skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Silverlight: The SkyDrive Is (Not) Falling
If bitcoin freaks you out, I suggest reading up on the history of fiat money, and the federal reserve.
Is there a business opportunity?
I cant login to my dotcloud account. I am the only one?
It becomes unethical when someone who doesn't know about Ponzi schemes are gets involved. If someone has to tick a box saying that they read the wikipedia (for example) page on Ponzi schemes, they assume responsibility for any loss... assuming that they own the resources being staked, and that they are of sound mind.

It's the kind of thing that will attract smug dicks as early investors, though, and you'll get some desperate people at the bottom of the pyramid.
Let's hope they catch them soon.
"Here is the password I use for potentially important information, and here is the email and phone number that would likely be associated with that password. Let me know when your database get's hacked so that way I can change my password and we can do this exercise again."

Something like that you mean?
With at least two people per call. How can that not be workable?

He was partially referring to the internet. What would the web look like if two servers that wanted to move data between each other, (say, in a stock exchange) had to use circuit-switched telephony?
We care about gmail on all browsers :).
There's an obvious one if you're a lawyer :)
Catch whom? The smokescreen creators or those exposing them?
Agreed.

We use Google mostly for adverts, and we're showing about a $1 per user acquisition rate. That's not CTR rate, that's

clicked ad->saw site->signed up.

At almost $2 just to get a "like", I would be very hard pressed to justify that.

"we averaged $1.83 per 'like'"

"what's a 'like'?"

"somebody click the like button next to us in Facebook"

"how much money is that worth to us?"

"well, it identifies interested people in our service who we can advertise to later"

"so we now know about people who might be interested in our service if we decide to spend even more money advertising to them?"

"basically"
Before anyone says, "Why harass these people? They're just trying to make a living." Think about it for a little while.
"Hashes" aren't interchangeable, they're an abstract concept. In this case, the thread is talking about the SHA-1 hash algorithm. AFAIK Bitcoin uses SHA-2 w/256-bit digests.

So, actually, in this case the two happen to be related but different - SHA-1 being considered potentially flawed but not (yet) the stronger SHA-2.

Also, the Bitcoin block headers that are hashed are (I think) 80 bytes (640 bits) long, salted passwords probably a bit shorter.

Wikipedia says SHA-256 runs about 2/3 the raw throughput of SHA-1. You can the comparative rate yourself on any nix computer:

$ openssl speed sha1 sha256
-snip-
Doing sha1 for 3s on 16 size blocks: 7760096 sha1's in 2.99s
Doing sha1 for 3s on 64 size blocks: 5502820 sha1's in 3.00s
-snip=
Doing sha256 for 3s on 16 size blocks: 5460366 sha256's in 3.00
Doing sha256 for 3s on 64 size blocks: 3169031 sha256's in 3.00s
-snip-
*

So... about 2/3 faster. I don't know enough about crypto implementation, but I'd guess this ratio would scale roughly to the much faster GPU implementations as well.
Augmented Reality: on iPad seen via Vuzix glasses in Moscow
Great experiment! Glad to see you got some engagement.

As someone who has run FB ads since the beginning though, I would disagree with one thing: in my experience over the years, people are ok with leaving Facebook, so long as you have a very nice, clean, easy to understand page with a clear value proposition.

My suggestion going forward is this:
1. Take each winning ad and make 3 more variants.
2. Take each interest you were targeting, make a separate campaign for each.
3. Place all variants of your winning ads in each campaign.

The purpose of this is to find which actual interest is responding to your product. Once you find that out, refine it again by breaking up location, age, gender, education, etc.

Get really granular over time. The end result is very good ROI and a solid way of making money on FB :)
Counterpoint: 200,000 apps is what they want
"Because of what you said before you started filming..." Cute.

