skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is Twitter a good idea? It's clearly an idea that's achieved traction with a userbase, but what is it about Twitter that makes it a "good" idea?
Chris Soghoian, principal technologist of the ACLU, wrote about this issue with respect to the hotel lock vulnerability that was revealed a few months ago (as well as general statements). http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/hotel-lock-securi...
This is absolutely false. The NSA asked IBM to not reveal that security against differential attacks was a design goal. They did not, as you suggest, allow the weakness to be present in DES (go read the Wikipedia article you cite again).

The NSA did make changes to the S-boxes used in DES at the last minute, and would not comment on the nature of the changes. Many people speculate this was the introduction of a backdoor. Last year at RSA a speaker from the NSA revealed that the (now 35 year old) changes served two purposes: 1. it actually fixed a weakness they had found, but did not want to disclose the details of. 2. scared the Russians into not trusting the now hardened algorithm and instead relying on older systems that they had attacks against.
didn't have a coin with me to try it out, but just found new blog to add to my rss feed... :)
I disagree. Suppose you increase the baseline “greatness” of humanity on the whole, so that the average person compares to the greats of the past, and the greats of the present are greater still.
An opinion on gun control
I'm guessing their system will be in stores for the casual person to buy and to it themselves soon.
This is sophistry. Some math is hard. Some is very easy. The math you're referring to is hard. The math of "what to do if startup valuations vary multiple orders of magnitudes less than startup outcomes" is very easy.

This point is so obvious that I find it hard to believe you wrote the above comment in good faith.
Yeah, I don't know much about the comic, but at least in the latest Christopher Nolan movies the engineering is all behind the scenes by Morgan Freeman's secret division. No slight to the series, just saying.
I don't think you should underestimate the essential contributions that great programmers make to large-scale software products. They can:

- Keep the entire system in their heads, which is of great help to other programmers who have questions about how the code works.

- See several steps ahead and thus avoid pitfalls that may not be obvious to others.

- Design stable and maintainable architectures.

- Debug nasty bugs that others on the team may never be able to solve.

- Mentor less-advanced programmers.

Without at least a handful of really good programmers to lead the way, a large development project probably has a very small probability of success.
I don’t understand your question clearly, but the idea is to incentivize children to “earn” points after completing tasks, so you are giving value to their “work” with points that they can exchange for rewards. If I would give a “learning objective” could be to teach children to “work” for the things that they want and don’t take everything for granted.
Cherry was not a great idea. Had they done some research (well, the people who gave them 5.25 million dollars to waste away), they would have learned some very simple things. Disclaimer: I used to own and operate (as in also wash cars) a successful on-site car wash business. Closed it down because it was a pain in the ass to run.

On-site car washing (or any other type of on-site auto service (YourMechanic guys should pay attention)) is very low on margins, and competition is tough. You have to compete with every 13 year old kid who wants to buy a new playstation game and will wash cars for $5. You will also have to compete with every other joe who will basically wash a car for a couple of bucks. So creating a solid customer list is tough.

There are also logistics issues. Getting a group of car washers who are not complete and total fuckheads is impossible (I'd say its easier to win the lottery twice). Cherry tried to circumvent that by having sub-contractors, which in other words means giving some random joe $5 to wash some car. They only provided them with some basic equipment. If you have ever washed a car in the cold, you know that you need more than a fucking soap sprayer and a sponge. There is a lot of equipment needed to correctly wash a car in diverse weather conditions. Sub-contractors did not buy equipment because they were being paid shit. So, getting good employees is impossible, getting good sub-contractors is like finding out you have a rich uncle who died and left you money and that suddenly, every hot celebrity out there is hot for you.

There is also the issue that people dont give a shit about cancelling an appointment 30 seconds before it is due. That plus rain, shady owners trying to blame you for "missing stuff", and people who smoke. Its just a shitty business to be in. The only people who manage to do something in that market are the professional detailers. Those guys do make some good money, but have to spend a shitload of time on a single customer, and cannot (in most cases) reliably duplicate their business in order to have any horizontal growth. The high end market is also very competitive and customer loyalty is very high. No Porsche owner will have some unknown detail his baby in order to save $50.

Also, I so called this. This is one of those "investments" that makes you go "huh?".

Edit:

And here I was feeling bummed about wasting $600 on car washing equipment. 5.25 million bucks! Hell, give me $500k and I'll make Nuuton so awesome that people will say "Google? What is that?" :)
You are correct sir, GA is the 2-letter abbreviation for the state of Georgia.
Show HN: Geotag your git commits
The first IBM computer to use a 386 was iirc the ps/2 model 80. There were also some clones out in short order, most notably the Olivetti and the Apricot.
I think you meant a low level hacker. :)
You're supposed to realize that enlightenment is not computable by an FA.
You are right. After reading this post and following some useful links to your site, I was able to sit down and redo the book structure. It solved my problem and was able to quickly write a nice draft of the first chapter. Very useful wisdom to share, thank you.
Why wouldn't the child talk to their parents instead of taking photos/videos. What's wrong with "Dad, I finished my homework", "Mom, I took out the trash".
Please add autocomplete, it would make it so much easier to work with; something like the Chrome console.
VLC for Windows 8 reaches $65,000 funding goal with five days to spare
It is a confusingly-written comment, and I think the final bit especially is simply the wrong wording for what the author means, but beneath all that there's still a valid criticism of Google Flights over Expedia.

