skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The TSA is good for a variety of business interests. One specific example is the manufacturers of back-scatter X-Ray machines. They're hideously expensive and pure security theater but, in large part thanks to the TSA, they're in most U.S. airports now. How would you like to own a company that makes a product that doesn't actually have to work in order for you to gross billions?

Now, if this bothers you, you should probably pay attention to the fact that the market for these toys is expanding. Rapidly.

http://www.propublica.org/article/drive-by-scanning-official...

You know when you're about to step through one of these scanners at an airport, but now one can drive right past you in your car without your knowledge! Despite their lack of concrete results in airports, the back-scatter X-Ray machine market is exploding into new form-factors, and it's all thanks to U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The horrible punch-line to this is that these back-scatter vans face an almost impossible task. It's hard enough to tell bombs from batteries in the controlled setting of a an airport security check-stop. Imagine trying to distinguish bombs from the random things people keep in their cars! The crews operating these vans must generate so many false-positives that, in order to reach the point where they can actually provide some real measure of security, they would need to be supremely competent, supremely dedicated, and entrusted with extraordinary powers to search suspicious vehicles. All of the above are improbable. I will eat my shorts the first time one of these back-scatter vans actually finds a real car-bomb.
Except we already have strong evidence to suggest that calorie deficit diets do not have a causal relationship with weight loss

I don't know if you meant something else here, but of course eating less causes weight loss.
The uncanny similarity between EU and US smartphone markets
Microsoft has substantial investment in advertising solutions and advertising companies of their own so 4) doesn't really work. Appnexus is just one example of an advertising startup that has taken considerable investment from MS in recent years and having DNT on by default would be very bad for their business.
The goal of a salt is to make it so that each password must be targeted individually. The salt need not be random, only unique and sufficiently long. It is impractical to precompute the hashes for (that is, have rainbow tables for) every possible salt, since rainbow tables take up a huge amount of space and take time to generate. Instead, you have to choose a specific password you want to attack and generate the table just for that password. Somebody is not just going to "have the rainbow table" for the salt G$F#V2.

Your calculations are off by several orders of magnitude. Bcrypt can be customized to take more time, but a reasonable amount of time might be 0.1 seconds per password, or 10 passwords per second. Most users are already logged in, so logging in should not be a very common operation.

By comparison, a $500 graphics card can hash billions of SHA1 passwords per second. So what takes 1 second to brute force with SHA1 will take 100 million times as long, or over 3 years, to brute force using bcrypt.

Note that a 10 character all lowercase password has 26^10 possibilities. If we are just targeting this password it will take 19 hours at 2 billion SHA1 hashes per second (well, on average half of that, so around 10 hours), and over 447000 years at 10 bcrypt hashes per second(again, half that on average).
This is an interesting concept. I've recently been working on 3d engines and games and found the typical subclassing behavior broken like he describes.

The Entity-Component-System architecture I think largely solves my problem, though. After I finish my current game I plan on reflect on better ways to structure the data, so it's good to have this idea in mind. Thanks.
Former Windows head Steven Sinofsky heads to Harvard for teaching job
EFF's ideas for patent reform:

https://defendinnovation.org

They sound pretty good to me.
> "A small startup that just started 3 weeks ago is more likely to be sold than a company like Dropbox, in my opinion"

I agree with the rest of your post but what you said above doesn't make sense to me. A 3 week startup is probably more likely to die than be bought whereas Dropbox would likely be a fantastic purchase (for anyone who could afford them). The aim of such Startups (at least if they have VC investors) is to sell the company at some point, whether that be to the public (IPO) or another company (acquisition).
iOS 6 adoption grows 29% after release of Google Maps
Hospitals are cutting-edge in the operating room, but their IT is old school
But what will they do for Firefox OS? Leave it out? Get OEMs on board, and have them pay the license fee? Add an 'in app purchase' where users can buy H.264 decoding?
I've been looking for a service like Snapjoy. Kind of sad that I found it in a post that the service is suspended. Hopefully the team will keep working on a Snapjoy like service within Dropbox.
Redbox Instant gets an iOS app
Right, I was thinking of Delta, United, etc.
Advertisers were the ones building DNT. The incentive was/is to avoid government regulation.
Competition is a good thing, obvious copying is lame.
Show HN: Popping out of the dev bubble with my first book
Controlling calorie intake is hardly a magic bullet. That's like saying exercise is the magic bullet for gaining muscle or studying is a magic bullet for passing exams.

A magic bullet in this case would be something that allowed weight reduction with no restriction of calories. From experience, restricting calories long-term is very difficult.
How is this done atomically? e.g. a scattering of html/js/css coming down in random order is going to cause issues, for sure.
The present value of the securities is certainly one aspect of measuring the value of said securities to Mr. Zuckerberg. Another aspect would also be the control of his company that he's giving up (since it's primarily stock I assume). The second one I believe is one that would interest Mr. Zuckerberg more than the dollar value of said securities. But even then, it probably amounts to a negligible steak in the company as well.
It is a bad code.