I know this has been discussed before, but how far away are we from having tiny wearable cameras that are always recording? It certainly seems that's where things are headed. Are there companies working on this?
That the negatives of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state are not intended doesn't much matter. Voter ignorance doesn't much matter either. If people cared they could find out. That people don't care about liberty enough to investigate how best to secure it is exactly why democracy and liberty don't mix.
> I wondered where the author would draw the line

I wondered the same thing. For example, what if I took his 8-bit music and painstakingly recreated by hand a 4 bit version by exactly copying the notes from his version. And what if that started appearing all over the internet and swamped the references to his own work? I think he'd be pissed off.

I feel bad for him because he did go out of his way to do the right thing on all other counts and this was an oversight - receiving a $32k punishment for a simple mistake is a tough break. However from his description he knew up front he was trading on a very fluid definition of fair use and he had to know it was a risk.
It would be on a per state basis. In several states [1] the common practice is now to use wiretapping laws to prosecute people who record conversations in which the parties involved have not consented to the recording.

Now in the example you chose, there is a different element in play, in that your camera is, ostensibly, for security and surveillance. I cannot speak to the specific laws of any state, but if surveillance is indeed the intent, I don't see it being particularly at issue for you to have the camera simply positioned somewhere.

It may be, however, that some states or municipalities have laws governing what areas may be observed by surveillance. For example, I cannot point a camera from across the street and at your bedroom window and claim that it is for surveillance on the side of my house. I don't want to be too anecdotal about that claim, but I was present for a neighborhood dispute with a similar situation in which one party was a lawyer and made some statements to that effect.

But back to wiretapping charges. It's best to simply know the laws in your state. In the State of Texas the recording a private conversation is legal as long as at least one party in the conversation is aware of it. You cannot record two random people in a private setting without their consent, but you can record your own conversation with someone, even if they are not aware of it.

[1] - http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010...
Nice, bet you don't have a TV either.
He's referring to the kids cracking anything and everything for the "lulz". There is no greater good and it's far from funny. If caught they will be behind bars for a very long time.
Nice timing then. I was browsing my gmail and at the same time received mtgox notification on my mobile and got locked out on the browser - assumed the notification email was a trigger.
This isn't about bitcoin per se.

> I’m convinced that the virtual currency itself is legitimate,

> but some of the biggest bitcoin 'businesses' are gambling

> and Ponzi/pyramid schemes.

It's about the legitimacy of 'honest and transparent' Ponzi/pyramid models.

If you strip out the deceit that usually accompanies these things, are they OK?

Or is there something fundamentally unethical or anti-social about this model?
Ah! - Sorry to those that only got the login page.
Advancing technology might eliminate some diseases, and make treating others trivially easy.

Note that nobody dies of smallpox anymore. That disease no longer exists in the population, it has been eliminated. IBM Watson will (eventually, kinda does now) automate diagnosis. Respirocytes[1] would eliminate decompression sickness, and make it pretty hard to bleed to death, with a medic handy. A Vasculoid[2] would eliminate bleeding entirely, as well as blocking all blood-borne diseases, by the simple expedient of replacing blood with something else.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte

2: http://jetpress.org/volume11/vasculoid.html
FB and Google CTR is like comparing apples and unicorns :)

Typically with FB, you are doing well if you are finding anything near 0.05% CTR. Remember, these are content ads and not paid search.

Paid search you should be hitting 5%+ CTR on your top search keywords (in position 1-2, around 3% for #3 and 2% or less for anything below). On FB, getting an ad with a consistent 0.077% CTR means they are on to something and should keep going.

Don't knock FB off your list of advertising venues though. Each one is different and has a completely different dynamic, approach to users and value proposition. With paid search you bid on user intent through keywords - what they are looking for right now. On Facebook you are bidding on people and trying to get their attention, a big difference :)
Just seen this demoed at the HN London meetup and it looks really cool. I'd read about how having the same language on the client and server is nice. But seeing someone live debugging the same code on the client and server was really eye opening. Kudos to AOL for funding this.
If this had happened for email, we would have had to deal with a myriad of different clients, servers and 'interworking' gateways.

