skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fun facts about the NSA:
1). There were limits imposed on teaching encryption techniques by the NSA. These limits were taken away in the early 90's. I have read this in military technology books at my school, but sadly I can't find any online sources. I'm pretty sure they were legit (they were in the military science section) but my failure to find other support is making me question myself.
2). The existence of _NSAKEY
3). Differential cryptanalysis was withheld by/from academia (but NSA strengthened DES against it)
4). The NSA has made severe investments into probabilistic CPU's, and enjoys tricking others into believing they are focusing on quantum computers. NTRU and other encryption standards most likely exist that are already strong against Shor's algorithm. The benefits and cost of a qc make it a very big in-joke.

In no way do I doubt that the NSA has the best intentions for the USA. But, I do have doubts about whether or not their beliefs, and how they impose their beliefs, might be actively discriminating against things that could rise the tide for everyone. I think that sharing technology will always be seen as a form of dissidence and aiding the enemy, while I guess I'm stuck believing that transparency and the sharing of knowledge are all we can do to help others question themselves. The need for security and the desire to predict the moves of others can make one scared of stepping openly and boldly towards what is best for all. I hope they are sleepless not out of fear of the enemy but out of fear of becoming their own enemy. I don't doubt most already are, but I have a habit of getting quite sad when I think about what wonders they hold from us all.

But who am I but another armchair idiot with an internet connection.
> If you don't like it, why come out of your way to make a negative comment about it unless you're just being a hater?

Intellectual honesty cannot coexist alongside zealotry.
You so completely missed the point that I wonder if you actually read it.

You have to learn FROM the mistake. Learn what you did wrong, and don't do that again.

Simply repeating your mistakes does nothing.

Can you really try 50 diets and not know what doesn't work in a diet? Don't repeat the same mistake in each diet - that's pointless.
Awesome excerpt on Woz from Jessica Livington's book:

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
It is pretty amazing that nearly all of the western first world nations agree on one thing...they are pretty ok with KGB style spying or monitoring of their citizens. It doesn't seem to matter if they are on-the-fence-socialists, outright socialists, or dyed-in-the-wool capitalists.
Designer Philippe Starck apparently never reads magazines or watches TV.

Finding time to be truly alone to work is becoming increasingly difficult. Silence is a luxury few get these days.
>I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee

The Internet would seem to be an obvious counter-example to this claim.
In most cases it will because they have different types:

foldl :: (a -> b -> a) -> a -> [b] -> a
foldr :: (a -> b -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b

So the only time it will be the same is if a and b are the same type.
I believe VS was always coupled to the Office look and feel...at least up until now.

Frankly, I'm impressed. The constantly shifting Office look and feel seems motivated by the desire to create artificial distinctions between versions of a product that peaked in 2000, or earlier.
And wasn't the Newton v2.0 just the Palm Pilot v2.0? And wasn't the Palm Pilot basically just an overgrown Psion personal organizer? So is it just Psions all the way down?
I've actually had ad companies complain about banners too close too buttons in apps before. They can tell, statistically, when users are clicking something by accident rather than interest. Raganwald's screenshot seems similar to me. The web site designer chose to blend the ad into the text content and Google may not even be happy about it due to the lower quality incoming traffic on the ad.
I swear to god, this would be such a non-issue if people would just stop acting like human history started with the release date of their favorite Apple product.
"The Internet" ? What definition of Internet allows it to be considered a single revolutionary entity that was invented, and by a committee no less.
You still have to worry about performance and memory usage with a for loop. You don't have to worry about blowing the stack, but you wouldn't have to worry about that in a language with proper tail call support either.

Admittedly, you do have to worry about the stack in Haskell, but that is entirely the fault of laziness and not recursion or higher-order functions. You're not really worried about a call stack, you're worried about having a really big thunk (deferred expression).

There may be no free lunch, but some are much better value for money than others.
For what it's worth I'm finding it hard to put my reaction to iWoz in words.

Try looking for specific moments in the book that embody what you feel, and examine at how those specific moments—they'll usually be sentences—are constructed and what they're trying to express. This won't automatically solve the problem of putting your reaction into words, but it should help.

(. . . says the English grad student who has heard similar comments from many, many students.)
I can't second this enough. I've held the job title "DevOps Engineer" twice, and the #1 thing is having enough of a background of all areas to pickup any part of the stack and run with it.

If you want to hire devops, the best interview question I've ever heard is (I believe) from John Allspaw. It's simply "describe what happens from when you enter an address and click go in your browser til the page is displayed".

