skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's pretty clear that the amounts YC invests wouldn't be enough to really "build an MVP" for Elon Musk's ideas. It's not something you do unless you already have a lot of money.

Elon Musk talks about this, in one of his interviews, how Tesla and SpaceX are something that requires a lot of money to begin with. Because they are big risks.
> I will say flatly that I do not care about our perception in the eyes of the 'world community', I merely care about the reality of our situation. \

You really should. The perception the world has of America has a great and fundamental impact on the "reality of our situation". We do not exist in a vacuum, and the worse we appear in the world's eyes, the more difficult things can become.

> I think anyone other than Bush would have 'elevated our standing' with the rest of the world much the same as Obama (bonus 'progressive' points if not white or male).

This is pretty much nonsense. McCain & Palin would not have elevated our standing in global perceptions, but eroded it further instead. World perception does not have to do with whether or not the President is white or male, either. It is built atop the content of ideas and the policies we follow. This is a rather ridiculously cynical view.

> I don't consider much of the rest of the world such a great place that we should be concerned about appeasing them with politics they get to muse about and we have to live with.

Nobody said anything of the sort. Hate to break it to you, though--as much as you don't consider the rest of the world such a great place that is worth being mindful of in our political decision-making, they feel exactly the same way. And they far outnumber us, friend. I think the world would quite unanimously declare the same sentiment:

We don't consider America such a great place that we should be concerned about appeasing it with politics that it gets to muse about and we all have to live with.
True. My last project started each day with 2 hours of scrum.
FWIW, that advice made more sense pre-internet, when compression formats were tighter and encryption was weaker -- the idea was that an attacker might find the key but not recognize that he successfully decrypted the data.

These days, even when we don't include cryptographic fingerprints (e.g., with the hash-and-encrypt construction C = E(M || H(M)) ) there's enough structure in compression format headers to allow an attacker to recognize if he has the right key... and he isn't going to be running a brute-force attack anyway.
How I follow an Apple Event
These are things that are obvious in hindsight. They may have been obvious to you before; or, as I'm claiming, they may just fit snugly into your (probably correct) philosophy about secure channel design.

But compression in TLS is not a relic of the 1990s; it's something that looks to have gained its earliest adoption in SSL/TLS at about the same time as Elliptic Curve.

My issue here isn't that you're wrong; it's that I think this is an extremely clever attack that says something profound about designing cryptosystems, and I wouldn't want to see Thai's and Juliano's (or Pornin's, if he's "wrong" about the prediction) work minimized by a glib comment about TLS.
I haven't gone through them, but there are quite a few references here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
Try again... it's on tumblr, so we hope it can stay up!
Quite a lot of CS professors could handle this, and and even higher proportion of their grad student Research Assistants. Y'know: the people who work at Google later and the people that train them.

This isn't iMovie; it's a courseware building platform. They didn't claim it would be useful for everyone.
I think "professionalism" is one of many factors that can lead a workplace to be joyless; I didn't mean it's the only way to cause that (as I know from personal experience).
what's with this fixation on Foxconn and Apple?

Apple is the most successful business in history. They have literally billions of dollars in the bank. The fact that they have reached this position by exploiting international labor conditions is dissonant with the glowing opinion of them in the American press. It is seen as hypocritical.

From your tone, I infer that you think you may agree - but that you feel conflict, and conceal that from yourself by lashing out at the messenger.

It is not a valid excuse to say they're Chinese, any more than it is valid to allow West Virginian mine workers to die of black lung to provide cheap heat for Philadelphia.

Injustice doesn't have to be in your own street for it to be injustice.
How would one go into running this code in your own server?
Problem 1 in Stanford's crypto class [1]:

Data compression is often used in data storage or transmission. Suppose you want to
use data compression in conjunction with encryption. Does it make more sense to

A. Compress the data and then encrypt the result, or

B. Encrypt the data and then compress the result.

Now we know the correct answer is Neither.

[1] http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cs255/hw_and_proj/hw1.pdf
Javascript: Why are unexecuted statements slowing down my functions?
Sockets exist, work, and are used by lots of people.
Thanks for mentioning Camus - I had not heard of him until I read your post.

This is HN's best feature - the discussions are often better than the story and often offer new things to learn about.
Strong agree. One of the big philosophical problems in cryptographic engineering seems to be that much of it was designed to address data-at-rest, but most of the practical problems are about data-in-motion, and those are two different problems.
Well, I would recommend you don't make a better version of a film that inspires murderous religious zealots to randomly take life. Stick to stuff that just makes snobby film critics spew their lattes in disgust.
Yesterday's pirates provide backup of cultural heritage tomorrow.
> This person is trying to use media coverage of the iPhone 5 to help people directly. Good on them.

