skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117293/

A group of young men are accused of murder because, basically, they look like goths and have the misfortune of living in a conservative Christian community.

---

The "Seven Up" series:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058578/

A group of British kids from various socio-economic backgrounds are interviewed starting when they are 7 years old, and interviewed again every 7 years.

---

"Manufacturing Consent"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104810/

Based on Noam Chomsky's book about the influence the mass media and other institutions have on Americans.

---

"Crumb"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109508/

The life of Robert Crumb, a hugely influential underground cartoonist.

---

"Born Rich"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342143/

About kids who are born in to insanely wealthy families.
Rain doesn't bother me. Smog bothers me. Tasers bother me. Not being able to afford healthcare bothers me. My family has been in California for six generations, and I love it, but you can have it. I'll take the Netherlands.
From what I heard on http://reddit.com/r/bitcoin the latest difficulty increase have now made bitcoin mining more expensive than the electricity required, and some home miners are now stopping production.
Google prioritizing Google Offers emails over other daily deal suppliers
This is one more reason why I love dynamic linking, fork/exec for static binaries is much faster than for dynamic ones, even for simple C programs that only use libc.
I'm not saying that this is the only reason why people come up with a limit on password length, but that I can imagine that some programmers who come up with such a limit do so because of plaintext storage in a fixed length database row (which is the only quasi-technical excuse for a limit I can up with).
What was called from x.y to x.y+1 is now x to x+1. Did Mozilla continue support for 3.5 for long after the 3.6 release? I don't see what the fuss is unless you're equating version numbers to progress, which is the wrong thing to do.

That said, they could throw a bone to enterprise and so on by copying the idea of Long Term Support versions for those IT departments that are more used to meaningful version numbers.
As someone who lived in a suburb and tried going without a car for a (short) while, it is near impossible to get around.

Biking on busy 35mph four lane streets where bored suburbanites go 50mph with no median is a prescription for death by invisibility. I had to double my short-lived bike commute to take advantage of back roads (which was even scarier because bored high schoolers barreling down the hill don't expect you).

Taking the bus to a destination (if it is even possible) can be a maddening version of real-life Candy Land in which you loop around and around and double-back and eventually reach point B.

Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis style layout of suburban enclaves make public transportation a virtual no-go as the shortest-path distance from point A to point B is impossible as it would require jumping fences or at the least, going through people's sacrosant backyards.

Bottom line, in the suburbs you need a car to live - to go grocery shopping, to go to Applebee's to meet your friends and carry that annoying table buzzer around like an embarassing vibrator while you wait for your table, to go to the Multiplex, to go park in the deadly silent except for lawn mowers parking lot of your rental apartment megaplex, and (most importantly) to go to the closest major city to escape the burbs for real nightlife.

But, witness the explosion in mega corporate office parks, and realize that the growth was because not everyone wants to live in a city - especially once you have kids. Companies built office parks because that is where their employees wanted to live. Or was it a chicken-before-the-egg issue?
You are, if you will pardon the expression, talking out of your ass.

I brought Appsterdam to Sofa. I kept Appsterdam when Sofa left. Even if I died tomorrow, Appsterdam would continue. This isn't a product. It's a movement. Its power doesn't come from its founders, it comes from its people, and our people are amazing.
It's true. But for me at least, I read the comments less than ever, since it's hard to find signal in the noise.
ASB Bank in New Zealand allows a maximum of 8 characters for your passwords. Numbers and letters only.

That's right, all that stands between you and your account details is 8 characters.

If someone tries to transfer out over ~$200 then you get a text message on your phone - IF you've enabled that service. So it's not the end of the world, but it's still pretty terrible.
Well, “the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”

I was seven in 1995 so I don’t remember all that much but we had no computer†, no VCR and certainly no mobile phones. My dad got a car phone for his company car around that time. I think we also just got our first cordless phone around the time (the batteries were constantly empty and it never worked quite right) and we bought our first CD player two years earlier. I sometimes played Tetris on my aunt’s Game Boy and Super Mario Kart as well as SimCity on a friend’s SNES.

You seem like a terribly early adopter, even of technologies that in the end went nowhere. I would be surprised if you experience were in any way typical.

