skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are three relevant hacks here, and it's good to keep them clearly separated.

First, Anonymous hacked into some server which ran a lot of hidden services (essentially, Tor was used to hide the identity of the server.) Some pedophiles were exposed, etc. This is not an attack on Tor: vulnerable webapps can be hacked, hidden service or not.

Second, it's been known for a long time that wide-scale traffic analysis can be used to discover who's talking to who. E.g. if I send packets into Tor at t=0, t=.1354 and t=.1432 and you receive packets from Tor at t=1.832, t=1.982 and t=2.091, these may well be related - the delay is approximately constant. (More clever analysis gets you better results.) This is a known attack and not fixable without introducing big random delays. (Mixmaster, "Tor for e-mail", does introduce such delays. It's not a good fit for the web, though.)

Third, some Eric Filiol reportedly claims to be able to decrypt Tor traffic (by hacking into lots of vulnerable Tor nodes and overloading the unhackable ones to force traffic through the compromised nodes.) This seems unlikely: the report seems to have lots of (minor) errors, and the description of the attack makes no sense (controlling the flow of encrypted data does not let you decrypt said data.) It is possible to discover who's talking to who if you hack into a sufficient number of nodes, by using the nodes as network monitoring stations. However, that's essentially the same hack as #2 above. (Note that only the last node in the Tor network to see the packet has access to the unencrypted form. Since running a Tor endpoint invites lots of unwelcome attention, these are probably far more professionally run than the average node.)
Sure, that works for ASCII and UTF-8, but what if I'm on an IBM System Z machine? Then everything's in EBCDIC, and that's just a nightmare.
How to tell the people that there's no Higgs
At this point, my guess is the majority of games are HTML5 based. Look at all the HTML5 games that came out of Mozilla's Game On contest for example.
https://gaming.mozillalabs.com/games/

They can run in whatever technology the browser has installed, which can even include Java applets. Runescape for example.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ajjblpfpopipimofkh...
I think your zeal for snark has lead you astray.

I understand what you're saying--nobody wants to land on a stuffy wall of text. But in this case, there's nothing to find but the window dressing. I'm fine clicking on a "find out more" link that takes me to more detail. But that's missing here entirely.
I was hoping that they restored the review ordering back to how it was. (Google is aware of this and working on a fix (there is talk on the Chrome extension developers mailing list); just hoped to see the fix now.)

I believe they now sort them by 'usefulness' when up until a month ago or so they sorted them by date. The current order is annoying because 1) the top reviews tend to be older and often talk about old bugs giving new potential users inaccurate impressions, 2) it is harder to see the new reviews (although the developer can log into a different interface and see them sorted by date), and 3) it makes conversations between the developer and users harder to follow.

The reason the last point is relevant is that for many users posting a review is the most obvious way to mention bugs. They should let developers respond to individual reviews and provide optional links to a bug tracker and a forum to better move traffic there.

UPDATE: Noticed that it now only allows you to write one 'review' so a developer can no longer respond multiple times; hopefully some of the above suggestions will be implemented.

A couple of other unrelated changes I noticed:

* They include your Google profile info when you write a review; not sure if you can leave a review anonymously (beyond having an anonymous Google profile) anymore.

* They no longer show a count of how many people +1ed it (but still let you do so from there.)
Getting into The Zone: Music
Design native iOS apps in real time using CSS
Python's lists are not linked lists. List indexing is O(1).
Isn't this kinda like looking back after running a search algorithm and saying "look at all of those branches that were explored that had nothing of value in them, what a useless waste."
You have to explore in order to learn. College helps one learn both how your actions affect the external environment but also the internal one - your goals, utility function whatever you want to call it. What is 'needed' will be a function of what you decide will be needed.
Top secret defence data stolen from Japanese contractor
There's nothing wrong with giving the engine a little jump start. That jump start might be enough to get something truly amazing going. However, if the product sucks no harm done--no amount of jump starting will help.
Wanton Acts of Debuggery: Keeping debug messages clear, useful, and not annoying
Ok but the real point is: how do you get the first thousand people to know about your product? That's the hard part, and a viral system can help there.
If there's a bad product behind, I think that it'll end up being a failure anyway, and in the end the product is surely what really matters.
Thanks. And also thank you for writing a spot-on post!
Using open-ended questions and parroting mirrors what good human listeners do. We treat it as lazy only because we know that in this instance it happens because it's the easy way out of a situation where the program doesn't have another response.
The major new interesting metric on the report is the disclosure of the number of users or accounts that were 'targeted' by requests for user data:

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/...
New Lemur Ultra: Not So Sexy Anymore
"Screentop" Keyboard for the iPad
>"I figure by dropping out of Uni completely, I can take on more jobs and focus on personal projects."

I figure that if you graduate Uni, you can take on more jobs and focus on personal projects.

It's a false dichotomy.

After you graduate, the jobs will be better and the personal projects more deeply informed.
All this suggests that Photoshop/by-hand image editing is a special case where the GUI is at its best.

It'd probably be useful to pick some other examples to discuss.
They're also going to be selling off real-time feeds of per-company sales data to investors:

MasterCard has launched a new product for investors leveraging its huge global panel of transaction data from over 1.7B cards. This panel is global, more representative, more timely (weekly data to get ahead of monthly comps) and more customizable than any other transactional database available to the buy-side.

There is a broad range of topics on which we can provide investors with timely insights with actual sales transactions. Here are just a few samples of the topics we have done work.

• Detailed Macro reads across 14 sectors in the US and 4 in the UK

• Department Stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size across segments

• Office Supply Stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size for ODP, OMX and SPLS

• Home Improvement – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size for HD, LOW, LL and Ace

• Consumer Electronics – Total Sales, Transactions segmented by price point (e.g. to get a read on flat-panel/laptop sales)

• Other Retailers across a broad range of segments – Total Sales and Transactions

• Grocery stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size

• E-Commerce—Segmenting direct v. store sales trends, analysis of e-commerce companies like AMZN, NILE and many others

• Hotels – direct vs. OTA bookings/international trends, highly correlative chain hotels RevPar, Vegas-specific hotels

• Airlines – forward looking bookings as an indicator of RASM

• Cable/Satellite – ARPU, Churn and Total sales
Will Aaron Sorkin take on Steve Jobs?
After the iPod, ex-Apple engineers built world's coolest thermostat
Thanks for the reply, it's exactly my opinion
Mine is in Python with several usual and some less usual influences: John McCarthy "Recursive Functions of..." by way of Paul Graham "The Roots of Lisp"; Peter Norvig "(How to Write..." and tail recursion from his "(An ((Even Better)..."; quoted-printable encoding of characters; Wikipedia & Knuth's enthusiasm for the balanced ternary number base. I have gone a very short way to start translating Lisp programs to Python code. Also I have gone a very short way to do relevant proofs in Coq in the manner of Benjamin C. Pierce, et al. "Software Foundations". My notions are to implement the Calculus of Constructions in the simplified form found in Claudio S. Coen, "Mathematical Libraries as Proof Assistant Environments", and natural deduction on top of that. And a TR SECD machine. Oh, and algorithms from Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. And a pony...
http://github.com/minopret/minopret-lisp
Apache Subversion 1.7.1 Released
There's an amusing prank where you call two Chinese restaurants: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz9ra9FqNKQ

(I think they pulled this prank on a late night show as well, I can't find the video though.)
Is selling / monetizing open source a zero sum game?
Pro Business Letter Format
It matters to the extent that you need enough roof space. The last time I calculated I figured that the available south facing roof of a typical midwestern United States house was about right for the non-heating power needs of the house with current solar technology.
Tendencias de Joyer�a
How Sinatra bought me a drink.
Apple iTV Details
Almost certainly premium/freemium. This type of app is usually marketed to businesses.
that 59 seconds guy is creepy.
Well, I'm also to be blamed for this exaggeration.

