skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to monitor the reply address for a newsletter list with ~250,000 people on it. At this scale, a simple filter on "out of office" in the subject line really doesn't cut it.

To do it right, it's easily a full time job (and not a very fun one). "Noreply" addresses are bad for customers, but that doesn't mean they're always the wrong choice. As others have mentioned, it's better to bounce a reply than to accept it but not dedicate the resources to deal with it efficiently.
Lua's compiler adds very little overhead, compared to loading directly from luac's precompiled bytecode. It has a really fast, single pass compiler, which is optimized for reading in data serialized as Lua tables. Lua was designed with JSON-like use cases in mind.

Its compiler doesn't do much analysis / optimization, but the performance of individual Lua constructs is usually easy to reason about.
I prefer using a program like Password Safe (http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/), and use a safe password that's a long sentence (with punctuation). Then I can use arbitrarily long and complex passwords for all my accounts, and not have to worry about memorizing them individually. The password safe can even be synced across computers using Dropbox.
> he can trivially test combinations of dictionary words in very short amount of time.

Explain the reasoning behind this, please.

Start with: You don't know the dictionary I used, but have to use one that seems 'good enough' (i.e. a superset of mine, if possible).

How many words are in there?

How many combinations can you create for 'two word phrases'? (You don't know the length of my phrase)

How many for three?

How many for four words?
Thanks everyone. I created this page long back, but later ReadtheDocs.org started offering PDF downloads of docs, making it redundant. Django is available at http://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/django/latest/django.pdf
This is great. I was just thinking about how much more productive I am while without internet (like at a cafe without wifi), except that I can't refer to documentation easily.
That is exactly what I was going to say. Investigating these UFOs would be a waste of money and a waste of time. I remember reading something where people would call to say they have spotted a ufo when they were actually looking at venus (the brightest "star").
I would actually advise going against this advice. While it isn't a best practice, password sharing can and does happen, as does shoulder-surfing. It would take a LOT of effort to memorise my password, but a simple four word password will probably be remembered by accident. In a year's time if I piss a friend off, I don't want my Facebook password to be readily accessible in their memory.

I think more people need to learn to remember arbitrary strings. There really is no way around that problem if you want a decently secure password, and it's rare someone has a "good memory" - in most cases they've just learnt how to remember things well.

(Note: This doesn't really apply to me or most of us here in most cases, but for example my WiFi password is of the form "Mycatsname9" and yet my neighbour still has to ask me for it whenever her phone forgets it)
Airbnb Offers ‘Love Containers’ At Germany’s Oktoberfest
Why not just say "WebKit is the HTML5 spec", then? It'd be less work than coming up with an HTML5 spec from scratch.
There's no data for 24th/25th Jan 2010. Any ideas why?
The US companies can be forced by the US government to be kept quiet about the data they revealed. However, their subsidiaries are European companies, and therefore must comply to EU law, therefore they shouldn't share the data, and if they do, that's a crime, and if they furthermore keep quiet about it, it's an even bigger crime.

I think they should be punished by law to the fullest extent available. Along with everybody that was responsible and is within the reach of EU law.

Actually, the EU should request extradition of those responsible that reside in the US, even if they didn't break the US law. Fair, isn't it?
The First Free Research-Sharing Site, arXiv, Turns 20 With an Uncertain Future
Anonymous : from the lulz to collective action
Django Docs are already available offline (for those who look)
Well, I guess it depends what level of false positives or false negatives you can live with. I think you might be surprised at the diversity in email autoresponder formats, though.
I agree, people are making it look like these applications are used to outsmart Apple or something. While in fact when the iPhone was originally announced Steve Jobs encouraged webapps, as there was no native SDK available yet. Sure, Apple likes their 30%, but it's not like they are trying to prevent you from running webapps. I think with some high-profile examples people will start to get used more to fancy offline capable apps straight from the web. That might make the whole app store hurdle look a little smaller.
Whole system? No. X? Yes. And when X crashes so does every other program I am using, so other than the shorter recovery time that isn't a lot better than crashing the whole system (ok, I have to admit there is much less chance of catastrophic disk corruption, as all the higher level processes will continue unimpeeded).

