skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your design may be secure software design but it is not a secure system design. When a system consists of multiple components you need to take into account the security and the failure modes of each individual component as well interactions between those failures.

The operator does not need to be tortured, he simply needs to be told to cough up the salt or get tried on terrorism charges in a secret court. How many people will you find willing to trade their freedom for your corporate profits? More importantly, you don't know whether they will or will not fold, regardless of what they tell you at the job interview.

Next, if the operator is the only one to know the secret, what is to stop him from blackmailing your businesses? Or dying under the bus and taking the secret with him? You will have to introduce a backup person who also knows the secret and is also fallible in the same way, increasing your risk. The questions of loyalty and conflicting interests are collectively known as "the agency problem" - where agents act not consistent with the interests of their employers.

Given agency problems soon enough you will come to a point where someone with big stake in the company (like a founder or CEO) has to know the secret to avoid possible conflict of interest. Of course such person will also have a lot to lose and will be even more likely to fold under simple pressure such as arrest of their assets.

The idea with storing the salt out of jurisdiction also has weak spots in it: first, you can't use public CA because NSA likely has their own certs signed by all major CAs. You would need to roll your own SSL cert and deliver it physically. Next, there wouldn't be any machine-gun-toting people streaming into the datacenter - there will be a subpoena to the CEO and if he does not comply he will go to jail and lose his mansion. Is it possible to set data such that CEO can not fetch the data? Technically yes, but realistically CEO that does not control his secrets will likely feel uneasy about losing those secrets to an accident or an agency problem and so he will most likely try to assert control over said secret. At which point he becomes a point of attack.

Now, how does remote site know not to dispense secrets to a anyone who asks? It would have to ask requester for an ID and that ID will be stored on the (now confiscated) machine.

Then, who will administer the remote site? What are his legal and moral obligations? Can their government compel them to cough up the secrets on request of your government?

Further, RAM can and does get examined. There are consumer-level tricks with canned air that allow to reboot the machine while keeping RAM content intact for the next booted OS to chew on. This was at the heart of the recent TPM security breach (for some implementations of TPM). Also when machines are being confiscated they are not unplugged, there are products that allow to transport machine without losing power.

The system is complex and there will likely be bugs at the points where some components talk to some other components.
One of my all time TED favourites.
What makes it so hard is that you can't recognize words as words so easily. You have to decode them letter by letter. I studied classical Arabic in college, and at the end of a year I could only recognize a couple hundred words as words.

I doubt there's any solution besides practice. Perhaps you could optimize practice by making flashcards of the most common words and training yourself to recognize them quickly.
Sorry, I don't have any specific tips. I studied Russian in college and didn't find Cyrillic to be a barrier at all. I just learned the sounds and with a week or two of practice, it seemed natural enough.

I've lost much of my Russian (such as it was) through disuse, but I can still read the alphabet just fine.
See the original submission, that's why not :-)

I want to not only have a backup scheme but also make sure it's restore-tested. Maybe I wasn't totally clear, not planning on a beautiful failover in each place in the beginning (planning failover for the DB at least). Just a tested (even if manual) restore procedure in each situation.
Take a class. I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, but personally I have only been able to learn languages in a classroom setting. For me, classes in Japanese and Spanish have proved effective, but self-taught German or Russian via websites, books, or tapes just never worked.
Warning to folks who this is true: trademark and copyright law are different entities. There's no such thing as "fair use" for trademarks.
Agreed 100%. I've been here for 9 years and while I love this place, I'm considering to move. "Small pond" indeed: 3 out of 4 recruiters who called me within last half year were all looking for RoR coders for Baer's startup (1st mentor in their list), the other Rails shop in town being FiveRuns. This applies pretty much to everything software: the city's tech scene is divided between about 4 well-known "gangs" of execs and entrepreneurs with essentially the same people running the show.
"creating an offsite backup using encryption keys that are only archived as part of said backup..."

