skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the record, I did not mean to imply that py-bcrypt was malicious. All I intended was that I think it's prudent to understand discrepancies like these because they could some day be an indication of something malicious. I apologize for the misunderstanding.
Anyone want to go conspiracy theory with me and wonder if some government agency wants more power to go after groups like anonymous and wikileaks and so are doing this themselves to get both people and the rest of government on board to give them more broad and exciting new powers (at our expense) to go after the real groups?
Not to be too cheezy, but i'd like to quote The Dark Knight here: "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
upvoted because the number in square brackets makes it credible.
Ask HN: any hosting companies offering microservers?
It would be great to be able to rent a microserver, ideally with an SSD - is such a configuration even possible at the moment? If yes, does anyone know of a hosting company that offers them?
The article said the technology is very similar to Google Goggles. From what I could deduce, Goggles uses some kind of local invariant descriptors (like SIFT or SURF), and TinEye uses some kind of global descriptor (maybe something like this: http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Loo... ).

If that is right, Google will be able to retrieve different photos in which the same object appears, whereas TinEye only retrieves the same image, with or without some changes. So, they're quite different beasts.

Can't wait to see if I am right...
They're all pretty similar. In fact, the lower price ones are probably safer because they've been doing it longer and have built an economy of scale. The small time guys doing beach jumps out of Cessna for $250 from 11k certainly aren't supertrained SAS guys :)
I'd really have to question the skills of any person who can't adapt from HTML to HAML. If you can do erb, you ought to be able to do HAML within, at most, an hour of pushing stuff through HTML2HAML.

Speaking of which, HTML2HAML works nearly every time.
That would certainly explain how they managed to piss off so many people and still remain undetected.
What's the difference between putting it in 3.1 vs. 3.2?

---------------------

The time between releases.
Instead of relying on users downloading the app, and annoying their seatmates, here's another idea. Since you're relying on the cinemas' cooperation anyway, why not sell them a button to be installed under each armrest?
The way to prevent abuse would be for an attendant to quietly come in and witness the disturbance, then act upon it or simply kick out the abuser at the next false-alarm buzz.
The Psychology of Shaving
GPS resolution on phones is generally not high enough to pin-point your seat location. At least not on my iPhone 4.

Also, most of the theaters I've been block cell signals. Seems like a much simpler solution to me.
Google Invests $280 Million In Residential Solar Installations
Valid point and a great quote. It's just hard to believe such people exist outside the realm of comic books.
Groupon (and their clones) have created a brand new style of sales. This new sales niche hasn't been properly researched, tested or evaluated. Groupon simply went full out, launched and is learning as they go.

I would be very interested in a category-by-category analysis of the effect that Groupons have.

With this data, we could figure out what types of businesses and specifically what types of deals work best for those businesses. Then, we could expand on this knowledge by creating new products, services and perhaps even entire businesses around this model.

Until we have this data and these conclusions, stories like this are anecdotal and even entertaining, but they don't represent an understanding of this new niche.
Thanks for the great info! I'll be doing remote contracting, so no company connections. I'm going for a change of scenery, the experience, lower cost of living, etc. After reading about what they put people through for this DNI (first I've heard of it), I'll probably pass on the whole thing and accept my inconvenient status. Sounds like my best bet for data is making friends with someone who will sign up for me, eh? Now there's some motivation to be sociable... :)
public broadcaster one day
government the next
game servers the next

trying to hit every demographic :/
Burglarious is an awesome word. Thanks
Please define microserver.

Amazon offers virtual servers ranging from very small, to very powerful: http://aws.amazon.com/en/ec2/
It's not deliberately deceiving anyone. We raised our price and then offered a discount. The price was raised for all customers. It is entirely different than forcing Groupon customers to order from a separate menu with similar products and higher prices, or funneling them through a website with an online store with the same products and higher prices. We just modified our pricing in advance of changing our business plan.
Retrievr is a prototype of a similar idea: search for Flickr photos by drawing (or uploaded image).

http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/
> The discrepancy in hash length is totally harmless (adding something like 2^-186 additional likelihood of collision) and was present in the reference implementation.

Assuming that this was not intentional -- and considering that the paper clearly supports this -- then it is not totally harmless. The additional likelihood of collision is increased by ~4.16% (8 / 192) which could be a Big Deal (TM) given the right circumstances, although it's still infinitesimally small.

But what worries me more is that you say "this assinine [sic] blog post". The author of the post found what could be an issue, even if it's not in your code, and you write it off completely. That is simply not an appropriate way to handle issues with cryptographic software.
They were taking requests for ddos targets. I don't think they care who they piss off since it is all about the " lulz" to them.
I am glad it worked out for you, but I find the practice of raising prices so you can claim a discount to be abhorrent - I hope businesses don't do it to me more than I think. This is the same scam that happens in every mall jewelry store.

