skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you’re right, many dictatorial regimes are figuring out that shutting down or censoring the Internet forcefully is a losing battle over the long haul. The Syrian regime may be successful in the short run by cracking some skulls, but if history has anything to say about it, they are using the wrong tactic. The medieval regimes of the middle ages could not reign in the Printing Press that decentralized information in Europe during the Enlightenment period. Yes, the regimes in Europe were successful at first and many peasants lost their lives early on, but in the end, Pandora’s box had been opened. And once those books were out, there was no getting them back in. Mubarak learned this the hard way when he shut down the Internet in Egypt, nothing pissed the Egyptians off more than that.

There are two viewpoints on how totalitarian regimes will wield power in the 21st century. The first being the George Orwell 1984 camp, where Big Brother (the government) watches your every move, censors and blocks information – what many regimes in the Middle East are trying to do.

The second camp is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World scenario where governments team with corporations to offer a litany of distractions and entertainment. Governments will not have to track us because we’ll voluntarily allow our entertainment outlets to do that for us. We’ll be offered all the entertainment and information we could ever want on cable and the Internet, as long as it is not too critical of the “establishment.”

The second dystopia seems to be where most regimes are heading, and with the massive consolidation of Internet Service Providers throughout the world, coupled with their merging with the largest entertainment providers in the world, the Internet as we know it will most likely look like Huxley’s model rather than Orwell’s.

Check out this trailer on kickstarter.com for more info on this topic:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-docum...
I think that does often happen the way you described, but not in this case.

First, to be a dev using the MSFT stack, as I'm sure you know, you learn a new technology every week -- so they're not against learning new things :-)

But more importantly, most of them complaining have used HTML/JS, and many use it regularly for the web side of the house. It's not an obscure language/Fx that people haven't touched before. They maybe haven't written Angry Bird with it (which BTW, their JS looks like it was machine generated -- anyone know how it was done?), but most know the technology decent enough to comment about it.
Besides being the third time this story has been posted to HN, it seems the original Gawker/Kotaku article has caused a 60% bump in prices over the last couple of days

http://gawker.com/5808314/everyone-wants-bitcoins-after-lear...
I did plenty of group work at Georgia Tech. Built several working robots in teams, a video game, a bus monitoring device, and various other software projects.

I think SOME colleges do not do group work, often because they fear it hard to evaluate the individual contribution of people in groups.
Groupon S-1: Mind The Ratios
Doesn't this all fit into the category of a leveraged buyout?
First: I admit I wasn't aware that retailers accepted bitcoins when I posted that comment. I've discovered otherwise now, so the "hill of beans" comment is wrong. Sorry.

:) That's a game of semantics. Gold's current price has little to do with its luxury good status, and everything to do with its scarcity and historical claim to fame as a currency.

"Semantics" have nothing to do with it. Commodities [0] != currencies [1], whether you're familiar with the definitions or not. One exists as a medium of exchange, while the other is a good with no differentiation between sources. Currencies are differentiated by the trustworthiness of the governments that issue them (you'd probably accept a US dollar today before accepting a German papiermark [2] in 1924).

Also, gold's price is a function of the market's supply and demand for gold as either (a) an investment vehicle or (b) an input in the production of goods. Investors don't give a damn that the US dollar was pegged to gold 200+ years ago--they're simply investing in it to make money.

The idea that gold is "currency" is ridiculous. Name a first-world country where gold is widely accepted as currency. Some places in some parts of the world might accept gold, but it's not backed by a central body nor does it carry a relatively stable value (unlike fiat money).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_papiermark
"Don't roll your eyes, but this is exactly what Reagan did to the Russians. Basically, spend more and faster than the other guy until he cries uncle."

Has that really worked out for us so well over the long term? Certainly we can't pin our all of our current economic issues on Reagan as we've done a lot of spending and borrowing long after he left office, but once you get the snowball rolling down the hill very fast it becomes increasingly difficult to slow it down or stop it even after it has served whatever its original purpose was.
True enough. A more likely solution would be to just sell a 'corporate' iPhone with no camera (and support for some other stuff to sweeten the deal).
Thanks for asking. If you're interested, would be very happy to discuss SpiderOak's crypto strategy in depth with you the next time I'm in Chicago. Could share source code, etc. IMO, most interesting parts are the key scoping, which allow users to selectively publish ("share") portions of stored data by publishing the appropriately scoped keys.

SpiderOak uses AES256 in CFB mode with authentication via HMAC. The code is careful about unique nonce/counter usage, crypto code is confined to specific modules that rarely change, and reviewed by cryptographers outside SpiderOak. Client and server have minimal trust relationship.