The beauty of this question is, it's not a trick, there's no right or wrong, but it shows how narrow or wide a scope the person has. Do they mention the browser, os, resolver DNS caches? Do they focus on TCP or HTTP? Do they describe how BGP routing works and the carrier hotels the connections go through? Do they mention how they're may be proxies, load balancers, etc before getting to the web servers? Do they understand how the request is transferred to your programming language of choice? Do they know how css/js assets are loaded by the browser and benefit of using multiple subdomains? Do they walk you through how the browser does the rendering?

I've asked that question to every candidate I've interviewed since I've heard of it, and it's never failed to enlighten me of where the candidate's strengths lay.

From just my questions above, you can likely tell I have little interest in the OS/hardware layer. Somebody else may emphasize all the kernel caches and I/O operations, etc. :)
In the video it was really cool to see where he points out the configuration of the 15 stages by looking at the top of the monitors in the foreground. Let that be a lesson to you opsen out there, don't let them see the big board!
But it isn't encouraging that they'd push the release out with what seems to be blatant crashes. It sort of feels like the developers are left out to dry and they have to soldier on. Personally, I rely on git to make sure I don't screw up my project/code to the point where the IDE crashes repeatably. And that's unacceptable.

It's called integrity. And although XCode has it from a design sense, it doesn't appear to have it in the engineering department.
Google is not yet able to translate from Mongolian into English
Ask HN: Is Javascript on JVM/CLR a bad idea?
Just curious to know why there is no Javascript on JVM/CLR (compile Javascript to vm bytecodes)? Is it possible at all? Node.js seems to be the only option to run Javascript server side.
But, people do precisely that. I was working with parsing log files and converting each row to a Mongoid object took forever. It was in a tight loop and did nothing but persist it. So, I had to drop into the Ruby Mongo driver, avoiding the ORM altogether.
That's an "interesting" usability decision, I'm curious to hear what makes you believe it's better usability than having a password be hidden?

I personally hate it because it get the following signals from it:

* How could such an obvious product bug be missed
* Feels "amateur" -> is my password secure/encrypted?
* I don't feel safe using the site, because who knows how secure my account data really is...

But you might not be designing for me, so let's take a step back. Given the following assumption:

Hidden password: All don't care, as it's standard. No one loves, no one hates.
Visible password: Some love it, some hate it, some are just confused.

I think the extra love is really not worth the amount of hate it brings along. Why have people hate when you can avoid it :) Just my 2 cents.
this is a solveable problem. i've done it, in fact.
this is a child pornography cases where mere possession alone is a crime: what if that wasn't the case? What if this was a murder case and the defendant had stored notes about his murder on the computer?

If someone is asked to decrypt their drive for a murder case, could they then invoke the Fifth Amendment on the basis that they might have child pornography? Can the Fifth Amendment protect you on an unrelated crime that you mention without either admitting to it?
I use both Git and Mercurial and I love Git, but I think that Mercurial is far better for the typical environment, where it's already virtually impossible to convince people that they should switch from Subversion to something decent.

I think that most programmers will learn a little Git and then run away fleeing in terror and become all the more entrenched in their woeful belief that Subversion is adequate. In this sense, I think that Git is doing more harm than good. If the current buzz were for Mercurial, which is far more approachable than Git, I think that most Subversion users might try Mercurial out, think, "Hey, this is pretty nice!" and then be perfectly happy to switch. Git, on the other hand, offers all the power that anyone could ever need, but even I, who am pretty fluent with Git, often have no clue what other Git users are talking about when they explain how to do something. I never have that issue with Mercurial.

Also, I've never had any problem with histedit. Though hgsubversion has definitely caused me to get a few extra gray hairs from time to time.
Interesting thought, we can think about this as an extension of group polarization theory in psychology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization). In group polarization, belonging to a group with specific views will actually expand any individual member's views in that direction; being in a group of pro-YC people will make me think even more fondly of YC.

So we end up more influenced by the people (and really, searches) that we're surrounded by. When Facebook introduced their new chat window, with the "top friends" (who you talk to and interact with most) at the top, I actually thought that was group polarization in the way - you'll talk more to the people you talk to, and less to the people we don't. I think Google is a more interesting example because we're dealing with knowledge, and not just interactions.

Don't think it'll wind up to be discriminatory, because we can't pinpoint and compare one search to another. From a business side, group polarization is the basis behind all ads - let's show you things we think you'll like, and if you do like them, then you'll click, and start liking them even more. So Google benefits from group polarization, and it's essentially another form of targeted knowledge/advertising for the end user.
Here's a business opportunity: Battery insurance.
Similar point is made in this article oriented toward military officers:

http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/

TLDR: Leadership requires depth of understanding, intospection, and capacity for creativity, all of which require solitude to cultivate.
I agree. So the solution is simple.

