skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By your very own definition, "In theory" means "we have a model that makes good predictions in some circumstances."

If I let "some circumstances" be "non critical use with no attacker" and the model be "very very very very very very very very very very very very very low probability of collision when applied on pre-existing files", I don't see any problem.

The problem is that you were commenting the article using an absurdly geek point of view, interpreting each sentence as it had a very strict mathematical meaning.

In the real world, peoples sometime do misuse the language a little with the resulting sentences being easier to understand for everybody. That is generally not a call for a smart people to point out that when translated word by word (i.e. when poorly translated) using quantifiers, the statement is mathematically false. Especially when everybody on earth understand that use of "in theory" in the first place.

If Jeff wanted to make a mathematical article, he probably had written mathematical statements in the first place.

If every time you see the world "theory" you are feeling you should correct the one using it by telling him about corner cases he very probably already knows about their existence in the first place, you will loose a lot of time for a lot of non-constructive comments.
Entropy Visualizations of Malware
Ah - noted. I've seen this confusion many, many times, and possibly jumped the gun in the case.
Here’s a PDF version I created: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/105727/fb-subpoena-db/fb-subpoena.pd...

Or view as a web page with JPEGs: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/105727/fb-subpoena-db/index.html

(What is more absurd than releasing information like this in SWF format and only SWF format…?)
As someone that occasionally smokes a joint, I really don't feel safe driving - but joints can have different effects on different people, the strength etc... Someone that smokes up daily is more resistant than people that smoke on small occasions
interviewstreet.com
Last year at OSCON there was a talk about this:

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18924

http://www.slideshare.net/rabble/building-a-hacker-culture-i...
Two tales from start-up Britain
Think about how much fewer wives would be beaten if the Government had a camera in everyone's bedroom, or how much money we'd save on taxes if law enforcement could do anything they wanted without a warrant.

Yes it's sarcasm, but I don't think the law enforcement agencies see it like that. They actually want that, and they've said before that having to get a warrant makes it "hard" for them - even though 90% of the warrants they ask for are approved.

Lately all of them are pushing for more invasion of privacy, because they don't see it like that. They see it as "making our job easier" - without any regard for the abuses that could lead to or for history of Government oppression, or if the people actually want that. After all, surely they know "best" what needs to be done to protect the population.
Chinese Teen Sells Kidney For iPad And iPhone
I've read conflicting reports before. Seattle's alternative weekly, The Stranger, has been talking a lot about pot and driving in light of the ballot referendum we'll have this year on pot legalization in Washington state. Here are a couple choice bits:

The report finds that only one of the participants had active THC levels above 5 ng/mL on "admission (day 1)," which suggests that the woman was high when she arrived...The woman had reported smoking four blunts per day.

and,

Likewise, Grotenhermen et al found in 2005: "The crash risk apparently begins to exceed that of sober drivers as THC concentrations in whole blood reach 5–10 ng/mL."

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/02/24/sorry-m...

So, in other words, yes smoking pot can impair your ability to operate heavy machinery, but you have to be smoking quite a bit (or not used to it, ostensibly).
As I understand it, keeping logs is optional. However, if you keep logs and receive a subpoena, you must turn over whatever logs you have.
Aside, but WOW the TechCrunch iPhone version is annoying. It's automatically paginated in the middle of sentences and (cardinal sin) there's no way to opt out and get access to the desktop version.
Constructive feedback here...it's not going to be pretty.

This looks like it was made by a developer. That's one of the distinctive factors, I have noticed, with the apps that come out of YC, you can't tell they were made by developers. They are given a nice sheen of design and it looks pleasant and inviting.

This doesn't. As a developer, this reminds me of Java and C++ (both of which make me cringe).

Whereas Ruby feels inviting and less intimidating.

Glad to see you guys doing something and I am not knocking that...it's just that developers are people too. We also want to use tools/sites/apps that feel & look good.

