skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This turned into a rant - possibly a rant with no informed opinions. Apologies in advance.

I think we can look at our vulnerabilities in three levels

- open windows
Backdoors left in as factory defaults, connecting 20 year old systems to Internet by slapping on an NIC. These are the blue collar computer systems running trains and factories. Replacing their systems with (OpenBSD) must be a major national priority. It will cost a fortune, and the foolish thing is to imagine we should replace like for like functionality.
As someone above noted, the md5 encryption was used to maintain backwards capability with a system uneconomic to upgrade. As a society we either make that an unacceptable deal or we turn off the lights now
This will disrupt a lot of industries. In both senses of the word.

- best practises - The cloud and competitive contracting will take care of things like not upgrading your OS for ten years. Thats doing what you already do but better. The killer practises will be the ones we don't do at all. Almost no-one sends me PGP signed or encrypted email. And even if they did I have no web of trust that links them back to me. Let's see Facebook or LinkedIns social graph become a layered web of trust. Then tripwire can tell me that the server I am giving my credit card has binaries that were signed by a sysadmin who is linked to three guys I know and the binary hashed match those signed by shuttle worth. In real time. And I am just making that up. But it is feasible.

Defense in Transparency - why can't I know what binaries a server is running, who put them there and when? I can look at the locks on doors, see the quality of the mortar in the brickwork. Why can't I ask a system to tell me how secure it is and expect to get a audit able answer.

I think I am ranting. But I know we cannot trust industry certification or peer pressure. We need to get to a point where when there is no lock on a door it is clear for everyone to see, and everyone expects to see locked doors.
Check out http://www.meetwindowsazure.com - It's a live broadcast happening right now which will answer a lot of questions.
Um, what is it then? Since the 20th Century most inhabitants of the US seem to think of themselves as Americans as opposed to Pennsylvanians or whatever. The US has a few things that look sort of like imperial possessions (e.g. Puerto Rico), but those are a pretty small part.
Meet Windows Azure (Scott Gu Keynote)
Amen. I like the analogy (coffee shop) but wondering if there's a better or easier one to get the point across to people.
+1 there's absolutely no reason why they cannot get it working for New Zealand -- considering most of our banks are actually owned by Australians, and typically use the same systems!
The complaint is about how the compression is implemented-

Header compression is a good feature with real world applications,
and deflate with persistent context is a good approach to achieve
it. A fixed dictionary is probably not very effective as it
complicates the implementation while only providing initial value to
the compression. As an example, this is how the average requests
sizes compares between HTTP and SPDY in different modes, using the
set of captured headers used to train the current SPDY 3 dictionary.

HTTP 821.1
HTTP zlib compressed 543.5
HTTP compressed with dictionary 497.0
SPDY 913.7
SPDY zlib compressed 606.5
SPDY compressed with dictionary 517.0

I.e. Just putting the HTTP request in a SPDY stream (after removing
disallowed headers) only differs by 20 bytes to SPDY binary header
format with dictionary based zlib compression. The benefit of using
a dictionary basically goes away entirely on the subsequent request.
Oh man and here I was thinking I was being slightly original with my little parable quoting Shakespeare :D.

Happy to be a modern rehash of Tolstoy's thoughts - I still haven't gotten around to reading War and Peace so I had no idea.

Everything is a remix is it not?
1940s electronic music pioneer Tom Dockstader recorded on steel wire
Semi-OT:

On the subject of GitHub's robots.txt[0], would anyone have a guess at why this particular repo[1] is singled out?

[0] https://github.com/robots.txt

[1] https://github.com/ekansa/Open-Context-Data
Amen indeed. My wife and I finally buckled down about a year and a half ago, and got unlimited texting. Why?

Because the amount of texts we were receiving (and starting to respond to) was starting to add up individually to be more expensive than getting the unlimited plan.

The way texting works in the US now, you're almost forced to buy unlimited texting if you have any friends who like to text on any sort of regular basis.
"It seems like the guy was added to some black database somewhere."

