skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is totally nit-picky, but strange use of the word "backdoor." When I read "backdoor" I was expecting to read about some malware-like functionality within the Skype client itself, but instead this is just telling us that Microsoft can read content after it is sent to them via the client and decrypted.

I would prefer Microsoft stopped scanning/reading my conversations, and I agree that what they're doing (e.g. accessing URLs) is a problem (and arguably illegal, given the recent case about someone accessing insecured AT&T URLs and going to jail).

Just think the original title could have been more clear.
How New York Times created "Money on the Bench" interactive charts
You could argue everyone who is literate has synesthesia - I can not look at symbols representing the alphabet and not hear the associated phonemes in my head. Makes me wonder what you see if you scan the brains of people who are born-deaf when reading, actually - which parts of the brain light up? Oh, and when reading logographic alphabets like Chinese of course.
Tumblr's revenue in 2012 was $13M and negative profits (they are actually losing money).

They "expect" $100M revenue and $60M profits in 2013.

Even if their expectations work, whoever offered them $1.1B is a complete idiot.
That article was nonsensical. English probably isn't their first language, but I have no idea what they're saying.
Is it Quartz composer they are using to prototype the charts, before moving onto D3?
Has there ever been an acquisition similar to Tumblr (company that has existed for 5+ years that hasn't found a profitable business model) which has contributed positively to the acquirer's net income? Is there any chance that this cannot turn out to be a boondoggle, because that seems to be the consensus among the commenters on HN.
Talk More. Do Less. Achieve More.
I tried to do just this myself and Btrfs ended up corrupting my install beyond use.

Thankfully this was just on a test system and I do appreciate that other people have had good success with Btrfs; but as a ZFS user for quite a few years now (since before Linux and FreeBSD ports became stable - so my file servers were originally running Solaris) and have never had an issue with the file system (in fact it's saved me a few times), I can't help thinking that Btrfs is still a long way off being a viable contender.

What's more, I found Btrfs's commands to be convoluted and, at times, counter-intuitive when compared with ZFS's. Which isn't a deal breaker on it's own, but it is a great shame given the opportunity they had to get it right (ie writing the entire software stack from scratch and with no legacy to worry about).

This is all my personal experiences though. Others will have their own preferences and (anecdotal) evidence to support that.
Could someone help me understand why the password changed from "bar" to "yeahright"? Or is that just a mistake on the authors side?
Indeed, Adam Back's first language is C or Perl I think.
It's Thomas Midgeley day
Mega-ships head for shipping firm amid global sea trade battle
While it's no surprise that a new MacBook Air might be around the corner, Apple could still better itself - Retina for Air, higher reliable/capacity SSDs, Longer battery life, etc.

I wonder if OS X itself would be tweaked a bit to facilitate enhanced power efficiency. An Air with long(er) battery life + Retina + decent crunching power could potentially threaten the "Ultrabook" segment.
The antisocial network?
Seconded. It's more a man in the middle to me. Still a problem, though.
Andrew Wilkins is working on a Go frontend that can also target PNaCL[1], but since it's a spare time project and he just had a baby it's slowed down. So if anyone want to help him out...

[1] http://blog.awilkins.id.au/2012/12/go-in-browser-llgo-does-p...
I'd say it's valid if science says otherwise
For those with a penchant for parentheses, there is also GNU Guix, which just had a second alpha release:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-05/msg00034....

It shares concepts and some bits with NixOS, but replaces the configuration language with Guile, an implementation of Scheme.
yeah, and then you can have real encryption too. I'm hugely in favor of phone-NFC eclipsing cards.
Why did it now work all that well in SCO OpenServer 5?
He probably typed out the string in the paragraph and copy-pasted the logs, so likely it is just a mistake on the author’s side.
If I were a Yahoo shareholder, even at a $1.1bn price tag, I would vote against the acquisition.

> Tumblr has no real revenue, let alone profit, making it a value dilutive acquisition for Yahoo.

