skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I consider voting for a third party to be more influential. When any third party gets any significant tracion, the two major parties start revising their platform to bring in those third party voters. Instead of pushing forward the status quo and giving the main parties more confidence in their stance, you're causing them to think more about what they might change.
I don't think new laws are needed. If the malware poses as one thing and then does another this should (hopefully, IANAL) be covered by existing laws against cracking or computer fraud. I'm not proposing putting any Orwellian laws on the book, but simply see this as a case of the company abusing the users' computer systems and apply existing laws to it. To me this is entirely analogous to some bored "hacker" talking people into installing a trojan on their computer.

Since malice seems obvious and the operation is clearly a commercial one, I don't see how this being anywhere in a gray area.
ISPs have always had explicit policies about not using their service or facilities to break laws. Your agreement to pay $xx/month for some number of megabits does not and can not and has never superseded the law.

... (d) you (or a subaccount associated with your Member ID) engage in conduct that is a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws); ...

http://www.att.com/shop/internet/att-internet-terms-of-servi...
Well, I can't argue with the specifics of your problem since I don't know about it (but the general point that this doesn't justify the current maths system for 99% of people).

However, at some point in time, computers will be taking over all human abilities (if you believe that AI is inevitbale). At what point will that occur? It's my strong suspicion that we have already reached that point and any evidence to the contrary is simply that people aren't trying automated methods (I believe that machine learning can solve any problem that humans can solve, and furthermore, this wouldn't require more computing power than we already have).
Heartbreaking. I hope for a cure for cancer in our lifetimes.
I know you mention tool support I think it's worth mentioning that if you're using the MS stack Visual Studio is really, really good.
Why not just use AJAX instead?
I originally read about this guy in a better researched article in a well known German newspaper magazine (well, in their online version). But since the original article was German, I couldn't really post it here, still found the whole story interesting though. I also thought that fellow hackers might be interested in this tale. So I searched a bit, and the best thing I could find was the Wikipedia site. You're right though, it lacks sources.

For what it's worth, here's the link to the original German article. http://einestages.spiegel.de/s/tb/25583/kane-kramer-erfinder...
Hacking the Dropbox Space Race
Interesting mathematics can be taught in high schools. In fact, I've tried and had some wonderful results. See my account of it here: http://jeremykun.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/teaching-mathemati....
Making Things Can Take A Long Time
Ubuntu pushing porn in the Applications menu
Some folks are using general purpose computing devices to access the web.
The problem with legal solutions is the global market problem. Ban it in the US and EU and you'll still see it being peddled from Russia and China and infecting world-wide computer users all the same. But at the same time you shackle your economy with (invariably overbroad) legislation that increases compliance costs for small businesses and entrepreneurs and gives large corporations another bludgeon to use against smaller competitors.

Better to just let the market put the bad guys out of business because the good guys all blacklist them.
Github link: https://github.com/Y-Vladimir/SmartDeblur
So what are you saying? YC is sexist and isn't accepting women into Startup School?
Enhance! It's real!
The only reasons those things don't happen is that they're not economically or practically feasible.

If they were, you can bet they would be trying to do it.
Ah ok, this make sense especially if some of your machines are on the same LAN but don't have an external IP.
Yikes, that would suck. But I totally agree with what you said. If people drop the ball (or poison gets in the system in quantity) it is always an issue, and when that becomes systemic I see a lot of the talented people vote with their feet and move on. Which when you are an employee is really your only option, assuming you feel you can't effect change.

A good employer will recognize this and look for a root cause after one or especially more A player(s) leave, a bad employer will just look at how to blame the employee(s) that left for the problem(s).
What would happen on your ideal day?
Android Features That Blow iPhone Out of the Water
very touching and heartbreaking read..
Useful resources - thank you for that.

"with techniques like problem-based learning, challenge-based learning, service learning, project-based learning, learning by design, learning through games, simulations, modeling, programming, etc."

I'm glad you mention games, because currently this field is mostly all about teaching arithmetic and other elementary subjects. Notable innovative exceptions are DragonBox and a few others in development.

It's probably a clichè to say that mathematics education is archaic, but it's true in a lot of cases. I've been to lectures where a simple 3-D program like Blender a few minutes of simple 3D work would have significantly helped countless students to imagine the mathematical entities being discussed. But alas, such things seem to be too advanced for much of academia - instead they build plastic models that only 1 person can use at a time.
But I don't think in the first place it will be possible to de-blur sensitive documents as well as this.

If you blur a region and than resize you loose that extra bit information you'd normally need to be able to do a good de-blur afterwards.