—

† Not just at home but also at work: My dad is a construction engineer responsible for all water supply projects in a small to mid sized engineering firm and didn’t routinely use a computer for his work in 1995. I always thought that was kind of funny considering he did learn how to program (rudimentary, mostly for structural analysis) at college in the late 70s and early 80s.
Yeah, what is up with that "Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis" layout going on? It's maddening!
Appsterdam events are in English. Other tech events in the city are usually some mixture of English and Dutch, depending on whether the audience is international.
Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan warned about this trend in their seminal paper "Program Design in the UNIX Environment" (also known as "cat -v considered harmful" which describes how proper unix programs should be designed:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/
Yeah, I agree with that. It's a stupid problem, but the problem exists, and until we are allowed to forcefully seize the servers of people who implement shitty software and fix the problems, it won't go away, so it's worth trying to do the best thing possible for users.
OK. Car-dealers loans (made by the car-marker banks) run usually around 1% where I live. Inflation is currently around 2.5% yty. Also some investments are quite tax-free, but most investment run about 25% taxes here in Germany.
tl;dr: don't give your password to anybody. we've been saying this since the mid-90s but people still seem to slip up.

gmail's two-factor auth is nice and easy with the handy iPhone app. of course nobody wants to complicate something like sign-in, but email integrity is very important. facebook also has a similar two-factor auth process (though not as nice; they text you, vs a nice app).

two-factor is a no-brainer at this point for managing your identity, especially given the huge volume of leaked passwords we've seen in the past month. it only takes a few minutes to set up and almost completely eliminates problems like the one in this article. if you haven't set it up yet, do it now! much easier than learning the hard way.
What's the analogy you're trying to make?
> with the pending doom from hackers...and Post-It notes defeat the purpose of passwords

I've always taken umbrage at those two lines of thought together. For the average person (you know, without dedicated enemies), a secure password written on a Post-It note on your monitor is a pretty safe scenario.

Or is Lulzsec peeking in everyone's windowz, too?
If it's as you suggest, and there are people that have done this previously. it would seem there was insufficient marketing. It would be interesting to hear the details of this incident and thought process.
I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, a fairly dense neighborhood just east of downtown. I can walk to no less than two supermarkets, one Trader Joe's, and one food co-op. My job is a ten minute walk on foot. I am surrounded by terrific restaurants and bars. I actually get irritated when I'm required to get into my car to go somewhere now.

When I first moved to the Seattle area, I lived in Microsoft corporate housing in Redmond, a smaller suburb about 12 miles east of Seattle. The area felt depressing, isolated and uninhabited most weekends.
I read a story similar to this a few weeks ago. The guy recovered his account, changed all passwords, but then it was snatched again. Rinse and repeat, I think he got it back in the end though.

Very strange - he thought he'd been targetted specifically.
Is This The Tipping Point For E-Books & Libraries?
It's easier to ensure that you live on a "quiet street" when the street doesn't go anywhere.
Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off
Doesn't having a secure password on a Post-It note make it insecure? There are plenty of people near me that would just love to look at my emails.
But from a hacker point of view Lulzsec would not be able to view your Post-It note password (web-cams and mirrors aside).
The primary disadvantage of Java/.NET compared to C/C++ is the memory overhead. Generational garbage collectors can require up to 5 times as much memory as their explicitly-managed equivalents. [1]

Space overhead doesn't matter for most applications. But it makes Java a no-go for embedded devices and data-intensive domains.

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2552
I wouldn't focus on technologies if you are interested in doing this - focus on the types of work/projects you can do. What job could you do from home? If you can do it from home you can do it from anywhere.

For example, I am a researcher at a university (an employee, not a grad student). I don't want to go into details, but basically I do a lot of numerical modelling-type work and model development. I use lots of different technologies to do it (including C++ at times). I work on the opposite side of the planet to where my university is located and it works well.

Meetings are the only slightly problematic area. Skype is ok, but really not ideal for more than one on one meetings.
That's just because the Lulzsec/Anon stuff is the "flavour of the month" for the media lately.

"The news" is not a reliable source of frequency for an activity, as they go through phases with what their favourite topic is for that period of time.
FB has been requesting my phone number to complete the authentication backups for a few weeks now, and the ability to opt out is not clearly marked. I have the nagging feeling that this is much more about getting my cellphone into their system.
Good point, but he takes it wayyyyy too far.

Less emphasis on the landing page = good.
NO emphasis on the landing page = bad.

I had no idea what his site was about until I read the blog post. And even now I'm still not very clear on what service he actually provides that can't be accomplished in a facebook or twitter post: "BBQ. My place. Sunday at 6."
Buried in the hyperbole is this nugget of truth:

It is only the last two generations that we have scaled places to the automobile.

City, suburb, whatever the residential setting, this is the true enemy of creating a network of livable communities. Any jogger, cyclist or volksmarcher can tell you that a continuous green ribbon connecting communities enhances the quality of life many times over. It's a crime that road/highway development rarely takes this into consideration, especially when some of the nicest trails I ride go alongside or beneath some of the busiest roads in my metropolitan area. A well-planned paved trail can can offer a cycling commute comparable to that of an automobile (sometimes even shorter), only far more pleasant and healthier. Unfortunately, sharing the road with cars in any metropolitan or suburban area is a life-threatening experience.
Okay, so which of the one-password apps is the best?