Being paranoid about data integrity (not only because of crypto issues, but also because bitrot happens routinely at petabyte scale) the data authentication happens repetitively at a few different layers. From all end user devices, we see about one bit error per 4.2tb of upload transactions.
Facebook is a tricky nut to crack.

I have a few questions (and these will go off track of the topic at hand, but can possibly help you): Are you split-testing ad images and ad copies?

What happens is that once you put up an initial batch of ads, Facebook will begin sending impressions. However, it doesn't spread the impressions equally. 1 to 2 of your ads will receive all the impressions.

They don't really respond well to fucking with your campaign once you set it up and the initial run of impressions have been sent.

It seems that this is what you're experiencing.
Congrats! Keep pushing for Waterloo interns hiring ;-)
Hacker News in the Terminal - Written in Common Lisp
I'm curious as to what this has bought them - there are many comparably small music services (Rdio,Napster,Rhapsody,Spotify, etc.) that I'm assuming could not have paid amounts of this magnitude. As those services I just listed indicates, there's really no shortage of competition in the cloud music space...
Hmm... a 19-year old dissing college. This sounds like that little kid in the movie commercial who argues Lebron > Jordan. You weren't there, man.
That's not the definition of a Ponzi Scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a confidence scam that requires deception. This is a bubble.

The investors in the last round knew that the money was being used to cash out the early shareholders. No one is claiming fraud.
I think he's got a lot of good points.

"conformity rather than independence" - Very few classes grade on content, rather than A,B,C,D. I'll admit there are some, though, especially in software development and literature.

"competition rather than collaboration" - I've actually had classes that graded on a legit curve. that meant the bottom X% of the class failed, no matter how well they did. Just because others -in that class- were better. I've only ever been in 1 group-project class. (And group-project classes have their own problems.)

"regurgitation rather than learning" - It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.

"theory rather than application" - Colleges don't generally teach enough to get to the 'application' part. Even medical school has students intern for months before they have enough practical experience to actually do the job.

I think the time is rapidly approaching where we are going to have to tailor the education to the subject, instead of the other way around. Doctors need a tremendous amount of memorization to do their jobs. The current system can work fairly well for them. Software developers, on the other hand, need a tremendous amount of practice, and rote memorization is pretty much useless.

Existing schools are not prepared for this change. Most of them will resist it mightily until someone comes along and forces them out of the game because of it.
WWDC: Brace Yourself for Change
I guess this is it as far as HN is concerned. Not bad for a first run! Thank you revorad and knowledgesale for your suggestions! As a result of your advice I'll implement a follow functionality for tags and see what I can do about integrating the Mendeley API in some way.

Even though Comments on Science didn't make it to the front page it was still a very exciting time for me. Today gave me a bit of a boost for future development.

I'll be back, ready for prime time.
It seems like this functionality may ultimately be included in Google analytics.
Steve Jobs’ Response To Windows 8 And Ultrabooks
Tesla raises $210 million more
You can fit microdata into any markup. It's just some HTML attributes, plus the values that are already visible on your page.
Setting aside the data integrity issues:

I think the author's point about privacy is valid, and a little silly. If I understand correctly (the article is very confusingly worded in some places), he is saying that weak passwords are weak. Anyone who cares about privacy should already be choosing long, complex, strong passwords for this kind of application.

Also, I'm confused about one feature of JD. When I signed up years ago, they allowed me to hold my key privately and it never left the client. I had the option to upload that key to the server, if I wanted to, or not. I understand from the article that the client might misbehave and, for example, share my key in ways I don't want it to. Am I getting this right?

When I looked into secure cloud-based storage two years ago, I found that JD was the best mix of privacy and convenience, if for no other reason than it could be deployed on a mix of Windows, Mac and Linux boxes. It was clear even then that data integrity was the weak link/trade off.

I'm interested in hearing about the latest, best solutions for easy, cross-platform, secure backups to cloud services that offer better data integrity.
I don't think Apple can stop you from giving an iPad away, but as I mention below, Apple might have some grounds to stop you from using their trademarks to promote your giveaway.

I suspect that like basseq says, the real target are those annoying web ads that promise free iPads if you click on them.

An example, one option that came up when we were discussing gifts for our non-profit's upcoming conference was to give away iPads.

If we did go with the iPads as gifts, we would just be giving them as gifts for the winners of research competitions (ie a gift-wrapped package), not as a way to promote the organization. In that circumstance, there probably wouldn't be any problem giving the iPads to the people and no legal issue would arise.

However if we were using the Free iPad offer as a way to promote the organization (ie in advertising, a banner or in our printed promotional material), we might get a cease-and-desist letter asking us to not use their trademark. And they might have a leg to stand on there.

edit: added some clarifying details
Great article. Chaining pipes together in Python with subprocess can get a little wordy, but the power is there to do anything you need to do.

