skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a really cool feature. It would be interesting to see if users in different locales respond to differently to variations. For example, in an A/B test, perhaps US visitors respond better to variation B, and Canadian users respond better to variation A.

These sorts of findings could then be automatically shown to the user without having to run separate tests. It could even be the first step in automatically customizing the site for different regions.
In my opinion your problem was being free.

Here in London it costs 45 GBP (about 65 USD) per year - you can also pay just per trip. Either way it works out to very cheap, much cheaper than the tube, bus, taxi, etc. but not free. You have to pay by card so they know who you are. Also the bikes are big bulky bikes, the parts won't fit with normal bikes. Based on the picture it looks like the Boston system is the same company, their bikes and software are used in several cities.
Pointers have an address, in the sense that it is semantically correct to take their address. If they happen to reside in a register at a given moment, that is an optimization and doesn't change their semantics.
Speaking of app longevity: Recently, I had someone email me saying that they were including some shareware I wrote in the mid-90s in a collection of software that they were going to be bundling with a Mac 680x0 emulator. Look at all the ancient games from the 80s that are still around in emulators and what not.
Invisible Children co-founder detained by police; charity made 'KONY 2012' video
Stratos 13 Mile Space Jump
Keep in mind Apple has some of the highest profit margins in the tech industry too. It can afford to make conditions better, but chooses not to, given company awareness of the practices of its overseas suppliers.
The voice of the people is the voice of God.
RSA signature verification code had been written (in many places, most notably in Mozilla's NSS library) to "parse" the RSA signature message block that resulted from the public key verification operation. RSA signature verification is a little like RSA encryption "inverted", and the element being encrypted is a hash of the content being signed. What vulnerable implementations would do was, they'd perform the public key transform and the extract the hash, then just check the hash against the content.

The problem is that a SHA2 hash of a message is much smaller than an RSA message block. The remainder of the content of the block is supposed to be "padding". "RSA padding" is one of the worst names in cryptography, because it isn't so much "padding" as it is "armor". If you don't pad in a very particular way, and check the padding scrupulously, you end up with multiple different vulnerabilities.

In this case, the vulnerability was that libraries like NSS weren't checking the padding at all (they naively assumed that if an RSA public key operation produced a SHA2 hash of a complicated message, whoever generated the signature must have the private key). The Bleichenbacher attack was that for E=3 RSA, the unchecked padding created a huge amount of "head room" in which garbage data would be ignored. Because of the low exponent, the modular multiplications performed by the signing (private) operation might never wrap the modulus; in other words, the modulus was irrelevant, because the math worked out to a simple cubing/cube root without ever hitting it. The bits produced by this "key oblivious" E=3 signing operation were gibberish, of course... but the RSA implementations weren't checking them, because they were "just padding". As long as the message bits included a hash in a predictable place, they looked valid.

The correct way to perform this operation was not to extract anything from the RSA message block produced by verification. Instead, the verifier should have simply created their own properly-padded message block from the original content and verified the whole block byte-for-byte. So the bug was, basically, trying to parse RSA signature blocks at all.

The end result was, because RSA verifiers were effectively ignoring most of the signature bits in the message, attackers could use trivial (as in, type- it- into- a- python- repl) math to generate valid-looking signatures for any SHA2 hash.

This bug was in RSA code for years and years and years.

Don't build crypto.
I don't want to be overly cynical, but a lot of users download the latest version, before they realize 2.7 is what they really want/need. I for one made that mistake. I know at least of a couple of friends who did this as well.
Well it wasn't as bad in Panama under Noriega as it was in Romania under Ceaușescu. Panama couldn't be called a benevolent dictatorship but it wasn't the worst of them.

Times were tough in Panama and this includes being tough for the cops. I had to pay bribes. I was once questioned by the police over a matter and was scared I'd be taken to a holding cell in Panama City. If you were put in a holding cell in Panama City and were not considered friendly to the regime you could be placed in a cell were you would be sexually assaulted by transvestites put in the cell for such a purpose.

Some areas - nice areas - were off limits to Americans who knew better. Places were officer of the Panamanian military lived. You didn't want to be caught there. When stopped by cops you considered it a good thing if the only thing that happened was that you lost money.

It was much worse for Panamanians than for Americans. We did have a military presence and until the end Noriega didn't want to push the boundaries of acceptable behavior too much.

The two defining characteristics in my mind of a police state are a feeling of powerlessness when dealing with police forces and the feeling of arbitrariness of how police forces deal with you. We aren't at the point of police statehood yet but I see the U.S. going down this path.
I hear that. However, the thrust of the article and the focus of my comment is about new grads, people in going through the recruitment -> internship -> job offer cycle
They didn't merely post or email people.

