skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is more "crypto nerd imagination", a la the XKCD comic. The FBI doesn't care about the encrypted passwords because it has access to all the content in plaintext. And what else would they need the passwords for? Other accounts on other services? They can just confiscate those servers too, where the content is most likely also in plaintext.

So in this case, where the FBI is involve, using a SHA-1 hash poses no extra security vulnerability.
Google’s Page, Schmidt Face Senate Subpoena Threats
I think they were going for sarcasm.
"Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head." -DFW
It may be illegal in many jurisdictions (not sure since nobody's playing for legal tender).

But regardless of legality, is it moral or ethical?

If all players know that the schmucks at the bottom of the pyramid lose their money to enrich those at the top, is that OK?

Or is there something fundamentally wrong about a 'business' that produces no new value and systematically transfers and concentrates existing value from the bottom to the top?
Just use a download tool which can continue interrupted downloads. For example wget with "-c" option:

wget -c http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/s.prince/book.pdf
We are working furiously to release a beta as soon as possible :)
API Ecosystem Tracking with StatsD and Graphite
I'm not going to hand over my e-mail address with no information. Skeptics will try to scroll down below the fold where that information should be.
The neighbors get involved at about 3:30.
Really?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Funitinu.net%2...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Funitinu.net%2...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Funitinu.net%2...

Dang, apparently so. Guess I was wrong.

The world's most inane objection: If you force the validator to HTML5 mode, (as in the first and second links) then you don't need to declare a DOCTYPE, a savings of 16 bytes. Not that you would ever do that for a real document, since it's a dumb idea.
Open Source Node.js on Windows using IOCP = great

M$ involved in any way with Joyent and/or Node.js = really bad idea
Thanks a lot for the comment mchusma. It's definitely scary to start something that may be shut down. We wouldn't worry so much if the state we expect to be in (CA) wasn't one of the states with the problem. We're still considering moving forward after wrapping up our current project. Hopefully some more research will clear things up futher. Thanks again.
James Pearce: “Everything Interesting in 2011… HTML 5″
Well, the nice thing about a pseudonym is I can tell you the same things here that I'd say privately. :-)

FYI in case you didn't know, it looks like they are planning to maintain the 3.x branch for a while, but 5 is being treated as the next step from 4 so they won't be maintaining a 4.x series independently.

Also FWIW, some of the specific problems encountered by projects I've worked on actually crept into the later 3.x series, notably the ones involving text rendering problems and the ones involving Java applets.

So I guess that's a vote from me for "probably more valuable uses for that much of your time", but I suppose YMMV depending on what specific issues you've encountered.
"Probing colons has never been so much fun." -- science writing line of the week.
I think I can understand Baio's logic:

Photographs & Music are two very different mediums.

A music composition is made to be played. And part of that is that multiple people will probably be playing it. The fact that the instrument choice used on the album was unique did not make it any different from any other cover album. And thus permission was sought.

A photograph on the other hand is made to be viewed & that's not how it was being used in this case. It was being used as the inspiration for a new derivative work of art which played off the concept of the music.

I can totally see why Baio was not worried about licensing the original. I can also totally see how this was a mistake in practice.
Or they don't trust that DigitalOne (or some employees of DigitalOne) aren't collaborating with their target.
While low-tech, credit cards are very flexible. I worry that the more high tech approaches (NFC, etc) are motivated not because its a step forward, but because its an opportunity to grab more control of the market, and leave consumers more exposed to fraud.
You can look at the source code of the page. You will see that the website is essentially an Iframe, hosted on the developers personal website.
We are the Morlocks.
"Do not eat iPod Shuffle"
"Adding flowers/plants to an office resulted in a 15 percent increase in ideas"
Tell HN: You should pay me $250 to build something for you.
I'm a college student majoring in Computer Science and I love hacking on cool software projects. I have a bit of experience with Python and some experience with Django as well. I'm a quick learner though and I wouldn't mind picking up some Ruby/Rails experience!

My list of projects is pretty short. I built my own website (which is yet to go live because I don't have the money for a domain) and I'm a research assistant for a CS professor at my university (doing work with robots using Java). Aside from that, there isn't much else.

I want two things out of this: I want experience, and I want a little bit of pay. The experience is more important, but of course I'd like to have some money so that I can fund my own projects.

My price is $250, flat rate. Here's the catch: We will decide on a deadline together and if I don't meet that deadline, I will finish the work and it will all be free.

Other conditions will apply and we'll discuss those later.

Feel free to leave questions or comments below or contact me at jjb127@mun.ca.