Is it really helping them, though?

Improving working conditions and the wellbeing of employees costs money. Put pressure on Apple/Foxconn to spend more on labor in China and there'll come a point where they just move production elsewhere, leaving these Chinese people without any jobs.

Let's not forget these people are working in these factories voluntarily. The working conditions might be a bit crap, but the employees are choosing to endure them at their current wage.
um, interpreters aren't prohibited.
The larger the team, the more overhead is needed, no matter what system you are using. The real problem is that scrum doesn't scale as efficiently as more structured management systems, so the overhead grows much faster than in most other systems as team size increases.

ADDED: Conversely, with small teams, the overhead of more formal methods doesn't scale down; that is where less structured methods like scrum are most efficient.
does anyone know if "Not interested" on Netflix factors into the ratings at all? Because I want to use it to hide the 100s of movies I've already seen that Netflix keeps showing me.
Hah, fair enough. I'll add Wicket to the list!

For the record, I'm trying to find if there is one dominant framework in Java that everybody's using as there is in Ruby, not necessarily looking for an easy way out ;)
I got the idea when I was looking for stamps once in an area I didn't know well. So I resorted to the usual approach of asking people near me and of texting immediate friends.

It hit me then that the above are inefficient ways to get quick answers.

If I have a question related to an area or an interest, I should have a way of tapping into people who are relevant i.e. who live/work in that area or who have that interest in common.

No one else.

So I hacked a Twitter app that does just that and called it iloqa.

I works as follows:

- You can 'subscribe' to any hashtag on iloqa by tweeting: '@iloqa #[hashtag]'

- If you add more text in the above tweet, the text will be considered a message and will be shared
among other users subscribed to that hashtag

- Sharing a message happens through the @iloqa account, which tweets "From [sender]: [this is the message] @subscribed-user", where @subscribed-user is an iloqa user who added the same hashtag.

In other words, iloqa users can communicate in groups using Twitter mentions, with the @iloqa account sending those mentions.

That's it. The site is live, would love to hear HN's feedback about what it can be used for.

Have fun,
Fadi

P.S. If you tried it out (thanks) and want to unregister from the app, just shoot me an email via the site's feedback form and I'll delete your oauth data from my db.
If you want a serious discussion about Java, watch this video from an Engineer at Urban Airship: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Java-next

The short summary is: Yes, it's worth the syntactical hassel because your tooling takes care of it for you. No, you won't be writing code with Notepad anymore... but would/should you trust a carpenter that insisted nailing every nail in your house with a hammar instead of pneumatic air nailer?

Java is not just a language, it's a tool suite. So Java "sucks" until you learn the tooling. After your learn the tooling, it's fast, simple, productive, and out-scales anything.
You'd have the same problem if HTTP supported compression of the request headers & body. It's because it only supports compression of the response body that there isn't any leakage already.
Preferred Caching
Play is the closest - but it's nowhere near the maturity of Rails. One good strategy that I see a lot of companies adopt is to write a services layer in Java/Scala and then keep the front-end Rails app part light weight. This way, you get the benefits of a robust, type-checked backend and the flexibility of Rails for the strictly web related stuff like asset pipelines etc.

Of course, the downside is that you need to switch context between two languages. However, this has not bothered me in the past too much.
I thought that was meant to be a tongue in cheek reference to the whole Elon Musk = Tony Stark meme. See http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-elon-musk-ton... for more.
Apple accidentally leaks new iPhone name and tech.
>My point is simply that Western civilization, and the Enlightenment values that underpin it, faces an existential threat from religious fundamentalism.

Closer to home is the threat to Enlightenment values comes from lobbyists buying off our politicians and slowly transforming us into the kind of third world shithole that fundamentalism thrives in. Maybe more of a high priority than evil Muslims on the other side of the world, eh? Less dramatic, though, so you can't feel all messianic about it and beat your chest from your armchair.
Trello cards thru email using Mailgun mailboxes
It just seems like a long winded way to avoid just charging at shorter intervals for reserved instances.

I guess the margins on these things are really thin but I don't see why, they can't charge monthly or let you upgrade a reserved instance (this I find particularly silly)
Not sure if you're being facetious, but recent versions of Ubuntu have included by default an advertisement for Landscape (not Launchpad, mea culpa):

http://www.ralree.com/2011/11/25/removing-advertising-from-u...