Take some time and invest in UI/UX design...it will go a long way.
Virus hits half a million Macs: How to protect yourself against malware
This source is extremely questionable.
This is basically a blog post (http://www.4autoinsurancequote.org/uncategorized/reasons-why...) and a press release (http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/4/prweb9375729.htm) summarizing some reasons that marijuana users are less dangerous on the road than drunks.
There is one study linked by the NHTSA which showed they drive slower than drunks, and the rest appears to be pure conjecture. All of this is this re-interpreted in the SFGate article to suggest marijuana users are safer than non-marijuana users. While I agree with the sentiment, this article is of questionable validity and does not really fall into the tech or programming news that belongs here.
Because fishing expedition, and the law of unintended consequences.
Former Goldman Sachs Programmer Found Guilty After Stealing Computer Code
Ask HN: When you launch a startup how do you get beta testers?
Google search engine algorithm change history
Everything I've read by him, including this article, has been written in a calm instructive tone, as if he is providing an example to follow. You are of course free to ignore it or disagree. From his writings and the ubiquitous negative comments, it appears RMS isn't nearly as threatened by others as they seem to be of him.
Liquid Armor
I like the idea because of the extremely low barrier to entry. What concerns me is how immediately exploitable it seems to be. What happens when I email a URL? Does it get linkified on the resulting page? What if my computer gets some malware that sends spam to everyone in my contact list. Does that page on inboxi.us become an outlet store for Viagra?
How to be more confident in your changes – Test First…
I met one of the team on the train once (Jordan I think?) and he seemed like a passionate young guy. I hope the project is a huge success.
It’s worth noting that Apple has at least attempted to address many of these concerns. Rate on delete is gone and they’ve added “Top Grossing”. These days app reviews usually take a week.

Of course the app store is still filled with junk apps, there are no paid updates, search is still broken and iTunes Connect is still a mess.
This is not true at all. I was a loyal T-Mobile customer for almost 8 years, I upgraded my contract, signed another two year contract (at year 6 of being a customer) and 6 months in I asked if they could unlock my phone because I was traveling to Europe and they told me that they don't do that until your contract that is up, and even then it was limited to a small subset of phones.

I ended up selling my phone on eBay and purchasing an iPhone 3G from a friend which I unlocked by jail breaking it!
Yes, Facebook has a private message feature, recently merged with live chat.
It’s really not.

Only in the last half-decade or so have we started to fight the datavores.
Randi Zuckerberg justifies Bravo’s new Silicon Valley reality show
I would like the ability to present the Netflix streaming titles with their associated imdb ratings... And filter accordingly. I find the high imdb ratings a better indication of what I actually enjoy than the Netflix rating.
Your sarcasm is exactly the kind of black and white thinking that gets nobody anywhere.

> The point of laws is not to make things harder for the police

The Facebook info presented in this article was lawfully obtained through a subpoena, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

> it is to protect all of us from the government.

Laws also exist to protect us from each other. When a crime is alleged, justice is best served (for both the accuser and the defendant) by having as much evidence as possible. But there also need to be checks on this, which is why we have the Bill of Rights and evidence rules in court.
I see many people in this community objecting to copyright

* extending beyond the life of the creator

* extending beyond the original 14 years or wherever it began

* held by non-human legal entities

* not requiring donation to Library of Congress

* not requiring some sort of property tax

* retroactively extended

and a few other issues with copyright. I've seen no more than a tiny minority objecting to copyright completely. I've observed this community supporting copyright in some form quite a bit. The GPL and other Free licenses are based in copyright, for example.

Respectfully, the red-herring of who is David and who is Goliath implies you don't understand the issues. I didn't downvote you, but I can understand why someone would. If I have a principled stand on an important issue and someone implies I blindly support the little guy -- I can see someone feeling that's what downvoting is for.
In a forum full of hackers, we should all be able to agree, information is information... Whether its letter order, word order, sentence order, paragraph order or topic order... There is a continuum when it comes to deciding what information is protectable IP. If I order 10 topics, that information is probably not protectable IP. However, if I order 10,000 topics in a tree, that is definitely complex labor-intensive information and should be protectable in the same way that an author can protect his ordering of 10,000 words.

Is there complex information in the ordering and organization of a 2000 page text book. I would tend to say yes, although I look forward to seeing what the courts say.
Note that Silverlight 3D cannot be used by Silverlight users due to a very convoluted process to enable it.

Also note that Silverlight nicely avoids being used as a JS backend to a wrapper implementing WebGL, since it requires shaders to be precompiled.
There was a UK study from the Transport Research Laboratory in 2000 that said that people who were slightly stoned tended to keep their distance more and their speed down.

People who were boxed were rubbish however. Sobriety is generally the best state for driving.
How To Root HTC One S [Tutorial]
Hey coderdude, these are awesome points. A few things, since we pull everything into our email reactor we can run spam filters on the content sent to us, so while this wont be 100% effective we think we can scale this technology with some practice. Second, we already run malware and anti virus scans on everything sent to us, again this is not 100% bullet proof but since we're using gmail as a back end email appliance its not bad so far.
> Yes it's sarcasm, but I don't think the law enforcement agencies see it like that.

Maybe some do, but some privacy advocates think it would be best if individuals could always prevent law enforcement from obtaining any evidence. Don't make arguments that are just as absurd as the extremists on the other side.
The parent post does not describe XSLT as "incredible," but rather as "incredibly single-purpose."
There are events, parties, groups, and meet-ups which are exclusively organized on Facebook.

