skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The added advantage of that solution is that (with a bit of backend work on your nameserver) you could rotate your Bitcoin address for every lookup, resulting in a unique address per transaction to preserve anonymity.
Having recently heard "magic" being used over and over again in several contexts, I was looking for a concise expression of what it means to me, covering aspects of design, imagination, the work it takes, etc. .. and sort of came up with this --

Magic is about what happens where you aren't looking.

A "magician" literally directs your eye somewhere and works her "magic" elsewhere. The iPad (or the radio for that matter) is "magical" 'cos you never look at all the decisions, and even sleight of hand, that go into creating every detail of it. ()

It takes a thorough understanding of the regularities of your world to create something magical. Without these regularities, there is no predictability and no control possible. And the magic happens when you hide it all and hide it so well that nobody notices ... like a master artist masking all his sources of inspiration in an "original" work.

In particular, if your critics say "oh I could build that over a weekend" and you know for yourself how complex the thing is and all the myriad details that you might be slipping right past your critics' watchful eyes, you've probably have created something "magical".

() For "sleight of hand", watch closely the notch that magically appears and disappears when you open/close a "folder" icon on iOS. Watch the home icons fly in closely and see if it matches what you thought they were doing before you looked closely. Movies and computer games have lots of such "tricks of the trade" as any movie buff who bothers to find continuity or physicality errors in movies will tell you. Such sensory "sleight of hand" even works because your brain has loads of such tricks as, for example, visual and aural paradoxes have shown us.
Berkeley research team introduces Google Maps-powered collaborative citizenship
Master Foo and the Script Kiddie
Well this is thoroughly embarrassing for old Gary. I'm gonna assume he got some 'Agency help' to 'back hack'. . oh dear. .
Cooked food is tastier than raw food eh? Sounds like the mother of all generalizations....
What Interests me is, who capped all the logs. In a room with four ops and 4 non ops, unless it was server admin?
That man sure knows how to say he is sorry ;-).

This just goes to show that testing more and especially unexpected input is extremely important. Test driven development is nice, but in general it only tests for known valid data and what it should return but doesn't include the tests to verify that the program still behaves as expected when given invalid data or data that you aren't expecting it to receive.
Europe is going to a model where the infrastructure is owned by some arm of the government (quangos like Railtrack in the UK or national rail administrations), because the initial outlay on infrastructure is too big to make private investment or even private-public partnerships profitable for the private actors everywhere except the most densely populated areas. It seems to me that the scheme is somewhat similar here? I don't know whether it would work in the US though.
JavaScript is Dead. Long Live JavaScript
It seems that bank accounts are public: https://blockexplorer.com/address/1MTbKpYWnzqmsLvCjdTtwrvuX8...

Why is this?
The granularity actually can make it dangerous if it's an impediment to correctly designing such rights. Unix model has this advantage to be simple enough to accommodate most needs. A subtle misstep or two with ACLs can create a hard to notice path to escape, while since Unix rights are coarse, holes are generally quite coarse too.
I would be microwaving my hard drives, flash drives, the cat (in case it talks under pressure), dying my hair and, I was going to say become a cross dresser but it looks like a few of them are already.
... Which will lead to 4. Trust. People can only agree to use a currency if they trust it.
This is why people say Bitcoin is pseudonymous: the entire transaction history of every Bitcoin is public knowledge.

To achieve actual anonymity, receivers need to use a one-time-address for each sender, and senders need to not leak information about which addresses they own.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity
Singapore Offers Luxury Hotels And Cheap Hotels In Singapore
Loopt is going to settle this matter tomorrow by putting up an offer for 50% off the iPad 2 redeemable at your local Apple store.

Wait, they aren't going to do that? Well, they really should... don't you all agree with me, guys?

Snarkiness aside, this illustrates why I don't like the Loopt model. Even if you ignore the trademark use issues, the whole system sets up a situation in which an outside party is allowed to set another business up as the bad guy for not honoring arbitrary deals they may never had any intention of offering.

IMO this is way worse than Groupon because at least with Groupon you sign up to be screwed.
4) Legislative issues. For example Germany (I'd bet) would not accept bitcoins in one's tax form ("I have to pay 345.67 bit coins of taxes to the state"). And if you have income in a non approved currency, you get into some trouble.
That's the way it works: everyone can see every transaction, and use that to figure how much money is at any address.

For anonymity, you can generate as many addresses as you want in your wallet, and there are services that you can use to conduct transactions anonymously (by proxies and spread out over a period of time).
The most important by far rule for currency is stability. With stability comes acceptance of the currency.

You don't have that - the owner first looked up the exchange rate to US dollars.

What you have is a medium of exchange, but you don't have a currency.

A medium of exchange is useful, and can eventually become a currency. But bitcoins are not yet a currency.

