skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm amazed and excited we're all in such good company. Thought I was the only one who selected text all the time. But then, I but most of us view source often, and hover and look at where links point to before clicking, both things the general populace doesn't do.
OP mentioned height. Gondola service in high winds are typically shut down, eg in the Alpine, etc. So thats not the normal fear associated with such [1]; which is more ~vertigo. But 20 ft is like a second floor aprtment or office--in other words, its an inherently normal-sort-of-height for most urban dwellers. But you raise a good point: chronic wind exposure in many places (eg, urban canyons, sf/bay, midwest, chicago etc) can be a significant hazard to this type of service in situ.

[1] The other is clausterphobia.
The original commenter said, "using RSA 1024 bit keys with exponent of 3" was a flaw in DRM systems he or she had reviewed. Your response was "e=3 is fine, so long as you remember to pad" and then "what kind of attacks remain when using proper padding (e.g. OAEP)?"

I feel a bit queasy any time I read "just do this" as a solution to crypto flaws[1]. Such answers assume way too much about the system the proposed fix applies to and make it sound trivial to secure. They also leave out all the steps behind what things "just pad" means (e.g., receiver must verify the padding and sender must properly generate).

When a developer hears "just pad", they think "append a string of zeros" when implementing a sender or "skip" when writing a receiver because that's what it means in other contexts.

In particular, your response assumed the DRM system in question:

* Was performing RSA encryption of a message, not signing or verification

* Used a public exponent e=3, not a private exponent d=3

Assuming the reader knows enough about RSA and cryptography to know what "just pad" implies, it may still be insufficient to solve the problem.

For example, if the commenter meant d=3, "just pad" wouldn't fix Wiener's attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener%27s_Attack

Or, in the cases of RSA used for purposes other than message encryption, the suggestion of OAEP does not apply. Consider the attacks against the TMN secret sharing protocol and Franklin/Reiter verifiable signature sharing scheme (sections 5.1 and 5.2 of this paper).

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.33.6...

The F/R scheme involves RSA encryption of signatures. But signatures must be the full modulus size (no padding possible) unless you use a larger RSA key for encryption than for signing. So again, OAEP would not fix this flaw.

Remember that the commenter was mentioning DRM, so jumping to the conclusion that they were using RSA for straightforward message encryption and with e=3 was not warranted. There are lots of applications for RSA in DRM (verifying a signature on a license key, calculations under homomorphic encryption, etc.)

For many scenarios, "just pad" would not solve the problem, even with the generous assumption that the reader knows exactly what that means and applies it correctly.

[1] I'm not picking on you here. The most astounding of these kinds of errors was when Colin Percival (who I highly respect) said "use AES-CTR mode + HMAC" and then later found he had made a fatal flaw in his own implementation of exactly that.

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-11-cryptographic-rig...

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-...
Really good job guys.. I have a couple questions:

1. How does the Meteor community look at Coffeescript?
2. Can the backend database be anything other than Mongo?
How to find statistics on OS usage for dev enviroments?
I'm making an article (home work) about Linux and I need to find statistics of OS usage on development enviroments, if I can be even more specific: web applications and websites.

Any idea on how I can get those numbers? It's not about the servers (pretty easy to see that unux owns everybody else) but where the applications are being developed.
Posixplorer
"Unfortunately, most restaurant rating services (like Yelp) aren't too accurate these days."

The scores are, but in aggregate, I have a decent experience with Yelp reviews. As with any user-generate content, there are plenty of opinionated idiots, but I can generally quickly skim them to find out if they're an idiot or not and discount their negative/positive ratings.
I've wrote my own OS back in the late '90s based heavily on this book. Probably one of the best learning experiences I've had. I'm not sure how relevant it is today. I'd love to see a second edition brought up to date.
I assume you mean the private keys would be on the player?

This would work until somebody manages to do a memory dump of one of the players and posts the private key on the internet.

Even if you were to re-encrypt the data for each individual player (manufacture each with a different key) you still have the problem that one DRM free copy can multiply quickly via bittorrent etc.