Last night I also posted one of those links on HN. Sorry about that, reading stuff at 3 in the morning isn't such a great idea after all.
Yeah. I got my CS degree (at a big state research university), learned a ton of computer software and hardware and theory and engineering stuff I absolutely would not have studied on my own because they weren't immediately practical, but were nonetheless extremely valuable. And I took a bunch of other classes that made me a much better thinker, in general and about various topics. I'm a vastly better software developer and a slightly more interesting person than I would have been without those classes.

If you're not enjoying and getting value out of university, something's wrong.
Bitkeeper was not the status quo, but I don't think that's important in the overall point. The original point was that git was inspired by previous software. The original software pointed at, cvs, was wrong, but I don't think the original point changes when we put the correct software, Bitkeeper, in its place in the sentence.
Does this mean he uses ruby in the same way you he was using GOAL?
Then you read in ASCII or UTF-8, and don't do your I/O in EBCDIC. Also, you run Z/Linux.
Japan under Heavy Cyber Attack
Looks pretty and I like the general trend of Google's new design, but it horribly breaks search (example: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/gmail?newlook). I'd rather having functioning ugly over broken sleek.
I'm so glad Alan is back and doing these again, after the book came out he kind of dropped off the edge of the Earth. Definitely one of the few sites I checked regularly.
Having just watched it two days ago, the Social Network shows Zuckerberg working all hours of the day, every day. If that doesn't give people the idea that it requires hard work, I don't know what will.
Amazon has nearly doubled their employee base in the last two years, and most of those hires were higher-paid "corporate" employees rather than fulfillment center hires. The expense structure may look the same but it's not, they've clearly explained that each time they do an earnings call and the market has backed them up on it - their stock has solidly outperformed Apple's for several years.

There's an earnings quality argument here as well: As a consumer electronics company, Apple's long term value is predicated heavily on their ability to stay "on trend" and keep delivering hot new products. Amazon doesn't have that pressure - whatever's popular, they'll be selling, and earning from things like government contracting are fairly stable as well. You get more market cap per dollar of earnings if those earnings are more likely to persist long-term.
Unless it bloats your data to the point where other stuff falls out of L1 cache.
http://articles.latimes.com/1994-06-11/news/mn-2837_1_mary-g...

"In 1980, she discussed with then-IBM Corp. Chairman John Opel, who was also on the United Way committee, the business IBM was doing with Microsoft. Opel, some accounts say, knew little about the venture, but mentioned Mary Gates to IBM executives who introduced Microsoft at a meeting of IBM's top-level management committee a few weeks later. IBM contracted with Microsoft, then a small firm specializing in computer languages, to create an operating system for its first personal computer."
I was going to post this as a joke but then I looked it up and it actually exists.

http://parenting.stackexchange.com/
Spacewar, the first 2D top-down shooter, turns 50
Thank you! While modern CPUs are definitely fast, they are not as fast as GPUs for code like this. Dynamic & realtime FTW.
A great hack and easily the funniest thing I've ever read on HN [damning with faint praise unintentional].

Parry v Siri would might be Youtube worthy.
10 Reasons To Start A Company In A Recession
Siri: We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.
> 4) You're in your last or next-to-last year and you're fed up with the system, you want your freedom and you want it now.

Don't do it. Why? Because dropping out is easy, getting back in later is hard. Sure, the system sucks, but you are this close to bagging that piece of paper, you might as well go all the way.

I fundamentally disagree with you on this one. Getting that piece of paper give you a quick escape plan for when things get tough. Lets say you graduate, and start your startup. In the back of your mind you'll be saying "If this doesn't work out, I'll just go get a regular, decent paying job". And then things start to head south. You can't raise money, or you have no traction, ect. That decent paying job starts to look more and more attractive.