Or, a much more simple explanation as was outlined in a post above, is that they asked what he does for a living, and he mentioned cryptographic technologies. Which is a controlled export in this country. Which would naturally raise the curiousity of someone whose job it is to monitor the flow of humans and properties in and out of this country.

Someone who enters and leaves this country frequently, who works in an area that is a defined controlled export of this country...

Tell me, if your job was a border agent, would you be curious? Would you interview that person? Wouldn't you be horrible at your job if you didn't?
I'll bite.

Disclaimer: Never been to the US, don't plan to do it, limited insight into the laws over there.

How are export restrictions relevant for people entering the country? Aren't US export restrictions only affecting US citizens or corporations? According to his twitter page that guys from Montreal / Beirut? And how does the whole idea of export restrictions for decentralized internet projects work?

I do believe this might've been blown out of proportions, but your answer seems a little too naive/easy, from this armchair here.
What is Life
You're right, but we can be part of the solution.

As Max Levchin says, the long term question is not whether the US is printing too much or too little - it's whether we (that's us, here, reading Hacker News) can focus on real innovation, which causes real productivity improvements, and thus real growth.

That's the best way out and it rests on us.
Ripping off the MagSafe or not doesn't even matter. They clearly didn't ask Apple for permission for any of this as this has illegal written all over it.
Peter Molyneux experiments, creates game with $77,000 one-of-a-kind DLC
> And, after all, wasn't that kind of the original purpose for a photograph? To capture an awesome moment you want to memorize?

Good point, but it wasn't until somewhat recently that the camera taking those photographs had a virtually endless supply of film. I think there's a HUGE difference between taking a couple of pictures to remember the event and literally spending the entire evening watching through your phone's screen.

It reminds me of the scene in Ocean's 13 where they demolish the casino right behind Don Cheadle, but he's watching it on TV instead of turning around.
Brands Start Automating Social Media Responses On Facebook And Twitter
> Also, the Roundup Ready soybeans patent is due to expire in 2014, so in 2 years farmers all around the world get Roundup Ready soybeans for free, just as the patent system intended.

Unless Monsanto suddenly stops selling Roundup and instead sells a different, "new and improved" herbicide with a new set of recently-patented resistent seeds. And lobbies for governments to ban Roundup because of a recently study saying it's a threat to the environment after all.

At least that's how it tends to work in the pharmaceutics industry.
I'm sorry, nobody has a clue what smartphone market share will be in 2016.
Frustrated iOS developers might be starting a union
Slightly OT, but Tumblr gave a great talk about their sharding architecture here: http://engineering.tumblr.com/post/12652551894/slides-from-o....

It's really quite a good intro to the subject, I think.
I agree. IDC, especially, has had more misses than hits. If they are so good at predicting this stuff, why aren't they doing predictions for next year? Shouldn't that be easier? I think they don't do it that way because that's too easy to check and call them out for it, compared to calling them out in 2016 for the prediction they are making now.
The Republicans were saying the same sort of stuff in 1929. America learned, at great cost, that macroeconomics matters. We'd do well to remember those lessons.
What to expect in Apple's upcoming Maps app
Continue in that vein, then if there is a natural disaster then it is their fault as well.

The information is useful. Heroku should provide it. We're done here.
As of a few months ago, most of the news I heard was around some labels choosing to pull content from streaming services rather than add more. I'm not going to jump to conclusions as I certainly think it can reverse course; but, for the moment, things aren't trending that way.
Full moon affects Large Hadron Collider operations
I used to have > 100GB of extremely carefully cataloged and organized mp3s. I gave that up years ago and don't even know where that collection is.

