skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Addressing his points one by one (quotation marks should in no way be thought of as referring to a quote):

"The Navy made it, why'd they release it?"

-They released it because it's entirely useless if the military are the only ones using it.

"It's not theoretically effective. There's lots of ways to break it."

-Sure, there have been papers written about ways to break TOR. I've yet to see someone actually do it. That doesn't mean the NSA or whoever isn't doing it, but you'd think if someone had compromised the system you'd see some story about it. Somebody who was using TOR would have been tracked down and they would have thought, "hey, wait a minute..."

"Project Vigilant"

-Meh. Again, if they compromised TOR, you'd hear about it. They'd have given the IPs of hidden wiki visitors to the feds, and some pedo would have been arrested. If PV don't care about pedos, they would have given the feds some information about somebody that would have led to some sort of action. The fact that none of this has come to light is pretty strong evidence that PV has not compromised TOR.

"Wikileaks uses TOR"

-So the fuck what? They have a pretty clear use case, and the fact that ioerror is a contributor means he's concerned about anonymity (for obvious reasons), not that Wikileaks has hatched a plot to snoop on anonymized traffic and leak details. Why the hell would they bother? They've got more than enough stuff to leak handed to them. What are the chances that someone using TOR would be transmitting data that WL would care about?

This is just stream-of-consciousness FUD from Zed, of the type we're used to seeing from him. He throws out a bunch of what ifs and pretends it's an argument. Show me the evidence. Show me some indication that TOR has been breached and I'll be the first one to question whether it should be used. In the meantime, TOR is only getting more secure as more people talk about it and use it.
Hi there, that is an interesting one. I think you are absolutely right, the Twitter account which goes together with your blog is absolutely key.

We launched our Twitter account simultaneously with our blog and it is our biggest driver of traffic :)
"From the Earth to the Moon" - a 12 part series about the American space program from Mercury through to the end of the Apollo program, told as stories from a number of different perspectives, narrated by Tom Hanks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(TV_...

"When We Left Earth" - a history of NASA from Mercury through to the mid 200Xs, including many interviews with engineers and astronauts, narrated by Gary Sinise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth
Hi Alan,

Just checked out Blogic, I think it is a brilliant idea, have you had any customers yet?
There is the nailgun project (http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/) which seems to initialize a JVM in the background so that tasks can execute more quickly, but it's not being maintained.
Show HN: TF-IDF search engine in 30 lines of Scala
I made a quick search on Google and Amsterdam turns out to be less expensive than the cities you cited.

First two links:

http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/expensive-cities-europe...
http://www.finfacts.ie/costofliving.htm
I'm not really sure if I understand your question. People have runtime speed demands for their applications and when they start a project they get to choose a language. Runtime speed is one of several pertinent pieces of information that is relevant when choosing which language to use.

Not that this benchmark is actually indicating anything about which language to use in any of those circumstances (Java has a bad startup but pretty good during runtime, and startup time on these orders is generally irrelevant for any nontrivial application), but that isn't to say that language benchmarks in general are irrelevant.
You think a person should have to consult a lawyer before changing jobs? That's insane. It's bad enough with health care concerns.
I started programming with circuits, and then machine code.

And I think you're wrong about starting with higher order logic. It's too easy to make plausible statements that are simply wrong. Learning the real nitty-gritty is essential to avoid sweeping errors.
In Silicon Valley, select tech workers are in high demand
He's not the only one to lead this lifestyle and write about it. Tim Ferris started a sports supplement company to fund his travels before writing "The 4-Hour Work Week."

