skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you, in particular because of logic similar to that in JosephBrown's post [1]:

> The justices seemed to argue that removing the introns was the step that makes cDNA patentable, but the introns are already removed from an mRNA molecule

If we take this decision at face value, then scientists simply have to decrease reliance on cDNA intermediates. But I worry that we will have to deal with fallout from analogies to the cDNA logic for decades to come.

1 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5874580
It's a terrible thing when somebody (Microsoft Engineer or not) tries to make sense of all the fact'less back n' forth about how much Microsoft sucks and they can't do anything right.

If more people stopped to think what the Master plan here might be, we would all be better off.

Instead we're entrenched in cold-war-like mentality of Apple-FRIEND, GOOGLE-FRIEND, SONY-BEST-FRIEND, ... Microsoft-ENEMY.

Microsoft stopped being a monopoly long, long time ago (in internet time), yet everybody still continues to hate.
> If I pay money, I don't want to be sold

Ever watched TV? Ever been to the cinema? Ever read a newspaper or a magazine? Get real.
A yottabyte would take 3.333×10^11 3 terabyte hard disks. A 3.5 inch hard disk has a volume of 376.77344 cm³. The NSA buildings in Bluffdale take up around 1.5 million square feet. That means just the hard discs for a yottabyte would be just a bit less than a kilometer high (901 meters). That's about a 100 meters taller than Burj Khalifa. I think it's unlikely it's designed for anything near a yottabyte.
>(you can't even speak english correctly)

Son, if you're going to play that card you need to proof-read before you hit that 'reply' button.
The uncrushable radio
Concise, but wrong: It keyed off of "find", so it produced a top hit of items related to that method (which means in rails: find in the database)

Now you could argue that I should have omitted "find", and there was a time where that was how search engines were used, but the fact that google got the semantics right is why it is first rate.
Check out http://metricshub.com (acquired by Microsoft) that provides a great dashboard of billing usage, but also lets you auto-scale resources, all for free.
I know, it's ridiculous. But people do want to see how many likes the story has, and cross-service comments are pretty next-wave, so you have to have widgets now for 5 social sites, 7 comment systems, global analytics, live analytics, sitewide ad, contextual ad, site cookie and maybe add two more because I haven't thought of them... that's 19 right there!

We really need something better than having these MASSIVE amounts of callouts. It's like those pictures of Internet Explorer totally taken over by toolbars, except it's a different set on every single site on the web. Bah!
How Plants Do Their Math
They could go for a bigger % cut of gamers disposable income, the same way smartphones have done for the cellphone market.

Videogames are also somewhat addictive, so the supply curve might look more like tobacco or alcohol.
Unless you wanted single player modes only those have been dead for a while, on both XBox and PS3. Ever heard of online codes?
KVS Erlang Data Framework for N2O
Provides High-Level Access to Acl, Users, Groups, Subscriptions, Feeds, Comments, Meetings, Accounts, Payments, Products, Purchases, etc.
Article behind paywall. Here is link that works: http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2...
> Yet Another(tm) online training service to teach these doctors how to use and maintain complex medical equipment that we know nothing about!

That example could actually work, you know. There's nothing stopping you from automating some intelligent scraping for each item that gets registered into the db, and presenting the users with tid-bits of what that item can be used for and how to use it, with a couple of links to places. It may not seem like a lot because it's so simple, but just trying to gather that tiny bit of preliminary information is probably a huge bottleneck in places that aren't used to automating everything and have better things to worry about. At least with this service they'd be able to quickly dive-in, get an idea of what something does, and if they need to, click on a few links for more information and have their questions answered within a few minutes.

The problem here is just assuming that this is a 'hard' problem that we lack the skill sets for. If we start looking at it that way, we prevent ourselves from even really trying to find any solution because our minds have already hinted at us that it's useless. "Nothing is impossible", and a community of entrepreneurs like HN should know that by now; but for some reason that curiosity, ambition, and cleverness just shuts down when looking at bigger problems that we might be a bit detached from. That doesn't make sense.
Clearly, only a true Microsoft employee would know such a well-kept secret. This proves everything.

Oh wait. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Streets-of-Asia/1595621342030...
Is it common for a lot of the source code live in header files?
E.g. https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets/blob/master/src/cell...
I'm not being sarcastic, just curious if this is normally done these days.
I don't think having to sign into other websites is that much of a bother, nor that people are that motivated to talk to their bank or physician on a regular basis that would drive adoption of this sort of thing.

And in return you have to stick all your eggs in one basket, get what would probably end up being a single persistent online identity that goes under your real name (if it's tied to an email address you use for business stuff), and that's owned by a company and may not even be willing to give them back to you (would you even own the private keys if it was being implemented on the server?)
The real misstep here is that Microsoft is still selling physical media.

