skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some problems with duplicity off the top of my head -- I'm sure there are others (there always are):

1. Duplicity uses GnuPG. GnuPG has a long history of security flaws, up to and including arbitrary code execution. Yes, these specific bugs have been fixed; but the poor history doesn't inspire much confidence.

2. Duplicity uses librsync, which follows rsync's lead by making rather dubious use of hashes. In his thesis, Tridge touts the fact that 'a failed transfer is equivalent to "cracking" MD4' as a reason to trust rsync; but now that we know how weak MD4 is, it's possible to create files which rsync -- and thus Duplicity -- will never manage to back up properly.

3. When you try to restore a backup, the storage system you're using can give you your most recent backup... or it can decide to give you any previous backup you stored. Duplicity won't notice.

4. If you try to use the --sign-key option without also using the --encrypt-key option, duplicity will silently ignore --sign-key, leaving your archives unsigned. Based on comments in the duplicity source code, this seems to be intentional... but this doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, and it seems to me that this is an incredibly dumb thing to do.
Thanks for the tip! Though the mp4 downloads rarely work.
For a sufficiently well designed test, the easiest route to higher marks would be actually understanding the material. The SAT sucks, and is easy to prep for. The only way to prep for the "standard" (1) calculus exam given at most universities is to actually get a basic understanding of the material.

If people are standing on their toes in a height test (perhaps because Princeton Review told them to), the problem is not the use of standardized inches. The problem is that we aren't forcing people to stand on their heels. And even a bad test isn't useless; most people on their toes are shorter than me on my heels, and the bad height test will reflect this.

(1) Even though there is no official inter-university standard calc test, they are pretty much all the same.
Pardon me, but I'm in an Algorithms class, and I'm seeing "Greedy Strategy" written all over that.
For over a year I've been using a GPG-based "password wallet" through a shell script based on this Linux Journal article.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9861

I just run wallet.sh -e and enter the wallet password, and then vim (or editor of your choice) opens up with your passwords. It can be handy to store other important data in this GPG protected file as well. When you exit vim, the file is re-encrypted automatically.

I keep automatic backups of the gpg encrypted wallet file for safety.

The nice thing about this approach is that you can view and edit the file in whatever way you are comfortable, e.g. with vim. No GUI needed, so you can access it over SSH quickly (and yes, you could use the GUI solutions with SSH forwarding, but nothing beats a text editor in terms of speed).

Also, for generating passwords, you can use a Vim keymapping
to shell out and run something like apg or spassgen to generate a random password.

I typically store website account info like this:

hotmail.com:hachiyamail@hotmail.com:password

or for more verbose account information:

americanairlines.com

hachiyamail@hotmail.com

Password: flyamericanairlines

Mother's Maiden Name: Smith

PIN: 2342
clipperz.com FTW

They also have community version that you can install on your own server
Why should it matter who made the submission?
The Chandler Project (personal information organizer)
Well StopBadware got screwed twice then. First, their site was overloaded because every Google user who attempted to view a search result url was taken to the interstitial page, which links to their site...bad news. Their site is still down as of this comment: http://stopbadware.org

Now I suspect their blog is down because Google linked to their blog.

The blog post basically pointed out some inaccuracies in the original version of the Google blog post.
Yes me too. I still believe that the godfather is Knuth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth think
But as you highlight Sedgewick to me was more readable and applicable to the code I was writing in the early 90s.
Consistent Hashing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing
Send him toward a toolkit that's ostensibly usable by "non-programmers". Have him put up a Wordpress blog. Hand him a copy of Using Drupal (but certainly not Pro Drupal Development yet, unless you want to scare him witless).

The advantage of these things is threefold. First, getting a basic Wordpress or Drupal installation up and running is excellent practice in the boring but essential skills of web development: Knowing what a server is, renting a shared host, using SSH and FTP, editing text files, debugging, searching Google, learning how to find and question your local guru, appreciating how much work it's all going to be and why it's going to take you years to learn. ;)

Second, there's always the chance that one of these toolkits is all the guy needs. These systems are actually used to build production sites. They have logins and stuff! They have nifty looking themes that look like real websites! That makes them more rewarding for a beginner with business aspirations than some primitive-blog-in-fifteen-minutes demo app. It's even possible that the guy will find that he doesn't need to learn to build an entire site from scratch in Django. He might be able to figure out how to assemble his site from open-source components -- or, once he learns about the existence of the components, he might rather spend time coming up with new business ideas that leverage those, rather than spending time learning Python syntax.

Finally, it's generally easier to tinker with an existing toolkit than to write a webapp from scratch. And, even if you really are better off writing your webapp from scratch, it pays to understand why you're doing that instead of building on top of a toolkit. Which in turn requires some experience with toolkits.
What about FirstnameLastinitial? E.g., I'd be Mikem, rather than nailer.
I chuckled at that, but it's true!