I keep meaning to start using one, but I don't know which to try. I'm an Apple user all the way (home and office Macs plus an iPhone and iPad) and some sort of sync would be great. Additionally, what are the different models for storage, encryption, and retrieval?
Obviously, there are rules for what constitutes a valid phrase, but they are rather complex for a password cracker to check.

My computer says there are 234979 words. Pick 5 and there are 716382975036689591261090899 combos. That is actually very very close to a 15 letter alphanumeric. 62 ^ 15 = 768909704948766668552634368.

I don't doubt that IsgoHNlf,bIbmp. is a secure password. But it's a bitch to type. Especially on a phone.
I don't really see why people felt the need to downvote, it seemed like he was doing a shameless plug entirely appropriately.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a fantastic biography of Robert Moses, the person who set the template for this kind of development. Though in power in New York, the projects he built (highways, parks, bridges, public housing) was at a scale never seem before him. He figured out how to cut through municipal red tape to build at a large scale using public money.

Not that he wasn't a terrible person. But he wrote the rules that allowed a lot of this kind of development to happen.
> most distressing to me is that I am still unable to explain how those guys were able to get access to the account twice after I changed the password, security questions and backup email address from my Mac that does not seem to be compromised.

It sounds very much like the hackers were also using the "last chance form." Consider that all of the information it requests is available through Gmail - account registration data, names of tags, most emailed people, and verification code (which was apparently emailed to him, and therefor present in the compromised email account) (Note: I haven't used the form myself, I'm going on the information in the article).

Also, the title is a bit link-baitish.
Although I can't cite any offhand, studies indicated that there was significantly less crime in such areas, as well.
It's because the market (that is, home buyers) don't want to live on streets that can be used as cut-throughs to get to other places. As traffic density increases, drivers will try to find shorter or less-congested routes to get where they want to go. The street on which I live (in an area built approximately 30 years ago) is an example of this: it is a wide two-lane street that connects two major roadways. There are other, non-residential streets that connect these same roadways but those routes are clogged most of the time. Therefore, people use my street with all of its attendant problems such as speeding, extremely loud exhaust and/or sound systems, not watching for people walking or biking, etc. So, non-connecting streets became the popular thing to do, along with curving streets to force drivers to slow down.
I think the topic of Google pervasively using their dominance of navigation on the Internet for the benefit of their business deserves discussion, but methodologically, I have some qualms here. A lot of the behavior in machine learning systems is emergent. Is it ridiculously convenient that Google alone of all offer providers would end up in the Priority Inbox? Yes. Are there innocent explanations for that, depending on the signals they use? Also yes. It could be as simple as "Google Offers sending IPs have been reported 5 times as spam. Groupon sending IPs have been reported 50,000 times as spam. Reports of spam suggest commercial mail, and we find that customers, on average, prefer not to have commercial email in Priority Inbox, as demonstrated these several gigabytes on usage data we have."

(Because Groupon's volume is much, much higher and it is longer established.)
Depends on whether you are trying to run a mining rig out of your home, or a data center that you have pass-through rates on electricity. Nobody in their right mind runs a set of mining rigs out of California out of their home at scale, particularly out of their home where they are usually on an E-1 Rate schedule at $0.34/kWh pretty quickly. http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-1.pdf

On the flip side, if you have a friend with data center space, you can usually buy electrity around $0.09/kWh - http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-20.pdf.

So, running a 42U Rack of mining gear out of your data center would cost you 500 Watts * 42 * 24*30 =15,120 kwH or $1512/electricity month. It would cost you $4500/month to do the same thing out of your home.
Sorry, I watched it at university. I do not know where one would purchase a copy these days. You might try sending a letter to KFC Investor Relations (seriously -- this department bends over backwards to say Yes in most companies).
Why founding a 3-person startup with 0 revenue is better than working for GS
Good post, but it would have been difficult to write without including IT (or media). You'd have to use the year 1795 or something. There are probably lots of fields today where Aristotle, if he would be brought back to life, would go "meh". (But he would think it was damn cool that he could be brought back to life.)
1Password should have you covered on all fronts (OSX/iOS versions). You have the option of using Dropbox to keep everything synced (http://help.agilebits.com/1Password3/cloud_syncing_with_drop...).
Not sure why any of these steps should lead you to fear about using Gmail. Hosting your email yourself is almost surely more risky. Those hosting their own email aren't going to have complex password recovery system with the abuse protection that Google's has. There isn't going to be a warning system to alert you that there have been sign-ons from foreign states/countries. There isn't going to be two-auth out of the box unless you install the PAM module.

If your weak link, was, as usual, the human link... I would be inclined to trust a system more catering to (forgive me) ignorant users.