> The acquisition price is artificially being inflated by investors who are trying to squeeze Yahoo, who is trying to "turnaround" its profitable business. The $1.1.bn price is already "too high" for Tumblr's true underlying value.

> Yahoo has no track-record of successfully acquiring, integrating and generating value from such acquisitions. Broadcast.com ($5.7bn), GeoCities ($3.6bn), Inktomi ($235m), Overture ($1.6bn), del.icio.us ($20m), Flickr ($?m), and the list goes on.

I feel sorry for Yahoo's retail investors. I guess "greed is good" when it comes to startup acquisitions.
Object Oriented Programming with closures
My point is, if you had bad parents, or no parents, you can change your behavior and thinking patterns and end up better off than kids who had good parents.
So with a contactless card a thief simply has to have the card - there's no chance a teller will check for matching signatures (not that most tellers do this in the US, though I have noticed in Germany tellers are more likely to). Who wanted these?
The wikipedia article for GameShark is pretty lean. I'm sure someone experienced in this subject could contribute a great deal of information.
Don't forget to offer a decent salary package. It's not uncommon to see people wondering where all the talent are, only to find that they're offering something like $30,000 salaries.
Everybody in the foodchain - well, except for the customers, but who cares about the customers, right?
The story on the BBC site concerns people who attempted to pay with their chip card by placing it in the reader but had their contactless card charged instead, which was still in their purse/wallet. In some instances, the transaction was processed twice using both forms of payment.

The first customer was able to obtain a refund after demonstrating the problem to the store manager.
sigh. retards

how could they not be reminded of bread by that sling-shot barrel. How can they not see that his trigger was an iron fetter?

These people are retards.

God says...

Achim; and Achim begat Eliud; 1:15 And Eliud begat Eleazar; and
Eleazar begat Matthan; and Matthan begat Jacob; 1:16 And Jacob begat
Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called
Christ.

1:17 So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen
generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are
fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto
Christ are fourteen generations.

1:18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his
mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was
found with child of the Holy Ghost.

1:19 Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to
make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.

----

ache

God says...
endures thereto characters wooed well-spring
Validation is everything.
At least to me :).

My app is ultra localized so it is not suited for being posted here :).
And my other projects didn't really get any attention so far :).

For those who are interested, here is the android app :
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.lengrand.br....

And here are the projects that didn't get noticed :
http://jlengrand.github.io/Ivolution/
http://greengame.co/

:)
I suppose that it's possible, but it never happens.
It is a bit baffling why Reddit's ad buying tools are so primitive. I assume the thinking is that if they shipped a proper ad dashboard that let advertisers target ads the way they want to, there'd be backlash from the community.
> Also "mash A to increase the chances of catching" is also unfortunately wrong.

I remember playing the game, thinking about this. I was wondering whether I had heard it somewhere or come up with it myself, how unlikely it was to be true, and how I still found myself doing it occasionally. A small existential crisis over confirmation bias and clever design.
None of the attacks on Adria Richards were done because she was a woman

Your naivety it adorable.
Asm.js doesn't have (as far as I know):

1. Good primitive data types (e.g. full width machine integers)

2. SIMD

3. Tail calls

4. Threads

5. Structs

6. Gotos

7. Memory management

Once you add these you lose the supposed advantages of asm.js in practice. You lose the light weight. You lose realistic backwards compatibility because programs using these features will run so slow on normal JS VMs that they're unusable, or in the case of tail calls the program will stackoverflow on a normal JS VM.
Figuring Out Numerals - typefaces and fonts for numbers
BS is awesome, I used it in a former project.
Good thing is that it tries to repair the parsed stuff too. And you'll see that most of what you retrieve will be broken :).

I currently use Jsoup, simply because I am working in java.
It gets the job done, I got only good things to say about it.

Concerning the real estate thing, I coulnd't agree more. Being a french guy, I know that all real estate website suck, and it is nearly impossible to have a way to know all houses to sell in the neighborhood.
Some kind of location based real estate aggregator with links to real estate websites could be a huge hit IMHO.