I just end up using Mutt as my MUA and Gmail as my really fancy sorta-half-MDA. To finish it out I have to use something like fetchmail (which is okay), I usually end up using Mutt's built-in imap feature.
Isn't StopBadware Niels Provos' Google 20% project?
From my experience posting, I'm learning more about what's acceptable, and sometimes I even delete a post that's dragging down my karma.

But more interesting - With the experience of posting here, I should be able to write a press release for my startup that appeals to hackers.
No question - Don't pay a dime. Use Heroku Garden for free, then you can upgrade to paid if you need to.

I have my main app on a Dreamhost shared server, but I had to move my blog because it kept getting shut down for using too much ram.

Heroku is great because you can develop online or off and use git if you want to
Fair enough. I (obviously) misinterpreted your post as being against version control itself. Fanboyism does suck.

However, DVCS systems are better than the previous state-of-the-art, by enough to be excited about. Not fanboyish about, but certainly excited about.
Many Unix systems (generally the traditionalists) will include vi (as in the standard non-vim vi). Vim is then an added package that can be installed if you wish. There are also several other vi based/cloned like nvi which some Unix systems include. Vim I guess won in that its whats used for the day to day of text editing.

Vim did not win in that its a large package and users are often forced to use a lighter wieght vi clone to admin directly a on server machine.

ps. how do you write a * followed by text?
russell... I would perhaps nominate bubble sort above quicksort...for us old timers, it was easy to understand, code, and install in our programs where ever we need a sort... bubble sort I would argue first brought sorting to our discipline.
Jon Bentley's in depth analysis of QuickSort (video)
I think this has been submitted before, but it was a long time ago, and with the recent postings about "Great Algorithms" in which QuickSort was mentioned, I thought it worth resurrecting this.

There are places where I sat open-mouthed at how brilliant this is. You may disagree - YMMV. However, I find that every time I watch or read something by Jon Bentley I learn something new, or remember something I should never have forgotten.
Making OS X support that much hardware is just as hard as Linux supporting that much hardware, only with significantly fewer engineers available to do the task.
But nobody talks about GNU Emacs and vim. They say emacs and vi.

When I log into a server and I want an editor I type vi, not vim. Because vi has worked for twenty years, and I assume it always will work!

(That's actually why I bothered to learn a little bit about vi -- it is always there, on every Unix box, and it always works the same way -- no wacky transposition of Meta keys, etc. On my own machines I use nothing but emacs. ;)
$400000 [...] can [...] afford you both a decent apartment and a small place in the woods.

$400,000 for an apartment alone would be pretty cheap in New York City. http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2009/01/30/new-york-city-r...

From the first quarter, the average price of condos and co-ops fell 11.5%, hitting $1.37 million in the fourth quarter. The median price for condos and co-ops meanwhile, peaked in the second quarter at $920,000 before plunging 17.8% to $757,000 in the fourth quarter.
But the more I think about it, I'd have to give Dijkstra's shortest path routing algorithm my highest marks...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm
it probably was used to route this message to all you who are reading this... and also used in the routing of the board design on which your screen is attached.,,and is the basis of many other technology and efficient scheduling applications in common use today...
This seems like something the browser should help you with.
Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test
Yet another reason to screw the "safety" of a big company and go launch a startup.
Whatever gets legitimately voted up from the "New" page is on topic.
Seconded, plus there is (at least one) for Linux as well:

http://gmail-notify.sourceforge.net/
Harnessing the power of the tides: cost vs. benefit
Turns out there is a repository of python modules out there:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=index

Don't reinvent the wheel if you can use someone else's.
Nice counterbalance to all the "kills 99.99% of germs" commercials we see these days.
I wonder if being a bit more lacksidasical about the amount of dirt kids are exposed to would also result in less cases of cleanliness OCD.
My wife proof-reads and copy edits professional translations. She and those producing the translations have tried pretty much every system they could get access to, and Google is pretty close to the best they tried.

It works much better if you use only very short sentences. Very short. Few adjectives, no connectives, only have a subject, object and verb in some order. The shorter (but grammatically correct!) the better.
From Steve Jobs talking in 1985 I learn something about color vision:

"You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision."

Googling on Land's color vision work:

http://www.greatreality.com/Color2Color.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinex

Neat.
I wonder where they get these numbers. From the article:

While tides are a free source of energy, generating power from them is three times more expensive than using natural gas or coal over the life of a project, according to the Carbon Trust, a U.K. government-funded research unit.

Including capital expenses, fuel and maintenance, U.K. tidal current power costs 15 pence per kilowatt hour, compared with 5 pence for coal and gas and 7 pence for wind, the trust says.