The unambiguous part is that Google Flights failed to account for the nature of the seats it had identified as "available", and went ahead with the recommendation when in fact they were not appropriate. The unclear part is whether Expedia did actually find the same flight and seats (as the author appears to be saying) but has some way around the security features (an agreement with the airline?), or whether Expedia was aware of the inappropriateness of the seats Google Flights recommended and in fact provided different ones on a different flight.

It would be nice if the parent had been clearer in the explanation but it seems that either way: Expedia 1, Google 0.
What about minix 3? It implements all of POSIX, and it's a true microkernel. The kernel process is apparently only 4-5K LOC which I have been meaning to take a look through.

Their papers have pretty detailed performance measurements. I recall that they pass fixed-length messages between processes for efficiency (to avoid buffering). And they said it takes approximately 500ns to send a message on a 2.2GHz Athlon, which is in the neighborhood of a malloc().

I don't know how the overall performance is. Minix 3 appears to be targeted at lower end devices, e.g. they mentioned OLPC. I don't think they have things that you would want for servers, like multicore support. I don't think anyone uses it for those types of applications. But it does implement POSIX and it is a microkernel. And from what I gather the codebase is relatively modern -- they said it is related to Minix 2 in name only.

http://www.minix3.org/documentation/index.html
You may jest, but the traditional ordering, appending later material/writing to the bottom, is an artifact of the mechanics of handwriting and then typing-on-paper.

On screens, freshest/latest-on-top makes more sense, and is just as easy to effect. Inherently online forms, like blogs and newsfeeds, have already inverted their preferred mapping of time-to-vertical-position. I predict many interactive shells and chatrooms will also invert soon.

!reverse might sentences individual within order word
the even maybe years hundred a In ?knows Who
Blog got it wrong for the real coin and my guesses.
I agree. These functions have completely changed how I approach algorithms and data manipulation.

I was super-excited to learn Go, but it was a showstopper to discover that Go's lack of support for generics effectively made this pattern of programming impossible. Major disappointment.
The problem by keeping it verbal is tracking what has already been done for an specific goal. Many parents may forget any “verbal agreement” with their kids.
I don't know how i feel about APL now, but I have some funny APL stories. One of my friends was the Jimi Hendrix of IBM APL2, he was amazing, unfortunately i can't tell the stories but when he learns haskell he'll be top notch. Another was the Dweezil Zappa of APL, he learned the language as a high school sophomore or junior from Iverson himself in Yorktown Heights.
Thanks. Fortunately I don't really care if it's cracked - I only care if I can have access to the western internet, and that works just fine.
The tone will turn some people off, but this is I think a really good comment, full of details about a specific business based on experience.

Also, coming from consulting, I think I agree with you on the dynamics of subcontracting. People are going to think you're being hyperbolic, but a reliable stable of 1099 subcontractors you can bill out over cost is, fundamentally, free money. Consulting firms know this because staffing a consultancy involves accepting the sales-side risk and paying your team rain or shine. I get a little irritated every time I hear someone brag about a real-world business based on 1099 contractors working on a fixed schedule.
All else being equal, I don't consider mild deflation to be any worse than mild inflation.

Comparing 1990s Japan to 1990s America is not an "all else being equal" situation. Really, economics is such a complex beast, it would take an incredibly complicated analysis to demonstrate which is better.
Wikipedia carries with it a political edge. Companies pay good money to protect their reputation and apparently every central country was the true cradle of civilization. The most I have seen on SO is bored NVIDIA engineers answering questions related to the CUDA tag :-)
> Not understanding why 'ls' worked a minute ago but not now (it's because they're in the interactive interpreter) causes rage.

Oh, you probably just need to tell them to download Pry.
Newsweek ends its 80-year print run with a hashtagged cover
I recommend some other functional language like Scheme or OCaml. All I got from my time with Haskell was frustration. I read RWH and worked through tutorials. I never got to a point where it didn't seem like the simplest tasks weren't painful.
Can a fingerprint image be reconstructed from the template?
I'd also like to see an article about how learning Haskell makes you prone to preaching to other people about how better programmer it made you and why you should learn it too, despite not having much in terms of actual production to show for it...
Because it is 2012, and every networked digital system in the world uses IP, and every business in the world has an Internet connection the same way every business in the world has a phone. Incidentally: there is nothing new under the sun: these same critical systems used to be exposed via the phone network.