Telsa should institute a completely unconditional agreement to replace your batteries should they fail for any reason for $7K (or less).

They are the ones that actually are more aware of what can brick one of these things so let them demonstrate the unlikeliness with their pocket book.

And we both agree that $XK leads to no difference in attention from the owners.
Looking for a tech partner (RoR, Music+Social, 75%+ complete)
I'm working on a music site similar in to hypemachine (hypem.com) but with greater ambition, a different business strategy and a few key social elements. I'm looking for someone who can help me finish the app in Rails, and ideally be able to develop or invest in an iOS app to accompany it.

Check out the pre-alpha here: http://2u [dot] fm

If interested please email me at natew [at] me [dot] com
Hiring Affordable Seo Services Is The Wisest
SEO, or search engine optimization is definitely one of the primary preferences for any site owner. Without proper and effective optimization, it would not be possible for a site to get better ranks and good flow of traffic into the site.
Bitterness is extremely easy to detect and is one of thered flag culture-fit no-hire reasons at my office.

Passion is passion.
Bad pay is bad pay.
They are orthogonal.
I don't see why you'd need to use a third party at all for this type of thing. Postmark is designed to increase email deliverability, but if you're only sending emails to yourself, that shouldn't really be an issue. It seems like good ol' sendmail would do the trick.

Agreed on the pricing though. Doesn't seem very honest.
Scumbag CodingHorror

Says encrypt all the things...

isn't encrypted.
Yes, I mentioned the gas/rust/coagulation issue in the post you replied to. I should mention that I have been through this process myself and I am well aware of the steps necessary to restore a long-sitting gas vehicle to service.

If a car is left to sit for a year the gas will be bad, but there will likely be no further repair necessary other than flushing the fuel system. This is relatively cheap. Even if one mistakenly tries to start it and gets water in the engine, the repairs are far less costly than the $40,000 battery price tag on the tesla.

I had mentioned a decade specifically in regard to engine seizure -- you will not have this problem over a shorter time period such as one year. Nor will you have dry-rot of your hosing or any other major mechanical malfunction. Ruined gas and a dead battery are about the limits of damage in the one year period -- possibly a tire may go flat.

The big deal is that if I leave my $80k gasoline car in a garage for a year it will take very little to get it running again. Probably a few hundred bucks. Perhaps up to several thousand dollars if I foolishly try to start it and get very unlucky. But you can't reasonably construct a scenario where a garaged gasoline car is likely to sustain $40,000 in damages just from safely sitting out of the elements. It's just not possible, period.
If you signed up for an account, then technically, they're exempt under the "transactional or relationship messages." exception[1]. The wording is broad enough, that combined with their TOS, you pretty much end up agreeing to get any emails they want to send you.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/7702#17
The fact that the average HN'er seems to be completely unwilling to even consider using a tool different than git is rather depressing. While I understand that git does have some impressive features that Mercurial does not, most of them are somewhat esoteric, and I certainly doubt that they are enough of a motivation to justify this viewpoint that git has already won and that Mercurial is a pile of trash.

"The more I use git, the more I realize that everyone enamored with it has a severe case of Stockholm syndrome." -- Matt Might [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/mattmight/status/161495662033248256
Some of us are looking for grad school eggheads, and pay a lot for it.
Why did this article start with a political attack? Are we seriously reduced to not being able to discuss a engineering problem without invoking politics?
You cleverly designed a system to con your way into a job you knew you would hate? Congratulations....?
Nitpicking here, but this would be a URI rather than HTTP feature. It is described in RFC2396 and is just part of how relative URIs work.
Agreed, the post title is actually "Quick dive into Ruby ORM object initialization".
Stop Email Overload - Best Practices
Dan from Optimizely here. I agree that engagement isn't always the best metric to use to determine the effectiveness of a variation and in this case it probably would have been better for them to track the submissions of the main form on their homepage. That said for large whole page changes it is a great way to determine whether or not people are more likely to engage on the page in some way vs. bouncing.

The original inspiration for Optimizely came out of my experience as the Director of Analytics for the Obama 2008 campaign where we used Google Website Optimizer and Omniture Test & Target. One of the things that was frustrating with GWO was only being able to measure one conversion goal. With Optimizely you can measure as many goals as you like and see the holistic impact of the changes you make. In this case I think they should have also measured the conversion rate of the main form and see the impact this variation had on it. We will do a better job of evangelizing lessons learned and best practices for our customers going forward!

