skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do anyone* think that the required NFC-enabled credit card terminals will be sold cheaply enough for all the small Mom and Pop businesses in the US to adopt this over the more familiar technology, non-NFC-enabled credit card terminals?

I imagine that this will go the way of Google Health eventually.

*Outside of Google
Meanwhile Microsoft Keeps Cashing In
". We present one application the attack: BEAST. BEAST focuses on SSL implementations on browsers which is HTTPS. BEAST works for most major browsers and websites."

The researchers said that the browser-based attack is just one variant. They said they also could implement a similar attack against other services that use SSL, such as instant-messaging clients or VPNs."

Please read the article before flaming it.
We won't know for certain until details are released but their claim that "exploit works even against sites that use HSTS, or HTTP Strict Transport Security" is disturbing.
The reason is placebos are receiving meta enhancement!

At first the placebo effect only had working for it the patients hope that they might be receiving the treatment pill and might get better. Alternatively, working against it was the concern they were getting the placebo and likelihood of getting worse. (Ie 1/2 odds at recovering)

But, as studies showed that even those receiving placebos were getting better patients came to realize that even if they were getting the placebo treatment they could still get better. So now, the placebo has working for it the patients hope of getting the treatment and getting better plus the hope that in the case they get the placebo they experience the placebo effect and get better anyways. Alternatively, placebo effect now only has working against it the "off chance" that if the patient gets the placebo he also does not experience the placebo effect. (Ie 2/3 odds at recovering)

Now, start with press releases like this and start stating that the placebo is so powerful, it always works--so much so we aren't going to bother giving the real drug to trial patients any more and just give them all sugar pills.. Then you'll get to watch placebo patients start consistently out performing trial drug patients at health recovery that eventually the above statement will be true.

And while I wrote this comment in good humor, I do think it's a valid argument that circular logic explains that the placebo effect is getting stronger because of the placebo effect (people believing in it). In fact, it may be the only valid and legitimate use case of circular logic.
You have to understand the history in order to understand why there's a distinction. If it weren't for all the Java programmers who've tried to get rich off the App Store in the past several years, there wouldn't be much need for a distinction. However, too many of the Java programmers that have been jumping on the Objective-C bandwagon have never before had to give any consideration to memory management. Thus they had trouble learning to use the Cocoa manual explicit reference counting paradigm, which requires the application programmer to know where to make calls to -retain and -release.

This requirement that the application programmer participate in memory management contributes more to the distinction than the fact that the Cocoa reference counting scheme imposes less runtime overhead than most robust garbage collectors of the sort used by Java or Python.

The new Automatic Reference Counting used by Cocoa is still different from traditional garbage collectors, because it is implemented without imposing any more runtime overhead than the manual scheme. ARC is essentially a preprocessor phase that infers (based on coding conventions) where to place the calls to -retain and -release. None of the complex logic for tracking the lifetime of an object is done at runtime. It's done at compile time, if at all. (ARC differs from full-fledged robust garbage collectors like what Java has in that ARC can't handle situations like cycles in the object graph. Handling those cycles is one of the main things that makes writing a high-performance Java-like GC non-trivial, but ARC simply chooses to not be that automatic.)
In a former life, I helped out on the SproutCore project. It's good to see things like Batman.js taking up the challenge of a tightly-integrated MVC framework.

(I'm still bummed SproutCore didn't take off, but there's little I can do to change things now.)
Please read the article linked to by the original post, not the article linked to by another commenter. The article on The Register which was linked to says nothing about VPNs or instant messaging clients.
The last slide mentions automatically failover is still needed. For that, look into DRDB + HeartBeat on Linux. They allow you to build automatically failover cluster easily.

In my past life, I've built high available MySQL cluster using the combo and it worked great. The same technique can be applied to Postgres.
Why do I still want to have POS systems and have to have a "credit card". So instead of the piece of plastic, I have to carry my phone and a piece of plastic?

I'd much prefer to see a comprehensive shift away from the credit card companies and PoS systems entirely.
I've been using Linode for a while now, and I am very pleased to watch them grow like this. Great job!
"...adherence to drug therapy may be a surrogate marker for overall healthy behaviour."
There's at least one study recently that shows this effect. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/22/placebo-effect... Even if you tell the patients that it's a placebo, they still get better.
It really blows my mind how many people don't understand our progressive tax system. Especially someone making 250k+...
If you don't need the add and remove operations, it's possible to reduce the size significantly by applying automata theory:
http://www.n3labs.com/pdf/lexicon-squeeze.pdf

It works extremely well "out of the box" for dictionary words, since the automata enables sharing of both prefixes and suffixes.
Firefox 7 Beta Arrives in Ubuntu 11.10, Scores a Perfect 100 in Acid3 Test
Linux Mint Debian 201109 released
> If by "higher quality apps" you mean loads and loads of thinly disguised ad- and spyware, as well as generally useless crap, then yes, curated native app stores are "great".
> I'd say the density of pure and utter crapware has never been higher than in the various app stores.