Ugh, that is awful.
write an algorithm that compute the factorial of a given whole number
Who would care to implement Ruby in Lua?
This is getting into details of semantics, but I'm not sure if your example is really shows that the language supports dynamic typing. It's more like an example of implementing dynamic typing in a static language. After all, you're not using the language's type system to do run-time type checking. You're using run-time pattern matching as a substitute.

Of course, I'm just being pernickety, but that's how I am :)
Most of my favorites are startup related or at least in the tech industry.

http://mashable.com
http://centernetworks.com
http://scalableintimacy.com/
http://chrisbrogan.com
http://xconomy.com
http://dondodge.typepad.com/
It's better than most of the YC clones' names.
I don't know about you - but it's January 31st for me.. :P (although I do believe it was just a typo)
Database Troubles
I'm trying hard to figure out what baby-eating is supposed to represent in our society... any ideas?
The Best E-Mail Program Ever: How Gmail destroyed Outlook.
What if OLPC and Sugar Labs were For-Profit?
Try comparing ruby to c++!
Are netbooks making any penetration into the corporate market? I think Eric Raymond's timeline of "unless something surprising happens in the next 30 months, Microsoft is toast" is too aggressive.
This year my new year's resolution was to learn Lua. I think with some developer attention it has the potential to become a "better PHP" for web development because it beats PHP in performance, simplicty and elegance.

Although I doubt it's going to ever replace PHP I think it's poised to make some inroads now that the next version of Apache will include mod_lua out of the box.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452396
??? Where do you live? Around here pretty much every gas station has multiple diesel pumps.

Then again, I do live out in the country...
I don't mean to get bogged down in a grammatical argument, but I really did intend to set a lower standard than sapience. What I mean is the second definition given by the OED for sentience, "self-awareness."

For example, I could make a robot that made all the expressions of pain when injured. Would such a robot be sentient? I doubt it. Perhaps I'm blinded by speciesist prejudices, but I still draw a bright clear line between humans, which are both sentient and sapient, and everything else.

There's definitely no cause for sapience in animals, but I doubt if there's even a case for sentience outside of some higher primates.
I found this really useful ...

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LearningLanguages.html?HN

Works for me too, even with Cyrillic. I've not tried it with Japanese yet 8-)
"Extrapolating from Gates’s implication of about a $12B-per-year burn rate, MSFT’s cash reserve gives it about 20 months of burn time at this point...I'm pretty certain from their recent behavior that Microsoft’s own planners aren’t giving the company more than 30 months to live without one of..."

These parts makes it sound like Microsoft is in the red when in reality they are making enormous profits, just not as much as they'd like. That 20 month figure assumes zero revenue.

Legacy customers, in particular in the corporate IT world, will ensure that Microsoft will retain its profitability long after it loses its stock value and its relevance (already it has lost a great deal of its relevance, but it still has much further to fall).
Lua doesn't even really have arrays per se, but rather "tables," which are a light, flexible data structure somewhat similar to Javascript's objects. You're free to index tables starting with 0 if you really want to, but the convention in Lua is to use 1.
how to write an algorithm
SuperHappyDevHouse Tomorrow - Saturday 01/31/2009
Bringing any fun projects?

I'm thinking about going to meet some people and working on my GTD spending tracker, or an art gallery dedicated to meat.
Transcript here: http://blog.ted.com/2007/04/james_howard_ku_1.php#more
That's nasty. Maybe you could automatically inject test data into a fake account and run test queries on the backup. That will not verify you are getting everything but at least that you got something recent.
...I'm surprised by the lack of input.
Perhaps you shouldn't attack Paul personally when the consensus of everyone else who replied was pretty much the same?

Better would be if you were open about how many groups paid you $250 and out of those, how many ended up getting funding. Or if you named some companies that got funded this way.
But your saying that an out of the box rails 2.2.2 site works on ruby 1.9? If so, that's the first I've ever heard of it...
Sure, these are all obvious attacks. But completely tangential to my point about the feasibility of the software. They're an 'operations/logistics' issue, not a software one.
Jeff is presumably choosing to build his reusable HTML widgets in functions, which is one valid way to do things.

