skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We were at, yes, the Nexus 4 is a great device. Can we at least agree about that ?

Yes. However ...

1 - No, you don't get to redefine terms how you want. You're entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own definitions or your own facts.

Loss leader is mostly well defined (and no, it's not "7% profit" or whatever it is you asked). Similarly, subsidy is well defined - it is a lower price than cost. And there's a huge difference between an ETF and a loan. There is a very simple test:

Get a two year plan at verizon (or at&t). Use phone. Note cost.

Get same phone and equivalent plan without commitment (paying for phone up-front, and month-to-month). Use phone exactly the same. Note cost. The first one is always cheaper with at&t and verizon (though not with t-mobile)

Do same in Europe, with e.g. vodaphone, three, etc. And note that - up to financing, costs are the same (and you can get comparable financing from a bank).

2 - I actually haven't used any android skin, because everyone I know uses either plain Android or CM (don't have android myself). But from looking it up in e.g. http://us.gizmodo.com/5921220/every-major-android-skin-compa... , it seems that actually my experience (which was a Win95/Win98 client, with tens of thousands of installs, and pervasive skinning, back in 99-2001) is extremely relevant.

Please enlighten me, because from what I can tell, an android skin is comparable to an enlightenment/gtk/thunderbird skin, plus 4-5 app customizations (people, calendar, notification, maybe a few more). That can totally be done in under $1M. Actually, under $200K if managed properly.

And I'm totally unimpressed by the multimillion cost at enterprises; I know it's there, and I know I've replaced such multimillion dollar projects with hundreds-of-thousands dollar projects that performed better (and were still very lucrative). I've also bought better hardware at 10% of the price than some enterprises I've worked with. They do NOT optimize for cost; they optimize for CYA.

I've also helped a friend run a VLSI design project that got working tape-outs of a designed-from-scratch processor, all costs included, for $200K in 2005. Everyone you'll ask will tell you that it's impossible. And they'd all be right in their respective frame of mind -- but would be wrong in the real world (http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_... is enlightening, although our project was not as commercially successful)

You might have spent too much time in the enterprise business to realize just how inefficient it is on that front. I probably have more real life experience running and budgeting software (and other) projects than you do: I've done many scales and many environments, software and hardware, not just "corporate and double digit (mil)".
You pretty much just described the concept of PaaS. :)
Zepto is also worth checking out, especially if you're looking to reuse bits built with jQuery from a larger web app (API is almost identical).
No offense to the Art.sy team, but this is just Heroku marketing copy. It lacks the detail we typically see on these sorts of high scalability "how we did it" posts. Non-trivial applications scale non-trivially, and when someone comes along claiming they have solved the scalability problem with the push of a button I am instantly skeptical.

I would really like to see more details about their architecture, especially about the MongoHQ integration.
From http://leapingbrain.com/:

"Video content is protected with our BrainTrust™ DRM, and is unplayable except by a legitimate owner. All aspects of the platform feature a near-ridiculous level of security."

Near-ridiculous security seems about right.
"Well, since they load the file from a Python script, it's easy to make a copy of the "decrypted" file before it's reverted."

He edited their Python script to make a copy.
China lands fighter jet on aircraft carrier for first time
Since they hacked it via a common CID spoofing site, that would seem to indicate that it is using caller ID.
The player decrypts the file before it is played and then encrypts again when it is finished, so if you grab the file while it is being used by the player then it will be decrypted.
The "proprietary player" was just a Python script that made a temporary decrypted the video and ran VLC against it. So he just changed the Python script to keep around a decrypted copy rather than re-encrypt it away.
I ported Linux to an embedded system that booted straight into ash (minimal shell). Other than ash, it only had custom applications. We didn't bother with a separate init app even - ash served that role sufficiently well.

