skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As previously stated.

This could be used to potentially track entropy of encryption key generation(such as trucrypt or, the new MEGA sites implementation, any site or program that employs mouse-movement/key binding for entropy.)

Mega Screenshot:
http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/...

Security Thread on Bank Login virtual keyboard:
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/22774/my-bank-ma...

Just something an idiot can think of so, any black-hat is just having fun @ this point.
This is exactly what they should be doing, but they will downplay it as all the publicity will actually detract from the current ruling elite's appearance (even if it wasn't them who made the law up).
There are also a number of excellent collaborative games, such as Pandemic, or the new(ish) and very quick Escape: The Curse of the Temple. These are great if you want a less competitive atmosphere.
News publishers had a range of choices on how to implement this. ProPublica did not enable frictionless sharing or an automatic dialog box asking you to install an app

http://www.propublica.org/article/introducing-a-new-non-evil...

I don't think the app was particularly popular leading me to wonder "what's the point?" (I used to work there) but I suppose for users who choose to live their lives through FB, giving them the choice of sharing and consuming through FB isn't necessarily a net negative
Thank you for a more concrete justification. I think I agree that the two links you provided are examples of use cases that could actually be exploited just using the position of the mouse.
Dobble is amazing for everyone, and it's great fun to explain it for the first time ("each two cards have only one shape in common, you have to find it") and hear people go "That's it? That's easy!" and then shout in frustration when they realize it's almost impossible :P

Also, Jungle Speed, Cockroach Salad, Halli Galli are pretty fun speed games. Tokyo Train is a classic for four people as well.
How to implement Concurrent Queue Linked in Java
FUD. I've had several developers over several teams pick up Backbone significantly faster than 1-2 months. I'd strongly recommend over generalising from personal experience, and perhaps considering why Backbone has so many devs using, and contributing to, it.

I've been writing MVC apps in JS and ECMA script in general (eg AS 3) for a good time now, and have used other MVCish frameworks before (Dojo, Flex etc). Backbone has a solid implementation of models, views and events. If you understand the fundamentals of Javascript (knowing event listener closures are references that'll prevent GC) and write modular code you can do great things with it without any "mess".
Introducing the Anonymous Social Network – Spraffl
This post looks at new Edinburgh based start-up 'Spraffl', an anonymous, location based social network. Does anonymity breed a more interesting experience?
If other countries want to govern their national nets without US control, they'll govern their national nets without US control. One way or another.

Seems to me the choice is that the US+friends either sign, or get a fragmented internet.
The variety and refinement in game mechanics is great. Browsing BoardGameGeek by mechanic[1] can be useful for new board game selection.

[1] http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic
PR bullshit
I tried it out on my late 2008 MacBook Pro (Lion, CoreDuo, SSD). Doesn't look so hot:

Eds-MacBook-Pro workspace$ time (find . -name '*java'|parallel grep Message > /dev/null)

real	0m2.176s
user	0m1.111s
sys	0m1.789s
Eds-MacBook-Pro workspace$ time (find . -name '*java'|xargs grep Message > /dev/null)

real	0m0.097s
user	0m0.035s
sys	0m0.061s

GNU Parallel was installed using homebrew. I don't know what compiler flags were used, but it's 22 times slower. I ran each multiple times but there was no significant difference.

From the 'sys' time, I'd guess the native xargs is probably not using a Posix call????
I agree entirely. The one thing which is pushing me from C++ to Haskell is cabal, and a large selection of easy-to-install libraries.

One thing that makes this hard in C++ of course is people tend to get annoyed if libraries don't work with clang, g++ and a recent visual studio. Even then you have the problem of older g++ and old visual studio, and then esoteric compilers. In Haskell on the other hand people tend to always be running a recent version of ghc.
Yes, but the developers who know how to then remove such hard coded variables and then where to store them will, out of habit, go the extra step, even if out of paranoia, because such a step is likely forgotten when the repo suddenly needs to be opened up

The more common case I've come across is that devs who leave their passwords hard coded do so because they are inexperienced and know of no other way. I wish the best practice were the default in this situation
So you're saying if you were given a mouse movement trace on top of a virtual keyboard, you couldn't possibly deduce what was typed?

