skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Assess a Security Vendor on the Sitting-Duck Scale
Good point, well made. In reality, the situation in your example of a multi-line queue is not usually as dire as your example portrays, because the delayed people in queue #1 are likely to jump ship sometime after the other two queues. have cleared. Nonetheless, this queue-jumping behaviour confuses the circulation pattern and causes congestion in the vicinity of the tills, which itself slows down the throughput. There's no doubt that a single-file call-forward queue is more efficient for both the customers and the shop.

One point I didn't see made in the article: single-file queues are also a fair amount more space-efficient, which has value to retailer that is separate from the issue of throughput. This spatial opportunity cost is something that also needs to be considered when designing a queuing system.

I've seen subtle & sophisticated studies which do say that customers prefer multi-line queues to single-line queues, but I rarely see any that bring the other factors into play. Retailers really should base their decisions on the following formula:

average revenue per customer * (% improved customer throuhgput - % of customers you'll lose because of multi-line queues) + extra retail m^2 * average revenue per m^2

In most cases, you'll find that that the value of a single-line queue is a good deal greater than the value of a multi-line queue. So this is one of those cases where it's likely a good idea to not cater to customer preferences.

(I'll also note that single-line queues are much more common here in the UK than in the US; I've become quite accustomed to them and in fact dread multi-line queues and the inevitable idiots that I get stuck behind in them. It seems likely to me that a large part of the American aversion to them is simply a bias against the unfamiliar; this is likely to subside as they become more accustomed to it.)
"Evernote primarily makes money by paying customers"

How exactly is this business model profitable for them?
I think his point is the original JooJoo design, which he provides, looked a lot less like the iPad.
It's better for page views if you keep the sensational false quote.
Do you have any evidence that the European design laws were intended to protect against consumer confusion? All the evidence I have seen is that the laws were intended to protect designers of a product sold in country A from copycats in country B. That way you can start on a small scale in Denmark (say), and if it catches on, ramp up and sell throughout the EU.
Review my startup: Automate registration, sign-in and checkout.
Dashlane is an app for both Mac and PC: the idea is to have a very secure app where you can store all sorts of data (addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, passwords, etc) and browser plugins that allow you to use this data without having to type it in. Our concept is further described in this video here: https://www.dashlane.com/en/epiphany

Several key points about our security:

- Each Dashlane user has a master password, solely used to encrypt data locally and another key for each device used for authentication against Dashlane’s servers

- The Master password is derived using more than 10,000 PBKDF2 rounds with a 32 bytes random salt to produce the encryption key used to encrypt user’s data locally. Encryption algorithm used is AES-256 (CBC mode).

- Neither the Master Password nor any derivative of it is ever sent to or stored on our servers, nor locally on your computer. When synchronized, personal data are sent encrypted to our servers.

If you are interested in details about our security, here's a white paper that explains in technical words exactly what we do:
https://www.dashlane.com/download/Security-Whitepaper-Final-Nov-2011.pdf

Anyway, I would love to have HNers testing our product, so I have 300 invites for those who would be interested: https://www.dashlane.com/hackernews.

Please let me know what you think about it, the Dashlane team and me would be happy to talk with you.
Digital certificate authority suspends ops following breach
I tend to agree with the idea that Google Circles is broken. The problem is that one also needs the reverse. I, as a content producer, need to be able to specify to those that I’m sharing with what it is that I’m sharing with them. This way, content consumers can choose to follow the items in my stream belonging to a certain category (or circle or whatever you want to call it).

As an example, I would like to be able to follow Ryan Dahl and get content from his stream regarding Node.js. I don’t however, need to read about him standing in front of some skulls: https://plus.google.com/115094562986465477143/posts/CEMdcTeE.... Currently, there’s almost zero information in his stream that I care about, but the only way for me to get to that information is to let all of it pass through my stream.
Twitter: Yours to discover
But not for the one that supports expiry:

https://github.com/igrigorik/bloomfilter-rb/blob/master/lib/...

As the point is to use Redis's expiration feature, which obviously does not apply to individual bits.
I love his videos. I wish he would make more. The harddrive one was interesting.
Hackers Redefined
Sure, if the line perfectly rebalances then three lines is almost identical to the single line.

BUT as I'm sure you know, it's sometimes hard to know when to move. Is it after you've waited one minute, then hop to the back of another line?

Let me give you a concrete example: Imagine you enter a line with 15 people in it. Your line moves 14 people through perfectly. You're next, but the guy in front of you takes longer -- maybe he can't make up his mind about wanting some bubble gum. Do you hop to the back of another line and wait 15 more minutes (because the average queue length is 15m) or do you wait it out while this guy in front of you goes? How long will this guy take? 1 more minute or 30 minutes?