Here's a good overview of all options available to ASP.NET MVC: http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/jimmy_bogard/archive/2009/01...
Google’s Jonathan Rochelle: Docs will get more integrated, social
Venture's New Grail
The real edge is not that it's based on commodity hardware, but that it's based on scalable low-management software (I imagine all this, and skimmed their Google File System paper once. I don't work for Google).

It wouldn't matter if they were blades or Sun UltraWhatevers, the real benefit is that if one dies, nobody need panic - plug another in and "the system" will rebuild it. If a rack dies, plug another in and the system will rebuild it. If a datacenter dies, the others will cover for it.

No backup tapes, no manual tweaking each new build.
Reminds me of LeafyHost.

(Summary: Small hosting company advertising multiple backups; their single server crashed and they had no backups at all. Long story involving terrible customer service ensues).
My attention was drawn as I was wondering why adblock was not working.
This isn't the kind of tip you are asking about, but...

I studied several languages academically (by taking courses and/or studying books). It finally dawned on me how utterly inefficient this is, and I will never make that mistake again. Next time I want to learn a language I will move to where it is spoken.

Among the many problems I expect this to make easier is that of an unfamiliar alphabet. It wouldn't remain unfamiliar for long.
The author said he'd read Vom Kriege, which is Clausewitz's "On War"
Contractors are bound by a contract too. There's nothing special about employees in regards to liability.
Let's say you had an insane amount of bookmarks (or something precious like it). Would you pay to have DVDs burned and sent to you?

It seems like a convenient re-assurance for users to get DVD backups mailed to them every so often -- but it would be a total pain to support this as a small business...
go get a Russian book, and crack open a dictionary...then go through it one word at a time.
Is this really the "official" book? Official usually means that it's endorsed by the company that makes the product but I've never heard of Apple giving any publication "official" status.

I grabbed these two products but haven't had the time to check them yet:

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/amiphd/iphone-sdk-development

http://www.pragprog.com/screencasts/v-bdiphone/writing-your-...
I wonder what will happen to 1.9 branch. It's not supported well by anything. 1.9 is suppose to be a transitional branch anyway... a place where Matz can experiment a bit. 2.0 is suppose to be the next big thing (like Python 3000) but I have no idea if that will ever see the light of the day.

I'm placing my bets on JRuby, Rubinius and MagLev in the meantime.
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%40magnolia
Your comment surprises me. I see a lot of startups in San Diego doing research into gene sequencing techniques and bioinformatics. I would think that life sciences, with the might of the pharmaceutical and agriculture industries behind it, would have the most private funding.

On the other hand, I always thought that physics would have the least private funding.

I have no facts, but that would be my suspicion. Am I wrong?
I had to reverse the dropdown values to get both the versions..

LuaJIT 1.1.4 Copyright (C) 2005-2008 Mike Pall

ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i686-linux]
Yikes: "I feel like I've lost a piece of me. This is scary."
that wouldn't be much of a strategy, though. it would only cut into sales of windows 7. seems more likely they'll discontinue both, if v7 is a hit.
TED: David Bolinsky - Fantastic voyage inside a cell
Seeing as it's Winamp, owned by AOL, I have to say - Me too (uses Winamp)
Does anybody use this site? I can never, ever remember the URL, and that bothers me a lot.

The way I see it, there are too many social bookmarking sites out there. If there's now one less, I wouldn't mind.
Apple Achieves 1.1 Percent Cellphone Market Share
Note very much. The game changer would be 64bit Windows.
Bringing any fun projects?