Perhaps someone can make a bank, where you store US dollars. Using that bank you can send and receive bitcoins. Only the bank can create bitcoins, but once created anyone can trade them without input from the bank.

If you are familiar with history this is how paper currency actually got started - goldsmiths would store gold and give chits of paper. Those chits started getting exchanged, and a currency was born.
sigh - this happens just as I completed moving my web app to bcrypt and once enough time has passed for most of the passwords to be converted from my old salted-md5 method.

Most of the users are German or French speaking, so I'm sure there will be 8bit characters. I wonder whether just forcing them to use the forgot-my-password function is good enough or whether I will have to do extra work.

Still. Very detailed email and very helpful thread.
Git - even if you're the whole team
Before GRADUATING?!

This was all things I was doing before I started ATTENDING university. It's super simple, and you won't be downloading Slackware on 30 floppy disks any more!
All account numbers and amounts are public but there's no name attached to them and you can have as many accounts as you please.
Reading the Laurelai/NA cap about the FBI raid made me wonder if anyone ever tries to reverse-bug the FBI by hiding bugs in HDDs and other equipment prone to seizure...
The recent malware entirely (as I understood) depended on the user putting their password into an OS prompt for permissions for the bad program. How can the OS make the line between that and something safe like Growl or Virtualbox?
The last time I called comcast (in the middle of the night) I actually spoke to someone who used linux at home.

Quite surprising, and she was quite knowledgeable and helpful too.

Comcast also has some complex IE only registration, but if you call them and say you use linux they'll say no problem ask for the MAC of the modem and activate you on the phone.
Understanding the South East Asian market
This is really not an ordinary post on HN, but I will still give it a shot anyway.

I understand that many of us are located in the States and I am an exception. I was born in China and is currently studying and working in Singapore. I have seen how the internet landscape in South east asia has evolved over the years and have my own two cents worth about it. I am currently doing business development for a social media technology company and also starting my own ventures.

To cut the story short, I will be heading to Palo Alto and Los Angeles area from 16 July to 1 August. If you want to understand the Asian market better or to just have a chat over coffee, please drop me an email: spencer@spenceryang.com.

Looking forward to sharing ideas with you all!
I'm curious. Where exactly do you see a security flaw in Bitcoin? Exchanges run by former magic the gathering admins don't count. What flaw is there is there in the security of the currency, I'm curious.
Thanks to Mr Sivers for referring me to this platform!
Why did that make the evidence inadmissible? Was it because it wasn't their room any more, and therefore the FBI didn't have a right to be there?
Excellent article. My favorite quote:

> Apart from whether there is a central bank somewhere to bid against George Soros, doesn’t the difference between a real currency and an imaginary currency lie in some sense in the composure with which a customer can ask if the currency is accepted here and in the composure with which a merchant can say yes?

Every currency is valuable only because other people consider it to have value.
Hmm it isn't complete; My password isn't on there yet. =\
New Isn’t Always Improved
What effects do you want? Pot and non-alcoholic beer? A easily-repeatable exercise like surfing or cycling? Skydiving?
Ask HN: What's the worst tech article?
Apropos to the title, what is the worst article you've ever seen on Hacker News or, generally, posted on the web and why?
Didn't the kid have a spell checker or did he just want to sound l33t?

Usually I'm not a grammar nazi (english isn't my first language so I understand the curse of engrish) but this is just annoying to read.
On LulzSec, Censorship & CloudFlare
I think the lack of physical tokens for Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) will likely be the main hurdle for public acceptance. It'll probably take another generation or two for people to get used to the idea of not having a physical representation for currency.
That makes no sense. Mountain View is a real place. Silicon Valley is a nickname for the region, so saying "MV is directly adjacent to SV" makes no sense to me.
So I get that Bitcoin by design keeps a global public record of every transaction. Does that have to be the HN front page?
That's a uselessly broad criterion. If I want to read about literature there are dozens of other specialized sites with much better informed contributors. The value of this site depends on a meaningful focus.
Signed characters for ASCII are silly. LoseThos uses unsigned. I made a promise of just ASCII, however, so I did not put extended ASCII in the font. It's trivial for international people to do so. The compiler allows extended ASCII for alphanumerics, though, it's untested much.
Both of them suck. Use XFCE.
http://nerdr.com/shutting-down-bitcoin-really-taking-down-th...

I'll add that the crypto will one day be broken (even brute force will eventually work once CPU/GPU have progressed far enough). And when it is, there is no reason you couldn't just sit back cracking those wallets in secret before funneling the coins your way. A significant weakness of the anonymity of the network means no one really "owns" a wallet in the traditional sense. They are essentially communal.
This makes no sense at all. I'd rather use telnet.
Economics of Groupon
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If bitcoin was a currency the meal would have been denominated in bitcoins not dollars. Bitcoin is an asset like gold or a stock certificate, not a currency.
No, only because Bitcoin isn't stable enough right now to know what the price should've been in BTC.
Firefox 4 is unsupported, but don't freak out
12. This is where Topiary comes in. They all form lulzsec to be "hacktivists".