While I do absolutely love being able to ctrl+alt+F(x) no matter how bad things are and regain control, the fact that Windows has been able to recover from the window manager, graphics card driver, or even graphics card crashing without my music even skipping a beat for years now makes the reliance on X (by far the least stable component at least on my install) feel wholly unnecessary.
Submit to the good directories. Killer Startups, FeedMyApp, and probably a few more I can't remember. They'll give you a few hundred visitors for relatively little effort.

Get involved with local events. Things like demos and barcamps can be quite valuable. Doesn't matter how small - someone is listening and might write about it. Plus, you get some solid feedback and possibly a lead or two.

Use AdWords if you can make the math work.

If you have a market that will oblige, cold calling bloggers will get some links. This is tough with technical products, but can be very productive with a less web-savvy audience. (If someone knows how to get tech/development blogs to pay attention, please let me know - we're a tough nut to crack).

If you want to hit the BIG blogs/media outlets, hire a good PR guy with connections to those blogs. It does work, but costs a fortune.

SEOMoz and Hubspot (among others) have some pretty nice SEO tools that will help drive the content you need to write and the links you need to target. Expect a multi-thousand dollar investment here, though.

Find trade groups and tell their members about your product.

Then you just do it over and over. Think opportunistically, and be patient. Just before it starts working, you will probably want to quit. Don't.
Was just about to quote that to you. Don't you think that you should take this quote into account when you say xkcd botched it?
Good point and you'll see that the title of my article is more provocative compared to the article itself, where I advocate exactly what you've said.

The most important point I tried to make was that generally one should avoid feedback this early, but if you decide to get feedback, be cautious in how you use it.
This might come in handy:

shuf -n4 /usr/share/dict/words | tr '\n' ' '
Thanks for making this, it's awesome to play! :-)

One major thing, though: it sucks that there is no way to save or at least resume a game.
> Making the EU company break EU law.

That's a very incorrect statement. Noone can make you break the law.

In this case, the correct interpretation is, preventing US companies from having EU subsidiaries. Which means that the US offices have to be a subsidiary of some overseas corporation (i.e. make Google incorporate in Europe, or possibly some tax&law haven, like Cayman islands (I don't actually know about the laws there, but I'm sure there is a place on earth that would be ok)).
Wal-Mart closing digital music stores
The XKCD criticism of the 'bad' password has the same problems. How does the hacker know I have this kind of password (starting with a real english word, for example)?
NERC - National Syrian energy research center Defaced by Cocain Team
In fact, even if the attacker:

1) Knows this scheme was used.

2) Knows the list of words you used.

3) Knows how many words you used.

You will still have that amount of entropy. Diceware entropy values are calculated with all three of these assumptions already made.
Nominate Visual WebGui now to get a FREE ProStudio License
'Lua bytecode' does not really exist -- i.e. it has no public definition -- the developers can change it in any way at any time -- only the Lua language itself is 'defined'.
Based on your profile, I'm assuming you're in your early 20s. When I was that age (15 years ago at this point), I had the same attitude. As I got older I started to feel the effects of bad diet and no exercise on my work and life.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't try to find ways to hack your sleep schedule or diet, but don't discount sleep as just wasted time in bed. If you don't treat your body right your mind will suffer.
I've never heard that story before, but it sounds just about spot-on. Do you have a link to it perhaps?
Show HN: Daily photos mashup
$1 to Charity for Ever Mile Run
A lot of comments here seem to be missing the point.

The main point is to use passwords that give you the most "bang for the buck" in the sense of adding the most bits of entropy for the least difficulty of remembering. Adding an extra number, or punctuation, or certain numbers of repetitions generally adds only a little bit of entropy for a significant cost in additional challenge to your memory.

