skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Introduction to Structure Equation Modelling (SEM)
I've been wondering lately why SSL ties both encryption between two parties and the identies of those two parties together. A genuine question borne of genuine ignorance on my part: why are these two concepts tied to the the same protocol?

Why can't we have two separate systems? One to ensure two parties communicate secretly with each other, and another to somehow verify the real-life identities of those two parties? Why did those to seemingly separate concepts evolve as one?

If we could separate them, it seems we could solve a lot of low-level security problems online: sites could have cost-free, CA-free self-signed certs to ensure only that packets between the client and server are secure/private; then separately, there could be a different system to ensure that the client is really, truly communicating with the Bank of Their Nation, Inc., and not a scammer from Nigeria.

How did identity and privacy become conflated, and how can we separate those to provide monetary-cost-free eavesdropping protection in the future?
That's a worthless demographic. What does that tell us about the demographics of startups and tech?
> Basically, it is an important to ask whether the government should be allowed to have whatever it is that the government believes it is gaining by not reading the suspect his rights in this case.

Supposedly, the government believes it is gaining "no bombs more bombs exploding people in Boston" as they get the opportunity to evacuate and/or defuse, if there are any more bombs in the first place. I don't think we should deprive them of that, precisely...
Eight Reasons Startup Incubators Are Better Than Business School
Great article, and totally agree.

I am working on a product where that is a critical design principle. An interesting related question I am wrestling with: can a product be successful by reducing overall cognitive load for a user, but carrying a larger cognitive load than the average app? That is, it reduces complexity for users, but since it deals with higher complexity concepts, it still nets out to being more complex. If so, how much additional cognitive load does this make tolerable/enjoyable? My guess is a little, but not much (in the mass market, of course).
Whoa, very cool. I've never seen this before and its value prop is very apparent.
I grew up in the tropics. The coming rain is easily sensed -- there's so much rain falling that at actually drives air from the upper atmosphere downwards ahead of it. A blast of cool, sweet air is a sign that the rain drops will be arriving in a minute or two.

God I miss it.
I read this as "I would prefer if there were 50 SVs we could invest in, but there aren't".
Meet David Henneberry, the Tipster Who Caught Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Excel 2007 was released in late 2006. Six and a half years have passed and two new versions have been released. It would be much more interesting to see the accuracy of the current version, then this very old version.
Samsung Galaxy S4 and Lenovo k900 Compared
In Virginia's Fairfax County, Robbing Banks for the CIA
Fascism is "extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice."

I can see how strongly held views might lead one to exaggeration, but I don't think hyperbole lends anyone's position much authority.
50K Array, HTML5 Web Worker Demo
And more importantly it is an actual programming language unlike spreadsheet formulas.
Nomadic matt has some amazing tips on traveling with less cash in hand.
Free StartSSL are for non commercial usage. This is, I guess, what he means by "for playing", I don't know for comodo, if their certificates can be use for commercial applications.
The best career advice: Do something valuable
Some may be reserved keywords - e.g. accounts is available, twitter.com/accounts returns a 404, but you are unable to register the username.
The mysterious powers of Microsoft Excel
> on a $800 certificate that doesn't do anything a $8 certificate can't do

Unless you need *.domain.tld certificates.
Gold fell out of widespread use as a currency after the mining became industrialized. Nobody wants to play in a rigged game.
Because encryption's purpose is completely defeated if you don't know who you are talking to.

A man in the middle could easily reproduce your data to the other party (and viceversa) if you are not sure you are talking to the correct party.

How could you be sure you're doing

A -(encrypted)-> B

and not

A -(encrypted)-> MITM -(encrypted)-> B

?

You can't, so you'd better ditch the encryption and just talk plaintext.

Encryption relies on the fact that you have a signature from B who says "hey, I'm REALLY B, you're talking to me directly, here's my public key so you can talk only to me and nobody else can read the data inbetween".