Hope this helps
The slang is very common in crypto* newsgroups of these sorts, I didn't find anything unusual or un-parseable in the message.
A backdoor in their encryption protocol. They claim it is secure.

"The Skype Security Policy is:
...
4. Messages transmitted through a Skype session are encrypted from Skype-end to
Skype-end. No intermediary node, if any exist, has access to the meaning of these
messages. [1]"

[1]: http://download.skype.com/share/security/2005-031%20security...

Aforementioned referenced on + additonal security overview/facade: http://www.skype.com/en/security/#encryption

Their hybrid peer-to-peer/client–server implementation allows for eavesdropping.
This is now confirmed to be in practice.
In response to some of the critics:

For a good user-generated content comparable, YouTube wasn't profitable until around 2010-2011[1], 7 years after its founding. It is, of course, very profitable now and looks like one of the best acquisitions ever made in the internet space. Google only had to fork out $1.65Bn in an all-stock transaction for a company which would now be worth many, many times that (some numbers would say over $50Bn [assuming $5Bn income at a conservative 10x P/E],[2] I would say many times more).

Revenue is, of course, a massive lagging indicator in the software industry. I think anyone who sees Tumblr as being overvalued greatly underestimates the sheer size of their user-generated content library, especially because most popular externally-facing Tumblr sites have custom URLs which hide the true size of the network. Most regular internet users will visit Tumblr many times throughout the day without noticing it. You have to remember that its Alexa rank has been climbing non stop over the last few years, and it is now at 19 in the US with a steady pageviews/user count (which not even Facebook can claim).[3]

[1] http://www.reelseo.com/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-claims-youtub...

[2] http://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/13/05/...

[3] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tumblr.com
Don't be surprised. While I can see 2 sides to this argument (it was discussed earlier here on HN, link below), we shouldn't be too surprised by what some companies do to "optimize," their products. Microsoft autocrawling http(s) links could be either for obtaining new bing search results (and it could make that result relative to your conversation), or it could be for security to screen links.

I don't know, but I agree that if you have a secret conversation, take steps like PGP to keep it secret. Big Brother is ALWAYS listening :: usually a good preventative security motivation ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721006
This may be the only legal way of teasing out a response from the other potential bidders without breaking the exclusive negotiation arrangement with Yahoo!.

If the other potential buyers indicate somehow that they would pay more, then the Tumblr board may perceive that the right thing to do is to be unreasonable on price so that Yahoo! walk away. Tumblr may not approach the others directly, but of course can read any correspondence that arrives.

It's a a dangerous course, as if there is only one other buyer then they may counter with a lower offer, and even if there is a genuine auction then there is the risk that market conditions could change.

And of course all this is also a tactic to nudge the Yahoo! board into making the 'right' decision.
in the study they only printed four letters in colour, not the entire alphabet
Hey, it's for the millions (I presume) of "Yahoo!News" readers out there, so I'd say "product-market fit": achievement-unlocked.
In addition to what the other respondent said, Hive and Impala make it redundant for most use-cases that could work on Hadoop anyway.
I can live without Retina.
I can live within 512GB SSD.
But I really need 16GB RAM... fingers crossed.

Haswell demos at IDF last year were pretty awesome, so I think longer battery life at the same travel weight (and better overall performance) is pretty much a given.
Inside Strongbox, the Hyper-Secure Inbox Built by Aaron Swartz
I wouldn't be surprised it this was intended to help bing discover deep web. If it's the case, combine that with the ability on bing to do "ip:<ip>" searches, and you have a formidable tool for forensics.
Installing multiple versions is not the problem. The problem is configuring packages with respect to their dependencies.

Nix enables per user installations and different users can use different versions of a package. What Nix cannot do (as far as i know), is using multiple versions as the same user. For example, Flash once broke due to change in the GNU libc. Can Nix use a different libc version for a specific browser plugin?
The Ultrabook segment was defined as a response to the (original) MBA, and I've yet to see an Ultrabook that truly competes with the MBA on performance/price.