If this is no longer the case that's great. :)
I'm guessing the latter is intended to help you add more conditions. Switch "if foo?" to "if true and (foo?)", which has the same meaning, then replace the "true" to get "if bar? and (foo?)". Seems unlikely to save much time in the long run, but there you have it.
What it does is eliminate the structure of the plaintext. Lots of practical crypto implementation attacks depend on plaintext structure, especially in their most naive and straightforward implementations.

A conceptual purist like Colin Percival would argue, correctly, that if there's an attack against a cryptosystem that benefits from knowing the distribution of bytes in the plaintext, that's a damning statement about the cryptosystem itself.

But compression does "break" some exploits.
My first job as a programmer, I took over some guy's workstation who was using Comic Sans. I continued to use it for years. Quite an odd choice, but you grow to like it.
That was an excellent observation. I like to explain the phenomenon you observed using queuing theory - As time went on, each of you (and you yourself) were able to estimate tasks very, very accurately. I'd like to think that this was a period of low attrition.. but even if it was not, you were able to model the behavior of a 100 employees (a large enough set) to come up with good estimates.

An agile/scrum process is designed to work with tasks of inaccurate estimates - the whole business of story points is designed around that fact. Since your underlying phenomenon changed, the process was no longer optimal.

I'm not sure if you experimented with your own "lean" inventions beyond agile - single queues, multiple queues, queues with an artificial stop signal to reduce variance, etc. - but it would have been interesting.
I've searched for "golang <something>" a hundred+ times and never haven't found what I was looking for, at or near the top of the list.
Quite a few references refuting it as well.
And work on all browser for all people.

Or wait.. they don't for most

http://caniuse.com/websockets
You may be interested in Garduino - a nice intersection of geek and growing stuff. Something that's on my to-do list.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Garduino-Gardening-Arduino/
"if I've seen it once I will never enjoy watching it again"

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but with Goodfilms, how many people who are rating a movie's rewatchablity have actually rewatched the movie they're rating?
New iTunes actually does.
If thats an honest question: http://singularity.org/what-we-do/

There exists an axis which all institutions lie upon where (i) those that do direct business and support short-term incremental innovations exist on the left hand side, and (ii) abstract research institutes supporting long-term paradigm shifts of innovation exist on the right had side.

Both serve the same ultimate purpose.

sorry for grammar i'm tired.
A local, social offers app is going to be "equivalent of the invention of electricity"?

I don't mean to sound down on the idea- I'm sure it could work out great. But come on.
What it means to "Vote Entrepreneur"
Top Canadian scientist and student caught in ‘blatant plagiarism’ of text
Unit testing can easily lead to arbitrary modularity or code fracturing, which makes code harder to use and reason about. Good code should be designed for solving problems, easy use and readability. If your code is designed primarily for passing code coverage checks, then it probably is not very good.
No, just vote for better funding of science research.

It only takes one genius to change the world, but it turns out that one genius tends to produce many changes (cf Einstein // Lord kelvin // Faraday)
The platform has been in private development for almost a year and there are a lot of interesting parts to review. Let me know if you have any questions about it.
compression [...] looks to have gained its earliest adoption in SSL/TLS at about the same time as Elliptic Curve

I guess by that point they had thrown in everything but the kitchen sink, and decided they might as well throw in the kitchen sink too.

I wouldn't want to see Thai's and Juliano's (or Pornin's, if he's "wrong" about the prediction) work minimized by a glib comment about TLS.

Oh, of course. I'm just irritated (as usual) by the fact that people continue to use SSL/TLS "because it's the standard" despite the fact that it's a phenomenally broken standard. There's places where you can't avoid it (HTTPS), but where it can be avoided...
"The good news is we've got working patches for most of the issues. The bad news is some of them might contribute to global warming"

Disabling compression could certainly contribute to global warming in a relatively small way...
Totally agree. Ambitious is not the same as pompous, people forget that.

For example: We are building a social platform that will change the way the upper class communicates with a chat-site exclusively for the rich as We are building technology that gets removes the need for cars and allows people to get around faster and safer.
Serge Vaudenay's CBC padding oracle attack plays out the same way, as does the simplest attack on ECB mode crypto.
New in Cappuccino 0.9.6 RC2
http://www.datapointed.net/2009/11/the-steeps-of-san-francis... cites it at 37% grade (37' rise for 100' run, approx 20 degrees).
Your statement is like looking at steel mill conditions in the early 1900's in Pittsburgh and the people on wall street saying... "Well, why are they pissed? Its not like its slavery."

