skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Steganography is a name given for a set of encryption techniques, where the targeted message is hidden inside an image in some form.

Actually, steganography is not a type of encryption, and is simply the process of hiding a message, be it inside of an image, another message, the closing values of the DJIA, or not inside of anything at all.

I'm curious why you didn't simply duplicate the palette 16 times, then use the gray values in 0x0X, and the brainfuck character component in 0xX0. You'd be able to fit vastly more brainfuck data into an image, depending on the characteristics of the image and the code.
That sounds pretty much the same as a plastic garbage bag. Sounds delightful.
I would have lived in quiet hall, despite the supposed social hindrance or (for some people) stigma. I need peace and quiet to concentrate, at which point I'm MUCH more efficient. One can always walk to another venue, when one is in the mood for louder socialization or a party.

I would have paid zero attention to "expert" opinions about what one "should" do. 'We don't have a geology program; just take chemistry and go into geology in grad school.' [1]

Not nice people aren't nice. Trust your intuition.

Related to all this, something that came up last night: When something isn't working, walk away (as soon as you reasonably can). Don't continue to support it (e.g. that nasty person) by virtue of your continued efforts.

Some of this is pretty general. But if you aren't applying it by the time you're in college, it's high time to learn it (and make your college experience a lot better).

1. P.S. I have a friend who was/is one of the smartest people I know. Yet in college his grades were lackluster and he was always getting involved in crazy personal projects, some illegal (but basically non-harmful).

He now in an engineer at CERN. He was smart, and he followed his passions.
Not in the near future. There are no plans to discontinue Desktop dev. More has been written about that by Mike Chambers here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3226087
Does anyone know the best VPS or cloud service if you need modest (average) computing power but have pretty sizable database storage requirements (on the order of 30-60 gb)?

The only Linode plans with that kind of storage have much more RAM/Transfer than I'd need.
Personally I miss my Save As and I am not a fan of auto-save, but I think it's horseshit that someone downvoted this.
Right - we would have to build a version of the engine to run on that hardware. Once that's done though, the applications would run. i.e. we prototyped on ARM earlier this year, and our unit tests worked.

That said - if you're building for specialized environments, you're probably going to want to hand-optimize code rather than rely on LLVM to do it. LLVM does a pretty good job though :)
Yeah, see, Mac keyboard equivalents actually predate most other OSes. So no, they're not going to change to accomodate the newcomers. option- shift- and command- arrows have been there since the 80s. Not going to change because Windows decided to do it differently.

As for discoverability, it is worse today, but historically there were no keyboard equivalents that were not in the menus (by Apple's UI guidelines), so discoverability was better on the Mac.
While I totally agree that the progress of mobile GPUs is amazing and Sony/Microsoft should be scared... this comparison ("we have a GPU that's almost as good in one particular area as PS3") is very much flawed.

The GPU in PS3 is probably it's weakest part. Most of games that push the hardware end up using a ton of SPUs to do work that a GPU would normally do. Image postprocessing, deferred lighting, skinning, vertex transformations etc. It will take a while until the mobile chips can host the power of PS3's SPUs!

Another big point is memory bandwidth. Even if ARM's new GPU could achieve these vertex transformation rates in theory, I'd bet in practice it wouldn't because of much, _much_ more limited memory bandwidth on a mobile system compared to a console. And bandwidth will not rise fast there, since memory subsystem is one of larger energy consumers.
That is quite curious... though can you really blame the operating system for a program running on it? (Presumably SW:tOR)
Come and Join the Hot Tub Party
Have you ever used a 30" display? Maximizing windows does not make a whole lot of sense there, especially considering the difference in window contents on Windows vs Mac (ie. self-contained menubar, etc).
> streaming video, streaming audio

Partly works now if you don't need much control over it, or if you do work on the server to split the media into chunks. Full streaming support in progress, see WebRTC and other ongoing work.

> socket connections

See WebSocket, which has gone through some initial hiccups but otherwise works fine.

> fast 3d

WebGL provides 3D which runs as fast as the user's system can handle.

> advertising

Don't care. "The web still has ads?" But for the sake of argument: iframe, javascript, arbitrary web content just as capable as any other webpage.

> webcam support, mic support

In progress. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

https://jboriss.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/enabling-real-time-...

And on a related note, https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/input#Image_ca...

> clipboard manipulation

Already exists in JavaScript, just blocked in modern browsers for privacy reasons. Needs to become another grantable permission, like geolocation, but I suspect it just hasn't become prominent enough on the radar yet compared to other features.

> install base

By definition smaller than the install base of web browsers. The proportion continues to decrease as mobile devices become more widespread.