They are devoting THEIR ENTIRE SHOW this weekend to the retraction.

If you honestly think Fox News would do this, I want some of your drugs.
This: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity is a much better way to find someones location so they don't have click the allow button.
Let's say your company needs a new way to keep track of all its employees. It'll take a long time to document everyone and integrate it with your other systems.

You have to choose between two different products: one by, say, Microsoft, and one by a startup. While I might prefer the startup's version, an established company makes more sense.
Agreed. I was really hoping that with 2.0, there would be at least some attempt at refining the interface.

Compare the interface to Reaper (The Cockos team has three main contributors, right?), Cubase or Vegas, or if you want to get shiny, Propellerheads or Line6.

A fresh coat of paint goes a long way.
In journalism circles you can often hear that the truth leans to the left. When things like Evolution and Climate Change are brought up you can either go with the facts which leans left or teach the controversy which leans right but there is no safe middle ground. The left has plenty of less than rational views, but when you simply speech the truth your far less likely to seem to lean to the right.
I managed to convert a few Github paying customers to switch to bitbucket. The only reason they state for using github was that they didn't know bitbucket is available for use with git (as well as with mercurial) besides the private repos thingy.
He seems to want to relocate to "silicon valley" (the Bay Area) and make it work long-term, from what I can tell, so while its a bit radical, it could work out for him, its hard to know when to make the jump. I think the case of a founder, who doesn't have a stable, solid income, it is even harder, personally I prefer the route of relocating for a job offer, putting in some time and then later, once some roots are put down, working on a startup, but since he already has one going, its probably not an option for him.
People have been experimenting with electrowetting and optional backlights. The results are encouraging - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/8610962.s...

EDIT: Something more recent - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag4HGceyVik . The colours seem to be lacking contrast but I'm sure that'll be improved as better filters are developed.

Mirasol and the like seem to be providing quite a good compromise - http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2012/01/01/review-kyobo-mi... That particular reader has the problem of not being as polished as the Kindle but it seems that the screen is rising up to the expectations.
I went crazy one time and decided to leave Silicon Valley and live out of my car in southern California. I saw a lot, met characters, and learned lots more.

Biggest takeaway: the idea bordered between impractical and stupid. But I was 24 and I thought I knew better. Also, I was 24, I could tolerate being stupid.

Other takeaways:

1. Buy a Costco 24 Hour Fitness membership. You now have access to facilities around the country.

2. Make friends with 7/11 clerks, the nice ones got your back at night for a few days at a time.

3. Pack a baseball bat. Seriously.

4. Bring a tent and camping chairs.

5. Very few bums and vagrants have good stories but the ones that do are worth their weight in gold.

At the end of the day you're going to spend more time and effort figuring out how to survive than working. This becomes a huge drag after the magic fades the first week.

And, oh yeah, if you want to be full on relentless: make friends with big corp employees in Mtn View and Palo Alto to partake in their cafeterias. Or figure out how to do the tailgating dance.
Performance at Any Scale
This was actually a different attack on RSA by the same person! tptacek described the padding attack well in a sibling comment.
Whenever I have used audacity to do simple audio edits I feel like I am using an elephant gun for a fly swatter. For some reason I never feel the same way when I use gimp to do the equivalent minor image modification.
I've tried this before while reconnoitering new cities. I have a far better setup for stealthy, comfortable car-camping than this poor chap and I typically end up breaking down and staying at a hostel or finding a furnished craigslist/couchsurfing room anyway. The money you end up spending while loitering around coffee shops and burning through gas does not justify the savings over finding a cheap place to crash.
On Windows my sound drivers include something called stereo mix. You can record this through audacity to get their side of the conversation. To record yourself as well you need to set your mic to playback through your speakers, but then you hear yourself speaking.

There may be a better way, but that's what I've always done if I needed to record on Skype.
Actually protecting the users should be. Maybe because I'm a Dad makes me lame like my father was before me, but...
Talk to someone about it, who will act as a good lens/mirror for distilling it into its core use.
His is worthless as well...

Unless you can fact check it.
Before universities, guilds would have members vouch for their apprentices. If you were a master blacksmith, your word saying that your apprentice was skilled enough to be called a blacksmith was enough for them to go out on their own.

It's not the same thing but its swinging back towards that.
MacOS KenDensed: Apple, iPhones & Investigation-palooza
During some of my crazier and younger moments I've been on some trips where I would sleep in the car one night and stay in a motel others, it seems saving money is the issue, so maybe he'd be better off "cycling" and sleeping the car a few nights but intermixing it with staying in a motel / hostel others
in UI design, polish and usability == working correctly
Glad you like it! Yep, several people complained about lack of alt support. Seems like a better choice overall.
What was Blodget accused of fabricating?