Someone should just make a program that does that, and this will all be settled. Maybe even make it guess what kind of virtual keyboard was used.
Fast DNA origami opens way for nanoscale machines
High-speed internet (and better internet access in general) is a win-win for communication & education, leading to a more open society and encouraging and facilitating change like marriage equality.
Show HN: New Android launcher for XMAS holidays
Ask HN: Does 37 Signals pay Coudal/Zeldman for Job Board?
37 Signals mentions on its Job Board that several websites such as Coudal.com feature links to its Job Board. Does 37Signals pay these websites for putting up these links? If yes, how would this work? Based on clicks?
So, we can either run with the assumption that people at Apple are idiots which seems massively unlikely, or the assumption that people at Apple are reasonably smart, which seems more likely.

When Google Maps was getting spun up, they relied on people adding POI, reporting issues and so on. This was a long, long while ago but it's still possible to report concerns to Google. Crowdsourcing will not solve it, but it will become a big factor in determining what they need to do.

Lets say 10% of people report an issue, and of those 10% there's 2% reporting really specific issues in one specific area of the globe, that allows Apple to then understand a key facet of the dataset and where it can be improved, that gives them knowledge of what issues exist in the current dataset and gives them the opportunity to see whether they can apply that on a larger scale.

More data, more input, faster the problem is solved. Everything I've reported has been sorted, things I've not reported but are in the same generalish area have been fixed. I'd assume Apple is running essentially a massive data mining operation to work out where needs work. If everyone jumps ship I'm sure Apple will continue to improve it but it'll be much, much slower.

In short: if you think crowdsourcing is useless, you are probably wrong.
If password is sufficiently long, x and y coordinates are all what is needed to deduce keyboard coordinates, button size and then, password.
The course is nice but frankly, for either software tutorials or programming course, the video format totally sucks. Really.
The D language comes to help
Essentially the only way to pay your dues in Reddit is to post content apart from your own, and make bunches of comments to prove that you are 'real person'.

That's problematic because content creators don't want to help the competition, and they have real jobs making stuff so don't want to make reddit their part time job.

Advertisement comes with certain guarantees---pay X amount and you get Y amount of impressions or clicks. Becoming part of a community has no guarantee of success, and even once successful Reddit can always turn against you if they view your posting 1 article per day as "spam" because you work for the newspaper who makes the article.
History's Biggest Scientific Fraud Goes Under the Microscope
Oddly, I think their warehouse employees might beg to differ. (Especially right now, since it's the middle of the Christmas rush.)
It became law on May 1, 2012 when it received Royal Assent. http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-12/protectionoffree...
Why the hell they issue statements instead of patches? Is it hard to fix? If yes, let us know. If no, just fix it.
Yes, but the precise number appears only in the commentary from 14th century
A better question is what degree of danger this information actually poses. It is possible to reverse a password hash created by bcrypt regardless of what settings you used. The question is HOW LONG would it take, and whether the cost makes the value of any potential exploit less than zero. If the value is less than zero, the risk is effectively minimal - at least for now.

Panic and tarring and feathering of Microsoft's security team is only justified if the risk is severe.
> HN is a dead lisp dialect,

pg will be unhappy with calling Arc dead :P.

> I don't know what reddit uses.

Python (started as Common Lisp though).

Also LessWrong uses modified Reddit code to have threaded discussions under articles, and again, as saurik keeps saying, I can bet that 90% of discussion content wouldn't be there if comments were linear. Web discussion is non-linear by nature.
I will resist the kneejerk 'oh you can't automate that because humans are special snowflakes' aspect that I'm sure will be well covered by others.

