skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you care to do this on as many sites as possible, use HTTPS Everywhere:

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/

As far as an argument for not switching to HTTPS, HN is one of the very few webs sites that loads up almost immediately on very bandwidth constrained/high latency links in my experience.

HTTPS seems to add additional overhead, where loading these same pages can time out or take forever to load.
The lab he worked in seems very well-suited for this project. I find it unlikely that there are really 200 labs in the Baltimore/Washington area that are. So I'm guessing much of the reaction is "good for this kid, it never would have worked here."
>"Maybe we want to write for a specific audience, but don’t want to address the people who usually read our blogs."

I use Jottit Dot Com for that purpose.

In the 5 or so years I have been using it, I've never encountered a bug or a service outage.
Unfortunately, pentadactyl doesn't seem to work with Firefox 15, so I guess I'll have to stay at 14. I tried both 1.0rc1 and the latest nightly and neither work.
This is by far my favorite programming font. Has been since Office 2007. You should also check out Inconsolata for Powerline, especially in Vim.

https://github.com/skwp/dotfiles/tree/master/fonts
"It could kill off Android completely in the US and not anywhere else."

Granted, the US is a major market for Android but these patent disputes will get laughed at in the UK courts and others as we have seen so far.
I'm not against using these buttons, the harmful/annoying thing is that they're used to set tracking cookies. The most simple solution would be to put them on an extra page or only enable them when the user clicks some button. But I'm sure if smart people think about it they find much more solutions. Obviously the designers of this site didnt, and thats what I dont like- being against "bad monopolies" and giving FB more data? Seriously?
Pedobear Ruins Nestle's Facebook Party
It’s legal: cops seize cell phone, impersonate owner
> People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM.

Does anyone know any reason why they would do that? Why would you pay to be exclusive to anyone?
I think the media is portraying it this way because there are a lot of people who get into fields and do work they way they're "supposed to", i.e., told to by peers and bosses, rather than, as this kid did, actually going through and figuring things out. Every medical breakthrough is a puzzle that's been solved, but some people aren't as interested in solving the puzzle as listening to what their boss says. Which makes sense, nobody wants to get fired, it's just suboptimal for problem solving.
Safari and Chrome might both run webkit, but there are still significant differences in how fast they render and handle transitions for different things. In this case, both draw on canvas initially as you suggest, but chrome then uses toDataURI() to draw the canvas to an image as otherwise the scale/zoom transitions run unacceptably slowly.
>The most important aspect of this work is that it (seemingly) establishes a new cryptographic primitive that completely removes the danger of rubber-hose cryptanalysis — i.e. obtaining passkeys via torture or coercion.

Does not compute. If there is a mechanism by which you can authenticate, you can be coerced into authenticating through that method.

The paper covers this of course:

>Coercion detection. Since our aim is to prevent users
from effectively transmitting the ability to authenticate
to others, there remains an attack where an adversary
coerces a user to authenticate while they are under adversary control. It is possible to reduce the effectiveness of this technique if the system could detect if the
user is under duress.

I take issue with the the article suggesting it's completely resistant to coercion. A system that detects duress... interesting I guess but seems like a stretch.

>This equates to around 38 bits of entropy, which is thousands/millions of times more secure than your average, memorable password.

Really? Playing around with KeePass briefly, it seems this is comparable to a 6 character password that includes upper, lower, numeric, and special characters. I wouldn't consider that very strong. Besides the fact that it appears you're not entering the password exactly, but only (if I'm understanding correctly) "good enough".
The the viral campaigners who made this revealed themselves over a month ago and this is linked to directly from the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InL4ONJh9fA
No.

Writing down a loss on a purchased company is not a taxable benefit at all. They are writing off goodwill and intangible assets which were acquired when they purchased a company, and this has no tax consequences. Maybe if they wrote off tangible assets, they could accelerate the depreciation, but it's most likely that all of the write down is in goodwill and maybe intangible assets.
Some sites use those as surprise 2-step verification. Your method would be very painful in that case!
Insurance for one. The original idea for insurance was that it was a not for profit enterprise that gets better the more people that are participating. We've bastardized that with private insurance, but in theory, an insurance monopoly is a good thing since it creates the best allocation of resources.
This makes me so angry, and I should know better.

Sorry, why are people falling for the cloud? The whole thing is absurd. We had all our data nice and safe, we could make it accessible across the net, and it was complete in our control. Then some one came up with a new trendy way of ruining all that. Now, for some reason I am yet to understand, we give control of our data, data being the most precious thing in IT since you cant go out and buy a replacement, to bible bashing, moralistic, judgemental, board meetings in big corporations.

HELLO?????????

This is the biggest kings new clothes situation since Satan knows when.