I guess the big question is did you make the price increase "to all customers" permanent, or is that part of the Groupon song and dance? If you just do it during Groupons, then while it may work, it's deceptive. You're not helping any customer in any way by perpetrating your "discount." It might be good for the bottom line, but the tactic is all about fleecing the sheep.

This is another business tale that I'll chalk up as an argument against Groupon. At least it tells me I need to get dirty to use Groupon effectively. I think Rocky over at TechCrunch is spot on - Groupon isn't run by evil people, but it's set up to be gray and shady by nature. It's Conway's Law brought to life.
As mentioned in the write-up, Skydiving is much different than, say, fast food, in that the groupon customer must schedule the jump (scheduled fast food ... isn't).

All of which probably means that Groupon (at least the daily version) isn't that good for business that can't scale appropriately (ie, restaurants) or schedule the delivery of service/goods.

Once the timed-deal market really matures, we'll likely see weekly, daily, and even multi-daily (Amazon goldbox?) coupons by various Groupon-like entities.
Yes forgive me if don't trust Amnesty international on Israel (or any Western country for that matter) [1]. Also, WP is legal when used in a civilian area if that's where the battlefield is (Israel did not choose to fight in an urban area, Hamas did). See my same link above.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amnesty_Internatio...
Yeah. It took me three guesses to get it right. :)
I agree, that would have been an interesting article to read.
> except if one of the big financial players like Citibank or someone like Amazon starts a bitcoin bank.

That's part of how the market solves this sort of problem, traditionally. When trustworthiness is especially valuable, brands develop that have it. One way to bootstrap the process is to start with an existing brand that has it, like American Express. Companies that want to be seen as trustworthy can also do things like offering money-back guarantees and putting money aside in an escrow account held by a third party.
Windows Phone update schedule: one major version a year
Let's not compare gun control with software. They're not really the same thing at all.

More importantly, if security professional has never created any kind of malware he or she is probably pretty bad at infosec. The fields are just two sides of the same coin.
Genting Club คาสิโน สมัคร Genting Club เล่นคาสิโนออนไลน์
Rails seems to be focused on it's own navel. It's written by developers to solve problems developers perceive they have. The platform rewards new layers of abstraction within the community - and those layers really exist to enforce a discipline which may not be needed and becomes restrictive if you don't want to do things the Rails way.

From my perspective as a serial startup founder, I won't touch the platform because startups must innovate or die and to enforce too much discipline on the way things are done within a platform is to risk killing innovation.

The best startups not only use platforms in unexpected ways, but are platform agnostic and use multiple platforms that probably didn't expect to have to talk to each other.

Startups choosing Rails need to remember that 37Signals have a group of mature apps that are maintaining and incrementally improving with (I'm guessing) growing team of devs. Their apps are also B2B and have relatively low traffic compared to many consumer focused startups. Their focus is code and team scaleability. They aren't rapidly prototyping or rapidly innovating. Also as the center of the Rails community, they don't need to care that Ruby devs are harder to come by than PHP or more mainstream languages.

Rails also strikes me as a rockstar dev culture that puts marketing, innovation and being perceived as a thought leader ahead of everything else, including the boring crap like productivity, simplicity and performance:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46457493@N00/4441909186/in/set-...
Best of all worlds would have been to drop AR altogether and promote a migration to Sequel for the official Rails O/RM. ;-)

Indeed. Or decouple the ORM entirely, though that likely removes a key aspect of what Rails is about.

It is, however, what makes Ramaze so appealing. No coupling to any ORM, but there is a community inclination to use Sequel (so you can learn from example and there are people to answer questions).
Think of the Lulzsec activities as more of an art than an act of vandalism. (Most taggers/spray painters feel the same way, and are also known to deface their own stomping grounds)

edit to the downvoters: I'm not defending their actions, just putting myself in their frame of mind
It would make it 256 times easier, reducing the keyspace by ~4.16%.
they are also called trolls, sometimes they have a lighter, sometimes they don't.
But the thing is that using a wifi node is not passive reception. And while wifi uses spread spectrum, in order to be accessible to the people you want to reach, you'd need to make it available using common protocols. The authorities need only go war driving for these nodes, connect and then watch the tcpdump output. Corporations do this now to detect rogue access points, so I don't think it's beyond the means of a sufficiently motivated government.
The 10k is still $169, is in effect for all customers, and is advertised as such on our site.

We wanted to boost T-Shirt sales so we raised shirt prices $5 and then gave everyone a $5 off coupon. It worked like a charm, and nothing is nefarious about that, is it?
Isn't the loophole for this obvious? Just include in your release:

"This tool is intended for educational use only. The Author is not responsible for any misuse."
Either way, hopefully they've improved it - I was never able to get Goggles to work very well at all (versus TinEye).
You probably mean http://www.everyjs.com/.

