skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In the United States we might start considering computer
> equipment as private spaces, not unlike our residents and
> vehicles. With so much of our lives increasingly digital
> in nature, it's not that screwy of an idea that law
> enforcement should require a search warrant for computer
> equipment and storage media.

That's not at all the issue. The 4th amendment has been extended to digital media:

http://www.cybercrime.gov/ssmanual/index.html

I'd be willing to bet my house that the law enforcement had a search warrant to take the data in question.

The problem is that the government's strategy -- grab the hardware -- doesn't work well when the hard drive is a virtual disk that sits on a server with a ton of other virtual disks.

Ultimately though, I think this isn't a question that can be solved by technical means. The solution is going to come when law enforcement can come up with a way of "confiscating" the virtual disks that doesn't open the door for claims of tampering & evidence planting.
One usecase might be if you have someone over at your house and they need to use your wifi. You might want to be able to let them connect securely without you having to tell them your password.
Love this comment. I am all for democratizing research. I think researchers all to often have a sense of entitlement, or talk in there own language. Try reading a peer reviewed medical journal. We make as language as difficult as possible. Some if is on purpose, but ultimately it kills innovation. Most of the great ideas come from cross pollination of ideas from divergent fields (discovery of brain shunt) or collision of two hunches (internet, and the printing press)... Chance favors the connected mind. The challenge is how do we connect minds and get then to talk in the same language.
It's a bit surprising in this day and age that you would have so much trouble convincing enough folks (at a financial institution nonetheless) that this is a bad practice. Does your organization not have anyone responsible for information security and customer privacy (that's usually a different person from the "most senior programmer")?
Have you seen squeryl? Its not quite as nice as LINQ, but its definitely a useful DSL
A typo - I meant machine translation aligner.
what bank do you work for, looney tunes acme bank ?
Did your "senior programmer" dude never hear of salt and SHA1-Hash, fairly trivial to do ?
Deploying a Clojure web app on Heroku
Yeah, but cmd-shift-t brings them back when I get clickclickclick happy. I'd rather click fewer times.
There may be safety in numbers. One can imagine that if the FBI showed up at an Amazon data center and was told "it's somewhere in these thousand racks" they'd rethink the "seize it all" approach.
I've seen another cause change of aversion in big organizations: admin bonus pay was tied to application uptime. This created a hilariously dysfunctional situation where the admins locked the developers out of production and refused to deploy any code changes to production, including bug fixes, for several months. Senior leadership in the organization insisted this was the best model to ensure service stability. In the meantime agile competitors ran circles around them until the service became irrelevant, but just look at those uptime numbers!
FWIW, it's an option in Chrome. Simply uncheck "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar" in the preferences.
NewsTilt (formerly NewsLabs) was shut down fairly quickly. Here's the deets: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...
I think the option of having an opt-in Google Authenticator-like service within Dropbox would be extremely useful. I would definitely use something like that.
I have a site up using Django-nonrel on GAE and it's working fine ( but not many users yet ). Because it abstracts the Google datastore django works the same as always. Getting this to work took much left effort than I expected.
I am impressed with the AppEngine version of our beloved (now dead) JoS forum. Great job.
TECHWORLD: Israel urges Apple to remove pro-Palestinian app
I agree that that shortcut is very, very useful. I need it many times a day. :)
The problem is that IT gets inundated with tons of requests and everyone thinks their problem is more important than someone else's. The moment you start queuing up requests and trying to apply some order to the chaos is the moment IT's bad reputation develops. It's a thankless position for sure.

The article doesn't offer a solution, but points out what we already know. Even though the "cloud" is to supposed to eliminate the need for a big internal IT department, you still need someone to support your cloud environment, which takes you back to square one.
(I'm the author of the article and also a heavy Python programmer).

That's not an easy question to answer.

If you were to do a faithful port i.e. using using the same techniques as C/Go code, it would be very close. upskirt uses a traditional lexing/top-down-parsing approach. There's nothing in Python syntax that makes writing such code more compact than in Go. It's a bit tedious to write but the benefit is that (in C/Go) it gives the best speed because it minimizes the number of times each source character is looked at.

If you were to use a different approach e.g. brute-forcing your way through the text several times with regexpes, which is the most popular way of doing that in dynamic languages, the code clocks at ~2 thousand lines (like the implementation I use for my home-grown blog system https://github.com/kjk/web-blog/blob/master/markdown2.py)

If you were to use this technique in Go, the code would probably end up smaller than the manual lexing/parsing approach used in upskirt, but it would be significantly slower.

