skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is ACTA potentially affecting desktop applications that are storing encrypted information to the cloud using private-public keypair?
Private key would be available only locally.

From ACTA it's not clear for me if desktop app provider should start storing the keypairs in case a law enforcement asks for the access to the data.

Any ideas?
Ask HN: what proportion of posts get more than 1 point?
It seems like posting to HN is almost an all-or-nothing proposition: the vast majority of submissions never get more than one point, and sometimes you get outliers who end up with 50+ points.

I would've expected a somewhat more balanced distribution. Has anybody ever done statistical analysis of HN points?
Thanks, sounding good so far, just need to get an account so I can test it out :)

The campfire channel seems to be non public?
That is kind of my point, for them it is not illegal, for everyone else it is. They are also protected from the kind of direct insider trading that the SEC tries to stamp out in the private sector, to say that it doesnt occur is to be a bit naieve really.

Here have a read:

http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2011/11/...

"In September 2008, Bachus and other congressional leaders were privately briefed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the economy’s imminent meltdown.

The next day, Bachus was buying option funds that would increase in value if the economy tanked.It did."
The lone wolf coder optimizing a language is excited about advances in garbage collection, which AFAICT have not slowed down.

I'm in the "old-timer" bucket this essay describes, and I really can't twist my mind into any perspective that makes today less exciting than 20 years ago.
I used to bike 50 minutes twice a day (13 and a half miles each way) through London - and I can honestly say I loved it every day.

Some days I'd wake up feeling tired and grumpy, but once I was on the bike I'd be fine. Some days it would start raining just before I was going to leave for home, but still once I was one the bike everything melted away.

I totally agree everyone is different, and living closer to work would have been nicer. But by living far away I was able to: afford a house not a flat, afford a car for when I wanted to take journeys that actually cost more by train in the UK, live near huge green open spaces - all the while working for the UKs biggest media organisation and getting all the benefits of that and of living in London.

I ate listening to music on a commute, so it was 50 minutes of silence, 50 minutes of either planning my day or shaking off my day. When I'd get home I'd be totally chilled no matter how my day had been, and I'd get to work with a full plan of my day - or if I wasn't busy I'd just let my mind wander onto a million what ifs.

---

I currently can't cycle and I really miss it - zoning out on the tube isn't the same, working out isn't the same, and it's hard to force yourself to cycled 25 miles a day if you aren't aiming to get anywhere.

But I can totally see how you could get the same from a car journey, or from just being at home earlier.

For me I have to work where I work now (central London), and I love living where I live.

Man I need to get back on my bike!
A new business strategy for startups
5 High-Risk, High-Reward Steps to Starting Your Dream Company
There is a touch of magic in fooling with assembler. But when I last used it, I concluded that programming in assembler was like carrying your bicycle--sometimes useful or even necessary, but reversing a natural relationship.

In any case, if he's writing for old-timers, shouldn't he use larger fonts?
People own collapsable shopping carts that they walk to and from the grocery store with. A lot of times a grocery store or market may be on your way home from work, making it not a big deal to stop in and get some fresh food.

How often would you say you buy a new TV? Making transportation decisions based on a once-in-a-10-year purchase isn't that rational. Plus, you could just have the TV delivered.
This made them a ton of customers who read the label as everyone else, felt pressured and bought the ticket [].

[] Not that I endorse that practice.
Another possibility on the AWS cloud is to put the logs on S3, Amazon S3 has High Durability. Heroku has published a tool for doing it: https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E , which they use to manage their database product.
See, I lived in upstate NY for a while in Saratoga Springs. You can walk all the way across that town very easily (I did a few times). But with my car I was able to drive up to the Adirondacks and go hiking on a whim, or drive myself and a bunch of other bored Navy guys across the border into Montreal as soon as we got off a 36-hour shift and had to be back in exactly 24 hours. Some of my local friends without vehicles ended up relying on me to get them anywhere outside of the city when they needed to.