I'm thinking about going to meet some people and working on my GTD spending tracker, or an art gallery dedicated to meat.
For example: http://www.smugmug.com/help/backups

But how do I offer this when we're in colocation or slicehost etc.? Can't be driving to the colocation center every time someone wants a DVD...
At the expense of Window 7's market penetration, which I imagine is the primary concern right now. They need the latest OS version to be a necessity, not a luxury.
from esr comment on same page:

>The big issue, however, is that Netbooks are not being bought as computer replacements

PCs weren’t bought as minicomputer replacements, either. This did not prevent them from executing a classic low-end disruption on minicomputers. You should study that concept.
So what's the cost for the average consumer of moving from Windows to GNU/Linux or MacOS X?

I guess Microsoft probably sells more licenses to BigCo than to natural persons these days, and for them the switching cost probably is non-negligible, owing largely to investments in custom Windows software. Maybe when you say "consumers" you have in mind a random sample from all Windows customers.

As for "consumers" in the vernacular sense of natural persons, I think the cost of switching from Windows to MacOS X or GNU/Linux is not more than the cost of moving from Windows to Windows. The main thing I've seen is that they have to copy their data from one machine to the other, and/or decide what to throw away. The second major cost is relicensing their old apps, which they do anyway because they might as well upgrade.
I've never understood why it's so popular in those countries. It really is an awful site, and they really don't get it. Given a choice between Orkut and MySpace, most people would go for the featureset in MySpace first. Orkut v. Facebook is a goodbye-Google slaughter.
I don't pay for Dropbox. Its free service is more than enough for me.
Recent work in JRuby does exactly that. It'll JIT your code, and you an even pre-compile if you want.

(AFAIK, just seen references to all this).
I found it very helpful to study and learn ancient greek with a modified alphabet song repeated (and written) ad nauseum... had to get the letters burned in my mind before I could start learning anything. Learning an order helped.
Google's services are synonymous with free. I don't see many people freaked out by it.

Competing with Google is like competing with MS in '90s... a really hard proposition.
I'd agree and say yes. The sorts of people who are attracted to Apple are the sorts of people I'd bet thrive in that hellish environment. The people who don't feel that way don't have to work there.
Will you switch if Google offers you more space and better integration with their apps? Imagine being able to access & edit your Gdrive files from Google Docs and Gmail, for example. I think this is where Google's going with this.
This is slightly less true than it used to be. The table length "#" operator returns the index of the largest integer key continuously reachable from the index at 1. (i.e. there can be no integer keys with nil values in between). This, as well as a handful of standard library operators, rely on the index-from-1 convention.

Tables in Lua can be thought of as discrete mappings of any value as key, to any value as value. The reference implementation happens to have the property that if you index from 1 upwards by increments of 1 that all of those values are kept in a single C array which is then subscripted in the usual fashion. It's a handy thing to know when you decide how to lay out your data. The "dictionary" portion of the table only springs into existence when something is actually inserted into it.

Actually if I understand correctly, an empty Lua table is basically just a pointer to a minimal structure in memory, so it can be used for identity comparisons and so on where only uniqueness is necessary, rather than a full array+dict functionality with the associated memory overhead.

Lua tables are extremely flexible and powerful. Especially when combined with the "metatable" concept.
Ask HN: customer backups delivered on the cheap?
It is cool when users can get DVD backups mailed to them every so often, for example: http://www.smugmug.com/help/backups

But how do I offer this when we're in colocation or slicehost etc.? Can't be driving to the colocation center every time someone wants a DVD... any creative solution?
it's really really a great talk. Really.

He implies that Main Street shops are important, and states that the world is running out of cheap oil. Do you believe these things?
Well, I finally did it. I stopped what I was doing, and worked out my backup strategy, which includes (finally) getting a script put together, and now to adjust it to email me copies and also (contemplating) using S3 to store copies. Maybe also box.net, depending on a few things.
New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests
The new reality: Ticketstumbler ($15,000 in funding) vs Fansnap ($10.5 million)
I suck at math, please divulge resources
This post is inspired by the "Wikipedia list of algorithms" submission at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457579 . Props to soundsop.