Nobody (well, almost nobody) gets mad when they can't resell their iPhone games or mp3s or Kindle books; compare that to the outpouring of anger when a company puts limitations on used optical media games or CDs or books.

Humans are wired to see a physical item (disks, etc.) and think mine.
(not just Americans...)
Yes, LXC and OpenVZ in it's core similar technologies that enable linux containers. OpenVZ also comes with varios containers management tools, some of which are available via docker for LXC containers too.
"Think about it, on steam you get a game for the true cost of the game, 5$-30$. On a console you have to pay for that PLUS any additional licenses for when you sell / trade / borrow / etc."

That's a neat theory, but if you listen to virtually any publisher or developer talk about used games and game pricing it is abundantly clear that they view $60 as the game price (and as far as they are concerned, you're getting a huge bargain), and used sales beyond that as virtually akin to theft. They absolutely do not view it from the angle of the game being worth $30 and the rest being money they're forced to charge to make up the losses.

On the PC with Steam the publishers are willing to drop the price to compete with piracy, but assuming the Xbox One is not cracked to the point of a Dreamcast, I can't imagine them ever allowing Steam-like prices.
I should also add that I think a lot of the criticisms of UML itself are fair.

I'm talking exclusively about using it as a problem solving tool before the implementation stage. I do wish there were better alternatives for graphically tracking and documenting large code-bases... or even generating UML diagrams for that matter.
That link is to a ridiculous "story". See my responses in the main thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5876943
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877115
What matters is the scope of the access, how broad it is. Not if the access is "direct" or not. That's semantics.

The NSA requested all metadata from Verizon. That tells us something new.
There are some things that the people may want to do, but that the government should still not do. This is why we're a republic, and not a democracy: to prevent the tyranny of the majority. The idea is that a constitution limits the power of the majority. The only deciding factor to any action by government (or lack thereof) is: is the act constitutional? In the US, this question is decided by the judiciary.

Since a court already opined that such surveillance is illegal, it shows how much stronger the executive branch is in comparison to the others. Since the legality of the surveillance is in question, in a fair and reasonable system, a court would order an injunction against the surveillance until the legality was settled. What complicates this matter, is the executive branch's position that even discussing the legality of their actions is classified and secret. Pretty sad from the administration that promised us transparency.
Thanks for the mention of Lucidchart (http://www.lucidchart.com). If there is any specific feedback on the app, would love to hear it -- and good luck with your tool!
What does that have to do with using a search engine? I'm pretty sure you aren't emailing them your queries.
All four examples you gave are in decline. His viewpoint is shared by a growing segment of the population.
AngularJS Interactive Tutorial
It's not "NSA vs. tptacek". It's "Greenwald's interpretation of NSA slide deck vs. Google". Google categorically denied Greenwald's report. The Guardian then began walking it back.
While I don't love that Steam has DRM, I don't hate their version of it either. What MS says they'll do (and what they'll probably end up doing) is nowhere close to what Valve has done. Valve has a history of listening to its customers about legitimate pain points with their DRM. Case in point: military personnel stationed abroad don't have the internet connection available to phone home every time they want to play a game, so Valve introduces an offline mode - authorize once before you deploy and freely play on that machine without an internet connection. Combine that with the fact that their DRM servers are pretty rock solid (I'm sure people have had problems with it but I've never encountered them in the years I've used steam) and the Gabe promise to unlock DRM if anything happens to Steam, and you get a lot of people comfortable trusting their game library to Steam.
True enough.. I haven't bought a Sony product since the CD rootkit fiasco... I may just get a PS4... though, kind of perterbed at the removal of "other os" option from PS3.
From what I remember of how LV works underneath, it's essentially a task stealing system: a bunch of worker threads pulling out clumps of code from a queue and executing them. I don't remember for sure, but I suspect it uses locking underneath to protect the queue. The reason I bring this up is that it wouldn't work very well if your parallelism was very fine-grained.

It's an elegant abstraction but by no means is it unique. Haskell springs to mind as another language with a similarly elegant abstraction for parallelism. I'm necessarily generalizing a bit but I would say that all these "automagical parallelizing" systems suffer from the problem of not working very well unless the granularity of parallelism the runtime was designed for matches the granularity of parallelism that your program has.
You don't factor in the number of times UofM 'gets it wrong'. Even given their influence you wouldn't be winning 9 out of 10 times. But it could still be an edge.
Wrong. They were accused of giving direct access to the government. They in fact aren't doing that. All they do is provide information when legally required to do so.

What exactly do you think Facebook and Google have done wrong?
In a way, I think he is looking at the economics via this analogy.

