skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We'll have to disagree about your concept of what B2C means. MS did the right thing by its customers for RRoD; I wouldn't call that B2-anything.

My point was that the Xbox was /designed/ from the ground up -- from the choice of components to the way the OS is booted and managed -- to be a consumer product. The Surface, not so much. And it shows.

Edit: Let me be a little more concrete.

Xbox: No registry. Registries suck; they become corrupt, they're hard to manage, they accumulate bloat and mystery. If a consumer has to deal with a registry, it's epic fail time.

Surface: A couple weeks ago my wife was editing the registry on her Surface in attempt to recover it. OMFG.

Xbox: A pretty decent security story, with decent support in the OS.

Surface: That's cute, guys.

Xbox: Turn it off accidentally? Trip over the power cord? No problem.

Surface: What are these things you call . . . "transactions"?

The Xbox pricing also showed some backbone. I don't know what the Surface people were thinking.
Thee was a time when Microsoft could do this and get away with it. It's sad that they seem to be the last ones to know that those days are behind them.
Dot grid books for designers and illustrators
Seems unlikely that there would be many collisions though...
What industry do you work in? I have not yet seen (in London) a single work-issued iPad. I've seen one or two people who have brought their own in to work, but they don't do anything more with it that check email and read a few word documents.

I've also never seen anyone on a train use an iPad for anything that looked like work. There are loads of them, but everyone is playing games, reading news etc.

My anecdotal experience is that BYOD iPads are talked about a lot, but it very rarely seems to actually happen - just a handful of upper management types, who usually struggle to open up a pdf on the thing.
The Olympic motto, which is virtually identical, pre-dates Daft Punk.
That should increase sales.
Mega would be storing copies of the key that can only be decrypted with a password.
Only if they had a copy of the original plaintext file.
Alternative Networks Challenge Colleges' Role in Alumni's Job Searches
They tried to halt progress because they thought progress was taking their jobs and making their lives worse.

And if we gave in to that sort of extremely short-sighted and regressive view then we'd be no better off today than we were 200 years ago.
Nice debugging, not a fan of making blanket assumptions when something isn't working as expected.
I agree with you. I guess I might have been a tad overreacting at the "we-are-the-best-and-only-truly-free-people" attitude I see too often coming from some people from the U.S.
Seriously, why? They are basically using the exact opposite of the HTML5 video codec argument, when they and Apple said there should be only one codec. And now they say are saying there should be multiple codecs for WebRTC - because maybe now it may not completely suit them? (even though Skype uses VP8).
No problem. :)

I remember having some fun with this one. I think the prof gave us a pretty simple maze, and a fairly complex one to test with. You may want to try the same, and start by solving the simple maze.

Other than that, the advice to try and solve a real-life problem is good.

Since you're currently working in the console, it may be a bit tougher to find some problems to solve. But here's a few ideas:

1) Write a program that can download a given webpage

2) Expand #1 by writing a library that allows you to parse the different HTML nodes on the page, searching for things like "a div with an id of 'content'"

3) Write a console based file uploader. I.e. so you can have a file in the root of a directory that you're working on, say "uploader.dat", which has the ftp (or ssh/S3?) server and username, and the files to upload / exclude. When you run your app, it will check that file, prompt you for a password, connect, and upload the specified files to the server. You can have settings in the file for whether to overwrite files or not, or prompt the user to decide whether to overwrite a file. You can add a bit of smarts in by checking the "last modified" date on each file, and compare it to a stored setting of when you last uploaded files (or each individual file). Perhaps display the files that were uploaded / modified after the upload is complete.

Anyway, just some thoughts. If you can find an app / problem that you'd be truly passionate about building / solving, I'd say go with that one.

I hope this helps.
I'm sorry, officer.
That's a nice site, thanks.
Facebook’s Graph Search Underwhelms, Drags Sector Down
"You were wrong."
In what way was I wrong? Perhaps you don't understand that whilst the panic attack was the 'straw that broke the camels back' so to speak, it was the teachings and approach that I disagreed with most in the end, the panic attack just woke me up to paying more attention to them.

"Vipassanna is the rather upsetting path toward learning to be able to sit quietly in a room, alone."
If that's all it was, I would've been happier with it. Being told you create misery, that your love (unless you follow the path) is shallow, that your ego will disappear, being told that Buddhism is 'scientific' and then being told the smallest particles in the universe are 'kalapas' of earth, air, fire, etc... wasn't exactly reassuring. I also disliked the chanting (you don't have to do it, but I personally found it off-putting to listen to).

I actually enjoyed practising anapana and vipassana (less so the third type, can't remember the name), though of course you're not meant to enjoy it. Becoming aware of the extra sensation you have of your body was pretty interesting.