One doesn't have to be a programmer or designer to lead a lifestyle like this, though those professions are more location independent by their nature.
Not reasonable for most companies on a great trajectory to repurchase at current fair market value. And consider that options for employees are substantially discounted, thus the delta there between what the employee paid and what the employer would pay to recoup is too great.
It depends. It doesn't penetrate very far into the trunk, but it doesn't have that much trouble with leaves and twigs. (Until they get rained on.) So you can have a line of sight that's pretty much blocked by trees visually, but quite clear in 2.4GHz.
Java running times can be really good, but the startup times are terrible. See the recently posted Eclipse speed-up article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2694840 .
Telcos could be the key to Twitter’s revenue model
Today's real life is yesterday's science fiction.
"The bottom line is that nobody is interested in any serious stuff being done remotely"
I disagree. I've done "serious" engineering (performance engineering, etc.) remotely. The key is establishing a level of trust with the client PRIOR to working remote (or having the references which back you up)....and to be able to perform remotely (which takes a lot of discipline).
He defined FMV as 409a valuation, which we all know is a number pulled out of thin air where value > last financing valuation < infinity.
"How can consumers look at this example and not believe that the regulation of marketing claims is the only way to insulate consumers from short-term selfish marketers in search of market share, marketers who will shade the truth, even if it kills some customers?"

Seems like Seth isn't thinking very creatively about this. How about letting marketers say whatever they want, but the FDA publishes a pamphlet that is posted in the store aisle that ranks brands according to the latest research on effectiveness?

I don't necessarily endorse this solution, but Seth's "only way" seems to me to be... not the only way.
Macbook Pro at 17 MH/s is a poor value compared to a $1K gaming notebook that comes with an 5870M (~150 MH/s according to mining hardware comparison)... there are also units with other, possibly faster, GPUs:

http://ncix.com/products/index.php?minorcatid=1323&submi...

As for Bitcoin mining being profitable, the difficulty level is going up quite quickly so the days of quickly recouping your hardware costs seem to be waning.
Ok, this is interesting, so now we're talking about hashing collisions, right? The idea might be that if you just start iterating through all possible alphanumeric combinations, that it's possible you'd stumble on a successful collision before you'd stumble on the actual password. It seems this would only be likely once the number of possible passwords was greater than the number of possible hash outputs (32^66 for MD5, right)? That would occur if the length restriction on the password was greater than the length of the hash output, or a broader charset was allowed for the password than for the hashing output.

I guess if this ever actually became a relevant concern, you'd simply keep adding a few extra chars to the hashing algorithm output to keep it beyond the range of reasonable.
He's using the low valuation of real tech companies (like Cisco) to argue the absurd value of social networking websites isn't out of whack. I don't agree with this logic at all. Although Groupon and Facebook are websites, they are really marketing companies. The bubble is in the value being placed on social networking audience sizes.
(The two comments were made four hours apart.)
Or you could show a single window on both monitors (if you have two), for example, xmobar. Or you could resize the windows as bitmaps instead of resizing app size into grotesque values (150x150 pixel browser?) in various tiling layouts. Not that this allows it right now, but working composite manager (and the compositing manager in gnome3 is good, compared to its alternatives) is required for that.
Companies don't pretend their stock is a new, better currency. Companies admit they exist to profit their shareholders.
The future of food: http://www.thefutureoffood.com/

Earthlings: http://www.earthlings.com/

Food Inc.: http://www.foodincmovie.com/

Absolut Warhola: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Absolut_Warho...
Ironically, we are trying to find people who can work remotely (.NET) and funny enough, no one is interested in doing serious stuff remotely :)
Looks cool, I'll add it to the list
Nothing new here, this is just the ubiquitous computing vision boiled down. One thing he was wrong about, a dynamo is a generator, not an electric motor.
Just tried LuaJIT on a MacBook:

4 ms: C, gcc (median real time)
4 ms: bash
5 ms: LuaJIT 2.0.0-beta4
73 ms: Python2.6.1

So Bash still wins! I wonder if it gets any special advantage from getting invoked from itself.
Ye I kinda agree with you there.
> If you move fast enough you will miss things. It happens.

Surely at the point it's pissing off your users (which has a financial implication too), you're moving too fast?