Compared to what? Download.com? Tucows? Every app put on the internet, ever? There are lots of useless and borderline malicious apps on the existing mobile app stores (and a handful of downright malicious apps), but I'm far from convinced that it's in any way worse than what we've had so far on the desktop. All the "browser toolbar" apps out there, by themselves, are enough to make app stores look good.

And having a unified place where you know you can get the official version of any app, along with any updates, and from where you can painlessly re-install all your apps when you get a new machine, cannot possibly be a bad thing.

What do developers get for that 30% cut? In Apple's case, they get access to a huge userbase who has already entered their credit card into the system and just need to press "buy"; they get access to payment processing, currency conversion, and storefront internationalization, close to world-wide, without lifting a finger. Is 30% "fair"? Probably not - it's probably a bit high for small developers, and larger developers may prefer to opt out and solve all those challenges for themselves, for much cheaper. (edit: for desktop Mac apps, they can. The fact that some developers choose to sell their Mac apps through the App Store suggests the 30% is worth it for those developers. It's important that those developers still have the choice to sell their desktop apps through other channels - so far, anyway).

Yes, it's ultimately about control, and about that 30% commission. I did say it's less choice, not more. But you can't say there are no benefits at all, to both users or developers.
Great for a personal project. I would be all over that. Looking at it from a business perspective you can see why there are so few tablet apps in the android market. The amount of android tablets in users hands right now is small. You target a much larger percentage of the market by making an app for mobile handsets. While it might initially appear easy to make the app "just work" on both tablet and handset it is actually a considerable amount of development time (not to mention the often missed design and testing time needed as well).
How would they jump sandboxes? Wouldn't that require a browser-specific attack? For example, how would some injected code on HN jump over to my secure banking tab, in another chrome process?
> 1. You’re not smarter than anyone

Should be: You're not smarter than everyone. Ever worked with interns? They have even more to learn than you do.

> 3. Looks matter

Do not care, and don't want to work for anyone who does. This is nonsense.

> 6. Software’s primary function is to earn profits

What? It's not. Software's primary function is to tell a device what to do. And the device is meant to make lives better. Nonprofits exist; they use software too.

I quit reading after #15 and #16 because clearly this dude is just trying to fill up bullet points. Is 33 the magic "get lots of views" number? FFS.
And I would argue the best way to give your excess money directly to those it the most without waste is to pay your workers well. All of them, think of workers who can't command a high salary. If the industry allow you to pay a worker $7.70(about minimum wage) can you afford to pay them $15.00 hr ? Many companies don't want to pay their employees a living wages so they can keep more of the revenue, but instead of giving the excess to government in the form of taxes, or donating to an vetted charity, why not give it to the people you know, your workers. It will be an investment in your company. Workers who are content, are typically more productive and you'll have higher retention.
Watch,contagion,online,megavideo
watch,contagion,online,megavideo
with all the news that Matt Damon and Jude Law had sunk into the spread in their
Linux Mint 11 Saves the Day
Maybe I've spent too much time being brainwashed by FOSS advocates, but #6 (Software’s primary function is to earn profit) made my stomach lurch. I agree, profit is the _company's_ primary function.

There are profitable companies out there who publish free software. Lets not go advising the younglings that the entire software world must be locked-up & proprietary.
Okay, I'm in the OPs position but have $15,000-25,000. Where to invest?
Did you read page 2 of The Register article?

Duong and Rizzo said the underlying vulnerability BEAST exploits is present in virtually all applications that use TLS 1.0, making it possible to apply the technique to monitor private communications sent through many instant messenger and Virtual Private Networking programs.
"In 10 years your 20 core smartphone will have a GC running in it."

Quite possibly. But it's also quite conceivable that Objective-C will still be in use by then, and still not have the what a Java programmer would think of as garbage collection. When iPhone hardware is ready for it, we'll probably see Python or MacRuby or JavaScript become the most common way of interacting with a Cocoa system that is still implemented in Objective-C.
<<That said, a small ops team (three people) can manage thousands of machines without much difficulty, and you can probably share two of those with the dev team as Dev-Ops guys, with one grizzled old sysadmin to handle the nastier problems.>>

I worked for a company that contracted with a guy whose entire business was based on this model. He was the hardcore sysadmin and would juggle tons of servers and administrative config for you. He trained the devs to handle all of the mundane ops stuff, with him as backup.

Really great system. It was really empowering for us devs, too.
I like these options, "Live CGI" most of all.

Thanks for everyone's contribution, it's very much appreciated. :)
The engine rates a long paragraph in Prime Movers and there's a picture of the ship as well. I get the impression that when the book was in production it was the biggest engine in use, but MAN B&W offers a slightly more powerful one and has designed a significantly more powerful one as well if/when it's needed.