I don't know what they're saying, but yes, I assure you, there is crazy stuff that is one or two pivot hosts away from an Internet attacker.
AWS’ gift to sysadmins: a cloudy command line
The times that I have been the person getting 40 hours worth of work done in 20 hours, I was using the other 20 hours to rewrite things with a different approach ... in other words, the "deep work" that the business didn't see a need for.

I knew that the deep work was why I could get 40 hours worth done in 20 hours, so I made sure I did the deep work. That, of course, put me behind in my directly assigned (non-deep-work) tasks. However, the deep work paid off in more powerful ways (more powerful abstractions, allowing me to find solutions to problems we thought we would be unable to solve, discovering real problems that we didn't yet know we had, etc.), and ultimately made it possible for me get my tasks done in the other 20 hours (or, to deliver something else of enough value that they decided my original tasks didn't matter).

It's not nearly as neat as "40 hours worth in 20 hours", and it certainly didn't lead to a bunch of free time sitting on my hands. It was just a case of knowing the deep work was necessary, even if those assigning me work didn't, and doing that deep work anyway, and having things work out well because the deep work really was necessary and powerful.

And I think that happens a lot with good developers in the "enterprise" software world.
Do you want to limit yourself to just a family environment?
Why were you compelled to repost someone's deleted comment without their permission?
Proposed Chinese Law May Force Real-Name Registration
Has anyone done an analysis that computes probabilities without brute force enumeration? Probabilistic decisions in Minesweeper are interesting, but this algorithm left me kind of disappointed.
Until you lose users because implementing that plugin infrastructure slows down your program or prevents certain features from being written easily (either directly due to trade offs in having the infrastructure implemented or indirectly in not wanting to break compatibility with older plugins).

Also as Apple showed, a nice polished product sells and that final polish matters. It's a lot more difficult to do that when you need to deal with an unknown quality like plugins.
> In short "you take a 5% cut in pay or I fire you and hire
> the next person who walks in that door." It doesn't even
> need to be said: "you will take a 5% cut in pay" implies "or
> you'll have to quit and find another job."

In practice this almost never happens. Employers are very reluctant to cut nominal wages, even if they could afford to hire more workers that way and get a more economically efficient outcome. This phenomenon is called "sticky wages" and is believed to be a significant cause of unemployment in recessions.

In summary, the relationship between unemployment and labor pricing power is believed, by many economists (most notably Keynsians but also e.g. market monetarists) to be about the opposite of what you said - stickiness of wages causes greater unemployment, rather than unemployment causing downward pressure on wages.
<quote>But you should recognize that moving from 2% to 0% would itself be a strong downward demand shock that in most countries would likely cause a recession.</quote>

Any sudden policy change is going to lead to turmoil and a likely recession. I did not suggest the change should be sudden.

Also, a target of 0% does not prevent appropriate price increases or decreases any more than a target of 2%. It is a goal not a mandate. As long as everyone knows what to expect, plans can be made reliably.
Americans have half the amount of time off of nearly every other nation
Nice algorithm. That's pretty close to optimal. There is one improvement you missed, though it's not obvious how to implement it and I'm not sure how helpful it would be. When you aren't sure what to do, you assign probabilities in order to guess which square to click, but you could also estimate how useful each square would be.

There might be one square that's unlikely to contain a mine, but also unlikely to help much in solving the rest of the board. You might even be able to infer exactly what it will be before you click on it. Then, if there is another square that's a bit more likely to have a mine but also more likely to help, you can click on that one instead.
I'm sure they didn't spend all the $5.25m on this business idea - and likely have lots left. I wonder how they came to the decision to shut it down and pivot - I think that's they key here that's missing...
Thanks. I was reading through the github readme going 'Well, that's cool... but why did they build this?'. Seemed to me before understanding why they needed it/built it, that it would have been time better spent working on a new crypto engine :).
I apologize for the tone. But Cherry just pisses me off because so much money was wasted on that really bad idea. It doesnt even compare to a Facebook for cats kind of thing (which was an un-tested market). Car washing has been going on since carriages were invented (300 years go?). I just hate seeing good money being wasted.