Linux has very minimal requirements of userspace - pretty much you need to have a process that will act as your init process that knows to wait to clean up any zombine processes now and again. The rest is pretty much up to how you want to organize things.
It's not forgetting you exactly but it is failing to redirect you to your account area. That's an obvious oversight. Sorry about that. I'll fix that ASAP. In the meantime (meantime being the next couple of hours as I'm on my way home from work) you can go to writeapp.me/write and you'll be in your account again, just as you left it. Currently, it'll only remember you for 2 hours. I didn't want to make it indefinite in case people log in on a public computer or something. Is that something I should change?
Casting to a C++11 lambda doesn't really make any sense; each lambda function is a unique anonymous type. There's also no need to do any casting to use an Obj-C block anywhere that you can use a C++11 lambda, since they obviously already implement the Callable concept.
Why Software Engineers are (Vastly) Undervalued – Pasha Sadri
Wanting Meaningful Work Is Not a First World Problem
I think that there's huge value in starting with something very simple and as "raw", if you will, as possible. Any one of the various small 8 bit processors out there are very easy to understand. You have a few registers, interrupts, a small amount of RAM, perhaps some Flash, serial ports, etc. Simple.

The idea here is to really get down to the basics and understand them with a series of incremental projects.

Of course, there are no universally true rules about this stuff. This happens to be my opinion based on over quite of few years of developing and shipping products that entail both electronics and software.

As an example, I am teaching my own son how to program with C and Java almost simultaneously. Why? Well, he is not learning on his own, his Dad happens to knows this stuff pretty well and we are spending a lot of time on all of it. So, navigating two languages at the same time is working out OK. I've also had him sit with me while I work in Objective-C and ask questions as I go along.

In about three months we are going to build a real physical alarm clock using a small microprocessor and LED displays. I am going to to bootstrap Forth on that processor. The job will also require writing a simple screen text editor in order to make the clock its own development system.

So, by the middle of next year he will have been exposed to raw C, Java and a threaded interpreted language like Forth. I want to expose him to Lisp as well but don't yet know when it will make sense to do that. Maybe in a year or so. With three programming paradigms on the table it will be far more important to explore algorithms and data structures/data representation and understand how they look like with each technology.
From what he says, it sounds like the app is really a standard movie player, plus their 'encrypter', plus a python script that does the following:

> calls 'decrypt movie_file' to create 'decrypted_movie_file'
> calls 'play decrypted_movie_file'
> calls 'delete decrypted_movie_file'

He just made a copy of the python script that calls their own decryption module but removed the delete line.
I assumed the middle name was original and simply left out, and that the name change was exclusively of the last name, presumably due to a marriage.
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Apparently rtalk will be/is under a MIT licence too -- but so far the only code is for the jvm-side, buried at:

http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Building_a_Dynamic_Language_on...
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Do we need parsed corpora? - Lousy linguist
Making Dollars: Clearing Up Spotify Payment Confusion
I am awed by the chutzpah of whoever is behind Leaping Brain, selling snake oil to clueless media people.

This is why I'll never be rich: I am utterly unable to sell crappy non-solutions to people with more money than knowledge.
Also interesting is that once you start re-writing and bump into hard issues, you decide to take a peek at how others have solved them, you eventually find yourself understanding the platform you're trying to re-write and realize that maybe that platform is not as bad as you thought it were.

"Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
The community fork of Doom Wiki tends to be a little bit better up-to-date on the whole:

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_3:_BFG_Edition
Another factor may be the fact that Goldman Sachs, and investment banking more generally, requires sacrifices that, even to me (a college intern nearly 10 years ago) seems completely ridiculous.

Investment banks expect their employees to make their work far and away their first priority in life. Working hours are often 8am to 1am, not for any real purpose but just to compete on who is more committed. Weekends? What are those?

