skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are giving your real identity to a company that claims not to keep a log of your actions. As far as I'm aware, some of these providers give out unique IP addresses, or at least ones that aren't used by more than a handful of people. At any rate, determined law enforcement can pressure a provider into logging incoming connections. I wager that happens quite often.

As another commenter suggested, they could all be honeypots.

If I was going to trust my life to the anonymity of my data transfer, the last service I would want to be using is a VPN.
German Copyright Law Targets Google Links
> If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future.

Let me try and shed some light on this mystery. Consider this rumor. Also, I am not an electrical engineer, so I may be talking out of my ass.

As best as I can tell, Lightning is not (yet, anyway) a real protocol like Firewire, USB, etc. What it is so far is USB with a different connector and some negotiating chips.

So when connect your lightning-USB cable to your iPhone, your iPhone squawks and says "What is this?" and the cable says "I'm USB". The iPhone then sets its pinout to USB mode and off you go.

What's so great about this, why not just use USB? I think the secret sauce is that Apple wants to surreptitiously invent new pinouts with faster data rates, without consulting any standards bodies and having to rally industry support on TVs, computers, et al. They just build some new controller to push Lightning at 2Gbps+, put it in new iPhones, and build active cables that spit out HDMI or UHDTV or USB3 or whatever it is the kids are doing these days. The active cables degrade gracefully for hardware running at the slower data rate.

What I think you are seeing right now, is the dry run with the off-the-shelf controller. Get manufacturing ramped up. You need this to plug your phone into a computer anyway. But it's just the tick. Wait for the tock.

Now the only thing that puzzles me is why they settled on 8 pins, when USB3 is 9. Obviously they wanted an even number so you could plug it in every which way, but you would think stepping up to 10 pins would let them use off-the-shelf USB3 controllers instead of USB2. Maybe they can do USB3 on 8-pins somehow, or maybe the tock will be ready fast enough that it's not worth it.

Further reading: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/
> Again, this is a connector from your computer to a display.

Huh? Its the plug on the bottom of a phone (and ipads now i guess). Lightning isn't on any computers.
Oh gosh, I don't want to complain, but I reported this about 1 month ago, and it didn't even get 1 point.

It seems different timezones, have different taste :P hehe
If I were a governmental entity - I'd go ahead and set up my very own honeypot VPN provider. I'd then log everything - whilst providing exceptional service - and play the long game - collect as much data from people who self-select themselves as requiring large amounts of anonymity (the paranoid/people who can't access Hulu overseas/criminals/terrorists).

I'd wait a few years and then use said data to slowly infiltrate various groups - looking to grab the big fish that are hopefully well separated from the VPN service and then take them down quietly.

Hell - I might even turn a nice little profit on the side.

Reality check: if your credit card details are visible to a third party - you're not anonymous.

Note: I don't actually believe the above to actually be the case in reality - but one must remember that stuff like Room 641A weren't that long ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A).

This is an example of where worst case thinking, despite its negative reputation, can help protect oneself from falling prey to the faulty assumptions that bring down complex systems (Will the generators kick in on time? What if the VPN provider is already compromised? Did we double check that after cleaning the safety valves - we didn't block any of them?).
a) This is a connector from a mobile device to a TV. That is the primary use case here. I doubt anybody is hooking up an iPhone to any other type of display.

b) Why is there a second pass compression/decompression stage ? Isn't iOS outputting the compressed H.264 stream and the adapter decoding it i.e. one stage ?

c) Given that Retina displays by definition are the best resolution we will need and it is far less than 4K it is questionable whether there will be a use for 4K on mobile devices. Other than using your iOS device as a media player for your TV (very small use case).
The smartest people I know are cooking family style meals using locally sourced ingredients, brewing beer, raising chickens and bees, and turning their lawns into fruit and vegetable gardens.

I sure hope everyone else will be doing this in ten years.
By 'pejorative', I meant 'prerogative'. Silly auto correct.
>the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum.