If the path you've chosen works for you, great, but please open your mind to accept it might not work great for everybody. One of the saving graces of the vipassana course for me is they didn't expect you to believe what they were saying, but rather believe in your own experience. That sort of honesty I can respect.
It is equally confounding on the desktop. But ultimately, I think it was a bad template choice by the author rather than any particular bug in Google Sites. (Two-column with pictures just doesn't work.)
This was an interesting read and very much in line with other travelers' reports. However, I do wonder about this part:

>Go to North Korea if you can. It is very, very strange.

Is it really a good idea to go if you don't have a particular reason (such as this diplomatic trip)? I recall that most human rights groups recommended that tourists not visit Burma until recently so as not to support the regime. For someone like me who would only be going to satisfy my own curiosity, would I not simply be supporting the North Korean regime? I would be giving them money and possibly helping them in their propaganda efforts (see, look, at this American who has come to visit our great country!). I can't think of any ways in which my visit would be good or helpful.
These accounts are fakes and the reason they have pictures and tweets is to mask the fact that they are fake. That is obvious, but what for then? Well based on the "following" of the first account from the article, I can see, they are being used by someone who is selling followers. All of those people have over 10k followers and do not look like they merit it.

No one buying followers wants "eggs" which is what they call the default twitter profile pictures. You will actually see people advertise, "no eggs." The pictures and tweets are scraped from other users either randomly or based on keywords to make the profiles look real. It's sucks for the people who get scraped, but that's what's it's like in that world...
Also, http://www.slashdong.org/
Ask HN: What will people pay money for?
I tried the idea of picking a market, emailing executives from top companies in that market on LinkedIn, and asking for their pain points. I didn't get any responses.

How can I figure out what to build? My goal is modest. 500k a year profit without employees would be adequate.
Fun Coding-Related T-Shirts
> So it's still hard, and will always be

That's a pretty bold claim, considering we're just beginning to understand quantum phenomena. Plus you have zero clue about what else awaits us in the future.
Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out
I'm not entirely sure what they mean by a "magic cookie" here.

The document does say it uses public/private keys for data transfer. You would not usually use public/private for data storage because of the huge keysizes required.
The U.S. has strains of puritanism and liberalism. In different areas, each side has won. When it comes to sex and drugs, the puritans have won. When it comes to free speech, the liberals have one. Which is free-er depends on who you are. If you're not a drug user, not poor, not black or hispanic, and not a minor, you're probably free-er in the U.S. You're less likely to get in trouble for starting a company selling violent video games, less likely to get nailed by a libel lawsuit for criticizing prominent celebrities, less likely to get in trouble for carrying a gun, etc.

If you're in one of the aforementioned categories, I agree that other countries are probably more free.
I was actually speaking about how far you could comfortably twist your head while sitting.
Intel’s spending plan raises more worries
Precompiling Razor Views in ASP.NET MVC 3
I still think MS are up to something with Win 8. Look at the new Thinkpad Helix for example. Its a full fledged i5/i7 11.6" Laptop running Win8, and if you remove the Display you have a i7 powered tablet running Win8. Basically all your computing needs in one device.
Sure they need to sort out a few things here and there, but this is the 1st generation of devices which looks really good.
WinRT is DOA though, it needs alot of work and i dont see that worth it.
Well, there is libtai from djb. Isn't that credible?
> "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

It is far too early to say with certainty that Microsoft's ship has sailed. IBM turned themselves around. Apple turned themselves around. Microsoft is still in a far, far better position than either of those companies were at one point.

EDIT: Parent edited their comment to tone it down. Leaving my comment as it is.
It's not much better on normal Chrome. She says at the top it's because of Google Sites, but it's probably more to do with the two column layout.
"Or you know, any of the wide range of other areas where European laws are more restrictive."

No, I don't know. Seems to me that the US has plenty of restrictive laws. Unless you mean laws regarding corporations, but those are pretty messed up too from what I've heard.
`Welcome to North Korea', a documentary well worth watching - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ6E3cShcVU

`North Korean Economy Watch', often has something of interest - http://www.nkeconwatch.com (also has a comprehensive-looking page of links)
Too, what is "progress"? If it's read as a teleological vector towards an ultimate goal, the idea of "progress" is absolutely open to debate.
Anyone else experiencing brown tap water in San Francisco right now?
I'm not trying to say that VR is impossible, it's that the oculus by itself isn't going to revolutionize gaming today. You'll still need a mouse, you'll still need a keyboard.

Someday, we'll be able to walk in a "hamster" ball and interact with haptic gloves, and I'm looking forward to that. A head mounted display, however, is not that.
50gb - It has been mentioned in a few articles but I did not readily find the info on the site.
Windows 8 is a fantastic improvement to Windows 7. Not that I've taken measurements, but it feels much faster. The built-in tools like task manager and even the copying utility are much more informative and useful now. I was much more impressed with it than I thought I would be, and now it's running on two of my family's laptops and our desktop.