My understanding is that he settled when he was accused of touting stocks he didn't like. But I also understand that he actually lost a lot of money on such stocks.

He paid $4m in restitution to investors, but apparently the total amount of lost money that could be traced to his transactions was less than the interest on the $4m over the half-decade after the fine. So the case looks a lot more complicated than the capsule version.
"There isn't much to do besides drink. Food is terrible. I heard it's gotten better but if you've lived in SF or LA and you love food, don't work in Ireland. There were a nice row of Chinese places on Parnell that were pretty good though."

I'd like to dispute this, there are some excellent fine restaurants in Dublin. They may be harder to find against the high background noise of fast food joints, but the same is true for all north American cities too.
Wow; I was one of the first developers to work on Audacity way back in 2001, but I haven't kept up with its development in a long time. It's exciting to see a new major release.

I'm always amazed and proud at how widely I see Audacity being used. Most recently I spent the 5 weeks as a juror on a criminal trial, and I saw Audacity installed on the prosecutor's computer.
I'm really excited by this idea. I know many first-year and second-year teachers who spend so much time lesson planning. It seems like a lot of duplicate work repeatedly done by teachers that can be saved or cut down with shared lesson plans.

I've seen other sites in the past attempt to solve this problem, but using the SourceForge model. Just hosting lesson plans and providing search and ratings isn't enough, though. I think the GitHub model is so much more successful because of the feedback provided by forks, watchers, and recent activity. This implicit measurement of activity is much more interesting than a star-rating when judging a project's quality.
Part of the trick is also not to give away too much in the title. If people want to know, which lib has been chosen, and they click on the link to find out, that does not have too be bad thing.

Sometimes I read a title, like let's say "X website reached Y amount of visitors". Even if I find that interesting, I won't click on the link, because the title already gives away all the information. Also I am not going to upvote it, if I have not even looked at the link.
You should not rely 100% on a service you pay for either, be ready to switch gears on a moment's notice as fast as possible. You never know, the US government may shut them down without warning due to some government bureaucrat trying to get his moment in the spotlight.
Maybe audacity's changed since I tried it, used to be that by chosing stereo in audacity your skype input was automatically set to stereo too.
cool story

sadly i can never order another book from them, ever after i made the mistake of ordering and actual reading "Couch DB" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596155902.do and "The Art of SEO" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596518875.do front to cover (as i do with 80% of all books i purchase)

It seems like o'reilly is no longer in the book publishing business, but in the business of collecting blogsposts, printing them on paper selling them via their outstanding brand - without any quality assurance of any kind (other than choosing still outstanding cover pics.

additionally i made the mistake of ordering "Data Source Handbook" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018254.do via Amazon, paid my $29.99 and only realized in the moment i opened the box, that it actually has 42 pages and no real content. thanks to jeff b. i could return it to amazon.

its very sad what happened to o'reilly - there was a time you could pick-up/buy any oreilly book, read it from front to cover and then know more about the topic than 99.999% of all other humans on this planet - and you had a very good base of actually becoming a real expert on that topic, these days seem now very long ago.
Had no idea Bleichenbacher was at Google. Good get.
Local Motion's electric cars target Silicon Valley HQs
Summary:

"a tablet of the highest quality"

"quad-core Tegra 3 processor is out"

"target price has been lowered to $149"

It seems to me that you can have one or the other. You can make a solid $149 tablet with many compromises. Or you can make a tablet that has top (ipad) quality hardware. You can't really do both without shoveling money into the toilet.

Indeed Asus already makes a tablet with top quality hardware. It sells for $499.
Or create a (resizeable) image that is case-sensitive. Not sure what the performance overheads of that will be, though.
Photos: Space Shuttles Discovery and Atlantis Meet One Last Time
No, it is a mechanical turk where you are the worker and your HITS are divulging personal bits of information and your rewards are badges and dopamine.
The only way for Google to ship something like this at this price point is to eat a big chunk of the production costs and sell it at a loss.
Keep it dead simple and do not add any extra features until users start to ask for them. Let the user base guide future product development. Put up a feedback link on every page and be responsive, but do not build every requested feature. Just the ones that make sense. It's a challenge that takes discipline.
What I find fascinating is that this seems to be a regular facet of cisco's culture. Some employees leave, start a start-up with access to Cisco's manufacturing/engineering resources, poach a bunch of employees from Cisco, then get bought back for huge sums of money a couple years later. As the article mentions, this must be tough on morale for the people that aren't picked to join the hot-new product-line.

I use the term "leave" very lightly. Apparently, Mario, Luca and Jain's previous spin-ins: Andiamo and Nuova moved right across the street into buildings still owned by Cisco.
Hacking Chartbeat
> What's "actual" education? One's personal opinion can differ.