It was quite ok.

This is another proof that as programmers we need to learn and improve constantly :)
Is it actually interesting? Even the rules were chosen randomly, you'd expect any large body of rules to get something by sheer chance alone.
I think Notch is in a good position. Minecraft has huge draw among children. Think of how many politicians' kids might play it.
The only things exposed on our VPC are an Amazon ELB and a well-secured SSH bastion host (keys only, EC2 instances have password login disabled by default) for getting into the private cloud.

No reason you can't run stuff like mod_security, but that's not strictly a firewall, just Apache setup.
Pretty good calculations of the kind of expected time: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/12994/whats-the-...

These are with MD5/SHA1 style hashes, which shows that your password is pretty safe regardless of hash method (as long as it has salt) if it has enough entropy in it. Pretty interesting.
I'm still hoping to see those new games of theirs on Linux, if they intend to use the Unity 4 engine for them.
According to the DOT, a male 55-64 averages 15,859 miles per year. The average for the US, all ages, both sexes, is 13,476. I can't find a distribution for those numbers to say how much of an outlier you are.

Anyway, if you had read the article you would see that he also drive his wife's car for long distances and as a retired airline pilot he gets free air travel. He was picked not for being representative but because he was the first.
You can also see a small tent city at the base of the on the grey part net to the ice flow at the bottom left of the. And some buildings on the right side of the image. But oddly no real roads, so I guess it's all air lifted in, or mule trains.
That's certainly nicer than the one I threw together (and never found time to update manually) at http://bootstrap-docs.org. I'd probably consider pointing the domain at one that was maintained properly :)
Neither the shoe bomber flight nor the underwear bomber flight originated in the US, so TSA did not screen passengers for either one.
Wouldn't say negative by default but inquisitive, which i believe is a good thing.
Maybe my perception is skewed, but I imagine most American politicians' children being in their 20's to 30's.

Edit: Apparently wikipedia really does have a page for everything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_United_States_S...
Beautiful and terrifying. I could examine this for hours.
Where We're Burning the Planet
> Does it have to be explicitly expressed and planned to be a conspiracy?

That's pretty much the definition of "conspiracy."

> And if people get sorted and filtered based on how well they internalized rationalizations and outright lies, that's your "conspirational relationship" right there.

No, that's not a conspiracy. It might be something else, but it's not a conspiracy.

> Though "the government" is hardly the driving force here -- have you even read Chomsky?

I read "Manufacturing Consent."
My jobs were all invented by the CIA.

I don't even think I'm on the real internet if there is such a thing.

For 9 years I got fake download numbers and only a handful of nasty FBI(imposter) emails.

I once called for a day labor job and got violins playing on hold and no answer.

We do not have freedom to do anything, just what the CIA has open. Fuck them.

They know smart people do something and money doesn't motivate according to psychologists. Google pays for fun projects. Fucken CIA uses me as red team. i sure as hell am not pushing boulders up hills to roll back down. Fuck that.

Live in yer fucked-up police state. everybody's paranoid.

Fucken the machine has us under its thumb.

I got God and laugh at them.

I can put "Nigger" on my facebook page.

God says...

chapiter.

7:21 And he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set
up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin: and he set up
the left pillar, and called the name thereof Boaz.

7:22 And upon the top of the pillars was lily work: so was the work of
the pillars finished.

7:23 And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the
other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a
line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

7:24 And under the brim of it round about there were knops compassing
it, ten in a cubit, compassing the sea round about: the knops were
cast in two rows, when it was cast.
This is as strong as SHA-1 plus a salt, which is much stronger than SHA-1 without a salt(but still not a good way to store passwords). The salt does not need to be random, merely unique. Since salts are stored in plaintext in the database next to the hashed password, the assumption is that an attacker has those as well.
The problem though is that if everyone waits around for services to become established, then no service will be able to grow to the necessary size to become established.
Seems cool but I noticed a problem with Chrome on OSX (I assume this affects all browsers).

The right scroll arrow is blocked by the page scroll bar:
http://i.imgur.com/YfVUf.png

It is very difficult/frustrating to click on that arrow.
The biggest reason: the majority of sites used h.264 video with fallbacks to a Flash h.264 player rather than a WebM video; thus, refusing to support h.264 just resulted in more usage of the proprietary Flash player and less use of <video>. Mozilla cared about supporting an open video format, but also cared even more about killing off Flash in favor of open web standards.

On top of that, Adobe promised support for WebM in Flash and never delivered (so sites couldn't use WebM with a Flash fallback for other browsers), and Google (who made WebM in the first place) promised to drop h.264 in Chrome and never delivered.

