skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Then what's to stop entities from outbidding everyone, buying up all the medallions every year and leasing them out?

What needs to happen is for passenger interests to be given weight. One way to do that might be to have the cities offer some short-term licenses for single shifts on a spot market, and some long-term (maybe quarterly or yearly) licenses with a fee inversely related to the driver's score over the last period (determined by average rating by his fares, and/or relative average tip amount for the route).

Applicants for long-term licenses with good ratings and relatively high tips for their routes for the previous period would get cheap licenses, those with poor scores would get more expensive licenses, and those without a track record or filed for the benefit of non-drivers would get exorbitant fees.

This would have the secondary benefit for municipalities of drivers being incentivized to declare their tips.
Show HN: Open source scripting Excel with Python
It's very difficult, but possible. It's a plausible enough threat, especially if you're cloud hosted now or ever might be, that you should take steps to avoid it.

Jitter and confounding are problems that can be addressed simply by repeated measurements.

The rule-of-thumb from Crosby & Wallach's paper on remote timing attacks is, assume tens-to-hundreds of nanoseconds precision if you can colocate the attacker at the same provider, and tens of microseconds if you have to do it over the Internet.
Not really surprising? Are you expecting everyone to introduce this in their contracts with their customers then? Do you think it's something they should do, that makes it so unsurprising?
If they are shutting down every user-facing service, how is the userbase relevant?

From the news they're only interested in the Meebo Bar installed base, which are not end-users.
I don't really have much experience in the way of sales and marketing, but my integration efforts so far have just been to setup Pushover applications with icons ahead of time and then e-mail admins with the API key and some explanation so they don't have to do much work. I did the Github integration and Adium plugin myself to increase visibility.

I went with $3.99 because Prowl is $2.99 and Notify My Android is $3.99. I'm not convinced that a yearly service is worth the overhead and I personally wouldn't pay to use a notification app that had a yearly fee.

The bandwidth and server overhead for running such a service are pretty low and iOS/Android push notifications are free, so I'm not really worried about monthly costs for normal users outweighing the revenue the app brings in. Right now Pushover is running on one of my servers that does other things, so it's not even really costing anything tangible. If costs start to go up, I can always increase the price of the apps to slow growth (or increase revenue if it doesn't slow growth).
Huh, so if Meebo is already "dead" why did Google buy Meebo? Google bought Meebo last week!

Surely the conclusion from this is that Google bought Meebo FOR the Meebo bar, not that the Meebo bar has failed. The Meebo bar product is the one they're continuing!
This is why I don't like games talking about how 'realistic' they will be. Firstly, because anything that runs on a standard computer will be far from reality anyway, and secondly because often users don't actually want reality (eg. most FPSs have far from realistic walking speeds - for good reason. Also stylised graphics etc.).

That said, the concept of different styles of swordplay is great - and having more 'realism' in that is something I think is pretty admirable.
Ask HN: Why Net 30? Why not pay immediately?
Why do companies do Net 30, 15, etc?

i'm planning to start a service which pays users money for submitting content.

is it legally possible to do a payout immediately upon a successful submission?
I like the idea of a physical key like this a lot. I think it matters though that we are talking about something that happens 'over the air' (even if it is just NFC). The security would need to be bulletproof. I'm not very knowledgeable how these systems work for NFC other than RFID's in credit cards. With credit cards there is a dynamic CVV code that can only be used once so if somebody sniffs your card they can't use it for more than one transaction. This might be acceptable for credit cards, but it isn't ok at all for a login scenario because if they compromise your login once, they potentially have access to all sorts of things.
It would increase the likelihood of more common passwords being present in the list giving the attackers insight into what hashing technique was being used to store the passwords.

But the difference between 10,000 hashes and 10,000,000 would not make it easier to crack.
"If you agree with this EULA, you'll forever be our customer, and you'll never be allowed to switch to one of our competitors". Might as well give that a try if they are getting away with this.
Google has some problems too, as a mentioned above.
This was very helpful. I find the constant unwillingness to link the sophistication of Emacs and Vi/Vim to the "simpler" concepts of Windows editors really frustrating, and I always appreciate it when someone extends a helping hand.

Yes, like Zork, the journey of solving Emacs or Vi with rapid keying is part of the fun, but sometimes, having a well written hint file (and yes, :help isn't it) can be really welcome.
The fact that Google believes it may be able to derive value from the Meebo bar product does not mean that Meebo was in a position to derive similar value at a palatable level of risk.
You don't need to assemble all the parts, just the receiver since that is what is legally considered the firearm. Parts kits (minus receivers) are plentiful, cheap, and unregulated. Your local and state laws may vary, but it is generally legal to make your own receiver without any sort of license or taxation, provided it is for personal use. I would consider another make of firearm though; AR-15 type rifles have been successfully constructed with carbon fiber, polymer, and composite receivers. I've never heard of anyone doing that with AK series weapons, and considering the stress the AK receiver is under during recoil (find a slow motion video, it's jiggling everywhere!) I wouldn't really want to.