That's where CAs come into play: they're the authorities that certify that B's signature/public key is actually tied to the domain you think you're talking to.

> CA-free self-signed certs to ensure only that packets between the client and server are secure/private

What's the difference of a self-signed certificate from www.gmail.com and a self-signed certificate from RandomHacker who says he's www.gmail.com ?

They look the same.

So... both concepts are actually separate already (e.g. did you ever trust a certificate manually in your browser?), but it's pretty pointless when you ignore CAs and therefore don't know if the certificate is real or crafted.
It also doesn't answer my main question: Why does the air smell good right before it rains. I'm sure being able to smell rain coming had evolutionary advantages...but how does it work?
It does look like an overview or a survey of various topics, not sure how in depth on each topic. Would love to see videos of it.
hi dmor, i know you catch flak from neckbeards on here, but one thing i noticed two weeks ago was the revenue numbers you post in your header. i find that so brave -- if it were to reopen as a communal blogging platform i would be MORE likely to sign up, not less, due to that openness.
StartSSL is recognized by OS X 10.5 or later, and Windows 7 or later. Older OSes might not recognize it if the user has missed any updates.

I'm OK with showing IE6/7 users a polite suggestion to upgrade, but a certificate error looks unprofessional. In addition, Chrome on XP is also affected (if the user has missed the CA update) because Chrome doesn't carry its own list of trusted CAs.
I am still using 2003 at my company...
Analysis of Excel 2010 http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~gmelard/rech/gmelard_csda23.pdf
> I agreed, but I thought it was premature. You write the legislation now and you risk things like nation-wide lock-in to IE6.

I have been tossing around the notion that a lot of laws should have a built-in trial period. I haven't been able to figure out how it could work, or grasp the consequences, but a way to automatically turn off a law unless it's converted into being permanent might be nice.
>Whether someone starts a new company to do their work or works within an existing one is completely irrelevant to the significance of their work.

It very much is for the perception of their contribution though. One was a leader himself, the other was part of an established team (which could presumably do the same work without him).

>Apple's entire product line is built on top of Ritchie's work.

No, it merely uses C and Unix as very basic components at the very base of it all, a C and Unix that are many times removed from the origins at that PDP-11, and have had the contributions of thousands upon thousands of people (including tons of hard work from hundreds of Apple's own engineers).

And even C/UNIX weren't created by Richie himself alone. There's BK, Ken Thompson et al too.
So, sure we can celebrate Richie as the co-creator of C and Unix but not of something as indirect and removed such as "Apple's product line".

Else, we might as well say "IBM's entire product line is built on top of the discovery of electricity". Which while true, it doesn't mean we celebrate Maxwell and Tesla for IBM's work. We don't even celebrate Turing and Von Neuman for IBM's stuff. We celebrate the company's engineers.

>You're absolutely right that Ritchie's not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, but he and Thompson did turn over whole sections of the economy. They just did it by proxy. The people doing the actual work are the ones with economic significance, not the proxy that happens to sell a lot of copies of it..

I'm not so sure. There are people who have discovered great things that went nowhere without some proxy. I think this is the naive programming concept that "marketing doesn't matter, it's just BS". Then you go code the finest program, and nobody buys/uses it.
No need to create a list quite that long, seeing as though Twitter doesn't allow handles longer than 15 characters in length.
I think that the opposite is true (but depends on the type of connection).
Mobile stations are focused on low power, they were designed that way from the beginning (e.g. they constantly try to reduce the transmit power if you have "too good" reception so it will be just good and use a lot less power) unlike wifi.

I remember the first mobile prototypes that were used around Motorola were dying of battery after few hours if used wifi instead of mobile data (that was about 8 years ago - so probably we are talking GPRS here).
Bullshit.

Most startups are boring ass websites with none viable business ideas. They do not need baller engineers. If they have a working business eventually, they're competing to hire the smart folks based upon the mix of compensation, work and colleagues. If you can't build a biz that can sustain a compelling mix of those three hiring ingredients, you aren't allowed to successfully hire good engineers.