It seems to me that with tidal energy, the initial cost of building a "harnessing source" would be fairly high, but the "maintenance costs," (for lack of a better phrase) would be significantly lower enough to validate investment.

Coal and natural gas, which this study apparently deems "cheaper" than tidal or wind, has ongoing maintenance which includes: cost of mining, cost of shipping, not to mention external negative externalities on the environment from carbon emissions. . ..
I'm not sure it's practical to test this on a dev server with each update.

I tell myself that all the time. And then I pause, and sigh, and load up the dev site anyway, just to make sure the home page has not exploded. Because sometimes it has. Typos happen. Brain farts happen.

Obviously I wouldn't necessarily expect Google to test a dev server by hand every time they change some code. That procedure is for little people like me. [1] For something as important as Google I'd expect there to be a procedure whereby each new change gets pushed to a small group of boxes, which then run a few really simple automated acceptance tests ("If I do a search for a random term, do I get back a page with links that can actually be followed?") before the thing gets pushed live fifteen minutes later.

Apparently I expect too much. Perhaps I'm overengineering this. Maybe it's okay if, a couple of times a decade, we just cripple half the Internet for 30 minutes and give 5% of the world's computer users a virus scare.

---

[1] At least until I get lazier (in the Larry Wall sense of the word) and write some more scripts.
nvi is the default vi on the bsds.
Wrong. CPM is still popular with both high end blogs and strong niche blogs. I sell only CPM. I also believe it's quite common with regular media web sites (newspapers, etc) but I don't have experience with that.
I just heard this and wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/ibm-model-m-unicomp... ; the Customizer is excellent, and I've been using one happily for about a year.
If a guy took 6 years to learn how to program and another guy took 6 months, the 6 month guy will be more productive when we decide we are going to use a brand new language. People ARE machines - but a lot less reliable and much softer. It's not moralism to want to categorize people, it's efficiency. The process of categorization is weak, but it's better than none at all.

I much prefer that I be ranked on my grades objectively, than I be ranked on something else like 'he attended oxford', because the second is likely due to the wealth and influence of my parents.

When a professor gets to subjectively evaluate a student, who do you think will fare better, the student who speaks like him, also plays golf and whose parents attend the same country club, or the other ghetto dressing slang talking student?

An exam is hard and objective. It speaks the truth, because it's judgment is cold and not affected by any preconceptions.

Excellence should always be as objectively graded as possible, because humans have too many biases.
I've been aware of this idea for many years, specifically with regards to asthma. My son is 10 months old, and for his whole life, we've been pretty careful to keep him as clean as possible. It's easy to believe something in theory, but harder to make yourself do it in practice.

Growing up on a cattle ranch, I remember all my neighbor ranch kids were all as healthy as I was. Any sickly kids, that I was aware of, tended to be town kids. But, there were a lot more town kids than ranch kids, so statistically, that would have happened anyway.

It's going to be hard to even find good clean dirt and cow pies and dead deer to poke with sticks, and frogs to catch, and all the wonderful things I had to get dirty with, for my son, now that we are city slickers. We'll hike and fish, but those events don't happen every day.
I find that the site has definitely spread apart in it's values. And the real problem is as "undesireables" flood in, the people who are truer to the original culture get disgusted and back away.

As a personal (though perhaps not universal) example, see here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458256 , a +23 comment decrying the multi-page split of the article. See here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398185 , my own comment railing against them wasting my time\effort like that.... modded down to -6.

I don't want to be a whiny nuisance about it, but when that happened it really alienated me from the community and quite frankly I don't think I've contributed much anything of value since. I felt betrayed when I chose to stand against that kind of crap and I was stabbed in the back. Add in the fact that the "rules" are not being applied equally as the culture splits, and it just feels random and unfair.

To conclude my soapbox, I could be doing approx. 50 trillion things on the internet right now, so stop trying to waste my time\effort with 11 three sentence pages, snarky\"witty" comments; and God save the YCNews
Root cause of current Economic Crisis and why it will eliminate your startup soon
This article provides enough arguments in order to be seriously worried about future of Startups and Hi-Tech sector in general.

Can the crisis of overproduction as fundamental problem of capitalism be hacked in new way this time? It seems to me without such hack we will see lots of problem very soon :-(
I'm disappointed. I guess I'm not the intended audience, but I was hoping to learn about the windowing operations. The simple stuff in this "cheatsheet" is stuff anyone other than a complete beginner will use absolutely all the time. Windowing makes vi fantastic - I need to learn it.

Note to self: Learn the windowing operations in vi.

Ctrl-p and Ctrl-n are the truly awesome commands for programmers.
My wife and I live in a part of East London that's particularly cool, and went for martinis on the way home last night. I have an iPhone, she has a G1. We ran into an old friend of my wives, who commented on how cool the G1 was.