What concerns me about this is factual accuracy. It seems to me that these books, while they may compile information, would have to be incapable of doing anything but, at best, providing the consensus about a certain topic. This type of system could also most likely be used to easily manufacture consensus which might be even more worrisome.

I'd bet $100 that he could set this system on any psychology/sociology topic and it would be hailed as an innovator.
Microsoft cannot issue patches instantly. They have to go through testing.
"This needs a little more context, doesn't it? Did usage drop because the app is unpopular? Did it drop because the Guardian is unpopular? Or is Facebook losing share overall?"

None, FB launched the opengraph plugin with a preferred list of partners, after the initial bedding in period other media companies were allowed to join, thus saturating the market and taking % share (UV).
Pivoting is a random-restart hill climbing algorithm. If you change strategic direction but remain in the same space, that's climbing the hill. If you change to a completely different idea, that's random restart.
Absolute nonsense. I was well into writing my first view helper extension for backbone at the end of the second week learning it, having already built a small app (comet shopping cart) in the first week.

There is literally a couple of days worth of reading to get up and running with either backbone or angular and the rest of the time is just standard write code -> question how good it is -> research better ways -> refactor loop that everyone should go through when picking up something new.
Thanks for the feedback! Good points, we'll also try to change the text a bit. It's funny that we had some more people say they were really surprised that it "just worked" to reply inline, but we'll probably add an option to include a link to the webform in the email header or footer as well.
Participation - why be a speaker at a conference
Please kill all these social reader apps, besides privacy infringement and spam, I've never seen any additional value in these apps to the reader ..
Couldn't agree more. German-style games make Monopoly etc look positively archaic. Two great starter games are Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. I'm a big fan of Ticket to Ride as well.

There are a couple of things that make these games so good. Firstly, they're extremely well balanced - unlike Monopoly, it's rare for one player to pull ahead to the point that it's impossible for anyone else to catch up with them.

Secondly, they tend to come to an inevitable conclusion - a game of Settlers will virtually never last more than an hour and a half due to resources / space on the board depleting over time. I've had games of Monopoly last 6 hours or more, by which time everyone is fed up and wishes they'd never started playing.
Out of curiosity, if one wanted to "re-learn modern C++" after years of Java, Python, Ruby, where could he start from? (something like a "crash course") Is Stroustrup's "Principles and Practice Using C++" any good for this purpose?
They seem to have never seen terminal PCs. I know a couple of places in my city where you have IE-based kiosk terminals with touch-on-screen keyboards that emulate a cursor. It should be even much easier to map mouse movement to actual inputs as the emulated cursor "jumps" from key to key during input.
Slightly off-topic: there is a story-like narrative description of development of quantum mechanics in a book by Manjit Kumar. I don't recall the title, though.
Dominion lets you spend all the time making decisions rather than waiting for other people by having hardly any interaction between players; at times it can feel like a time trial race. I tend to prefer Tanto Cuore; while it's largely a direct rip-off (and the art puts some people off) it gives you more attack options, and the balance shifts to allow a wider variety of strategies (Dominion I find duchies are almost entirely irrelevant, and anything other than going for the high end rarely works). So it's an improvement, but it's so similar I suspect we're converging on the ultimate form of that kind of game.

I still need to try Agricola.
I've used both Backbone and AngularJS, and found the AngularJS learning curve to be steeper than the Backbone one, and there's more 'jargon' to grok before you start understanding things.

How steep you find a learning curve is likely to be influenced by your technical history.

That said, the difference in difficulty, in my experience, is certainly not an order of magnitude.
Tokenization with Scanner in Java
Eugene Kaspersky Answers Questions
This sort of thing would be extremely useful for me at the moment. I have a new role starting in a month or so, with a lot of green-field C++ development work. I'm happy with OO concepts and have extended a variety of pre-existing C++ in my time, but my main body of knowledge is most definitely C.