Note: Some of you may have seen adelevie's post advertising his services for $500. I am not undercutting him. He sen't me an email saying that this seems to be working well for him. I am charging less because I am less experienced.
Fascinating. We've been trying to read from brains, and lo, we might figure out how to make them writable.
The average click-through rate for Facebook ads was 0.063% in 2009 and 0.051% in 2010. Click-through rates used to be about 3% in the 90s, but have been declining since. Current industry standard is 0.1%.
I heard that facebook is good for awareness, just to let low- or no-paying people know you exist, but click-through rates are pitiful, indeed.
The increased capability is for the API lookup, since we use Linkedin's API to display mobile profiles. We can't access anything you couldn't already see by visiting a 2nd/3rd degree's profile page through your web browser. We are still bound by the limits set by Linkedin, and the privacy settings of their users.

In addition, we do not look up anyone for you as some other user, ever. Linkedin explicitly forbids it, and we don't think it's ethical either.

The three things our users can see now are education, work history, and related connections of 2nd and 3rd degree connections, which as I mentioned before you can already see by visiting their linkedin profile website.

Things such as your email address, phone, etc. are not revealed. Beyond 3rd degree is unavailable to us.
I suppose that's fair enough. It's not exactly ideal though is it, but PHP's lacklustre naming conventions are hardly ground that needs to be trodden again.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#ichat6

iChat in Lion will features service plugins.
That doesn't help much. I don't see any mentions on his blog or twitter. The closest I can guess is that it's something like Khan Academy (from the name).
Facebook calculates an "edge rank" for each piece of content based on metrics such as likes, comments, post time, content type, and so on. Edge rank is used, among other things, to determine the likelihood of a given piece of content appearing in your feed.

Only a fraction of a page's fans will see each update from that page. By some estimates, that number is only 5-10% of a page's fans. So they've earned 700 new fans, but that doesn't mean 700 impressions each time they post.
Show HN: my Twitter experiment to try and increase engagement on a new startup
> The problem is it's not clear that anyone ever wrote a program free from [buffer overruns].

There are lots of programs in languages like COBOL that don't have buffer overruns, because they don't have pointer arithmetic.

Nobody has ever found a buffer overrun in qmail, despite looking very hard for many years.

It is very likely that my toy compiler http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/urscheme/ doesn't have any buffer overruns. It's written in Scheme, generating x86 assembly. The only places that do pointer arithmetic under the control of user code are string-ref and string-set!, which call the same check-array-bounds routine to verify that the index is within the bounds of the string. Unless I fucked up that check, which is seven lines of assembly, there's no way to get a buffer overrun in code compiled with the compiler.

(Technically there's also code having to do with closures that could potentially have a buffer-overrun bug, but it's much less likely. Indeed, virtually any of the assembly language output of the compiler could conceivably have a bug that smashes memory. But it probably doesn't.)

There's also no way to efficiently move data in and out of a string, because every access is individually bounds-checked. But reasonably-efficiently-bounds-checked array access, while it's more than seven lines of assembly, isn't an unboundedly-large problem either. It's just that there's always a tradeoff between safety and efficiency.
St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
But then... THAT will be on HN. Then what?
i thought the same thing. i spent a confused minute trying to figure out which units the 20/40 on the google analytics graph represented, given $1100+ in spending.

$250/day and on no day did facebook generate more than 40 hits. i would not consider that a success.

if facebook ads are good for "brand awareness" would it make more sense to use CPM ads with some sort of logo and/or memorable copy? they seem to be a bit cheaper.
You're not overstaying your welcome, but you did get the arguments to scanf backwards.
We put some hints in the meta data of the page :) Also, there are links to the FB/Twitter pages which is a primary place where we will post updates as we come closer to release. (And trust me if I was just trying to collect emails for spam, this is not how I would do it). Thanks!
Maybe you can set the new guy to writing code in Lua for a while, and do pre-checkin reviews on all of his code.
The control still lies within your linkedin account. Information about 2nd and 3rd degree contacts through the API is more limited than what you can see by visiting someone's linkedin profile page. We were able to have our API access come to the same level as web access.
This is completely from left field, but should you ever move the project to an alternate domain name, card.io would be a perfect domain for a fitness-related app focusing on cardio workouts.

I can see the title on HN: "Card.io - fast and easy workouts"
There's still hope for sopranos: thanks to evolution
I assume NASA is saying they want a launch in less than 100 years, not getting there in 100 years. Getting there in less than a 100 years is woefully unrealistic.

Anyway, we would gain so much just by having better propulsion capabilities, I am in, even if we don't launch an interstellar probe in 100 years. I'll be happy with a soccer-field-sized optical telescope in space.
What is HN to discuss if you won't even tell us what it is?
I think email will be an eternal well of problems to solve, and hence, startup ideas. :)
The valgrind comment may not have been useful to you, but it was useful to me; I didn't know valgrind could do that!
This tells us nothing new about bitcoin, it's an ok summary but there is not need for this article on HN (and I REALLY like bitcoin).
There's just a timeout on replies that grows with depth.