Source: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=iVujX4TR
Skype’s Worthless Employee Stock Option Plan: Here’s Why They Did It
What you mean is that the ridiculously easy passwords have been cracked? Not really a surprise considering they have been out for so long.

While I'm glad I do not have a account there they would not have been able to crack my password :-)

Edit:

I am a fool, salted hashes are probably not in anyones rainbow tables :)
Spend x weeks updating passwords as the users log in, then for whoever hasn't logged in since then can be sent an email (maybe it doesn't have to exactly say "Login so I can update the passwords", just some sort of incentive to log in.
yeah lets put random peoples names in a pastebin and claim they are 3 different groups all rolled into one. I just write articles, and sometimes people get upset by them. its probably Barr because i wrote those crowdleaks articles about him ,he also had his pet lawyer threaten me.
Well, considering that 292 of the passwords contain mixed case, 79 of them are 12 characters or more (this one's nice: "qwe123QWE!@#"), 59 of them contain non-alphanumeric characters, and 6713 of the 8655 passwords posted are unique ... it's probably only a matter of time.

Nice. I think it's time to upgrade all my passwords.
I currently use Limechat... checked out the Textual website but can't see anything that differentiates it. What does it add over the base limechat?
You mean yes, not no. It's precisely because bitcoins are not stable that bitcoins are not a currency.
Anyone know if scrypt is similarly affected?
this was good to know. i am a cloudflare user and it's good that they are pro freedom of speech!
Even by pure chance some funds are going to outperform index trackers, it's basic monkey & typewriter statistics.
Rainbow tables do not exist for randomised salts.
> What is remarkable about Khan Academy is that it was done. It was a huge effort.

So true. It is the completeness that is the most impressing.
Can someone please help me understand the implications?

Crypt_blowfish handles 8(and higher?)-bit characters wrong on OpenBSD? Are other *nix systems also affected? Is the wrong character handling consistent?
It's the criterion of the site-owner and runner.

If you do not like the criteria that he uses to run his site, then possibly you would be happier using a site with different criteria, or forming your own site?
I suppose this is an article about keyword arguments in Ruby, Clojure and Common Lisp.
The restaurant owner was basically exchanging BTC for USD on the spot and also reporting tax income in USD.
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The thing is, the deeper you are, the longer are the urls, so if you do a breadth first search, you are more likely to visit short urls first.
Does that mean that the Euro is not a real currency? Or that the US dollar isn't real in Canada?
You can still make money with CC.
Just for the record, you got that about as wrong as you possibly could -- to such an extent that I'm scratching my head at your interpretation of what I wrote -- but I can't clarify it any further because I've already made this as clear as I can.

edit: it sounds like you may not be aware that "rational actor" means a specific thing in microeconomics. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory . Specifically, in order for Bob to qualify as a rational actor, he must act in such a way as to maximize his benefit, where his benefit is defined in objective terms of monetary value. i.e., "I like having flowers in my yard" does not qualify as a benefit, thus a rational actor would not spend money to put flowers in their yard. The entire point of all that was to describe, in as simple of an example as I could construct, why I think that behaving only as rational actors -- i.e., measuring our benefits only in terms of monetary value -- can lead to undesirable outcomes, and why acting irrationally -- again, in the sense of microeconomics -- can lead to better outcomes for all involved.

I can't figure out where I went wrong in stating all that the last time 'round.
Like a wave they will again become sea, only to rise later as a different wave.

Or to put my high school poetics into plain English:

They will want to blend in with the Anonymous masses, until they deem it safe to once again to craft new identities for themselves.
What about snagging someone's log files?
Raj Kapoor martini' and 'Raja Hotel' mark IIFA in Toronto
I don't know about the rules in America, but this circuit design wouldn't be approved for use here in Europe. Circuits are not allowed to draw what is called 'reactive power', because it stresses the grid. Therefore you have to compensate it (in the simplest case using an inductor or a capacitor).
Long term Firefox support for corporate users is still possible
"qwe123QWE!@#" is only nice until you look at the keyboard. First three qwerty letters. First three keys just above them. Then the same shifted.
> there are about 20 ways that law enforcement could possibly track these guys down that don't require particularly l33t skillz.

Would be interesting to hear some of them.
So the entire user community is people with lots of hardware resources waiting to brute force passwords. What could possibly go wrong? :-)
There is information other than insiders get which can be used as an advantage. A person more knowledgeable about a field of activity may be better at spotting trends in that field. Also, someone like Warren Buffet who actually steps foot on the ground may get overall better information about companies.