There are definite advantages to living in an area where you rarely need a vehicle, but I will always want to own one anyway. :-)
I have put some sketches into my post to describe when things hit disk and when the client making the request continues. I hope this clarifies all the ACID questions.
I'm going to cast a dissenting vote from the other comments here and say yes.

The golden age of my personal programming experiences was around 1993, during high school. After outgrowing GW-Basic, I was hacking around in x86 assembly language, figuring out how to program DOS graphical games by manipulating VGA hardware registers. My tutors were library books on x86 assembler and instructional text files gleaned from local BBSes. (I still have and treasure those resources to this day. Michael Abrash was my god.) I was able, by myself, to produce programs as technically intricate and graphically rich as industry-leading fare like Commander Keen or Epic Pinball, in pure assembly language. (I never actually made anything beyond tech demo stages into an actual marketable game.)

This was magic. Not a single other person I'd ever met in my life or even on local BBSes across my entire area code had that sort of capability. This awed even non-techies, whose pinnacle of computer experience was somewhere between Solitaire and Minesweeper. I had a mini-career programming BBS advertisements for inclusion in zip files, putting out some neat and impressive graphical effects in 2k or so of assembler code. My favorite trick was to include what appeared to be a custom font in these tiny executables - done by copying the BIOS ROM font at runtime and applying some bitmap transformations to each letter. I even wrote my own mini sound engine for the Adlib FM-synthesis registers.

Nowadays? Grab a Flash development tutorial and you can do in a week what I spent most of high school learning and doing. Everything is possible in programming and everybody knows it and every answer is seconds away. There's no feeling of exploration and achievement. There's certainly achievement in building a business or product, but not in the programming itself, which now serves as the drudgerous means to an end.

The connectivity of the Internet has eliminated local maxima. I was in high school by an order of magnitude the smartest programmer I'd ever met, but I'm thoroughly average in the Internet world. I've never been motivated to strike out building my own cool software or startup since nothing's ever come to me that could recapture the magic of my early days of DOS VGA assembly discovery and programming.

All the cool technology and companies now are about connectivity, starting with Google and its primal concept of page rank and link juice. Facebook and its world-squared size social graph. Ebay the world-squared size marketplace. Apple and its million-strong app store. Dropbox and its seamless cloud connectivity. You can't program anything meaningful and novel in and of itself; programs are now defined by what they interact with. Some do find scalability and connectivity exciting, but not me. You can certainly produce scintillating results with modern resources, but for me it's always been about the journey not the goal, and the journey of modern programming is, for me, essentially drudgery.
My only complain is that the phone disintegrates during the interview.

The other phones look a lot like Nokia's offerings.
Wondering if there are any blind programmers?
Just a thought, do you know any "blind" programmers?
Find a nice open source game and start showing him how to modify/extend it.
The article, and idea behind the startup, seems to be that the studios are screwing over the backers and the funding corporation.

But if this is so, why do people continue to invest in these vehicles? Don't the backers of these movies, especially a blockbuster like Harry Potter, know that this accounting is going to happen?

It seems to me like there must be another explanation at work here - such as the funding corporations being set up as losers purposefully for the purposes of taxes. Otherwise, if the studios were screwing their funders so much, wouldn't they have run out of suckers by now?
I've been programming since the early 90's. I went through three stages of excitement:

A. Hardware/OS/experience. At first, I was excited by the experience of working with computers. When I got access to a special computer lab in college that had Suns with big monitors, I used to go there and program just to use the computers. I loved the excitement of learning new commands, playing with different desktop managers, mastering various editors. All of it was in service of programming, but it was fun on its own.

B. As that stage faded, I was excited by specific technologies (Java! XML! Whatever!). During this phase, I would write something in one language, or using one technology, and then get excited about re-writing it in a different language or using a different technology.

C. The final, and most lasting, phase for me was getting excited about the problems I work on. Now, the hardware and the technologies have become tools for me, but the problems are infinitely interesting. What excites me most is working on problems that I believe matter.