As for "enough"? Well, measured as shaft vs. brake horsepower, Iowa class battleships (with their superheaters running) would put out nearly twice as much and Nimitz class supercarriers 2.4 times as much. But of course those are fast ships designed to go in harm's way. For the merchant marine, these diesels are "enough".
It raises the question: if humans are so prone to the placebo effect, how is your business affected? Or, is this a phenomenon that's regulated to medicine?
I didn't even see there was a page 2 on the Register article, so mea culpa on that (though the parent's quote was indeed not from that page, but from one another commenter linked to).
Did anyone really trust it anyways? I mean, with fake certs floating around, in order for it to really be secure you need to guarantee that the cert you got is the real cert anyways, which most people (read: average users) don't bother with.
I worked on PACS and incidentally integrating with EHRs in the past -- I'd be very interested in talking with you about exactly what security concerns you have with this kind of solution and figuring out how a system could satisfy them.

I think the dictation issues are non core; either apple fixes it in iOS 5 or drchrono could integrate with a third party transcription provider.

The template and macro thing is definitely at the core to a good ehr
Nevermind the buttons: that Facebook is launching new graph verbs makes their graph exponentially more interesting
Guardian angels can come to economy's rescue - Business News - News
Mom-and-pop, maybe not, but there are already a ton of NFC-enabled machines out there. Around here (Florida) I can even use the chip in my AmEx to buy a soda.
Addressable LED strips for your Arduino
Hypothetically, if I were interested in getting in to Android development, but I didn't want to switch to using an Android phone, what would be the most cost-effective way to get my hands on an Android device that would be good for testing? Or is the emulator reliable enough to release without testing on hardware?
Why 80 Percent of Web Projects Are Total Bullshit: A Freelancer’s Rant
The poster edited their comment. It originally started something like "tl;dr no really I didn't read the article" and proceeded with the speculation (and hubris that it's the "only reasonable explanation") that remains at the time of this writing.

I downmodded the comment because it's the type of quick, non-substantial response that actually detracts from conversation among those who took the time to read the article and want a real discussion.
I'm in San Francisco.
Unclear how this will play out. The decision to 'like' is more complex. What if you read text and watch a video? Which button do you click? I understand this generates more data - and that's the real power, but the LIKE has already become so ubiquitous.
Inside radiology rooms it may be the case, and is absolutely the case in MRI (no metal includes no iPhone...)

I'm sure there are quiet area no cellphone rules for patient/staff sanity, not RF concerns, elsewhere.
So I'm getting a ton of downvotes because I called an Apple-invented distinction an Apple-invented distinction?

Did I just step into the twilight zone?
Dreams Answered
The Supreme Court tried, and were overruled by a lower court.

what

The US legal system is baffling.

I can see why you'd think that. Could you try referencing which case you think involved a lower court overruling the Supreme court (like find a news story that mentions it or something)? That way someone might be able to clear up the misconception for you. I agree that civil procedure and matters of precedent can be very confusing, but I promise you the lower courts aren't going about overruling the Supreme Court, much as they might like to.
Which suggests that non-drug interventions are generally better than drug interventions, at least when people actually do them. (Obviously people are much more likely to take a pill than to change their diet, which is part of what makes the research so interesting.)

Not surprisingly, many of the diseases with the lowest adherence are the ones where people would benefit the most. Type 2 diabetes is literally a disease of non-adherence, with 98% of patients not following their doctor's recommendations.

I've learned a ton from reading through the major adherence research findings over the last couple months, and I think there are a ton of ideas that can be applied to entrepreneurship and web startups especially. DiMatteo actually has a brand new book out on this so you don't even really need to read through all the original journal articles anymore to get the main ideas:

http://www.amazon.com/Health-Behavior-Change-Treatment-Adher...
> I'd imagine placebos are getting more effective due to more people having purely headspace/mindset (or even imaginative) illnesses/causes due to stress factors

Here's a list of medical conditions studied by placebo treatements: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#List_of_medical_conditi... Many of them had significant positive results for the placebo.

You could argue that many of those ailments could be due to mental/stress issues, and that it makes sense that calming the mind and believing in a treatment would work, but for some of them (Parkinson's, Herpes, food allergy), it's pretty amazing at how individuals are affected. Maybe we're under-crediting the brain's ability to control the body.
Martin Seligman (of both "learned optimism" and "learned helplessness" fame) showed that rats' immune systems are influenced by their psychological state, specifically, the extent of control they had over unpleasant stimuli. This included tumour reduction.

In the light of this, the placebo effect does not seem so far-fetched.

