiar with GAAP but it seems somewhat disingenuous.
Primarily it's the salesforce and other employees from what I understand. 8000 employees x $40k/year average = $320 mil/year
Consider the scrypt thing a friendly style note.

Note taken. :-)

What privacy attacks were you thinking of?

Things like replacing files with malware.
> My point wasn't that less professional looking websites
> succeed over more professional looking sites.

Besides that your point is not true I fail to see how it applies to Apple. Should they remake apple.com to something horribly amateurish, and then they somehow succeed? Are they failing?

And I bet that if some website which looks amateur succeeds over more professionally done the looks is not the key to success.
> Clones were a bad idea because they diluted Apple's brand and cut way into their margins (Apple is a hardware company and makes money from that).

Well Apple's embracing amateur content may turn out to be a bad idea for all I know -- it would certainly dilute a few things. I stand by my claim that there is a parallel.

> As for cheap phones, Apple now sells the 3GS for $49

Disregarding the actual device cost, I suppose Apple has achieved the goal of having several price tiers, however it did not do so in the way that was recommended by a number of pundits, about whose view (that Apple must design cheap phones otherwise it is dead in the water) I was complaining.

> The point is not that Apple should do the same thing as everyone else to succeed at the web. It's just that they've been trying one thing over and over again with no success. They have to change something.

That may be your personal point (and I would agree with it), but it does not seem to be the point of the author of the article who was more specific about what, in the author's opinion, needs to be changed.
Why We Sold Our Startup
Groupon IPO Tanking Ahead - Will Google or Facebook Save Groupon First?
Haskell is Purely Object Oriented
Minorities, perhaps. But they definitely exist. There was zero representation. How can you build a legit network of startup mentors without much diversity?
Yeah, I guess there are a few small leaps in the first two points there. The connection I was trying to make was that Apple's taking it's experience with things they understand (desktop apps, marketing to professionals, making beautiful things, etc) and applying it to a new domain that they don't have a good grasp on.
For a first email MailChimp's 1% unsubscribe rate really could hurt you.

We started using them recently and our first newsletter had a 0.5% unsubscribe rate of our users who don't want our emails but had never had or seen the opportunity to opt in or out, I just hadn't thought that far ahead when this all started and I personally knew everyone using our platform and could directly tell them about stuff.

Our second email had just a 0.1% unsubscribe rate, but with a bit of bad luck we would have been banned before we could send that one.
The java version spends 75% of it's time gc? That smells fishy to me.

edit: I just got to section VI of the paper, which does some gc tuning. In my playing, I also found about a 20% speedup by changing the HavlakLoopFinder.UnionFindMode class to being a statuc class.
why do you say years? wouldn't all the earliest employees be partially vested right now, and vesting more each month? and as long as the share price stays bubbly through the end of the lockup period they can cash out at/close to the top.
> I don't know that this will be true for very much longer, if it's not already been disproven.

Please show me examples of these 50k+ line JS applications that have no backend, or run JS on the backend, that are not a mess.

...That you can develop, debug, and tie in with the rest of the system with the same ease (or even 10% of ease) as you can with native .NET apps.
I believe today what I've always believed - net profits rule, bootstrapping is the way to start a business, and spending less than you earn is the only way to have a healthy relationship with money.

Don't you also have a rule about not growing beyond a certain number of employees?
The web-based API looks like the Active Channels 2ND attempt, there's nothing like history to get a glimpse of the future. [1]

[1]: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768176.aspx
Citation? I haven't seen this number and I'm very curious as to how it was derived.
> The heart of a ponzi scheme is continually securing new investments to pay out earlier investors.

The difference is the nature of the deception. In a ponzi scheme, you accept an investment, buy yourself a new house, and then tell the investor they're earning 10%. You flat-out lie about what you did with the money, and year after year you you keep enough cash around to make incremental pay outs as necessary to maintain the illusion of a stable, well-performing portfolio.

It's 100% deception and the element of theft is obvious.

With GroupOn, the risks may be downplayed and the potential benefits exaggerated, but certainly right now no one should invest without understanding that investing means significant risk. Furthermore, it's been published what money has gone to cash out early investors, and what money has been invested into the company.

The ethics are definitely questionable, but then the ethics of a casino are questionable, too. The ethics of a ponzi scheme are not questionable-- it's straightforward lying and stealing.
Yeah, we were saying the same thing, I think, but you said it more clearly.
Tomb Raider trailer is based on details Lara’s adventure
> Daft Punk, have done so little, five albums by my count.

3 studio albums, 1 soundtrack, 2 live albums and 3 remixes. But they also have 17 singles, as many music videos, 2 full-length movies (Interstella 5555 as part of Discovery, and Daft Punk's Electroma which is a bona-fide movie directed by the duo) and they have toured a lot. I don't think Daft Punk is a good example of "doing so little" quantity-wise.
Dear lord, thank you for this bit of common sense.

