skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Stenography is a good idea, though.

Steganography is provably secure but requires a lot of cover data and careful implementation.

Steganography is less useful for most purposes than most people want.
Fixing the Python subprocess interface
Well I think people are interested in the story, it's like girls that like to watch a girls serie, like to gossip.

That said the "tech" relevance of the story isn't that big & I feel bad for Curebit, I read DHH 's post on twitter about it yesterday & although they are making incredible stupid mistakes, one public flame is enough, they're also just trying to start a company.
"doesn't this mean that there are perhaps tens of thousands of engineers who are on average producing $1m/year in revenue?"

No. Just because total revenue divided by total headcount comes out to a million doesn't mean every engineer is contributing a million. For one thing, a lot of that revenue is return on investment - in the code, in customer relationships, in the "brand" generally - in previous years, nothing to do with current headcount. For another, the distribution is exponential. A few people contribute many times that million, while the majority contribute less, and many of those at the high end aren't engineers. So yes, engineers who contribute a million dollars to the bottom line do exist, but they're a very small minority. I've even been one myself, but not every year. Everyone in SV seems to think they're firmly established in that elite category. 99% of them are wrong.

"If one of these $1m revenue/year ("1MRPY") engineers starts a company with n 1MRPY engineer friends, is it so crazy to suggest that they might produce $x * n million worth of value over x years?"

It's not totally crazy, but it's very unlikely. Such engineers are rare enough, and in such high demand, and self-directed enough, that you're unlikely to get more than a couple of them to follow one vision even if you're friends. Then you have to find people with non-engineering skill sets who are as good in their respective fields, and convince them to join you. Then you'll probably still fail due to factors other than the quality of your personnel.

What we're facing here is the compounding of two errors. Everyone thinks they're in the top 1%, and that being in the top 1% for one skill set is enough to ensure success. In reality, most startups have average teams and many non-technical obstacles to overcome. I've been in nine startups myself. I'd hardly discourage anyone from trying, but overconfidence can prevent people from doing what they really need to, and overconfidence seems to be California's most abundant crop.
EE Buzz for DesignCon
Right now the CPU usage of a project I'm working on is dominated by PNG compression. An alternative with significantly faster compression times would be very useful. I'll be watching this closely, and hope that it becomes possible to decode IZ images in the browser (or implement it myself).
Only if they have a sufficiently flexible bandwidth contract.
Cool concept, I can imagine this getting into enterprise emails everywhere.

Anyone interested in rolling their own should check out Movable Ink (http://movableink.com) -- dynamic content for email.
what is starting strength getting downvoted?
The thing about Emacs is really its extensibility. There is simply no other text editor out there that can open a single C/C++ source file and automatically infer all tags (even of included headers) without any kind of project set up. That is simply awesome and to my knowledge only available with semantic-mode in Emacs.

Vim can use ctags or cscope or clang, but that is not the same thing. These are great tools, but they need to be set up with the correct include paths and they need to be run regularly to be useful.

To my mind, that is what makes Emacs so unique and powerful and that is something that really, no other program can hope to accomplish in a short time frame (sorry, Sublime Text).

That said, Vim hands down beats Emacs when it comes to pure text editing speed. It's keybindings are just a lot more powerful and flexible than Emacs's. And of course, that is what evil-mode is for. It emulates a subset of Vim in Emacs. It is by far the best simulation of Vim I have ever seen (judging from ViEmu, Viper, Vintage, Vico and Vimpulse), but it is not the real thing. Plus, there are lots of great Vim plugins that do not work in evil-mode.

I, for one, use Emacs and Evil and I am happy with it.

And I hope that Sublime Text will provide a potent entry-level drug for the next generation. But really, without open sourcing it at some point, I can't see it catching up to The Big Two.
Google Fires Keyna Lead Over Mocality Scandal
I don't know, but isn't the point to get the situation taken care of? Methinks the band might have ulterior motives that have nothing to do with copyright.