People: you aren't allowed to blame your crap hiring strategy on NYC finance firms scooping up all the smart engineers that wanted to work in finance. There are so many smart engineers who do / want live in NYC and Not work in finance. If you're failing to hire people it's because you have at least one of the following: a work environment that isn't a sane/pleasant place to spend 40 hours a week, crap compensation, or your biz is a CRUD website with the personality of a heavily used smelly sponge.

No particular category of business "deserves" smart people, they work hard to get those folks. And frankly, most startups are just crud websites. Additionally, the vast majority of interesting engineering challenges only happen at larger organizations. (That said, there are many small tech businesses that have really cool tech challenges, but that's the exception rather than the rule).

Let me restate that: most startups have boring work, terrible hours and crap pay.

Tl;dr to quote a favorite phrase of an awesome friend / software engineer: "fuck you, pay me money [if you want me to work with you]"

New York is a lovely place to live, one of the most truely urban and actually diverse locales one the planet. Certainly the only city in the US with subways that work 24/7 and good food at all hours. Not having to drive is a beautiful healthy thing.
Tsarnaev and Miranda Rights
They do one of these every iteration of Excel, and the results are usually similar. One day, Microsoft will make a good version of Excel, but I'm still waiting.
http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~gmelard/rech/gmelard_csda23.pdf
very interesting....
...and yet every permutation of "Brian Willis" is taken. Many of which are spam accounts which twitter seems completely uninterested in killing off.
'BadNews' Android Malware downloaded up to 9 million times
Because there's no alternative. Either you trust the authorities or live in a constant fear that the other parties' certificates are hacker-crafted.
Related to this is that there are no descriptive variable names either. Just a massive three dimensional grid of, non typesafe, memory indexed by letter and number: sheet/row/column.
Imagine programming like this:

A5 = (C6*C6 * Sheet5:D1 + Sheet6:D1 / B3)

I'm not saying you have to use excel like this, there are options to do for example Sum(myTable[myRow]) and pivottable reduces alot of manual equations also. However both of these alternatives require that you format everything nicely into one table per sheet like a proper database and use the "Format as table" option, you almost need a DBA to use excel properly! The problem is that normal people don't use excel like this, they paste random data around everywhere, they want to have the sum, the average and lots of other calculations both below and on the right side of the data so you can see both simultaneously but once you do this you've screwed up your table and we're back on square one.
Most games are just incrementing and decrementing variables. You can still derive pleasure from that.

Though in the case of Curiosity, I'd say you'd need a lot of imagination.
Is there a HelloWorld example I can try?
This is OT: I've always wanted to take a crack at a couple of problems/semi-thought-experiments I came up with:

1) Find the verified Twitter account followed by minimum number of users - This is easy, since Twitter maintains an official list of verified accounts at https://twitter.com/verified/following . We could iterate over this list, and find the minimum.

2) Find the maximum-followed non-verified Twitter account. Now this is a harder problem. Does anyone have any ideas apart from brute-forcing Twitter handles?
New software company in the field of Artificial Intelligence
I think that in jobs where statistics is the main function of the job, you will often not find them using Excel. The business intelligence folks at my company use it for cursory analyses, but I often question the rigor involved in their practices, and using Excel to do statistics is icing on the cake. I would trust the results of SAS or R or, hell, even Minitab, over the results I get out of Excel. Microsoft seems more content making their product shinier than improving the underlying numerical accuracy of their methods.

The sooner people realize it's not designed for real statistics, the sooner people can stop hearing statisticians rant when they receive "Report_Analysis_Feb1-2012_Update_Final-v3.xlsx".
Yeah, Conky or similar status bar window manager widget is better for me for the real-time data (battery, cpu temp, date/time, etc.); too much to visually parse otherwise.

Definitely some nice features in here at first glance (colored directory perms and colored root vs. normal user are real nice-to-haves for example).
I think that in by this point in time, it's a pretty safe rule of thumb to take everything Peter Molyneux says with a very large grain of salt.
http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/11/12/death-by-million-cubes/
The argument about QR codes I didn't totally agree with either, and I think that at least in Europe it caught-on pretty well.

One thing that could definitely be improved is if the built-in camera app on your phone automatically detected them and popped-up more info. When I first tried using a QR code, that's what I did, using the iphone camera app, and was disappointed to discover it didn't work this way.

Eliminating the need for an extra app and could dramatically boost their appeal, but the core concept is there.
TRI soft is a company, dedicated to solving real-world problems. We employ the field of Artificial Intelligence, empirical research and innovative technology. Some of our recent work includes visual tracker, scientific visualization of a tornado dynamics and multi-touch web-applications.
Interesting - https://demo.webengage.com/awesome-demo.html?action=takeDemo...
They are just now moving people off MSO 2003 at ours as well, following complaints from several people that they can't open the newer xlsx, docx, and accdb file extensions. IT and Clinical Analytics are the first wave to move to "brand new" MS Office 2010, as of Jan'13.

Sure hope you aren't doing any life-threatening numerical computations in your version of Excel!
People could use R or python and do similar mistakes. I am creating a small algorithm to analyze stock prices and I am just realizing how easy is to mess up in these things.

Unfortunately, these things are treated like earthquakes in some countries: it's rare, we don't care. However, bad quality of reports is not rare. But the problem is: companies do not have other ways. They are stuck with the big players (SAP, Oracle, etc.) and they can't understand why their IT stack is crap.

I wish from all this Excel bashing we could have a serious talk about these tools. BEFORE writing any line of code, we must first understand deeply why professionals use Excel in this way and what we can do about it.

Finally, realize that the "cloud" is not considered always "safe". People put in Excel all kind of "secret" data and they are scared of having them on a third party server. Please, consider this too when thinking about a possible solution.
At least @arsefeet is available - don't all rush to get it at once
Tsarnaev's mother claims: "FBI set-up".
As a foreigner, I would suggest citizens of the United States (I imagine, very good people) to be wary of the evil of their government, of which the rest of the world is very aware.

My condolences regarding the bombing, it pains me that such a fact ever occurred and it saddens me deeply.
Earthquake in Ya'an, China, 160 dead, 3500 injured
> The most interesting thing about violations of open source licenses is the reverse engineering perspective. When you're able to identify the misused open source code within an executable binary, you can then use fingerprinting of the open source to better understand the closed source binaries. If you're curious about this kind of identification and program understanding in reverse engineering, you should look into the FLIRT and FLARE features of the IDA Pro disassembler.

For Linux-based devices more often than not they use a uImage loader with one of 3 filesystems (JFFS2, Squashfs, CramFS), so once you've got around whatever encryption or encapsulation's in the image (I typically generate a picture graphing bytes to spot entropy, a technique I shamelessly stole from Don A. Bailey) you can normally run something like binwalk[1] to identify the filesystems and dd them out using a small shell script. I typically mount each resulting image and extract the contents then unmount. You can usually spot the open source bits by looking at binary names, strings and the way they're linked.

Most Linux-based devices use common distros based on SBCs with uClibc and are either ARM or MIPS based. I'm slightly biased towards ARM because of the hotspot work but there's a lot of broadcom SBCs out there running *wrt variants.

If anyone's interested, I'll be at #44Café[2] this tuesday talking about breaking into onboard BMCs used for IPMI-based management. Again, GPL violations ahoy.

[1] - https://code.google.com/p/binwalk/
[2] - http://44con.com/44cafe
I just fixed it in the code, it will work when I'll deploy the new version.
I tried it but I really didn't like the old iframe look.
The ironic thing is that Tsarnaev became a naturalized U.S. citizen on Sept. 11, 2012. Anyone that decides to kill and hurt innocent people through bombs and guns deserves no rights.
'v' and 'r' are implemented and will be available when I deploy the new version.
It doesn't matter the version, if 2003 or 2020, I would never do life-threatening computations in Excel. It's just too painful and dangerous (look at how it treates dates). But unfurtunately I don't do this much, I do mostly finance-accounting. Yet, if I did, be sure I would have to put the results in a nicely formatted Excel file.
not even @2q4 anymore...
> I'd say Excel is superior to those systems for any one-person project.

> I was referring to professional software projects where I've had to work with other people

We're having different discussions. It happens. I was pretty careful about choice of words: I said "tiny" and "one-person" rather than "small". For a "small" project I'd use Bugzilla or Trac or whatever makes the grass greener with the least fertilizer.

Not every developer wants to be a sysadmin. Some developers are hobbyists with a single Windows machine—for those developers, Bugzilla administration might be an arduous task which requires skills they don't want to waste graymatter on.
Do you mean have all the entries opened and scrolling through marking them as read ? I never used that feature of google reader so I haven't implemented that yet. If it's something people use and want, I'll add it.
I didn't, but I posted on reddit a fews days ago maybe someone posted it here then.
| They look the same

Unless you have a known, valid signature.
That's how these decision makers earn their money.

If everything works they can claim they did in one month what a team of 10 would do in a year. Bang, instant bonus!

If things doesn't work, they blame the tools and try again.
Off topic: what's up with the url ;)
I'm not sure why the intelligence of your girlfriend was necessary for an introduction. It's having my question whether or not I should have been perhaps announcing the same of my own introductions, with that of a similar degree in my wife.
Previously posted (different URL, but same exact announcement by Andy Lester):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5577986
More detail here: http://www.metafilter.com/122295/The-rain-in-Spain-smells-ma...

Or why not just buy it in perfume form (#020 Soaked Earth)?

http://cbihateperfume.com/premium-accord-shop.html
An implementation of the R Language in Java
Probably a reserved word rather than an account.
I share your frustration. No reasonable permutation of my name and initials or usual handles is available, and most are inactive accounts.

Besides their developer-relations problem, namespace pollution and stagnation is a big problem for Twitter going forward. Who wants to join and use a service when the closest thing they can get to their desired username is a second-class moniker like @ffffirst_last1 or @L4stF1rst88 ?? I've heard this complaint from several of my friends who were late to the Twitter scene. The name availability issue is the main reason I think app.net has any chance of succeeding.
I don't know if any firms specifically identify themselves as being "Adaptive Enterprises" or not, but I think there are examples of some companies which appear to use at least some of the ideas. The firm mentioned in TFA may well be one. W.L. Gore[1] and Valve[2] are other firms that come to mind that, while they don't use the term, appear to have structures which bear at least some similarity to what Haeckel describes.

Back in 1999 when Haecke wrote "The Adaptive Enterprise" he said there were no full-fledged examples of a firm which was totally based on the idea. Whether or not there are any today, I can't say for sure.

What I will say, is that I think there is a lot of reason to think that this approach might be a good idea, and to think that it's still an emerging trend.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation
I’m not John Gruber, but having read the blog for many years I feel I can safely say that the guy does not hate Microsoft, nor does he hate Google.
"hello world" print

...although, more realistically, you're probably interested in something like the gettings started section of the docs [1]. There are also some great short example posts on the planet feed [2] from various blogs.

EDIT: I'll plug my own blog for this too, as I started writing a Beginning Factor series of posts a long time ago [3], but never got beyond a couple entries.

[1] http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-handbook.html

[2] http://planet.factorcode.org/

[3] http://elasticdog.com/2008/11/beginning-factor-introduction/
You can get unlimited *.domain.tld certificates from StartSSL after inexpensive verfication step. But don't tell anyone.
I did something very similar to this a while back[1]. I also wrote a blog post about it with code here http://blog.interstellr.com/post/22534653144/mining-twitter-...

[1] http://www.twtspire.com/
You could try :helpgrep foo next time.