Appreciate the feedback and keep it coming!
If you're trying to protect from hacking via HTTP Referrer info, you're doing it wrong.

Anyone can fake HTTP Referer info, and if they're going to the trouble of stealing an API key then they're not just a passing bot.
if there's ever a case that demonstrates the shoddiness software patents that are granted these days it's this one.

Only 1 of 10 original patents in the suit remain as valid! (and I'd bet a dollar that one will go away as well)

If that's extended out to all granted patents, fully 90% of software patents might be invalid.
Exactly, this is so needed.
As it is now unless it's in the top 100 it does not exist.
My reading is that the court implied, and what likely could be argued/people would like to argue, is that, even if police were aware of the existence of specific documents, you might still be able to use the Fifth Amendment to prevent decryption. If that was the clear holding of this case, that would be significant. My point about the murder case was to replicate a factual scenario in which the government knew of specific files, and the possession of those files alone would not constitute a crime: could the would-be defendant still use the protections of the Fifth Amendment to prevent decryption? That factual scenario is comparable to Fricosu: the government knew of the existence of specific files and compelled decryption. Given the dicta in this case, however, it is arguable that, even in such a scenario, a defendant would be able to prevent decryption, thus creating an inconsistency with Fricosu. As far as I am aware, only the Fricosu court has discussed this issue--and that was cursory, and from a district court in Colorado.
>As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experimenting with everything.

wrong.
That's really funny partner. Using Excel for generating code fragments that can be cut and pasted into your compiler is powerful and fast. Nothing wrong with it. But, go ahead and don't. I love compete with others doing thing less efficiently. Makes me smile.
There's Rhino, but AFAIK it's much slower than V8. http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/ http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/07/rhino-invokedynamic

Nashorn and dyn.js are some immature but promising implementations. http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/10/dynjs
Ah yes, that should have read 'keys', plural.
I do this with my GPG key too, mainly.
I don't see any way of sorting by tags. We also use tags for several other things so it wouldn't even know which tags to sort by.

trac does a really good job on this side of things, especially a nice place to provide (and sort) milestones, show their progress, a little bit of writeup etc. This is an example:

http://trac.edgewall.org/roadmap
Parent is talking about beautiful schema, not a beautiful query planner. If you are capable of understanding the concept of abstraction and encapsulation, you can design a good system knowing the performance characteristics of your components but not their internals.

The geniuses who wrote postgres don't know how to write responsive web sites. The geniuses who make gorgeous fast websites don't know how a Btree is implemented. It's OK. That's how the global economy works.
Microsoft's request for FRAND pricing on patents related to mutually created industry standard protocols does not seem unreasonable to me.

In isolation it does seem reasonable. You might feel differently, however, if all your business customers using your mobile OS were either being sued by or paying bogus licensing fees to one of your competitors. Microsoft has been asking for it.
The Tragedy of LightSquared vs GPS
Not that I'm biased here (I use git and am more than happy on it), but git on Windows is an abomination as compared to Mercurial. Other than the sometimes complex commandline statements, it's one of git's bigger problems.
Magnetband
Ferriti, Magneti Permanenti, Ferroxcube, Magnetband, Magnete, Permanentmagnete
Freshdesk takes fresh approach to pricing, launches ‘Day Pass’
I love John Perry Barlow's use of language. As you guessed, he was referring to Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu hypertext project. "The Matrix" was a term used by researcher John Quarterman (and the title of Quarterman's seminal book) to designate the totality of all the world's computer networks, which in 1991 were not all linked together (FidoNet, the Internet, DECnet, others long forgotten). As far as I know, Quarterman appropriated the term from William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, where "the Matrix" was the global computer network that was the locus of cyberspace. I think Barlow, in his visionary way, was referencing Neuromancer. The Wachowski brothers' borrowing of the term "the Matrix" for their 1999 film corrupted a term that had meaning in the early 1990s. Now, shall we say, it is deprecated.
So then the browsers have to implement two security systems.
The difference is that with one set of patents, the owner of the patents asked for them to be included in standards, and promised to license then on fair and reasonable terms to anyone who wished to implement the standards. That did not happen with the other set.
With piracy you can download it somewhere else and use a memory stick.

PC system requirements are still notoriously inaccurate. There are too many variables and the wrong combination of CPU, GPU, motherboard, memory bus, OS or drivers can make or break performance of a game. Minimum (or recommended) spec doesn't always mean that playing will be enjoyable.