The most practical solution would be to have players that will only play DRM protected medium and require hardware circumvention on each individual player to bypass that and hope that this is more effort than it is worth to potential pirates.
The best way to market a VPS product is to make a better VPS product. Linode offers a very good product, but it could be better. Their dashboard and management utilities are better than most, but aren't especially manager friendly and don't scale well to teams.

My ideal VPS provider would be somewhere between Heroku and Linode, offering self-managed hosting when you want it, and fully-managed hosting where you need it.
Winner-take-all elections, no matter how they operate, leave many people without the representation they prefer. Proportional representation is much less likely to do this.

Proportional representation can used in the executive branch too. Switzerland does it.
[meteor dev here] The latest plan for 1.0 is at http://roadmap.meteor.com/. It's too early to have a specific release date but it'll be well under a year from now.
Question: Can anybody name a DRM scheme that hasn't been cracked?
I'm surprised they didn't mention the Solidoodle. $499 for the base model. I've ordered it ... hope to get it before the end of the year.

The main reason I'm getting it is to explore the software tools for 3D printing. I don't expect professional grade prints from the device. When I was in grad school, we had access to one of the 10K+ 3D printers. However, it was a big hassle using those (required chemical baths to remove filler material, etc.).

What I am very surprised by is the number of companies trying to make 3D printers. While competition is usually good for customers, I am concerned that the large number of offerings will fragment the user base.
I’ll recommend Heroku.
Well, I ever! Didn't even realise something like this is even possible! :O

Is it the same for Cyrillic or German or Spanish for that matter?

Blown. Away.
I'll let Tom answer your first question, but regarding the backend database so far only Mongo is supported, although more database options are coming (see the Meteor roadmap here: https://trello.com/board/meteor-roadmap/508721606e02bb9d5700... under "Later").
I used Slicehost and Linode in parallel until it was obvious that Linode's CPU performance was quite consistent and Slicehost's would waver from marginally better to significantly worse. This is probably because Linode is configured to use a fixed CPU time allocation method.

Amazon's CPU commitments are just as reliable as Linode's, but they seem to be less for the same dollar.

As for actual hardware, to go based on `/proc/cpuinfo`, some of the older instances I manage show up as Xeon L5420 CPUs at 2.5GHz, and the newer ones tend to be L5520 at 2.27GHz for what that's worth. They seem fairly consistent, and if you don't like what you get, just like AWS you can delete the instance and get a new one. You get refunded for your unused time.
Agree. Of course, we should always consider the possibility that Apple is not acting rationally.

Interstingly, my wife said I was talking in my sleep this morning when she woke me up:

Me: "Are they going to sacrifice the goat?"

Wife: "No, but you need to get up."

Me: "No goat?"

Wife: "No, but we still need to leave soon."

Me: "Oh, I was hoping the goat was going to save us."

Wife: "No, we're on our own."

Apparently I then insisted that I was continuing a conversation I heard her having with the kids.
[meteor dev] I had a chance to meet Sacha and Tom a few weeks back. They're two of the nicest fellows I've worked with -- absolutely delighted to have them as leaders in the Meteor community.
I've been working with Telescope's code for just over a week, and Meteor since the beginning of the year, and I wanted to vow for what a pleasure it has been. The Meteor team is putting together something truly grand, and these guys in turn are doing a terrific job putting forth a great open app written in great Javascript, which is really a wonderful service to all those wanting to get into Meteor. I'll be the first in line to buy their book.

Congrats, I knew you'd make the front page, Sacha! And so good to know it's holding up, that changes my plans considerably, I'll plod on full steam on top of Telescope and Meteor.

For context, I forked this app for an MVP[1] showing Meteor's own roadmap, up for vote, in HN-clone format, which went live only a week ago[2].

[1] http://www.leakmap.com/
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4815271
Bring Airport Security Home With This DIY X-Ray Scanner
I find it interesting that you're imploring me to discuss the facts when I started this thread by calling out incorrect "facts". I'm the only one that seems to be interested in the black and white facts, whereas you'd prefer to alter the OP's words so that they become facts.

