skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, but all that needs to happen to be caught without savings is for shit to happen twice in close succession, with the first problem depleting your savings. If you have a major medical or other expense, and then you lose your job less than a year later... Well, there you are.

That's true even if you are in a position to save. There are those who are not: sometimes you can't reduce your expenses as your income drops. This is especially true if you have children.

So really, you don't understand people who don't have savings... assuming they have, up to now, had relatively problem-free and low-commitment lives.
While I do think these scientists are persuing a worthwhile endeavour, it does feel like the complexity of this approach is so great that it would never be useful under normal operational scenarios. Perhaps some HN submariners would like to comment on the utility of this approach?
Why are you bringing up URLs? Noone else knowing your URL string makes your wallet secure?
I see what you mean, but I disagree about the bias. I'm pretty handy with English, yet parsing some headlines is a challenge sometimes, like the poster above noted. I have yet to encounter parsing trouble in Greek.

The example you give about the -o affix, while valid at first glance, is actually not, simply because verbs end in omega while neuter nouns end in omicron. Thus, they could never be mistaken.

I'm not saying Greek is easier (approximately zero foreigners can make sense of our affixes, always choosing one and tacking it onto every word when they try to speak Greek), but I am saying it's less ambiguous :) For the record, I had no trouble parsing this title, and, in fact, was unaware of alternate interpretations until the poster above pointed it out.

Fruit flies like a banana!
Is the suggestion here that because Redis logs suboptimally, Redis is a bad solution for managing log entries?
1 out of 2M doesn't worry me. I'm surprised by how badly they are handling this. This kind of PR snafoo happens all the time, they should have been all over it from the beginning ensuring she felt like they were helping her solve all of it. Flying out to meet her and everything. It blows my mind if it's true that they brought up that she should take down her words cause it was negatively portraying them.

Most people are reasonable and would not write off the whole platform because of 1 out 2M incident, most will just take more precautions, some will just be comfortable with the odds.
Unsure if you're willing to relocate but there are 2 python job opening in my company.

http://www.gazaro.com/careers
Not really, it's just ambiguous...
Shifting media, Newspapers fading?
Blogging saw a massive rise 4 years ago, but is now experiencing a decline (according to these somewhat crude stats). Coinsiding with a rise in Twitter.

The question is, are newspapers on the way out?
I'm pretty sure the project I'm working on will be the next Twitter, and this video's making me second guess staying with RoR.
Hey, at least they're way ahead of Donald Knuth.
A simple layman/lossy walkthrough of what homomorphic encryption is is on the edge of feasible, though I don't know of a good one beyond the mere definition. A walkthrough of why homomorphic encryption may or may not ever be efficient probably isn't; as this implies, it's an open problem on the cutting edge of research, so metaphorically the ground is rough and the jungle is still wild. We don't have a paved path with convenient rest stops for that yet.
Async JS doesn't block either - and cross-domain scripting rules are strict enough that it is pretty safe. The iframe code has an async Google Analytics script in it - perhaps that is the reason for the iframe (to use google analytics for tracking usage).
Poll is broken and will yield biased results. For example: I haven't used Airbnb before and I never will, not because of these events but because I'm just not interested in the service.

There's been a lot of press about this because "every day is repost day" and blogs want to milk hits. It's a notable incident, but most of the press is just trying to milk ad impressions from attention while it lasts.
Her blog post here http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-year-new-hom... mentions that its a rented apartment.

I quickly rented a place of my own and began to settle in – unpacking dusty boxes, unloading suitcases and scouring the internet for furniture. Something along the lines of a home began to take shape, and with it came that invaluable feeling of being at peace.
I've used Airbnb and will keep using them, but hope that they significantly change their operations to address the concerns raised!

I also hope that they make some significant updates to their PR and Crisis PR team and processes, so they are better equipped to handle crises like this in the future.
How about this option: "I didn't know about Airbnb, just learned about them from that scandal and may use Airbnb in the future"?
A Billion Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Basic Human Decency
Maybe instead of "used AirBnB" you say something like "rented out a space with AirBnB" or something to the effect - I doubt the tenants are concerned with the breakin, but many landlords would be, yet both would be considered to have "used AirBnB".
The problems with the scheme you presented aside, you've misunderstood the problem. The goal isn't just to be able to do limited things like searching or other select things, the goal of a fully homomorphic cryptosystem is to allow any computation on encrypted data.

Existing relatively feasible partially homomorphic schemes exist that allow you to do some things on encrypted data, like adds for instance. Search is also possible, I think. But neither have much to do with whether a fully homomorphic scheme is practical.
I was unlikely to ever use the service to begin with, not being a big traveler, but I would use the service if it made sense.