For the last 4 years, I've not downloaded or purchased one single song, I just listen to everything I want to hear on YouTube playlists.
I do it because I love writing software and learning. I have never had a job that I constantly learned and never got bored..
That's a perfectly reasonable approach — we did that at PBworks a long time ago. Totally transparent to users if done right. You can also declare password bankruptcy and zero out everything. That forces password resets for your entire user base. The latter approach doesn't go over so well with users or support staff but it is much simpler.
Infinitec's Pocket TV Micro-Computer Runs ICS on your TV
But if they do, they're bitter enough to want to interrogate every programmer who comes through their station.
Very interesting analysis and segmentation of APIs! I am just wondering which factor has been so the most prominent for not having the long tail represented (or badly)?
The point is, 50kb of javascript and css seems silly.
You might be providing a service to people who would like to know what part of the chain broke. If hosting company A fails all the time, and that's visible to me as a technical user of service A, I would avoid hosting company A for anything that I happen to host. I'm not the average end user, but that information is still valuable to me, and I would think less of hosting company A, instead of service A.

By Heroku not listing when its their downtime, they are insulating their reputation as a hosting company from end users, at the expense of the customers already using them. It's a little shady.

I agree that the average end user would probably not care, but most not caring does not mean it's not valuable information to some people. So I see where the original poster is coming from.
Interesting, and disturbing, that Sequoia only suggest reducing head count in the engineering department (slide 47).
Time.

More specifically, Time that I can spend doing whatever I want, with enough income to do it.

The plan is to do it with a small pile of SaaS products that don't take a lot of maintenance to keep alive and attract customers who don't need much hand holding. Naturally, the target is to have as high an income as possible with the least amount of time spent "working".

It's taken a while to get it all off the grand, but it's started to pay off in the last year or so.
VLC? Winamp?
"who takes these Flurry reports seriously?"

The sad answer is (according to techmeme):

MacRumors, Marketing Land, The Next Web, 9to5Google, 9to5Mac, Business Insider, TechCrunch, PadGadget, IntoMobile, Appolicious Advisor, Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News, memeburn, Gruber, Siegler.
Many banks are encumbered by old mainframe systems that still do a lot of their computing. I don't know how much of that bubbles up through to the web interfaces we deal with, but I know many tellers and agents are still on green screens, or on interfaces that are just pretty wrappers to mainframe terminals.
Lone Survivor and Super Meat Boy should be there by the end of the day, Braid already is.
planetguy is probably referring to the _government_ of Iran, which hardly pays much heed to its citizens' decisions about "how they want to live".
I doubt it requires anywhere near 10 dynos, normally I just run 1, and I suspect 2 or 3 dynos would work fine today... but since 10 dynos only costs 45 cents per hour, and it's presumably just for an hour or two, I simply threw two handfuls at the problem and went back to my actual work. Handling a one-time spike didn't seem like something worth optimizing when I could throw the price of a cup of coffee at the problem.
I'm going to take Monsanto's side here. The farmers are upset because they are being charged royalties over use of renewal seeds produced from the original 'store bought' seeds.

The argument is over whether the purchase of seeds implies the farmer is financing the 'use' (like a car lease) or the 'ownership' of the seed (like a car purchase).

Monsanto will argue that as the seed's utility is not entirely consumed by it's use (planting) that the most suitable pricing model is to finance the 'use' of the seed, not its ownership. Ergo royalties.

They have an enormously strong point to make here - which is that if ownership were implied by purchase the price would be much higher (as they would need to factor in both the value that future generations of seed provides and cannibalization of future seed demand from renewals).

Which is why the outcome of this case is somewhat moot. If Monsanto is prevented from charging a royalty because of some technicality they would simply charge a much higher upfront price, which they would then allow you to finance (and the farmer will end up being economically indifferent to whether it is called a royalty or not).
For those of you in NYC, I saw Indie Game: the Movie at the IFC theater and highly recommend it.
I don't know about "can't survive" part but here's a long list of gems I use or like and find useful:

Utils: devise, omniauth, cancan, squeel, ransack, active_scaffold, rails_config, switch_user, simple_form, navigasmic, sentient_model, userstamp, mail_form, carrierwave, state_machine, concerned_with, kaminari, recommendable, jbuilder, ancestry, acts_as_nested_set, acts_as_nested_interval [ my gem :) ], paper_trail, version_fu, pdfkit, wicked_pdf, wkhtmltopdf-binary, delayed_job, whenever, active-model-email-validator, nested_form, cocoon, bitfields