Also possibly relevant: http://microjs.com/
Adding Tor to the equation makes the system fully anonymous, assuming you don't leak other information.
YouTube - Hamburg Iowa Huge levee Crumbles Caught on Camera June 13, 2011
Agreed.
"I wish I knew what to say" is perfectly appropriate when it's true ... it also lets the other person set the tone of the discussion.
Just thinking – couldn't this be a temporary pre-launch solution because Apple's huge NC data center isn't fully operational yet?
It has the downside that when you use it, someone somewhere, whom you've never met, dies.
I do Crossfit every day. It's quick (a "long" workout might be 20 minutes) and it works. You're always working out with others, who are there to push you and support you. It's incredibly gratifying to accomplish something you've been working towards. And like the article says, you get a nice energy boost.
I think if the overall price increase is permanent then it is indeed not deceptive on your part... totally fine by me at least.

On the other hand, if that's what it takes for a business to use Groupon effectively, then that makes me question Groupon's long-term value to consumers.

EDIT: Here, I made a picture. Is this good for me as a buyer of things? http://i.imgur.com/zJrxw.jpg
Pretty easy, and superficially appealing, but I find that there must surely be exceptions to a rule such as this. Nuclear weapons (and similarly, some chemical weapons) are the obvious special case.

Edit: reminded reading a comment below that child pr0n is another one that the general moral consensus has problems with (I refer to the 'consensus' not because I think it is always correct but simply as it provides cases worth thinking about), and also handling stolen goods (although this can be justified through property rights).
The clinical term is "Antisocial personality disorder" and such people need help.
What about vulnerability testing software? In principle those can be used as attack tools.

Maybe a line can be drawn... Design kits for viruses come to mind. But even then, it's a fine line, and history has shown once a mechanism is in place to outlaw something it will be extended and abused to apply to things that were not originally targeted.
So maybe the $99 jump is as big of a deal as it sounds like - but assuming they go into the funnel that we want them to:

-buy a $99 weekday only 10k jump
-reserve a weekend, upgrade to 15k for an additional $30

they are getting a $199 product for $129. still a GREAT deal.
That said, I feel that all of the Groupon horror stories floating around are from businesses that would be in trouble regardless.

I would love to find out that your experience is more typical for Groupon customers, but it strikes me that there is a bit of selection bias at play here. The fact that you are posting this on HN, with 3 years/700+ karma here, suggests you might take a more analytical approach to assessing the Groupon opportunity and building a business model to make it work for you. I doubt this is typical of the small B&M business owner that Groupon sells to.

Congratulations, though, on your success and thanks for the write-up.
And Apple is building Azure- or AWS-compatible APIs for iCloud to use in the new DC?
So true. That remark goes for so many other topics as well.
It's possible if RAM isn't a constraint, using a bitset of all possible five-letter strings. The bitset would take up 4G of RAM (128G for extended ASCII, more for unicode).

In practice, that would actually be slower on this input, because of the cost of initializing the bitset. But that is not dependent on the input, so computational complexity is unaffected.

edit: Removed description. Yes, you're right, you can't even look at the whole input in constant time.
Very interesting. Most of the Groupon customer stories I have read thus far are from lower-margin merchants such as restaurants. Since Groupon customers likely skip the upsells (wine, appetizers and desserts), restaurants seem to be less positive about their experience in general. They need to focus more on converting Groupons into returning (full price) customers to generate positive returns.
Millions in Africa saved from meningitis by 50 cent vaccine
"I’m tired of seeing small businesses get screwed."

I really don't understand this as a rationalization for the somewhat skewed portrayal of Groupon that this guy has been giving. I'm sure some small businesses have been screwed by choosing to do a poorly thought out Groupon. Groupon's business plan does not rely on them screwing over small businesses, in fact, they're heavily reliant on small businesses having a positive experience with the company. From all of the stories I've seen, it seems like there have been some nasty Groupon sales guys that may have took advantage of a small business owner, but it seems like Groupon is not encouraging that behavior in the long term. It's obviously not in their best business interests to do so, and Andrew Mason, being neither a fool nor a monster would not allow the business to lose sight of its longer term goals. Also, the fact that he took a very low payout tells me that he may be in it for the long haul.
It's seems like they are almost a caricature. Maybe they really are, or see my conspiracy theory

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2655040
I've stared at this thing for 30 minutes trying to extract text from it. There is probably some trick meant to be clever that will strike people as obnoxious once they hear it.
See https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/232
It seems to me that Bitcoin requires an actual wallet. A physical device that will store your "money" ie. verifiable account info, the way a general purpose computer is storing it now.
Because it's simple, it gives you the flexibility of going lower-level easily, supports CPK+FK and I haven't run into any bugs.

It's been very exciting for me. I picked it up in about a day, asked some questions, and am now easily doing things I couldn't before, and it just works.