Your sub-contractor part does hit me straight in the heart, because I'm a sub-contractor right now. Its not all rosy and nice, but I do get to work remotely and make my own schedule. It also allows me to work on Nuuton without having to worry about IP issues with an employer. But would still consider a good remote job offer. ;)

Edit:

I also have to add that I studied this market from every angle. Even went as far as testing an android app to get customers to order car washes through it. People would download the app and just create an appointment through the app to get their car washed. Payment would be handled by the app itself. But it tested horribly and the local market did not want it. In the end, its just one more business that did not work out. After a dozen or so, it doesn't make you feel bad about it failing. :)
Subcontracting is fine, right? It's building a business that depends on staffing subcontractors reliably that isn't; those kinds of businesses are basically predatory.
This is from Voltaire.
"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien"
Congrats to the folks at VLC, it's great software and the more platforms it runs on the better for everyone...
17 \|/0|_||_|) 83|-|00\/3 _|00 70 \/1$17 |-|77P://\|/\|/\|/._|4`/$$173.(0|\/|/$7|_||=|=/|_337/|_337_7.-4|\|$|_470.-.|-|7|\/||_.[1]

[1]http://www.jayssite.com/stuff/l33t/l33t_translator.html
C'mon people! Let's give these guys a break. They had a vision for something great and they tried their best to make it happen. Not every business succeeds, in fact almost many fail. They had the guts, the vision and the nerve to be great.
I haven't used the assistant, but yes, git-annex works well.

For example, my music collection is split across multiple hard drives in two different states - not by intention, of course; it's just what happens over the years. However, I can create a single folder on my laptop that organizes all of this music, even though it's far too large to fit on the laptop's hard drive. Even though the files exist on multiple hard drives, my laptop knows which ones have which files, so I know which hard drive I'd need to plug in to access a particular file.

Better yet, since this is a fully distributed setup, there's nothing magical about my laptop - I have a desktop that has another copy of the repository, and it too knows where all of the files are (even though it has a different subset of my music collection).

I can also back portions of the collection up without ever having my entire collection on a single drive. I can enforce redundancy - "make sure that three verifiable copies of this file exist on other drives before deleting it here". I can back up to Amazon S3 or Glacier. I can - well, do pretty much whatever you'd want to do on a non-distributed filesystem - except this is distributed.

Dropbox is a great idea - I'm happy that it exists, and I see its value for a lot of use cases, but at the end of the day, it's not really solving the problem of distributed data; it's just creating a centralized, canonical data store in the cloud that is capable of interacting with other data stores.

Dropbox is great, but at some point, it's nice to move on from SVN! :)

Keep in mind, I'm not trying to do any sort of version control on my files - it's strictly a way of managing a completely distributed filesystem. If you want versioning, git-annex apparently can do some of this too, but I can't speak to it.
People will get mad at this but no one will ever reject a personal coupon in the basis that it is unfair for other customers.

I have had customers get annoyed when they find out we are charging more on Amazon (simply passing on the amazon fee). As a customer you will likely find on the amazon marketplace that an seller that also sells from a website will be doing a better price on the website. I guess in this case though the extra price is buying you some protection as the marketplace is very customer friendly.
I'm seeing much skepticism and criticism of Lanier in the comments here, which would be my position too, based on 99% of what I've watched or read about him (a scene with an Aibo comes to mind especially!).

However, there was a 1% where I felt he really shined and that was in a bloggingheads discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky. It's been about a year since I last watched it but I've seen it four times in total and every time there are large periods where I'm really locked into the points Lanier is making and find myself in agreement. Check it out here (go on, Yudkowsky is always good value!): http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1849.
Mentor's Thoughts Week 37 - Valuing Partnerships: The Other Stake Holders
They're going to pivot to an on-demand shoe shine service.
This is great news for Surface RT users!
Thanks for your comment. You bring up the exact point that the banks bring up to justify this, and I hope I can make you think about it in a different way.

I would argue that people don't really have a choice about whether to overdraft.

Have you ever accidentally tripped while walking? I have. In fact, I probably do it a few times a year. Do I choose to trip? No. I choose to walk, and sometimes tripping happens.

Now imagine if every time I accidentally tripped, someone charged me $30. That would be pretty absurd, right?

Well that's exactly what happens with overdraft charges. People who are just trying to walk--trying to hold a job and pay their bills--occasionally trip and the bank takes $30 from their account with no discussion. These people aren't choosing to trip, they are just trying to walk. The part that motivates me to speak out about this, is that the only people getting charged $30 for tripping, are those who can least afford it, or speak up for themselves.

If the banks suffered when someone tripped, then the question would be more open. But it doesn't cost a bank anything to simply decline overdraft charges without charging a fee. Maybe it did a while ago. It doesn't anymore, not when balances are checked digitally.
This is very silly. As Cody would tell you, the Onity flaw he found was so basic (it is the electronic equivalent of the Bic cap trick that unlocked Kryptonite locks) that any EE grad working at DoD or NSA would have had it instantly. The idea that there'd be some huge conspiracy involving the government reaching out to private firms to enable them to break into trivially breakable locks rings false.

You should simply assume that the government has always, always, always been technically capable enough to break into hotel rooms undetected.
How to Embed Clickable Hyperlink to Flash Flipping Magazines
A tutorial tells about how to embed a clickable link to created flash flipping magazines. Follow this guide, you can easily convert PDF, photos and flash movies to flash flip books.