But this does makes me think, who knows terrorists could be using regular photo's, looking not important at all at first sight, to store messages. So you'd have to de-blur an out-of-focus zone to reveil the message.
I would agree with VBprogrammer's response - "Automatic" tools are available, but generally it takes some work to get everything correct.
It seems strange that the author is complaining about AES speed. About a year ago, I benchmarked an IPsec setup between two cheap routers with an ARM9 processor that did not have any special crypto blocks in it. AES significanly outperformed the other algorithms I tried.
Hacken Goodgame Empire
Better that they should have to spend the same money in additional taxes to support government investigations and prosecutions, only to have the bad guys move offshore and keep at it?

I think you're perhaps overestimating the cost of banning such things too. For one thing, there is no reason to go it alone. Major ad networks should be providing websites with tools to identify and disinfect affected clients. Then the cost to the NY Times et al would be little more than installing the supplied tools on their servers.

In addition, there is a certain amount of "starve them and they die" that needs to happen here. If something is illegal but still profitable, it continues to happen. On the other hand, if it becomes unprofitable because no websites will service infected clients then it disappears even if it's still legal.
I'm aware of that. I meant that Chrome should be blacklisting these plugins so that they cannot be installed, even manually.
Mathematics is not about calculations. That's exactly the problem with math education, that the people designing the curriculum don't accept that.
After a marriage and a divorce I can expand on this (marital lessons reframed for business though).

There's a second question to ask: how often do you fight?

If you are generally in alignment but disagree sometimes / occasionally, that's good. If you seem to disagree most of the time, that's a problem.

Other specifics I'd look at:

- are you aligned on the fundamentals? (e.g. B2C vs B2B)

- do you fight the same way? If one of you prefers rational discussion and the other prefers combative, whoever-sticks-longest-wins then it's going to go poorly

- how do the fights end? "ok, after thinking about it, I think you were right about XYZ" is very different from "fine, whatever. I'm tired of arguing."

- do you resolve issues and come to agreement or do the same topics come up again and again?

- after a conclusion is reached and a plan is put together, do both parties fulfill their pieces of it reliably and on time?

One very simple way to avoid issues during fights is the 'I statement': "I feel my opinions get ignored a lot..." is a lot less escalation-inducing than "You always ignore my opinions".
I would not surprised if _hundreds_ of people have "invented" a fully digital media-free audio player years or decades before Apple perfected it into a consumer device.

This is a world of billions of people. Billions. The romantic idea of one man/woman inventing something - without another man/woman inventing the same unknowingly - is just not realistic for most things.
..or, you are seem fanatically dedicated to something because you are trying to defend the fact that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. :)
I read recently that a great way to test a persons understanding of a problem, is to ask them to argue for the opposing point of view.
With that example we should be teaching our high school students graph theory. And I'm completely in support of that. Nobody uses geometry to read a map, because geometry is about shapes and angles, not routes.
There was a program where people in certain sectors went to the USSR to get educated. It wasn't very big. Also, I have found, people are fairly pragmatic politics is politics and business is business. Indians come to the US because they have an infrastructure here (established Indians) and job opportunities, neither of which exist in scale in the USSR.
Now, can you please solve this with 50% less code using Haskell?
Get any legal contract summarized and simplified in plain english
Where's the glory in winning if you cheat?
You were almost certainly benchmarking an implementation of AES that relies on table lookups for speed; those table lookups create a side channel vulnerability, which was much of the point of this article.
as i said, i think i understand CTR mode. or thought i did. i was more curious about how you could seek to a particular counter value. and then was even more confused by the idea that neither nonce nor counter can be repeated, as i thought it was the combination that had to be unique. so maybe i do need to take that course. hmmm.
Search trends, presumably: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=voter%20registration...
Also, Coral Cache link since sometimes the author's site is slowing down:

http://yuzhikov.com.nyud.net/articles/BlurredImagesRestorati...
http://bench.cr.yp.to/results-stream.html
If you don't vote for them, it's guaranteed they won't get traction.

If you're reading this and live in California, you should strongly consider the 3rd parties on the ballot. Obama's got the state locked up by 15-20 points, so there's no risk in third party voting. Obama will win, Romney will lose. This will happen however you vote.

So take a look at the 3rd parties, and if one of them more closely matches your views, support them. Don't waste your vote on parties you don't believe in.
Ask HN: Review my startup www.smartsenda.com
Hi HN,

This is my first post here but I know you guys are pros. I would really appreciate your expert feedback on my new site. My husband and I have just launched a card organising site which allows users to shop for and allocate greeting cards. The idea being that it takes the hassle out of sending cards.

We've been working on this site for the best part of a year and officially launched one week ago. Problem is lots of people are visiting but very few are signing up. It's making us wonder if there's something on the homepage putting people off?