Interestingly, upskirt approach would probably be slower in Python than the regexp approach, because regexpes are heavily optimized C code and looking at individual characters of the string in Python code isn't particularly fast due to python interpretation overhead.
Ask HN: Lego case for iPhone - kickstart
Can anyone offer any advice on getting the word out on a kickstart project without seeming spammy? I've submitted to reddit a couple of times, and tweeted a little bit, but am walking on eggshells in fear of seeming spammy.

the project was created by my brother who is a teacher, and I'm doing my best to help as I'm a "prgrammer" so I must know how to do these things. Little do they know I program via search?&q= and thus need to do the same here.

Any help/advice/criticism would be appreciated.

There's more info on the project at his website: http://tinkerbrick.com/

Thanks!
Quoted from comments and decided to analyze:
"A family sedan for $80,000. That will work."

At an average of 15K miles/year, 30mpg, and $3/gal of gas, that's $1500 in gasoline a year. Over 5 years, that's a savings of $7500 ($10000 for $4/gal). We're not quite at that point where it offsets completely from a pure 'gas vs electric' POV (I'm not sure if the car has a Mercedes-comparable interior or a Toyota-comparable interior).

I don't think this means it won't work, but I was interested in the gas savings over time. I would buy one if I could afford an $80000 car.
That's not my experience random walker. A huge number of papers are hidden inside journals, and sites like the ACM. I run into this problem constantly.
reminds me of QuickSilver talking about wu wei, and seems fairly accurate--the sequence "tap Command, pause about a quarter second, type "S", hit Space" for launching Safari feels a lot like "lean towards where you want to go" does on a bike (or maybe "steer one way and lean the other to make a tight turn without leaning the bike over as far", a more advanced technique).
Careful; it is not yet clear whether this person is affiliated with LulzSec. You should add "alleged" or "suspected" to the title.
This seems like an odd way to go about doing an open standard. Don't you usually want to let vendors work on getting things working and then come back and standardize based on best practices?

It would seem like the WG should work with MS and Adobe to get Silverlight and Flash working really well. Get it out in peoples hands for a year or two. And then come back and say, "OK, we generally get 3D on the web now. Now lets standardize it."

It really feels like this WG is in a race to hurry to get something out the door as fast as possible.
Fight For Your Life In Project Zomboid
What happens when desktop App Stores (e.g. Mac App Store) start taking hold as the primary delivery platform for the desktop? Will they erode some of the benefits of web apps on the desktop?

When development and deployment are easier, the end user will benefit from more frequent updates, fixes and new features.
while that bug was only possible because of WebGL, it really is a bug in Firefox (the blog post submission mentions this). This is evident since this attack is not possible in Chrome or Firefox 5 (released today).
That's a feature, not a bug. I use it all the time. It's a password manager, as the admin I should be able to view its data.
He was NOT a ring leader. Misleading title..
Passpack is one of the more interesting security applications in the cloud -- they actually do client side encryption properly (I work out of the same office as them and talked with their lead developer a few times).
I just started using Pinboard a couple days ago (mostly because of integration with Instapaper), and so far it looks great. The fact that, even with all this chaos going on, the main functionality of the service is still up and running is really great.
Eh, friend of a friend who was a "big shot mixing guy in LA" claimed that Apple was ditching the pro audio space now that ProTools isn't hardware bound anymore and has been taking more market share.

Then again, Apple has been really quiet about Logic Pro and surprised everybody with announcements of new versions every time.
Is there a way to control lego motors and sensors using an ipod instead of the mindstorms control bricks?

Also, have you tried posting on lego forums (lego.com has a message board)?
And the saving the search term thing is that way because that's how Google-the-website works. Search for something on google.com, and the Results Page shows that term in the box. The Search Box behavior was just carried over from that.
It's not competing with Garage Band, it's competing with Pro Tools, Live, Reason, etc. etc. depending on what you use it for.
Japan scientist synthesizes meat from human feces
If you have only an engineering-level math background, the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post. And it will have to do it briefly enough that you stay interested, and accurately enough that what follows is meaningful. This sounds to me like an impossible task.

Mathematicians do have the advantage that all their papers are open-access. If you're interested in math, you can cruise on over to arXiv and read 60 abstracts an hour.
Another Netscape Navigator, err before that NSCA Mosaic user here, and yes we walked to school uphill both ways.

I love firefox but have suffered with the memory issues for years. Please free memory when I close tabs, or at least add a flush button so I can reclaim the 500mb it balloons to in a day or two of heavy usage.
Security breaks there already: If someone knows your password ...
Building UI in Google Apps Script just got a whole lot easier
For some reason this article rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's because I feel like the author is using a link bait title to "teach me" something that already seems pretty obvious. The whole question answer setup is annoying.

The title suggests that this article is about user experience when it really feels more like a rehash of pick 2: fast/cheap/quality.

1) Reasonable Time To Market (fast)

2) Flawless user experience (quality)

3) Big Reach (Cheap: big payoff for time/money invested)
Now that upskirt has been ported to Go as a library, it's also 5 lines.