And of course, once you hop to the back of another line, the guy from your previous line finishes, and there's someone else in your new line who takes forever. Then you're even more upset that you switched lines!! :-)

With a single line you remove the need for an oracle, which you need for the n-line scenario.
FROM paying customers he meant, vs ad-supported free customers
Romanian Nationals Charged in Multimillion Dollar Point-of-Sale Hacking Scheme
Thanks, good idea. I've got he and Mitchell Wand's well-known Essentials of Programming Languages and it taught me a ton.

You're right about the conciseness of RS miniKanren - it's just two pages in the "Connecting the Wires" part of the text.
Agreed, I have it on my phone, but I never really started using it in other areas. Currently I could really use a program like this to organize my notes (rather than emailing them back and forth and having no availablility on Iphone). All this huge praise for Evernote (although apparently only in Tokyo and Silicon Valley) makes it seem like a good solution, but outside of this Company of the year business, I haven't heard much since I got the app ~6 months ago.
> Why needlessly set CPU affinity

There are practical reasons to do that. That is common in realtime systems. Trying to isolate the cpu for a particular process. So that is available faster when that process needs it. You could also have n-realtime processes. You don't want them competing for the same CPU if you know ahead of time you can allocate a CPU for each one of them.

Another reason is caching. For example you can assign a CPU to process network interrupt requests from a particular network device. Then you might or might not want to also assign the process that consumes that data to that CPU.
This is really cool; I love to use Bash for a lot of simple scripts, but having more complex data objects would be Very useful!
You could also look at YUI. YUI3 is built from the bottom up with that mentality: keep a file for each class, merge them in the build stage into one module file and serve all modules combined automatically.
I'll warrant quite a few HN readers weren't born when Apple started investing in tablet computing.
INet for OS X & iOS Reveals Devices on Your Network
Ah, I read the original wish as "sleep in a healthy way", instead of "skip meals or sleep". I probably need some sleep myself.
Pick one that seems cool. Build something with it. Share it on HN; you will get comments like "Cool-- but why are you using X instead of Y?"

Repeat using Y.
i think there is an argument to be made that your gifted program sucked because it had basically no resources, probably as a result of budgeting decisions.
In Response to Thiel's 'End of the Future' Essay
We need AI to control our planes.
Imagine a world where Bash supports JSON.
Remarkably similar in design to hyper-threading. Lol!
Twitter redesign
Imagine if the shell script had been written in a literate way? :)
Americans use shared cars all the time. They're called taxis. Also, ZipCars, rental cars, shuttle busses...
> Large portions of society are waiting for the chance to lose themselves in a deterministic, programmed world that is more pleasurable than their reality. It's terrifying to consider the ramifications of this. If you can plug in, feed yourself some poptarts and hydrate every 8 hours, and otherwise float in limbo being someone you love more than your real self, we're going to see entire classes of people disappear, just like my WoW friends that I'll probably never chat with again.

You're describing the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's `Snow Crash'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

Read it. It's fun.
I think a big part of the "company of the year" bit is because they've done something most people thought wasn't possible-- build a big business charging consumers. It's refreshing!

I don't know much about their business, but I'm guessing they are sacrificing a lot of revenue/profit for growth.

They could probably double their conversion by slowly dialing down the awesomeness of the free version in favor of the paid version. Could they do advertising/leadgen to their massive free audience? I'm skeptical, but it's a big/untapped asset. Is the data asset interesting? You never know.

They are clearly onto something-- I saw a comment here was someone said, "it's as important to me as email."
Isn't there a middle ground where you can remain in the spirit of literate programming but still use libraries? It seems like that would be the best way . That seems like it would handle the biggest critique of the article unless I'm missing the point.
You can run pretty much any JS library on Node with jsdom https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom/
> assuming you gave them a generous valuation on 20x revenue and completely neglect profitability.

The fact that this is a fashionable valuation tells me everything I need to know about the market.
In the UK, Tesco and other grocery retailers do this. I've seen this in place in the USA at the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle (an enormously crowded store that moves along well).

Based on these data points, it would seem as though more crowded places use this optimization.
But it fulfills most of the things apple is claiming that Samsung infringed upon except the color black.
Indeed. Bindings are just triggers that makes sure the data model is in sync with the view. It's just for convenience.

There is also a model binding plugin to Backbone: https://github.com/derickbailey/backbone.modelbinding
Great point, thx.
Thanks for the great summary. I also read the full BEA report which was very informative.

Is there ever a situation in a commercial plane where a stall would be a good thing? My non-pilot brain is trying to figure out why the plane would allow a stall even in alternate law mode.

I'm sure the Airbus user interface designers know what they are doing, but wouldn't it be possible to make stall protection always enabled, and then add a failsafe requiring both pilots to press a button to override stall protection? Then they would both have to consciously do a physical act to enter this dangerous state.
All along, I've been hoping that the average person would start to take computers seriously and make an honest effort to learn what is going on with them... since the average person has started using computers throughout the day, unlike say, 1992.