And when did I say they should be ignored?
Hey there! I'm a 2x Tar Heel and the Founder/CEO at http://argylesocial.com in Durham. Shoot me a note via @ericboggs or http://ericboggs.com - I'd love to meet up.
Composite keys (multi-dimensional) and distributed counters were not in the Dynamo paper. They were added to Cassandra, which is indeed based partially on Dynamo.
What if authorities cannot distinguish between such utterances and bad jokes? (Obviously they can't)
I think, many people would change the way they communicate, if a single silly tweet can have legal consequences or even can destroy their lives.
FoundersBox - Startup apps delivered to your inbox every month
Why Google+ is a Fail.
How To Build Your Own 3D Printer
Earlier I had used dovecot+postfix for my personal email system. The advantages are that if you roll your own you can do whatever the heck you want.

Huge disadvantage (other than the fact that power, static IP etc are all your problem) is that a LOT of email providers will think you are spam.

Now I use SES for outgoing (for my app) and Gmail for incoming. Works a lot better. I remember reading that Gmail lets you write filters and what not as well, but I have not examined it in detail. I'm sure its do-able.
One one hand we have "IP theft is ok" and on the other "IP thieves! Get them!"

People don't care too much about "stealing" IP for your own viewing/listening enjoyment.

They do care if you're stealing it and re-publishing it as part of your own product without the proper permissions.

There's no contradiction here.
Left in 2008 as well, last time I went back I was first denied entry because my American passport (issued a few months previous in Frankfurt) was "invalid". After some haggling I convinced them that indeed, it was a valid passport, and they should check their computer that in fact I was who I said I was. Eventually, after about ten minutes questioning, I was allowed in. Being of nth-generation pilgrim descent apparently didn't matter.

Fast forward to landing in Germany, where I was not only not a citizen, I wasn't even a permanent resident. After looking at my passport for all of about two seconds, I was whisked through the border.

It sucks to be treated like a criminal in your own country, but it's what the US has come to for everyone now. Sure has been that way for, at various times, native americans, blacks, the irish, hispanics, chinese, whatever. But now instead of treating everyone like a free citizen, the decision has been made to treat us all like potential criminals.
For receiving email, why would you want to donate your bandwidth costs to spammers? I understand the desire to use Postfix though, so just use Gmail, or even Pobox (which has adjustable spam settings), then forward to your own server with some whitelisting in place. Then at least you've cut your bandwidth by about 99%.

For sending email, there are some steps for DNS and signing missing here that can result in your email going to spam with the major ISPs. It looks like he was going to add Domain Keys in v6 but abandoned it.
I would just like to add that for hardgainers, the biggest thing to change is the amount of food you eat [i.e. eat a lot more than normal]
interesting, although I think this code creates a copy of the original object’s properties rather than proxying them. Mind you, that could be what you want some times...
Lengthy previous discussion (still on the front page):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3528138
Show HN: GuideKit - Build Awesome Documentation with Ease
As a Uruguay national, I can't "just cross".

I have to apply for a visa, and at the time there was a significant chance of it being denied - and forget about being refunded, and chances of it being accepted after re-applying drop dramatically. So it isn't worth it.

I could probably be accepted for a visa now since I "settled down".

And Canadian customs and inmigration were very friendly, I don't doubt the U.S. people might be the same (though they did fingerprint my father the time he was there, and he reported a few not so friendly times, and he is a frequent visitor).
Vassar computer error incorrectly informs 72 applicants they're accepted
Yes, but the Dynamo paper offers two operations Get(key) and Set(key, value). Anything Cassandra adds atop that they did themselves i.e. column families, secondary indices.
I recently switched from Emacs to Vim, because Emacs is pretty much unusable on an iPhone or iPad. Vim seems pretty good on a touchscreen. There are things I miss but as a former Emacs snob I'm pleasantly surprised at how powerful and extensible Vim is.
Calling any of these things programming is a huge stretch. Most highly paid, highly skilled workers do not need to know programming.
It's not programming in a sense that justifies a plumber learning C, Java, or Ruby.