Are you saying a desktop user wouldn't want to use windows 8 because of the Metro UI? There's only really one place where I ever see Metro on Windows 8, and that's in the start screen (which replaced the start menu), which is easily navigable using just a keyboard. In fact, I prefer the start screen to the start menu in Windows 7, Vista etc. because it's just a lot faster.
Ah I see this was in reference to your convergent encryption post above. Point taken.

Assuming that it works this way, it would allow Mega to figure out if you own a known "bad" file. Just take something like "New_Jay-Z_Album.zip," hash it, and try the hash against your encrypted files. It seems like Kim is trying to avoid this problem.
"David and I were at the booth for the first 2 days, then he had to cut his trip short and return to our office to help with our production process."

Why couldn't he just us a Double?
Yup, and they've properly specced it out and everything. I frequently advocate people nick this and reuse or build on it.
How does the Surface weigh more than an iPad 3 when the iPad 3 had a high-res display and was already considered to heavy? Why does the Surface have a kickstand that is useless on your lap when typing? This is what hardware design is about.

The delta in weight between the iPad3 and Surface is pretty close to zero (15 grams). Furthermore, while the iPad3 has the HiRes display the Surface does have a USB and MicroSD slot and a better feeling body material.

And the kickstand is usable on my lap. Not as nice as a laptop, but I use it on my lap nearly everyday.

I'm sure MS will get better at hardware and software but they should learn patience first instead of being so quick in attempting to jump both Apple and Google in product development.

Actually they did the exact right thing, IMO. You don't get great at HW design by not shipping. The Surface is a very good product. Not great, but it will get better I'm sure. Much like the iPod and iPad.
Which in theory they don't have, as they encrypt it on your browser.
A reader of Orin’s post would likely miss those complexities. Again, the tie does not go to the accused.

That sums up everything I have a problem with in Orin's discussions about Aaron Swartz: he always sides with the government, whenever there is any doubt at all about the facts, the law, or the case. It's anti-Aaron, all the time, in seemingly every possible way Orin could find (without even considering all of the evidence). It makes no sense. Worse, it's dishonest, as the reader is given a severely distorted view of the facts.

I don't know why Orin chose to do that with Aaron; certainly, in others, he's not been reflexively pro-government as a rule. Maybe he just wanted page views, TMZ-style.

Or perhaps it's because the Computer Fraud issue was finally getting press, even though Orin has labored at it for years (without getting any traction at all)? That would explain why he seems so offended that Aaron's "fame" is why people care about Computer Fraud now.

Still, it's sad to see Orin so blinded by someone with "fame" and "friends". I suspect in the years to come that Orin will regret lashing out at Aaron literally days after his death. It just made Orin look petty, and any "fame" he's gained as a result is certainly the wrong kind of fame.
I'd argue they are in a far better position than Google, Facebook and Apple regarding privacy and honesty (shokcing thought that). I think this will be the next battleground so they may have a chance of winning.
[Linked from the article]

Microsoft's reasons in Microsoft's own words:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2012/08/06/...

The Ars article sums this up as:

Even backers of the current WebRTC specification acknowledge that the SDP problems have so far proven intractable. The WebRTC spec hinges on getting SDP fit for purpose.

So the title of the article is a bit link baity.
In that case wouldn't decrypt(encrypt(F, K1), K2) produce garbage?
MEGA servers store the hash of the password, not the password itself.

Unlocking a key requires a real password but the server knows only the hashed version. This way they can't capture the real password to unlock. The trick would be to make sure server always gets only the hashed password. Even at website login, the password must be hashed before sending!

We used similar crypto for http://timegt.com product where everything is end-to-end encrypted with a keypair generated by the user yet stored at the server. But it's stored at the server in a locked form that can be opened with a password that user entered. But this password is never sent to the server, only the password hash is and is used only to make sure that it's ok to send this locked key to the user. Hopefully this didn't sound too confusing now...
This is a fun read:
http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson is a staggeringly good novel about North Korea. Fictional, of course, but well-researched.
If you been using both browsers for a while, you could (at least IMHO) feel the increasing slowness of FF comparing to Chrome, at lest within last 2 years.

Further, the site looks very much polished in Chrome and its hard to find anything to blame for. If they did benchmark testing and realized Chrome works the best for decryption/encrypting/etc, I don't blame them for giving up on other browsers.
Why I'm a Luddite, kind-of
If that actually happened, that would be a major improvement on the legislative and legal front for everyone in the world, not just tech people.