However, this has not happened and indeed, people are pleased to obliviously broadcast their personal details across their neighborhood without even considering 'if I can pick this up, can my neighbor next door listen in?'. They'd probably figure it out if it was just a radio, right?

Security hazards of unsecured (or poorly secured, say WEP) wifi has been known for some time, of course. My current favorite is coffee shop that don't use AP isolation... nothing is more exciting than eavesdropping on students doing their nursing homework.
It's being rolled out slowly. Target in Emeryville has a rather advanced queuing system like this, but customers definitely don't like it and don't necessarily realize it's faster, perhaps because Target has less cashiers as a result of the decreased wait.

Edit: Yelp says this line system has been eliminated. http://www.yelp.com/biz/target-emeryville-2
> It looks like Dart is going to become native on the WebKit Browser.

No, the actual WebKit mailing list shows the exact opposite. Opposition (mainly from Apple) was quite strong, and it looks like Google will not be able to do this as a WebKit branch.

Instead, it will be a branch somewhere outside WebKit apparently. In that respect it will be like several other Google-specific technologies that are in Chrome but not WebKit, like NaCl and Pepper.
There's interesting work on queuing theory. In practice, each shopper picks the queue that she thinks is least loaded. How many queue lengths do you need to sample? It turns out that if you sample just two queue lengths, you get a huge benefit (in terms of reducing the avg queue length), but not so much if you sample more.

See "Power of two random choices": http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook20...

EDIT: link
Twitter Redesigns Around Four Concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover, Me
fuck Amber.js
I seriously doubt they are using IE. Using Google Chrome, I can't resize text either. On Firefox, I can though.
Besides the other reasons, retailers have incentives to keep you in the store as long as possible without you getting so annoyed you won't come back, especially near the checkout where they put their most shiny things out for you to impulse buy.
To Remain On Top, The U.S. Needs To Start Protecting Its Design IP
The Download Dot-Con
"Fortunately, SproutCore 2.0 was going to fix a lot of that. Only now it isn't. Do we have two half-baked, related frameworks? Are they kinda ports of each other? Is SproutCore 1.x now deprecated? And how confusing will it be when SproutCore 1.x upgrades to a not-AmberJS SproutCore 2.x?"

SproutCore 2.0 becomes Amber. We'll be moving the code into the amberjs organization today. The SproutCore folks, who are now focusing on native-style applications, will be carrying the torch on the (not deprecated) SproutCore 1.x.
Ask HN: No money, can't find any jobs, what am I doing wrong?
HN.

I am a semi avid reader, a programmer, and a college student in the midwest USA (Ohio).

I am in a bind.

I consider myself a frontend programmer, Html, Css, Javascript (mainly) and I primarily work on web apps. I use node.js for the backend, but I also know php (started with php web dev years ago). I am not a bad programmer, but I could be better (can't we all?).

For the past 2 months I have been living off of savings and petty cash primarily. I cannot find a job. With my location, I am pretty much confined to doing remote freelance work, which limits the positions substantially. However it is my understanding that front end developers are in fairly high demand. I must be doing something wrong. I know that I am a fairly good programmer, so I do not think my skill set is the limiting factor.

I don't have a github, I always just work on my own projects that I host, never spent the time (or really wanted to) put the code on github. I know a lot of employers look for that however.

I have a online portfolio/resume (past work, skills, about me, etc) all on one page.

I mainly don't know where to find jobs. I'm mainly limited to the Who is hiring threads on HN and craigslist job posts, neither of which have been very fruitful.

I'm going to need to get a non web dev job soon, which I'd rather not do. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Should I learn RoR or Python? Any thoughts?

Thanks
Learning From Failure, Wise Words from Bill Gross
How did you decide to acquire it back, if I may ask?
I would hope nobody would value a company like that. I pulled that multipier out of the air for what seems both absurd and reasonable.
Cappuccino's @import does this really well: it is both asynchronous and blocking. In other words, having three @imports one after the other will all load in parallel (without having to explicitly request it, even if they are separated by other lines of code), but the code itself will not execute until the imports are done:

@import "one.js" // loaded in parallel to the other two
@import "two.js" // loaded in parallel to the other two

code code code // this is run only after one.js and two.js (but not three.js) have been loaded and run

@import "three.js" // loaded in parallel to the other two
With the exception of JFK.
So. Adding stuff like the canvas tag (added to webkit to display dashboard widgets) and CSS transforms (ditto) is ok because they were going to submit them as standards anyways.

But adding another language besides JS is not ok because that would be bad for the web.

Now, personally I don't care about dart, but I know that I had the same bad feeling back in the day when Safari learned the then nonstandard canvas tag than I have now when it should learn the nonstandard scripting language.

