skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the scanner isn't starting off with "17" (as in two ascii characters) it is starting off with a bit mapped image that your brain happens to interpret as the number 17. It is too much to ask that a lossy image compression algorithm never result in a compressed bitmap that your brain interprets exactly as the original.

Having various compression/quality options allows you to pick the tradeoff (file size/resulting quality) that is acceptable for your situtation. There is no perfect setting for all situations. Even the original bitmap is an imperfect (i.e. lossy) rendering of the original document.
To the mod:

POWER is not a typo, and it is not a emphasis, this is the trademark from IBM, the thing is really named POWER in all caps.
So astronomical objects are classifiable under a magnetic AC/DC onotology? Wow. Seems like dualism dies hard.
Agreed, we are thinking the weekly rotation will be better then daily to help whomever is on call to have a sense of "ownership" of the environment.

Our overall goal is to keep the DevOps skills sharp between as many members of the team as possible...
Not necessarily. Any alert system has to walk a very fine line: too few alerts can mean people don't understand what they are or why they're important, but too many alerts leads to people just ignoring them all. Treating them essentially as background noise.

I would imagine that this particular alert system has to deal with this pressure more than most. It's a system that can send an alert to every pocket and purse in the country, complete with audible and visual notification of its arrival. Anyone who has something they want to alert the public about would love to have their alerts go out to that network. But if they all could, it would just train people to ignore the buzzing and flashing -- which could lead to them missing an alert that is genuinely important, such as a dangerous weather event or potential mass-casualty threat in their area.
I was hoping pg would weigh in on the discussion. Didn't he first start out with trying to convince galleries to start online shops?
No major advantage over SMS. It just sounds great, but that's about it. If someone has your phone you are compromised be it via SMS or their app. Disadvantage is numerous, (1) if you lose your phone, you are in for a world of hurt trying to reauthenticate, (2) all users without smart phone are out i.e, users in 3rd world countries where data is readily not available but SMS is. I personally think they should have done both.
> I believe the whole purpose of putting session data into cookies is to prevent the other issues that arise when storing session data on the server's database. The main issue is that when you're load balancing, each request could be load balanced to a different server,

When you are load balancing, request 1 goes to web/app server 1, the app server reads the session id from the cookie and read the session from the db..the next request goes to web server 2, web server 2 reads the session id from the cookie, loads the session from the db...

Each request being load balanced to a different web/app server doesn't affect the session. You are going to read the session id from the signed cookie, and then load the session from the db which is being shared between all of your web/app servers.
No, they're not depriving you of any opportunities to verify. They're offering you a shortcut if you decide that you trust them enough to forgo examining thousands of lines of code. If you decide you want to review the code, just wget it down and then install it after you review it. And if someone doesn't know enough command line to do that, are they really going to be in a position to audit the code?
Rule #1 of security: There is no such thing as perfect security.

Of course there are still problems with two factor authentication, but it's better than the alternative.

If you lose your phone with two factor auth the provider should give you several temporary keys that you can use, or a way to contact their support line and confirm your identity.
Xerox also explicitly recommends the lossy/lousy/normal setting if you need to send the scan over a network.

http://www.dkriesel.com/_media/blog/2013/colorqube.jpg
Even that was difficult because there was no thousands separator.

It normally takes me a moment to understand that 3697893 is three million and not three hundred thousand. It's even worse if that number keeps changing. (Perhaps it's just me because I'm mildly dyslexic.)

Cool project though!
We have not discussed this point, but I'm assuming it's off the table due to cost. And yes, this is for 24x7 rotations where everyone is in the same timezone...
Welcome to HN.

It is a pretty popular web site with a part of the technical crowd. It gets analyzed a lot [1][2]. It also gets a lot of 'spam' (since coverage on the front page of HN can send you lots of traffic [3][4][5]) HN "scores" its participants using a counter 'karma' [6] which also affects features visible to your account (well at least the down vote button) And with any 'score' there are people who score more than others [7]. And where there is scoring there is competition.

The bottom line is that certain behaviors emerge for people who actively try to achieve a 'high score' (more karma) and people who are trying to achieve 'viriality'[8] (more exposure).

It was unkind of me to point out the behavior (usually I just note it and ignore it) and for that I apologize.

Colin (grandparent posting) has a 'thing' about stuff that gets doubly or triply or more posted. I understand the annoyance, it can get annoying. But I've also noted that he posts a lot of links :-) A number of people tend to complain when their version of the link doesn't make it to the front page when someone else's done (it's a 'I'm not getting that karma whine') And generally harmless (other than it sometimes back fires and they get down voted for whining)

[1] http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analys...

[2] http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall

[3] http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/05/26/hacker-news-and-driv...

[4] http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/lessons-learned...

[5] http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/10-lessons-learned-from-a-succes...

