skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would change a lot if it were true. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft plans to build the expertise necessary to abandon Intel, though. And though they're making inroads into building their own hardware, I don't think they're in any position to abandon their OEMs yet, either.
Have a kid or two and tell me that with a straight face.
Apple Should Protect Me From My Porn Addiction
My apologies for summarizing things a little too casually, and thank you for the excellent papers. I'm especially impressed by the cross-campus timing attack in Boneh.

My knowledge of convert channel attacks and timing attacks mostly dates to the 90s. Here's what little I know, for whatever it might be worth:

1. If your crypto primitives take variable time and your attacker can see that, you're hosed. Any encryption system with variable time encryption is useless unless you can somehow quantize it safely.

2. Eliminating covert channels is very nearly impossible. The literature on this goes way back, and it's ugly.

Should most users defend against these attacks? The timing attacks, yes. But I would assert that if a hardware encryption module appears to operate in constant time, most users should trust it. But as always, it depends on your threat model.

For something like a serious credit card vault, I still think your best bet is to get it off the network, build and audit a custom protocol that only passes a known set of messages, rate limit those messages, and quantize message timings. At that point, your biggest problems are bribery, insiders and physical security.

But if you do all that, I can't imagine why you would want to generate your encryption keys using somebody else's black-box hardware. Entropy pools are a good idea, even if you decide to trust your hardware AES implementation.

(And yes, I'm still oversimplifying. Hacker News is no substitute for a real threat analysis and security audit, nor for a conversation with whoever regulates or insures your business.)
In Kuwait, Instagram Accounts Are Big Business
Trust Yourself and Your Life
Oh, boy. I've gotten our rails dev environment set up on a dozen different machines now and there's always a little problem here or there. One thing I can say right off the bat: I could never get it fully up and running on Windows, unfortunately.

But we have had success on both OS X and Linux machines.

The trick is to 1) install rbenv or rvm, 2) build the right version of ruby, 3) install the right gems, 4) make sure your PATH is set up properly.

The rails consultancy thoughtbot has a script you can run to just magically set up a new laptop for rails development. I don't do this (too magical, and too little control), but I usually pull up the script[1] just to remind myself of what things I need to attend to and install.

Feel free to hit me up at my email address in my profile if you're stumped on something. I've probably seen most issues by now...

[1] https://raw.github.com/thoughtbot/laptop/master/linux
Re 1: You have to know to open the page (in the menu, or at chrome://downloads) -- by default it just shows you the download bar at the bottom of the page where you downloaded the file.

Re 2: Parent probably is confused by extensions versus web apps. I find this confusing too, since it's up to the developer to choose which form factor to use when writing the extension/app.
Use node.js! It's as easy as npm install, npm start. Few other steps for the mongodb as well. None of this weird rvm crap. 90% of the time we're just putting text on the screen in various arrangements. Doesn't need to be rocket science.
I follow this guide to set up rvm, ruby, and rails: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you/
Well, that's totally worth doubling Google's headcount.
Would you recommend that strategy--having a quiet, unmemorable, word-of-mouth-driven initial launch (which you can call a "beta period"), and then, once you've already got some hooks into the press and a good userbase, a follow-on publicity stunt (which you can call a "launch")?
This looks cool. BTW, thanks for helping me not feel like a total moron while learning Python, the hard way was the right way.
It's in Help -> Troubleshooting

Read this article to see what it preserves (or "tries to preserve"): http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix...

FWIW, I just tried it and it indeed made things a whole lot faster.
Not at this time but we want to start simple.

I would rather we perfected the simple stuff then added the things that increased value and that people are actually wanting.
> I guess it's a good thing then that Intel added RdRand on IvyBridge. And doesn't TPM also have hardware RNG in it?

Sarcasm detected. Intentional or no?
"So can popes in the Vatican"
List of 700+ MOOC courses:
http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses

Bioinformatic open curriculum:
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

I once had this idea of making an open source project where people could engage and create online curriculums based only on MOOC courses. But as always I'm full of ideas but with very little will power to make them happen.

I think what comes closest to it is:
http://universityofreddit.com/
Of course, since the article was written, we've had Storm, Riemann and Cascalog. That's 3 killer apps on the platform. I don't think Clojure is going away anytime soon.
Wasn't looking forward to this "upgrade" ...
The fact that it's from the same dude as PulseAudio is enough to make me anxious, the pulseaudio stuff didn't go smooth. (I'm still of ALSA, yes also is a mess to.)

So I hope I won't be forced, to a more crappy system !

The fact that it will be handling a lot of stuff more, sounds like a major pita ...
Then surely they must logically also assume that when the prime minister's FM radio is tuned between channels he is receiving encrypted transmissions from terrorists. Are they going to xkcd-538 him for the key then?