Test:
rspec-rails, factory_girl_rails, faker, capybara, shoulda,
database_cleaner, simplecov, spork, guard, capybara-webkit, timecop, vcr, fakeweb, capybara-mechanize, capybara-selenium-remote

Assets:
compass-rails, sass-rails, bootstrap-sass, jquery-rest-rails, fullcalendar-rails, underscore-rails, jquery-ui-rails, coffee-rails, chosen-rails, pjax_rails, rails-backbone, jquery-rails

Development:
mongrel, debugger, mailcatcher

Production:
dalli, exception_notification, capistrano, capistrano-ext
Gotta say, great job guys.

I'd heard of Swiftype before but it never really clicked until this video. It's perfect for my current project and I got a basic setup integrated pretty fast.
When we support copyright as a goverment (society) enforced monopoly we should think about society based models for the actual money-making. And at the end of the day the only model that makes sense to me is a flat rate to consumer, usage based remuneration to producer. Yes, with a country wide database of usage - how do you want to enforce copyright otherwise?
In addition to the other examples mentioned, I would definitely call the F# and C# languages "interesting." I would also call their new approach to async "interesting." There are quite a few interesting things going on, but you don't find microsoft "interesting" you probably rarely hear about it.
I also rely on youtube a good amount of the time. My main problem is that I mostly listen to electronic music that often can't be found on amazon (and I haven't ever really liked iTunes, much less bought anything on it).

If DI.fm had some way to purchase the song that was currently playing/recently played, I'd probably rely on youtube a lot less, but I don't see something like that happening anytime soon.
Yeah, I'm totally open to other analogies; I'd love to collect more and field test them a little. It's tricky to find a way to whine appropriately over 20¢ ;)
The gist that I'm getting from a few places seems to be: Have separate hosts/service providers, and do the load balancing yourself, or make switch yourself, when one fails. I've yet to find many detailed examples, though, as most similar articles deal with load balancing with in your own locally-managed network, or co-located set of machines.

The more generalized "Cloud plus Dedicated" fallback/load balancing seems fairly involved, and raises a lot of other questions, but at least I've got a path to follow now. Also would be more expensive, as a backup server might just be hanging around doing nothing at times.

Then again, it would pay for itself in satisfied customers after just a single event.
All platforms are supported for development on Azure. The SDK is rleased for Windows, Mac, and Linux
Streaming is different from the purchasing model of itunes. Consider Netflix. It will probably never have new releases first and subscription music services will likely go that way, if not already there.
Not implying that they don't deserve it (they absolutely do), but I'm blown away by how lucrative this is for the developers. With some reasonable assumptions, it looks like the original 5 developers have already made $300,000 each.

Quite a payday for games that have already been released for a while. I think (from my rough calculations) that's about what Braid made on its opening weekend.
Definitely. A 256 x 256 pixel grayscale image (8 bits per pixel) is half a million bits of entropy... try cracking that on your botnet!

Although the real entropy of thumbprint images is likely to be much smaller, considering that they share many simliar pixels... but it's still unimaginably huge compared to a short alphanumeric password.
I checked my HB download link instead of complaining, and discovered that the extra games were already added for me.
Fat or fiction? Nutrition depicted in food pictures
Are you aware of the level of details people have to report (or have reported by the airline and weird treaties I'll never understand) to enter this fine country?

How many people are scanned (using information that's, in spite of your advice of 'not putting things in public', readily available to the US immigration and border control)? How many of those are terrorists?
You're talking in the past tense, like the situation is over. For all we know, it's just beginning.

>"We just happened to be under one of the few umbrellas in a storm."

It's not different there. It never is.
Thanks for the pointer, I spent the last 30 minutes reading the book.

