skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re pronounceable: I wonder if it makes any sense at all to use full words (from a dictionary), assembled into sentences (using a grammar). They'd be much longer, but (possibly) more readable and memorable. I'm sure this has been done - I wonder how it worked out?
uhuh, right.

--

Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:23:51 +0000

Subject: Your Google+ Appeal

From: 1165307103153794475-noreply@google.com

Hello,

After reviewing your appeal, we have determined that your name does not comply with the Google+ Names Policy.

...
You mirror drives as part of evidence collection
They savy criminal argument doesn't pass constitutional muster.

You could say "allowing criminals to not testify against themselves could frustrate law enforcement because a savy criminal could just commit everything to memory."

The 5th ammendment clearly says "too bad, those are the rules."
Boycott the opening weekend of The Dark Knight Rises
The licensing issues may be a problem but the solution is not piracy enforcement. You will never win that war, EVER.

The studios job is to make money for their shareholders and artists. The best way for them to make that money is to work to get rid of these restrictions they are under so they can distribute these products without these problems you mentioned.

To me this is practically a horse and buggy (the studios) vs the automobile (the internet) type issue. I'm sure some people complained "you can't go supporting cars! I'm livery will go out of business". Well too bad for you. Make a change or be left behind. The world doesn't care about your union agreements or any others.

I also don't agree you can't compete with free. You can! How else do you think iTunes Music Store has been kicking butt even though all the music can be had for free? It's unlikely piracy sites will ever get to the level of convenience that is something like iTMS. The studios have the opportunity to do the same with movies. If their past agreements shackle them to failure boohoo to them. They're not going to get people to stop pirating as long as they continue to keep adding more and more incentives to do so by making legit ways of accessing content painful, frustrating and limited.
One question I’ve been asked, interviewing at startups, is: “how do you feel about cash vs. equity?” For my personal financial needs, this is a no-brainer: cash is king, baby. But other HN readers might be in a position where their market-rate salary is $100K cash but they could see themselves getting by at $75K or even $50K... how should they answer that question?
Review my start-up: a life-goal management tool
Tell HN: Building NYC Scala team. Dinner on me if you know Clj or Scala.
I'm a software engineer at a well-funded and extremely promising startup. We're moving a lot of our code from Python to JVM languages. None of us want to program in that IDE-dependent horrible mess called Java so we're trying to build a Scala team (but I'm also interested in reaching out to Clojure developers... and also top-1% Java devs if they're willing to learn Scala, since they've probably already Greenspun'd it at their Java jobs.)

If you're looking to get involved, drop me a line. Dinner + drinks on me, later this week. My email is port5764@gmail.com .
He's talking simply about clock speed which used to make regular gains with Moore's law but ran up against the heat limits of silicon awhile back.

The original article that this follows on gives additional background:

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
Sure. You could do even better: keep your computer on at all times and keep everything you do in RAM. No encryption is necessary here, just a $100 UPS and your laptop's own battery.

The problem with all these comments about "what if I give half of my phrase to a friend?" or "what if I write it in the dust at the entrance to my house and the FBI wipes it away when they bust in?" is that it doesn't really address the core issue. There is no technological solution to this situation:

1. The gov't can just give up on the idea of looking at encrypted drives. Not likely and possibly bad for society as a whole. I am not able to judge that.

2. The judge can just refuse to understand that there is no way to decrypt the drive and hold you in contempt of the court indefinitely at which point you'll be cursing yourself for not burying the passphrase chiseled into a stone in your back yard.

3. The gov't makes it illegal to encrypt drives without giving them the keys. At best this is done through some kind of third-party escrow service so that an actual warrant needs to be given before the key is given out. At worst, you just drop off your encryption keys with the nearest post office.

4. There is no #4. The judicial system won't just go "well, this guy has an encrypted drive and we can't get in. Let's just let him go since he clearly outsmarted us." They either will find something else on you, or compel you to decrypt the drive.