> youtube, rdio, pandora, hulu, kongregate, flickr, imgur, github, googledocs, every site that has ads...

https://www.youtube.com/html5, http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/16/pandora-radios-html5-rede..., github only uses it for the clipboard, never seen flash on flickr, imgur, or google docs, the web still has ads?
Ha, +1 point for snarkiness, -10 points for thinking that walk cycle experiment is a comparable example to even average Flash animation work, +9 points hoping for the love of the internet that you were just trying to make a laugh = net worth of nothing.
Google can do the same, you have to say per instead of a though.
Stanford’s machine learning stuff gets to the good stuff
I'm using both Linux and OS X regularly. Apt is awesome, without a doubt, particularly for the breadth of software available. And on the whole, I agree that Homebrew is considerably inferior. But there is one aspect I'm liking better about the Homebrew/Mac approach. With Homebrew I can have the latest software without a problem, because the OS itself is not so hooked in to the web of package manager dependencies. In many cases on Linux I just wait until the next OS release to upgrade software - because toying with the huge dependency graph is not worth it. Maybe I should switch to a rolling release distro? I haven't tried that. But I do like the ability to upgrade software without so many inter-dependencies.
Operation Brotherhood Shutdown by Anonymous Hackers
Unfortunately Asus has the worst support ever. If anything breaks on that laptop, you're SOL. I would also question Asus's build quality as well. I don't know about that netbook in particular, but their EeePCs aren't very well built.
Design Paradigms by Henry Petroski
...nobody goes to jail from Citibank or Goldman for [allegedly] committing [civil, not criminal] fraud...

Fixed that for you.

Note that neither Citi nor Goldman were convicted of fraud, they merely settled with no admission of wrongdoing to make it go away. Further, even if convicted, you don't go to jail for civil offenses.

I don't have access to their books but it's likely they made more money on the fraud than they paid in the fine.

From the article: "The payment includes the fees and profit Citigroup earned, plus $30 million in interest and a $95 million penalty."

In Goldman's case, the settlement money does not subtract the money Goldman lost on ABACUS.
In reference to the attacked woman at the beginning of the article, here's what the chimp did:

(Disclaimer: The images are pretty bad)

http://socialmediaseo.net/2010/05/07/charla-nash/
You make a fine point. Amended the intro.

The original idea that popped into my head was, "what if an image was a BF program?" With compression and/or palette reorganisation, of course more BF can be fit into an image, but it wouldn't be a pure BF program.
> No separate delete or backspace keys,

Maybe not on Apple's laptops, but Apple's full size keyboards have it. Also, fn + "delete" will have the effect of deleting a character in front of the current cursor.

> no multiple desktops,

Mission control has multiple desktops, or are you conveniently forgetting that. Also, Windows and multiple desktops?

> breathtakingly expensive hardware and software,

Mac OS X at $30, then iWork at $79, iLife at $79. Should we compare to Windows? (comparing to Linux and free everything is always going to be expensive).

> awkward layout of files in the GUI,

Eh, what?

> closing apps frustrating X doesn't close the app it minimizes it but you also have a minimize button (??),

No, one closes the current context. Lets say you have 10 Word documents open, you can close the single instance using the red button, if you use the yellow button it minimizes it down to the dock. The two buttons have very different behaviors.

When you have Microsoft Word open on Windows, you can have multiple documents open as well, when you close one you don't want to close all of them, well on Mac OS X when you close the last one it won't quit the full application, whereas in Windows it will. Mac OS X Lion has solved this by allowing applications to specify that they are no longer in use and when required they will be quit.

> am I copying/pasting/cutting?,

Cmd + C == Copy
Cmd + V == Paste
Cmd + X == Cut

Clearly you are using it in a different context ...
Pure Python PNG Canvas (updated for Python 2.7+)
Breakthrough Could Yield Instant-On Computers
No problem! Yes, I have this working:

http://webfuel.org/instaunshredderv2.php

It also works on the test images I created:

http://webfuel.org/a.png
http://webfuel.org/b.png
http://webfuel.org/c.png
How do you want them to fit a number keypad on a laptop? Fn + Delete does what you want.
I remember writing a report on the failure of the war on drugs...and this was 13 some years ago when I was in junior high. Sad to see drug policies still haven't changed much since then.
I propose Maggie's Law (based on an episode of The Simpsons -- or was it their movie -- the one with the big glass dome): "All sandboxes leak."

(I'm sure I'm not the first to quip on this point.)
Is MW3 Steam-only?
If so, it would be a lot more impressive.
Mxml is a development tool, you could compile it down to html and css with a javascript api. Look at extjs. It provides a crossbrowser OO flexlike api on top of the DOM. Javascript is good enough as a target language for a compiler. I expect adobe to keep the dev tools but change the output to be pluginfree.
What about the increase in corruption in Mexico? An increase in corruption means more criminals can have drug businesses without being stopped by the cops.