You may know this already, but this is in the essay called "Culture" which starts on page 317 of the book you mention. The preview on Amazon includes this passage, which is on page 318. The other essays there are worthwhile if you're into Eno -- a lot are in the preview.

http://www.amazon.com/Year-With-Swollen-Appendices-Brian/dp/...
Ask HN: How do I get my mum to use unique passwords?
It took 6 months, but I finally managed to get my mrs to turn on 2 Factor auth for her GMail. I've been whining about the importance of Internet and password security to my friends and colleagues for years, but they just ignore me. My mum uses the same 6 character password for everything, and it is comprised of the name of her dog.

How the heck do I get these people to listen?! The recent news of LinkedIn and potential Last.fm breaches doesn't even cause them to blink.

Does anyone have any tricks or success stories?
There's a very real truth to it, even if it is an exaggeration; large companies are not worried whether MS will be in business in 10 years.

Your example has the CTO coming in and changing one industry standard technology over another due to personal preference, and that's the reason he got fired. The story could just as easily been the other way around.

If a startup like Heroku comes along that's a more direct customer to AWS, despite being the darling of a site like this (myself included), nobody in enterprise land is going to touch it with a 10 foot pole. MS could compete toe to toe with Amazon for this business, and that's my point.
And I am saying that he does not have to worry about NSA, Mossad or The Secret Army of Northern Virginia spending years to develop Flame 2.0 so they can read his email. On the flip side if you are a high level enemy of the state you should still be worried if you are in Topeka or Ottawa; if its not a hellfire coming in the window it will be equally lethal scary rough men dressed in black.
IPv6: When do you really need to switch?
> First, it's not "outside of work". What was described _is_ work.

Then even worse -- I want to be working during the workday, and living my life outside of that. Not working for ten-day stretches, unless there's an external deadline to meet and there's simply no choice.

> Second, it's 10 days out of the year, not 365.

The post says it's 10 days a day "several times a year" -- assuming that's 4-5 times, that's an entire two months away from my normal life, which I enjoy too much to give up a whole sixth of it.

> not meant to replace or displace any other recharging you might engage in

Then, once again, no thanks -- going 10 days without any recharging with my friends/family is simply not my idea of a good time.

> maybe work with people you could consider friends?

That's the thing about work -- your coworkers are generally chosen for you, based on their professional skills -- not chosen by you, for their personalities.

If you become close personal friends with some of them over time, then that's wonderful. But how on earth are you going to expect someone to take a job somewhere where their coworkers are friends? That would be an incredibly privileged position to be in, which very few people are lucky enough to be in. If that's your case, then I'm very happy for you, but don't extrapolate to most of us.
Choosing the best technology for your website - thoughts from Obvious engineers
What value exists in publishing a breakthrough crypto technique? The best value exists in selling it on the black market to the highest bidder
Macroeconomics matters enormously. The financial crisis was caused by illusory growth from the ponzi innovation of a bonus culture + fraudulent ratings agencies.

Real growth comes from technological innovation. That has been equally true in 1929, 1933, 2006, 2008, and 2012. Go read Wealth of Nations (published in 1776). And I invite you to come out here to Silicon Valley.

EDIT: can't reply / too deep. I've never read Ron Paul newsletters, and I'd love to hear you explain how CDOs of highly correlated assets deserve AAA ratings. Love even more to hear how you think macroeconomic policy caused the shock.
Why Voxer’s CEO Tom Katis Won’t Announce Funding
Avoid Bad Advice - Avoiding Password Breaches 101: Salt Your Hash
The author of that is wrong to conflate nationality and ethnicity. A nationality is a much more general concept. Because most people in the US would list "American" as their primary group identity, and because the people who don't aren't off in their own geographical areas, the US is more of a nation state than it is anything else. Now, you shouldn't throw around the term nation state unless you deliberately mean to exclude, say, Kenya or the old USSR - but that's a different matter.

EDIT: Or compare the US and the EU. The typical New Yorker regards people in Florida as the same sort of person as them, so the permanent fiscal transfers from New York to Florida don't spark the sort of outrage in the US that permanent transfers from Germany to Greece do.
Perhaps they know something you don't.

What are you implying?
I don't think it has anything to do with what people want. Getting Android running on this hardware was easier than getting Ubuntu running, so that's what they did.