Like I said, there is no technical solution, only social/behavioral. Encryption became too sophisticated and there isn't much that we can do nowadays.
Rust is also natively unicode-aware. OCaml is not.
What if they embraced both operating systems and charged more for their hardware? IMO BB currently has the best hardware and worst software.

If I could have bought a BlackBerry Android phone I would have easily spent an additional $50 on it. $50 upfront is really nothing for business customers who need reliability and a great email app.
The problem here is that you have to convince people you're telling the truth. If there are any number of stenographic techniques at your disposal, and only way to confirm whether you're being honest is if the drive decrypts, then unless that occurs it can't be easily determined whether you were giving a good faith answer or not.
InterDigital Calls Off Patent Sale
Right, and that's what the article says a judge decided is NOT the case.
Drilling down to some categories yields some with no results. (Maybe grey out and don't provide a click-thru to the category if it has no items..)
The valid CoffeeScript you write is always valid JavaScript :)
I for one don't like default actions being taken away from me. I use ^N ^T and ^W constantly, and a page taking them away from me would be extremely annoying.
You don't have to give up a key. They would be asking you to decrypt the drive. Whether that requires you to enter a passphrase or turn on the webcam and do a jig, it doesn't matter. They have no interest in your key/password/secret 4 digit code. They want the contents of the drive.

Now they could be playing at a disadvantage, but the point is that the 5th amendment does not enter into here. If the police have a warrant for papers in your safe, they simply ask you to open the safe, by whatever means. This is no different when they have a warrant for files (papers, information) on your encrypted drive (safe) and are asking you to open it by whatever means.
In case you haven't noticed, the legal world isn't in a giant rush to throw away centuries of precedent just so Megaupload's allegedly law breaking servers can keep running.
It looks like a terminal/repl to me.

First I tried ls, then I tried to type in some lisp code.

It did not work! ;-) /s

This is pretty easy to use.
But I don't think the issue with pastebin clones is ease of use.
javascript-tools for TextMate. Calls JSHint on every save and quickly gives you the number of errors. Also allows a full check using JSLint or Closure linter, minifying etc.

https://github.com/subtleGradient/javascript-tools.tmbundle
Robotics Mastermind, Sebastian Thrun take Education Online
I could seemingly get behind a much shorter copyright term. However, won't the enforcement measures needed to protect those new works be just as complex, ineffective or invasive as they are for 70 year copyrights? Enforcing copyrighted works, no matter how long or short the period, would require much the same overreaching action, right?
I'm just explaining the way it works and that there's nothing special about megaupload or new happening here:

Break the law and the police are going to take your stuff. If you used that stuff for your business oh well sucks to be you.

You may think that is a bad system and have some great ideas for liberating us from the bad police but those ideas are no more valid or invalid today then they were 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago.
Are you counting the Storm 1 in the 'best hardware' category? Or just the newest of the new?
OTGH, the software industry is $300B (in the U.S. src: wp), and has had its own important part in delivering those astonishing things.

If anyone's in place to say "y'all need to try harder" - it's us.
MS paid Mueller for (at least) one study:

Microsoft has commissioned this study.

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/10/study-on-worldwide-u...
Android Developer Relations
Probably a bit off topic: why all contest organizers want the project to be tweeted.
There is one more contest (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3501355) posted today. I understand that the organizer gets visibility, but any other advantages?
. . . which is subsequently rendered useless by the TPM erasing itself.

(The standard procedure is to encrypt the drive using a key stored in the TPM. The TPM then decrypts the drive when provided with the proper authentication. If the designated security policy is violated the TPM destroys the key, rendering the drive's contents useless.)
I have never been in a salary negotiation in which I was bargained down hard, which may mean I'm a terrible person to ask for negotiation advice.

But not entirely, because the "assume the counterparty is a dick" technique is actually kind of pointlessly lossy, even if it works out in aggregate over the market. It's been a long time since I negotiated a salary, but in a few recent contracting scenarios I've just set a price that I knew was fair, stuck to it, and when necessary explained to the prospect why it was fair.