It's actually quite hard to know what a given piece of code will do on a given microarchitecture even if on average it runs everything X% faster - you may find you're the bit of code that bites the big one and run X% slower on the new microarchitecture (e.g. you were depending on branch mispredicts being cheaper than they are) or suddenly your code runs way faster than competing codes (e.g. you're the superstar running 2X% faster because a sudden increase in ILP exposes that you've got a main loop full of independent operations).
I commented above:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617160
Lockheed Martin buys quantum computer for $10 million
Is that why your user name is an abbreviation of portmanteau?
Maybe I'm just not understanding something here, but aren't people on the boards of directors of companies supposed to be committed to the success of that company, not simply providing advice? Sounds like you were never very committed.
How the Microsoft Windows 8 demo video was made
No they're not failing over all at all. They're just failing at web stuff (which they keep trying at). I wouldn't change a thing with their hardware business, and as a result I wouldn't change apple.com. I would change me.com though, because it's not a success by any definition of the term.

Also, my point was not about whether a site is amateur or professionally done. It's whether the focus is on amateur or professional content. Apple is very good at the latter and not so much at the former which is why they have so much trouble with the web.
But if you take a look at their SEC filing, $203 million of their 2010 expenses were one-time acquisition related. So the operating loss isn't being reduced as quickly as one might think.

Other warning signs. Working capital deficit was larger at the end of Q1 '11 by about $32 million and free cash flow is going down.

Plus, since all the costs are sales & marketing related, they're not boxing anyone out by building large-scale infrastructure (Amazon, Google) or making customers sticky (Facebook).

I would hazard a guess because they own ad-delivery systems, Facebook or Google could reach the number of people Groupon reaches for a lot less marketing dollars.
RFID In Plant Solutions
I particularly recommend the chapter "Preparing Mathematics Teachers"

http://download.nap.edu/cart/download.cgi?&record_id=128...

from the book Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy.

Thanks for sharing this news about freely downloadable .PDFs of the many National Academy Press publications.
DSK And Other Bankers Won't Be Able To Pull The Same Stunts Anymore
What makes you shy away from backup apps that rely on GPG?
Dirty Harry Pwned: Researchers Hack Cop Car Video Streams
World Most Beautiful Bras Wallpapers, Cool Bras
Brand APIs with PayPal, Netflix & Best Buy - Adam Kleinberg
Free Intro to Computer Graphics Text (Uses processing for examples)
There Is No One Size Fits All Social Media Strategy
I am the author :). It's possible I didn't make my point as clearly as I could have in my post though.

Also re: phone prices, I agree with you. I think the pundits were wrong and pre-judged Apple's path to success on little evidence. I think there's plenty of evidence that their current path on the web is the wrong one.
Online Business and Internet Marketing
10 Best Practices for Preventing Online Brand Scams
I just don't see his point. Why go ugly/messy when elegant/perfect is working so well?

OK, so Ping isn't doing well. Seemed a "me too!" gesture in a market saturated with social networking apps, a messy application for a slick product.

No point in changing a paradigm that works, only to garner greater market coverage with subsequent much less penetration. If Apple's gonna "go ugly", they have to compete with "ugly" at 10% the price they're used to.

Why be worse, when you're famous for best?
I'm gunna go ahead and say while there are tons of information you can teach, real ENTREPRENEURS, and not necessarily small business owners, have a unique set of innate traits that cannot be taught.
Staffing should be a huge component. Crunchbase[1] lists 3100 employees and yet there's 8000 now. Most of them probably inside sales. Spreading the word out and getting every brick and mortar to hear about and use them is critical now.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/groupon
I recently did some medium-scale work with it and was generally satisfied. The gotchas I encountered were mainly javascripts fault.
What tptacek said. :-)
The G round investors are buying their way into the IPO.

They believe that the IPO will be huge regardless of Groupon's health, and there's a lot of money to be made on it, so they're purchasing -- from the early investors -- access to pre-IPO stock.
Did you ever feel compelled to voice your opinion after you saw the data that indicated Groupon was spending more than they earned? Why did they ask you to leave the board?

Thanks for sharing what you have. It's been said before, but I'll say it again: HN is a remarkable place when intelligent people are having open conversations about the news that directly involves their own business.
Cosign, I find it takes me the same amount of time to fold in a full theme into an ASP.NET MVC site using Razor. It's all just markup in the end, and whatever angle-bracket tax you're paying for server-side includes. Normally the most time intensive part is replacing paths to statics in CSS and HTML.
Libya did that and has not fallen yet. In fact, despite a significant intervention from Europe (which is unlikely to be repeated in Syria), Libya seems to be in some sort of stalemate right now.