Yes, the pay is extremely high. But the vast majority of the partners at Goldman Sachs have sacrificed everything important in life -- family, friends, relationships, marriages, children, hobbies -- just to make tens of millions of dollars per year. It takes a certain kind of poor prioritization to commit to such a career and I'm not surprised that more men than women choose to participate.
What's their basis for concluding that 'CPUs will be presoldered to the motherboard' implies "PCs have no relevance"?

Intel Atoms come presoldered too. I admit to finding that change a little disappointing, but not Earth-shattering.

I've been replacing chips since the original IBM PC, so I consider myself an 'enthusiast'. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've upgraded my CPU without upgrading the MB and RAM too. When building new systems, I always buy the CPU, MB, and RAM from the same dealer on the same invoice to avoid any ambiguities with compatibility returns.

And I'm part of that weirdo fringe who builds our own systems. I wish it were otherwise, but consumers who prefer to insert their own CPUs into MB sockets have never been a particularly large part of the PC industry.
Yeah I've tried Zepto as a drop-in replacement for JQuery once ... a long time ago. The results were disastrous (everything broke!) but I guess I'll try it again
What do you mean by "transfinite proofs"? Let's look at Cantor's proof. It is:

For every set A and function f : A -> P(A) there exists y in P(A) such that for all x, f(x) /= y.

Proof: Define y = {a: a is not in f(a)}. If f(x) = y, then f(x) = {a: a is not in f(a)}, but this implies x is in f(x) <=> x is not in f(x), contradiction.

It does not mention infinity anywhere! It only says that there cannot be a surjection between one set and the other. We could call this situation "transfinite" but this is only a name; under the hood, this is a normal proof of properties of functions, using very natural reasoning rules. That's why I disagreed - there's nothing special in Cantor's proof from a formal viewpoint, possible concerns are of psychological/historical nature, which are not relevant to a machine.

It is true that changing foundations might require rewriting the prover. However, humans also need time to adjust to a new formal system. For example, it takes a lot of effort to get a good grasp of intuitionistic logic. This might be a concern, but ZFC is a very well-grounded common framework for mathematicians, and this is extremely unlikely to change. Perhaps calculus of constructions, as a version of lambda calculus, is closer to computation, and this is why it was chosen in Coq. I'm not sure. Mizar (another theorem-proving environment) is based on an extension of ZFC. [ZFC is untyped - everything is a set, while CoC has a rich type system.]

Small nitpick: It's not like proofs involving unique choice + excluded middle cannot be expressed in Coq; they can, but as the system is inconsistent, they have no value, as everything is provable.
Black Hat Webcast Series - Another Year In Web Security
> Wordpress, git repo, and tinkering

A micro instance should be fine.

It is 5$/month, but I think if you are a new customer big-A give you get one year for free.
Classic Sega Rally Arcade machine meets RC cars using Arduinos
I wrote a blog post on our overall tech stack here: http://artsy.github.com/blog/2012/10/10/artsy-technology-sta...

Our MongoHQ integration is very straightforward - MongoHQ provides us with a replica set and we configure it as any other MongoDB database.

Feel free to ask any specific questions.
'Copenhagenizing' the world, one city at a time
Maybe I don't. But what about founders before 2010? There are plenty of companies that succeed without being based in the US. Is spending almost 20% of your business runway on immigration worth it?
Safari uses UTF-16, not UCS-2. I believe this is true of other browsers as well. Otherwise this would render the replacement char, but it doesn't, it renders correctly:

javascript:var x = '𝌆';document.write(x);
Building Strong Retail Relationships through Mobile Applications
Thank you for telling me. I'll address these in order:

1. I'm not sure offhand what's going on there. I'll have a look and see what I can find. Sorry I can't be more helpful with an explanation on this one.

2. Right now, the new notebook link will only work if you've written at least one note. It's something I knew about but left it for later anyway. I've been sitting on this for six months and I had to open it up or dump it. This will be number two on my list of things to fix.

3. Good ideas. I'm thinking I'll have the page scroll down with the options pane, use a modal window, or have it slide from the sides like you say.