Mandatory I Am Not A Lawyer Statement
He missed talking about our massive trade deficit, which is the cornerstone of many of the other financial problems we have. Obviously cheap prices is a valid goal for an economy to work well but without good paying jobs then it barely aids the economy as a whole. Is it any wonder our fiscal problems are so great including, but not limited to, our currency being devalued internationally.

How many dollars can you pack into foreign FOREX reserve accounts?
How do you deal with mach/whatever calls inside the darwin userland? Do you just replace them with equivalent linux/bsd calls?
Castle Ville Share Items Free
Honestly, there are better web messengers out there. Off the very top of my head, there's IM+ and eBuddy. Hell, even Trillian has a web version now.
I didn't notice any ambiguity until I read the replies
I wish him luck. Various projects have come along with backing from people outside the video game industry with the goal of being more realistic, more revolutionary and so on. But it's a lot harder to make a playable fun game. Realism often isn't fun. Modern Warfare 3 is the culmination of 20 years of evolution from Wolfenstein, and still is nothing like being a real soldier.
Nope. Feel free to play around and try it yourself. I think the experience is not 100% perfect but is pretty darn good. That said, I'm always open to constructive feedback. www.voo.st
Could you expand on this? I'm not familiar with this option/setting and can't seem to turn anything up via search.
Not sure what "transition plan" they could possibly offer. They only exist as a frontend to other IM services. It takes literally 5 minutes to duplicate 10 IM accounts on another identical service (IMO,ebuddy,trillian,implus).

The only thing they had of value were the logs, and they're giving those out to download.
Just asking for disruption.... (P2P taxis, ride-sharing apps, etc.).
I am not sure it is a big deal, other than that it is relatively unknown here, and the mindset here tends to be that financial transactions need some kind of monolithic centralized authority to be involved.
Stuff like this is required, not because there are problems with programmers, or even with education, or men, or women, stuff like this is required because of wider problems in our society as a whole.

When most people have some level of general respect beyond clannishness, is when things like this will no longer be required. Personally, I'm not holding my breath.
If you redesigned some parts to be all metal, you could probably (maybe) be able to construct it completely out of titanium.

Since Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) titanium has nearly the same properties of cast titanium, you could buy a printer in the sub 50k range.
Often people will store the password salt alongside their password hashes*, so if someone has the user table they would have the salts.

---

At Authic.com we are investigating the practicalities of storing salts in a separate database from the password hashes.
Google has a precedent of buying up startups that "discover" and conquer a new piece of mainstream media web sites.

They bought Feedburner way back in 2007 because they'd come to own RSS feeds at almost all the major publishers.

Now they're buying Meebo because that will let them own the toolbar across the bottom of lots of major publishers...where they will certainly start surfacing Google + bullcrap that no one wants to see.
Google bought Meebo for the team, not the product.
Probably because the hardware is language agnostic. You would consider how the hardware works no matter if you were using GLSL (GL's shader language), HLSL (D3D's shader language), OpenCL (Compute sister language to GL/GLSL), DirectCompute (Compute sister language to D3D/HLSL), or CUDA.
Selection bias much? It's very common in the South.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/darwin-birthday-believe-ev...
They were controlling drones...with Windows XP? Oh my. Don't tell me they were logging through IE6, too.
Got it! Thanks. Will try. May be eat my own dogfood and try and give it free for anyone who would solve a challenge :)
The market will stop somebody from doing that. There will be a price that if the bids go above, the bidder will not profit because the required shift leasing rate would not allow the driver to make a profit. If the driver cannot make ANY profit, they will realize quickly and not lease any shifts. The market obviously isnt that perfect, but still, it should protect people from bidding way too high to control the market.

If I completely misinterpreted your main point and instead you are saying that it wouldnt change the way things are currently run in practice, then you are probably right; HOWEVER [and I think this is what the parent comment was getting at], the local governments would be far, far better off, at least allowing for some good to come out of this system
Apple’s Proposed ‘Spaceship’ Campus Comes Alive in New Floor Plans
Well that point will be moot soon since CM9 will incorporate the optimization, but I wonder if Google will use it, too.
You are absolutely correct; I should have actually done the 5-second calculation before writing that instead of relying on my flawed memory.