I really don't understand why the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and the telcos can't agree on a standard. Guess business reasons are behind this. After all, walled gardens are great if you are the incumbent, it's how Skype got to be so valued.

Maybe the FCC should step in and take this on.
CTR has declined since the early days but profitability has really increased. Check out some of the ad management tools if you're having trouble - they can really help you get into the data and find results :)
Sorry, they didn't "target" the AZDPS and there were no good intentions involved. They are vultures and I'm guessing one of them that lives nearby cracked an insecure wireless network and stole some shared docs.
Real time, in web technology, means that the client communicates with the server through a socket instead of repeated HTTP get requests. This is exactly what this project is describing.

You probably hear this a lot lately, especially from javascript programmers, because this is one thing node.js could be really good at.
Sure. Freedom has everything to do with the culture of HN.
And if you cruise to a stop in the middle of a train crossing?

Or if the steering shuts down while on a long curve next to a cliff?
New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs
Exposing home addresses and wife is uncool. Leave the home and family out of it.
That's appropriate on many levels... As you intended, no doubt.
I've been thinking along the same lines and have already drawn up some concepts for what I think would be a killer non-profit substitute for facebook. I have also founded a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit, so I have some expertise when it comes to running a non-profit. Shoot me an email if you'd like to explore the idea further. kris [at] oowom [dot] com
Static electricity: how does it work?
'Iron Curtain' defense smacks rockets in mid-flight.
Apologies - got mixed up with the wording. Been amended now. Thanks.
Which is the Apple and which is the Unicorn?
Drop the acronym BS & call it what it is: another QoS/price option. Start with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service#Key_qualitie... (but swap out-of-order delivery for bitrate) and let the providers get measured. Publish the results.

You can actually sell quite a few network services to people, once you start talking about them in real terms. Gaming network links, with better latency guarantees, make a lot of sense. So do high-bandwidth, high-jitter links for downloaders.

IMHO it's another case of the marketers completely fucking up the market, because they're too dumb to understand their own product.
wikileaks is gonna be jealous
Downvote me, delete my account if you wish, but +1000000
Have you bothered to "think about" this? Police officers have a sworn duty to uphold the law. They don't write it. If you have a problem with the law your issue is with the Legislators not the cops.

(This is the very definition of "killing the messenger")
There's nothing noble about lulzsec. If someone rampaged through a neighborhood lock picking or crowbaring doors open and dumping the contents on the street out of some misguided sense of raising awareness about security how would people view them? Why should we view lulzsec any different?
Specifically with this attack, I don't think they're doing for lulz anymore.
Replying to myself here to give some info on my experiences with FB:

Here are my stats on the last week for one campaign where I make about $35-$50 on average per lead:

- Spend: $3,345.30
- Impressions: 6,305,765
- Clicks: 2,570
- CTR: 0.0408% (average, some ads are near 0.1% and they make the most money)
- Average CPC: $1.30
- Leads: 237
- Average CPL: $14.11
- Revenue: $8,703.70

That's a pretty damn good ROI. Not every campaign does as well as this, but taking the time to find your audience, craft your message and optimize will yield good results.
You may not like his presentation style, but the stats bear his argument out.
I like that he wants to be a CEO and thinks that "market cap" = "money in the bank".
Let's play a little game here.

Assume a corporation is creating over 100 custom applications to support businesses over dozens of product divisions, and any time supports over 1,000 internal applications, dating back to COBOL.

The COBOL applications keep working. The ColdFusion apps keep working. The VB6 apps are supported on an XP development box, but they still work on Windows 7. People are planning the replacement applications right now.

And then there's Mozilla. A feature introduced in 6 gets deprecated in 11, or changed just enough. Suddenly, 50 applications have an immediate need to change before there are any security bugs found in 10. After all, 10 is EOL and security bugs wont' be updated.