Doubtful. Right now the lesson is "don't piss off rich people when it comes to financial crimes" and yet not-rich folk still get the short stick in terms of prosecution. The folks with the loudest voices always get listened too, the folks with no voices are ignored.

edit: downvoter, what do you disagree with?
I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm saying that a lot of the software one writes against (date-time libraries, databases, data formats etc.) don't make it easy. And programmers don't think about it very hard.
This report is really interesting, despite the fact it is just a survey of media use in North Korea... http://audiencescapes.org/sites/default/files/A_Quiet_Openin...
You may be able to infer it from the sequential ordering of events described in the letters, but, yes, point taken.
Track record and personal recommendations, find someone who was an early employee at a successful startup in a similar space doing the role you care about and poach them.
Probably can't afford them, not on a startup budget :)
I see Kim Dotcom as a stereotypical gangster who makes money by delivering illegal products. He has the narcissistic personality and lifestyle trappings to go with it. He even wants to buy protection from New Zealand itself by bringing free fibre optic cable to the island!

It's just hard for me to respect the man, because he's not fighting for information freedom, he's fighting for as much cash, status, and power as he can get his hands on.
I think the cookie bit is just an authorization credential.

If they use asymmetric encryption for data transfer, then how does that work as part of a convergent encryption scheme? Wouldn't all of the file hashes be different at that point?
I agree that absolutes are rarely beneficial.

However, in defence of buddhism, it seems to me Buddha didn't want acquistion of a skill or material possession, but rather for people to rise above misery and be at peace and happy. That's a fine goal in my opinion, and I wouldn't want you to feel discouraged from learning more if it interests you, just trust in your own guide above any others.
I use Chrome on a Mac with a half dozen spaces with multiple monitors and have never had problem moving between spaces. Out of curiosity are you using the release, beta or dev channel?
What illegal products are you talking about?
The wifi and cell networks at CES are terrible. We ended up using Bluetooth for the demo.
Reusing existing tweets is a common practice for Twitter bots.

Research-grade bots typically combine this with some logic like taking tweets from sources external to your current network graph, or trying to keep the bot's persona reasonably self-consistent. E.g. see the RealBoy project:

http://ca.olin.edu/2008/realboy/

Spam bots generally have a much lower bar. The majority seem to just use a follow-back paradigm, i.e. they put some spam message in the user profile, follow people at random or according to some search parameters, then unfollow a couple days later if you don't follow back - this last, since Twitter decides you might be a spammer if you let your following/followers ratio get too high.

I've been doing some work with Twitter followers recently, to try and estimate real followers versus spam accounts. So far, I'm seeing something like 15% real, using relatively simplistic spam detection (likely high error).

I'm mainly looking at commercial accounts with five-digit follower counts. I also haven't run enough yet to know if the result is more up to my detection routine, or if I'm choosing accounts that bought followers at some point, or what. So don't take it as a general rule (yet).
For those less practically interested in the history of the computation of time, Arno Borst's "The Ordering Of Time: From The Ancient Computus To The Modern Computer" is recommended reading.
3-D sonar provides new view of Civil War shipwreck
From that StackExchange link, the top-ranked answer has the following comment:

"However, one more attack: an attacker can guess plaintexts and test if you have that file."

If that's the case, pirates beware.
Yeah, I couldn't work out how to read it. Column A first? Flip-flop back and forth. Nothing seemed to line up.
You also need to know how tokens are produced by lexical analysis. It could have produced:

'num1' '+' '++' 'num2'

In fact it produces

'num1' '++' '+' 'num2'

so it's not about evaluate from left-to-right.
Was that just added? There is a link at the top.
I'd like to hear the counter, but MS's rationale here seems solid. And given they have it working compatibly in IE10 and Chrome seems like they're moving in good faith.

I know that a lot of HN likes to say, "M$ can't do that because everyone knows they're evil" -- I'd like to actually see good technical arguments for why what they're doing isn't prudent.
Is anyone else confused by the layout of the article? In Chrome on a large monitor(27"@2560x1440) it's kind of difficult to intuit the order of reading.
Hardly. Don't extrapolate from your own biases -- it's lazy thinking.
Kim Schmitz (aka Kimble)
Funny of you to name a crew of sample-based musicians as exemplars of copyright law...
Grunt Task for WieldyMarkup
When did MS say there should be only one codec? MS actually said that they'll support whatever codec you had on your computer -- they just weren't going to ship <choose your favorite codec> in the box. It was Google that was saying that they'd stop supporting H264 in Chrome, period.
If the other option were years of prosecution, loss of millions of dollars and the potential to be sentenced for 35 years in prison and paying millions more... I'd take the caning in a heart beat. Who wouldn't?

Just goes to show that our belief that the US justice system is more civilized than most of the rest of the world is a superficial load of horseshit.