A good education is one that reflects reality. If your opinion of what reality is differs from mine, you're welcome to show me wrong using experiments. Otherwise, you are wrong and are not likely to be a good educator.

> The debate about mentioning creationism in schools shows that both sides see the school as the indoctrination vehicle

Not to the extent you seem to think: One side has facts on its side, whereas the other does not. If you can't see any asymmetry there I refuse to try to help you.

> Of course, you or I may not like their choice, but why should they care?

Because I have to live with the laws they have the political clout to force through Congress. I have to deal with the fact they have just as much political clout as I do and no idea why the tides come in or why trickle-down economics is a terrible idea or why banning abortions doesn't magically make everyone into someone who can raise a child in a reasonable fashion.
That would kill the internet over night. Think of the thousands of links you couldn't visit because you need to pay that site $1. The internet is supposed to help people access the world's information. If you charge $1 per site they would have to choose a few sites to use and not use any others - and they could end up getting fed biased information. The other problem would be content ownership. If you embed YouTube videos on your site and charge $1 to access your site are you charging for access to that content (which you do not own)?
Joseph Kony and the Moral Ambiguity of the Modern World
He can just rebrand it a comedy.
I can't speak to the Google examples, but the Microsoft and Apple examples were products, not services. They didn't magically stop working when Microsoft/Apple stopped producing them -- In fact, I know someone who still uses his Newton today.
The Engadget Show is live, here at 6:00PM ET
Keep your mattress and supplies in the car out of sight, there are slime things that make their way up and down market street that would smash all your windows for just the sleeping bag or mattress.

Getting smashed and grabbed is a very likely thing to happen if you have anything in the car at all.
You can never fully escape economics, but I think a better way of looking at it is overemphasizing micro-optimization while being stuck in a small local maximum.
[Breaking] The new iPad Is Shipped Unlocked
I agree: paying for a service does not guarantee that the service will be around. However, if the service is 100% free, then it guarantees that none of the users of that service are actual customers.
Haskell.org has been accepted this year despite its non-presence on the list.
Funny you should bring that up. I dislike the Lean Startup ideology precisely because it is at odds with the creative process as I understand it. Did you see the interview with the Pinterest founder the other day? He said he was glad he hadn't known about it earlier because it would have convinced him to give up. Twitter may be a similar case; the founders said they kept going for a long time when people were telling them it was useless.

When you see something other people don't see, measuring their opinions is likely to tell you you're wrong. But what if you're not wrong? Emerson has a great line somewhere about the pain of having an original thought and giving it up under pressure, only to find out later that it was right.
Big difference.

James Frey lied about his own personal experience and Henry Blodget was involved in securities fraud. They are relatively unknown outside their industry.

Mike Daisey told lies that he presented to news organizations, blogs, etc. as facts -- for money and self-promotion at the expense of a well respected company. CNN, NYTimes, The Washington Post, etc. wrote articles based on Mike Daisey's lies. In my view this is similar to what happened to Dan Rather a few years ago. People will forget, but they will remember.
And sell the video on iTunes :)
Interesting to see Twitter on the list!
Releasing a product of any sort is not trivial when you're someone like Netflix - your product needs to be thoroughly vetted by your partners (who are interested in content protection), tested, and supported by real people.
How bizzarre, but christ those are some serious allegations. That definitely strikes a blow to the legitimacy of this campaign...
I think this is a very big thing.

I'm taking two free Stanford/Coursera classes (PGM and NLP) and in return for a lot of my time (about 15 hours per week, per class), I have the opportunity to master two topics that interest me.

These "superstar academics" themselves have the opportunity to positively affect the lives of a very large number of people.
> Money is the best explanation for the PR push behind your email.

So your position is that Apple is pressuring NPR which is pressuring Chicago Public Media which is pressuring Chicago Public Radio which is pressuring Public Radio International which is pressuring This American Life to issue a retraction?

I really don't think This American Life needed much pushing to retract admitted falsehoods.
> then treat the service as disposable.

This has implications for pricing.
well said, and even they have some guys w/o titles, just to organize and filter employees' ideas, but still.. (of course if they are still working at google)
Wow, thanks for that link. That was before we even had a logo. I should go see if we have that file somewhere.
Exactly. Advertising works least well when it's spam, slightly better when it's targeted, and best of all when it's a personal endorsement from someone you trust. When Alton Brown tells you to buy Shun knives or when Penny Arcade tells you to play SW:TOR that has a lot more impact than a random ad for wicker furniture or what-have-you.

That's something that google and facebook are working towards but perhaps they are working too indirectly.