Why not fuzz your own code then?
Whenever I have a chance to use both, it's seriously a tossup- it depends on the song, environment, and phone, but they're usually equivalent in my experience.

The main reason I use Shazam over SoundHound is simply that SoundHound doesn't have a Windows Phone 7 app.
Unfollowing people from Twitter or from your feed-reader is just sane and even required, as sometimes you just need to cut the noise.

But I think that you're going out of your way to criticize David, judging by your other comment too.

Personally I like his opinions; he has a gift of cutting through the bullshit that is refreshing. That doesn't mean that he's always right or that his opinions matter in any way, but the guy has fine taste for what's important for him and you can learn something from that behavior.
Bomb-Thrower Peter Yared: Social Is 'Over,' Machine Learning is Next Wave
I see your point, but I think a VM spec comes with an implicit promise that it is OK to develop languages as opposed to the "why don't you just program in what we give you?" mantra.

I agree its a very hard problem. If I was starting from scratch I would probably look a lot more on vector operations than someone would have 10 years ago. Plus the manner of parallelism a person choses would seriously influence language implementors.
The ultimate control device is a brain-machine interface, and some products are already getting close. I don't see the reason why people would invest their time developing something else at this point in time.
For what it's worth, I agree with you 100%. That said, you're fighting a losing battle on this one - the majority of HNN readers seem to think that as long as you've written a famous piece of software, it's perfectly reasonable to carry on like a sniping, petulant child. Spewing vitriol and sarcasm is being "visionary" instead of "douchey."
I see a future of encrypted bit torrent traffic and hosted torrent files on Freenet.
With Apples position on flash (especially on iOS), do you think they are going to leave browser 3d stuff totally alone? It does make sense though, they want people to put that stuff in an app, and not a webapp.
Sorry, but this sounds exactly like one of these comp-sci things which are perfectly true in theory and not usually true in practice. A compiler is usually written by a very strong team with an understanding of code correctness and techniques for ensuring it. Applications are written by average teams with a typically shaky understanding of software verification. A compiler usually has a much tighter specification. In the real world, it makes perfect sense to move as much of the burden of ensuring correctness as possible from the application to the compiler. Theoretically, it doesn't change anything, but practically, it helps a lot.

There are exceptions - embedded applications like anti-lock brake control systems are often written very close to the metal by strong teams which understand exactly how to ensure their correctness. They also have super-precise specifications. A compiler is often unnecessary or harmful here, and only introduces complexity. But this is not the case case for most of the millions of lines of code which keep being written in C/C++. I really think they would benefit from being written in a safer language. That's hard to justify rigorously, but I think that's part of the reason we saw C/C++ move from an absolutely dominant to merely a very important market share.
I don't think "smug" is quite the correct term. I meant nothing negative with my comment (and was teasing with the "mostly"). You do have an "air of authority" about your answers, but that authority is clearly earned. I enjoyed your answers on the C# mailing list quite a bit.
I've feel like I've seen these demos a dozen times in the past decade.
Crowd sourcing your BitCoin mining
Why not host the files directly on Freenet then?
Parse (formerly zStack) releases Android SDK
Are there any Jboss users here? If so what do you consider an ideal use case for this tool/framework?
OK, if your site gets demoted by Google, do you really know why? I mean they are bought links, spam etc which are obvious, but what if G met and decide that X sector should have lower priority in search results.

How do you know they aren't demoting their competitors? Not sure if the government can help here but that are a lot of legitimate questions.
I guess we've all been programmers since we got our first VCR. But I think there is a real qualitative difference these days between someone who can write a program and someone who is actually quite good at doing so.

We commonly talk of a 10x difference in ability between programmers (and I won't go into the truth of that here) but it's not unreasonable to expect that the difference between the best and the worst programmers will widen by another order of magnitude in the future.

Really the argument is semantics. Technology (and software programmed by genuinely skilled programmers) is making it easier and easier for people who would otherwise be poor programmers to achieve a result - even if it is a strange sort of chimera cookie-cutter application that only sort of meets their needs. (This is what Microsoft does with software for the enterprise.)

We'll all become programmers in the sense that we're all now omniscient due to the introduction of mobile phones with web browsers built in and the availability of search results on tap through said web browsers.
This would be the ultimate way to kill UGC sites. Sue them into bankruptcy. Just keep losing, but exhausting their cash. This is why the US needs a loser-pay model like the UK.
I can't fairly evaluate that without understanding why it was done that way. It looks to me like something that might have been dumped from a database table named "person" with two columns one called "name" the other called "value."