What you're interpreting from his statements certainly isn't obvious, as it's just the way that you interpreted it. I interpreted it differently, using only the words that he typed and not filling in any of my own as you have -- I think you realize that, too, since you italicized your additions.

> (I wonder now which one of the users you were in that forum thread. sednet?)

I do not post on the Linode forums.

Fine, you're right; I might have been a little harsh on taligent, but I'm perpetually annoyed by crusaders who latch on to one mistake so strongly that the surrounding facts of the mistake begin to distort in their memory. If you're going to have a problem with Linode, back it up with the truth -- we get enough of alternate reality with politics.
How else will I play LetterPress with my brother?
The problem is that in large swathes of the country (outside of the largest cities), there aren't enough reviews to get an "aggregate" opinion. So it's easy for outliers to sway the overall rating for any given restaurant.
No, but it's entirely possible they were responsible for characterizing Apple Maps as, "better than Google," or failing to object to that characterization. The decision to release Apple Maps rests on the shoulders of the senior management, but they are only as well-informed as their subordinates make them. It's hard to assign blame for systemic failures, where something fails and no one sees it coming, but a possible answer is that the people closest to the project need to go.
TOCTTOU bugs and checking if a file exists (Python)
Answering (1) for myself, I do everything Meteor in Coffeescript, and in fact I'm playing around with the idea of maintaining a Coffee-fork of Telescope, as I'm integrating it into my app.
I think this can best be illustrated with drinking wine.

Some people have to have the perfect Amarone at precisely 21 degrees celsius in exactly those specific glasses in order to feel it's a good wine experience.

Other people, while they appreciate the same as the first group of people, can still enjoy a powerful wine a little to cold in whatever glass and still feel it's a great experience.

Quality of life really is about what you want it to be.
Yes yes yes.

The feeling you get from a good SSD is largely due to reduced IO latency (both read and write).

The ability to absorb random writes (to a degree) is huge too. It's why the 2008-vintage Intel X25-M caught the industry by surprise. Other SSDs at the time had extremely poor random write latencies.

Bandwidth is secondary, unless you are talking about an enterprise/database deployment (where queue depth is deep and you want great bandwidth and latency).

Pedants will note that bandwidth and latency are related (see Little's Law).
Found a PDP11 and some other awesome old tech stuff laying around
[meteor dev] I explained a bit more of the philosophy behind the Meteor security model in a Stack Overflow answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13331836/meteor-userid-is...

And of course, http://meteor.com/authcast if you haven't seen the 0.5.0 screencast.
Lessons Office - Food Order Bot and how build one
Ask HN: How do you drive traffic to a startup pre-launch landing page?
Well, pg didn't found the company that made him a millionaire until he was thirty years old...
Need Designer for Fb canvas app - social micropayment service
Hi YC,

We're building social micropayment and microgiving service Give+. I'm looking for designer in order to make our closed beta nice. This is Fb canvas app, as well as our portal. UX is already done, mockups are 80% ready.

Fb app will be installed within non-profit facebook pages and will be used by them to raise money \ monetize audience support.

No budget at this moment, but equity. Would appreciate leads. I saw some good people on Dribbble - not sure who of them will work w\o budget.

Thank you

My mail is igor at(@) giveaheart dot(.) com
Because I don't have my own car. Just having public transit info at my fingertips is enough reason for me. I'm not really sure how I would get around in new/unfamiliar areas efficiently without my phone. Obviously it's possible, because I used to do it, but it was far more hassle. Add to that driving directions for when I am in a car, a music library in my pocket, and it just makes sense (for me).

It's absolutely a luxury, and I could certainly survive without one. Frankly, though, its not the first luxury I'd give up. I'd do without cable, without a television, and without a clothes dryer before giving up my smartphone.

P.S. Turn off email notifications. You don't need to be alerted every time an email comes in.
Yep. A Solidoodle 2 user here. Used two printers, one of the earlier serial numbers, and a very recent built. Can recommend it. Pretty neat design. No troubles, comes ready to print...