This stuff is not ok. Not at all.
How is this different from
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/
Maybe I can help! http://askabootstrapper.com
It felt like the main difference from most essays is that this one give lots of concrete examples of everything he talks about.

I'm in two minds about this. It makes it more accessible, but seems like it could divert attention away from the general point to the specific companies.
>How does research 'work' then?

Well, often enough a prof may have several projects going. universities usually assign you classes to lecture based on how much research you have going on. It would be impossible to organize research activities on an ongoing constant basis for a department of researchers. Sometimes you have too much work sometimes not enough.

>but the incentives lead to weaker instruction than a pure instructor. Especially in entry level courses.

Yeah, I agree it isn't optimal.

>You get travesties such as people who have very thick accents

Oh, get over it. This is more urban legend than reality. Learn to work with people who aren't from your home town.

> and bad language skills teaching second year courses because it's a research university.

May be annoying for you if it isn't your field and you just need some science courses; but if you want to work with people who are doing interesting leading research in some field, there's a good chance you'll have to work with people who aren't native English speakers.
Or just mine bitcoin with that spare CPU. Works great on mobile devices! http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/07/esea-2/
We haven't bought the hardware yet although we have a shortlist so I can't give you any specifics at this time :(

Backups won't be online from day one I don't think but it is something we will be looking at soon after.

Power/Bandwidth is a strange beast in the UK: Up north, power is cheap and bandwidth is expensive but it is the other way round the further south you go! (anecdotal evidence but it's broadly true)

We are looking at up to 16GB at the moment but we are not ruling out bigger VMs

We will be based on Hyper-V 2012.

More details will be forthcoming as we get nearer the launch date.
Probably RAID 1 (or manufacturer equivalent) for the VMs.
Answers for bad questions on Stack Overflow
I know you're not on a mac, but I just re-setup a mac and went through this. So, for anyone wondering. Luckily with homebrew supporting rbenv now it's a lot easier to do.

Download the git installer and run it.

Install homebrew using their script.

brew install rbenv

brew install ruby-build

Once that is done you'll need to copy some stuff in your shell profile. It will tell you the two lines. Restart your shell.

Here's the first trick. You need openssl:

brew install open-ssl

(make sure "qmake" is now available or restart shell and see)

To see ruby versions: rbenv install -l

I installed 2.0.0-rc2: rbenv install 2.0.0-rc2

Almost there! Set it as your global ruby

rbenv global 2.0.0-rc2

Make sure this outputs the right ruby version now: ruby -v

Now install bundler and rails!

gem install bundler

gem install rails

I probably missed a step or two, but I just ran through that process and had a few bumps in the road as usual myself.
Chrome is very fast on my 4.8Ghz Windows PC with literally hundreds of tabs open sometimes. Almost as fast as Waterfox. If it slows with a few tabs my guess would be the OS is swapping Chrome processes memory to the swap file (or files). FWIW I just put 32GiB in my machines and remove all swap files.
I should qualify that statement as it sounds a bit "final"... I mean that we want to release as few features as we can that still provide value at the start, then we perfect them before adding more as time goes on and as demand rises.

I think Jason Fried said something along the lines of "it's better to release a well done half than a half-assed whole"

That sounds a bit better :)
Actually, he was in normal mode and issued

5dd

at the start of the block.
Holy shit. This is exactly what I've been doing and it's working incredibly well. For PG to confirm everything I've been doing...I'm on cloud nine.
I thought Sulu looked familiar. It's Grant Imahara from MythBusters!
This is wasteful of people's electricity and inefficient at the same time. Opting people in to wasting their battery life or raising their electric bill is treating users as a means rather than an end.
Anyone had luck compiling this on OSX?
I honestly wish I could use Firefox as my development environment. I prefer Firebug to the Chrome dev tools. But I've been slowly forced to admit that it can't keep up. With Chrome, I can casually open up a dozen tabs without considering the consequences; in Firefox, I get worried when I have two open. This pans out in the Activity Monitor.

There exist huge inconsistencies in all of these claims, and it's extremely strange how difficult it is to work out what third variables are involved that are causing such vastly different reports.
That's not a problem with Stephen's approach, that's simply what he was writing about. I found it to be a great concise presentation. Your post and his post have different goals, that does not make either one better than the other.
>> Unfortunately, desktop Firefox does not have multi-process architecture yet.

I personally hate Chrome for creating a process per tab. It adds a little bit of security, but it makes harder to manage the processes in a system.
"People would be calling us constantly."

"Let's try it for a few days and find out. I'll answer the calls."
It's not about saying things that might upset some group. It's about saying things in a public forum that are deliberately upsetting and abusive and promoting hatred. You don't have to worry about it because you know exactly what you are doing when you do it. It's like worrying about getting a ticket because you accidentally drove in reverse down a one way street. And if you look the vast majority of cases get dismissed.