In Feudal Europe, the greatest economic resource was land. If you controlled lots of land, you had lots of power. But land was expensive to maintain and make productive. There was a lot of overhead, so merely owning it wouldn't make you rich. The feudal arrangement was that lords contracted the land out to vassals, who then employed serfs to work it. Protection and convenience flowed down, and in return wealth flowed up.

Now the greatest economic resource is information, and controlling it gives you power. But producing information in a top-down manner is ineffective, so in return for protection and convenience, the serf-users of the internet age produce a wealth of information for their lords. The main difference in the power relationship seems to be that modern serf-users are free to choose their lords, leading to greater competition among rival lords, whereas feudal serfs were born into the service of a single vassal, who in turn served a single lord.
...unless you encrypt it.
We have to believe that "all this time they wanted to charge less but their hands were tied". Sure. This has happened loads of times in history, where prices were high but kind hearted vendors dropped their prices whenever possible...

By the way; anyone working for one of those companies hit by the recession that has asked their staff to take a pay cut, "but we'll restore your salary when the good times return" ? Yeah, right.
Not a very helpful way to express the advice; if you tell people "don't hash secrets" the natural interpretation is "send them in the clear".

HMACs have their use case, and it's good to use them for that, but honestly it's a tiny corner of the possibilities for "hashing secrets", and an effective approximation (hash(message + hash(secret)), as mentioned towards the end of the article) is the obvious approach if you have any idea how hashes work, and just as effective as a dedicated HMAC.
They are only declining because products that you don't pay for, where you are the product are booming.
>Isn't that an ends justify the means sort of argument?

Yes?
That's the beauty of Chrome Frame. In most cases, it gets "deployed" without needing any approval from IT.

Chrome for Business looks like a solid and proper upgrade path, but it does require a semi-progressive IT team.
Spoiler alert: They can't decrypt it. That's why they have to ask these companies for the info, rather than just take it from the ISPs.
If it's not thought interesting then it won't meet the front page?
I agree, and that's why I was thinking that a company that is still growing and is known for their privacy practices could be good (beach-head?) at doing this (at least being able to advertise it on their own services to get some traction and feedback).

It's not like google or anyone else is going to do it. And looking at DDG traffic, it seems like it is a growing need. Then again, how to you monetize encrypted emails? contextual encyrpted ads? ;)
> when the work has already been done?

I am very wary about introducing new software into our stack, if I doesn't understand it. Bad configured software could cause problems down the road.

Last time I tried out a recipe that installed Redis, it didn't version lock the Redis-server which meant that the daemon couldn't start because they had deprecated some configs.

The recent DDOS DNS attacks was possible because people have setup wrongly configured DNS servers.
Speaking as a PC gamer.. Steam who everybody 'loves' does not allow you to transfer games.

You can't even transfer games from one account to another account that YOU owe. It's not allowed.

Just some perspective into this. And I don't agree there should be ANY limitations for hard media.
>calculates total amount for you //

Pretty basic to do that in a LibreOffice or Word doc isn't it (certainly is in LO).
Why Apple Inc. Can't Be Forgiven for iOS 7
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"How much are you willing to bet they can't decrypt https?"

I'd bet quite a bit, though not "my life", that they do not have a generalized "read everything" ability for all forms of SSL. They may have what cryptographers would call "a crack", but that's a low bar, and doesn't prove they have a practical attack.

However, DDG is currently using 128-bit RC4, which is very weak. [1] I wouldn't care to bet anything that the NSA doesn't have an RC4 cipher crack that is practical to run on wide swathes of traffic.

RC4 is very popular, which I believe is because some people claimed it was a defense against the BEAST attack. I researched this for work, and I couldn't find anyone whom I trusted saying that was a good mitigation. The people I trusted merely observed that RC4 was not vulnerable, but never said you should switch to it. Only secondary sources ever suggested that. My conclusion was that there was a reason for the primary sources never suggesting that; in response to a theoretical break of the rest of SSL, the correct move was not to move to a solution that had much more practical attacks already known than what BEAST demonstrated. But now it's even sillier; BEAST has been either entirely or almost entirely mitigated in browsers (there's no server-side defense against BEAST, but there's a client-side one you can use, and browsers now have it). As far as I can tell, RC4 should be abandoned and we should resume using stronger ciphers for SSL. Anyone still concerned about BEAST should update their browser.