Can anyone recommend a quick-start guide to modern(ish) C++ for the experienced C developer?
Depending on move constructors scare the bajeezus out of me because I have no way of knowing if it's working properly. It's behavior is also implementation specific. Given the following test you'll get a variety of results depending on your platform.

struct Foo{...}
std::vector<Foo> vec;
for( int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { vec.push_back( Foo() ); }

Results: 35 move / 25 copy / 10 move + 15 copy / 25 move.

It all depends on your compiler and STL implementation. Not knowing scares the hell out of me.
I was just about to post this, but 'A short history of nearly everything' by Bill Bryson has a LOT of these stories. It explains how we determined the circumference and the weight of the earth, the distance to the moon and the sun, etc.

In fact the whole book is about this, it explains all the important scientific breakthroughs from the past and how we've gotten to them.
Compare with what? Honest question, it seems to me self evident that there is nothing to compare to at first time, so maybe I'm mistaken. Would you mind to elaborate?
Makes one think about ideas that are ahead of their time now, but will make sense when Gigabit broadband is widespread.

You could apply this to other areas in tech too, e.g. car OSes, which are new and not great (like 2002 phones versus 2012 phones), but in 10 years will be a key selling point in cars - over the air firmware updates, every car has it's own IP address, high-speed mobile broadband as standard, detects if you're too drunk and dials a cab, auto-dials emergency services if you crash (some of these are already in development, there are probably lots more features that are hard to imagine just like with phones and tablets).
The 30-year-old prank that became the first computer virus
A security issue is a security issue, regardless of how severe it is.

If MS had come out and said "We're working on fixing it, but we don't think it's a critical vulnerability" - that would be understandable. What needs to be called out is if they come and say "This isn't an issue at all".

If some website was leaking password hashes, would "well the hashes are so strong that this isn't really an issue" be an acceptable response?
I've never been able to stand Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride falls firmly into my "meh" category - with multiple players you optimize your chances of winning by taking a lot of routes, and it's then mostly a matter of luck whether you get a set that overlaps enough to complete. Settlers is good if you play it with people who pay attention, but if not you can easily be waiting half an hour while everyone asks everyone else several times over if they want to sell them any grain for their sheep.

So yeah, I've mentioned San Juan; Citadels is similar and conveniently is playable for 2-8. If you're a group of programmers then Roborally is fantastic (just ignore the life tokens).
The difference is that parallel always invokes a new process for each argument, whereas xargs will pass many files into the same argument. You can see this with:

seq 1000 | xargs echo | wc -l
1

seq 1000 | parallel echo | wc -l
1000

So xargs has only run echo once, whereas parallel has run it 1000 times.

If we force xargs to run only one argument at once, things look better:

time ( seq 1000 | xargs -n 1 echo | wc -l )
1000
real	0m1.478s
time ( seq 1000 | parallel echo | wc -l )
1000
real	0m5.536s

Although, still not great for parallel

However, we still haven't taken advantage of parallelisation. This is where the real strength of parallel comes in, and where (I suspect) a bunch of the slow down comes in.

If we run xargs in parallel (with --max-procs=4), then we get much faster real time, but the output is randomly shuffled up (as xargs just lets each process output when it wants). If we had programs with multiline output, they would be all shuffled together.

On the other hand, when we parallelise with parallel, the output is still all nicely sorted in order, as parallel stores up the output of each program, and outputs them in the correct order. This does create some overhead, but means the output is much more readable. In your example, if you parallelised your xargs with --max-procs, you would find the greps of different files mixed together, but not with parallel.

Wow, wrote more than I intended. Basically there is a difference, but it isn't quite as much as you think due to differences in default behaviour. However, parallel also does more stuff once you start parallelising!
Email me Jason@fab.com so I can check it out please.
The issue was reported in October.