On another note, I know this isn't totally obvious or really publicized but you can make notes public and visit them at https://writeapp.me/your-username (I plan to add support for custom subdomains at some point). I published a short list of known bugs this morning on the official Write.app space which is here: https://writeapp.me/writeapp
If someone sent you a contract to sign, do you think you could scribble your own terms all over it and sign it and have that hold any weight? You can't unilaterally modify the terms of a contract, both parties have to sign and agree.
Visas cost 5-10k per founder. We had to pay an extra month of rent as 'deposit'. You will need to fly in and out of the US several times while the visas get process, as the ESTA is only 3 months. A round trip from LON-SF can be 1k per person, and that's from a hub. I've already got enough miles to be bumped up on my frequent flyer prog.

It's not the end of the world, and the typical YC company will be resilient enough to survive whatever.
However it does add up fast (40k easily), it's not something you can avoid, like say buy a less shiny laptop, and reduces your runway in a meaningful way.
For every comment, there are probably at least 50x more people who echo those sentiments but choose to stay silent. Count me as one of those people (who didn't post in this thread the first time I read it) who absolutely refuse to use Facebook authentication even though I'm very interested in finding out about Makegameswithus.

(I use Grooveshark instead of Spotify on my desktop for the exact same reason)
Let's have a bit of common sense here. 'Contracts override rights in law' is as wrong as 'Rights in law override contracts' (note that I'm not saying your comment said or implied that). Clearly, there are some regulations that you can contract out of. Equally clearly, there are some regulations that you can't. It's usually pretty clear which category any particular provision is in.

Example from the first category: "Unless a different intention appears from the terms of the contract, stipulations as to time of payment are not of the essence of a contract of sale" - s.10(1) SOGA1979.

Example from the second category: "A person cannot by reference to any contract term ... exclude or restrict his liability for death or personal injury resulting from negligence." - s.2(1) UCTA1979

A common pattern is to allow you to contract out of a provision in general, but not when you're dealing with a consumer, e.g. "In a case where the buyer deals as consumer ... subsections (1) to (3) above [which lay out default rules for the passing of risk, but can usually be overridden in the contract] must be ignored and the goods remain at the seller’s risk until they are delivered to the consumer" - SOGA1979 s.20(4). See also: the UTCCR1999, which applies only to consumer contracts and can't be contracted out of.

All examples from UK law. IANYAL.
I don't even know what's worse - their "proprietary encryption algorithm" or the fact that they used Python for a critical piece of distributed software that you don't want to be reverse-engineered!
Coding algs and data structures in C lets you see how those things _actually work_ in the computer. A lot is hidden by the abstractions of higher-level languages.

In particular, I am thinking about pointers and memory management, but there are other things.
San Francisco Hacker News meetup happening this Thursday
Hi Everyone,

I'm organizing a SFHN meetup this Thursday, November 29th. It will be at the Coderwall offices on 480 2nd Street, Suite 302 from 6pm-8pm.

Refreshments will be provided!

-

Please RSVP at http://sfhn.eventbrite.com/
and join our FB group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/gosfhn
From what I see, when you have a single dyno, Heroku deploys you to a different environment sandbox called "development". Typically that has less uptime and takes lots of upgrades all the time with interesting consequences. I believe they promote to "production" applications much less frequently.
Locking people into needing a specific editor just to get the documentation is a bad move.
I merely used the fact that all languages ultimately compile to (or are interpreted by) machine code to illustrate the fact that you calling me an idiot and asserting that "C is one of the worst languages for learning the actual fundamentals of programming, which are algorithms and data structures." is, well, misplaced.

You can learn just as much with assembler. It would be a huge pain in the ass. And, just in case there's any doubt, I am not proposing that anyone use assembler to learn complex algorithms, patterns or data structures.

Your original comment "what an idiotic thing to say" is just false. You can learn ALL fundamentals of programming with C. And, yes, you can learn ALL fundamentals of data structures with C.