BTW: if people want to do markdown in Go, the library to use is https://github.com/russross/blackfriday. It's a different one that the code I ported but Russ Ross did exactly the same thing at almost exactly the same time and was a little bit ahead, so after I discovered his work, I decided to contribute to his code instead of maintaining my own, almost identical, project.
How's threatening to sue the makers of hardware used to commit a crime working out for victims of gun crime?

Phones don't record gigs, people do.
Multiple Homepages with Highrise & 37signals
Poorly implemented, as you're redirected to a new page after their main page loads.

http://highrisehq.com/index2 - replace 2 with a number through 8. Big & subtle changes abound.
None of my linux keychain passwords are the same as my user password. The keychain password is much more difficult and I never re-enter it to get back into my machine (unlike the screensaver password prompt).
I have to agree with the article. Native apps "feel" better. I think some users feel uncomfortable with going to a web browser on their phone to use an app. Feels fragile and brittle. Like they might accidently close a tab or hit refresh and lose all their data or something. How do I get to it? Where is it in my bookmarks? How many people know about and use Home Screen Web Apps?

I think solutions like PhoneGap is the best of both worlds. Users get their "native" app. Developers get to keep their web app.
Feels like a step backwards to me. I preferred when I closed a tab it would resize immediately. Now I have to wait until I move the mouse away.
$58,0000 for 160 mile range, $80,000 for extra batteries to bring it up to 300 mile range, which is $22,000 more. The extra weight of the batteries reduces mileage slightly so the extra pack doubles the battery capacity. Now battery cost is the big problem, so the $22,000 pack is being sold at near cost. So a 300 mile range battery pack from 0 mile range is $44,000, this is the cost of the two packs. Batteries need to be replaced every 3-6 years depending on use, so figure $9000/yr battery cost for this machine, not including the $1000 or so fees for disposing of the toxic waste (lithium batteries are not accepted at the dump).

So yes, you save on gas driving this machine and save the environment by not emitting as many fumes. But it costs $9000 a year to maintain the batteries, which are a serious toxic waste disposal problem.

Not harping on Tesla here though, this is the basic problem with electric cars.
I don't believe that is what he is saying. He's saying that he thinks that extreme would still be worth it if that was required to run WebGL.
Oops. Pesky apostrophe. Fixed.
The FBI is just another in the list of bad things that can happen to your servers. Flood, fire, theft, law-enforcement... its all the same thing to a hosted service.

Off site backups, executed masterfully here saves the day.

There are a few services that I run on servers in separate countries. Failure of reasonable rule of law within a single country is a failure mode we consider.
Try this: Turn off the x's as they just waste space. Then close tabs with a middle click or Ctrl+W.
If you really wanted an EV now, you could get a Nissan LEAF for a lot less than a Tesla Roadster. But if you want a couple generations, you should get a pretty decent price and a much bigger range (not to mention that by then fast charging stations should be more common).
I'm not aware of any other way outside of mindstorm. But there is a cool integrator for mindstorm that allows you to connect MS to wi-fi thus allowing integration with iOS (and other platforms I'm sure). So with this and a couple of iPhone/iTouch devices you could definitely do what you're asking.

Yes, I think there has been some effort on the Lego forum front by my brother, but I think he's a bit hesitant to scream in Lego's face that he's created something base on their product. Even though it's all perfectly legal, it's still touchy. Thanks!
So Lua has negative indexes?
My interviewing experience was much different. I found my Amazon interviews to be much easier than Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Maybe it changes with different teams?
The Tesla model S is supposed to be similar in dimension to the last 7 series BMW...
which retails for about $80k. I believe fit and finish is to be up to that par as well.
http://autos.yahoo.com/bmw/7-series/2012/

It's not close on a gas savings level, but you don't buy a Tesla for the gas savings... You buy it because it is a different type of car and to make a statement.
Middle click to close those tabs.
Fighting Paradox with Paradox
When there's an FBI goon breathing down your neck telling you to keep your mouth shut, and you're pressured by customers to say something, your options aren't real attractive.
Does anyone know if this library will have encryption features built in?
Tesla's next car, a sedan, will cost $58,000. What is it that makes electric cars so expensive? I don't know much about cars, but I thought electric cars had fewer parts than a gas car. Is it just that the parts for electric cars haven't reached economies of scale yet?
"Batteries need to be replaced every 3-6 years depending on use"

Please cite your source on this. AFAIK, the batteries in most electric cars are good for the life of the vehicle. They're designed to use only part of their capacity to extend life and then compensate as much as possible for loss of charge over time..

And they pay you to recycle lithium-ion batteries, and they aren't very toxic at all.

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mythbusters-part-3-recycling...
Batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Price
PhoneGap is pretty sweet, but I found it a little too sluggish for my needs. I switched to Appcelerator Titanium. Like PhoneGap, it's a FOSS package that lets you write cross-platform code in Javascript, except that it compiles the JS to native code. It feels much snappier to me.
Batteries are still expensive, and there isn't much economies of scale yet.
In a sane environment, you'd be right.