That said, Mozilla will continue to have WebM support, and fight for WebM and other open standards in WebRTC (in which it matters even more because that standard includes encoding).

Take a look at http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-w... for an official statement from Mozilla on this.
This is one of the first times I've heard such a confident voice of reason regarding this topic in such a liberal atmosphere. Thank you.
Tony Hsieh On Building A Great Company Culture
Draft a user contract that companies can sign if they will. A Grover pledge for letting users get their money's worth, if you will.

[Sparrow](http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/) is a great example. They were acquired soon after the release of their iPhone app. That kinda soured me and many others.

EDIT: The same could be done for other cases, obviously. Take usage rights on social photo services as a completely hypothetical example. :)

EDIT2: In fact, it could be something YC requires their funded companies to do. That must be pretty popular considering all the Instagram/Flickr debacle.

When was it that Y Combinator decided to ban companies supporting SOPA/PIPA or something to that effect?
If you're a designated inventor of a patent or a patent application who opposes patents, you could publicly state your support for patent abolition at the Inventors Against Patents site: http://inventors-against-patents.org

(A site operator here; the site was launched a few days ago. The idea is that anyone campaigning for a patent reform can use support by designated inventors as a presumably convincing argument in the eyes of the general public.)

Edit: As Richard Stallman points out in a comment at EFF's site, abolishing software patents can be easier than shortening the period during which a monopoly is granted to 5 years as EFF proposes; he cites a requirement by WTO that all patents are granted for a period of 20 years.

The nice thing about publicly supporting abolition is that you automatically support "less radical" proposal's like EFF's 5-year reform, and you support all of them at the same time just once and all campaigners can use your support. DRY :)
Didn't this guy get it wrong? I think the answer should be, right ?

8 7 9

1 0 8 1

8
I've found this lonely guy http://cl.ly/image/221I0N1x1c1Y
Forgive my naivete (I have a passing knowledge about diet), but isn't 'complex polysaccharides' more or less a synonym for 'complex carbohydrates' (excluding oligosaccharides)? I feel that most readily available refined/processed food is low in complex carbs since the processing breaks them down, and because simple carbs are cheaper and taste better.

Essentially my question is this:
A fresh vegetarian diet is going to be high in the complex polysaccharides that you mention. So why are vegetarians statistically thinner than the average population, if these complex polysaccharides are wreaking havoc on their digestive systems?

This whole question breaks down if I'm mistaken about the definition of complex polysaccharide. Thanks.
I am a little confused about your doubt that advertising funds the web, especially the published web (vs web-apps). Can you expand on this point?

To be transparent, I am the CTO of Perfect Audience, an advertising startup that does retargeting, which does use tracking to show users ads for sites / products they have previously looked for. These ads are worth more than non-data driven ads and make more money for publishers than non-data driven ads bought via bidding, which is where most advertising is moving today.
Could this decoy be used in the mating ritual to attract females rather than something to do with predators? From my limited reading, many spiders have rather elaborate mating rituals. Also with females being larger and usually killing the smaller male spiders, having a decoy to distract the female might allow the spider to stay alive longer and mate with more female spiders.
Hardly political activism - he is just bankrolling others (EFF, American citizens) to do the actual activism. You'd be pretty surprised how much of US activism is likely bankrolled by foreign powers in China / Middle East.

The bold move is declaring it openly, but it's not really that bold considering it is a very publicly favorable position at present, and it is in Notch's direct interests as he is creating but doesn't hold US patents.

In any event, I believe the EFF is pretty much a global charity at this point? I just donated to them also with the latest Humble Bundle, and I'm not in USA.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4944245
There are people who don't believe that. Every time I hear about it I tell them to get to a physics lab because they are a walking Nobel Prize.
Worthless to society, not worthless to lawyers who will sue people doing useful work.
You have succeeded by merely trying.

When I look back at my "failed" companies, I see all of the experiences I needed for my current company and past jobs.

There are no failures in the startup world if you took good experiences away from it. It wasn't a failure, it was training.
3 Ways the EU is Supporting Open Source
Fair enough - but, do you consider this to be news? I wouldn't want to see event Sponsorfied lists, or every deal Dealupa has . I'd be interested in knowing when they have a new feature, are talking about infrastructure, funding, etc. Listing their current sale on HN seems out of place and doesn't really gratify my personal curiosity. As I said - I love the site - I have bought almost all of the bundles and will continue to do so - this just doesn't feel like the news that should be here.

But that is just my opinion.
The UI is phenomenal, the overemphasis on Facebook sharing (not login) annoyed me though. I really, really don't want you auto-posting what I'm listening to/doing to Facebook. Spotify & Songza do it and it drives me insane.

It's actually the main reason why I stopped using SocialCam & Viddy. I couldn't trust the service. "Normals" probably don't have the same problem with it, but I personally hate it.