People are either willing to listen to reason or they're not worth dealing with.
You are making the implicit assumption (2) that Google's "fair share" includes some fraction of the money they make outside the US.

I disagree - I believe taxes are payment for government services received. Google Ireland and the Guinness Brewing Company did not receive government services from the US, and hence their "fair share" (to the US) is precisely $0.

Incidentally, the shareholders of Google USA may not live in the US. And similarly, the shareholders of Guinness may be located in the US. If it turns out that some large fraction of Guinness shareholders live in the US, should Guinness start paying taxes in the US for it's Irish operations?

(Guinness does, of course, pay taxes in the US for profits made by it's US subsidiary.)
A Marketing Lesson from Philz Coffee. Yup
I'd say 80% of the ease of use of Hastebin is in the URL. ;) I'm going to remember it, probably whether I want to or not.

If I install the gem I only have to remember a five-character verb, and it's a fun verb.

"Pocoo" isn't even a word in my language, I have to remember a subdomain, and "pocoo.com" forwards to a random Chinese (?) e-commerce site that appears to sell tchotchkes.
It is interesting to see various Constitutional Law Professors and pundits discuss Sotomayor's role. Compare what Rebecca Rosen says here with what Jonathan Turley says here http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/23/supreme-court-unanimous... or what Orin Kerr says in many posts but especially here: http://volokh.com/2012/01/23/why-did-justice-sotomayor-join-...

Also interesting the comparisons of the roles and opinions of Alito and Scalia.

Another relevant article is this one: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/homeland-security-su...

Homeland Security wants technology to persistently spy on 4 square miles (of city) at a time, with automated, real time, motion detection."

Think about that and whose Jones opinion you prefer....
"I forgot the key." Done.

(Presumably serving an 18 month contempt sentence in a county jail is better than the 25-to-life in a maximum security federal prison you'd get if they saw the contents of your hard drive.)
The jurisprudence in this area has to evolve. In a house, for example, the police might be able to search your house because they have a warrant, or they might be able to search your house because of any other exception to the warrant requirement. In all of those cases, police can only search for discrete things--as in, they probably couldn't turn over your bed, unless they thought someone was hiding under it, or the warrant they got suggested that they could. The "plain view" doctrine might indicate that something clearly illegal in plain view could be seized, but this is somewhat narrowly tailored.

If digital jurisprudence evolves the same way, perhaps a warrant (or discovery request) could be obtained to search within a single folder only, but not another, or the like. Perhaps there are cases out there like this already--but possibly a whole body of jurisprudence needs to evolve to deal with these issues.
Without knowing more about the business it's hard to say... Why don't you try referrals from those successful clients to start? Or you can try to make it plain and simple so everyone here understands and you may have some takers!

One question - do you need POA? Or would it be possible for a person to consent for you to make decisions in your specific arena. That does seem a bit scary.
Show HN: Hot or not meets Twitter
I am working with a couple of friends on a new concept of social network / blogging platform.

The idea is simple: we ask users to vote other users' messages in order to get points and use these points to post new messages.

The idea is similar to hotornot.com in that the user has to vote other users' content in order to have his content delivered into the system and receive feedback from others.

The idea is similar to twitter.com in that this is a micro blogging platform, where messages are limited to 500 characters.

The website is still in its alpha status. We don't have any design yet, many things are still basic and some of the messages posted so far are in Italian (yes, we are from Italy).

If you have time and if you would like to help, please take a look at the website, sign up and play a little with it. We would love to get your feedback, any kind of feedback.

Thanks in advance.

The website's address:

http://www.milanfreelance.com/frames/ET/
This is a serious question that I hope gets answered: Is it possible to tell Linux (or Windows I guess) to immediately crash if you boot it up and are either 1) not connected to the internet or 2) not connected from a certain IP address.