If you drop out, you're burning your bridges and forcing yourself to stay committed when shit hits the fan. Graduating leaves open an easy retreat strategy; it makes it much easier to quit.
Dang! Blackberry even has to take shots in a Nokia thread? Well, allow me to retort! At least Blackberry has copy and paste! And network security! And BBM! And, um... that's all I got.

It seems to be de rigeur to hate on Blackberry these days. But I think people are starting to realize that the smartphone market = more than the Facebook + Angry Birds continuum. http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/why-people-stil...

Both Nokia's Symbian phones and Blackberry still have enviable mind and market share when you look at them globally. Reports of the death of either have been greatly exaggerated.

Windows Phone, however, is fast going the way of the Zune. Looks great, and is, in point of actual fact, a nifty platform, but nobody you know has one. Say what you will about Symbian and Blackberry, there are phones out there loaded with those OSes that are selling. Blackberry's profit may be off by 50% for the quarter, but it is still a profit.

Windows Phone needs a flagship Nokia device soon, or it is going to go the way of the Zune and the Kin.
Government Requests For Google User Data Keep Rising
I dropped out of school last semester, so I think I can add some (unique) perspective. Maybe I will flesh these thoughts out into a blog post later.

When considering dropping out of college, you're the one who is ultimately responsible for that decision, you're the one who will live with the consequences, and you're the one who has the best information for making that decision. It's all on you. You have to ask yourself if you really believe that you can live with the consequences and, if so, take the plunge.

Now, I've only been a drop out for 3 months, so it's impossible for me to comment on the long term effects, but -- if there's one thing you need to realize before dropping out -- being a drop out is hard.

For one thing, everyone thinks that kids between the ages of 18 and 22 should be attending college, and they'll be happy to tell you so. Lots of people attended college and, since it worked for them, they will believe that the system can work for you. Further, these people have a vested interest in telling you how important college is and what a worthwhile experience it is because, frankly, they are trying to justify spending however many years attending college and paying off their student loans

Basically, don't expect a whole lot of support.

In addition, being a drop out in today's climate is a little bit more difficult than it was in the past. Computer Science is now an established discipline and schools actually teach it, so being self-taught is less of a necessity and more of an oddity. Further, while the common wisdom seems to be that the current economic climate is not so bad for programmers, it's certainly harder to get a job now than it was during the dot-com boom.

The final, and hardest part of being a drop out, is that it's incredibly lonely and incredibly difficult to stay motivated when you're on your own. I imagine that it's similar to being a solo founder. There are days when it's hard to find the strength to get out of bed, when you'll be filled with self-doubt, when you'll wonder if dropping out was the right decision. Hacking on your own for four years and building a portfolio, instead of attending school, might sound great on paper, but without your peers to support and motivate you, it's very hard.
How would I need that theory stuff if it contains hardware and other similar stuff and I am not planing to do anything with that kind of things in my career (I just want to be a software programmer, because I love it)? I am just feeling that I am studying lots of useless things...

Thank you very much for researching companies advice, it's a very good advice, I will start doing that.
Well, I doubt there would be much of a speed difference when using canvas/drawImage, since I assume "calculating the frame" involves just use some arithmetic on the dimensions of each frame - which is pretty trivial in terms of CPU use at 60fps.