But more profoundly, the markets are not really suited for retail customers. These people are drawn in by the promise (often lie) that investing is easy and it is possible to make a hobby out of it. What happens is these amateurs are losing money, which are gained by the real professionals.

Rules against insider trading are directed at making the markets a fairer place and especially so for the retail customers. In reality, these rules create the illusion that it's possible to make it as an amateur with little money and no connections. As we've seen, the promise is often illusory.
I tried it a few weeks ago again (I thought after 2 years they might have fixed that) - but still there was no transfer possible.
All MPs under 30 in India's Parliament are children of MPs.
Err, now I feel (more) stupid. Anyway my point being those passwords are not exactly the strongest.
Thank you and everybody else for your opinions and encouragement.

I've decided to continue working on the site for now, and see how it goes. Maybe if I do a bit of advertising and my visitor numbers start to increase, my motivation also increases.
Yeah, I caught that but it's still decent at meeting the usual password requirements, and it's almost as arbitrary as any other keyboard pattern.
from wikipedia[1]:
Moving between quintiles is more frequent in the middle quintiles (2-4) than in the lowest and highest quintiles. Of those in one of the quintiles 2-4 in 1996, approximately 35% stayed in the same quintile; and approximately 22% went up one quintile or down one quintile (moves of more than one quintile are rarer). However, 42% of children born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile[3].
On the opposite end of the spectrum, 39% of those who were born into the top quintile as children in 1968 are likely to stay there, and 23% end up in the fourth quintile[3]. Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%[4]. On the other hand, the children of wealthy families have a 22% chance of reaching the top 5%[4].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#United_States
Apparently diethyl ether used to be a popular substitute, but I have no idea what it will do to your pancreas. And it's very volatile and flammable, which might not mix very well with inebriation...
Anyways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethyl_ether#Recreational_use
I once heard some advice worth remembering from a lawyer: do not sign contracts on the basis of trust for the counter party, because they are your counter party today. For long-term contracts, when you actually have a dispute several years down the road, you may be dealing with a totally different set of actual people. People change jobs. Companies get bought. Cultures and personalities drift over time.

Your contract will not, ordinarily, adjust itself just because the guy who promised that Odious Clause X was boilerplate that would never be held against you has left the company and been replaced by Scrooge McStealYourEquity. Don't give Scrooge the opportunity. Get exactly what you expect to have happen to you written in the contract.

P.S. Relatedly, your discount rate is probably too low, and you probably overestimate your odds of a liquidity event and the upside potential. Your employers will act to encourage this. Get paid in cash as much as possible.
But if the salt is global and its value is "1", it might.
Following your logic, s/bitcoin/Euro/ would mean that the Euro is not a currency. That's just plain goofiness -- the USD is just the default currency at this establishment.
Bitcoin is a commodity. Nobody issues it, it is mined and has a predictable, limited supply. People aspire to use bitcoin as fiat money, but that's impossible, there is no one to provide liquidity when the market runs out and there's no underlying economy it will be based upon. Commodities like gold, silver, petrol have been used or tied to money for centuries, but at some point their use was deprecated by the needs of the people. Adopting bitcoin as currency is like going back to the 19th century. It's an interesting idea for geeks, and maybe it will be used in special applications, but it's not an advancement for the economy, its a step back.

He might as well have paid with (numbered) paperclips if there was an MtGox for paperclips, does that mean that paperclips are the future?
I was surprised at how few randomly generated passwords there were in that list, if any. Like you mention, there's a lot of variants on qwerty/12345/!@#$%: 1qaz2wsx, Zaq1Xsw2, 1qazxsw23e, 1q2w3e, !@#$1234, etc.

"ZXasqw12!@" was about as random as it got from a quick scroll-through, and even that is basically just keys directly next to each other.

I assume randomness doesn't mean as much as sheer password length does when it comes to crackability, but I wonder if there's anything to be learned from this. Maybe only that random password generators tend to default to a safer (longer) length? :)
It's a little hard to judge this article when the most important information (the before and after of the name) has been changed in the pursuit of anonymity.
I second to Brown Paper Tickets, i love their perspective in ticketing business. Please take time to read this old article: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/03/14/ta...

And here is the details from BPT website: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/faq.html

Ticketmaster is evil, and it's not just in America, it has lots of child companies all around world and doing the same unfair and awful business model.
How much traffic does #2 on Hacker News yield?
Nor mine.
Maybe it's about scvngr? http://www.scvngr.com/
Just a guess. :)
How is this (if we presume it's true) possible without deep infiltration? If that's the case, wouldn't the guy that exposed them be a perpetrator too?
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