Personally I don't like the idea of missing basic things, and from your description that really sounds like a bug that should have been caught - but that might just be a brief summary. Can you recall how frequently the bug manifested, or any reason it wasn't caught in testing?
It would be great to have on the print version of your page.

Still, a more explicit api would be great.
Dollar bill redesigns
This catalyzer shows up regularly on conspiracy theory websites and alternative energy forums. Note that Rossi claims that it is a low energy nuclear reaction and Foccardi claims that the nickel is converted to copper in the reaction. For "completely new field of science", read "pseudoscience".

I personally don't believe a word of it. There are zero credible sources for their claims. The "journal" he published in is not considered reputable. Note that the link to it from the posted article is dead. The correct link is with science replaced with physics. About half of the articles in that "journal" appear to be be about Rossi and Foccardi's nickel battery.

I also read that Rossi was involved in a massive energy scandal some years back and got charged with tax evasion and improper waste disposal.
I know it's great fun, and fashionable to bash Java, but the Java startup time is slow, because the default settings are optimized for long running processes.

If you want a quicker execution time for a short lived program, just tweak the settings. But then Java may not be the best choice for short lived 'scripting' anyway.

So yes, it rules it out, unless you know what you're doing.
I had a lot of problems with him in the documentary, especially his dismissals of certain cultures based on extremely sparse data from archeological records. But it was still good overall.
Well actually unbounded recursion and infinite memory is what is required for turing equivalence. Conditioning can be present in a non turing complete language. I added the practically because all computers on which language models are built on are finite. It is easier to get turing completeness than to ensure you haven't accidently allowed it to sneak in - as evinced in C++ templates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_recursive_function#Co...
I went down to Ann Arbor this week to see the debut of this documentary on the birth of the venture capital industry and it was quite good:

http://www.geekosystem.com/something-ventured-documentary/

Did you know that Intel's business plan was a single page double spaced and full of typos?

That Steve Jobs offered his then boss Nolan Bushnell half of Apple Computer for $50K? Bushnell passed and joked in the movie that he refused to calculate the return on that investment because it would be too painful ;<).
What tool was used to make that screencast? I'd love to know about a tool for Linux that overlays keypresses on the video like that.
Errol Morris: "The Thin Blue Line". If you are pro-death penalty, then you need to watch this film.
Don't worry, it's for Europeans and Americans equally. But Europeans (as me) do not need a visa and can come here anytime without any problem. This is the only reason for that sentence.

We had around 150 people at the launch keynote. There were some Americans, but the majority were people from around all Europe.

Edit: BTW, thank you for the report, I notified the person responsible for the website about the error.
I think the expectation is that any halfway decent web site will make whatever changes are necessary to avoid the warning.
If want to generate QR Codes locally I shared the qrcode generator I use in my Safari Extension (Tab Transmit).

https://github.com/amanuel/JS-HTML5-QRCode-Generator
EBay Builds A Retail Transformer
While not the point of the article, I was happy to learn about bash's {..} operator! I've always missed perl's .. in the shell.

echo {1..100}
Who loves the hacktivists?
U.S. zoos attract visitors with sleepovers
find . -name '.py' | grep 'import'

I don't think that works. That'll grep for files named '\import\',
SQL is expensive in many ways :)
Would you consider very long passwords (say 40 characters) containing only dictionary words to be safe?
The Selector/Workers/Recorder pattern
1. Of your friends, you just get a list of names, not any contact information whatsoever.
Dot Com Boom. Web 2.0. Real Time Web. Mobile. What's Next?
Loved reading that, especially the comments. Really makes you think how far we've come over the years, and we haven't really noticed. Suppose it's been so gradual that it's hard to. A cure for cancer would really be a massive milestone for me in the future (and maybe teleportation!)
Yes, i have the same problem. Many times i thought, that i will build something while traveling, but that never happened :)

Though as far as i understood, they solved this with going out as tourists only on weekends.
Kırmızı Karınca
IMO the summer here is great. It's not too hot and I love to bike in the summer breeze. In these days the sun sets at 10pm.