I look forward to hearing your opinions.

Many Thanks

Lisa
I don't have much to say about his tone ("drops mic" and all that).

But the core issue here, just to make it very clear: Roth disagreed with a critical interpretation of _The Human Stain_ (albeit an interpretation that was grounded in fact --- "which acquaintance of Roth was the story inspired by"), and felt that his standing as the book's author gave him the authority to demand the removal of that interpretation from the encyclopedia.

I respectfully submit that you don't have to be a rules lawyer to accept the encyclopedia's refusal to do that.
That's a table of stream ciphers benchmarked against AES, a block cipher, in CTR mode.
It's so unmathematical to use the equal sign there... and of course there are plenty of people who live their entire lives without any of those three things.

Math is also about finding structure and patterns that don't arise in any of those three contexts. It's about learning how to generalize and specify. It can be about isolating the relevant parts of a real-world problem so you can solve it in a way that matters.

None of those skills involve or benefit from memorization, but they're damn well more important than memorizing a multiplication table or knowing facts about convex polygons.
Interesting; it was what's in the Linux kernel.
Here, look at something horrible I did just to see if it could be done. It runs in the background, both in the "continuous calculation" sense, and that it's actually behind the words on the page via z-index.

https://rachelbythebay.com/fun/sier/
Android Features That Blow iPhone Out of the Water
The same old story!
Pretty sure that's an S-box AES. The issue is that when implemented (a) in software (b) without reliance on large lookup tables --- ie, "securely" --- AES is significantly slower.
Recipe for Startup Success
> Dropbox’s founder and MIT Alum, Drew Houston, tried to lessen our emotional damage by creating a “United States Leaderboard” where we still held the #1 position

It's pretty funny how butthurt the MIT people are that the Singaporeans and Taiwanese managed to beat them. If you look at the leaderboard[0], Houston even put the "United States Leaderboard" above the "Global Leaderboard" so that people would think that MIT was in first place.

0: https://www.dropbox.com/spacerace
Yes. Apart from disk encryption, they are pretty much interchangeable (OP talked about IPSec).
The cost isn't in implementing the detection or writing a nice notice, it's in supporting the people it's for. Removal can be hard, look at Sony's bs with rootkits the other year.

Aside from that websites are a terrible way to fix a problem, there's probably still a massive amount of the internet 'best viewed in X' even though standards and non-IE browsers have been popularized for years. It's taken like a decade of campaigning, education and updates to reduce IE6 to insignificance.

Browser / operating system vendors are in a good position to tackle it and there's precedence for that too, but a single website even as big as the NYTimes is in a weak position to do anything except sue.
I'm am guessing it would take substantially more LOC to do this in Haskell than in Java. The problem seems to lend itself much better to OO design patterns than to functional ones.

edit: unless perhaps you make use of haskell's FFI, then maybe haskell could beat it on LOC
Great idea. I'd use it, if there were things to rent in my area.
Blacklists are a constant game of whack-a-mole. Anything you add to the blacklist will be replaced by 10 more variants.

Whitelisting would be a more reliable solution. It has snuck into consumer computing under a different name: app stores.
Topaz Labs has had a Photoshop plugin out for some time now (InFocus) that does the same thing. It cuts off at a fairly low blur radius, though, since it's intended for photo correction rather than forensic retrieval, and ringing can get pretty severe even at a small pixel radius.

What sets the Adobe tool apart from the rest (so far) is that you can define a non-linear path for motion blur. From what was said at the demo, there seems to be some hope for automatically determining a non-linear motion path. That would be really cool.
I was struck by the amount of care that was seemingly influenced by fear of litigation. An ambulance driver diverted to a closer e/r despite having a physician onboard. A nurse wouldn't sanction ice chips without the admitting physician's chop. Exhausting and time-consuming tests needlessly repeated.

I once asked a veterinarian acquaintance of mine why he hadn't become a physician. "Wouldn't you rather drive something fancier than that pickup truck?" I needled, gesturing out the window at his old F150. "Yeah" he replied, "but those guys spend most of their time doing paperwork. I get to practice medicine."
I usually can't hear individual tones in, say, a chord, but I heard this effect too. But far more prominent on my crappy laptop speakers (which produce no low tones whatsoever) than with cheap headphones that have a more linear frequency characteristic.
Do Portfolios Suck?
Its hard to compete with a school who has about the same number of undergrads as MIT does people (undergrads, grads, and faculty)