Our minds are well suited to remembering combinations of common words, and by stringing a few such words together, you can generate a larger search space than using a single word with a few substitutions. Even if the attacker knows the scheme you're using, he still must search through the space of combinations of common words, which XKCD is pointing out is quite large.
If you want the django docs locally just fire up a terminal cd to the docs/ directory of your django installation then run python -m SimpleHttpServer 8880 and then visit http://localhost:8880
You need a web designer asap. I actually had to read around to find out how to buy the game, that is terrible.
Reminds me of this previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450972

Maybe Randall was inspired by that post.
Flash Presentation Templates
> Start with: You don't know the dictionary I used, but have to use one that seems 'good enough' (i.e. a superset of mine, if possible).

People are likely to use a standard English dictionary. In my experience (which is exactly within this field) people use a fairly tight subset of the English vocabulary.

So I would be quite happy to test for a dictionary of, say, 100,000 words and be hopeful of a good hit rate (note that XKCD says common words, which is easily missed)

Our software has a test (which runs about third in its list of tests) which does dictionary combinations up to three words (two words is quite a commonly used password based on our statistics) with a dictionary size of 
175,000
17,500. (Edit: sorry, apparently it is an order of magnitude smaller, I checked with one of the engineers :)) This includes English words plus a few commonly used foreign/slang terms. The hit rate on this is fairly high.

(we crack document/windows passwords mainly)

You could of course choose deliberately obscure words to invalidate this - but they aren't so easy to remember (so people will tend not to).

If someone is going out of their way to secure a password, sure, you're going to hit a brick wall. But what every password scheme tends to forget is the "human factor" whereby people not concentrating on being secure will introduce attack vectors.
Even 4 words is good enough for many use cases.
Underscore-Perl
I'm less astonished at his lack of unit testing (because I often eschew it in PHP projects, too) and more the, uh, everything else that he said that was horrible.

And I don't care if it's a "big, real" site or not, making mods to a live site is (almost) never good practice. Fix it offline, test it, push.
So then maybe you could give second thought to sending these mails in the first place. For me, they are the first thing I filter to /dev/null when I sign up for social-like service. I have in the ballpark of 300 people in my circles - so I just have to filter the updates like these in order to be able to actually use the mail account :-)

Maybe I am a super-extravert with a ton of similarly hyperactive friends, so take this with a grain of salt :)
Original xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/936/

Oh and there are unfortunately way too many systems limiting your password to only 6 or 8 characters still in use today.
0.6% is probably at a younger age. It grows _a lot_ later in life... easily double digits.
Oh yes! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSrcMaid0mg (a fragment of the alien vs. powerloader fight)
> "It would likely require support from nations that are friendly to the cause of a free and open Internet,"

There are none.
I'm a programmer and this site looks like it was designed by a programmer. If you are serious about this idea, spend some money and pay a designer to make it prettier. I think this is the kind of site that needs an appealing design.

In particular, the bottom section with the 'guarantee' and the logos of 'buzz' sites looks like one of those dodgy software download sites with the fake awards and testimonials.

Also, I would want to see some samples of Questions & Answers before I handed over my cash. Have a question of the day or something so people can get a feel of the quality of your responses (if you have any yet).
Hollywood is not what made exoskeletons familiar. Things like the Iron Man comic series accomplished that long before Hollywood thought about it. It has also appeared in countless games, such as the Halo series.

