skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What hurdles/risks are present in bittorrent that are not incurred when uploading to a free file hosting service? I do not think bittorrent and/or free file services provide any serious level of anonymity against a group with pockets as deep as the CoS. Let's not forget these are the people that brought down anon.penet.fi...

N.B.: I also updated my post to include using a tor hidden service. I thought I had included it originally.

From the responses I have read it seems that I should have been more clear that I was also taking censorship resistance into consideration.
If they weren't competent enough to do that before, what makes you think they're competent enough to do it now?

For all we know, they've "fixed" the issue by switching to unsalted MD5 password hashes.
All security is about obscurity because it involves having a secret that you don't believe anyone else can get. (ie; a password, a private key, cert, a random number, a physical object).
On the one hand, yes, it allows the inventor to impose a royalty.

On the other hand, the whole point of a patent is to spread the idea. A patent has to provide enough information to replicate the invention yourself.

So now publishers just have to license the patent; before this, they would have had to come up with a system like this themselves.
Au contraire? Respectfully, in my opinion sitting back and hoping someone else has the motivation to be inquisitive/curious is counter to the spirit of HN.

Furthermore as others have pointed out (as well as myself in another thread) CoS has deep pockets and I imagine that serves as a decent motivation for big media to not publish the incident.
What a surprise statement coming from Google.
Nice article. It's just what I needed to read today :)
Both of the links you posted say that video/event functions should not be called from different threads:

Don't call SDL video/event functions from separate threads

most graphics back ends are not thread-safe, so you should only call SDL video functions from the main thread of your application

The second one specifically says from the main thread, while the first one only says "separate threads". I was always under the illusion that it didn't matter which thread, as long as its the one you cal SDL_Init from. Your experience shows otherwise...

I agree - documentation should be clear about limitations and assumptions.
> You are limiting what can be created in the world.

Not really true. You could say that IP limits some forms of use that could produce new creations. But that would ignore the fact that often IP is licensed, thus not preventing the creation of some content.

Further, providing a reward for the creation of new IP dramatically increases the overall creation rate of what society considers to be "useful" IP.

> No we did not. Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy

That's just an ad hominem.

> At no point in history did we, as a society, conclude that if we limit reward producers it would add to the useful aggregate.

See, this is just factually incorrect. All you need to do is to look at US history and the motivations for creating copyright and patent law as part of the new nation to see that you're wrong.

The saddest thing is that I actually think that our system of IP is in serious need of a rewrite. The way that big media companies abuse our legal system and the power of our government should be criminalized. At very least, we should be using statistical models and the Scientific method to determine the ideal values for copyright and patent lengths rather than basing new IP laws upon the lobbying efforts of Disney.

That said, as an advocate for changing the situation, you're not being effective. You make totally unfounded arguments and in at least one other place in this same thread I saw where you were using cheap online debating tricks to try to get your point across.

When I read the original article this thread is based on, I felt some legitimate annoyance at the professor since what he's doing is unethical. But then I read a couple of your posts and felt I needed to respond to arguments that were remarkably uninformed and disingenuously constructed.
Why would it? Are you confusing Scientology with Mormonism and Austria with America?
I think statically typed languages are generally easier for people less experienced with debugging, too. It's much easier to have your editor blinking "THIS LINE IS WRONG" than to try to make sense of a stack trace after the fact.
Just use Tor bundle and that’s it. The only way you can shoot yourself in foot is if you use flash uploader and that bypasses Tor (fortunately plugins are disabled in Tor bundle AFAIK).

Seeding via Tor? You need to configure Torrent client to use Tor, make sure it doesn’t leak anything (DNS lookups, publishing to DHT or tracker, some stuff on the protocol level was a problem as well). There’s nothing that comes working out of the box. Of course it’s not rocket science, it’s just a bit more work.

Hosting just via hidden service is actually worse than uploading to random locations on clearnet:

1) Still no way to do load balancing with hidden services

2) It’s usually slower anyway

3) If your server gets compromised you’re toasted, unless you use hacked servers, or buy your servers with Bitcoins or stolen CCs.

The best network for publishing that kind of leaks would be Freenet or I2P + Tahoe. But those are not nearly as popular (and secure) as Tor.
I have developed for foreign companies both with and without a contract. I can see no way either me or those companies would have pursued the agreement legally. Maybe because the companies were in fact startups.