So, when more drug businesses pop-up, there will be less of a monopoly on the supply and the cost will go down over time. It's the same as any normal business.

Even if we legalized all drugs tomorrow, it won't stop the violence. If the Mexican police were actually doing their job, the criminals wouldn't be running the show.
Sorry for the late response to this. I have had mixed feelings for a while - it gives a good living to the family, but on the other had we all want to work towards the betterment of the world.

For my mom, at first she was very gung ho about it - arsenal of democracy and the importance of having a strong nation. Now she is having second thoughts, and is looking to follow her passion which is something in the education space.
I ticketed this up and I will get to it Monday. I should be able to ship it with SimpleCV 1.2. https://sourceforge.net/p/simplecv/tickets/180/
New Method for Making Neurons Could Lead to Parkinson's Treatment
> computer hardware had advanced so much that there was very little demand for a high-performance operating system in the desktop market.

That was kinda the problem. BeOS was built around the 1990s mentality that PC hardware was quite limited, and a light fast OS was more important than security, robustness, etc. It ran like greased lightning, but really wasn't a whole lot more advanced than other contemporary consumer OSes.

Next, on the other hand, was always intended to be a workstation OS (with 'enterprise frameworks') and was a much better fit for the hardware of the 2000s. With MS moving to the NT line, it would have been a huge mistake for Apple to adopt a single-user OS like Be.
Lela Rose Satin Bridesmaid Dress
HN isn't being monetized directly, but it is bringing tremendous value to YC. It's might even be their most valuable asset.
Obviously, he's speaking in relative terms. C is low-level compared to PHP, but it's high-level compared to assembly.
A la Google Sky Map?
The email field isn't visible to other users. You have to put it in the profile field.
Clapham Cars
It would stop a significant amount of the violence as explained by the fucking article.

It is impossible to police drugs. Drugs even get into US max security prisons. The most fucking locked down place on Earth. If you can't eradicate it there how do you plan on eradicating it outside?
> This is exactly what people complain about.

Well, this is what Linux users complain about. Windows users tend to complain about the lack of games or long-term support.

The problem is, Apple is able to do what it does specifically by not providing these things. If they were off in the weeds trying to make everyone happy, they wouldn't be able to create the streamlined experiences that have made them so successful.
Thanks for the tip! I didn't know about RightZoom.

Here are some little known Mac utilities I like:

* MutableCode's Breakaway let's you configure separate audio volumes (including silence) for with and without headphones.

* Stereopsis' Flux adjusts your display's color temperature to match the type of lighting in your room (e.g. daylight, halogen, fluorescent) to avoid the blindly blue glare in a dark room.
Ridiculous is not the patent, but the patent system that accepted it.
I really hated the small title bars. Never got used (admittedly, never tried that much) to them. We had a BeOS machine at the office in 1998, a beautiful IBM Aptiva S.
Like you, I also have a tic of hitting command-S. However, I don't think requiring the user to develop a tic to keep their data safe is very good usability.
Replace "nobody" with "nobody who cannot see the matrix..."
Building from source isn't necessarily a bad thing: some Linux packages have the same behavior (e.g. Portage, on which MacPorts is based). There are pros and cons to both approaches.

Package management is definitely a disaster on OS X, though. Regardless of whether you use Homebrew, Fink, or MacPorts, packages tend to break often. Some of this may be unavoidable: there are enough differences between Linux and OS X that compiling programs developed for Linux for OS X is bound to cause problems.
I'm always running Linux on some systems and it works very well on servers. But on all the laptops I owned in recent years (MacBook, Acer, Dell, Toshiba) Linux was a hot, noisy battery hog. I learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know about powertop, CPU states, generations of power management daemons and kernel modules, USB drivers and whatnot. I got a lot of things to work but it has never worked nearly as well as Windows on the same machine. Sleep/resume is also extremely spotty.

Recently I made a half hearted attempt to install Ubuntu on my iMac. I got nothing but a blank screen after booting up the installation CD.

If you don't have any issues with Windows as a dev platform I can only assume that you don't work in C/C++ much or your code targets only Windows. And if Windows really got a great node.js port only this week you're making my point for me.
Hehe... Thanks for catching my error. That should have read: "1 MB" or "1024 KB".
Could it? Yes.
Should it? No (My opinion).
Would it? No (I highly doubt it).

As for your interior question of why it hasn't been replicated for other topics, I don't think it's simple enough to replicated. HN isn't monetized traditionally so there isn't a successful business model to replicate unless you include the entire company of Y Combinator.
To all the Linode recommenders: If localization were not critical, which data center would you choose? I know enough from recent news to stay away from Freemont (IIRC), California. What about Texas versus Georgia versus, I seem to recall, one on the East Coast in the neighborhood of New Jersey.