"Whilst the Microsoft Security Research Center has acknowledged the vulnerability in Internet Explorer, they have also stated that there are no immediate plans to patch this vulnerability in existing versions of the browser."

http://spider.io/blog/2012/12/internet-explorer-data-leakage...

So, instead of fixing it:

- receive vulnerability report

- don't fix it and wait until there's PR disaster

- issue statement that now "we're working actively to fix it"

- [future] fix the issue

My question, again -- why the hell they didn't fix it in the first place? Why go though this? Do you have to be a psychic to figure out that any Microsoft's non-response to vulnerability (even if its effect is overblown) is a PR disaster?
The biggest need web startups fail to address
This has always struck me as blindingly obvious but, since nobody is saying it, perhaps it's not.

The single most important factor which makes me gloss over new web startups and the services that they provide is that there is no option for self-hosting.

Considering how many web 2.0 businesses have gone out of service (I remember an infographic showing something close to half), it is, in my opinion, insane to have a company which relies on one.

It's really simple - just license your code out for people who want to host it themselves. This gives you a passive income stream, which is always great - especially for those slow months. It gives your customers peace of mind because they know that if you go out of business the impact will be minimal.
I have the feeling Windows 8 will become a better attack target than Windows 7 was, because of all the new (and exploitable) stuff Microsoft introduced through the Metro stuff and through the Windows store, that are still very much untested.
Yeah, but you still wouldn't want sites making their bcrypt hashes publicly available...
I call submarine on this.
Whoever Gillian is, she just rocked my world with that comment.
On the try a demo, it'd be nice if you could have an example email sent to your email address (maybe the form that appears when you click the button now, so that you can do a side-by-side comparison).
Top Tracks of 2012 Mixed by Hype Machine
EFF: Stop Congress from Reauthorizing the Warrantless Spying Bill
SKorea’s government says Samsung chip plant caused worker’s breast cancer
They probably all committed suicide. It's a really common end for GLBT, unfortunately.
Google makes it difficult to search for  porn
Tesco (http://www.tesco.com/) has applied the Webvan strategy, except in reverse - start with a chain of stores, and add the online and home delivery element later. They have the brand loyalty, the consumer attention and the infrastructure - so adding the online element is an obvious next step. Seems to be working out well for them.

(Tesco also tried to expand to the US but failed: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/09/fresh-not-eas...)
I can't see that happening right now. The PM has announced that Gay Marriage is going to become a thing here imminently.

It's a weird bill because it actually forbids the state church from performing homosexual marriages, not even leaving it open for the church itself to decide, but it does allow other churches to make their own decisions and civil ceremonies to take place.

This is a major step (IMHO) but it has had the usual backlash of small minded folks spouting on about family values and how their rights are being eroded (?!) so politically a blanket, retroactive pardon seems very unlikely.

Baby steps...
Thanks! We're using the geolocation API directly in javascript, the accuracy it's quite good.
There's Polish site wykop.pl, it's a digg (now reddit) analogue. They use capped level system (article -> comment -> reply) with special formatting for > quotes and @nicks so people can refer to each other in the comments, and the discussion doesn't differ much in structure from the one on reddit, from what I noticed. It's rather large site, often there's around 300 comments on one article, but it is easy to read (easier than reddit, at least for me).
xTuple is simpler, and less buggy :)

http://www.xtuple.com - company site
http://www.xtuple.org - community site
How to manipulate e-mail links in HTML
Many startups already offer what you're suggesting, e.g., github enterprise (https://enterprise.github.com/).

The difficulty about offering self-hosted apps is, obviously, support. While support an app hosted and controlled by you might not be that hard, imagine the multitude of server configurations that your users might have.

That's probably why startups who offer self-hosted options, usually do it at a high price range.
Totally agree, my best friend is an Indian. His parents have been happily married for 30 years and still going strong. It was an arranged marraige, but there is a lot to learn from them.
EE introduces the UK's first 4G tablet: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 LTE