Guys, you know how this works. Stop marching in towards the edge of the cliff. Its is no use bleating on and on about privacy etc, when almost every one is buying in the the cloud regime. When the hell did these companies ever respect your privacy and right to your own morality. You know they don't. Yet ever single time this sort of issues crops up there is almost utter surprise. Its like watching a woman being beaten up for the 100th time by her psycho husband.

Please, the king has no clothes. None. Secure you own data your way.

Thanks for the rant space.
I think that's the wrong lesson to take. The reality is that no company is going to appeal to everyone--and a relative who's disconnected from "anything internet" probably never would have used Groupon. You've learned something about your target market.

A good lesson for everyone is that our personal needs from a business aren't the same as everyone else's, even tech people. After all, I'm still a little in shock that Bingo Card Creator sells for $30.
Same here with my ATM PIN - I could probably make a guess and tell you what the numbers are but not the order without actually using an ATM pad.

A few weeks ago it was late, I'd just come from the gym and not eaten anything and I couldn't figure out why my PIN wasn't working. Turned out I was trying to use a code that I stopped using a couple years ago.
The real question now is whether this work will be patented and made 26,000 times more expensive or buried.
Trends in Enterprise Information Architecture
This proves Authentication, not key storage that enables encryption/decryption. Per the paper, for authentication "a participant is presented with multiple SISL tasks where one of the tasks contains elements from the trained sequence." Hence the system must already know the secret password. If that system is your laptop, then the feds already have the key when they seize it and don't need to resort to rubber hose or its russian variant thermal-rectal cryptography.

Also, the paper assumes physical presence of a live human at some terminal for authentication. At the point that you can make assumptions about who is operating your authentication system, biometrics seem to be a far faster and more reliable authentication system. Both those limitations,however, could change with further research.
It is. :( I have few accounts on the net, so I have rarely run into this except on sites I do not care much about. However, I understand others differ in habit. It is hard enough to remember one password per account.
I'd love to see some data for this.

Perhaps patent litigation is something that some consumers would base their buying decisions on?
Because it is defending the status quo. Everything that was said is true, but nothing was said that didn't defend the old perspective. It happens a lot - you defend an opinion you had, and when you come up with some good evidence in your favor, you pretty much stop there. But if you had tried to see it from the other side, you may not have been so defensive.

Cultural/memetic inertia is really hard to overcome, mostly because of this I think.
6 Tips For Building a High Quality Blog Following
Brian Clark, CEO of CopyBlogger Media, says a building a quality blog following means “attracting the right people in order to accomplish your specific goals.” In other words, he says, “you’ve got to put quality ahead of quantity.”
I'll second this. That stupid-looking cat tells me nothing about the goal of the movement, what it's fighting against, or the character of its supporters, other than they probably also like nyancat or hello kitty. If you want a serious symbol, use the liberty cap that Congress couldn't bring themselves to use on their statue of Columbia.
I think the name for what John is getting at is the "numerical stability" of an algorithm for anyone wanting to look further into this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_stability
HN is one of the very few webs sites that loads up almost immediately on very bandwidth constrained/high latency links in my experience.

I have the opposite experience - HN pages sometimes take more than 30 seconds to load, though this is likely due to waiting for DNS - once the page loads, the entire page loads quickly. No matter if it's the high-speed connection to the laptop at work, PC at home, wifi to phone at friends' house, 1-bar 3g connection, etc.
> Those are value judgements, they cannot be "wrong".

Uh, of course it's a value judgement. That's the entire point of calling out sexism.

Do you disagree that they're sexist, or do you disagree that a sexist belief is wrong?

> This is hard, factual, statistical data that doesn't support your conclusion.

I'm pretty sure I said that. In fact, I'm pretty sure I spent two entire paragraphs on that.
It's not even that. YOu can't store a key with this divice because for the authentication game to work, the system has to have the password.
• Game company signs deal with Microsoft to be a platform exclusive.
• Game company releases game with problems but has a successful launch.
• Game company complains that their original contract is bad, it would be fixed in an alternate world, and that they complain about paying to be a platform exclusive.

If I didn't think Phil Fish was a drama queen before...
> Do people really think that scientists involved in research with their training are at some kind of disadvantage in solving medical mysteries?

I'll be brash and say "Yes"

Not because these particular researchers/experts are dumber than those in any other field. But this is a natural psychological state for anyone working within a specialized, intellectually demanding field: to not be aware of (or not want to care about) any other machinations that happen peripherally to what they're focused on.

So, I don't mean that a layperson can walk in and say, "Hey, I have a hunch if you combine this protein with this chemical and run this lab routine I developed on my own, you'll come up with the cure for cancer." But a layperson can notice that there may be an information gap between a researcher and a practitioner that results in groundbreaking work being ignored/not implemented correctly, and suggest a process that in itself is groundbreaking. Because a scientific breakthrough is not really useful if it's not actually used.