I think we're talking about something beyond the old concept of "computer literacy" here. Any future plumbers are going to have grown up using iPhones, and will have the basic skills needed for the limited interactions they'll have with computers in their jobs.

Until they're replaced by robot plumbers, anyway.
I really like the "try to have at least two internships: one at a small start-up and one at a tech company" sentiment. Internships aren't just for your resume, they're for you to figure out what areas in the business you like and to gain a variety of skills and experiences.
There is a windows binary in this thread (obviously try with caution)

http://encode.ru/threads/1471-iz-New-fast-lossless-RGB-photo...
> Bringing up obvious concerns or problems is met more with a "why are you poo pooing my optimism buzz?"

Haha, I had to learn this bigtime coming from NYC. East Coast culture is kind of 'half-empty-cup-first' thinking, then the other party is expected to prove their point. Out here it's more like 'my cup runneth over!' then you say 'yeah dude, that is totally awesome'. (pause) 'BTW, have you thought about this little issue? I'm sure it's nothing, but you should have a good response in case some wanker VC brings it up..' then you gently drop da bomb that their idea is wildly unworkable.

Very different cultures -- not just in hi-tech, this is a deep east coast/northern CA differential.
a few features of the UI are cool, especially the pinch open list to add a new item.
The UI has been designed to work great on tablets and it also works pretty well on a phone (albeit a tad crammed). We'll probably do something more dedicated for mobile after launch.
Lovotics, an update on the science of human-robot love
I'm coming here from a slightly different angle, as a computer engineer, but here's how I see it.

If you're going to work at a tiny little startup of 2-3 people, maybe they can't pay you. Of course, maybe they shouldn't be hiring interns at that stage of the game. I worked as an intern for a startup that size, though, and they still paid me $15/hour.

If you're working somewhere larger, it only makes sense that they should pay you if you're doing work of value. Telling you it's all about the experience is like that oft-told story where clients want web designers to work for free, because it's "good exposure" and will "expand your portfolio".

As an intern, I've laid out, soldered, and debugged PCBs, designed and assembled test equipment setups, made fiber optic cables, tested cameras for surveillance drones, re-written UIs to use WPF, done significant kernel hacking, and published several papers, among other things. All of these tasks generated value for my employers, and it only makes sense that they should pay me for it.

That's just my 2 cents, though.
Persisting has_many associations on a Rails service with Backbone Collections
Intel Leads $20M Investment in Cyber Security Firm
The Rise of the Toilet Texter
A couple of things,

As many know the #ident tag in 'C' code was used with SCCS (pre-cursor to git/svn/cvs/etc) to create a string in the 'binary' which identified the code. In shell scripts it just sat there.

The change in the ident string where it gets the 'SMI' is when the version was from 'Sun Microsystems Inc' (aka SMI).

The reason Solaris included it was because it was part of the 'merge' between SunOS and System V and Sun had permission to all of the AT&T copyrights with respect to UNIX once they became 'partners' (AT&T invested essentially a billion dollars in Sun).
Okay, maybe you don't mean to, but this sounds a little talky-pointy to me. Who's against allowing people to make up their own minds and bring new ideas to life? Most of the people I know who talk that way live on K Street.

If you want to avoid sounding like a lobbyist, address the heart of what someone is saying. Who denied you think regs are important?

The point was that effective regulation is very likely _impossible_ at a cost consistent with the scale available at these funding levels. How do we regulate a bunch of these things, from a variety of sources, inside the budgets available to them? I don't see it.
I would describe myself as a pretty proficient and comfortable user of Vim and I have switched to Other Editors for short and long periods of time. Really, switching text editors is like switching languages: Every time you learn a new language, you also learn a new way to think and express yourself.