I do find it hypocritical though to allow one and disallow the other.
I actually felt pain in my head. Real pain, not virtual. :)
These are the kinds of things that arise from mixing another interest or skill with programming. A knitter wouldn't think of doing this, and neither would a programmer, but a knitter-programmer comes up with this great idea.
Why the downvotes? I'm serious. If cars start lasting 600k+ miles and are shared by multiple drivers and families, car companies will ‘need’ to recoup their losses. Expect prices of car components (the stuff that wears out) to skyrocket, and patent litigation to get rid of the after-market/3rd-party compatible components.
How do you keep hosting costs down for 100 sites with each bringing in ~$30/mo?
I've been meaning to start taking lessons so I can get a private pilot's license, but it's hard when you live in downtown Chicago without a car. There are a couple schools at MDW, but you'll eventually have to drive to the suburbs as MDW does not let students fly solo out of the airport. Probably for good reason :)
Amazon starts $6M fund to boost Kindle’s indie authors and publishers
Number one thing I learned from this -- don't write code in bash ...
Then they have to fight! You can't delegate responsibility to the "system" to resolve such a fight. A fight is a fight. And if it's happening, you can't automagically get rid of the fight.
Does Empower Network Help New Bloggers
What offline hassles have you encountered recently?
some examples:

finding a taxi cab during peak hours (uber), ordering lunch for your office (zerocater), finding a place to sleep when hotels are sold out (airbnb)
human driven cars will be illegal in less than 20 years

I think this is very unlikely. Maybe 20 years from the commercial introduction of driverless cars, or 10 years from when they are the default?
Sneaky (and smart) Ways To Advance Your Career During Holiday Season
I wonder if they have a patent on using an automated natural language processing system to fight patent trolls.
Wood Cabin Kits from Timberblock
Ah yes it is 2 pages, I've edited my comment above, believe it or not they actually have reduced it even further to roughly a page and a half. I was really inspired by the extreme dedication and passion it takes to look at a full logic programming implementation in 2 pages of code and say "nope, we can do better". Dan is definitely one of my all time heroes.
I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted. Although I don't feel you necessarily need to share it on HN, the best way is the build some simple apps and find out for yourself what the libraries are all about.
Many people usually looks at design from design features perspective rather than the subtleness of it. After all, they're all rectangular with bezels and screen in the middle. It can't be much different, right?

However once you start looking in details there will be a lot of differences, subtle or not. Are the bezels and screens completely flat in a single piece? What are the visual featuring of buttons? How black/white it is? etc.
i would love to augment my behavior with a little algorithmic discipline.
A well written and well reasoned writeup.

From what I have read here and elsewhere, it looks to me like there are 3 possible outcomes from every startup(or business for that matter):
1)death/folding/quitting (probably the most likely outcome--although it doesn't have to be)
2)Being bought out and becoming part of another company's product(the goal of many in SV)
3)Growth into a sustainable business

Not taking outside funding forces the founder to really concentrate on those aspects of the business that can evolve the business into 3), a self-sustaining business.
So what happens if I lose / don't remember my Master password ? If it's used to encrypt my data I suppose you can't reset it ?
There's even the theory that addiction to video games helps explain the Fermi paradox:

http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_print.html#miller

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550112
One of my primary use-cases is to save web pages that I wouldn't want to necessarily bookmark, which I normally do for frequently visited pages. Then, I can search saved notes (which searches page content too!) for whatever I need.
It is possible that they are making $18M this year and just hit 750k users. In which case, growth is skewing things. So if they had 500k users a year ago, many of the new users might still be on monthly plans, without bring the account life down that low.
I know they are just bloggers. But it is funny that they only want to be called 'just bloggers' when they fuck up and journalists when they want to be taken seriously.

"Real" journalists make mistakes all the time. Haven't you noticed that just about every newspaper or magazine ever printed had a "corrections" section where they corrected mistakes in previous editions / issues?
Speaking as a foreigner who spent one year in a US high-school, I was shocked that both disabled students and non-disabled students were in the same school.

To me it was obvious this was bad for both, but especially the disabled students who could be served much better in a specialized school.

But then once I learned more US history regarding segregating different groups of people... well I still think it's a bad way to go, but now at least I understand why it is that way.

In other countries disabled students attend specialized schools who provide them with a much better level of services. The concentration of students with disabilities allows for the concentration of people with advance and specialized skills. This not usually possible in a standard school, where only a very small number of students is disabled.
And if anyone was wondering, it's not exactly new. When did I learn the proof that single queue is faster than multi-queue? In undergrad 20 years ago. And yet so many multi-queue setups out there...
Whether or not these conclusions are accurate, Groupon at least in the UK does appear to be very fishy.

The sheer number of "business consultants" (read: graduates doing sales) they are listing jobs for (http://jobs.groupon.co.uk/) is staggering and points very much towards a deluded sense of their own scope.