Then you could give up the key, but tell them "see, it's broken and I haven't been able to use it anyway."
100 times faster? (That's what I understand a couple orders of magnitude to mean. It's closer to 10 years of the old Moore's-law rate of improvement.)
We built the referral system long before we had buy it now, and a higher minimum deposit. The last serious re-visit it got was close to four years ago. It's one of those made sense at the times things that continue to work OK.

Keeping on top of referral fraud is a bit tricky too, and gets worse the more complex you make the referral system.

edit I also remember that way back then when the code was redone there was no themeforest, just flashden and audiojungle. We were heavily focused on finding new customers more than directing people to specific files. So that might give you a bit of context.
Look if the police are corrupt and go around destroying legitimate businesses willy nilly it's the people's responsibility to demand new police.

However there's no indication that's what's going on here. Every indication is that this business knew exactly what they were doing at the highest levels.
RE: Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class
Which law? I'm not American so I'm not familiar with this. But there's certainly plenty of kids on other sites that are used for communications, so what makes Google delete kids' accounts?
To be fair probably 99% of people going through the sign-up flow won't realize this.
How to design a login system that doesn't suck
I commented on the original but I think that others here might also value this here:

I liked this post and the way that it turns the question of piracy upon itself, but I still felt like there were about three dramatic ideas missing, so I wrote those up and put them on my web site briefly:

http://drostie.org/on_copying.html

I fear I was too verbose in that essay and perhaps I will edit it more later -- but basically, those ideas are (1) that easy copying has led to an absurd situation where you can buy things without getting them; (2) that copying is both absurdly natural and restricting copying is absurdly natural, so that we feel entitled to do both; and (3) that the media companies today face an absurd situation where they fight for their lives -- and as Y Combinator said, they might do quite a bit of damage on their way down.
I wish someone (not my game, so it's best if it's not me) would combine:
- hastebin's elegant, simple and pretty UI;
- ideone's IDE features (compiling, running, debugging, ...)
- gist's concept of making pastes git repos with easily accessible history
Perhaps G+ should substitute all comment boxes with dropdown menus

It would help with data hygiene. It would also integrate nicely with a no-keyboard computer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA "The aardvark admitted its fault."
I'd be hard for a kid to make "Angry Birds" because of the block tumbling/collision physics. From experience, though, simple platformers, tank games and tron clones are within the reach of children with minimal instruction. A language/environment designed for that sort of thing helps a lot, though. We used QBasic, I'm not sure what you'd use these days.
I find it very easy to imagine myself writing some code that assumes a function doesn't need to do I/O, and then lo and behold the spec changes and we have to refactor the entire call stack of anything that assumes it's nonblocking.
What if you made your passphrase itself a confession to a crime?

"I shot the sheriff."

Then you could claim that supplying your password would constitute self-incrimination, and so you'd like to invoke your 5th Amendment rights :)
In India they do it with technology. Far form proven but they might get better at this.

A case.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsN...

The tech.
http://www.forensic-centre.com/assessments/brainwave-profili...
If we build laws around files and folders, I can't wait to see what happens when filesystem design changes and there's no such thing as a 'folder' anymore.
I can respect not wanting to have constant meta-discussions about each submission, but I think SEO is an interesting topic in its own right. Especially the sneaky-but-still-white-hat type. I'm not even sure there's necessarily anything wrong with it; it's ultimately based on creating content that people want to read. (I didn't flag this article, for example. It's an interesting story.)

But I think it's worthwhile to note that this post was almost surely written with the primary intent of boosting page rank as a sort of guerilla SEO.
Memorias USB Angry Birds
My reading of Google's new policy is that you can't be cuddlybunny1984, but you can be "Cuddly Bunny" or +cuddlybunny1984. Furthermore, if you have a government ID that says your name is cuddlybunny1984, then you can be that too. The goal, I'm assuming, is to prevent the site from looking like Xanga.