Vim is absolutely awesome, however it is but one way of editing text. Other methods have their own merits and incorporating their styles in your workflow will make you more proficient in the long run even if you eventually come back to Vim.
Do you think you'd have learned less at a paid internship?
http://skulpture.maxiom.de/playground/list-iz.txt

They tried it on the same benchmark as this list

http://www.imagecompression.info/gralic/LPCB.html

Of course it's meaningless without the time to decompress on there but it has to be done on the same machine as the master benchmark list.
I wrote a similar article not too long ago:

http://www.writemoretests.com/2011/09/test-driven-developmen...
I think you mean steganography. "Stenography" is writing down what someone is saying.
There is one other reason that I knew would always keep me in the Vim and Emacs world. At first I couldn't figure out what it was that bothered me about SublimeText 2. Vim and Emacs is open source! I don't see this point mentioned in arguments for or against but this is important to me.

I agree, especially after witnessing TextMate go stale and TextMate2 start to follow the Duke Nukem Forever release schedule. When I see a project like IntelliJ, I'm confident they will be around awhile. Looking at TextMate and SublimeText... I'm a little hesitant. The development muscle doesn't appear very robust. If a lead developer (or the only developer) gets hit by a bus is the project going to disappear?
Gates gets pharma giants to promise drug giveaways and pledge to share research
Using SpecFlow to drive Selenium WebDriver Tests
After Being Outed For ‘Stealing’ Code, Artist Claims Curebit Stole His Music
Still awaiting the release of Cinco…
In my experience if management isn't asking the question, then its a dead issue. At a large company I worked at - data analysis was flat out rejected. I've been told to stop doing and return to standard procedure using heuristics .
Even something as simple as introducing a new data model - at a large company I've been told that "my future replacement" wouldn't understand it. Management looking for continuity will not accept new ways of doing things.
I realize that you can lose your business if your equipment is confiscated and so forth, but isn't this akin to a temporary injunction? These stop a suspected-within-reason on-going crime and do not require a full trial to be placed. I don't know how long a temporary injunction lasts or what is considered reasonable, but every time I see the argument about shutting down the business, I am reminded of the temporary remedy. Perhaps it is abused in this case. IANAL and have little idea of what I am talking about, so please correct me on the legality here if you know better.
Indeed, I should have paid more attention to my spell checker which does not recognize "steganography". Thanks.
How to disable Tabbed Browsing feature in Internet Explorer 9?
> at least in California you're getting something for your money. DC

Not in Palo Alto or any of the desirable bay suburbs. You get what would in any other part of the country be a starter 3-bed with 1/10 acre plot for upwards of $2M. It's insane and unsustainable.
It does seem fairly common for people to think that their profession is something everyone needs to know, and sometimes the arguments are even pretty good. I've met several lawyers who believe that everyone should be legally trained, at least to a basic level, because the impact of law is so pervasive in modern society (even here on HN, a good portion of our discussions are about law).
The Impact of BYOD on IT
Just use ":" in BASH.
I think the reasoning the feds use is it prevents the suspect from destroying evidence, and/or stops the activity from continuing to 'harm' the public.
> Remember you are testing what it does, not how it does it.

While I tend to agree with you (I strongly prefer black-box testing over white-box testing), this is a hotly debated topic and many people feel quite strongly the opposite.

You can Google around and find many advocates for white box unit tests. Martin Fowler's article from several years ago I think does an excellent job of presenting a balanced look at both sides: http://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html
Can't agree enough. For me, internships were largely about being able to say "Okay, now I know I don't want to do that." Places I interned:

* Quigo (acquired by AOL) twice, before and after freshman year

* AMD, after sophomore year

* Goldman Sachs (as a developer), after junior year

* Microsoft, between the two years of my MS

* NASA, while doing my MS

I'm not trying to name drop, but to point out that I optimized for diversity and to emphasize how valuable this was. I worked for a startup (at two different sizes), an EE company, a bank, a big software company, and as an researcher at a government agency. Ultimately this helped me figure out what I wanted to do after school (work on my startup, then go to Google). I could easily have ended up doing something miserable (like going to Goldman - which would be miserable for me, at least) if I hadn't sampled so widely.
Philip - unpaid internships are not inherently evil, but the market for tech interns is strong enough that most everybody should be able to find a paying internship. It's a different standard in tech - the only interns not being paid are the ones nobody told better.
What separates the Dentist from the bank teller? Clearly ATM's have drastically reduced the need for Bank tellers, yet nobody seems that concerned about it. More generally, I suspect there is always going to be gap’s when as a field gets automated. As the more complex the task the harder it is to automate and less cost effective it is to do. So, it feels like the steady erosion of low end jobs everywhere vs. a sudden loss of a single profession.

We can see this as an increased demand for education / training. But, not everyone is able to keep up and over time ever fewer people are going to be capable of the remaining niches. It's possible that the service industry's are going to continue to absorb the less capable, but that does not help the economy in the long term.
Thanks for the feedback! If the recipient's user agent doesn't display images we don't record an impression, and so it doesn't show up in the analytics.

I totally understand that it might be annoying to only get a marketing message from clicking "Display Images". I guess the way I look at it is that it's a chance for companies you're already interacting with to tell you things about themselves that you might not already know - so it might be annoying or if you like the company it might be cool too.

It's also an amazing platform for organizations like schools, charities and political campaigns to do outreach with. For example, a charity can have their big donors install this in their signature and have a unified, centrally controlled donation message going out every day that's always current and updated.

Thanks again for the feedback!
"In addition to the psychic merits of working on the personally meaningful, in an economy where low-wage, high-skill overseas workers and no-wage machines encroach ever more rapidly, it is essential to compete both in input and output."

I think the importance of these points completely dwarfs the rest of the argument.

Set aside the fact that the psychic value of working on your own project can, for many people, offset much of the higher expected monetary value of a steadier job. Crucially, starting and running your own company rapidly develops your executive, decision-making and management skills, largely independent of financial success. These are skills that aren't going to machines or offshore, at least in the near term. Entrepreneurship IS long-term risk mitigation.
Neat but way too magical for my taste. The code to figure out what to do in the case of 'from .. import *' is particularly ugly.

Perhaps the commands should accessible from an object you import. That's slightly more typing but more explicit and would not require ugly magic. E.g.

from pbs import sh
print sh.ifconfig('eth')

If it's not clear, the 'sh' object could override __getattr__ or __getattribute__ and wrap commands as necessary.
The most interesting tidbit is this:

Code to Test Ratio: 1:0.8

That seems like an awful lot, no?
That's pretty brilliant, well done.
Merits to one side, this sort of argument is going nowhere in the aftermath of the subprime loan mess.

Which people really should look at as a stress test on how something like this could be abused.
Anything that encourages a from ... import * usage is evil irrespective of its implementation.
Machine learning for bakers and chefs? Wow, you've managed to take everything that is fun, interesting, and compelling out of making great food. I'll pass on your future world of Oreos and Heinz Ketchup.

In fact, the food and bev industry is going in the exact opposite direction of this form of commoditization with small, craft shops popping up all over the place.
Thanks! It's just a simple HTML snippet that gets inserted into their emails. The snippet contains an image that we change on the server side. It's gets a lot more complicated than that, but that's the basic premise. I'd love to chat more some time - feel free email me at dan@airtimehq.com if you're interested!
Google Code University: Distributed Systems
There was some guy, on HN recently, who could convert any image to CSS (kindof hacky) -- CSS is always displayed, even if browser won't show images.

You will wouldn't have analytics, but at least the ad would display.
Thanks for the feedback. Yep Moveable Ink has similar technology and they're a great startup. Our product is just a bit more targeted to marketing :)
> I gladly give up a few of the more esoteric vim features for the integrated project editing features of ST2.

Right, I just wanted to point out that it's not a very vim-compatible vim mode so people aren't surprised if they try it out.
New membrane can block helium, yet allow water to flow freely