Also consider that American corporations wield an immense power to restrict speech, and they are quite liberal about doing so.
Try Linux Mint instead...

Its Ubuntu under the hood, but has a windows like UI.

I almost gave up on Rails because I was using windows; life is easier as a rails developer with Linux or a Mac.
Hijacking my cpu without my consent is not doing good. There is nothing good about that.
It's a bit more complicated than that. In many of the former communist countries (Russia looks like one, Romania is another), communist authorities spent great effort to extinguish religion and turn everyone atheist (not sure why). However, that didn't really work; even now, many people are still deeply religious, in spite of everything the communists did.
Startup Spring: Tech Entrepreneurs In The Middle East
systemd also logs stderr + stdout, so if some daemon fails to start up, you can easily see it in 'service $SERVICE status'.

A lot of things could theoretically be done by putting that all in a sysvinit script. That means duplicating that in every sysvinit script. Bugs galore :P
You wouldn't believe how often I've attempted to make myself available to other areas of the company that have needed help. But I was hired to write code, so I should just focus on that. ;-)
Arab Women Entrepreneurs: Untraditional Choice
yep, I probably should have named it "less evil."
I'll admit having a custom "cd" makes me really itchy, but rvm is the path of least resistance (mysql and ubuntu are the same: itchy PLR)

http://railsinstaller.org/
Ricon East 2013 Videos
Fair point.

However, Zimmerman disobeyed instructions when he was told to not follow the kid, went after him, and confronted him. Standing his ground?

And speaking of 'stand your ground': http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57433184/fla-mom-gets-20...
KillTheYak.com is seeking contributors
If you just chase, not brandishing a weapon, screaming threats or in some other way giving a person being chased reasonable fear for his life, then the person punching is at fault. Running on the street is not a violation of anybody's rights, and you do not have to have any specific "good reason" to run on the street, neither is running while other person is present on the same street. Punching one in the nose, on the other hand, is.
systemd is not something that is intentionally put up to prevent Hurd or FreeBSD from being popular.

When I asked about the Hurd of FreeBSD versions of Debian, it seems that stuff has to compile against it. Every Debian maintainer has to already spend a lot of time on it, while the usage is pretty low.

Furthermore, it seems rarely useful. At most in the 'it compiles, but does not run, ship it anyway!' stage.

If people want Hurd or FreeBSD, then why not have them put in a bit more effort? Not like sysvinit will be completely broken.
Haven't heard about lot of users complaining about the way Arch developers did it. In fact I think it works flawlessly.
South Sudan: Vroom, Vroom In The Bush
Also in for a cameo appearance is Jamie Bamber, who played Apollo in BSG. Seems appropriate :)

Couple more surprises in there, but I don't want to spoil too much.
Of course it is relevant - the history of interest in topics of violence and describing one's fighting prowess is highly relevant when the case is about a fight and who initiated it. It's like saying in case about hacking it is irrelevant if the participant in the case is an accomplished hacker or doesn't even know where "any key" is. Of course it's relevant.

It has absolutely nothing to do with Martin being black or white or any other color, nobody said the missing information is relevant because Martin was black (and that fact was obvious from the start, so nobody in his right mind could claim there's some new information there) - the claim was that the information was relevant because Martin allegedly had closer relation to violence and firearms that was previously known. Nobody ever claimed that Martin was aggressive because he was black.
The racism charge is pure bullshit. It is a fallacy to claim that it is always racist to say some particular black man is violent, because it "implies the stereotype". Well, some people are violent, and some black people are too - and the question was not whether Martin was black and thus violent (it is obvious he's black but that says nothing of him being violent) but whether Martin was violent regardless of him being black. And the data in the phone was relevant to that. Exactly because it is not imply that Martin was violent just from him being black, we need some evidence beyond that to figure out if he was - and the phone data is that evidence.
you could try vagrant, not sure if its the VDI that you were referring to, but I would say that setup generally seems smoother inside of linux vs. other environments (so it's worth it to deal with the extra complexity of a vm)

there are a bunch of github projects that you can get that has everything to setup a VDI- this one seems popular: https://github.com/amaia/rails-starter-box

there's also a railscast about it: http://railscasts.com/episodes/292-virtual-machines-with-vag...
But of course! All the other Android manufacturers must be absolutely blind not to try all these things as well! That must be the reason they are all struggling so much and Samsung is stomping all over their profits!

Or maybe... Could it be that Android has commoditized the handset business, just as Windows did the PC hardware business, so maybe all those things don't help as much any more?