However, I prefer to work under the terms of an agreement, mainly because the employer shows interest in taking the time to formally define his expectations and attitude toward developers.
Are you mistaking CoS for the LDS (aka the Mormons)?
A little history on three.js and mrdoob’s tale of getting into coding
I just have to question the quality of the code one risks receiving when outsourcing; sure you can get lucky and find a great guy but in all likelihood it would take a few iterations to find someone worthwhile. All the while you'd be spending time and money finding a developer & losing precious time working on the product at hand.
That's a good one actually, I might switch over to that.
So you're saying you didn't look under the locked filing cabinet in the basement of the condemned warehouse, the one that they were storing in the closet that used to be the men's room until it flooded. I see. How is that Google's fault?
This change adds a few extra steps for an off-store install, unless the user or administrator configures things otherwise. That's it; updates and existing installations aren't affected at all. The details are very clear if you read the discussion or a few of the comments in the bug.
I'm a medical/biotech device engineer, yet I did not know this. Do you have a link to a good source for this issue?

ETA: It seems that the FDA has approved BD's automated screening system for cervical smears.

http://www.bd.com/tripath/labs/fp_screening.asp

http://www.bd.com/contentmanager/b_article.asp?Item_ID=23597...
Carbon et al was an issue. Rosetta wasn't there until the very end. You can get an idea of the lower level work by diffing the divergent Darwin sources from the time (two source branches were used, and Apple released distinct x86/ppc source drops)
Howdy, I am a developer (PHP, .Net, Ruby) and I have had similar experiences as the author, but I think that he should have highlighted the part where he says "fire fast". That is the best advice that he could ever have given. Let's face it, the majority of web applications today are not a technical challenge that have never been solved before.

Your main advantage will be to take the requirement and break it down into its lowest parts and then hand off those parts to an outsourced developer and if he/she does not deliver exactly to your spec, then end the relationship. Period.

There is a certain amount of luck to it, but just as the author suggests, I recommend first having the developer create a very simple application with requirements that you define and estimate how long it would have taken you (probably no more than a 5 hour task) and if he/she can deliver, then you've got yourself a winner and you can focus on the business and not javascript errors.
The bigger reveal seems to me that Steve then took the Vaio laptop running OS X to Japan (or Hawaii, see below) to meet with Sony. This is well after Apple had killed off their clone business, but it seems they were looking at a possible licensee deal? I can't begin to imagine how different the last 10 years would have been in the tech world if Sony had (finally) licensed Mac OS.

(quora comment mentioning Hawaii meeting: http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...)
Do YC companies use Arc?
Can someone answer how many YC companies use Arc when they are building their first prototypes?

Can someone also answer how many YC companies use Arc in their product?
The quality of the code is up to your requirements as a developer. Have the outsourced developer code exactly to the requirement and accept nothing less.
None have that I know of. Several have used Clojure.

Frankly, I would not recommend a startup use it. Although we continue to tweak our version, we haven't bothered to release a new version for a long time. And I doubt there is much in the way of libraries or integration with other stuff.
BASH: Find string in files
As something becomes more pervasive, almost certainly the number of searches for it will go down - it may not (and in this case, dare I say probably doesn't) have anything to do with the level of interest in the search term.

Which I assume was the OP's postulation, despite the 'correlation doesn't infer causation' disclaimer.
Using CoralCDN may be a lot better for everyone.

http://pic.pwny.biz.nyud.net/x/buchladen_at_scientology.co.a...

http://pic.pwny.biz.nyud.net/x/ed_at_scientology.co.at/
I'm in a similar position, but have never worked without some kind of contract. Even if it's not binding, it describes what people expect and so gives guidance on what to do. I've never broken a contract and never had one broken.

The one thing that has worried me is being asked, after signing a contract with a company in at "at will" state, to agree to a "gentleman's agreement" to give a month's notice. If that's what they wanted, why didn't they put it in writing?

More usefully, for the OP, if you're a foreign contractor by far the biggest hurdle is trust. For finding a job and for making that job work. Anyone with an established reputation / identity is going to care - likely more than you - that things work out. On the other hand, I guess, people like that also don't have the kind of cost difference you might be hoping for...
> Right. As was typical, Feynman had a level of understanding of a great many things that were difficult to convey to even some of the smartest people like a bunch of Caltech graduates.

And indeed, he even makes that exact point in this speech.
I didn't know about :Vex. At a quick glance, I'd still prefer NERDTree though, especially with nerdree-tabs as I like having a file tree and I like having one that's always present.

I do shell out a lot, but I still think it's more convenient to perform operations against nodes in NERDTree. Saves having to navigate/down/a/really/long/hierarchy.
Am I the only one who doesn't find this all that positive? I already think scientology is bad/evil/dangerous, and I think that illegally getting access to their secrets might make the opposition (us) look worse in the public eye. Everybody has dirty secrets, both sides, and it's a bit low to go after the other side's private emails. It'd be much easier to fight/debate against their public image, which is easy enough, without having to resort to intrusive attacks. We have the warrant system in the states for a reason, and if this were to happen in court the evidence would just get tossed right out.