Enrollment statistics of National University of Singapore http://www.nus.edu.sg/registrar/statistics.html or of National University of Taiwan http://www.ntu.edu.tw/engv4/about/about.html
List of Great Papers in Computer Science
Actually, which leaderboard is shown on top depends on your (connection's) location.
I don't have serious problem with this... but ballot stuffing and fake account registration seems the domain of SEO/blackhats or Anon. This isn't a 'cute hack' worthy of praise -- it's just abuse of MIT and Dropbox systems for no great reason other than perhaps pride.
It's worth noting that MIT did get "punished" for cheating: the required number of points for the extra 25GB space was relatively much, much higher: http://i.imgur.com/QLJP5.jpg

It doesn't matter when you can create unlimited e-mail addresses, though.
Hiware Bazar - A Story About Community Driven Reinvention
The Windows team made a huge investment in HTML & Javascript. You could even say they bet on developers using that over XAML/C#.

Looking at the apps in the Store though, and talking to insiders, and the picture is clear that over 80% of the apps in the Windows 8 Store now are XAML/C#. I've been tracking this for the last few months, and the trend is continuing.
There seems to be some discussion about Mono's performance, and I wanted to address that.

The default configuration for Mono is a blend of fast startup, and decent code speed. You can tune these parameters depending on your use profile which can range all the way from: startup is the most important factor to high performing code at any cost.

In general the language Shootout compares the default configuration of Mono vs all kinds of other configurations.

Those interested in Mono for High Performance Computing will be interested in some options:

* LLVM: passing the --llvm flag to Mono instructs Mono to pass the code to the LLVM optimizing compiler, and will run your program through every heavy weight optimization that LLVM supports. This comes at the price of slow startup times (much slower), but for HPC or server loads, the extra time it takes to JIT is worth it.

* Unsafe mode. If you have battle tested your application and you never get an IndexOutOfRange exception, you can instruct Mono to never perform array-bounds checking. Arrays bounds checking basically ensures that every time you do array [i] that the value of "i" is within the range 0..array.Length. This can be expensive, but makes your program safe.

Passing -O=unsafe basically gives you the same semantics of C or C++: you know what you are doing, and you really are not too much into safety.

With LLVM + unsafe access, as far as the LLVM optimizer is concerned, there is really no difference between C# and C++ code, and you will get the same performance for compute intensive tasks. The only case where the dynamic of performance would come into play is when the garbage collector kicks-in, vs manual memory management. That in general depends a lot on the kind of app you are building. Many HPC applications preallocate all of their memory before large computations anyways, so in those apps the GC makes no difference.

The third optimization is to use Mono's new garbage collector, which gives in general a nice 2x performance boost to memory intensive applications. In general, the new GC is great for memory intensive applications, while the old one is better for pure computational applications that are not memory allocation bound.

With Mono 3.0, we also have implemented the inlining attribute (new in NET 4.5), which developers can use to force a function to be inlined, something that before was entirely based on JIT heuristics.

And of course, you can tune the individual Mono or LLVM optimization options.
Are you ready to give your credit card number to a service run by chinese or russians ? rememeber they dont follow US laws , wait til they screw you ...
Blurity author here. I'm happy to say that Blurity does exactly what you're requesting in your second paragraph: it can "automatically determine a non-linear motion path" using true blind deconvolution. Although Blurity is a commercial product, the watermarked trial is free. I'd be curious to hear your reactions.
I'm going to guess you are from the US.

For me in Israel, Israel's board was the top one.
In practice, value types are a huge performance differentiator.

That is why even the simplest benchmarks involving value types tend to beat Java's optimized code gen.
the front page feel really busy for me, may just want to remove everything below "you relax" the above the 3 steps are all you really need and make the login/register buttons a bit more visible maybe put it as the first step as you have to singnup first
I would characterize this as cheating/fraud, not as hacking. The technical details are interesting nonetheless.
The scaling for the number of points was set before the hack took place. Not sure why Dropbox made it so much harder for MIT vs CMU. Also, creating the mailing lists was actually one of the biggest bottlenecks and actually ended the progress, so its not exactly unlimited :)
Google to unveil 300 PPI 10" tablet on October 29
>I once asked a veterinarian acquaintance of mine why he hadn't become a physician. "Wouldn't you rather drive something fancier than that pickup truck?" I needled, gesturing out the window at his old F150. "Yeah" he replied, "but those guys spend most of their time doing paperwork. I get to practice medicine."

That is an amazing (albeit gravely unfortunate) quote. I'm going to share it with some friends who are studying to become vets themselves (I hope that's alright with you).

Thanks for sharing the anecdote :).
An awesome book titled "The lives of a cell" by "Thomas Lewis" delved into the problems of Medicine (among other things) in the later 70s. He was amazingly prescient about the problems that Medicine faces today. He also offered some wonderful solutions for fixing Medicine.