But the government is going to claim that its "right" to get at the evidence is stronger than the property rights of the other co-resident users.

Consider: the 4th Amendment isn't in effect when you're within 100 miles (?) of the border; the chance of smuggling, etc., is greater there, so the need to detain and search people in that zone outweighs our rights. Or, consider a case in which my buddy borrows my car, and is seen driving through an unsavory neighborhood, is stopped, and found with a big sum of cash. This gives them the "right" to confiscate my car because it was involved in drug trafficking, even though no crime has been committed, and I wasn't involved in any case.
Your analysis left out the cost of electricity that has to be used instead of gas. Even so in 5 years you save a maximum of 10% of the cost of the car. This only works if you're put a personal value on not using fossil fuels which far exceeds the cost of gasoline.

In return you get a very fast sedan that can't be used for any long road trips. It would be fine for commutes and around town, but even something like a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco would be a major fail.
My Weekend Project: Bitcoins For Charity
So, one question I have is how much does in-app billing improve the bottom line of your app? Does in-app purchase really make a free app more profitable than a straight up paid app or how does it compare?

I haven't seen much data myself on these kind of comparisons, so I'm quite curious.
You said that PHP's arrays/hashes were awesome, but did not say why. In other words, you did not contribute to the discussion. This may have attracted some of your downvotes; certainly it made it your post unlikely to convince anyone of anything.
Seems like I'm in the minority here, but just yesterday I found an off-by-one bug in my small project for my dissertation, that was sitting there unnoticed for months and I started thinking about how ridiculously stupid is the fact that zero-based indexing is in widespread use. Here I see someone arguing how it eases up cycling through the array, "a frequent operation". How is looping through an array or accessing its last element for a frequent operation?

In every non-computer related document one will found ordinal numbers starting from 1 and n-element sets with the number of the last element being n. Now thanks to the zero-based indexing one has to always switch back and forth between two ways of counting things, depending if one writes/reads code or prose. Just pay attention over the next week or month how many times you forget to make the switch and make this kind of off-by-one mistake I'm talking about. I admire mathematics more then any other discipline and I do see the benefits of a formal approach, but here the formalism has in my opinion clearly diverged from any kind of common sense and from actual software engineering practice.

In fact in any engineering discipline, if you study its history, communication errors are the most frequent reason for failure or even for disaster. Having to always translate every document to the private language of your discipline certainly doesn't help communication. Dijkstra mostly did proofs and didn't have to deal with other people too much in his work, so perhaps he didn't understand that.
App Store isn't only mobile, is it? Doesn't MacOS X use it now?
... that doesn't mean they should automatically get to know all your other passwords.

When I'm making online bank transfers, I get prompted for my password for every transfer, even though I'm already logged in - better to double-check the really sensitive stuff, rather than just protect the entry point.
What is the purpose of pinned tabs in Chrome if they aren't pinned after reload?
Good architecture. And nice of you to explain clearly and completely the problem and to invite your users to backup. I'd like to see that more often, but more companies are too scared to lose customers to do that.
The Dangers of Entrepreneurial Passion
Your experience is very similar to ours. We ended up spending about 100K on trade shows in the first 2 years. We learned a lot from speaking with that volume of target customers, but once the learning rate tapered so did the value. The number of customers we were able to acquire was disappointingly small.

At the show, they love your product, call them later, and
they're too busy.

Think of what that 8k of spend can do with web marketing.

If I had to do it again... less shows.
I doubt there would have been an initial bombing if there was even a minute chance that Napels, Rome or Marseille (or Tel Aviv; it is a bit farther away, but even a half attempt at hitting that could have grave consequences) would have been targeted in response.

Politicians know that; that is why they threaten the nuclear card when they can, even though I think most wouldn't dare play it.
A Mathematician's Survival Guide
I like it but it needs some optimization or throttling. Would you believe the fans on my laptop go on full blast when I type in the url bar? Annoying.
Flickr API now supports OAuth 1.0a
Gmail stops working if you have DOM Snitch enabled.

I tried it but to be honest did not find it terribly useful. They seem to be using some very simple rules for best practices (like avoiding document.write). But it's nothing more than that (yet)
Business processes. The code is dead simple. A few hundred lines of order matching. The real meat is handling all the business processes, clearing transfers, etc.

and finding a legally safe location to put a business like that.
The results are random in order, but consistent between calls, so it's not all bad
At least Qt was first used only for Meego but they made compiling to Symbian possible in 2010 or so and the developers switched over to Qt.
Thankfully I can as my Thinkpad has a 3rd button. The majority of laptop users won't be so lucky.
Bitcoin wiki already lists several exchanges. What would a new one do to make a difference?