The idea of a long term release (supported X years) is a good one. Enforced bit rot and continual QA on legacy apps sucks, but having to do it every few months is untenable.

On the other hand, about 50 people see a market opportunity right about now. :)
I can't judge the whole thing (but it doesn't seem for the lulz), this action anyway has been certainly uncool, I guess they were lucky that their children weren't on file, otherwise they would have been probably involved too.
I'm obviously not talking about programs written in memory-safe languages - my point is that they don't have buffer overruns.

About the programs written in unsafe languages, I think it's clear that I don't literally mean that every single one has a buffer overrun; you can ensure that simple programs don't, and I am also assuming that well-designed language runtimes and compilers do not. Otherwise, you'd gain nothing by going to a memory-safe language. In the real world, something like a JIT compiler or a JVM is far less likely to be unsafe than an average app, although it does have bugs and there were a couple of patches for buffer overruns.

Also, programs which essentially transform strings to strings, like compilers, are easier to make formally correct, or at least correct enough that you have confidence in them, than many other classes of programs. If you have to deal with timings, polling, complicated interactions with the environment - it all becomes much harder. Also, compilers can have tight specifications of what they do - I don't think it's possible to specify the behavior of a word processor to the same extent. For many C/C++ apps, it's just hard to ever say they don't have a buffer overrun.

So you can imagine our feeling when learning about the ROP attacks. They're going to write a compiler for their malicious code which targets a virtual machine made up of tiny pieces of our app. What kind of a world is this? And they only need one buffer overrun. A scary feeling, although, as someone already pointed out, the idea of running a little piece of code from somewhere is not new, and the attack is not the end of the world.
It's not very ethical.

The line between moral and not moral is fuzzy, and this is definitely somewhere in the fuzzy zone, not in the clear white zone.
If you lived in AZ you'd know that DPS had very little to do with 1070 and in some cases spoke against it.
Everyone should apply to YC. I'm considering applying this upcoming round myself. :)
Where did you get the impression that Google hasn't incorporated SSDs?
Why would you incur any costs? Surely the company will pay for servers etc.?

Weird.
Didn't Wyden already place a hold on this?
Well, at least by putting "non-human" in "non-human animals", they understood that human shouldn't be excluded by default.

By "wrong" I essentially meant "you shouldn't do that", here because it is misleading. Using the single word "animal" when you actually mean "non-human animal" suggest we humans are not animals. We are.

Now you changed my mind a bit: the "non-human animals" category does have its uses, and it does make sense to think of it. I just think it doesn't deserve the shorter expression "animals".
I guess extreme caution is good. But saying to somebody Your email, username, and password have been compromised" strikes me as a little sensational.

Granted, the average user doesn't need to know or understand the vagaries of password hashes. But if somebody reads this, they should think "OMFG somebody can login to my email account!" I mean, that's exactly what it says. But there's no legitimate reason to believe that.

Moreover, if you look at MtGox, Google locked every account on that list and forced people to change their passwords. But if you're Joe User looking at this today, are you going to connect the dots enough to see that yes, you WERE in a data leak, but then you changed your password, but this site just didn't know about it and is informing you only of the leak?
They switch places depending on AdWords QS and FB's approval policies :D
> So how secure is SocketStream? Well, to be honest - we just don't know. The entire stack, from Node.js right up to the SocketStream client is brand new and no part of it is claiming to be production-ready just yet. So for now we recommend using SocketStream internally, behind a firewall.