Why? They'll plug another $50 adapter on it and it'll work.
There’s no shell in the image, there’s no utilities (analogous to what we used to call the “BSD Subsystem” in Mac OS X). It boots straight into a daemon designed to accept incoming data...(and the fact that the firmware is stored in RAM rather then ROM)...

But there could be. In fact, it could do almost anything as its a powerful little computer in its own right and it sounds an awful lot like it boots the kernel and then runs a daemon in a most familiar fashion. I can think of a few delightful applications off hand. There will be some epic hacks. Is there like a "Bunnie" signal?
I hope that some of them will allow P2P inside their networks. That could solve a lot of problems.

Anyway - does some of the services allow for independent audit of their systems to confirm that the policies they claim are real and enforced?
The video is interesting, but all I can think is, "Wow. They really just made ink sexy for over half a million people."
Your sound like an executive too, putting emphasis on well-researched words, and mentioning things like capturing inspiration.

As far as I've seen, there is little inspiration involved in most programming environments, just a lot of thinking.
I'd set up a forum where I'd review these things to make sure that new entrants to the game would flock to my bugged services. I'd give articles there titles that suggest that the competition does not take your privacy seriously.
Jeesh, plagiarism and misrepresentation on the internet now? What's next?
>a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part

I don't think jacq presumed bad intention or dismissed the post entirely. I appreciate someone calling out the combination of 'narrowness of vision' and a little self-righteousness. Chris' post was totally well-intentioned, but jacq's meta point adds value, as now there's the human component of self-importance in addition to the original point of the post
This article could be retitled to "Why Fox News and Right Wing Talk Radio is so Effective". Injecting constant insults and rage into commentary is the secret ingredient.
Predicting the future is, as the saying goes, hard.

Humans are basically awful at it. Even the smartest and best informed humans, as Philip Tetlock demonstrated pretty convincingly.

Some forms of knowledge are profoundly retrospective. You can deduce general principles, you can load up your squishy neural net with subtle patterns to match, but ultimately lots of things can only be guessed at with a great deal of innate fuzziness and uncertainty.

The process of forming such a system of judgement is called "wisdom". It's slow, inefficient and it's still absolutely crushed by simple statistical heuristics such as "40% of the time things stay about the same".
maybe post a link to it?
Somebody has to pay the piper-- the hardware to transmit HDMI has to exist somewhere. With a smart adapter, only the people who need the feature have to pay for it.
I think that if you have a 1080p source on your phone, it goes to tv as 1080 and without another compression step, it's only mirroring that reduces the resolution (which, for ipad mini, is less than 1080p btw) and introduces compression pass
If that were needed perhaps links.example.com could display an iframe containing the third party site.

I agree that neither approach is ideal, but it would prevent users from receiving third party links in their emails.
How To Build a Messenger – The Main Components
I believe it was actually William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) who said it: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
Two observations:

1. Working hard doesn't entitle you to anything. Tired of politicians making this claim.

2. Part of rise in inequality is powered by technology. I'm sure in 1970 you couldn't have created a billion dollar company with 12 people in 2 years (Instagram).
Everyone knows Heroku screwed up, there not much left to say about that part of this story... so then we get to the application.
Where does it say that RC2 is only used for the free product?

AFAIK it's all the time which is ABadThing (tm)

FWIW, if one has to rely on security being a differentiator in 2013, that's IMO a bad sign. Compete on other features but not security.
Yep, and the comment about them using already existent h264 support in hardware I think supports dry-run-fastest-to-deadline solution.