Did you know Sequel's open bug-list is often at zero open issues?

Tried AR but it blew my mind that after all this time the support for CPK is still MIA? It's not about Opinionation IMO. Sequel has opinions. It also has features though.

DM had a few bugs. I asked about the particular relation I was trying to get working in #datamapper and Jeremy suggested Sequel would do it easily, pointing me to the test for it on github. So I tried it on a whim. And he was right, it worked.

Then I saw the documentation. It's beautiful. Seriously. Makes my eyes water just thinking about it.

That Sequel isn't the default O/RM for everything-Ruby just goes to prove there is no justice, and no Santa Claus. I'm not always 100% in love with the syntax, but the documentation, the support, the features, all that means so much more than wether I get to define properties for my models or not, and it's not obtrusive.

Oh, and disk-space is cheap. I appreciate that Sequel doesn't break itself up into 500 gems. That really annoys me about DM. There's no excuse for that outside of database drivers (and yes, that is absolutely my own fault; but it should get fixed...).
The do because they can. and the immense butthurt of the gamers is music to their ears.
Intro to Programming and Databases for Biologists - free online course
Theaters that offer assigned seating can automatically update your Tattlr profile with your seating for the given movie. In theaters that do not offer assigned seating, users would have to manually enter in their own row # and seat # after selecting their seats.

I've never heard of theaters blocking cell signals.
It baffles me. I went through Trubates the other day. Bought two $8 coupons for $20 of food, limit two per table (!).

Spent $16 for a feast. Why would I upgrade? However, had it been limit 1 per table, only applied to appetizers, had a 1 drink minimum, or was only available weekdays, it would've worked out better for the merchant.

As it was they structured the deal so there was NO WAY I'd upgrade.
In the book "in the plex" , the author says that the first demos of google were really impressive both for vc's and users, and it went viral in stanford. that was when they were fighting to get hardware to crawl the web , so their speed wasn't that amazing back than.

So yes , the algorithm probably did won.
You'd reasonably expect to give up partial updates for prepared statements, and IIRC their performance benefit was fairly marginal anyways.
When to use GraphLab vs using Map/Reduce
Lessons Learned From Lean Designs’s First Newsletter Campaign
I keep hearing this conspiracy theory pop up in almost every thread both here and on reddit about lulzsec's activities.

Can somebody give me a "worst case" scenario for a government crackdown on the internet?

What's to stop me from running tor? From VPNing out of the country myself? How would this alleged crackdown affect me?

And are you all new to the internet? Hacker groups like this have been around since...ever. I will admit that their publicity seems to have been waning in the last 5-6 years, but we're not really seeing anything new here. The only new thing about it is that this time it's happening on twitter.

This isn't a government cover-up. This isn't a conspiracy. It's one or several nerds doing what most nerds love to do: cause trouble. It's just that this time, it's happening on a much more public forum.
Joe just wanted to echo patio on thanking you. With all the breathless negative press Groupon is receiving post the S-1 IPO filing, it's tough to gauge what the reality is. Thanks for the informative post!
They don't care. They're doing to to amuse themselves. That's really all it is. No overarching strategy or cause, just lulz.
My karma was around 550 before this post :)

I went into this management position with zero management experience. If I am at the top end of small business management then we're all doomed. I honestly feel that every single one of these Groupon horror stories are from careless, dare I say stupid, business owners. You see them all the time. How many buildings have you seen cycle through restaurants every 8 months?

One of these businesses happens to run a Groupon and then it's Groupon's fault they went out of business.
First product to implement Google's SPDY protocol for faster http traffic
While I can't really see legitimate uses of some of the "hacking tools" - viruses, botnets, rootkits (yes, you, Sony!), etc. - I can't get rid of the feeling that there is another hand trying to get a grip on the free land of Internet, and I really don't like that.

On a completely tangential matter, I have a feeling this is going to be another one of that laws that cost a lot of money and have little to no effect... at least positive effect.
What makes it simplistic for me is really the idea that we can make the climate better by tinkering with a single variable (temperature in this case) - I'm not convinced we even know what 'better' is, let alone have enough understanding to predict what the side effects would be. What if we cause some imbalance that doesn't immediately manifest any problems but has a detrimental longer term effect?

I do take your point about space mirrors and the ability to experiment, though - certainly more appealing than man-made plankton blooms shudder - and I think you hit the nail on the head with respect to the political issues!
Do you have a PhD? Thought about academia? You get a lot of free reign to work on whatever projects interest you. If you don't have a doctorate yet but are interested in working on challenging problems you might consider grad school.
Why is this article suggesting people change their login details? Is this anything more than a ddos, have the servers actually been compromised? Or is it a warning to change before they get compromised?
These idiots won't be happy until the internet is locked up into a corporate controlled gated community.

Being a p.i.t.a is not cool. Throw the book at them.