I must say, I'm excited for this to become more robust, but I appreciate their candor in telling me why I shouldn't use it in production yet. Back to old fashioned socket.io I guess (or maybe NowJS).
Kudos for telling it as it is.
This may be the first time the public gets really riled up by hackers in (almost) the same way they do about murders and robberies. I can imagine a police appeal for information resulting in literally thousands of names of hacker-types being given over.
Interestingly, I've seen this video--3 years ago and yet this technology has yet to gain any significant traction. Sorry, but this is not the "near" future of computing. The primary reason being that "gesture" based interaction is too complicated. You can't expect the user to remember the gestures and be able to operate the device no matter how intuitive you make it. Primarily, because gestures are not universal. They are cultural, and even geographical. For example, think of the "come here" gesture. Comparing "come here" between the Japanese and English version and you have to very different motions. Even if you compare the gesture between two different people of the same culture, you're going to get varied emphasis on parts of the motion.
I like your idea, I wish I had it first.

Best of luck for you :)
What about people who don't like or use the Gmail web UI (I use it over IMAP) but would still like to use Google Talk to stay in touch with friends? Is my only option to use third-party clients? I like Google Talk but dislike Gmail, and tying the two together doesn't really work out in my favour.
I could see them releasing a migration tool. Maybe it wouldn't support everything, forcing you to render some clips, but it would be better than nothing.
Thanks. If you read that last paragraph though, I didn't have the idea first. :)
You don't need to give them your password or phone number, just the email address associated with your account(s). Adding a phone number would be optional.
That's the other half of the blogosphere. It makes everyone an editor. From everything I've heard, the average editor's slush pile is even worse than the average fanfiction.
I like how Douglas Crockford explained it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook#t=27m20s
Racial profiling sucks! It's demeaning, belittling, and alienating. If the cops acted within the law, then what are they afraid of? More transparency = a more democratic state, right? (I don't think their family names should have been listed here though). You can't applaud Wiki leaks for igniting the overthrow of autocratic Middle Eastern governments, and hypocritically argue against similar actions when it's your own country in question.

The US is turning into a police state slowly. I recently saw on HN how a woman was arrested for taping them on her own property. Sounds less like the land of the free, and more like a place where the citizens serve the authorities (my country of birth, Pakistan, citizens, especially the innocent ones, pee their pants when they see cops - something very wrong about that).
password: 12345

I knew there'd be at least one.
Between this and the CG Japanese popstar it looks like we won't be able to trust video any more than we trust digital photos now.
Announcing Echoprint, a fully free and open music fingerprint.
Actually, I hadn't realized that we agreed on that. I will think more about Stepanov's approach, although I still think he is ignoring the different efforts likely to be put into securing different type of programs.
Can academics be new-media journalists?
Ah. OK. You win. I retract. Thank you.
Police have a great deal of latitude in how they enforce the law.

Ever been to court when it was your word against a police officer? Who would you imagine the court, jury or your peers will believe?
For immediate release = For immediate delete
How First-Time Entrepreneurs Can Establish Credibility: 3 Case Studies
Good target to retaliate against. I'm sure they considered going after the people who drafted the legislation, or the voters who passed it, but passed on that because... this was the server they happened to find that was easy to get in to and they came up with their justification afterwards.
Show HN: Backbone JS Key-Value Observing
https://github.com/bruth/backbone-kvo

I've come to appreciate the various libraries in my current JavaScript stack including: jQuery, Backbone (and thus Underscore), and RequireJS. The one thing missing is key-value observing between my DOM elements and my data. I was hoping the jQuery datalink API would have matured, but the scope of the API is limited and the implementation is somewhat confusing to me.

So I decided to start writing one that initially assumes Backbone (since it has events built in). Since Backbone's controllers aren't traditional controllers, I linked the DOM element via the View to the Model the View represents. There are quite a few assumptions being made in the implementation and lots of room for improvement in the API, names of things, and performance.

If you clone the repo, you can just open index.html since I pre-built the JS for the time being. Thanks.
I'm guessing you've never been in a car when a cop plays the "I smell pot Joe. What do think?" game.

Police officers do have a sworn duty. But some of them do not uphold their oaths. Some of them even break the law outright. It's therefore quite possible to have an issue with law enforcement, separate from the laws themselves.
Look at PBKDF2:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2898.txt