Classes and OO are not "fundamentals". That's the next level. And there's a whole movement proposing that there are huge issues with OO to boot.

I have a question. You were quick to call me an idiot for suggesting that newbies need to start with C. OK. I have a thick skin. Thanks.

Now, let's move on. I noticed that you did not offer a solution. What would you suggest someone should start with? Why? How is it better than starting with C?

Now, keep in mind that we are talking about STARTING here. We are not talking about --and I have never suggested that-- C is the ONLY language someone should learn. Quite the contrary.

Your ball.
He just performed a bitwise XOR of the plaintext and ciphertext stream to obtain the key.

From the post:

By comparing the binary files, I discovered the "proprietary video encryption" algorithm: for the first 15kB, each 1kB block has its initial bytes xor'd with the string "RANDOM_STRING".

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_cipher
Nashorn proposed as new JavaScript engine for OpenJDK
That depends on the country. (as usual) For example in the UK there's a data protection act which allows you to both check and edit any personal information stored about you by any company. I would assume that godaddy has to comply with that too if they're doing business in the UK.
Forgive me, but if some other VC had said this, I would have thought, "The blowing-up startups aren't the primary revenue stream - this VC is solving the wrong problem, i.e., optimizing the hedonic profile of failing startups instead of optimizing the financial profile of successful startups." Obviously things are different for you because you aren't necessarily in YC primarily to maximize RoI... but nonetheless, am I missing something? My brain throws a fairly large warning exception when it encounters the event "find yourself disagreeing with PG about VC".

(The alternative I would've given that hypothetical VC would've been to pay somebody with professional business mediation or even personal counseling experience to specialize in the part of the problem they were finding painful. This option is admittedly less open to the average VC because they would have to solve the Design Paradox well enough to identify a good mediator/counselor. I have a rant about groups not explicitly recursing on their most important obstacles and trying to solve them on an ad-hoc basis instead focusing strongly enough to start a subproject that can invoke specialization and a person whose explicit responsibility is to solve that problem, but it probably doesn't belong here.)
So basically, the thesis is that a startup only needs $80k to determine if it may succeed or definitely fail and that $150k provides little added benefit in determining success for those that will be successful, but let failing startups stick around for too long sucking up time and attention. Tough love, but sounds like a great idea.

I'm curious what it might do to valuations. Now the startups have 12 months of runway instead of 18-24 months depending on the number of founders. This means that at demo day, investors know they could potentially squeeze startups a bit more because the runway is shorter. Hopefully the sheer competition will mitigate VC propensity to keep telling investors, "Hey come back next month with updated numbers" until the startup is willing to take money at any valuation.
InterSystems Caché (http://www.intersystems.com/cache/)
Could someone (OP?) provide more of the steps that might have gone (went) into discovering it was an XOR operation and the original string? Seems like an impressive intuitive leap to me!
ICE is a merger of the former INS and Customs. Prior to DHS Customs had nothing to do with immigration, and that job is now split between ICE and CIS for reasons that don't seem apparent.
I don't think they are targeting people with real experience though.
How is hellbanning supposed to be better than, say, a mod telling someone off or banning them and giving a reason for the ban? Assuming hellbanned users are actual spammers, they're still generating spam. Assuming they're not, legitimate and potentially interesting content is being stifled.
Looking briefly at the .mov file format[1], it appears that any such file is guaranteed to have exactly the same bytes 4-11 (atom identifier and major brand identifier), is almost guaranteed to lead with three zero bytes (first four bytes are the length of the first atom, which is likely to be small), and will probably have the same bytes 12-15 (minor version number). If you know it's a .mov file, then you can extract "RAN" and "OM_STRIN" trivially, and the rest is easily guessable from there. In fact, since the first three bytes are probably zero, "RAN" will be right there in the file, ready for pondering.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Quick...
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