Idk, am I alone here? Am I wrong? I'm open to contrary opinions.
You completely misunderstood. I'm not justifying pirating by "pretending" the publisher is a worthless middleman. Did you not read my post? Piracy is not unethical. The fact that a middleman exists gives me more incentive to not purchase through the traditional means.

Piracy is not unethical. It's not wrong. It's not stealing. If the musician wants to own the content they should simply not release it. I could care less about "respecting" the musician. Why should I pay money for low quality content when I could download the flac version for free without drm?
You're a little confused. He's a Mormon, not a Scientologist.
There are a lot of things I don't understand about China's economy, and every time I think I might have a handle on it, I come across juicy tidbits like these ones:

* The ghost city of Ordos. Built on spec for one million residents, this city sits empty in the middle of nowhere. A lot of money went into building all its plazas, museums, parks, office buildings, and residences, but no one needs or uses any of it.[1]

* The New South China Mall, in Guangdong Province. With nearly 10 million square feet of retail space, it's by far the world's largest mall. Opened in 2005, almost no one ever visits it, and only around 1% of the retail space has been leased -- it just sits empty. A lot of money went into building it, but no one needs or uses it.[2]

* A well-known hedge fund manager recently reported that China is building "2.8 billion square metres of Class A office space over the following couple of years... That’s basically a five-foot by five-foot office cubicle for every man, woman and child in China.” A lot of money is going into building a new cubicle for everyone, but what's the economic rationale?[3]

[1] Here's a recent BBC article on it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17390729 and a great photo essay in Time: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1975397,00.htm...

[2] Here's a recent video of the mall on a Saturday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eel1r1nm1lU and here's an article about it: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223747/Ghost-mall-T...

[3] For example, see http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazi...
To be fair, you could easily see this as one of Amazon's "features", much like Zappos. Everyone orders from Zappos knowing that they can not only return shoes for free, but that it is usually encouraged to buy several and return the ones you don't want.

While Amazon isn't quite so blatant about that "feature", their incredibly awesome customer support, zero-hassle returns encourage this kind of behavior...effectively making it a feature.

And to be honest, it's an awesome feature.
I have had experience in this, and you're right about how difficult it is to enforce but in my experience merely having a document to reference and threaten with legal action is enough to scare most fear away. Just don't lean on your agreement, lean on your payment. Begin with simple tasks, and the most you would be out is $20-$30 and if you begin to show the outsourced developer that you will be bringing them constant work then you will be a god-send. Do not start a project and wait until the end to point out that something is going wrong with timing/code/payment/etc.
Because uploading it to a free file hosting service can easily be done via a compromised machine and/or tor (don't know how well uploading large files over tor works though) - maybe even a library/public computer, making it quite hard to trace (though when using a public computer you need to take other precautions, like avoiding surveillance cameras). Also since nothing is made public instantly you have time to erase any traces.

With bittorrent you need at least one seeder that is available long enough to feed the swarm (in decent time), during that time a lot of things can go wrong (if anything goes wrong when uploading to a free hosting service you just start over, nothing lost).
You already pay for the use of the labs, the chairs, the time of the professor, etc out of tuition, right?

Then why on earth do you not also pay for the use of a book?
Mozilla does have an extension "blocklist", but it's used very infrequently, mostly for confirmed malware. It also distinguishes between "soft" blocks, which the user can re-enable, and "hard" blocks, which the user cannot.
The 10 second blog-engine for hackers (in javascript)
> "I believe the denial of evolution is something characteristic for american evangelicals."

It's pretty easy to trace the history of this belief.

In the late 1800s, a movement sprang up primarily in the US called "Liberal Christianity", which at its most extreme treated the Bible as essentially a useful and unreliable fairy tale. In response to this, a countermovement called "Christian Fundamentalism" arose, which at its most extreme treated the Bible (typically King James Version) as completely literal and completely perfect, and viewed any study of external data (like manuscripts or culture) with great suspicion. Fundamentalism became fairly influential in American Evangelical circles, even among those who did not explicitly adopt the title Fundamentalist.

As a result of the rise of Fundamentalism, the idea of a literal six-day creation becameentrenched in the US, which directly led to the rejection of the theories Darwin had recently proposed regarding speciation.

When I say the literalist belief became entrenched, I do not mean to say it was nonexistent before, only that it was rare. Various non-literal understandings of the creation account can be found throughout Christian history. For example, Augustine's treatise on Genesis 1 [0] is quite allegorical.