Anyways, you're right, with lots of assets it probably is a much better way to organize sprites into spritesheet. I just never did anything on that scale. 45 animation frames? Sheesh, I'm happy if I can get 5 or 6. :)
True enough, there are research systems that have been built with hard realtime properties. I don't know much about them. So I should have qualified it with "all popular GC-based interpreters" or the like.
This is a great collection. It seems like the master module list on github hasn't added many modules in a long time.
You don't think that economics helped you understand intelligent agents in AI? Or markets as a mechanism for efficient information exchange? Or constrained optimization - if you studied economics, it is intuitive for you to see the Lagrange multiplier as price/cost (shadow) in convex optimization. Whether or not it helped in implementation, that is another thing, but in interpretation and thinking about a problem I can't see how it couldn't be of value.
The only surprising thing about this is that it took so long for them to do it. I'd actually assumed that they were already doing this.
I worked with Symfony for almost 3 years, from 2008 to 2010. This year I'm working on a big Ruby on Rails project. And before 2008, most of the work I did involved hacked together PHP projects. I would say that if one can use Ruby On Rails, then of course one should. It doesn't matter whether Ruby is better than PHP as a language, what is certain is that Ruby ecosystem is much stronger than anything in the world of PHP, and for any large project you will be depending on whatever ecosystem surrounds a language.

Having said that, I would say that Symfony is the best hope for PHP. It is the framework that takes PHP furthest forward, and offers the best starting point of a strong ecosystem. Symfony imitates many of the best features of Rails.

I've worked on a lot of PHP projects. I've worked on WordPress and Drupal and CakePHP. I dislike nearly all software written in PHP. But Symfony is elegant and clean and the people behind it are serious and intelligent. If you have to work with PHP, then you should work with Symfony.

However, I do not expect the Symfony community to ever grow large, and I will quote something that I wrote on my blog a year ago to explain why:

"No matter what data source you consult, the conclusion is unmistakable: Symfony is a small community, and its rate of growth is slow. Why is this? My own theory is that Symfony brings to PHP something that PHP has long been missing: a truly professional, industrial strength, object oriented architecture that allows PHP to be taken seriously in the enterprise. However, all of the people who would be truly interested in such a framework have long ago found a home using Ruby, Java or Python. In short, the kinds of people who gravitate to PHP are exactly the kind of people who are unwilling or unable to appreciate the beautiful elegance and power of a system like Symfony. The people who need something like Symfony gravitate to other languages."

http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/2010/04/11/the-symfony-commun...
relevant, for mercurial:

hg has an extension for that http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChurnExtension

results are easy to parse to generate some other view

zalew:~/webprojects/x$ hg churn -f '%u-%a' -s
1-Mon 1690 **
2-Tue 4756 ******
3-Wed 3007 ****
5-Fri 70758 ****************************************************************************************
(dj125)2011-10-25 17:38:36
zalew:~/webprojects/x$ hg churn -f '%u-%a' -s -c
1-Mon 12 *****************************************
2-Tue 26 ****************************************************************************************
3-Wed 4 **************
5-Fri 9 ******************************
(dj125)2011-10-25 17:38:58
zalew:~/webprojects/x$ hg churn -f '%H' -s -c
02 1 **********
03 4 ****************************************
04 6 *************************************************************
05 3 ******************************
06 8 *********************************************************************************
07 3 ******************************
11 1 **********
12 2 ********************
13 3 ******************************
14 5 ***************************************************
15 3 ******************************
16 9 *******************************************************************************************
17 3 ******************************
Steve Jobs: What an Asshole
Accessible, CSS-only Toggle Switches
I don't get it! How does this network work? What value does it provide? Why would it make me move away from FB? How is this different from diaspora?
The benefits to the phone, you already have it and keeping it charged and in general not forgetting it at home are more or less taken care of.

If I were considering options for additional units to purchase for determining occupancy (perhaps the kids do not have cellphones yet) then a small zigbee type mesh sensor would be ideal. This type of solution would give many options for those with zone based heating and cooling and would lend itself to even more pretty visualizations.

Edit: Getting a post right the first time from a phone is harder than it should be.
Something - yes. Something which implements everything required and is tested - not likely.

There's a huge difference between converting data from your little hobby and converting the vital knowledge of your company. It's different because it's more mission critical - you don't want to screw it up.

It's also different because the bigger dataset is likely to have some customizations and other "small" stuff which tends to matter in big perspective. You might be okay for losing e.g. votes if it's a small data set, but you really want it in with a big one.