Of course, I sometimes go back to stage B (MongoDB! AWS!) or maybe even stage A (general purpose GPU programming!), but mostly its stage C that keeps me passionate.
How does an extradition take place if the host country doesn't agree to let it happen? They had to give consent. Their police conducted the raid.
Oh, wow! This is awesome; I'm just now at the point in a Backbone project where I was preparing to implement something similar, and wasn't exactly relishing the thought. It's awesome that I now have something to work with instead of having to roll my own.

I do have one suggestion, though: while it's of course not much work to compile the script to JavaScript, it couldn't hurt to include a current JS version in the repo for people who don't have Node & CoffeeScript installed.
yeah, totally... I knew a couple of folks from our local association for the blind who took computer science classes in college.

Also, see WWW:Wake from Robert Sawyer.
Mixed-use zoning is making a comeback, and it really fosters walkability. You can have a dense area that isn't that easy to get to things because its zoned too rigidly.

Zoning originally came about for a few reasons. One was that industrial pollution was a serious issue and people wanted that away from other types of land use. The other was the rise of the car. Zoning has allowed places to require minimum lot sizes or state that mixed-use isn't allowed. One of the reasons we have so few walkable communities in the U.S. (even small ones like old towns used to be) is that zoning doesn't permit it. Because of this, areas that are walkable and are mixed-use are extremely expensive to live in.
Beautiful rotating HTML5 game: Tiny Prince planet defense
My favourite feature is the search capabilities, which are well integrated and extremely powerful.

# installed packages with yaml in the name
aptitude search '~i yaml'

# installed packages requiring yaml
# (~D means depends on)
aptitude search '~i ~D yaml'

# packages whose name starts with lib and
# mentioning SQL in their descriptions
aptitude search '^lib ~d sql'

# installed packages from some non-standard repo
# apt-cache policy describes package origins
aptitude search '~i ?origin(apt.opscode.com)'

# why is libvirt0 installed?
aptitude why libvirt0

# which ubuntu metapackage is keeping libvirt0 installed?
aptitude why '~i ubun' libvirt0

# don't keep any transitional package installed
sudo aptitude markauto '~i ~d transitional'

# purge ganeti packages
sudo aptitude purge '~i ganeti'
Actually your country did NOT sign it yet - hopefully they wont ?
Bestprepaidcellphones.com : Domain Analysis, Competitor Analysis, Seo Rep
Show HN: A photo-real 3D model of you in under 5 minutes
Nice list, A few nitpicks :

+ *Coffeine* Gaaaah. An IT guy misspelling Caffeine.
+ *twits* This one is actualy funny. A "twit" is a moron. A "tweet" is a twitter message.
The "No twits" thing definitely helps concentration, but did you mean "tweet" ?

I would also add a part about cutting out hardware/tool-related frustration. Nothing kicks me out of the flow like the system freezing, having to hunt for free disk space on the test server, etc.
Losing a traffic lane is not cheap. That said, allowing buses to use additional lanes has significant benefits. One of the best ideas I have seen is only allowing buses to use the break down lane. Opening them up to normal traffic risks major delays after an accident and often the real issue is off ramps not though traffic, but a bus can get around the occasional broken down car with minimal delays while significantly increasing a roads capacity. Also adding bus specific shortcuts can provide major benefits for minimal cost.
A heat map of the world's most photographed places: zoom in for highres details.
You're confused as to why a scammer doesn't exhibit smart long-term planning?
G'day (esp on Australia Day).

I'm an Aussie too living in London. I'm a keen cyclist and love walking.
I've been hit by several cars while cycling, three times very seriously.
I walk whenever humanly possible, cycle for a lot of odd jobs that most would use a car for.

I just have to say my bit in defense of cars. You (cletus) didn't seem to be attacking them per se, I'm mostly chiming into your anecdotes.

* Some localities are just too hilly/valleyey (sp?) without cars.

I cycled from Bondi/Maroubra/Neutral Bay daily in Sydney and the hills killed me. The Harbour Bridge is just two massive ramps BTW. I've heard HongKong is too hilly for bike/cycle.