It might be a lazy way to dump the database but that's not XML's fault.
I took a look at their ads and still do not have a clue as to what SignNow is about. Still scratching my head as to what they were advertising..
Having installed almost 200 Intel SSDs into servers with 0 failures, I doubt his anecdotal evidence.

Also compare with Intel's reported annual failure rates: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review and a french retailer: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/...
I can't connect to those domains. DNS propagation, perhaps? Are they working for anyone else?
Maybe a HN post on posting on HN about Facebook...HAHAHA
> now something like only 3% of the population are still employed as farmers.

That's about exactly accurate: it was 2.8%, as of 1998, and is projected to dip down to 2.4% by 2018. [1] I happened to be looking at this just a few minutes ago, linked from http://zamfi.net/blog/one-day-we-will-all-be-programmers

[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
The state of the publishing world (and how it is similar to tech)
Consider an analogy. The FBI gets a valid warrant for the servers belonging to a company with a street address of "101 Main St, Somewhere, DC". The building at 101 Main St. is a multi-tenant, multi-story, office building.

If the FBI seized all the computer equipment in the entire building or even just the computers on the same floor as the targeted company but belonging to other companies who just happen to be physically adjacent to the targeted company, would it seem reasonable?
Reid Hoffman on how to hit a fast-moving target in the second-wave Web boom
There is an institution dedicated to "graduated response to piracy" in France. It is a complete fail. As far as I know, nobody ever received a letter claiming their Internet access will be restricted.

While they rely on technical system to stop piracy, they will fail.

For now it is more a societal behavior problem than a technical one. The only way I see to fight efficiently piracy is to make easier to pay than to pirate things. I predict a very long mouse and cat fight.
C++ was based on Stroustrup's early-1970s experience with Simula, where he was able to write a beautiful program (for his thesis research, I think?) that did exactly what he needed, but then discovered that doing the compute run he wanted to do would consume his department's entire computation-time budget on the mainframe. (Apparently 80% of the compute time was being spent in the garbage collector, even after he stopped allocating new objects, which sounds like a straight-up bug in the Simula runtime.) So he rewrote the program in BCPL, which is about like Forth except that it has infix notation and doesn't have metaprogramming.

So, some years later, in 1983, his key consideration in the design of C++ was efficiency — avoiding imposing any unnecessary overhead.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106l/course-reader/Ch0_WhatI...

In the interim, although he didn't know this, generational garbage collection and inline method caches had been invented, which probably would have provided enough efficiency that he never would have had to switch to BCPL. (Actually, even a decently implemented early-70s Simula would have been five times faster, and that might have sufficed.)
My reality is broken in so many ways. I'd be a buffoon to advertise.

Prayer should involve A-B testing. Cain and Abel.

God says...
cherish repay pryers sailors transcribe nostrils intend
actual interrupted easy echoes combine Wyoming
Just a list of things I came up with thinking for a few moments. These are all my thoughts and I don't have much to back up these positions, except for life experiences (and I'm pretty young):

* Small download,

* Controllable data,

* Instant, transparent upgrade,

* easier to get good/better demographics on usage,

* can more easily charge for usage,

* easier to get money via advertisements,

* works on Windows/Linux/Mac, because it's browser dependent,

* fewer steps to usability:

- goto website, signup vs

- goto website, install this program, go to program, start program. It's confusing and scary for a non-power-user.

* People feel safer going to a website than installing this rogue application on their computer (though not so with a handheld device, it would seem).

[another I thought of while reading what I wrote after fixing some display-errors]

* A/B testing easier to evaluate
The list of fatal regressions both chrome and firefox have introduced is pretty close to 0, developing a new version of a web app every 3 months for both browsers is beyond obtuse to the point of outright lying.

Web developers arent as utterly hopefully as you seem to think, my gmail supports drag and drop attachments, my irc client supports websockets when available, my task tracker works offline (and on a mobile), my maps support geolocation.

And I personally dont support have to support ie6, but a lot of people still have to. I havent heard of anyone that has to support Chrome v1.
What you are referring to is called "stretching". It's a lot better than a simple salted hash, but bcrypt would still be better.

I'm no crypto expert, but I think this is due to the way bcrypt was designed, and their use of a pessimized Blowfish cypher. SHA512 was designed for speed, which is the opposite of what you want with a password hashing scheme.

tptacek talks a little about this in this blog post:

http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/9/7/enough-with-the...

"Bcrypt uses Blowfish instead of MD5. Blowfish is a block cipher with a notoriously expensive setup time. To optimize Blowfish to run much faster, you’d have to contribute a major advance to cryptography. We security practioners are all “betting people”, and we usually like to place our bets on the side that “demands major advances in cryptography”."

Other interesting links:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3722780/do-any-security-e...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt