skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run Linux and use Skype, it's available for Mac's too... why the assumption that Windows is the main player?

http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/choose/?cm_sp=sv|d...

But I like brl's interpretation...
I was a strong applicant from a random place in Michigan. Someone in the office must have taken a liking to something I wrote and pushed me into the admit pile. It's not possible to take credit for that.
I'll take that kind of ad over almost any other kind of ad any day.
Wow -- that seems like a lot of rapes and other crimes for such a small town (20k).
The terms plugin, extension, add-on, widget, drop-in, applet, cram-thru, etc. have all historically been used interchangeably to mean little more than "lack of modular design".

Don't expect actual extensibility from Chromium any time soon. If they can't be bothered to even plan for platform independence (http://dev.chromium.org/developers/browser-bootstrapping) then they don't have the design wherewithall to retrofit a C++ app with a comprehensive extension mechanism.

My hope is that a Google-independent fork will start that extracts the nifty subsystems in Chromium, like process level isolation, and uses them to build a more thoughtfully architected browser/platform.
The first is part of the charter of this site. That it doesn't come up often doesn't change that.

The second is something neither the site owners nor the site community want.
That is some Pretty Good Privacy.
Are you sure it can't mean anything but that?

Are you sure that the best way to hide the fact that you have found an attack against Skype is to advertise a contest with a billion dollar reward to anybody who can find the same attack (or any other one)?
Demo Day Tweets
> Are you sure that the best way to hide the fact that you have found an attack against Skype is to advertise a contest with a billion dollar reward

Can you think of a better way?
Google Releases First Major Update For Chrome
Google is continuing efforts to establish itself in the web browser market by the release of a new version of its Chrome Web browser on Tuesday, Reuters reported. It is the first large-scale update of Chrome since Google entered the browser business six months ago.
The problem with skype isn't listening in on the calls, it's finding the links between people.

The P2P nature of Skype makes it difficult to identify links of bad guys (or innocent guys that happen to be in the wrong place wrong time).

Listening in on calls isn't that useful - unless you know that "the goose flies south for winter" means we attack at dawn.
I think Apple's statistics are probably highly misleading.

I doubt that 95% of all submissions are approved. That's probably 95% of all apps are eventually approved, perhaps after several rejections.

The 98% statistic probably means of the submissions that are approved, 98% take < 1 week.
In the US they are probably required to provide CALEA interception capabilities to law enforcement for their dial-out service, but I doubt they have some secret interception backdoor in the software itself.

If somebody who is reverse engineering Skype found it, and it would eventually be found, the company would be ruined.
> instead of Sun then laying off employees, they are shifted into services. One area goes down, another goes up.

The same people that might make great software producers might be lousy at services, so it's entirely possible that large layoffs would still happen, which would hurt morale. Indeed, 'services' is a different industry, and it's not like you can just pick up from one day to the next and become a services company. IBM managed to do that, so maybe they would be a good fit, but it's not an easy thing to accomplish in any case.
Huh? Spotlight lets you search your music, mail, notes, calendars, and a few other things stored on your phone. Wundrbar lets you search various services on the internet. There's zero overlap, AFAIK.
Well, your question is ambiguous. Guilty according to what? According to the law, of course this hypothetical person would be guilty. Very guilty.

In terms of my own ideal moral boundaries? Well, it depends on the circumstances. I will refer to this hypothetical person as X.

1. If X made/caused to be made the images: Guilty beyond doubt. Lock X up and throw away the key. Sexual assault of a 7yo? Are you kidding? Absolutely wrong and absolutely should be removed from society before more harm is caused.

2. If X did not make the images but contributed to their creation via payment: Guilty. By payment, he has directly helped fund this and future crimes.

3. If X did not make the images but contributed to their creation by other means: Grey area. Could be considered part of a conspiracy to commit a crime. Would depend on the circumstances.

4. If X did not make the images and had no link to the person(s) who did: Not guilty, of course. There is no link between him and the crime. He merely has a visual record. Obviously a promising candidate for counselling, however. To be treated the same was as, say, someone found with 10GB of execution photos/videos.

I wonder what answer you were expecting? I am sorry but I just cannot accept that making a copy of a file can be considered a criminal offence or even wrong.

I consider anyone who rapes 7yo kids to be utterly reprehensible, by the way. That is fucking sick. Lock up anyone who does that, forever, and I will applaud you. But possessing an image of the crime in progress? That should not be a crime, that should never be a crime, that should not even be able to be a crime.
I use it on linux too and know way too many people who use it on Macs. I agree, its not quite right to limit it to Windows.
Answering to Customers
Yes, a better way would be to not have a contest to entice competent cryptanalysts to start disassembling Skype on the weekend.

Maybe not talk about Skype attacks at all. You know, keep it a secret.
Interesting that people will pay what the owner says they do, when in physical proximity, and totally exploit the creator's friendliness when it comes to "donationware".
This is junk and has been uninstalled. Page loads are absurdly slow. The fact that you can't interact with the page renders it almost pointless. I can't believe its this difficult for M$ to make a worthwhile multi browser testing tool. I will stick with testing on multiple computers / standalone versions for now.
Beyond that, I think that some of the beauty of mathematics can be revealed in working on hard problems. Math just seemed kind of boring in high school because it wasn't really about understanding the way that things work. When you hit up against limitations and realize that to get your head around them there are some concepts that happen to be expressed in mathematical notation that will make you more capable, suddenly wading through a bunch of cryptic notation seems like less of a chore.

It's kind of like the difference between learning Spanish because your high school teacher told you too verses stumbling into some of Pablo Neruda's poetry and realizing that it'd be more powerful in its native form.
Except for the tiny screens. I agree that CPU power is not much of an issue, but it doesn't seem like fun to cope with the tiny screens for everything.
Space Tourists Pack Bags for 2011 Vacation
_very_ useful, but not exclusively. pairing is great for gaining momentum, learning a new technique or domain, focusing on solving a particularly hard problem and mentally syncing with your co-prorammer. it is draining and ineffective if done for more than a week or two.
A low-energy hub for controlling household robots?
UK Goverment may track all Facebook traffic
I agree. I'd also add that the game industry is never given enough credit for the PC revolution. I remember back in the 80s when people started buying PCs and Apples (and others)... almost everyone I ever met said they bought them for word processing or spreadsheets, but what they actually did was play Wizardry and Castle Wolfenstein.
One pass is enough, part 2
As someone who recently moved to an apartment sight unseen (it worked out) and will be moving again soon under the same conditions, a decent rental site would be most welcome. CL doesn't cut it.
250MB trial to test 3 lousy browsers? I'd prefer to display a message to my IE users to get a real browser.
Gorgeous UI, slightly odd architecture of said UI: Why are the cities so random?
I believe it shows you interesting destinations, or something.
I went to Middlebury College's Summer Language Program for French. In seven weeks, I skipped past 2 years of college level French classes. I was well beyond the norm for that class, but it was not an exceptional amount of work.

The instructors there were a real credit. And it was a kick to sit down at dinner with people from the more advanced classes (including graduate level learners) and have them respond somewhat incredulously, "You're in BEGINNING French?"

It was fun -- a lot of fun, and mentally challenging in a good way. That made it easy to do.

The Middlebury French program was just beginning to use a new video based course course instruction / materials. This didn't reduce the contribution of their instructors, but it enhanced the experience significantly. It really helped in presenting French as actually spoken (well, relatively so; it's still relatively free of the everyday slang and contractions). It also presented language use in context. You saw the setting in which things were being discussed and used. There was a lot of supplementary information regarding (Parisian) French culture and behavior, that you picked up not deliberately but as much by osmosis while watching the story within the lessons. And there was just that, a running storyline that helped you to stay engaged and curious as to how it would unfold. It was somewhat campy, deliberately so and with an open wink, but nonetheless enjoyable. Finally, you could watch the videos as often as you liked. Something I found possible with the videos, while language audio tapes almost immediately put me to sleep.

(Actually, the Middlebury instructor was godmother to the video course developer/instructor's daughter. She had a very good handle on the material and an excellent pedagogical pedigree. Her assistant was equally excellent.)

For Spanish, there is at least one instructional course I am aware of that uses videos. It is fairly contemporary with the French video material I've been describing.

Destiños

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destinos

The videos are available on line, albeit in DRM'ed WMF/WMV format with a quite small framesize. A legitimate route to a better format may be through your library (tapes/DVDs: unfortunately very expensive for individual purchase), or per chance a local PBS station if you are in the U.S. There is also at least one torrent floating around, although I've never downloaded it.

Again, the show has a running story to help keep you engaged.

By the way, at the bottom of that Wikipedia page is a link to a page on the French video course that I was describing: French in Action.

HTH
What Distributed rendering farms achieve
What about Bruce Schneier's blog? I'm not into crypto so asking out of curiosity.
Military Laser Hits Battlefield Strength
it's probably rapes per 100,000 residents.
From what I've followed with gaming, is that modding and level design is generally the best way to get into a game development.

I believe there are a lot of indie developers who do make money, but if you want a real career you can't go it alone unless you really want to invest time into a truly unique idea. I believe the classic example is Chris Sawyer with Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon, both of which IIRC were programmed solely by him. If you do that and sell it to a publisher, you've got gold, but unless you do that I doubt there'll ever be an indie developer earning a large amount.

If you sell big like Sawyer did, then it doesn't matter if it takes another two years before your next game, because your only company expense is your own house!
Two related puzzles, one not so hard, one hard
Pair-programming as a dogmatic part of the development process is, IMNSHO, very overrated.

Coding standards, simple interfaces, commit policies, etc are far more important.

Pair programming is useful for,

* Building small but critical pieces of code which everyone interfaces with on some level inside a group (a core plugin API would be a good example)

* Knowledge transfer. I use PP extensively to work-in new people and get them comfortable with a codebase, svn commit policy, documentation, etc. (I let them choose the tools, read on for more on that).

* Solving short coding problems in a common piece of code.

Code review also plays a much more important role than PP. The ability to read, understand and change each others code should just be built into the development process instead of trying to force an artificial level of quality/shared-knowledge via PP.

As an example, in my spare time I'm implementing a simple and clean Ruby version of some core functionality that we have in C# and JS (yes, I know, odd combination). A colleague is tracking my commits and implementing the same system in Python (also in his spare time). At any point in the future, someone wanting to implement this in Perl (for example) can just follow the commit changes on this reference implementation.

PP is also tricky when you choose to do something other than C# or Java, because in those cases you have a common IDE that's used in the company.

If you're doing anything unix-y some people will use emacs (setup their way) and others screen + vim (setup their way). Some poor misguided fools will use Notepad++ on Windows, and while that's fair enough if it works for them, that doesn't help matters any for PP.

I'm not dismissing PP, but the XP model just isn't suited for every environment.
Does anybody know how to do this in emacs?
"HN users typically actively police"

This isn't very scalable. If HN's userbase were of the same size as Digg's or Reddit's and most of those people were unwanted (i.e., if a large group of Digg/Reddit users were to begin frequenting HN), it would not be able to prevent them from saying/doing as they pleased.

"the application restricts functionality based on your karma"

The karma is determined by other user's ratings, right? How well is that going to work if a majority of the users are similar to your average Digg/Reddit user?

One of the big differences that makes it possible for HN to maintain its civility is its relatively small size. So far, I have not seen any scalable methods of moderating a user-contributed link aggregation website. Therefore, I can only hope that Digg/Reddit users don't find out about HN (which is mostly a pipe dream).
It's never a good idea to put valid UUIDs in tutorials, there's just too many copy-pasters out there.
I would argue that this is what the Java culture does to software engineers, not the language. There seems to be this culture of the 'Enterprise Astronaut', that says everything needs to be 'Enterprise Ready'. I'm not sure what this means, but it seems to indicate incredible complexity.

But the language itself doesn't enforce this; it is very possible to write concise software in Java. What's better still, is you can use a Groovy (or JRuby, or Jython), and still use the HUGE class library provided by Java.

If you haven't played with it, give one of the JVM dynamic languages a go.
Visualizing the Change In Google's User Behavior
This is so awesome.
I want one for VIM.
Wish I was in town then.
Almost all of the methodology promoted as "Pair Programming" is at best neutral, but there is a kernel of awesomeness in the idea:

Get two developers working in close proximity, criticizing with each other constantly as they work. The more yelling the better.
I've read that pair programming is good for mediocre or novice programmers.
Hyperinflation: fed prints $300 billion to buy its own debt
the fed has always threatened to buy the long end of the treasury, but looks like it has decided to use the end move.
He almost never talks about crypto anymore.
It's good to see a Hacker News meetup starting in Pittsburgh. People interested in this event may also be interested in attending DevHouse Pittsburgh 8, which is happening this Thursday (March 19). http://devhousepgh.org/
Google Launches Chrome Experiments To Showcase JavaScript Applications
When I submitted my app, Apple actually called ME. Kind of ridiculous, but it was pretty cool. They were super friendly and wanted me to make some quick changes before approval, which I did, and it was rather seamless experience.

The code signing ritual...now that was a different story.
To be fair, the web server really was dead for quite a while (and I really hate that movie).
Pair programming is useful when the project is so heinous and boring that nobody would work on it unless there's another person sitting next to them keeping them on task.
P.S. I didn't look at your links, yet, Wallflower (my apology, but I wanted to respond before I got sidetracked).

Your text did mention Beloit and "not for beginners". This suddenly made me think further of my own experiences. Middlebury's program was billed as "immersion", and you actually signed a "contract" of sorts stating that you would use the language you were learning exclusively at all times to the best extent possible.

Sounds really impressive, up front. In practice, many of the beginning class members were not that motivated and they mostly spoke English outside of class. The amount of effort and success varied, and plenty of people showed some good will effort. But the "immersion" experience did not match the marketing.

I was more than a little frustrated by this. But in terms of a lesson to pass on, I would say not to allow yourself to be intimidated by such marketing language. If you have an honest intent to learn and practice, that's probably going to quickly place in you the top 25% of performers, regardless of your starting ability.

I also spent some time during college in Munich, Germany, as part of an exchange program. Again, the program billed itself as "advanced" and requiring fluency and daily use of German. In practice, a lot of those kids could barely string a sentence together. (And you haven't lived until you've heard German spoken with a full on Dallas drawl. ;-) It seems that one kind of marketing for these language courses focuses on projecting the image of "advanced learners". My personal, anecdotal experience is that, for the U.S. audience, at least, and a couple of decades ago, this was consistently, dramatically exaggerated.

Don't let a bunch of attitude put you off. If you really want to learn, you're already ahead of 4/5 of the pack.

Cheers!
How to estimate Y?
Agreed, I'd love to know if an indie game can accomplish a profitable MMO following.

I mean assuming you can keep roughly 1,000 people subscribed at $5 a month, then each year a game would pay out $60,000 dollars. If you get a loyal fan following then this would be a great revenue source. Once people are emotionally tied into a game then it can often keep them in the game for many, many years.

If you could keep a lot of the heavy work on client-side (not unreasonable for modern computers if you're producing a non-CPU intensive game by nature) so that your bandwidth and server needs stay low, then once you break-even you'd hopefully be able to keep a large chunk of that $60k.

Correctly done, I imagine an MMO could quite possibly be the best way an "indie" developer could make big money without a publisher taking a huge cut. I mean sure if you can get a publisher to sell the game for $20 or so and let them take most of it to help grow your users, but keep the monthly fees in your pocket.
Discovery sues over Amazon's Kindle
At least for the first revision of the Air, they couldn't produce them fast enough to keep up with demand.
The company'd be much better off if he applied the same standard to the development side of the company, which has an average tenure of around 12-18 months for developers (more senior devs tend to leave more quickly than junior devs).
Sobering scenes from the recession
These bonuses were a contractual obligation. If the problem had been allowed to run its course, a bankruptcy judge would have determined how to discharge all of the company's debts.

But that time is past. The US government has elected to keep AIG afloat, and to do so without allowing the company to reorganize its debts. Thus, it still owes 100% of its debts to all of its creditors.

The company cannot now go picking and choosing which debts to pay. To do so would do far more damage than failing to retain the executives in question now. While the US government has been trying to shore up confidence in AIG, an action like this would cause ALL of its creditors to question whether the debts that it is owed would be the next to be ignored. Thus, failing to pay these debts would set expectations that future debt might not be paid. This risk would at best increase all costs to AIG, and at worst completely prevent it from doing any business in the future when they can't be trusted.

In short, welching on these debts would likely lead to exactly the problem that the government has decided must be avoided.
Ha! Trade secret.

But think about what institutions a school would want to keep around. How big's their sports program? Music program? Legacy admissions?
Depends on who upvotes, different users have different weight.
It was Intel that gained from cloning, and IBM then suffered, you're right. But MS had the APIs into it for Windows so it gained.

The idea was that Sun becomes a designer of and licensor of state-of-the-art HW designs (which it may or may not implement). The designs come with software APIs too that different companies may want to implement.

The difficulty is that SPARC International is already a different organization to Sun. So, I don't know if they could've done this legally.
"This shows a worrisome lack of basic business knowledge."

"The manager of your local McDonald’s is smarter than the AIG executives."

These types of remarks seem common when discussing this and similar situations related to the current economic situation. Perhaps the intentions of these executives was not to save the company, but to take care of themselves. I don't see this as stupidity. Greedy and unethical? Most definitely. These people are not stupid.
I read one study that showed having eyeballs (e.g., a picture of someone looking at you) next to the cash box increased deposits by some N% (I don't want to spout facts as I can't recall the number, but it was n > 10 - double digit percentage increase). They controlled for there just being a picture by alternating pictures of eyeballs with pictures of flowers.

I suspect part of it may be due to people showing up just for the novelty of it, but going back to the eyeball study (which I am too lazy to look up the reference for) I wonder if there is another thing at play too. Perhaps people think oh cool, let's show up and game the system, and they make plans to go there intending to perhaps pay 20% less than market.

Then they have to look the owner in the eye and tell him what they think is fair, and for whatever reason their mind changes. So rather than paying .8x, like they originally intended, they end up paying instead x - 1.2x

So you get increased business because people who were willing to pay .8x (lets say x = $10 based on the article, so $8) show up, and end up spending x - 1.2x ($10-12, per the article). Some portion of new customers may see that their game won't work (because they don't want to lie to the owner) and they just leave. No harm done - these people weren't eating at the cafe to begin with.

So I chalk at least part of this up to a neat psychological trick - but I wonder if many of those people will be repeat customers (some portion obviously will).

Anybody have references to back this up? This is just what I suspect may be happening, as it's what I susepct happened with folks who may have intended to steal bagels/candy from the office kitchen, saw the eyeballs and ended up paying for them instead.