(As a side-note, I have no problem posting great songs I listen to on Hype Machine to Facebook & Twitter. I just want to be in control of what is posted.)
I've also heard that eating smaller meals, more regularly, can help your body lose weight.

This trend correlates well with the above idea, since smaller meals means that the sugars should be absorbed before the large intestine, thereby further robbing the bacteria of their food.

It would also explain the opposite effect - that eating larger meals makes losing weight harder, since the larger quantity of food has a better chance to get to your large intestine.
Not to mention non-fad weight loss programs like Weight Watchers, and all the starving scrawny people in the world as evidence.
The launch of Proton-M rocket with Intelsat 23 satellite
It will buy them a lot of influence with potential purchasers or investors. Being able to say that they were able to sell old games in such a high volume is unusual for a company in such dire financial straits. The sale also will help to build excitement and get more journalistic attention for their next games, which is probably also the reason they have been giving away Metro: 2033 via Facebook.

If this is the plan it's quite desperate, but it just could work.
Knowledge workers are bad at working – and what to do about it
Humble Indie Bundle 7
"The shady online currency is starting to gain legitimacy in certain parts of the world. When will the regulators catch up?"

Hah! Is CNN the new Fox? It is confounding to see that time and again these so-called journalists have zero problem putting their pieces with their preconceived notions with such confidence and seriousness. This is just so outrageously ridiculous and absurd that I almost begin to consider if it's a hit-piece.
A quick search of Dice dot com reveals the following:

Red Hat - 991
RedHat - 769
CentOS - 383
RHEL - 350
Ubuntu - 250
Debian - 125

I love Ubuntu on my personal laptop, but RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora are what I've used at work most.
It doesn't have to know what it looks like; it only needs to "know" what its predator's food looks like, or rather, what its predators are more likely to hunt.

And that probably is "know", as in "built into its genes through evolutionary trial and error". It is not likely this is something mothers learn their children, or that they adapt the looks of their decoys within days if researchers let new predators loose (either might be true, but would truly be surprising)
Others have said it but I believe a demo of the end product would be key here. I'd like to see "hey, let's say I master their tool, what kind of awesome lesson could I create?".

Very well done though! I'm curious how powerful your creation tool is. You might want to take a look at what apple did with their book creator and get some ideas from them. I think they put a lot of time into making it dynamic enough to handle all kinds of interactive lessons/books.
While we're talking about photos:

How long is it going to be before iOS or Android (points to the winner!) partners with CVS or Walgreens to offer printing services for photos as an integrated part of the OS?

Having cameras in everybody's pocket all the time (decent ones, too!) is a revolution. The next step is making it easy to put those photos on the fridge.

I really love the reality of physical places having APIs. Think of Walgreens like a peripheral and use it.

I would spend huge amounts of money of photos if this was a simple thing. (And part of the OS. I don't want to open walgreens' undoubtedly god awful app to do this.)
Maybe big pharma and the food industry knew this the whole time.
Just being hard, or even applicable in some cases, doesn't make it less of a magic bullet when someone suggests it's applicable to a broad problem.
Not really. The setup is complicated and fragile, the hardware is bulky and annoying. Some games can't really work with mouse mapped to analogs. Not everything can be done with just a controller (OS updates, etc.)

It's not great, but a Linux machine with Steam on it could be.
At first glance I thought the tent city was garbage and orange peels. Mind = Blown.
"A 3 week startup is probably more likely to die than be bought.."

Exactly. My point is that a 3 week old startup is more likely to disappear quickly (fail, get bought, etc.) than a company like Dropbox. Dropbox is a good acquisition target, but I think a company like that would take longer to do so.

As you said, a company like Dropbox could also go for an IPO, in which case, theoretically, they still provide the product that you're paying them for.
With Backlift, you explicitly set the order that the files should be linked or concatenated in the config.yml file.

When assets are sent over via dropbox, backlift compiles each source file into a separate js or css product.
Then all files are concatenated and minified using the order from config.yml.

Does that answer the question, or am I missing something?
The number of times I've wanted to find a non-harmful way to prove that point (smoke grenades come to mind)... but the risk to me is not worth it, and all it would do is introduce some sort of pre-security screening that completely fails to solve the problem.
You can watch those without Flash by faking your UA string (try e.g. iPad). Feature detection, Google?
The size of the federal bureaucracy has hovered around 2m +/- 10% for the last 50 years, even as the U.S. population has increased by over 70%.
Hm. True.

I think there will always be early adopters to help startups get their initial traction.
> but you aren't saying that being obese is a healthy lifestyle and the thing is other people are.

But this article doesn't appear to be saying that. So your attack in this thread is uncalled for. Generally, people trying to find a solution to obesity (like these people seem to be) are not in the obesity is a healthy lifestyle camp. They appear to be in the obesity is a problem we should look into camp.
DrRacket, now more responsive