I feel sorry for the victim, but there's little I could do, so the only real affect it has had on me was to convince me to trawl through "new" and look for more interesting stories to read, rather than the Nth rehash of this one.
But if you're reading Learn Python the Hard Way and actually doing what it says, you are doing a bunch of coding exercises including experimenting and not just reading.
woah, i want to hack python with other hipster hackers!
But if you control it, why bother with syslog?

I'd ask this backwards: Why bother with a homegrown solution when syslog exists and gets the job done?

A home-grown solution takes at least a couple weeks to stabilize, likely much longer before the last bugs are ironed out. Syslog takes about a day to beat into shape.

Any ad hoc scheme you come up with that uses a real backend store will be better than syslog.

You know better than that.

Shipping messages reliably is a surprisingly tedious problem. First you realize you need a disk-spool. Then you realize that spool should be size-capped anyhow. Eventually your boss says you need a network topology more complex than A->B for some idiotic but inevitable reason.

And then next month you run into some redis limitation and realize some kind of datastore abstraction would have been a better idea to begin with. Hmm, perhaps dump to plain-text files until we figure that one out?

See the pattern here?

At the end you have reinvented syslog. Sure, yours may be nicer or at least different.

But that's a whole lot of work to avoid something that, despite all its warts, already works.
Personally, I think people should be able to say whatever they want, so long as it’s not openly inflammatory.

... thus making MLK's "I have a dream" speech illegal.
Also consider:

Hacker changes grades, later saves world from military

Hacker plays games, later finds he has saved world from aliens

Hacker discovers secret code, later saves world from (military takeover) | (evil bad guy)

and of course

Hacker quits college, creates startup, (saves) | (corrupts) the planet earns a zillion dollars (gets the girl) | (still cannot get laid)
Total project followers is more interesting to me than how many follow me directly.
I don't understand how BRPOPLPUSH helps you doing things you could not do with centralized syslog: you can also start indexing things with syslog by analysing the central logs without changing anything client-side. And in both cases, what will be needed is essentially the same: if the logs are not structured at the source, you will need to post-process them, the storage medium does not change any of that.

The redis is easier than syslog is a bit of a strawman, because you will have to understand syslog anyway, since that's the only thing spoken by quite a few applications. In the OP'case, they are already using redis, so the cost on that side is very low, though.
I haven't used AirBnB, but was considering using them in the near future for travel, and possibly to try to reduce losses on my bachelor pad (until I hit the end of my lease).

While the current incident doesn't make me feel unsafe in those choices (statistics are good), AirBnB's handling of it has left me with no confidence whatsoever that they are a well-managed or reasonable company. They may well be awesome people... but they do have competition, and I'll be using them instead. First impressions matter.
I think downvoting would provide a greater benefit to the HN community if a commenter was somehow made aware that their comment was down voted. Maybe next to the score show the number of downvotes in red (if there are any).

Onetime I noticed that my karma went down but I could not tell what comment was downvoted. It could have been a learning moment but instead it was a mystery.
I'm kind of new to this, but here's my understanding of this idea -

"Fully Homomorphic Encryption" allows a computer to run an encrypted program without knowing what goes on inside. It's like a true black box, without any feasible way of accessing the internal components. I assume there are also ways of sending unencrypted inputs into the black box, and receiving unencrypted outputs, otherwise it would be relatively useless.

If I understand it correctly, then I see at least one application in web games. You could have the client run the entire game, by sending user inputs into the black box, and then later saving their game by sending the black box back to the server. This would allow cheat-proof gaming without any server validation required (until saving).
I've used AirBnB as a renter, and I plan to rent out my spare room in the future (although not 'til January). While I'll take additional safeguards to make sure my stuff is protected, I'm not worried.
Javascript version is on the horizon. We used iframe because it was quick&dirty and "good enough" to start with =)
That's very interesting, thanks for showing a typical example. They state they require verifiable 3.5 x income to rent ratio. This means you must make at least $2395 x 3.5 x 12 = $100,590 in order to be allowed to rent this dinky old 1 bedroom that appears to have been constructed on the roof of a parking garage.
I don't suppose you feel like sharing your reasoning behind this speculation, do you? There's some fundamentally annoying information theory involved in constructing an actual secure scheme. Gentry ran into some issues and I think the frustrating aspects of his scheme aren't particularly well understood.

Oh, and as an explantion, I voted you down because you're chiming in merely to state that you think the answer is that a fully homomorphic scheme is practical without discussing any of your reasoning for your claim or a basis... that didn't rise to the level where it seemed like it was a contribution to the discussion anymore than a comment that said "Yep, this is a really hard problem" would.
As I understand it, the differences aren't even ideological any more. According to Nate Silver's article from the other day,

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/its-all-...

the Boehner bill (which has been passed by the House and rejected by the Senate) and the Reid bill (which may or may not actually exist yet) are pretty much identical in all important ways. The main sticking point is whether to kick the can down the road 'til the middle of election season (which the Republicans want) or 'til slightly after the election is over (which the Democrats want). Both parties have high-minded-sounding justifications for why their preferred option is the right thing for the country, but...