But we can fight back. Quoting Dave Winer:

> BTW, I get invited to events that say check out the Facebook page for details about where to be and when. If I care about the event, I write back to them telling them I don't use Facebook, and would read about it if they put up a blog post. Otherwise I can't come. If people hear that a few times, it'll start changing behavior. It's not the kind of thing you need a lot of people to do to force change. It's kind of like Apple refusing to put Flash on their iPhone and iPad. I don't imagine too many events would get reconceived just for me, but if a few more people do it, that could be enough to make the change.
Todo list primarily. Striking things off a piece of paper is oddly satisfying.

I basically break down my tasks into stuff that can be done in a few hours.
Did not know that Andre had bulgarian father. (I'm bulgarian myself). Obey!
Thanks Sejje, yeah I haven't spent much time on the home page yet, but hope to have something this weekend that shows you what's trending.
Instructive blog posts and advocacy talks don't constitute "pushing down my throat." A response to an idea often says more about the responder than it does the idea.
(I replied a little more to local-variable below.)
I refuse to believe such a beast exists.
Megaupload Points Out That The Feds Want To Destroy Relevant Evidence
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Of course they're safer. They're sitting in their driveways, giggling their heads off because of the funny shapes of their keys until they remember that they're hungry and head back inside for those Doritos that fell behind the couch the other day.
The essay in question is infinitely more complex and nuanced than you seem to be giving it credit for, as are the myriad views of the HN community.

HN is filled with entrepreneurs who, in one way or another, almost always rely on copyright. Claiming some sort of blanket "anti-copyright" sentiment is both disingenuous and insulting.
#1. You're confusing free as in beer and free as in freedom. Stallman cares about free as in freedom. You really want to go back and review this because you are clearly unfamiliar with the philosophy behind the free software movement. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html The freedom the FSF talks about is not related to cost, it's related to the freedom to modify and share software.

#2. Software in the days you speak of WAS more like free software today. Hackers did share software and patches and such. If you had a problem with a piece of Unix code, whoever the commercial vendor was would often just send you the source. If it stayed like this, there would never be a need for the FSF.

#3. Developers can work on whatever they want in their spare time. If a developer feels that it's valuable to donate his or her labor to improve a piece of software that can improve everyone's lives then that's their business. They have the FREEDOM to do what they want with their time and intellectual capacity and if that's in creating software that supports user freedom, then obviously they see a benefit in it.

#4. It's shortsighted and wrong to say that free software is anti-commercial. Red Hat is a billion dollar company now. Microsoft was one of the largest contributors of code to the Linux kernel last year. Every internet company we ever talk about on HN mostly owes their business to free software like Apache, Linux, BSD, Nginx, PHP, Ruby, etc etc etc etc etc

#5. No, RMS would not refuse medical treatment at a non-free facility. This is a specious argument that has been brought up time and time again and shot down repeatedly. Read this very thread, that point is addressed.
> it would be nice to have something with all the power of XSLT and with a lighter syntax

That thing you are looking for is XQuery (http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/) and it is fantastic.

Don't be fooled by the name: it can produce content, too.
I understand philosophers like Sarte and Kant would agree that the moral thing to do here is not use a plug-in that lets us nerds cheerily use links generated by an evil feature without harming ourselves (by auto-sharing what we read), but rather choose not to follow such links and to warn our often-unwitting friends that they are auto-sharing content merely by reading it.

Because the question is, what is the effect if others were to act like ourselves?

One action still rewards these evil social reader / frictionless sharing apps.

The alternative helps impede them.

I know which world I want to help create.
Imagine it this way. Your friends are data, you have limited capacity, and you access them with some pattern. Suppose you live in a world without Facebook.

Your wife and kids are in your registers. You see them all the time, and generally they're either a room away or (at the most) a phone call away.

Your best friends are in your L1 cache. Sometimes they come up to the registers after you've been hanging out with them for a while, but even if not, they're only a phone call or text away in the L1 cache.

...

Your friend from elementary school you haven't talked to for years is on disk swap. He lives in Japan, and you might want to contact him if you're traveling there.

In that world, it's still very cheap to access your most frequently-accessed connections--your wife, kids, best friends. However, as you go down the memory hierarchy it becomes very expensive to access them. And so, you contact them less often.

Enter Facebook. Now your friend from Japan is only a post away. You don't have time to have email threads with all of your friends, down to that friend from elementary school. But you can occasionally keep up with that friend by browsing to his timeline, occasionally seeing some major events "X got engaged", and maybe sending a light message. Suddenly your disk became an SSD and it became much cheaper to keep in contact.