In response to your edit: It's not really Samsung bringing new things to the table, it's Google and maybe to some extent Apple. The big innovations aren't in the hardware or even the software, it's in the services, such as Siri and Now. Sure every Android vendor and their grandmother have their own cloud services, but the ones everybody wants are Google's. Unfortunately, since it's not limited to a specific Android manufacturer, it wouldn't help Nokia either.
To all those who are replying to me that I have misinterpreted this as beginner material, well the first sentence does say that it's an "introduction to Haskell monads".
Interesting. I wonder if anyone has built (or it would make any practical sense) a distributed silent bot net not for DDoS of websites but rather of math.

Imagine a small, otherwise-benign virus which simply spends some of your CPU cycles cracking something. Computers are pretty fast these days. It'd sure be easier to brute-force attack a password with thousands of average computers than one big one.

(I realize it'd probably be vastly easier and more practical to simply buy cloud-based CPU cycles, of course.)
You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy.

I'd like to elaborate on this point, because it's probably the most valuable thing I learned while working at Cloudkick.

Similar to how every Marine is a rifleman, I think every developer should be tech support[1]. It's an incredibly easy way to please users. Many customers don't realize how small your company is. They expect an experience similar to Comcast or Verizon: Listening to on-hold muzak interrupted by advertisements. Forced to enter obscure info such as an account number on a billing statement. Getting handed between people in various departments, each time repeating answers to the same set of questions.

To your users, it's as if they called Comcast and a cable modem firmware developer picked up the phone.

Could you imagine how much you would love Comcast if that happened to you? You'd still love it if the person said, "Oh sorry, that's a bug in our firmware. We'll probably have it fixed by tomorrow. I'll contact you with an update then."

That sort of support is impossible in a larger company. It makes your users outrageously happy. Many of them will praise you publicly and tell their friends how great you are.

1. Modulo standard disclaimers, working at a small startup, etc. I also think everyone should be in the on-call rotation, but that's another can of worms.
> I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy.

Aren't lots of service companies killed this way? Bending over backward for some client? Maybe they are small companies rather than startups...

Guess I'm being picky though: pg's point is an excellent one.
Excellent read and dead-on. It's something I'm working on every day since launch and will be a good point of reference should I need reminding.
That's how I first learned about bitcoin few years back. I've visited some forum and noticed Firefox started taking 100% CPU suddenly. Quick analysis of site's resources showed the admin included a third-party script for mining bitcoins.
Why nobody's built a startup around this already:

(a) There's no money to be had. A company that offered to solve your distributed problems using distributed JavaScript could only charge as much as the spot price of buying EC2 instances. Otherwise, you'd just buy the EC2 instances and solve it there. A problem not amenable to solving with temporary machines wouldn't be amenable to solving with times slices of JavaScript running on webpages.

It would take millions of page views to get the CPU-time equivalent of an hour running compiled code on an EC2 instance. That means the eCPMs the company could reasonably charge, or pay its publishers hosting the code, are thousands of times less than they earn from advertising.

(b) It's a net negative for the economy. Distributing work through JavaScript on webpages is an involuntary donation from employers/schools moreso than the person behind the computer. That extra expense with no gain for the business/school has to be made up somewhere -- higher prices or lower wages/employment.

(c) It's a net negative for the environment. The problems could be solved faster on bare metal with server-class hardware, concentrated in data centers built where energy is the cheapest, usually because there's solar/hydro/wind generated nearby. Solving them on desktop/mobile CPUs, in an interpreted language, powered by coal-generated electricity, would be a waste you'd measure in tons of CO2 that didn't need to be released.
Individual vehicles self-assemble, coordinate, and take flight
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systemd supports /usr just fine. It is the other software that is broken. The systemd package on Gentoo was packaged wrongly, which made people think that the problem lied with systemd, not that is said that other software is broken.

This has been clarified a great number of times, also by Lennart. If you're against systemd because of /usr, you're not against systemd :D
How would you define "manual user acquisition"?

Thanks for posting this. I hope you and others write more on failed products/companies. They are very enlightening, despite the details left out for privacy/embarrassment.
This isn't "less evil" either, this is taking advantage of the unaware visitor resources without his consent; if I found a site doing this I would think it's downright malware.
This only really works if idle time is considered wasteful, but it's not. Electricity, battery life, cooling all come into effect. And to make a real squeeze out of those spare CPU cycles, JavaScript probably isn't the best choice.

There is also a bandwidth cost of delivering the application and sending the results.

But having said that, yes there is a cost, but there could also be a real gain for that cost. Replacing adverts with CPU cycles only changes the nature of paying indirectly for something. There should always be an easy way to opt out and users should know it's happening.
This is a library-specific solution to a specific case of JavaScript memory management. Perhaps it should be titled, "Cleaning up event listeners with JQuery."

You should mention what happens if you don't remove the event listeners.

In the Closure Library, you can do something similar with a EventHandler, http://docs.closure-library.googlecode.com/git/class_goog_ev...