Of course there are trade-offs, and you have to go through the winter which in California does not exist.
Open Source Comes to Academic Publishing
Is this any different from an IPO being a pyramid scheme in that it is usually to enrich early adopters?
What does it typically cost to have a lawyer go over the contract?
I was thinking more about the drizzly rain. I've only been there about 10 days total but it rained every day (in the summer.)
Show HN: My Weekend Project Nudity Detector API
On my machine perl is .008, python is .036, and PHP is .044.

So it looks like PHP is a good deal slower than python, and certainly perl. 22 times slower than C..
I was giving a simple metric by which to check turing completeness. If the language allows you to do infinite loops e.g. "while loops" then it is turing complete.
I think this was the reasoning in the article and it seems pretty supportable. Basically when a company is 'new' its value proposition is unknown, it can fluctuate a lot. Once its known the value rationalizes.

The side point that tech stocks are suffering a general malaise because of the fear however should not be missed either. When Sun Micro was young (I started 2 weeks after it went public) I recall being annoyed that IBM (then the dominant 'computer' player) would have a bad quarter and people would sell Sun stock (and it would sink in price). While the whole time Sun was doing great business, growing really quickly, and taking money away from IBM left and right. My financial adviser and I discussed it and I got to learn about what it meant to be part of the 'data processing sector' even if you were the up and coming dominant force in that sector.

I agree with Ben that the pendulum is pretty hard over in the 'fear' side, hints of 'bubble' and people flee tech stocks. But solid companies get painted with the same brush just because they are part of the 'tech sector'.

One of the things that bolsters Ben's point is that there have not been a lot of individual investors trying to pile on to the IPOs. This is a good sign that they are standing on the sidelines.

If you're an investor, you might be watching the tech sector to see when the swing back to the 'greed' side starts and try to jump on and ride it over.
A better question is why most of it even got covered at all. Script kiddies deface and publish all the time - the only reason the press was covering at all was because it was pushed and packaged in PR friendly ways. Yawn.
You certainly want to eventually get rid of all the transitions when you've learned to use a WM instinctively, but for newbies they can provide valuable feedback.
The first link isn't dead, it just has an extra quote at the end of the URL

It was dead because it was non-functioning. OK, so the fixed link is good and doesn't backup your assertion:

The guy who wired the lead 9/11 hijacker 100k, presumably to pay for the 9/11 attacks, had breakfast with the Bush administration the morning of 9/11.

That's what people here are asking for a "reliable source" for. And Loose Change would not be considered a reliable source.
Under this provocative title, there is a quite insightful post. Reinforces importance of focusing on actually selling your service/product rather than flattening yourself with cute homepage. I am gonna talk with teammates about taking this insight at tomorrow morning coffee.

An earlier post that started the discussion, with more reasoning: http://housefed.tumblr.com/post/6690059612/delete-your-homep...
OP is linking to an infographic for some reason. Source article is at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/157/jack-abraham-ebay-mi... dated July 22, 2011
Ask HN: What is the best way to promote a KickStart project?
I've got a friend who is just started doing a Kick Starter project ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/devilsminstrels/the-devils-minstrels-origin-comic-book-0 ), and I was curious as to the wisdom that HN could share in how to market and promote these type of projects.
Louis Theroux has an incredible set of documentaries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Louis_Theroux_Documenta...
- or - a bookmarklet http://miniqr.com/docs/bookmarklet.php ... per default the url of the webpage you are currently viewing - or the currently selected text
One problem you're probably going to run into is caches (especially caching proxies) ignoring your nocache header, causing users to see the wrong QR code.