Disclaimer: I'm not in any way associated with Solidoodle, aside from being a customer.
Very cool. I am working on a music site right now in Meteor and really enjoy it! I will likely open source it after. Check it out thus far: http://tunes.meteor.com

I think there are lot's of improvements that could be made to sites like Reddit/HN. But thanks a lot for open sourcing it this will be very helpful to me in learning meteor!

edit: Just noticed you are planning on writing a book. Can't wait!
I used to drag windows around in a similar manner... until windows 7 decided two or tree back and forths indicated "minimize everything else".
The idea here is the choice between:

easy/disposable/cheap combined with a wide selection of possessions and

requires research/lasts a long time/expensive combined with a minimal aesthetic about what you need to own.

Don't get stuck on the semantic argument of if "best" means absolute single best, it's that idea that is the interesting and potentially powerful part.
And on my blackberry I still have the same rdio app for 2 years...
On an Android phone: Calendar app, menu button, settings, click on your account name, and then check the calendars you want to sync to your device. Very easy.
Since I read "The Best" I wanted to write exactly this answer. Thanks.

I'd have added a cultural point of view: This debate is likely typically American, and Americans may have a problem with their owning stuff. I'd bet it is a perverse fascination on physical things, maybe induced by some TV/Movie propaganda.

For instance, I remember fairly well an American friend I had 5 years ago. We discussed one night long on "consumerism" and how bad it was. Then, the /next/ day, this nice clever guy bought an extremely expensive backpack filled with useless gadgets (an incorporated lighter, a water bag with a pipe so you can drink without taking a bottle out of the pocket, etc. etc.), showing it to me with tears in his eyes: it was so awesome a thing for a kiker like him!

I couldn't help remembering the "other kind of" hickers I crossed in Nepal: those Nepalese, they /walk/ from Snow mountains to India back and forth looking for work, and their "backpack" is an empty tissue thing with 2 rupees and one toothbrush inside, and they wear plastic slippers, and they sleep outside every day.

So what? So, "the Best" philosophy is both producing sometime very nice little pieces of perfection, like the iPod, and I understand why a professional designer would bend on this side. But I fear it is also pernicient and overall negative for normal people and the hole society, because it generates waste, frustration, greed, and so on...

Disc: I live in China, where the Best/Worst dialectic exists, but is obviously drawn along very different lines.
They just needed to out put the word Beta in there.
If you are not really into sysadmin stuff you should try to avoid VPS if possible. It's not hard but you don't want to be learning while you have more important stuff to do. Check out Heroku or AppFog.

Having said that, Softlayer has a program called Softlayer Catalyst where they give you $1000/month in hosting expenses, mentoring and some other stuff. You can read more about it and apply here: http://www.softlayer.com/partners/catalyst
I got hellbanned a few years ago and it's pretty lonely out here. I sent an email to PG and was basically told to f-off
p.s. I hadn't seen the mention on Telescope's page! Man, you're awesome.
Regarding CS: I don't think the meteor community looks at it particularly differently to the JS community in general; some people use it, some don't.

It's supported by the framework; I've used it on a few projects but now I'm moving away from it (I find the hassles of communicating with non-CS users about bugs etc outweigh the benefits it gives me). That's totally a personal opinion though.
The CEO of Leaping Brain (or someone pretending to be him) has now joined the Google Plus thread, implying that the "DRM" was intended as satire...
Moral code: can you program a conscience?
Mathematically, giving root login to person X is never more secure against person X than any other interaction with person X. I think the idea was regarding other people. With SSH, what you are exposing to those who lack the key is SSH, which is well hardened.

If you set up a web service naively and run it as root, you have a weaker surface more exposed in exchange for more security against a mostly trusted party (who already has physical access).