The iPhone went uncommented, much in the same way a B&O stereo would.
Is Graphene/Graphane the Future of CPUs?
How to demo software
You are right; I had it reversed. I will add that Harvard Law is switching to a pass/fail system in 2009.
If I understand the article correctly, it's city dirt that you'd want to expose your son to, since that's where you live.
Do you really think most consumers define Asus, Lenovo and Dell as 'not a Mac'? I think it's a deficiency of Vista's part (and age on XP's part) that pushes some people to Macs.

But perhaps Windows 7 will stop pushing people away.

I also doubt that most computer geeks either own Macs or define cool.
A chocolate penis that ejaculates money.
As per a post on Joel on Software, I've started using PasswordSafe (SWT..the java one) on all my machines, and sync the datbase with dropbox. It's great.
I was going to tongue-in-cheek nominate bubble sort, but you got to it first!
Congratulations Facebook
Insider Look at How Twitter Was Born
A Nice Cup of Tea by George Orwell
Chemical warfare used in attacking Roman fort.
I probably need to use more passwords. I make them by creating simple geometric patterns on my keyboard. It's easy to remember, and they aren't common words.
Good interview, but I didn't notice any mention of a pending economic disaster.
This is a good example of how your success is never what you started out to build. Twitter came from a team that thought they were building a podcast directory called Odeo. The article is from Odeo's QA Lead during the creation and launch of Twitter (or Twttr as it was then).
What a contrast between Branson's realistic-but-optimistic outlook and the dire tone of the interviewer. Many of the questions were focused on failure and pessimism:

"How gloomy should British businesspeople be?"
"How worried should the world's charities be..."
"There is a tremendous amount of gloom here..."

I know they were good interview questions and the interviewer did his job well. Yet it's coming from a consciousness of scarcity and fear. I wanted to shake the fellow and say, "Hey, dummy! if you are always looking for bad things, that's what you're going to find! Your attitude in the present creates your future, so watch your thoughts carefully!"

It was not very long ago that my attitude would have been very similar. Now, when I look around, amid the carnage I see much opportunity and potential, especially for new businesses and startups - to create jobs, serve people and create wealth.

I take that attitude shift as a sign of personal progress.
I think it would be hard to argue that any other single modern algorithm had as much effect on the world as RSA.
Agreed. Encryption/signing is easy with Claws mail (which is what I use on Linux) but Gmail doesn't seem to make any concessions.
Seems like HN should ask a GMail Goggles-like "Are you drunk?" question before you are allowed to post comments!
I was at NEDBDay (New England Database Day) on Friday where Alon Halevy from Google was talking about this.

Basically there's a lot of information on the web that are in tables that cab be mined. As the data is already ordered or structured you can use the data to look for or mine information. The problem is trying to figure out what this data is and how it's organised and understanding the types of data in a table. One example he gave of someone doing something like this is www.kosmix.com .

An interesting snippet he pointed out, that kinda unrelated to this, is that "the format of a schema can be classed as intellectual propery".

NEDB link:
http://db.csail.mit.edu/nedbday09/
As a corollary to the argument presented here, I had to give up Git the first two times I tried it because the Subversion integration wasn't all there yet. Git, on it's own, was miraculous and beautiful, but it all fell down when I couldn't push back to Subversion past a branch (this was in the 1.3 days of Git).

Now, though, I couldn't agree with this article more!
In a similar vein, I think people go to far with "Email contains important information, therefore everyone must keep all email".

A large percentage of email is dross, and a large percent of the text in any given email is dross or repeats (quoted text in reply/forwards). Filter out the important bits into a useful system and delete the email, I say.

Or, in another way of saying it, buried deep in an email archive is not the best place for any given piece of information. Especially not any information that anybody else might ever need to look at - which, in a company, is quite a lot.

The sheer effort of remembering what might be in there, the ensuing obligation to search your massive archive any time you need any information just in case (because you can't be sure if it's there or not), the minimal hassle of not finding most 'important' information and the large amount of 'information' that you will, in practice, never look at again makes it a dubious thing to do, IMO. Not to mention the hassle, disk space, database maintenance, backup bloat and on and on.
Probably not helped by Outlook's irritating top quoting.

> It's a cultural mismatch.
Venture Rogues -How one Silicon Valley VC tried to get away with millions.
Not so - there are On/Off Topic subjects mentioned in the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Given the headline I expected more of an argument about how Obama's stimulus plan is Keynesianism's first "true" test.

Really the argument amounts to this:
1. FDR didn't really try Keynesianism until he was forced to during WWII (the 30s didn't count). Too little Keynes.
2. The whiz kids of the 60s took Keynes too seriously.
3. The ~$650 billion Obama wants to spend follows directly from Keynes's formula. Goldilocks Keynes.

Not particularly rigorous, but the link to the "Marginal Revolution" blog might be fruitful. http://www.marginalrevolution.com/