A standard way to avoid this is by making the image URL http://lilqr.com/qr?rand=[nonce], where you'd generate the nonce randomly on each page load. You can ignore it on the server of course.
thanks - i'd forgotten about this one
or http://miniqr.com/
I thought that this was a fantastic Promotion for a Kickstart project - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgH5mqQLYJU
Anything that's quite self-contained is fast; anything that needs to look up and read lots of files is slow.

Do SSDs magically fix this?
It is a really good watch and is on netflix.
If you like Capitalism : A love story - then do watch "The corporation"
Lots and lots of people in the valley and elsewhere were wary of a bubble '97-'00. We used to talk about it all the time. That didn't stop it from happening.

Mr. Horowitz needs to ensure that in the next few years he can sell on the public market stock they've been paying increasingly higher premiums for privately.

It's clearly in his best interests to dismiss any bubble talk.
Not sure if that's what you meant, but there is already JavaScript to CoffeeScript compiler: http://ricostacruz.com/js2coffee/
Link Creating Services: Construct Links To Construct Small Business
I quite like that director's previous documentary: Helvetica (http://www.helveticafilm.com/)
I actually wrong a bookmarklet one day when I wanted something like this. (I don't always use the same browser.)

https://github.com/wccrawford/Bookmarklets/blob/master/qr/ur...
Random thought: If the bitcoin currency fails, would people turn their bitcoin mining rigs into hash cracking rigs? I wonder if it's more economical to be mining bitcoin or to crack hashes.
In the summer it definitely rains more than in the winter, but not that much. Sometimes the weather turns bad for some days as you experienced (and as it happened last week). Overall I don't think it rains that much, I can count on one hand the times I had to wear the raincoat on my bike during the last months (I bike every day). Drizzle is bearable in my opinion, but of course does not compare to an always sunny weather.

I prefer much more a changing weather and changing seasons to constant weather, but that's definitely very personal.
Or if you want to create your own vCard

http://yeblon.com/vcard-on-business-card-with-qr-code
Anyone interested in this should definitely read the description of a lot related work of recovery in the excellent paper by Warren Toomey on the restoration of early UNIX artifacts. There was a lot more involved than just doing an OCR scan of old documents, it is really impressive. http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toome...
so basically you spent the weekend looking at porn? haha I jest :P

Looks like a fantastic API, I've never seen something like it before, will try it when I have a chance. Good Luck!
you can do the maths. if the words are drawn from a dictionary of size D and you use N words then the number of choices that need to be explored is D^N. the equivalent number of bits is log2 of that.

so what's D? i imagine most people would use common words, so let's take the most popular 1 percent of "dict/words" on my computer. that's 4,000 words. log2(D^N) = N * log2(D) = N * 12 (since log2(1000)~10).

now in another thread here there's an article saying that 9 characters drawn from an alphabet of 100 (lower+upper+symbols) is around the current limit. the equivalent number of bits there is log2(100^9) = 60. so you'd need about 5 words (5*12=60) for the same level of security.

tl;dr: you need more than 5 words (very) roughly. i am not 100% sure i have the maths right, either :o)

in more practical terms, i don't know of a program that actually does this. the programs i know about typically only combine a few words. but i am no great expert, and it would be fairly easy to write such a program.

[edit: actually, you are less safe than i estimate above if the attacker is smart, because the words probably aren't independent (most people will use meaningful sentences). so you can use markov chains to hugely reduce the search space (in more general terms: "the" will be followed by a noun phrase, etc). so you need significantly more than 5 words. heh. if someone wants to pay me to write such a program, please get in touch... ;o]
Mining bitcoins and selling them will soon be not profitable anymore. It was just some weeks ago but since that time loads of people started mining and now the difficulty of the mining algorithm goes up every 7-10days effectivly cutting profits in half. I you buy a mining rig now you will probably never be able to pay it off as electricity costs will eat up all profits before August of this year.
Of course the value of Bitcoins could raise dramatically to make it profitable again, but if and when that happens remains to be seen.