I just worry that the mindset is, "I got hacked because I use Gmail, if I used something else I'd be safer." and I find that logical to be pretty flawed.
Or using MD5, for that matter....
Older planned development suburbs had straight streets, and seeing the same house repeated a dozen times is pretty depressing. I always thought it was so that people weren't confronted so bleakly with the cheap repetition.
Agreed, Synergy is excellent. For me, anyway, I can have the laptop open on the desk in front of the desktop's monitors. Your underpowered laptop is probably still pretty good for reading email, etc.

Also PS: If you like the action of the Lenovo laptop keyboards you might like the Kinesis keyboards too ... that's what I've shifted to using lately.
If you use an Android phone, I would recommend using Firefox on both your phone and as your desktop browser. The latest FF builds (v4 and v5) have a sync feature which synchronizes all your history, bookmarks AND open pages in your browser. The best part about the feature is the ability to add multiple "machines" which I use to easily sync my stuff across my home computer, my work desktop and my mobile.

A very common usage scenario for me: I'm in the midst of reading a couple of webpages (most likely very heavily commented HN articles) and suddenly, I realise my train is arriving soon and I've to make a quick dash to the station. Once I get on the train, fire up FF on my phone, sync and in an instant, all my open tabs on my work computer is on my mobile.
This design, by the way, isn't just some evil plot by the Robert Moses's and Henry Fords of the world; it's an idiom endorsed by Christopher Alexander in _A Pattern Language_.
If your car has 6 gears, why are you only using one?

Again, it's all about the implementation. Some game teams opt to do their own storage of user information rather than rely on the remote service call to the centralized system.

In some cases, like the two projects I worked on, the central system doesn't store all of the user data you need, so you end up storing some in the local system, extending the centralized one. "Some" teams opted to build their own rather than take advantage of the one that existed. (For what it's worth, there is a lot of "build it ourselves" mentality in some teams).

This particular team have a few "interesting" things that they've done beyond the user authentication. Their authorization and entitlement implementations left more than a few of us from other teams scratching our heads as to how they opted to utilize the centralized EA service. It was less than ideal, and did cause some issues for a few other teams.

I don't want to get into it too much, but I guess if there's one message I'd like to share it's that EA is not one big company, but rather a whole bunch of individual development teams working on their own things. As much as there is an attempt to centralize a lot of knowledge and services, it's by no means a given that everyone's doing the same or right thing.

Just because one team totally screwed the pooch on stuff like this, doesn't mean others have as well.

A lot of the teams have some leeway and discretion when it comes to what technologies or internal services they use, and sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's not.
Panopticlick - check your browser's unique fingerprint
> me he wanted 0.52 Bitcoins for my lunch

With the Bitcoin currently valued at about $0.02 (down from $17.00), I suspect the restaurant won't be accepting to many more Bitcoin orders.
I invested a lot of time on this site in the past, only to have my account unceremoniously hellbanned, without warning or cause. I've no expectation that this won't happen again, so I'm not planning to stick around.
Apple's new multitouch patent
There are places, even Facebook's registration form, that make your re-enter your email address.
> Doesn't having a secure password on a Post-It note make it insecure?

Technically.

> There are plenty of people near me that would just love to look at my emails.

I just don't think that's actually true for many people. My parents, for instance. Or people with home offices who don't leave the door open when they have crazy parties—or who put their passwords on a piece of paper stuffed in the middle of a book.

The point is that writing your password down, for most people, is actually good advice.
Politics is a Scam - Why I Will Never Vote Again
I love the implementation, but am torn on the reason.

I don't think this scratches any itch, and if it does, you're using QR codes wrong.

If I'm already on a web page, what does a QR code offer me? The same content on my phone?

Yawn.

QR codes are for offline use, not online use. They direct you to online content. It's akin to having your URL repeat as a graphic border for your site. I get it, but I'm already there. This only diffuses your content, and distracts from the real message.

I've railed against the improper use of QR codes before:
http://underdesign.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/the-proper-use-o...
This is exactly why I'm using two-factor authentication for gmail (heck, I even ported the two factor auth code generator to my watch so I don't have to panic when my android phone runs out of battery - http://tnhh.net/pancake/chronos-otp.xml :-)

However, I don't use Gmail for 'everything,' it's just too dangerous and I feel doing that way Google knows more about me than they should. I think everyone should be hosting the main email address under something that they can sure control (your work/edu account, or a paid email service). My main account is hosted on fastmail (I paid something like 12 bucks for three years) and is cloaked under a dozen of other email addresses.

Plus, for fastmail you get a free smtp account, and a standard IMAP account (gmail's IMAP is weird). And they will respond if you're in troubles.
The blog post linked in your grandparent showed that one developer left the company to stay, because they believed in Appsterdam. The implication is that other developers did not. Everyone made a choice here, including the owners of Sofa when they sold.