I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the whole charade at this point. I know how this movie ends, it's just that the two leads are still arguing over who gets to look like the hero in the final scene.
Yup. If you run opt-out rather than confirmed opt-in mailing lists, you will get blacklisted by spamhaus and the like, and kicked off of many ISPs. Opt-out, rightly or wrongly, is generally considered to be spam.

Now, I'm not saying opt-out can't be effective; I'm sure it is, else people wouldn't do it. But it does show a certain lack of respect for my time.
No, the suggestion is: Having all logs in one place is a good thing. Even if it's so unstructured that only a human can digest it.

Context matters, a lot. When my app logs a timeout against redis then my next question is "so what did redis do at the time, did it perhaps log something"?

Following your advice I'd either have to look in two places (redislog and syslog) or feed my syslog stream into redislog, to have everything end up in one place (redis).

Any sane person would do the latter. Under that premise, what's the benefit of having some apps log to redis directly when the syslog-stream also ends up in redis anyways?
On the Savant Syndrome and Prime Numbers
> Speed is technically a rate of distance.

Actually, the scalar component of velocity, making it distance per unit of time.
It's not the odds X out of 2M (not 1, those were "nights", and this probably isn't the only incident either?) that worries me, it's the whole procedure that they use to do business.
Does index.haml, a hacker theme make?
For sure, I was meaning from the perspective of a startup. There's obviously existing industries where real-time data is big, but they don't tend to be web fronted serving hundreds of millions of users.
List of smartphone losers gets longer
I'm not sure how this would be practical in any way. They're only hiding the effects of the body moving through fluids, not the effects of what's moving the body in the first place.

In the case of submarines, the only way to create propulsion is to push water out the backside. I'm pretty sure this alone would create a visible wake: see what it looks like by running a boat's engine without it actually moving.
You're actually looking at it backwards. The data is the black box. The operations being conducted on it are sometimes unknown by the system conducting them, but this isn't a requirement for homomorphic encryption or necessarily the point.

You might want to try wikipedia's explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
I used AirBnb in the past, had a great experience with them, love the service, and will use them in the future.

This is a one-in-a-million incident, blown out of proportion and turned into melodrama.
I remember that. People complained a lot, but at the time Pulseaudio was pretty stable. It worked well and I personally didn't have any issues. In fact, I'd say I had more issues with ALSA. At the time, Linux audio was a mess... and some may argue it still is.
Though if you're not twenty-something you have even less excuse for not having savings.

If you're twenty-something you should have tens of thousands in savings. If you're forty-something you should have hundreds of thousands in savings.
I read a comment like this 2 years ago, but was able to understand it only now. Get in the market and work something. Anything. Even if it's small and simple. People are looking for things quite different than what is taught in school. They are also looking for things you'll never think of and the implementation isn't just coding knowledge.

I'm living in a Third World country, so freelancing is my way. It's not quite hard to get some jobs, but you need a portfolio and few connections.
> I clearly recall some people from the NoSQL camp (read non-relational data stores, non SQL enabled) saying that SQL itself is bad and something else is needed

No, wrong, irrelevant, who said this?
The paper mentioned that the functions in the financing applications might be proprietary, and it would be the point in their case to keep this logic hidden.
Blogging has been declining for some time now, especially since the rise in Twitter. No conicidence I am sure.

Newspapers are fading fast. Anybody following the News of the World Scancal in the UK will tell you their thoughts.

The question is, will newspapers they die?
It is really useful for making remote and encrypted dbs, not to mention that you can safely store any data on Amazon EC2, compute on it, and only the producers and the consumers of the input/output will ever know the contents.

I've blogged about it when it first became possible, in 2009: http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/you-ca...
> Ah yes, it's so easy to move when you can't even afford $100 to start a company. Great advice.

I don't think he means he has no money (completely broke). I think he means he is about... So I hope he has a plane ticket.
"I am fervently against the idea that Facebook has any kind of obligation to include a feature because not doing so would offend a minority of its users."

Facebook is a company, its users help them make money, doing things to please their users is obviously what they are in the business of doing. I wouldn't say they have an obligation, but it is definitely in their best interest.