To refer to the "Checklist" again, there is nothing on that list that a high schooler could not have thought up him/herself. But do you think its implementation would've been accepted anywhere if someone who was not a doctor had pushed it? Even though a doctor did devise it, it faced considerable resistance.

So this is my wild speculation: The medicine field is especially susceptible to the detrimental effects of having blinders. Its practitioners are hard-working geniuses who have well-justified confidence in their processes and insights...but because of that confidence, may be unable to notice blind spots. Moreover, laypeople are unwilling to put in the effort to challenge medicine professionals, because doctors have traditionally such a reputation of being near-all-knowing, and so it's easy to sitback and say, "Who am I to question them? I didn't go to medical school for 8 years"

And this is how the implementation of a sensible checklist that includes steps as simple as "Wash your hands" can have a huge impact in modern medicine.
Study Suggests Alzheimer's Disease Can Be Stabilized
use a browser that blocks third party cookies by default. safari does, opera does and google has an option buried somewhere 9 clicks away in the settings.
Sprint Commits to Free 3G FaceTime, AT&T & Verizon Stall
I think the trick is to distinguish between unhelpfully negative people and useful negative feedback. As an entrepreneur, you need both motivation (which positive feedback is good for) and information about your customers/business (which is ultimately negative, no matter what Edison-like spin you put on it, since the parts to improve are the parts you're currently doing wrong.)

It's not the quantity or proportion of negativity coming from people that's important; it's how accurate and actionable their feedback is in making your company better.
Already discussed in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245179
His advice about lawyers is bad. Very bad. Not incorporating properly can sink you quickly, especially if co-founder disputes come up. I've seen perfectly good startups get sunk that wouldn't have had they just gotten the founder contracts right in the beginning (especially with respect to vesting).

They cost so little in the grand scheme of things and take so little time. I don't know what he means about them becoming advisers. Mine have never advised me in any unnecessary capacity, and I suspect he just has experience (first or second hand) with some Saul Goodman type.

Get an experienced startup lawyer to help you incorporate at a bare minimum. Many will even defer something like your first $15k of fees (more than enough to get started) in the hopes of earning more business later when you turn into the next YouTube.
I've always liked that about my name -- it has a certain amount of ambiguity.

(It is Mr Seb though. Today, anyway.)
Those things are all very much debatable. Unfortunately reasoned debate rarely occurs, what we get instead is hyper-partisan shouting matches.
I totally agree that the cat/league/etc. is ridiculous.

The problem is not with old style senators. The problem is with the 95% of the general population that is confused or turned off by it. You're trying to convince the general electorate, which then determines who gets elected.

It does feel like a little club of geeks, which is not effective as a movement that aims to convince/beyond that circle.
Not free but i've used Pragmata over the last years.
http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm
So it's legal for cops to seize your residence, confiscate your postal mail, open it, and write replies impersonating you to whomever they want?

How is this any different? Because there's an electronic device involved?
> What about a basic shift from a company-as-machine model to a company-as-ecosystem model?

Replace "company" with "society" and you have a deal. If you want to start at the company level, that makes sense to me; I'd argue that most startups are, by necessity, run according to an ecosystem model.

> Those things you mention strike me as band-aids.

I am not, unfortunately, a political genius and my suggestions are not the best possible. If something better and actionable comes along, I am more than happy to back it.

But asking 300 million people, let alone 7 billion, to "rethink the way we" do anything is a fairly gargantuan task. Some of us have already changed our minds. Others will need convincing. Still others will not be convinced.
Saving Small Businesses- The 3/50 Project
You could just, you know, choose not be logged in with facebook. Im not.

And as for tracking cookies: every website has them to some extend. And every browser lets you pick the policy you prefer.

But if you care some much.. Go help them out!
This is a vector image
I find the implication that people who know how to use curl are inhuman to be insulting and arrogant.
The fact that a 15 year old digested that information and put the two together is impressive in itself. Who cares if he was standing on the shoulders of giants? He bothered to gaze towards the horizon rather than at his own navel.
and the recently patented wheel or the wooden stick (to throw your dog)
Do you have g+ / tweet / like buttons on your site? Google Analytics? Disqus? jQuery CDN?
it depends on point of view
The only initiative Microsoft should focus on for the next quarter is ridding itself of Ballmer.
Let's not get jelly. I think this sort of advancement, if actually true and not just sensational journalism, is really promising for the future of humanity. He's not working on getting people to click ads.
> Something like a 2 year protection would give companies significant advantage, yet still allow smaller players to use the stuff in time.

Don't they take something like 2-3 years to only review the application and grant the patent at the moment ?
"I agree with your point that there are good people working in govt but I fail to see how the abundance of secrecy helps them do their jobs better."