It's especially excellent when compared to Ruby. Ruby has a bunch of popen calls, but each one has strange quirks and inflexibility to make it not good for building pipelines.

http://whynotwiki.com/Ruby_/_Process_management#How_do_I_exe...

I'm finding myself using a ton more shell (bash) for pipelines, as this is what it was built to do, but when I need to add more logic its Python and subprocess.
How to prepare for a Job Hunt
A large portion of the federal budget consists of transfer payments from today's working population to retirees, with the expectation that tomorrow's working population will make similar transfer payments to today's.
.NET is not going away anytime soon. If anything I feel this further deprecates silverlight. There is no way that MS expects the majority of apps to be written in HTML+JS, it's just an option to make it easy for those used to HTML+JS to write apps on the platform, in the same vein as writing an HTML+JS app for iPhone. Most serious Windows applications are written in C++ for Win32 anyway, VS which is becoming more and more .NET everyday still has heavy roots in COM/Win32. Office integration is still best done in C++. No these apps aren't whats fueling the consumer web but they make big bucks for the vendors who write them, and ensure platform lockin to Windows as MS tries to transition away from their desktop monopoly.

MS is not stupid enough to pull another Vista and make apps that used to work not work. Even if MS were very serious about transitioning everything to HTML+JS you'd be looking at a 10-15 year timeline. The day you see Office written in HTML+JS is the day to start worrying if you're a Win32 / .NET app developer.
If the investors have had the uses of their investment disclosed to them then it's hardly a Ponzi scheme. Wether the investment is sound is a different question.
Why LinkedIn Will Not Be a $25 Billion Company in 5 Years
But what would that CSS end up looking like? There will be a lot of proprietary extensions (at least their should be) and a lot of quixotic classes and element id's that you'd probably have to work around. I envision something like Office's awful "open" format - the same people are driving this bus.

I've done the MS HTML/JS client route for a long time - I've set up a lot of gadgets, and InfoPath(!) has an HTML/XML/JS programming model. Truth be told this model is actually really painful to work with if all you have is HTML/JS. Keep in mind that the "web" isn't just HTML. It's Perl, Rails, Json, JS, Google, Wikipedia, RSS, etc.

Now, if these tiles are something akin to mini-web browsers, where you can use the full power of the web & web technologies (is this what they are actually saying?), that is a different story.
> That's why I'm leading UnCollege: a social movement empowering individuals to take their education beyond the classroom. Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim started problem-solving in the real world. Imagine if we started our own companies, our own projects and our own organizations. Imagine if we went back to learning as practiced in French salons, gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other in improving the human condition.

Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.)

He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) = 64% of college students do show an improvement.

I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people (edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.

Your thoughts are welcome.
The hypergrowth strategy worked well for pets.com and webvan. What could go wrong?
Stupid question: Why is the 34 character password easier to crack than the 8 character password?

(Upon re-reading I think I may have missed the assumption that the long password only contains english text, no punctuation, numerics, etc.)
Yep, they wrote about this on their tech blog: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-.... It seems that they identified EBS as potentially problematic and built their system with minimal dependencies on EBS. Consequently they weathered the April AWS outage rather well.
Sony Pictures hacked by Lulz Security, 1,000,000 passwords claimed stolen
Is there any reason why this version of LuaJIT wouldn't perform well on an ARM Cortex A-series? Has the mircoarchitecture changed enough that code optimized for a single-issue limited out-of-order execution ARM11 would run badly on the dual-issue speculative out-of-order Cortex A9?

The most significant instruction set changes have been for SIMD/FP operations (which aren't applicable to most code), and Thumb, which might not be very useful for a JIT.
I cant agree with that. When I invest, I have some expectations as to how that money should be invested, and for a company that is in desperate need of cash inflow to sustain its growth, thats where it should go. Period. Not to the coffers of early investors and employees. No one has any problem with them cashing out a part of their equity. This however (almost 400 million went to an early investor couple!) was a careless and completely selfish act to line one's pockets.

And now, they are ready for the next round, and only this time, its the public who stand to get scammed.
I'm hardly an expert but it was greatly beneficial to me. Got the complexity under control, started working much faster, and being able to understand stuff better when i revisited it. It's also just generally more pleasurable to use, with the high-level loops and other control aspects. Makes your code much prettier. And this, I might add, with a far from optimal development setup - can't get Node to run on my comp, so I'm just pasting code in and out of the 'try coffeescript' widget on github.
I totally agree that PDO is great. Though I also like the procedural style of mysqli_ functions (don't shoot!). (In Java stuff I have a "object, build yourself from these rows" OOPy pattern.) As for cross-DB support, unless you're using an ORM it's probably going to be painful. Given that some databases conform to ANSI SQL, others (like MySQL) do their own thing, etc., then the issue of built-ins and custom functions (e.g. LucidDB lets you write Java/Jython/Javascript user-defined functions/procedures/transformations) I don't trust any of the SQL strings to work on multiple databases.