[0] http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf101.toc.html - from where the word "Genesis" first appears on the page, down to where the list of names starts, you can click through to read each individual paragraph/section.
I was assuming someone from anonymous could handle figuring out how to setup tor to seed.

More importantly hosting via hidden service is not worse than uploading to depositfiles. Hidden services protects both the uploader's and the downloader's anonymity and it is much, much, much more resistant to censorship. I am not sure what "hosting gets breached" has to do with the discussion.
Negative savings rates? China has one of the highest savings rates in the world. Did you mean negative real interest rates? Even so, still gibberish. Building see-through buildings, palatial headquarters for SEOs and vanity projects is as wasteful as anything we see in the West, if not more so. Some impressive modern architecture and engineering, though.

Boom/bust economics don't apply to China because there isn't a free capital market (legitimately anyway, there is a shadow underground financial system in some parts, not sure how big).

It's not really a market economy, it's selective application of market principles in a primarily top-down government-run economy.

Government directs SEOs to build apartments, high-speed rail etc., banks to lend for it, and bails everyone out if it doesn't make money. Result is massive resource misallocation. (Not that the West doesn't misallocate resources, build see-through buildings, Pets.com, etc.)

Another good read on China is here -
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/05/a-different-way-of-look...
Nothing complex about this--it's a time-saving measure. Obviously there will be plenty of people sifting through this data, and we are free to rely on them to do so.

You don't have to do everything yourself and find every data problem interesting to keep within the 'spirit of HN'.
Nice! To be fair to the Flash version, it appears to be using the 2D drawing API (equivalent to HTML5 canvas). If the Flash version used Stage3D, performance would probably be equivalent to WebGL for this demo, since most of the work would be offloaded to the GPU.
And when the hosting service receives the inevitable take down notice from CoS? CoS lawyers brought down anon.penet.fi I am sure they can convince depositfiles that they do not want to go to court.
For any project that you want to pivot or extend substantially beyond your first iteration, this seems very risky as you might end up with code that has bad commenting, indecipherable, or needs to be completely rewritten before you can either work on it yourself or pass it on to another developer.

I would imagine, in most cases, building the MVP yourself and then bringing in an Odesk developer to add functionality is likely better in most cases.
To generate random alphanumeric strings drop the following into your zshrc:

function mkpw () {
if (( $# == 0 )) then
head /dev/urandom | uuencode -m - | sed -n 2p | cut -c1-${1:-12}
else
head /dev/urandom | uuencode -m - | sed -n 2p | cut -c1-${1:-$1}
fi
}

By default it generates an alphanumeric string of length 12. Given an integer argument n it generates an alphanumeric string of length n.
That isn't what security through obscurity ever means though. You're taking the words at face value while everyone else is using the words for what they actually mean.

Security by obscurity doesn't refer to the secrets used as keys but instead to the way those keys are stored used to perform authentication.
India-niggers
Alternatively, people could just get bored of facebook and stop using it. It's hard for me to point to any killer feature facebook has. Photo's can be shared a number of other ways, same with text and status updates.

If facebook didn't exist tomorrow would it really matter? Despite their corporate motto of bringing the world together or whatever... I feel like Facebook is entertainment for most people and could easily go out of fashion.
Hey, I've been doing some gigs in oDesk and when you're working on an hourly billed project it's quite safe. They have a piece of software you install that randomly takes print screens while you're working, and makes sure you're active by measuring keystrokes and mouse clicks. You also do daily reports and so the guy who is paying you basically knows everything that is going on. If things eventually don't check out they can appeal on the payments based on the activity and end result, but I have no experience with that.
I do hope I'm not the only one who thought of this:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Here's a conveniently executable fiddle if people want to exec cheald's benchmark themselves:

http://jsfiddle.net/javajosh/SjPub/
You're assuming they have a Twitter account.
That's premature optimization. That's the not the important reason for footwork.
My iPhone Homescreen as of June 2012
I disagree. Sure, they're the bigger name HERE in the US, but when you clone a startup that hasn't moved overseas yet, the clone becomes the bigger name, e.g. Renren, the facebook clone. Facebook is available in china, but I don't see them gaining "100% of the user market". A clone that gets traction early on can dominate the market.
My Email From Steve Jobs
Through the Rabbit Hole - RabbitMQ Clustering
I guess we will find out, that sounds like a pretty big roadblock for the skill level of users I am working with.

There seem like there's a better solution out there, at leat for my use case. I serve the crx bundle from the same domain that it interacts with, that seems like it could be pretty malware proof.
I guess it’s not a major issue when just hosting some static content, but still if someone gets access to your server sitting behind Tor, you better make sure you don’t have any activity that can tie you to that server.

This is how some people running CP sites via Tor were caught.