Looks like the publicly available rainbow tables go out to 7 characters with special chars included, which comes out to a much more reasonable 3.2 TB (using 62 chars).
Cal Henderson says "Shut up and use bcrypt"
I assumed that wasn't the case as in the original comment thread people reported that Meebo had been letting staff go because of the acquisition, although I guess that could mean they're only interested in a small portion of the team. My mistake for discounting that possibility.
Userbase, talent, technology. It's surprisingly easy to have a very well put together company that nevertheless is missing some key elements needed for profitability.
The reddit thread has some benchmarks: http://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyNexus/comments/usos8/linaro_op...
In your example, the company selling deceptively labeled monitors pays $10 million. That should discourage them from continuing that practice.
The Scientific Case for Exploring the Moon
Git-reset: explained for humans
Looks nice. My biggest feedback is that there is no "Join now" link/button, just a login. I presume that if you try and login without an account it will go ahead and sign you up, but it is not obvious.

Also the line "All events on Voost are managed by an organization" - I'm not sure what that means, what is an organisation? Is that me?
I really don't get the down-voting here. Did I say something that is no true?
So one of his arguments is as follows:

A) Debt necessarily creates a society with certain undesirable characteristics.

B) Our monetary system is based on the creation of debt, as new money is created exactly when someone borrows, ie. gets into debt.

C) Bitcoin does not involve debt when it created; when you "create" BTC, no debt is involved. Of course you do devaluate the entire currency when you create additional BTC, but the same is true when M2 is increased in fractional-reserve banking.

Did I get the argument right?

I'm sure many people disagree with A (which I have only paraphrased very broadly since it seems hopeless to represent it in a few sentences here). B seems to be a widespread characterization of fractional reserve banking, and fairly accurate to me (but all of this bewilders me) -- is it controversial? C seems interesting; although of course this raises the question whether there aren't other alternatives that could replace/complement our monetary system (and he does discuss some in an article he links to).
I think I was pretty clear that extension attacks work. I was clear that they work despite features of a hash algorithm that would appear to address the issues highlighted in the article. I was also very clear that it is the defender's problems that are deceptively hard.

In a couple of cases I probably should have said "simple" instead of "easy". "Easy" implies more about effort than complexity. At some points I meant "little effort" and other points I meant "little complexity", but I used the same word for both, so that's bad.

Still, I don't get how you inferred the above from this, which to me reads as "any efforts you might make to address this problem your own way will almost certainly fail miserably":

It's just not nearly as easy as this article suggests, and conclusions one might draw from this article (like you can solve this problem by feeding all source text in to the hash algorithm backwards) are likely ill founded.
Military procurement methods plus a culture of contract outsourcing do produce some amusing outcomes sometimes.
I think your comments have been misleading, so I corrected them. Nothing personal.
After briefly looking at your website, I think that mailinator.com looks to have superior features.

1) You don't even need to go to Mailinator to get an email address. You just know that any time you have any address you want on hand.
2) With Mailinator you just use any name when you register on some website. (generated names are suspicious)
3) Mailinator has different domains to avoid blacklisting (domain name doesn't matter. You just need to know the username to check your mail)
4) There are websites that try to you using Mailinator by trying to log is with the name of your e-mail. For these services you can use another generated name that can only be used for sending mail, not for logging in.
5) Mailinator does not retain your messages for long. Also everything is stored in memory (as far as I heard), so the messages cannot be stolen.
None of them have the polish and stability of Meebo Messenger, I don't know what criteria for "better" they excel at.
Are you filtering your content before giving them cash? What if it's complete garbage/copied.
He’s Uneducated: Rethinking Our Models of Learning
It strikes me that only allowing individual drivers to buy the medallions might help with this problem. I.e. only allow a person who had bought the thing directly from the government to use it for driving a cab. Then the drivers could take out loans from someone to purchase a medallion, but that loan would be on the same terms as anyone else.
EDIT: Oops! I read your post the other way. You want to pay immediately, rather than net-15 or longer, rather than get paid immediately. Still, most of the below applies.

Sure, it's legally possible. Do you want them to have a stack of cash for you when you're done? Then make that be a requirement in the contract. I'm not sure how you would enforce it - charging a penalty for late payment makes the most sense.

But most companies don't have that much cash on hand without preparation, and keeping a lot of money around for all of the vendor payments sounds very risky. Most people would feel safer paying by check or wire transfer. Of course, that might take a few days if you get paid on a bank holiday

What if the person you've been working with is sick that day - who can confirm that the payment is authorized for that day? What if your invoice arrives at the end of the day just before everyone takes a week off for Christmas? Or on the day of the company picnic, or there was a blackout.

Basically I'm saying that expecting to be paid on the same day is organizationally difficult for the general case, and therefore unreasonable. Net-15 is reasonable, although if there's only one person handling accounts then it becomes a bit trickier taking two weeks off for holiday. Net-30 has been standard in my experience and it's what I charge. I've had one client do net-60. That was a right nuisance.
Yeah, we are a long ways away from these printers being cheap and robust enough to make their way into daily lives, but it does seem like the tech is there, it's more a matter of economies of scale, and incremental improvements that are needed for more mass adoption. I do think that the key will be more robust capabilities for purpose-built 'smart' devices. There's a limited amount of utility for the population at large for devices that can only spit out 'dumb' objects like rings and doorknobs.