Then I don't think you really understand statecraft or warfare. Two essential components of any sovereign nation. No offense meant. Just saying, secrecy are central tenants of both of those, and they are two of the most important functions of government.
Thanks for the link to HTTPS Everywhere. I recall reading about it at launch, but wanted to understand it better before installing. IIRC, it uses an explicit whitelist of URLs that redirect from http to their secure equivalent, which gave me pause, as it would seemingly be (theoretically) possible for a malicious party to compromise the whitelist and hijack the redirects. I could be wrong about the technique of course; I just wanted to wait until I investigated the approach first.

Regarding latency, there are many sites, such as www.google.com itself, that achieve low latencies even over SSL. Given the lightweight nature of HN, I imagine it is at least worth the experiment. I'm using https://news.ycombinator.com myself right now, and the latency, if any, isn't noticeable. For me anyway.

Thanks again for the pointer to HTTPS Everywhere.
I think the poster has a legitimate point. As an end user you can protect yourself, but as an organization that cares about Internet freedom it's a legitimate concern to consider: "Are we enabling tracking through the use of our advocacy, and if so can we avoid that."

Although, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I can't take them seriously because they decided to use the buttons.
Climate Change Not an Issue for 'Gen X'
How my startup almost died 2 years ago
If you have XSS attack vector on your site, the attacker can do almost anything including cookie access(for all cookies that aren't HttpOnly). Also CSRF protection doesn't protect against clickjacking attacks where the page is iframed set transparent and user is encouraged to click in a specific location(punch the monkey in the face) on the attackers page. Easiest solution is to use javascript to detect if your page is iframed and bust out of it.
Don't assume that its actually a pair of SSDs under the hood. It's very likely that its actually ~8 SSDs md/LVM'd together as two volumes(JBOD, no raid). I'm pretty sure they've taken steps to ensure that TRIM is working, as they'd burn through drives/complaints too quickly otherwise.

That said, you're absolutely right about being cautious/not RAIDing the volumes. There are almost no RAID configurations that support TRIM at present, so it's definitely not a good idea to be RAIDing up these drives. Just go JBOD.
It's very true that kids adapt. It's same reason why kids who are abused keep their mental faculties about them. Being beaten every other day is "normal" to them.

There are two problems with this "adaption". It creates adults with warped sense of what's normal. If they are lucky enough to gain a healthy disposition, they end up hating their parents for the upbringing they got.
TIJABP
This part makes me uncomfortable:

> Our organization and network helped to defeat SOPA/PIPA [..] The Internet Defense League continues this work. But it depends on its members' donations

It then goes on to ask for a donation to support staff who 'work behind the scenes'.

I think to people who are unfamiliar with what happen around the community action with SOPA and PIPA this section can be interpreted as the Internet Defense League taking credit for the defeat of the bills.

It also suggests that without financial contributions from members that this work wouldn't happen and SOPA/PIPA/what-comes-next may just succeed next time, even though this organization wasn't even around during the SOPA debate.

There is also no transparency around how this money that is raised will be spent. Who will be hired? What will they do? What will be volunteer roles and what will be hired roles? Weren't SOPA and PIPA defeated by volunteers in ad hoc communities and not paid salarymen working for a quasi online charity? Why is this not structured as a charitable organization? Why is my donation not tax deductible? Who are the people behind this? Where are they based? Why is this so United States centric? Who is backing this financially so far? Where is the about page? Is this a scam?

There should be a lot more details on that page before you ask people for money.

I would have preferred that donations were directed to the EFF, and that the online organization is done by volunteers - as, you know, it has worked just fine in the past.
To add detail, when I zoom in on my iPhone the text from the top-left (Innovation Thoughts: ... ) covers the main body of text.
Microsoft advertises for you in the form of product placement, co-branding, etc
> orders of magnitude more expensive than the physical hardware

Orders of magnitude? So, like 100x or 1000x more expensive? Really?
It is time to bring Fair Use into the 21st century. (We the People Petition)
They're probably using SATA MLC drives. All their EC2 storage has been SATA so far, and its ridiculously difficult to get 1TB of SLC and remain cost effective.
One display buyer's dream: integrated RTB and creative optimization:
The paper is cheap and assumes they have a human attacker." Threat model: The proposed system is designed to be
used as a local password mechanism requiring physical
presence. That is, we consider authentication at the entrance to a secure location where a guard can ensure that
a real person is taking the test without the aid of any electronics."
Setup your backup software to backup any content you add to Dropbox. That way you have multiple copies. If DB kills your account and somehow deletes everything from your local disk you'll still have everything.
It must mean that it is 90% accurate in identifying cancer. If your test was given 100 people with PC it would be 100% wrong but this test would be 90% correct. That is how I am reading it anyway.