[1]: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/16/has-https-finally...
It's already been established that they redefine "collect" as a human actually viewing the data. The admit that they store roughly everything they can on everyone.
Doesn't necessarily mean they don't have the ability to decrypt, it just means that they have a process in place so in case shit ever hit the fan (like it just did) they can come back and say "what's the big deal? we have a process in place"
The worse problem is that the stack of UML diagrams in 1. is sent offshore to be implemented verbatim by many junior people working in parallel and in isolation, a manual test team produces thousands of bug reports on the resultant ball of mud which are then hastily patched over with sticky tape, and the whole sorry mess is hailed as an exemplar of software delivery process for being made to hobble over the line without exploding.
The Pros & Cons of Bitcoin - LeWeb London 2013 [video]
I'm claiming that your characterization of all such "optimization" as malicious is misguided.

White hat is not exploiting the rules of a game, it is following the rules. Proper SEO according to G is doing everything you can to make your site interact well with crawlers. That's akin to following directions when applying for a job, or following the rules when playing a sport. You can't be considered for the job if you don't apply properly, and you'll soon be disqualified if you ignore the rules of a sport. Same with search: if your site doesn't comply with a search engine's standards for crawling, you won't have the opportunity to be ranked fairly.
Yep, it would really be great if there was something similar to this for Safari on OSX.
The first thing I tell designers and coders with iOS experience is to get over trying to make your layouts pixel-perfect. It's such a simple thing. But so many projects end up wasting a lot of resources, or even end up locking screen orientation when they first ship because they didn't take this seriously.

The other side of this coin is that a simple wireframe can get implemented on iOS quickly, while on Android, the coders may spend a lot of time on multiple layouts, multiple sets of graphical assets, different font sizes, different screen dimensions and densities, etc. It often helps if the designer participates in creating and testing layouts and assets for an Android version.

Secondly, a lot of coders who don't also have some server-side Java experience find Eclipse jarringly unfriendly. Spend some time getting used to Eclipse and understand how the "It's plugins all the way down" model makes Eclipse do some stupid things. Android Studio is much better, but it's still an "early access" release.

Thirdly, Android's runtime is a platform for apps and system middleware. Large parts of the Android system are written in Java using the same toolchain as apps. You can, for example, add an API to Android that other apps can use. You can communicate with lots of other apps. You can "borrow" parts of apps' UI and ask them to do particular tasks, like picking a file, for you, and you can let other apps do the same with your app. Android is more complex because it is more expressive.
Innovative is the new Mac Pro, IOS is a only Jonathan Ive on steroids in Apple.
I hesitated signing it for a good 5 minutes because I didn't want my name on the list of subversives, but then realized that since they monitor everything, I was already on the list.

Oh well, I'll let you guys know how good the food is in the secret prisons.
MetaMed Enhances Medical Diagnoses With Data Analysts, Researchers
So then, it's easy for them to have a consistent block of text to filter on?

Is there any data that sending template emails works? It seems like its too easy to write off as people investing minimal effort, and not sending a unique message.

I honestly don't know,, but this does not feel 'effective' to me.
ANN: Triangle Crypto / Cypherpunks
Welcome to the new era of McCarthyism.
I'm a grad student who writes lots of papers in LaTeX with collaborators. We use git most of the time, but git works most painlessly when you tweak it to ignore whitespace and to use word diffs. For example, let's say that my collaborator says "oh, I pushed a new diff" and now I'm curious what he added. Running:

git pull && git log -p -w --color-words

lets me see exactly which words he added/removed/changed ignoring the fact that he changed all my tabs to spaces in that commit.

Also, if I have a conflict, it's also nicer to use a specialized tool to merge than relying on git's linewise merges.

I imagine github could incorporate some of these tools too.
10.9 was just announced last week at WWDC.
Why not be comfortable with it? Unless, of course, you are one of those who have something to hide. ;-)
It's certainly possible to have an interesting conversation about the changes to the way markets will work when the cost of reproduction falls to zero; it's ridiculous to think, however, that the place to start this conversation is at the introduction of a new gaming console.
Nonsense. You have repeatedly insisted that the NSA document must be wrong ("nothing to see here, folks"), simply because Google denies providing "direct access". You do this by drawing a semantic equivalence between what the NSA asserts and what Google denies, and then assuming that the NSA is wrong.

This is not a reasonable position for anyone with a technical background. Because anyone with such a background should surely realize that the two statements are not mutually exclusive, and there are plenty of ways for data to be collected which the NSA might reasonable categorize as "direct" while leaving Google with plausible grounds to categorize as "indirect" or otherwise deny knowledge of.
The issue, that Microsoft seems to be blinded to, is that the games will still be the same price as PS4 - absolutely nothing has been said otherwise.
I think the point is that that is not necessarily true for all hash functions, since reordering your example with SHA1 renders it weaker.

If I understood correctly sha1(sha1(secret) + message) is not safe, because from that hash you can calculate sha1(sha1(secret) + message + ANYTHING)