* Cars are great for Kids and Shopping

* Vans & Trucks bring in all our vegetables and consumables. Rail okay for heavy goods, but laying rail everywhere would bankrupt us all.

----

My suggestion on how to make cars better/greener is to gradually introduce automated driving vehicles. Specially equipped vehicles should be allocated special roads and given priority. They'll still have manual controls for the normal roads of course.

Regulating the speed of the vehicles will make everything much cheaper/cleaner.
Vogels: Amazon wants "1,000 platforms to bloom"
No plans to become a major PaaS vendor, instead AWS wants to be the enabling layer for services like Heroku, EngineYard, and so on.
Google's "Evil" Pivot
I didn't know, but it would be logical, yes.

The fun part is, there is no strong definition of how much space you need to park a car, you have to prove you can actually park your car in the space you declare.
An officer follows you to your parking place, and stands there watching your maneuvers.
Try commuting in a manual :) You can use the brake less by downshifting (which helps relieve congestion, people are seeing less brake lights), but talk about irregular foot movements. Need to be off the clutch to slow your car using the engine, but on it to slow your car using the brakes, off the clutch on the gas to start moving, then (clutch in) into second (clutch out) but whoa hold on, (clutch in) back into first (clutch out to slow down) and we're stopped (clutch in, brakes on, shift to neutral, clutch out).

Then we go again (clutch in, into gear, clutch out+gas), and it continues. If everyone was forced to drive a manual, we'd have less slowdowns (and less DUIs, IMO) just from the thinking and movement it requires. No one would want to stop.
Fun with math: Dividing one by 998001 yields a surprising result
Sheesh! Let your SSHd listen to something else than the standard port already!
Dedicating all this land to car storage basically reduces the density by about half, doubles the average distance between locations ...

Halving density increases average distance by sqrt(2), not double.
right, and I just mean to point out that it's not the relevant number to compare to, while providing a useful comparison.
Driving the road to Hana was one of the coolest things I've ever done.

Cars have ruined where I grew up in Dallas, though — so much sprawl. I live in Austin, which is sort of fighting it, but establishing the infrastructure after the fact is so difficult.
I think the theme of false urgency/scarcity is the main annoyance of the Cleartrip presentation. The rest of it is just a matter of Cleartrip displaying few seats for a narrow price, vs MakeMyTrip displaying more seats with a wider pricing range.
Could you please elaborate or give a link to article(s) about why aptitude is better?
People's jetseting ambitions are no big deal, the Hollywood types portray lot worse. But the tech-media seems to be fascinated by this guy's choices in living his life, perhaps tech-media is finding an opening for the first time to compete with the Hollywood media? No wonder there is a clash between the two industries.
Cloud App to covert Balsamiq Mockups to Bootstrap HTML
TL;DR: "Skilled and experienced practitioners are able to find elegant solutions to problems both because they are able to consider a broad range of possible solutions and because they can correctly analyze the possible repercussions of adopting each of these solutions."
> What's your insurance cost?

Right, I forgot that, and you can see in a comment above that it brings my yearly cost up to about $5000.
Ask HN: Is the Fraternity/Sorority market too niche?
Greeks have specific needs that Facebook and other sites do not meet. CollegeACB had 900,000 hits its 2nd day, now its down.

Greeks are:

1. Predictable: If they purchase stuff for an event one year, they will the next
2. Bulk: Everything they purchase is for their entire house
3. Lucrative: At UPenn, the average budget is ~$125,000 a semester, and that's money each house MUST spend.