My personal theory is that when an animal feels safe and secure in a non-threatening environment, the immune system is stimulated, because the immune system requires resources, and the body can spare these when it is safe. When volunteers are given placebos, in a controlled and professional setting, it is clearly a safe and stress-free environment. (This could be tested by putting the subjects in the same safe setting, but not giving them the placebo).
I'm not a Christian, Muslim or Jew. I don't believe in God. I find it slightly unnerving that there's still religious fundamentalists out there that flatly refuse to accept scientific evidence of evolution and more, and yet...

I can't stand Richard Dawkins.

I know that there's some dangerous ideas put out there by fundamentalists, but for the most part, if they stick to themselves and are generally good people who don't interfere with others then I don't really care what they believe.

Not necessarily this article, but generally, and especially listening to him talk live (radio, conferences etc) Richard Dawkins is arrogant and pig headed. It's kind of ironic that by dedicating his life to setting them straight, Dawkins has become as much of a fundamentalist evangelist as the religious fundamentalists he spends his time mocking.
Probably, the developer will add whichever button of Like, Read, Watched, Listened makes the most sense for the content.

As for the ubiquity of Like, the new buttons will probably look like a Like button, and probably use an icon from the Facebook interface. That should help people make the connection to Facebook.
Also known as a radix tree, I believe.
Isn't the idea that the human race is progressing intellectually a remnant of Enlightenment philosophy? Espousing that is hardly bashing orthodoxy.
I hadn't even noticed this. $0.01, you have to ask?! Of course, get it :-) I haven't read Clockwork rocket yet. I found his first collection, Luminous, and then got into his stuff from there. Diaspora was my favorite so far, although it was the most difficult.

His prose is quite dry, even cold. It took a little getting used to but I found the effort very much worth it.
I wouldn't be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They just made the wrong choices--Riak is fantastic. Having said that, it's incredibly easy to make the wrong choices right now:

1. The "NoSQL" field is generally immature and filled with land mines, so a random selection favors a bad outcome

2. The mass-appeal rank ordered reputation of these projects is not in line with their actual quality/robustness, especially when it comes to very high-demand situations (node counts are high enough to render node failures common, write loads are heavy, machines are within 50% of their I/O limit).

So, I wouldn't let these reports discourage one too much about the possibilities of NoSQL, especially the scaling possibilities of fully distributed databases. It really can be a game changer with a solid implementation. Riak is one.

(Note: "wrong decision" is not meant to be judgmental, we (bu.mp) are ourselves just recovering from a similar "wrong decision"... VERY similar. :-)

Agree completely re: bare metal. If you have scaling problems you should have a very good reason not to be doing dedicated hosting on bare metal IME.
Seems to be so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_tree
They seem to have worked pretty well for Netflix and the X prizes.
One thing that I didn't read in the article, and haven't heard about is whether the placebo effect continues on after the testing phase.

One thing that I could see affecting results is that people are selected for a trial, which may well influence their mindset ("OOh, I'm taking this incredible new drug in a special trial. It is soo much more effective than anything else on the market!") In other words, being part of the experimental group is more important than the placebo or actual drug being tested.

If these drugs are then available via normal channels, I imagine the placebo drug is not distributed, and the results may also not be monitored anymore.

Is there any indication whether this happens? In that packet of anti-depressants, half are placebo and there is no way to tell which is which? Could be cheaper to manufacture and unlikely to be detected. Not too sure of the legalities either...
LibreOffice Won’t Ship With Global Menu By Default in 11.10 | OMG Ubuntu
Actually, I've come around to the idea that homeopathy is a brilliant piece of social engineering. The theory of homeopathy is simple, internally consistent and not obviously false, which makes it a good way to harness the placebo effect without lying to the patient. The whole idea that diluting medecine makes it more effective has a number of benefits as well:

Concentration/dilution is a simple, objective, physical property that can be measured for any medicine. It's much easier to think and talk about than wishy-washy concepts like "effectiveness in clinical trials."

Diluting medicines down to really low concentrations take sophisticated equipment, so it's legitimate to charge more for those medicines. By agreeing to pay more for less, patients can strengthen their belief and actually increase the effectiveness of the placebo.

The preoccupation with dilution also makes homeopathy safer. At the extreme, patients are being prescribed purified water. No side effects!

Dilution also mitigates any other harmful effects that the homeopathic industry might have on the world. A few leaves of St. John's Wart go a loooong way when they're diluted down to 1 part per million. Out-of-control homeopathy won't lead to, say, increased poaching of bears and tigers for their internal organs.

The whole thing is brilliant.
Presumably the injected code creates specially crafted requests to the SSL site being attacked - it can't read the results of those requests, but that doesn't matter: its only purpose is to create some adaptively-chosen known plaintext for the sniffer.
Writing modern C++ code: how C++ has evolved over the years
Or time to step out & start a competing business ;)
The Wikipedia article mentions that the ships had cranes.