I can really see the need for standardization of certain non-reproducible parts so that the end user can keep a few small parts on hand that can be used in a large number of possible smart devices.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like the strengths of 3D printing are such that it will bring about a revolution that doesn't intersect with traditional products (We won't be pirating iphones and printing them out). Instead I think 3D printing may supersede traditional devices in some cases. I might make my own utilitarian cell phone with few features to supplement my fancy expensive phone.
If Bitcoin is a FIAT currency using that logic, then gold should be FIAT, too. Bitcoin is a lot more like gold than it is like the dollar.
what happens to your bitcoins if the algorythm gets cracked?
Seeking Academic Edge, Teenagers Abuse Stimulants
Basically, all the surplus that was supposed to go to drivers via the license restriction has instead been sucked off by a rent-seeking financier class.
You can easily do this at a large company (you can even be a really terrible employee and get away with it). But, I've worked at small companies pretty much my entire career and it's not easy to do this without getting noticed and eventually fired.
But still a good point: Why limit your password length? My online banking is the worst offender that I know. Not only do they insist that the password is no longer than 8 characters, it HAS to be 8 characters. Madness!
The article mentions notably faster on Galaxy Nexus.
Unsalted hashes. Wow. What a bunch of amateurs.

Also, 10 internet points says at least one other major website will fall too within 2 weeks. Someone has found a new exploit & is trying various sites & collecting hashes.
One small healthy sign is that the terms "rent-seeking" and "financialization" seem now to have entered the lexicon.
Hmm, at the moment I'm writing something in Ruby using OpenSSL, where a Socket object becomes an OpenSSL::SSL::SSLSocket

It's an absolute nightmare. It won't stay alive for more than 10 minutes without some form of OpenSSL error, and I've even managed to create some kind of weird condition where pure bytes and other garbage are read off the socket

What really concerns me is the lack of documentation for this. It's SSL, out of any piece of Ruby I would like it to be the most documentated/most maintained/easy to find help with piece, but instead, I've been stuck with this giant piece of broken code for three months with no idea where to et help

The point being, it's all very well saying massive companies with engineers on tap are supporting these technologies. But for a startup with one person at the keyboard, they are figuratively screwed. I'm still holding out for the possibility that there is somewhere in the world someone who understands how to securely handle OpenSSL sockets in Ruby, I really do.

I refuse to go to MVP with a server which is raising exceptions left right and center, and at the moment, that's gonna kill the startup dead in its tracks.
Yes, I mean both. You have a traditional chicken and egg problem. And the idea of giving a testing-weekend is very good.

But also the design is in my opinion slick and minimalistic, but a bit TOO minimalistic. The design itself does not suggest that people use this website. It looks like an API description or something like that. You put a lot of emphasis on the "how it works" but I, as a user, lack basically opportunities of using the website.

I guess if you put "top 5 recent projects" or something on the landing page, people would see instantly that there are other people using this website. Currently, when I visit the page, I feel very alone.
Had some fun on a Virgin Atlantic flight the other day. Entertainment system wasn't working and got to watch an attendant rebooting into Windows 98 over and over.. turns out the reason it takes 30+ minutes for the system to "reboot" is because ScanDisk is forced to run on every boot.
The algorithm is already "cracked", bitcoin has been open source from the very beginning.
I'm actually surprised they chose Meebo over Ebuddy, which I've preferred over Meebo for many years (lately it has also become a bit too bloated, so I've been using imo.im). But maybe Google knows something I don't about the Meebo team.

Only the most important and biggest tech companies we can expect to still "be alive" for more than a decade from now, maybe 2. Most of the others should disappear within a decade, and I think that goes for Facebook, too, unless they produce something revolutionary over the next few years.
Test-driving Builders with Mockito and Hamcrest
With constitutional amendments, that logic seems a bit circular. Amendments are hard to reverse because it takes another amendment to do that and adding an amendment is difficult. If adding an amendment was easier (I think some state constitutions are like this) then they would also be easier to reverse.
Testing multiple properties with single assertion
I hate one declaration per line. I wrap at 80ish columns. I can then see all of the CSS for a single page at once on my screen, without paging up and down through some ridiculously long file. It bothers me that idiomatic CSS is so wasteful of vertical space.
I would like to print my own iPhone case instead of paying someone $50. The day I can go to reddit.com/r/3dmodels, download the CAD file for iPhone that someone created and shared with others, and print it at my home, will be the day 3D printing will have arrived. Until then it is still a niche market.
You're not serious, are you? What's the average lifetime of a company - 10 years? And since the pace of change keeps accelerating, that means the average life keeps getting shorter (used to be 15 years, etc).