(To be honest, I do find it really weird to be using my real name online. "Jonathan has shared XXX" sounds stupid to me, because nobody in real life calls me Jonathan. But that's how I write my first name.

I would prefer "jrockway has shared XXX", since that is more "me" than a first name that 239483 other people have.)
Okay, American hackers, here's your civil disobedience:

Go to a foreign country. Buy a flash drive. Set up two partitions; make one a small TrueCrypt bootstrap partition, configured to decrypt the second with a password. Random-wipe the second. (For insurance, you may wish to do this provably. Maybe use a publicly-accessible source of random data?)

Travel back across the border. When you are asked to decrypt your drive, inform the authority that you are unable to do so, since no password exists, and the data is utterly meaningless.

They will probably want you to provide some evidence of this. Refuse; insist that you cannot be required to prove that you have not done something wrong.

If all goes well, they'll arrest you for something. Then, call a lawyer.
Phone verification works against spammers on most sites because of one thing.
• The free seo report updated on Jan 24, 2012 for "Exosus" (6 letters domain name), shows an average of 55 indexed pages and an average of 14 backlinks .
• The site www.exosus.com encoded as utf-8 and runing on a Apache/2.2 server, is not listed on yahoo directory and is missing the sitemap.xml . Although the Adsense code was not found, therefore the monthly earning potential is of about $8 .
• "exosus", with ".com" as top-level domain, has been online since 27-apr-2004 and has a total of 347 references on major Social Networks.
Blimey. John Smith is going to be popular.

Won't be using G+ anyway, breaking trust is a one-way road for some of us. I also use FB with strictly fake data.
RIM's OSes have always been conservative because they're very corporate-oriented. I don't think that WP7 fits into that category- I love it, but it would be a huge, massive leap fro m what RIM has done before now.
It's usually not a matter of when, but what I'm coding. I can be energetic but if I'm coding some boring, trivial task, I probably can't get myself to focus right away
Neat. I wonder what our society would have looked like today if Marshall lost that one (had a bad day, spilled his coffee).
People blog for many different reasons. I would argue that posts written to generate linkbacks and boost page rank are actually relatively unusual. I think most blog posts are either written to directly promote something on-site or to bring in direct revenue through ad impressions or because, ya know, the person just has a story to tell or an ego to stroke.
So your computer today is 100 times faster than the computer you had 5 years ago? That seems like a stretch. What two CPUs are you talking about exactly?

Hmm, I guess if you had an Intel Pentium III Mobile 750MHz (circa June 2000) five years ago:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+III+Mo...

Then if you got an Intel Core i7-2600K @ 3.40GHz that would score 100 times higher on the PassMark CPU Mark.

But there's a 10 year gap between the release of those CPUs. Also, the Core i7-2600K has 4 cores and 8 threads, while that Pentium III had only one core and one thread.
My guess is that we'll be shown fairly conclusive internal communication that makes it clear the MU knew exactly that they were profiting illegally and continued to do it and enable it. At that point it doesn't matter exactly how much they made legally or illegally. Does it matter that a pawn shop makes some money legitimately if it's basically a front for selling stolen property?
How prelink works [pdf]
> This is no different when they have a warrant for files (papers, information) on your encrypted drive (safe) and are asking you to open it by whatever means.

This seems acceptable if they have a warrant for the contents of your safe. If they had a warrant for "evidence" and no knowledge or reason to believe that it was in the safe, could they open it/force you to open it simply because you own the safe. Similarly, if you had a hard drive, could they force decryption without knowing how the contents relate to the case.

Another issue that comes to mind is what happens if a hard drive containing truly random data is found, but the state thinks it contains encrypted data. Could someone be held in contempt for not releasing the (nonexistant) keys. This is probably related to the problem of destroyed keys.
I agree and so do past rulings. This judge needs brush up on US law.
Thanks for the usability comments guys, I'll switch the acorns to something a bit more obvious :)