Your registers and L1 caches haven't changed much. Now you can contact them in the medium that's most convenient at the time. You can message them from your phone (fb messenger), or skype them on your computer, but you can also just call them or talk to them. Facebook gives you more options for accessing the most-accessed friends. As a result, it both expands the size of your caches and main memory, but also makes each level faster to access so you can keep in touch with more of them.

So I don't think the right approach is to think of friends in a binary fashion: Worth keeping in touch with, and not worth keeping in touch with.

Instead, it's a gradient, and communication platforms like Facebook just improve the gradient so it's worthwhile (i.e. possible and easy) to keep in touch with a lot more of your friends.
Messaging is most useful when you want to communicate between separate servers (or at least processes) and you control both sides. Within a process it is usually overkill. On a public interface with independent implementations you probably want a protocol that can be implemented in any language rather than be tied to a specific messaging library. Between separate parts of one system, messaging can be a convenient and efficient way to send around information. This used to be most common in large complex systems ("enterprise"), but with distributed scaling it is getting more useful for startups and hobbyists.

An alternative in the same space is remote procedure call (RPC). RPC is synchronous while messaging is asynchronous.
There is no law in US that requires keeping records for websites.
That's quite a burden to take on (and quite a technical challenge to get right). I wish you luck.

One more thing I wanted to find out about. How do you handle email signatures? When someone comments on a task in BaseCamp (via email) the entire email is posted to the thread, including their signature and whatever little images they included (photograph, or Facebook/Twitter icons). Is there anything you can do about that? Gmail seems to be pretty good at detecting the boilerplate part of a message -- possibly only after having seen one message from the user. This would be an important thing to nail.

Edit: What if you want to lock a page down so that only you or a select few may email updates? I would probably want that for at least one of the pages. Now that I'm thinking about it, the lack of registration is possibly due to how hard it would be to authenticate a user via easily-spoofed email. You might be able to come up with a sort of "secret key" that you add anywhere in the email but I could see that not working out for your average user.
Emblr, the Ember.js Resources Tumblr
Well, there is one thing "terribly damning," and that's the "Deleted Wall Posts" bit.

This was also discovered when someone in Europe requested all of the data that Facebook has on him: that stuff which he had deleted had never actually been deleted, but was instead stored with a flag "deleted=True" which was checked by the database queries.

In principle, at least for short time scales, this is not a bad idea -- you should try to make most or all of your database manipulations reversible, just in case someone steals someone else's account (or other similar abuses). But for long time scales, you would really expect that it would eventually get purged -- and as far as anybody knows, it never is.
I wrote on it, too: http://alanhogan.com/facebook-pseudo-links

And aggregated a few (more noteworthy) bloggers’ reactions: http://alanhogan.com/facebook-frictionless-sharing-pushback
You have to remember that jurors are normal people who have no vested interest in the case either way. As a juror you feel a heavy weight of responsibility, because you know that people's futures are in your hands.

If a person is convicted, it is because 12 random people unanimously agreed beyond a reasonable doubt that the alleged crimes happened. Your lawyer would have a chance to stand in front of the jury and say "of course my client was trying to learn about what happens when a human body decomposes; his family member was dead and he wanted to learn the truth." Jurors are normal people who understand normal arguments.
I think it's probably the worst language I've had the misfortune of having to write anything in. Certainly it was the one I enjoyed the least (even slightly less than Fortran 90 which was somewhat of an achievement), and I think it wins my "most hated language" because of the intersection of awfulness and the nonzero chance that I'd have to program in it. While there are almost certainly worse languages - COBOL certainly appears to be one - there's effectively zero chance that I'll ever write anything in them, hence they're more of an amusing curiosity than something I can hate. Whereas I've had to spend interminable days on XSLT in the past and unfortunately I can't say for sure that I'll never have to again.
It might go a lot like this:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20113365-17/apple-wins-key...
But isn't that how every site ever works? How would it even work otherwise?

I'm starting to think people here are just overanalyzing.
Something I wrote a while back, using Python and PIL.

import sys
import math
from PIL import Image

def getSize(len, width):
h = int(math.ceil(float(len) / width))
return (width, h)

def getImage(file, width=256):
d = file.read()
s = getSize(len(d), width)
im = Image.new('L', s)
im.putdata(d)
return im

def main():
if len(sys.argv) < 2:
print 'Usage: file2img.py <file> <output> [width]'
return

with open(sys.argv[1], 'rb') as f:
if len(sys.argv) > 3:
width = int(sys.argv[3])
img = getImage(f, width)
else:
img = getImage(f)
img.save(sys.argv[2])

if __name__ == "__main__":
main()

Here's a visualization of user32.dll on Windows. Notice how you can actually make out the images that are embedded in the resources!

http://i.imgur.com/7yEHR.png