skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
sad nobody understood the point I was making, I shall dumb it down a little.

If a low IQ person saw a rocket and had no idea how it worked then they would deem it magic, aka creative. So with that the more intellegent somebody is on the IQ scale then the more that what would appear creative is to them common logical sence. But thanks for the feedback of silence :p.
Finally I urge you to please watch Taren's video at the end of the linked article.

I watched it. It was certainly touching. What specifically are you referring to in the video? Or just the whole thing?
I didn't want to phrase that statement too strongly because there are more degrees of success than failure. It may be that avoiding denial is enough to avoid failure, but that to be a big success you need other things as well, like being smart or being in a hot market.
For me, while it's absolutely no surprise, it's still quite depressing the clear lobbying that is/will occur to trample this project. As others have said, the cost seems quite realistic and I would put my money on the 8-person having a much better handle on the end-users needs over some big consulting-ware shop. But the big firms surely have great influence with those most able to appropriate the funds for whatever solution B.C. opts to implement. There's obviously maintenance, support, enhancement, etc. that must go on after initial launch, but that still should not get anywhere near the monster price from an outside vendor.

I hope their fate is not so dire. I will definitely be interested in updates on the school district's efforts.
> In Microsoft's defence, Apple haven't done anything to fix the problem of people with several screens of apps, which is basically impossible to navigate enjoyable. I almost always use Spotlight to open apps that aren't in the first two screens nowadays.

Those two sentences contradict each other.
Good point. I guess I've grown accustomed to random things on the page stealing scrolling functionality (e.g. Flash/plugins, which I've disabled now) so I usually don't try to scroll unless the mouse is on the background somewhere.
Why does nobody ever mention grsecurity/pax?

http://www.grsecurity.net

It's worth your time.
This really depends on whether Mega turns out to be a file sharing service or piracy-as-a-service.

Passworded zips predate them all I think.
The url validation seems a bit strict, requiring "http:// at the start. No one types that these days, and I think in practice it might be a real roadblock for less computer literate users. I notice also that "ftp://" is valid, but not other protocols like, say, "afp://" or "git://".

Other than that, great job! I'm actually really looking forward to using this in my next project - form validation is usually such a pain.
Yii can also do client side validation (without an ajax call) for most of its built in validation rules.
This is neat.

A couple of points:

1- Client side validation is easy to circumvent. If you use this you have to make sure it is for UI only and that the real validation happens server side.

2- Using regex for email validation is fraught with issues. Probably the most salient one is that there are a million expressions out there. People run a quick google search, grab one and move on without knowing what they just plugged into their code. This particular tool will, for example, pass "m@apple.comm" as valid.

Other than that, I am sure this is a great time saver.
The blog post was good, but the title was completely misleading. I was expecting a scientific / thorough look at the title question, and there was absolutely nothing to that effect.

However, the real subject of this post -- "Methods To Increase Your Intelligence" -- was rather well done.
I'm not security expert, but isn't this:

"128-bit client-side Rabbit encryption"

obsolete practice? Doesn't mega use 2048? This is kind of big deal. And, of course, mega interface is a lot more than a simple "cryptolink" service. I actually feel that if mega will come up with good APIs (as well as with a client for dummies), and nobody will raid Kim for a second time, dropbox and alikes are gonna have bad times.
Well if you're not in the US and you're not allowed to perform services for NASA by your home country (clause iv) what would you expect?
Started with C=64, but was in a small town and didn't really have access to any books or guidance. Moved on to PC and wrote some text-based games. It was enough to get me interested in CS for college. This was the mid-90s and I got really interested in Internet. I wrote a simple risk-style RTS game and ran the server directly on the CS department's web server! Incredible that this was allowed at that time.
Real-Time Data Segmentation in MySQL
I found the book "The Definitive Guide to SQLite" to also be an excellent primer on SQL, especially for small application developers. It doesn't cover the variants used in big databases, but handles the basics quite well, along with giving lots of insight into SQLite's specific implementation.
What would Tufte say about someone that tried to "liberate" his beautiful, expensive and excellent books? Would he be outraged at the sight of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" available as a pdf on a torrent site?

If Swartz and his ideas were so marvelous, why is Tufte still charging any money for his work?
Here's something interesting to do with the same test. Instead of guessing which one you think is Helvetica, choose the one you like better. Then see if Helvetica shows up more times than Arial (or vice versa).
no, but it does get in the way of finishing what you have created.
The "faded out" state actually manages to draw more attention to it, which isn't great when trying to focus on the article.
Aren't you comparing apples and oranges? More bits don't equal better encryption …

In the case of Mega, the claim of 'military-grade encryption' sounds too much of snake oil as I would want to try the service. Kim Schmitz' past isn't a reason to trust him either.
I appreciate the effort but this advice is not especially good.