Of course, I'm not sure what kind of statistics can't be gathered by anyone but root; even if there are some (and there probably are in some configurations), I don't see why they couldn't be polled by root in a cronjob and dumped in a log file that's readable by a (specific, if you care) non-root user and fetched over SSH by that non-root user, &c. So, on the whole, I agree that there's no reason to give out root; but it's not a crazy notion that there are things worse than giving root to person A, with respect to your security against person B.
We've had 3 SSD failures out of 5 SSDs, and 0 magnetic failures out of 8 magnetic drives in our office over the last 2 years. We definitely keep only OS, programs, and VMs on SSDs.
> it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet

Elephants evolved in the same environment, are vegetarians, don't cook their food, and have the largest brains of any land animal.
As a matter of fact, cows were pretty late on the "domestication" game (around 3-4k years after pigs and sheep)[1].

Also, a lot of studies indicate that the kind of meat the humans ate when their brains grew was much more on the frog/bird/misc small animals side than on domesticated cattle.

[1] The edible story of food / Guns, germs & steel
> We are not here to sit in judgement of Dustin Curtis

Says the guy commenting on a website with buttons to up and down vote comments.
I did a light comparison a while back:

http://blog.jupo.org/2011/07/30/rails-quick-start-for-django...
Oh wow, I did not know that. Well I'm sold, thanks for replying. Meteor looks to be a pretty promising way to build realtime applications, I see what all of the fuss is about now.
Elephant's brains are proportionally smaller than human ones (so are whales', which are huge)...
Thank you. I will check Heroky, AppFog and the Catalyst program.

Does VPS need more maintenance than a shared hosting?
Very cool! That reminds me I've been thinking about a way to integrate YouTube videos into Telescope (like Reddit does with video links).
Cool, I thought about asking this :)
Using Stats to Not Break Search
Why You Should Be Using an App Launcher
I apologize. After re-reading that I definitely missed something when I made the post. I thought that you were saying that an Air would be better for programming.
>> High-variance life isn't fun unless you hit an early home run. Otherwise, it's stressful and shitty.

Story of my life! +1 to that!
Of course, Leakmap is a great example of what you can build with Telescope!
If only they didn't call saturated fat "heart-stopping" that would be quite a fine article.
Bay Area technology startups are notoriously hard for just about anybody! Perhaps older people are just becoming more normal and balanced.

Thankfully, I have not encountered this problem yet :-)
One quibble:

> "no point giving commission to a travel-agent when you can plan it yourself."

Travel agents often purchase in bulk and can get discounts that you can't get via 'do it yourself' flight tools. I recently travelled to Vancouver and Helsinki from New Zealand (effectively a round-world ticket) that worked out about $NZ 700 cheaper via an agent than online.

Good agents are also adept at 'working the system' - ie, knowing when and where cheap flights are available, upcoming deals, etc. It would pay to check whether your agent can do a better deal before booking online.
Ah. Finally someone here who share my dislike for Chrome for the same reason. It does not snap selections at end of lines and paragraphs and makes too hard to read for people like us. Whenever I used to explain this as my reason behind preferring Firefox to Chrome, I've got curious looks.
Yes, I do! @elisemoussa on Twitter, an EdTech entrepreneur based in Cambridge :)
On a related note, something I've always wondered about is why there isn't a native host object that represents the UA? Is there anything, save for tons of live code parsing UA strings, preventing this?

Seriously, even this 'lightweight' parser is around 7.6kb and a couple hundred lines of code -- and I'm not trying to knock the OP's work by any stretch. It just seems crazy that we still have to muck with this manual string parsing!

Why can't we just have:

UA = {
name: "Chrome",
vendor: "Google",
version: [24, 0, 1312, 14], // "24.0.1312.14",
renderer: {
name: "WebKit",
vendor: "Apple",
version: [537, 17],
},
javascript: {
name: "V8",
vendor: "Google",
version: [3, 14, 5, 1],
},
os: {
name: "Windows 7",
vendor: "Microsoft",
version: ["NT", 6, 1], // "NT 6.1"
},
user: {
locale: "en-US",
timezone: "America/Chicago",
utc: -6,
}
};
9 Marketing Services Every Restaurant Should Be Using
I do this, because it helps me remember important points, cause I tend to read highlighted points twiceover or more.
Curious about your "fast" comment. Tried to get in twice with the "Login with Twitter" option and things just spun and spun until they timed out. What are you commenting on? Speed of adding new articles or... ?
> python3 support

Go on