On several different occasions I've brought up the Wikipedia page on discrete cosine transforms and hoped to understand it. This selection was made because DCTs are apparently fundamental algorithms for lossy data compression like that found in JPEGs or MP3s or whatever. I want to be able to write decoders for these things -- I've poked around in mplayer's source and want to change stuff, want to create a JPEG decoder as proof-of-concept to myself, etc.

But, here's the hitch: I have no mentionable background in mathematics. I got up to geometry in high school (i.e., I know cosines in triangles but have no idea what a cosine wave is, how it works, and/or how they're related if at all). Where can I learn all of the things I need to learn for these things to make sense to me, and to become blessed with the skills and understanding necessary to create and/or decode such algorithms? I need something somewhat simple and plain, something I don't have to chain through five hundred articles to understand -- that's the problem with WP; I don't understand one thing, so middle-click it, do that about ten times per math article, including on the articles I opened to understand the first article, and there's a never-ending lot of WP articles for me to read, and that's not really tenable. I need something focused on teaching, not necessarily technical precision and exhaustiveness.

I know what a logarithm is, I looked it up. I've also tried #math on Freenode but those dudes just don't know how to talk to someone without any mathematical training. Ask for a simple explanation there, it's usually kind of funny.

Please help me. Thanks. : )
LuaJIT is not the standard mainline Lua interpreter that most people think of as "Lua the language". It's still a fairly young, experimental project and you wouldn't want to write production code in it. However, the standard Lua distribution is still much faster than Ruby.

But even though both are dynamic interpreted languages, it's still apples to oranges - they have very different design goals.

Still, I think it's a copout to say performance doesn't matter in any general-purpose language the way the core Ruby team seems to. Micro-optimization is a waste of time, but efficiency and intelligent implementation choices are necessary.
Actually nickb, 1.9.1 is no longer thought of as a transitional/development release. It's a stable release we are all expected to migrate to sooner or later.
Might be a little too early to call it an absolute win for the home team. But then again, they are profitable already...
You're missing the point.

Brand in this case means that YC:

A) Attracts the best startups. If you're going to gun for one of these, YC is at the top of your list.
B) Attracts the best investors. It's in the Valley and historically has actually made some investors a pile of money already.
C) Attracts acquisitions.

Past performance doesn't not guarantee future returns, however. It'll be a slow change in brand perception, much like an elite school slowly falling out of favor in favor of a newer school.
Upmod for RuPaul link farther down that page. Now, that's Change!
I'm completely naive on both. What are the biggest differences between the two from the user side? With that quick separation (after the YC buzz fell off), is it something really obvious (e.g., cost to list) or a collection of factors?
So, this begs the question - why did Fansnap's investors feel that 10.5M (roughly 3 orders of magnitude more) was necessary to build their business?
yep i've trawled through my /tmp (the osx equivalent anyway) for the flv file, and if you use an flv player you can play the file
Trinary : Ternary computer science, logic and computers
Old-School Keyboard Makes Comeback Of Sorts
List of the Top Job Sites for Job-Seekers
The only modern ternary computer implementation was the Russian Setun:

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

According to the wikipedia article:

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

ternary logic's elegance and efficiency is predicted by Donald Knuth to bring them back into development in the future
The alphabet is a separate problem from learning a language. I can "sorta" learn it in a session, but then find I haven't retained it well. Two tricks:

1) Print out the alphabet and hang it in the bathroom, at eye level. But after a time it becomes invisible.

2) Flash cards with words that contain the letters you know least. This is a great way to burn things in across sessions. Write each word yourself, so you'll be embarrassed when you can't remember it.

Computer programs like Rosetta Stone are useful for audio/visual testing of a new language. I'm not sure how they handle the input of a strange language, but Rosetta Stone helped me with Korea's Hangul even though I couldn't type it.
Open Table files for an IPO and reveals its finances