Despite all of the sponsorship from Intel, it also wouldn't surprise me at all to see Ultrabook OEMs trailing Apple by weeks/months getting Haswell based stuff out the door.
This is misleading, it's not a backdoor. At least not my definition of backdoor. Anyways, if you need secrecy, don't use a service like this.

I have read people speculating if it's for spam/malware protection. They screen the urls to see if it's a redirect to known malware.
Many customers wanted them - they make payment a lot more convenient.
Very strange article. It only re-does what all other news sources already stated.. plus, i think that commonly a backdoor is understood as something in the software itself that let's someone get access from the outside, which doesn't appear to be the case.

Plus, to think that skype would be exempt from the governments claim to get access to all communications and messaging data is very simple-minded. The guy does realize that today governments can access all his mails, right? SSL/TLS or not.
Show HN: HTMLify - Turn code snippets into HTML, for tech bloggers
I used to think the split between vim and emacs users was roughly 50/50, but reading posts here it seems more like 90/10. Why is it that people here prefer vim to emacs? I'm not asking why is vim better than emacs, but what is it about HN that means more vim users. Certainly in free software circles emacs is equally popular. Is it just a cultural thing where people tend to stick with what they first learned and what their coworkers are using?
Besides this hair-on-fire title and intro, this is pretty much just yet another rehashing that Skype visits URLs in chats?

(Honestly, if you'd just asked, I would have been assumed this would have been the case anyway)
I agree with this. I know that when I've done webdev and when I check out a unique sandbox url (like jumbled letters with no backlinks) for a page I'll design, I use to see GoogleBot crawl that page eventually in the logs. (guess what browser I was using...Chrome)
Except for the fact that it was last updated in 2008 :(
Would you use PhoneGap again?
Google Lock-In Lock-Out
Put some time limits or let anyone judge, it keeps getting stuck on “Waiting For Others”.
I doubt parsing and validating ascii asm.js is much more work than parsing and validating binary llvm.
Have people checked if the client itself sends the URLs separately via some webservice (as opposed to MS being able to decrypt the IM) ?
What your nationality says about your ideal office space
You are aware that many popular services allow to share stuff privately using URL encoded credentials?
The ASUS zenbooks were pretty damn good as far as I could tell. I've heard decent stuff about the Dell XPS ultrabooks.

Not exactly an ultrabook, but thinkpad x220/x230 was pretty amazing except for the low screen resolution. IPS screen, great keyboard, great performance aside from integrated graphics, space for an mSATA SSD as well as SATA HDD/SSD, battery slice to boost it to 20+ hours, removable battery, and great linux support.
Google's open video proposal closes door on software freedom
I don't think you could actually change the layout, you would have to be moderator of that subreddit to do it
Perhaps a microwave oven can fry the input stage to the radio receiver, which presumably has an antenna hanging off it and so is more susceptible to damage, whilst leaving the rest of the chip intact? Anyone tried this?
Instagram had 500m in cash and Tumblr is running out of the money. So this is the good exit for Tumblr
my whole office use emacs for clojure dev but I use vim. I tried emacs for a few days on more than one occasions but simply couldn't bear the physical awkwardness of the key combos (I did remap ctrl to caps).
I use vim for editing configs (especially on servers) and emacs for writing code.

But I think a lot if not most of HN are actually SublimeText fans, not vim fans.
This is the company currently running ads positioning itself as a company that holds privacy dear.

"At Microsoft, we take our responsibilities for protecting your privacy very seriously. It’s a priority across all our businesses, and an area where we continue to work closely with others throughout academia, government and industry."

http://blogs.windows.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2013/04/22/consumer...

"Your Privacy is Our Priority"
"The lines between public and private may never be perfect, but at Microsoft we are going to keep on trying, because your privacy is our priority."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt51MWll1oY
Crawling HackerNews
I'm still good with my mid-2011 model, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 13"... Old adage of updating Macs every 3 years still holds I guess.
Work Better.
That subreddit is not anti-advertising.