For example fail2ban is fine but it's almost always better to just use ssh key pairs.

His firewall configuration doesn't do anything basically, just gives access to the network services that are already running, and logging firewall errors is only good if they are actionable (they rarely are) otherwise they are just filling up disk space.

The sysctl entries, I haven't checked one by one by the look like the defaults in a modern distro.
Over a year ago, it was a safe bet that users had Flash installed (more than today are likely to have a "modern browser"). Flash can read files directly with, AFAIK, arbitrary complexity and was specifically popular to build improved file upload widgets (such as Facebook's photo importer tool). This concept thereby doesn't really "rely" on the File API (so one could easily imagine there having been someone doing exactly this many years ago, not that "first" is really relevant anyway ;P).

In the case of Wuala, they actually were totally available via web browsers [1]; they used Java, however, instead of Flash, as seemingly their desktop client was already written in Java, so this was convenient. (Additionally, Java came pre-installed on most systems, albeit Windows shipped with the ancient 1.1 version, of course, due to that lawsuit.) You can find presentations from 2009 discussing the technical issues that went into this [2].

[1]: http://www.wuala.com/en/launch/

[2]: http://jazoon.com/portals/0/Content/ArchivWebsite/jazoon.com...

This method did, of course, involve getting pulled out of the web browser, but AFAIK that was not a technical requirement of Java for this purpose. (They claim in the presentation that a "Web App", even with Flash, wasn't capable of client-side encryption, which doesn't make much sense to me; maybe they just didn't want to implement the encryption algorithm? I also do not see them considering embedding the Applet into the website as opposed to just using it to launch their external app, but again: convenience to their existing codebase is likely a strong factor.)
The Return of Kim Dotcom
I see what you mean, but I don't think your analogy fits. People are only vulnerable if they choose to be and it's not the difference between knives and firearms, it's the difference between the powerful with firearms and everyone with firearms.

I think my Firesheep comparison was better. Firesheep made something possible easy and the result was not an outbreak of hijacked email and social media accounts although that certainly happened in cases where it wouldn't have otherwise. The result was education through surprise and an actual improvement in online security practices (defaulting to https).

If someone is going to have this level of information more transparency about what there is and what can be done with it is the lesser of two evils.
I've done similar when working for a non-profit.

Having the tech guys on campus helps drive the development you get access to the people who work with the data as well as updates on requirements of what is needed (there's always something people will forget in a spec... until some report is due and they mention it.) They can also bring in staff to test components as they are being developed.

My thing was child care related; student tracking is a whole new level, key things are relationships as in families, adults to children children to education, teachers to children to classes to teachers to credentials, etc. Plus whatever factors affect all that (social assistance qualifications, immunizations, gpas, etc.)

Though once you get the core data figured out and organized (which is the major bit) the rest starts falling into place.

It's not rocket science but it is a definitely a detailed data situation, which you need people dedicated to it for years to put it all together.

As far as anything like that being "done" not in the public sector... you got everything going then some new law changes and you need to adjust tracking/claims based on some new factor or add in an adjusted reimbursement calculation etc. so you have to restructure some data add some new entry methods, new reports, etc. Easier on an open system than a closed system.

Problem with "canned" software is it is usually developed out of one district with their own unique needs when it gets packaged as a one thing fits all it needs to be patched for other conditions and environments... It is usually geared for a specific administration staffing method, so buying something canned may mean you have to do administrative changes in order to work with the new system, etc.

It's good work though, and a nice challenge to sort out all the data and get it collected, properly managed, and accessible to the right people.
No, you should stick with verdana. It's fully cross-platform, designed from the start to be a screen font, and generally looks better.

Alternatively, @font-face is supported by just about everything at this point, opening up the opportunity to use much better fonts, like open sans

(also, helvetica is a print font. It doesn't work for body copy at the sizes commonly used for screen text.)
Yes! Me too. Same with focus - I often find myself subconsciously clicking the background of a page to defocus whatever the page's developer or browser has decided should be focused. Flash is definitely (or at least used to be) the worst offender.
I could definitely use something like this on iOS as well.

As a designer, I'm constantly making things I want to be able to show to others at any given time, so I constantly email mockups to my phone. The process currently sucks, and this would be really helpful.
Sadly this is more and more common. It's not unusual for entrants to university computer science courses to have no formal education in programming.

Fortunately there are plenty of fantastic free online resources available for independent study, and online communities brimming with experts only too happy to help :-)
Lots of questionable advice here (/dev/shm, fail2ban, PermitRootLogin no, "sysctl hardening") with little explanation and glaring omissions (SSH-port left unchanged, no check for listening services, no pointer to an iptables-wrapper).