Re pins, I'm not EE either, but I don't get why people concern about number of pins so much, as I asked earlier in this thread, is there a relation between number of pins and bandwidth (well with physics involved there is _some_)?
Just so you know, the Japanese asked to surrender before the first bomb was dropped. There was also the alternative that US general MacArthur actually recommended, which was to continue firebombing them into submission. The a-bombs weren't dropped to "save lives", they were dropped to show the Soviets what they were capable of. As an aside, do you really think that in a country that was in complete shambles, that any word of a bomb that had killed everyone around it, or that word of the real damage would have gotten to the emperor in the time it took them to surrender?
The most likely reason that they surrendered was that they knew they were hooped once the Soviets finally joined the war against them on August 8th.
You would have to know the URL on the third party server to redirect to. And usually, you don't, because they are generated internally by some pre-processor.
The "Category 8" housing is a somewhat amusing coincidence from U.S. eyes, since "Section 8" housing here refers to public housing projects and private rental assistance.
Will your ISP or government get interested in you if you anonymize your connection through VPN or Tor?
They actually tried to surrender, the US declined.
I don't buy this. They could easily have high security versions in countries that allow it. Lowest common denominator in this case is not a good idea.
haha oops :P will make a new thread just now :D my bad!
I agree with this. I find the convention most stifling-- my instinct in the afternoon is to go work somewhere else, but quickly guilt* starts to pop up and tell me I'm doing something wrong, even if it's just to do work more ably.

(* - this guilt is a weird thing I can't really describe. It also lessens as I advance further in my career and am more sure of myself.)
Show HN: My first product: A Foodie Kit
My bad, I forgot to link it. Here it is now.
That's a red herring, the MHL standard does raw video over an USB connector. And it's a real thing, exists on phones today.
You just made me realize something. I attributed my own college grades slipping a bit my senior year to burnout, but it was also Fall '08, and I had just got an iPhone 3G, my first smartphone...
Well, don't do that. At least stick it in truecrypt
In an attempt to re-rail the discussion away from the somewhat fluffy and self-congratulatory tone of the blogpost, let me make a few observations.

Startups and new technologies need growth more than anything. Whether it's bitcoin or NoSQL, you need to reach some sort of critical mass or it's game over. As a general rule, if your idea is good there must be people out there who can get really passionate about what you're doing and you have to be able to find them. The earliest adopters. To them you have to provide what pg calls the quantum of utility.

You don't create these early adopters as much as you discover them. If the problem is real then the pain points are real and then people will automatically care about your solution and spread the word.

We programmers hack away at projects in the weekends, because it's what we love to do. Frequently we gravitate to projects that somehow make our lives easier. Maybe we just need a couple of scripts to grep through a music library or maybe something to reliably diff SQL table layouts. Of course it's not just programmers, it applies to makers of all sorts. For instance you'll see mechanics modify office chairs so they can work comfortably in odd positions.

These makers who hack together solutions for themselves aren't early adopters, they precede the early adopters. They're not just people who realize a some half-baked startup product prototype is useful but people who immediately see how it can potentially change the world exactly because they considered building it 9 months ago. A long time ago we learned that it's madness to market new products to Laggards. It doesn't matter that they need what you've made and that they have money. It doesn't matter because you have to persuade every Laggard individually. And that way you can't grow.

I'm thinking that in the same way targeting early adopters is madness when you can target Makers instead.

If startups are all about traction, who is a better advocate for your product than somebody who's been playing with the idea for the past year during their weekends? Nobody! If you have an army of makers as your first users and customers the regular early adopters will follow automatically. And with traction like that you'll be unstoppable. Like Stripe.
Compilers Are Way Smarter Than I Thought
What I’ve learned from 35 years of wearing computerized eyewear
Fantastic video. Truly shows how passionate these guys are and the quality and craftsmanship involved. If I ever need great ink, I know where to go. Beautifully made video as well.
Yes, you can get a Lightning to USB cable for charging and syncing for $5, but to connect to a TV you need to get the Lightning AV adapter which costs $50.
The other day I used Bing to search for "C++14 ...", because Google doesn't recognize it as a search term. Though it does understand C++11.

Granted I didn't get many worthwhile hits, but I did get some. Google simply provided me with the results of "C++ 14", which is pretty useless.
If you assume the things you listed are going on at all VPN-services, I don't see how they supply "privacy" either.