But if you want to give extra credit to Hollywood, you should look at earlier popular movies that used exoskeletons. Such as the defenders of Zion in the sequels to The Matrix, or Starship Troopers.
I believe that's what a Beta used to be before the 2.0's started tagging everything with it and making incremental changes to their work based on incessant user feedback. The problem today is that an entire plethora of applications target the many pieces required to solve your problem if not the core problem itself, so you either have to include a baseline of functionality expected in todays's app and risk being flushed away or you actually revolutionize the space from the ground up at the risk of total failure. It's a choice you have to make and with the speed of today's releases and the reactions of social media (see: Color) you need to strike a balance between vision and feedback instead of focusing on point releases, which are in themselves kind of pointless.

tl;dr: this article addresses software as it was developed ten years ago and includes a most horrid blog theme to boot.
Oh great. Yet another "foo can kill you" thread. Honestly people .. this is starting to sound like /.
I like the creativity here, but the naivete is a bit much. Very strange that I should make that observation about Cuban, but there it is.

We already have this incredible sophisticated and involved system for creating jobs -- its called the startup market. Each year, tens of thousands of folks come up with ideas to do things people want, and that always means creating a job, if only for the founders. Each year folks invest, or not, and those folks get a shot at succeeding.

So we have tens of thousands of highly-motivated folks putting their own lives and money on the line to make jobs. How could this possibly stack up against BigCorp getting subsidies to create busywork?

The Tea Party used to be non-partisan, at least in theory. Probably never really were, though. But there's a critical non-partisan meta point that you have to acknowledge before you spin off with a bunch of creative top-down ideas: we've been here before. Every time there's an economic problem people come out of the woodwork with all sorts of totally awesome ideas. Some of these work, some don't. The only difference between these implemented ideas and the startups I mentioned is that these ideas are huge things and we can only do a few at a time as a nation.

I think this creative problem-solving is great, but you have to face facts: been there, done that. Whatever we do, we have to have a system that continues to let us come up with and fund these ideas when we need to. Running huge deficits and debt loads over 100% of GDP doesn't let us do that. [insert argument about how I exaggerate when exactly we become limited in our options, but note that at some point even the hardiest Keynesian must realize that the time has arrived.] So debt arguments are not necessarily about philosophy for how to run the economy and create jobs, they can be about the simple ability to do so.

If you ask me, we need to talk about policies that are going to create millions of failures from the bottom-up, all trying to build things to help folks. Not trying to pick among the hundreds of great ideas for the top 3 or 4 that we then throw hundreds of billions of dollars at. It might feel great all rallying around one or two cool ideas, but this is a numbers game. We need to play it intelligently.
Thanks for these links. I was only aware of the social advertising one because of twitter last night.

Opted out of the other two as well.
That's not how people in crypto roll :)

He calculated the entropy assuming that knowledge was had, I think he botched it in saying that 44 bits were enough. Of course if he were to recalculate it without those assumptions, but make it clear that he were doing that, then it would be better.
What about sites that don't allow spaces?

I know hotukdeals.com only allows [a-zA-Z0-9] which sucks.
> It would make for a fun app though

Like this one? http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

Orbiter is a space sim with accurate orbital mechanics (including the Oberth effect ;).

It's a lot of fun. You can use realistic current vehicles for accuracy, or unrealistic ones with huge power-to-weight for fun.
What's the point of locking yourself to a bytecode when Lua code JITs just fine on LuaJIT? Lua is a great language and this looks like another alternative. I doubt we're looking at exclusion here.
Better Master Passwords: The geek edition
Unfortunately this rings truer every day "If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold"
Some sample questions and answers would help.

Maybe I'm lacking imagination, but I'm not exactly sure what I would ask the ladies, or what kind of answers they could give.
Yes. But let clarify.

You need to specify how many women you want the responses from. That means, if you want 20 responses, you pay $40.
[$2/response].

Try it out here: http://www.helpaguyout.com/asker-submit-question.php It's fun.

To keep things interesting, ask a question to your significant other, then ask the same question to 5 ladies on our site. See what happens. You will get very interesting result. [

To answer your second question, there are variations of advice related services - from free to proffesional ones charging hundreds if not thousands. What sets us apart is the ease of use, low pricing and guaranteed response. Plus our platform allows everyone to remain anonymous - women tend to open up and give a more insightful, genuine opinion that way.