How many customers must spend that much money, in predictable ways, in bulk? So the question begs, do these pros outweigh the con, the size of the market?
In your specific case, this wouldn't have happened if your SSHd had listened to something else than port 22.
I wrote something very similar a week ago: https://github.com/scosman/Backbone.CachedModel

Differences:

- it works with any .sync implementation you might already have (JSON, XML, whatever). It just drops in, caching the server responses locally, not assuming anything about how the service works

- instead of overridding Backbone.Sync I let you extend CachedModel on a per model basis (that way some models can be cached locally while others are not)

I didn't include any fancy cache expiry, just using a simple localstorage.clear on login for now.

example usage:
var User = Backbone.CachedModel.extend({
cacheName: 'USERS',
});
The Least Boring Programming Book: Chapter 1 (excerpt)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/145900/lbpb.pdf
The words used in your tweets give away where you're from
That's how I started with python. Even year after that I sometimes went to that site for reference for some specific things I knew I'd find there. If someone knows how to program this is the resource I recommend for starting with python. It's easy, it's short, it's entertaining (some of the tasks) and it gives pretty nice overview.
There is almost a 4th, higher order tool here, one which is implied through each of the three, and that is: determine (and articulate) your values.
Here's my two line shell script that accomplishes the same thing (sans dropbox). Been using it for years and it's a lifesaver.

https://gist.github.com/1683661

You need scrot, xclip, and libnotify. Set up private key ssh access to your webserver and update the directories/url and you're good to go.
Why not just sell it instead or am I missing something? The post was very vague on this point.
Similar to being able to discern what customers want vs what customers need... or being able to tell a person who wants to buy your product you don't think it's a good fit (and, of course, suggesting an alternative)
I would add this attitude to the long list of "counterintuitive things you should do if you want to be successful in the long run".

Sure, a company where everyone is all chummy and nobody disagrees once a decision has been made, that sort of place might be successful in the short run. They can probably iterate more rapidly when no one argues about a feature. The might be able to implement more features in a shorter time when no one argues about implementation. Ultimately, though, I would bet they end up with an inefficient product that no one wants.

Actually, this reminds me of how Penn and Teller describe their relationship: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYcabRJRG54
Nice catches! Thanks. Fixing...
How Sitting All Day Is Damaging Your Body and How You Can Counteract It
How Ravelry makes money
I think he means the literal processes of typing code. I have fun designing a system and figuring out how to make things work together. I don't get much pleasure sitting in front of a computer for hours typing away. Debugging on the other hand can be more interesting because once again, it's back to problem solving mode.
I work on modern systems, but fun is going home and hacking 6502 assembly language on a BBC Micro. And the occasional game of Elite :-)
Oh, K's in memory processing model is surely compatible with modern GPUs - at last for most primitives.

The thing I'm not sure about is whether the transfer overhead (GPU, CPU, Memory) would still be worth it in the general case. There's a question of what you're actually comparing to - e.g. you can have a (relatively) naive implementation, like the first commit of Kona was. You can have Arthur's cache-optimized-but-still-pure-C-and-CPU implementation (I think the main kona branch is comparable these days, but I'm not sure), which is faster.

And then, you can compare it to an SSE2/SSE4 version, still on the CPU; such a version does not exist afaik, but is easier to code than you would expect if you use ispc (https://github.com/ispc/ispc/tree/master/examples) or cilk-plus -- simple things with no data dependencies, as many K primitives are, often get a 4x speedup with ISPC.

Oh, and by the way, thanks for your work on kona and this message -- I've only been following kevinlawler's branch, but I'll start following you too.
Interesting. I may steal some code :)

I handle not sending models to the server with remote/local boolean attributes on the model. Certainly not as well decoupled as yours.
Ask HN: How come ACTA isn't being taken as seriously as SOPA?
Whenever I hear about how horrible some company does something, I always think "Opportunity!" Just not sucking at something puts your scrappy little company ahead of your more impressive competitors.
Designer Tools
Interesting to see Core Transformation in a posting about programming. I highly recommend CT as a low-cost self-coaching / self-therapy methodology. And if you can find a partner, so much the better.

Highly recommended to untwist mental knots and resolve issues from the past that are bothering you until now.
Looking for webmail services based in the EU
I want to take many of my clients away from Gmail. I am looking for a webmail service with the following requirements:

- must be based in the European Union
- must cost 5 Euros or less per month (some clients just need one single mail account)
- must have good reputation

Thank you all for any suggestions or tips.