PDO's advantage is a standard interface (like JDBC), and if you're planning to ever use more than MySQL with PHP then yes you should use PDO even for MySQL just to get used to the standard.
Crazy - I was just about to ask this same question.

My New Years resolution for this year was to read two books a month. I just finished reading "In the Plex" by Steven Levy and I'm starting Stephen Hawking's "A Briefer History of Time." It should take me no time to blow through the latter, so I'm looking for suggestions as for what to read next.
Patri Friedman: Libertarian Island
Milton Friedman's grandson Patri has a vision that might have made the economist proud: to build a floating libertarian nation 12 miles off the coast of California.
I've only ever been in 1 group-project class.

When I was in college group projects were extremely common. As were group-projects for clubs. The SW engineering sequence was all group based. The compiler sequence was group project based. OS was group project based. And architecture was group project based.

It's incredibly difficult to test for learned knowledge, rather than just memorization.

Is it really? Most of my tests were open book or take home. You'd think that this would negate 90% of the benefit of memorization.
High-Profile Gmail Users Target of Chinese Phishing Scam
Wow!! This is amazing!

Huge congratulations to Ilya and the crew at PostRank. Consistent and best-in-class execution. Awesome job and hope it was a huge pay day :)

I know it's hypocritical for me to say but rather unfortunate they're moving to MV. Would be nice to have some rich young people in Waterloo to act as investor/mentors.
Exactly. There's no way that everybody is going to write entire apps in craptastic html/css/js.
College is more than learning the material, it's also about learning about yourself. Most of the time, it's your first taste of freedom and it's one of the only times where you aren't really a kid anymore and you aren't stuck working in a 9-5.

You can still get these experiences without going to college, but it's not that easy.
Everybody, jump on the "education is a bubble and a waste" bandwagon!
Just don't get too carried away in the whole "college is useless" craze.
People that don't need college probably don't need anyone to tell them that. They are already doing that. Probably the result of all those anti-college campaigns will mostly be providing an excuse to ones looking for a silly one.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop anyone from saying what they believe is true (well, I do agree with them). Just pointing out a fact and I'm mostly talking about the short term effect.
In the mid-long run I'm sure we're looking at major changes to the concepts of education as a whole.
Comparing video conferencing platforms
In defense of health care regulation
I doubt it. The debate wasn't an indictment of Python, but rather resistance to the idea of replacing SICP (of which Scheme use was simply an implementation detail) with anything else.
Ok, I made some quick benchmarks, comparing LuaJIT git HEAD and Dalvik 1.2.0 (Android 2.2.1) on the MSM 7201A (528 MHz ARM11 soft-fp). I don't have access to a newer Dalvik VM for this device. The Dalvik JIT compiler is definitely enabled, because performance gets much worse when I disable it.

Here are SciMark scores (HIGHER numbers are better):

ARM11 SciMark SMALL | FFT SOR MC SPARSE LU
-----------------------+---------------------------------------
Lua 5.1.4 0.60 | 0.50 0.92 0.36 0.55 0.69
LuaJIT git 4.34*| 2.61* 6.70* 3.91* 3.13 5.36*
Dalvik 1.2.0+JIT 3.35 | 2.35 5.65 1.09 3.39* 4.27

Those are not too relevant, though, since it's a soft-float device. The maximum speedup is limited by the high cost of the soft-float operations (e.g. 62 cycles for a double-precision FP ADD).

And here are some simple integer benchmarks, run time in seconds (LOWER numbers are better):

ARM11 fannkuch 10 nsieve-bits 8 binary-trees 11
---------------------------------------------------------------
LuaJIT git 7.45* 3.04* 2.05*
Dalvik 1.2.0+JIT 12.83 10.42 4.02

Note that binary-trees is a GC-intensive benchmark where LuaJIT usually loses against Java VMs, since they have a much better GC. Not so for Dalvik it seems.

The winner for each benchmark is marked with a '*'. Looks good. ;-)
The salient point in this article aside (I agree with the author that Apple doesn't get the P2P nature of the web), I think Ping failed for a different reason:

I don't trust Apple knowing what music I have (ripped). They are too close to the recording industry which has spent years suing everyday folks like me to prop up their dying business model.

Sure, I know Apple won't "turn me in" (would be bad for business) for my shady music collection (most of which is NOT available in the US, btw) but I don't want to take the chance.

The fact that Apple seems to segregate the "professionals/industry" from the "amatuers/consumers" only adds to the dilemma that Ping has yet to resolve.
Also see: http://www.simplescripts.com/script_details/install:Wordpres...