Reddit runs a lot of ads where people will link to Amazon with their own affiliate tag. So they are selling nothing, not really promoting anything, just trying to get their affiliate cookie planted in as many browsers as possible. There is also at least one sales aggregator site (which just scrapes price feeds) which does the same. It is that sort of ad which the sub readers do not like.

A genuine ad from a company would be welcome but as you have pointed out Amazon and others have built their rep without ads so finding a reason for them to suddenly spend is going to be hard.
Yahoo Japan Suspects 22 Million IDs Stolen
How the US version of The Office reflects on America - and the UK
I love vim but for some tasks (Clojure, Scala) it seems emacs is the better option, so I've recently tried to switch over to emacs + evil for these tasks. However: While my MacVim (and terminal vim) looks quite beautiful these days, due to all these splendid plugins and color themes (powerline etc) that I installed, I have to say that emacs looks awful. I did search Github for nice Emacs configs that make it look more pleasant (just using Solarized doesn't cut it for me) but I couldn't find any.

Does anyone have tips for nice emacs configurations that make it look a lot more beautiful?

Edit: My current vim looks like this (opened random old files)
http://appventure.me/vim.png
Chrome has all kinds of services like "resolve navigation error", "URL prediction" and "usage statistics".
That Chrome sends your URLs out there on the Internet isn't exactly a secret.
If it bothers you, you can disable some of the features under 'Privacy' on:

chrome://settings/

The difference here is that Chrome doesn't pretend to be a secure communication channel like Microsoft claims Skype is.
@Techendo also has a how-to by Tim Jarratt on How-to Emacs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d_uf_Ddj-8
I am interested as well. I'll need some advance notice, since I'm coming (probably by train) from Istanbul. But this seems like a great excuse to get a break from the city.
Try Evil Mode with Emacs for Clojure. Its pretty close to vim
$1.1 Billion is a really good deal for a trashcan full of 99% animated cat GIFs and 1% decent content.

Have you read Yahoo news lately? It's dumbed-down sensationalistic garbage that makes Tumblr look absolutely brilliant in comparison.
I should have followed the link first. Looks like I can't make this one, but I would love to come up for another.
That was a long blog which essentially would have been pretty common knowledge for most Joy Division fans and/or people interested in astrophysics. And because of that I think the author missed out on raising a bigger and more interesting discussion: (I'll quote one of the comments on his site as that phrases is things rather well)

Interesting, but the article misses the point in all kinds of ways. It was common knowledge (at least, to those familiar with Joy Division and Saville's work) that the image itself was appropriated from an original that was in the public domain. The interesting point here is not copyright, but the way in which an image can come to represent a concept such that it gains new meaning. When the intended audience sees this, they think, "Joy Division", not "pulsar". Hence, when you copy the image by way of Saville, you are appropriating the association that he has established. So, this isn't about stealing images, it's about riding on the coat-tails of a talented designer who managed to create a strong brand.

A proper understanding of what's going on here makes this sentiment: "If you ever want to use the image for your own personal benefit, just make sure it’s clear you have no connection with Joy Division, Peter Saville, etc…" pretty shiesty.
StyledJS: NodeJS Console Colorization & Styling Library
Google's FRAND-zero patent license for VP8 threatens to divide Web and FOSS
A, ok then. Didn't think of that interpretation.
Vim is a nifty editor, using Emacs is for most a major investment in adapting your workflow to it, Emacs users tend to want to do everything possible in it. Of course you can use Emacs as just another editor, but the culture around it is to use as a multi-purpose toolbox. It's not so strange that Emacs users would be fewer but far more invested.

For Vim users the keybindings are essential, but for most the scripts aren't that important, that's why other editors can seduce them by offering vi keybindings. But an Emacs user shivers at the thought of losing all their elisp.

(Note: Vim user)
True that. I tried getting into the whole Vim/Emacs war. While Vim seemed relatively easy (I already had some experience with Vi) Emacs was a chore to work with.

Sublime Text gets the job done, fast and painlessly.
Great, but I'd like to see a preview of the output on that page.
GPS data could improve tsunami early warning