When it comes to law enforcement, I suppose there are differences in which approach they take depending on where the VPN-service is located. If law enforcement did what you suggest frequently in the country where I live, it would be presented as a scandal and would be the death of the VPN-service in question.

Of course, you must choose a service you trust to not actually keep logs, and give out non-unique IP-adresses. However, if I lived in a country where I could not trust my government, I agree with you, I would avoid VPN-services located there.
s/normally distributed/uniformly distributed/

This is what happens when I try to sound cleverer than I actually am. :(
Yes, and? Lightning 2.0. Sure. That doesn't mean the physical interface changes. That doesn't mean there isn't backwards compatibility. That doesn't mean there isn't forwards compatibility. "And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf" argument made no statements to support itself. "Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth" is like saying "Meanwhile, USB still has the same bandwidth with USB 2.0 as it did with USB 1.0". There will be higher bandwidth Lightning 2.0 peripherals with Lightning 2.0 devices; but Lightning 1.0 peripherals will still be compatible. The Lightning interface doesn't establish some sort of permanent bandwidth cap to its future backwards-compatible revisions.
It was a higher apprenticeship, which lets them get away with paying 1/3 as much for someone with the same talent and experience.
One of the things I am missing in postgresql is compressed tables. It's actually big game changer in some cases.
Why wouldn't they use H.264 and their existing hardware ?

Do you really think it makes more sense to decode H.264 on the device then re-encode it in another format and then decode that on the adapter ? Sounds slow, illogical and bound to introduce more artifacts.
Setting a strict curve is probably the laziest way to grade a class. It doesn't tell you anything about how well you did (do you get the material? Can you solve problems on your own? Or are you the 27th "best" person in the class?) Of course, with a curve, a professor doesn't have to actually think over what a passing grade is. Which causes all kinds of negative incentive (such as cheating, or almost worse, anti-collaboration). I'll take a class where 10% of the class get an A because the standards are exceptionally high over a class where a strict 40% will get an A, as one implies I'll get a lot out of it, and the other implies I'll stress needlessly over unimportant trivia.
Why did Evernote's e-mail look like a scam?
Yesterday evening I received the email from Evernote mentioning what had befallen them and urging me to reset my password, as a precaution on their end.

First off, the e-mail started off with "Dear Evernote user,". Why would they address me as "Evernote user" if they already have my e-mail and therefore my username, I've always gotten such emails from big companies addressing me by whichever value I had to set "Real Name". Or at least with my username!

Second of all, every link on that e-mail pointed to this strange URL, "http://links.evernote.mkt5371.com/ctt?kn=4&ms=NTcwNzMxMwS2&r=MzMwNjIzODAxNDMS1&b=0&j=Njc1NzUzOTES1&mt=1&rt=0" to which Gmail's Mail Scanner responded to by prefixing every instance of said URL by "MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "links.evernote.mkt5371.com" claiming to be evernote.com." (screenshot here: http://imgur.com/4oXR8Lu )

But this morning I head to evernote.com and I get prompted to reset my password of course. But what the fuck is up with that e-mail?
From September of 2001 to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 the New York Times treated the world with fabricated story after story about WMDs in Iraq, by way of Judith Miller, by way of dedicated liar Ahmed Chalabi, whose fairy tales the New York Times saw fit to print on its front page time and time again. I kind of like the idea that the vox populi can call them for their BS under their articles. Of course comments are still invisible until approved by a moderator.

Incidentally, Chalabi went to MIT and studied under Whitfield Diffie, of Diffie-Hellman key exchange fame.
Kernel.org redesign
C compilers have been optimising switch statements like this since at least the 90s, haven't they?
Interesting.

xyzzy scores 'instant'.

My B of A pass phrase, Jer1m1ah Cl4rke, scores 31 years. Should I change it?