Just because other Chinese working conditions suck doesn't mean that its right. Yeah, so maybe the pay isn't as high because the cost of living is lower, but that doesn't mean you treat people like crap when they are making you filthy rich just because "everbody does it".
I think he is trying to say that what this journalist is getting paid could be better or worse than other factories, but there's no way to tell reading this article. The author expects the reader to compare it to dollars as stated with the $4 wage. How many Yuan is that, and how many Yuan is a good living over there? I have a friend living in Shenzhen and he gets by on like $0.25 a day, living like a westerner.

And of course you are going to get reprimanded if you don't do your job correctly, e.g. too much oil or inaccurate placement. And of course a new employee won't be good at it at first.

Personally, the most atrocious thing I've read in the whole article is that dirty sheets is commonplace. And frankly, that is common in China.
Why Everyone Should Be Upper Class
The Facebook-addicted judge and the little blue bird
Apple Allows Forced “One-Child” Pregnancy Screening of Its Employees in China
Compression Reveals Information Meant (to be) Encrypted?
> "If you want to argue big-picture political issues, go right ahead."

From the guidelines [0]

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

Argue big-picture political issues if you have genuine contributions to make. If you just want to say something boring like "religion is the root of all evil", it doesn't belong on Hacker News in any thread.

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Any time I have mentioned that someone should change their diet to help them deal with any number of problems (weight, mild depression, seasonal affective disorder, overall energy levels), I am universally met with disbelief and dismissal.

The fad diet industry has ruined people's ability to think clearly about the topic of diet. The part that gets to me the most is that I have had profound changes in my life due to diet and exercise changes, and they know that. They still won't even try.
Copyrights for Back to School so as not to copyright infringe.
Can you script google docs?

Yes: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/overview

By the way, I started programming in '99, and since I didn't have a computer at the time, I learned JavaScript, since I could run it on IE4 on public machines. So yes, a browser (and, I guess, Notepad) is really all you need!

Besides, since then and between PHP/Python/etc shared hosting and tools like Codeanywhere (which can talk to S/FTP servers), a web browser is enough for building web applications.

(Of course, the web is far from reaching the potential of desktop development, of course. But it has come a long way already)
tmpfs is awesome to run rails from (i.e. for development).

IO bound becomes CPU bound so you're getting as good speed as you can get.
Interesting. The attacker would also need to push the request size up to the next block boundary, but it should work.

At least we can still do compression at the HTTP (or other higher-level protocol) level. That gets us most of the benefit anyway.
No, and no. Also, it's invariably illegal to smoke indoors or within 10 feet of a building entrance. And there is constant anti-smoking propaganda. And people on the street will make negative comments about you smoking.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321657292/
U.S. News Best College Rankings 1983-2013 - The Airspace
Your perspective on HTTPS/TLS is that it has a history of vulnerabilities because it is poorly designed.

My perspective on HTTPS/TLS is that it has a history of vulnerabilities because it is the most carefully studied cryptosystem in human history.

I agree to disagree with you on this.
This is a cyclical, not a structural, unemployment
Does the attack apply to SPDY as well?
I think it does. To get a movie to show up again, you have to clear your "rating" for that movie.
I don't know about JVM, but the concurrency features of Go are amazing, far better than multi-threading in .NET IMO. If an app can benefit from concurrency (and major apps usually can), Go may be a better choice than .NET.
Iteration planning meetings are seriously expensive.
Group discussion around design, group estimation, group
acceptance, all highly inefficient. [...] I remember just
getting bored to tears listening to discussions around
stories I wasn’t developing on to begin with.

That's quite team size dependent. In a scrum team with 4 people this isn't a problem - but when the team's twice as large it doubles both the amount of work to plan and the hourly cost to assemble the entire team, quadrupling planning costs.

If a team is structured in such a way that a developer knows they won't be working on a story, that seems like a logical line for splitting into two scrum teams.
In wake of anti-Islam video, Afghanistan blocks YouTube
The OP made a big deal about how it's different in China so we can't compare directly. My point is that this is a Chinese national who lives in China and has actually worked at the plant. Regardless of journalistic pedigree, the writer is vastly more capable of writing an honest story from the Chinese perspective than a Western journalist or the OP.

A NY Times reporter covering poor working conditions in a meat packing plant in the Midwest is also a story worth reading. It happens, sometimes it changes when it's exposed, but almost never changes without exposure. An American reporting on bad American working conditions is more impactful than a Chinese reporter reporting on poor American conditions and the reverse is also true.

Upton Sinclair was able to change things with his work on The Jungle. I don't see this as being a lot different.