The lesson that the Syrian's seem to have taken is that the way to stay in power is to double down on repression.
Currency is not a "kind of stock". It is not a claim of ownership in an asset / entity or a claim on a future cash flow stream.

It is in fact the opposite of a claim on the printing operation of the issuer, given that the more currency is printed, the less valuable the currency you hold becomes.

If nobody will accept a currency, it does not continue to have value, because its value is based upon what someone is willing to trade you for it.
GPG is big and complicated. The more code you have the more likely it is that you'll have security vulnerabilities. (This is especially true for code like GPG which reads attacker-provided inputs, since it allows the attacker to pick which of many code paths get invoked.)
Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
Did you learn in middle school? High school? Later? How did you get started with computers and programming?
My understanding is that SpiderOak, Tarsnap, and Wuala all do this correctly (using one of PBKDF2, bcrypt, or scrypt.)

Colin - Perhaps the companies in the backup space that put effort into handling this carefully should work together and create a PSA style website with a matrix chart of how the varies providers handle "encrypted" data. Make it a separate domain and do our best to be elaborately objective about it. Any interest?
Very cool. I ran a quick CS->JS->CS test with this, and much of the generated CoffeeScript makes sense.

There are obviously areas missing, like the bound "fat arrow" functions. But maybe those can be improved on.
Cryptographers hate GPG. GPG is ugly as sin†. Unfortunately (and I mean that only with a little bit of snark), GPG mostly still works, in the sense of standing up to active, informed attackers with modern techniques.

† For instance, look how it handles message integrity.
No we don't have a rule about not growing beyond a certain number of employees. We believe in keeping things as small as possible. Currently for us that's a bit under 30, but if as small as possible means 40, then we'll be at 40. We are opposed to hiring more people than we need.
Of course I want them to succeed - that's why I offered to help them with product design. I wouldn't spend my time helping someone if I didn't want them to succeed.
Windows 8: It's the applications, stupid.
Every deal is different, but it's not unusual for vesting to take four years.
This is a gross misuse of Warren Buffet's famous quote to say the least. I would highly recommend reading about Warren Buffet's investment strategy -- he never talks about buying into the latest high tech IPO. Investing in hot IPOs (or even hyped IPOs) isn't at all how he made his money. He bought into boring industries that everyone was basically ignoring and then he helped them increase their margins by bringing in very good management that was focused on the long-term bottom line. The management at Groupon is very scary as they are clearly cashing out and are not looking at the long term at all.

Also, if there is general negative sentiment (not just isolated as it is now) about Groupon, there won't be an IPO. It could easily be withdrawn and if it is withdrawn, it likely won't come back if what everyone is saying here on HN is true.
In a confusing bit of ISO trivia, std::list implementations can do either - the standards draw a distinction between "should" and "shall". If an implementation "shall" do something, it's a requirement, and if it "should" do something, it's the preferred choice among several. The size() function only "should" be constant time. In fact, in GCC (which I assume is the Google compiler of choice), std::list::size() is O(n) (http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/latest-doxygen/a0142...).
The office must be a madhouse at the rate they're hiring.
Ha, I'm in my usual cycle: code, code, code, refresh HN, read some article with an interesting headline as quickly as I possibly can (being at work and all), completely disregard who is who, post my opinion, code, code, code, refresh HN.
Anonymous makes off with scanned passports from Iran, 10k e-mails
On an Apple II+, I programmed a simple game in Apple Basic when I was maybe 10 or 12 years old.
What block cipher mode does SpiderOak use, and how does it verify the authenticity of its data? Tarsnap goes through a lot of extra trouble to MAC its data; few other providers do. You'd hate to see everyone treat key derivation as a shorthand for "doing all of encryption right".

I looked on the SpiderOak site, saw a lot of material on how keys are derived and not stored on SpiderOak servers (great!), but didn't see a lot of details about the mechanics of actually encrypting and checking data.
This sounds like a great idea! I'll try to in incorporate it into my practice. I can also draw many interesting parallels between this and mindfullness.
Your definition of "mostly still works" is "it's secure as long as you ignore the vulnerabilities people keep on finding"?
What is it with everything being described as a Ponzi scheme these days? Groupon, Bitcoin, Subprime MBSs, Social Security, etc.
WordPress install is too slow, so I created this 90 second installer.
This happens when you listen to and then improperly handle keyboard events.

Somebody probably just copied a script from w3schools and smashed their face into it for a few hours until it did some approximation of what they might have maybe wanted it to do.

Unfortunately, the buckshot approach to software development leaves a lot to be desired. Especially when you start with such a horrible original product as w3schools.
This is very cool. Bookmarked.