As for his larger points on free speech and the hypocrisy of American culture. I don't think is hypocritical for a country to defend free speech and also be somewhat culturally prudish when it comes to television broadcasts or sexual content in video games. Taste and Rights are fundamentally different.
Can you tell me more about how you accomplished this?
I wonder whether protocol and technical aspects provide a defense to this. If I request a page from your web site and I get back 200 OK, is that not some kind of permission? If then I receive an instruction to cache the page (or elements thereof), is that not some kind of encouragement to keep a copy? If the page has a permissive robots.txt, or even by choice no robots.txt, does it not indicate that visitors are welcome to come and store the copy for indexing purposes?
Arguing against the supposed behaviors of a "current breed of silicon valley wunderkinds" seems, at best, like a straw man. Do Paul Carr or Sara Lacy really know founders and their companies that well? Pieces like this make my blood boil a little bit -- Carr, Lacy, and the like profit from being the peanut-gallery for the "wunderkids" while taking cheap shots against them without complete information. So much for basic human decency.
Robert Scoble on Airbnb controversy
Hard to discuss/review without any video of it in action... it's not the kind of app that is best presented via screenshots.
Yes, many homomorphic schemes seem to enable privacy of the operations being conducted as well as the data being operated on, but that isn't what defines a fully homomorphic scheme.
The feedback regarding came from known users with technical background. I chose clarity and reliability (could not login myself once with my own OpenID) for my long-term users over higher sign-up conversions (OpenID was 2 clicks for login and granting access, now 2 clicks with 4 validated input fields which increases the barrier).
AirBnb: A Lesson in Crisis Management
My general feeling is that if this were really practical, there's no way we'd be hearing about it. The technology, and its author, would be quietly vanishing into the Naval Research Laboratory.

I wonder what does happen in those situations, actually. If I, as a university academic, invented something that could make a submarine undetectable, I'd be willing to consider any cash offers to keep it secret that the US Navy might be willing to make. But how do I approach 'em?

I've never heard of this kind of thing happening... but then again, I wouldn't, would I?
This article really made me question my understanding of gene sequencing? Is it saying we can't really sequence a genome? We can't tell how many times a gene is repeated?
There's something different about us. We're smart. It really is an exceptional trait. If you're anything like me, you may well mute commercials, or just not watch TV at all. That and a baseline of saving 15% of your income. I did that for years, allowing me to survive a jolly long unemployed patch.

In general, too many people have crappy jobs, a long stressful commute, 8 hours in a cube, a poor diet, and debt up to their eyeballs, because everyone on TV has an SUV, so they need to have one too. And with little time, they have to eat out a lot, or eat processed foods. That's a huge stressor.

Lifestyle is expensive and easily eats up the $120,000 income of a couple working a job each, if you aren't careful. And if they spend it as it comes in, just getting by really, then there's no savings for when they hit that rough patch.
Visa trials mobile phone credit card
this is getting quite old
Directly converting current fees into dollars per megabyte isn't going to work. A person who does nothing but check e-mail will be paying pennies per month, which is not going to pay for the ISP's costs. Instead, I would expect there to be a monthly fee just to have service at all, and then usage charges on top of that. I'd expect that roughly 50% of the current typical monthly charge would be to have service, and then the rest would be captured by usage charges.

There's also nothing preventing ISPs from providing volume discounts. Indeed, they should, as their own cost per byte per customer should go down as the customer uses more.

I'm not sure why you see it as a good thing that average users subsidize top users. Surely top users should pay in proportion to their additional use? After all, I don't pay the same amount for my electricity as somebody who cools his house to 60 degrees and leaves his lights on 24/7. Structure usage so that the average cost per month stays the same (and thus total revenue stays the same) but heavy users get charged more. It's more fair and is the model used in virtually every other service and industry in existence.
From 1890: The First Text Messages
I guess you don't have a startup?
key conclusion:

The whole case looks like the iPhone prototype saga again: a civil claim
that some overly aggressive prosecutor is trying to dress up as a federal
crime. JSTOR has more than adequate civil remedies for whatever transpired here.
Thanks. I appreciate this.
I'm surprised how strongly this seems to have affected those in the HN community. This is a very pro-YC and pro-startups group, and the most popular answer is "I never will (because of these events)".
"if Groupon were to slash their marketing budget in order to meet their earnings estimates, you'd see better net income"

Accounting is supposed to be about measuring things that are more tangible to act as a reality check against projections and optimism. It's supposed to be about where the company is at now and where it's been in the past -- not just for potential investors, but for current investors who might want to compare against their previous projections. Predicting the future is left as an exercise for the reader.

Marketing expenditures, particularly for new companies in new markets, are based on projections. If Groupon is trying to attract investors based on its current profits, then slashing the marketing budget might be a reasonable course of action. But I doubt it is; they are trying to attract investors based on its potential for profits in the future, and part of that growth story involves spending a lot on marketing. With that in mind, slashing their marketing budget (or for that matter, pretty much any other part of their budget) would not make any sense, and would likely turn off investors (even if unsophisticated).