I'm focusing on the U.S. If there's an argument for using one of their overseas centers, though, I'd be interested in hearing it.

Thanks. I'm in a similar position of maybe about to give Linode a go.
If memory serves AS2 was supposed to be more or less the same as ecmascript 4. The problem is ecmascript 4 never made it out of committee. With the reboot in the ecmascript committee that produced the harmony release, we're now on the road to get optional strict typing. For me the typing is the only thing really missing from javascript.

You can get quite far on the way to strict typing with a good IDE like jetbrains. It has very thorough 'compile time' checks (while editing). I almost don't miss strict typing when writing large pieces of javascript in jetbrains.
It hasn't changed much because it is working great for a very well connected sub-set of our society.
You're thinking of Flash Lite, but that's not what everyone is freaking out about. Adobe has, in fact, stopped development of the exact "REAL" Flash Player for mobile (tablet and smartphone) browsers that you refer to.
And for time conversions:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6:30+am+ist+in+austin+t...
If you want something fixed, changed, or added, simply file a bug radar.

Apple does certain things for a reason. If you disagree with Apple's reasoning behind something specific and want to change it, then change it yourself. Most commenters complaining about OS X can count the number of grievances they have with their fingers.
What planet are you on? Have you ever viewed a youtube video before? Fire up activity monitor and watch a youtube video -- your cpu utilization will hover around 30%. Poorly coded apps have much higher cpu utilization. However, if you fire up youtube videos on windows, the cpu utilization barely goes above 3%.

If you visit a site like teevox.com where the flash app takes up the majority of the screen, the cpu utilization hovers around 150% -- your fan cranks on and your laptop becomes a mini space heater. Try it in windows and again, the utilization barely goes above 5%.
What do you think would happen to a Mexican police officer and his family if he tried to simply "just do his job"?

There is a reason the police are the ones wearing ski masks down there: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WO-AG531_MEXICO_G_...
Who cares about the justification. The major problem with it is that the behaviour is unpredictable. You have no idea what is going to happen when you push that button for a given app. In some apps, they'll go full screen. A browser might resize to fit the current web page. iTunes actually shrinks down to a mini control window.

So now in order to use this button if a useful manner the user has to remember exactly what it does for any given application.
I can certainly blame Microsoft for Microsoft libraries that don't install on its own operating system cleanly, and requires a Microsoft-issued fix.
OpenCalais Semantic Web Failure
Actually, it is possible to write a compression program that can compress any file, even random data, by one byte: http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/barf.html

(See if you can spot the evil trick.)
"each successive release ... buggier"

Snow Leopard was more solid than Leopard. Lion followed Snow Leopard and does admittedly have more bugs. A "streak" of one isn’t a streak at all.
Oh come on its $0.99 - hardly much to ask considering the amount of time and effort thats been spent on the app.
60 Tips For An Amazing Life
> "Cloud" is what marketing and non-technical people use. I'm ok with that.

I would assume this means he'll use the general "cloud" term when talking with non-geeks.

Technical people should know that [SPI]aaS are specific parts of the "cloud." Within technical communities, the correct terms should be used to avoid ambiguity. It's about knowing your audience and making sure they can relate to you.
That renders like shit on my Droid X.
On the other hand, NeXT's main source of revenue was WebObjects, something Apple wasn't really interested in marketing. The operating system was pretty much a back catalog item.
People like to blame everything on Windows, including "I dropped my laptop down the stairs and now it doesn't work right" type stuff. I think if Microsoft had replaced the blue screen with a message that instead said "Your $PC-MAKER computer is a piece of crap, buy a $OTHER-PC instead." nobody would actually complain about Windows.

[a general comment, not directly related to lewisham's problem.]
Money feed
"It would stop a significant amount of the violence as explained by the fucking article."

I'm sorry, I read the article and I disagree. I'm merely giving a different view and you have to get all angry about it. You should use more logic and less emotion when dealing with issues like this.

"The most fucking locked down place on Earth. If you can't eradicate it there how do you plan on eradicating it outside?"

I never said anything about eradicating it. I'm saying that the decrease in Cocaine prices might have to do with the increase in the corruption of Mexican officials.
http://dev.sencha.com/animator/demos/kickfu/

Sencha is aiming their animator product at replacing flash animations with html5. They have a long way to go, but it's not an impossible thing.
I've never installed SW:tOR on a Mac, so I can't say for sure, but I've never corrupted my operating system by installing an application before. That kind of bullshit actually is the fault of the OS.