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/209/zxcvbn/test/index.html

Edit: I just checked 9223372036854775808L, and it answered 'centuries' with a suspiciously round crack time in seconds. Don't think so.
> Obviously they wanted an even number so you could plug it in every which way

How so? A center pin is still the center pin when you flip it around. Odd pin counts work fine.
I did read the original article. The problem is that their stack is not concurrent.

In a non-concurrent web application stack(like Rails), one request is processed at a time and further requests to the same node are queued. This means that if some request takes five seconds to answer, everybody that is queued on that node after that long request has to wait until the first request is fulfilled. That's the behavior they're seeing.

In a multithreaded or reactive web stack, other requests will get processed alongside the long request and, guess what, the problem doesn't happen unless all worker threads are processing long requests because the short requests will get processed alongside the long one by the other workers.

Assuming your stack has, say, 20 worker threads, the probability of your random load balancer overloading your node with 60 long requests given a large enough pool is small, assuming long requests are a small fraction of your load. If your concurrency level is 1, the probability of your node getting overwhelmed by long requests is much higher.

You can see it this way; if you have a stack that can only process one request at a time, the probability of that one single request processor getting backlogged is getting three heads in a row on a non-biased coin. If you have twenty request processors, the probability of that node being backlogged is getting three heads in a row for all twenty processors. Much less likely to happen.

They were told to run Unicorn, which from my understanding just forks the Ruby interpreter a couple of times to run in parallel. They decided not to (or were unable to).

They decided instead to whine about the problem and ask Heroku to build some magic load balancer that would solve all their problems. Even if they did have a load balancer that did least-conns, all of Heroku's traffic does not go through a single load balancer, meaning that separate load balancers could, through bad luck, allocate their requests to the same unfortunate node. [1]

What they did is amateurish; instead of looking at the problem and fixing it by either multithreading their code or switching away from RoR, they blamed their vendors, just like beginning programmers blame their bugs on the compiler or the libraries they use. When Twitter needed to scale, they moved some of their stuff away from Rails to Scala, Facebook wrote hiphop php, their PHP to C++ transpiler, etc.

Was Heroku completely in the clear? No. Their documentation was misleading and I believe they've admitted that. Was it a problem that New Relic didn't show all the metrics needed to isolate the performance issue? Yes.

We'll see how this whole story unfolds, but from my perspective, the more of a stink RapGenius raises, the more amateurish they look.

[1] http://aphyr.com/posts/277-timelike-a-network-simulator
The Mystical Mathematics of Rock and Roll
And even if you do get chargebacks as long as the reason given is fraud amazon will cover them.
Nope. This is _the_ question here, what prevented them from pushing framebuffer data to the adapter, which then puts it into HDMI compatible form
No, I'm talking about menu like "File, Edit, View ...". It's just not visible because you have to put your mouse on that panel to see it.

It's not that it's "unity thing", it's just that I'm not sure if you can do that in Awesome WM.
Yes, he/she is thinking about Thunderbolt.
> discussing whether Nazi train schedules were effective

Honestly, that sounds like a great HN article.
Literally thousands of things.
Still not an EE, but as I understand it, if you are creating your own controllers and you also control how the cable is shielded, pin count doesn't matter much except for power.

Traditionally it's been easier for most hardware makers to double the pin counts than to build controllers that run at twice the clock rate and also make everybody use fancy cables. But traditionally not everybody has PA Semi across the hall to build chips for you and years of experience selling $50 cables to consumers via direct retail. So I'm betting that the usual economics of the consumer data interface market don't apply to Apple.
I totally agree with jackalope.
That's a strawman - disagreeing with the concept of the Invisible Hand (or perhaps rather, disagreeing with the scale some attribute it) is not the same as saying humans are RNGs.
I have a seedbox on OVH. I use sFTP to download from it. And I use a SSH tunnel to browse through that server. It is about 15 bucks a month. OVH could give me up but I am one of thousands. There is lower hanging fruit so I don't worry.