Since the advice is paid for, the asker "owns" the advice and the woman understands that it is a private advice only for him. So, though, anonymous, there is a bit of "I am actually helping this guy out" factor involved.
Woohoo! The page I started on Wikipedia has more hits:

http://stats.grok.se/en/201108/Hessian_matrix
Very interesting perspective, I'll admit I know little about Detroit although I have been there twice in the last 2 years for a few days on business so I have seen the city in its current state.
How about (NOT SECURE YET, IT NEEDS MORE ENTROPY):

from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn

all_animals = set()
def add_to_set(animal):
all_animals.add(animal.name.split('.')[0].replace('_',' '))
for child in animal.hyponyms():
add_to_set(child)

add_to_set(wn.synset('animal.n.01'))
all_animals = list(all_animals)

actions = ['ate','chased','killed','fought','kissed',
'talked to','hated','loved','ambushed','fled'] # can add more

def make_password():
import random
random = random.SystemRandom() # is this secure?
choice = random.choice
return 'the %s %s the %s'%(choice(all_animals), choice(actions), choice(all_animals))

If you pruned out 90% of the animals (i.e. the obscure, hard to spell, or scientific names), this is still about 20 bits. And the passwords are kind of memorable (I've gotten such gems as "the dodo chased the guppy" or "the tigress killed the king charles spanial").

You could also add a humorous adjective ("rabid", "talking", "magic", "invisible", "evil" ...) or adverb ("roughly", "quickly", "quietly", "secretly" ...).

You could also add a place name.
Wallflower,

Did not know about this site. Anyways, even though the concept is somewhat similar, I believe our approach and what we are trying to accomplish is different.
Best to error on the side of suggesting more. If the reader is technical enough to to realize you did that, then they're technical enough to estimate a more suitable value themselves.
No, it doesn't have the same problem.

It criticizes a particular way to choose passwords, leading to a result that seems 'secure' and even quite good to lots of people. One that easily satisfies braindead corporate password rules.

The entropy given there is based on that way to choose a password and even explained, graphically.

If you choose your password totally different and from different sets of characters, then the number will be off. That's not a surprise though?
For those of you who share my slow mental arithmetic, no 1998 isn't twenty years ago -- you are not that old. Yet.
That doesn't make one jot of sense.

By complying with the request they immediately violated the safe harbor provision.
http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html
It's a poor title
I hear the music but only see a black screen in Chrome 13 on Snow Leopard. :-(
I tried to get into out-of-copyright classics but I just can't read them. Call me stupid or uncultured but I prefer a good fiction book that is light hearted and will get me through my commute.

Are those really much better formatted though?
In.com Hacked and Defaced by Mr25 ~ THN
Some papers published on this topic:

Effect of sleep loss on C-reactive protein, an inflammatory marker of cardiovascular risk. (http://www.med.upenn.edu/uep/user_documents/dfd10.pdf)

Short Sleep Duration Is Associated with Reduced Leptin, Elevated Ghrelin, and Increased Body Mass Index. (http://med.stanford.edu/school/Psychiatry/narcolepsy/article...)

Neurocognitive Consequences of Sleep Deprivation. (http://www.med.upenn.edu/uep/user_documents/DurmerandDinges-...)

Insomnia with Objective Short Sleep Duration is Associated with Type 2 Diabetes. (http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2009/07/28/dc...)
How would you get those photos without sending in a phone number?
I've been using phrases and sentences as passwords for a while, and I've found that there are 2 main problems;

1) A lot of sites, still in this day and age, have max password lengths, so I still have a lot of short passwords. Usually this is bank sites and the like.

2) Password entry fields are often very short visually, and with a long password getting lost is much easier. I find I have to type them over A LOT.

The second is actually the more annoying problem.
I will be extremely happy when the whitespace-for-blocks fad passes. I have a feeling it's going to be a long winter.