None of the bullets seems immediately harmful security-wise, but many of them have the potential to break legitimate applications or lock you out of your host.

If you intend to follow this guide then make sure you fully understand each step before applying it.
The analogy would be terrible if I claimed to know which carpenter would produce a better table, but I intentionally left that conclusion to the reader.
In addition, 128-bit encryption is more than safe.

In order to brute force it (and you will have to, there are no known vulnerabilities in Rabbit), you need to try up to 3.410^38 keys.

The fastest supercomputers in the world would take about 1.0210^18 years to crack 128-bit encryption.

See more on this topic (article is about AES, but the basics apply): http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded-internet-design/43724...
Um, jQuery validate plugin? DRY.

http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validatio...
It is not currently possible to keep files on Securesha.re for longer than 7 days; this is a feature, not a bug.

We do not use HTTPS at the moment. As all file transmissions are encrypted, we did not consider it necessary at the moment. A snooper could see the URL of files you have uploaded; however, the password will not be seen.
I'd say that obsession and monomania about one form of cognition makes you less creative, and high IQ people are often so impressed with their analytical intellect that they fall into the trap of disregarding other mental capabilities.
Rabbit is a symmetric cypher, and Mega's mention of 2048 is in respect to RSA, an asymmetric cypher. Even if Mega were using RSA to encrypt the entire file (as opposed to an encryption key which is then used to encrypt the file, which I personally find more likely, given the performance constraints and various other limitations of RSA, but maybe they really are doing that: I'm not an expert ;P), 2048-bit RSA is said by RSA themselves to be equivalent to a symmetric cypher with a 112-bit key.

> As of 2003 RSA Security claims that 1024-bit RSA keys are equivalent in strength to 80-bit symmetric keys, 2048-bit RSA keys to 112-bit symmetric keys and 3072-bit RSA keys to 128-bit symmetric keys.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size

(Although, this is almost certainly ignoring mathematical attacks, as those would make things highly variable: one could imagine a really lame cypher that doesn't effectively utilize the key, or which leaks the key into the cyphertext. The choice "Rabbit" is thereby important, and Wikipedia mentions that if you want to break a large number of keys, such as for a large number of related files/accounts on a file-storage service, and just need to break any one, a 128-bit key is only about as effective as a 96-bit one.)

> Rabbit claims 128-bit security against attackers whose target is one specific key. If, however, the attacker targets a large number of keys at once and does not really care which one he breaks, then the small IV size results in a reduced security level of 96 bit. This is due to generic TMD trade-off attacks.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(cipher)
I think the "doubters" are just not used to seeing that sort of thing. They probably think the approach is going to look more like this:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organiza...

You know, the case where you hire a team of contractors to build something, and then that team totally screws up, goes years past the deadline, and charges you enormous amounts of money. Meanwhile, there are ready-to-ship products out there that can be bought for a yearly fee, which carry less risk but higher costs.
Advice on securing full-time employment for web developers
I guessed that, given that Arial was probably a Helvetica clone, its designers probably added superfluous flourishes to differentiate it. That led me to notice the weirdly angled edges in Arial, which gave away most of them. So, yeah, proof of why Arial is dumb.
"Google has also been faced with demands for compensation from content providers such as newspapers, who charge the search giant makes lots of advertising revenue from referencing their material."

"Hollande said “Those who make a profit from the information” produced by media companies should participate in their financing."

It's depressing to see so many examples of the abysmal understanding of the internet that so many politicians seem to have. Ignorance can be forgiven to a certain extent, but not even making an attempt to try to understand the situation - just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt - is inexcusable.

Public and state ignorance of computers and the internet are leading us down a very dark path; there needs to be an effort to try to educate our political representatives, or we risk a future where legislation like SOPA is passed purely out of ignorance of what it means.
Read-only would be bad! You want no-execute on /tmp/, /var/tmp, /dev/shm and they should be their own partitions on a secure system.

The reasoning is that if someone does break into your system via apache/php or something else, they will almost always want to get a binary to elevate their access level (i.e. root the machine). They download a binary to a temporary location and execute the code (This can happen in apache/php directories too but most of the time these are locked down). Setting these to no-execute does not allow the attacker to execute code on your system. This is just a minor slowdown but does greatly help to prevent automated attacks.

The goal is to slow people down to improve your chances of being alerted. I think this is fiarly standard and is listed as a best practice via the NSA RHEL hardening guide [1].

[1] www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/redhat/rhel5-guide-i731.pdf
You use it because it's the only option you have under Windows.
I'd say that it's usually because the pace of change in the industry is too fast for the curriculum to keep up.

Maths courses written in the time of COBOL are still being taught. The only option is to teach the basic fundamentals, which (without application) makes for a very dull subject.
No, just put sans-serif. Windows users get arial, os x users get helvetica, Linux users get whatever. Everybody wins.
>And ridiculous creativity isn't helpful either, what's needed in life is good ideas.

I think the point is to separate creativity and intelligence as two orthogonal concepts. A creative person will filter out fewer thoughts, an intelligent person will make better decisions from their thoughts. It's possible to have both, and I think those are the most successful people.

When I think of the combination of creative and intelligent I think of Bobby Fischer. Back when I used to play tournament chess I went through every game from his book "60 Memorable Games", and I was amazed at how creative he was: he would often pick game-winning moves that I would never consider. This is part of what made him the greatest chess player of his time.
HTTPS is not always the answer, and Securesha.re is not meant to be a direct competitor to Mega. We are focused less on enabling the sharing of movies & applications and more on the sharing of sensitive documents, private information, and so on.
As a rule, asymmetric encryption requires more bits than symmetric encryption - RSA-1024 and AES-128 are both standard. I'm not sure what Mega is using asymmetric encryption for, but it doesn't seem to be necessary for this use case; that said, Rabbit is not a commonly used algorithm.
If nothing else, combine enough simple problems and you get a hard one.
This is easily accomplished by kindlegen[1], which takes in an epub file and spits out a mobi file.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...
I can't even load the BCeSIS website through all of the Java security warnings: http://www.bcesis.isw-bc.ca/
To my knowledge, no (if you mean a blog post in which he explicitly states it). I'm just inferring from the disbelief and shock he apparently experienced when prosecutors chose to follow through.

If you mean if there was evidence whether he was wrong about the legality of distributing JSTOR documents...there seems to be some confusion about it, but it doesn't seem that many of Aaron's most legally-mindful defenders have said that freeing JSTOR was just as non-criminal as freeing PACER.
20/20, although MATTEL was tricky. That pesky capital 'A'.
Functional programming in Javascript
"Most teachers are still writing their lesson plans in Word or its equivalent, which is like writing your code in notepad without any coding-specific extensions."

There are plug-ins for Word that can produce quizzes, and most of the interactive white-board software packages (each dedicated to a make of interactive white-board) can import from Powerpoint or allow authoring of interactive content. What I as a teacher don't need is someone telling me to use some huge IDE like package to build my lessons!

In the future I'd like to use a cheap tablet to scribe on and have what I'm scribing (or what I have prepared earlier) just appear on the projector and on the student tablets. I'd also like to be able to invite student A to 'show' something to everyone else. Then I'd like to be able to roll the whole lesson up and pop it somewhere like a Moodle course so the students can access the stuff later for revision.

The original article addresses 'back end' student tracking and data capture type software. More of a business application.
I got 3 out of twenty, 2 of which I was lucky to see the capital R. I guess I can tell the difference, though I'd be careful to reverse all my answers in the future.
That's a very good point, especially given that the standard deviation of IQ scores is 15, which suggests that scores of between 125 and 140 are possible (indeed, somewhat likely) for the same individual - a finding which I have found in my own experience of taking them.

Additionally, IQ tests were developed to assess someone's ability to benefit from formal education, and to the extent that these skills are uncorrelated with successful outcomes, IQ will be a poor predictor of it.
I rely a lot on apparmor to secure an Ubuntu installation. It offers a very fine grained control on what processes are allowed to do, what files they can access. I find it more powerful and easier to setup than a chroot.
ParamQuery Grid - jQuery plugin inspired by MS Excel and Google spreadsheet
An honest mistake: Your form has 3 required fields but the user only filled out 2. This shouldn't require a trip to the server.

A hack attempt may be a direct POST circumventing any client side checks.
As I understand it, Swartz believed in open access to publicly funded research, not freedom of information in a more general sense. There is a substantial distinction between the two; I don't think Aaron would have taken issue with Tufte charging for his book.
"...in this part, Tufte related how he told Aaron, half-seriously, that Aaron’s main fault was downloading millions of articles when only a few thousand were worth downloading."

So true; the trick is in recognising and curating those few thousand.
I think a neat experiment with the any cast feature of ip6 would be to write a simple CDN that uses it to provide the locality. Would likely not be a terribly performant CDN (there's a lot more nifty bits going on with a good cdn) but it'd probably be a great way to really understand the precise practical tradeoffs and value of anycast in practice.

IP networks are some of the most complex (and interesting) systems humanity has ever built, so at some point complex systems need to be experimented with to see how they'll actually behave!