[6] http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/10-lessons-learned-from-a-succes...

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

[8] Not exactly a word, but my definition would be the rate at which things spread, especially on the Internet.
Streaming video, even compressed will eat up your data plan pretty quickly.
It does sound like the public-key crypto is one of the best ideas for internet-enabled 2-factor so far, though I haven't quite wrapped my head around the implications of the weird "hash it one less time" backup code method. Based on the description on the skey page here[1], here's some pseudocode of how the challenge works without your phone:

# Create password
client -> hashit 64-bits-of-random-data 10000 > backup.crypt
hashit 64-bits-of-random-data 9999 > backup.code
tell-user "Write this down!" + backup.code
remote-copy user@server backup.crypt
server -> store backup.crypt
counter = 9999

# Log into the server
client -> request-challenge-from user@server
server -> send-reply "send me hash 9999"
client -> read-value "Tell me the backup code you wrote down" backup.code
try-login user@server backup.code
server -> hashit backup.code 1 > trypw.crypt
if trypw.crypt != backup.crypt
fail "Error! wrong backup code"
else
success "Code good!"
counter = 9998
done
client -> hashit the-same-old-64-bits-of-random-data 9998 > backup.code
tell-user "Write down the new backup code!" + backup.code

Edit: so every time you attempt to use a backup code, if it works, you write down a new backup code. Depending on how they implement this, there's a couple fun attacks based on things like the randomness of the pad, if we can force it to reduce the rounds used over a pad (which might not even matter if it's something fast like SHA1), etc. The [remote] security of the second factor now depends on whether or not you can guess a 60-bit "random" hash. Fun stuff.

If I were them, i'd just do e-mailed password resets and leave it up to the user to secure their e-mail. This complicated scheme is way more likely to be exploited somewhere in implementation, considering how rare and custom it is.

[1] http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/CSEL/skey/skey_eecs.html
POS is a standard abbreviation for part-of-speech, but I assume the others aren't ;)
be sure to redirect you bare domain http://the-collage.com/ to the http://www.the-collage.com/ version
If something cool comes out of this I will be very happy.

I always considered POWER much more cool than x86, and was pretty sad when Apple abandoned it.

Also I was happy the current gen consoles used it, but I think Sony move to make it bizarrely complex to the point that noone could code for it, kinda stupid.
Standard idiot-box weasel-wording. Another case study to put on the enormous pile of examples of how not to communicate with your customers.

Pretend you care, blame the users, and don't take any action. Hey, what could be wrong with that?
Samsung is a gigantic company, a South Korean Siemens. They are active in any number of markets, and Apple certainly didn't provide for a majority of their sales.
Twitter account hacked, Twitter suggests calling National Suicide Hotline
SMS is a huge security hole; it's not secure at all. Literally child's play to circumvent, intercept and spoof. (Also, unfortunately, they still have an SMS option for when you lose your device, which doesn't make much sense, but whatever)
I think these graphs are based on the reported number of queries from the companies themselves.

But I think Google has always publicly under-reported the number of search queries they get. So I suspect the number is higher than we're seeing on this page, perhaps by quite a bit.

(Google says "Every day Google answers more than one billion questions" [1]. But that number hasn't changed in years. And technically ten billion questions a day is more than one billion.)

http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html
Is this a real response? It is bylined as "Guest Blogger" and is not in an official-looking blog.
Let's hope it merely correlates with a nicer one. I liked the 90s a lot better than the last decade in many respects.
You should define your "it"'s here, but words don't enter into slang by themselves.
"With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors"

I didn't know Power chip business still existed.
The most surprising thing to me was that, according to this site, there are more YouTube videos being watched every second than there are Google searches made. Does anyone have a source to confirm this?
To summarise, email - that insecure, yet open and mature standard - still beats, hands down without breaking a sweat, the latest fad websites' cool metrics of performance.

It would be very interesting to compare this to whatever is current in 10 years time. I seriously hope we have at least started to consider replacing email by then.
I probably need a /cynic tag for days like today.
Finally. I still don't understand why 1) they took so long to do anything and 2) they did the crappy SMS-only form earlier, but this actually looks like what a reasonable person would implement, given the Twitter user model (mostly moving to mobile clients, crossplatform, etc.)
I am assuming by "keep the session server side", you mean keep it in the RAM. If you want to keep the session in the ram, store it in memcache or redis.

Also, the more complex an app becomes, it's generally desirable to have less state, not more(as in sticky sessions).
Much of it depends on the background of a company. If you are writing software for a large financial institution, chances are the HR department will ask you to wear business casual (or worse). In my experience in the east, middle-sized companies can go either way--some mandate business casual, others don't care. Again, in my experience, this is often related to whether clients are often visiting the offices.

My current employer, with its tech leadership drawn from the Valley, has been incredibly flexible about most things. But we were recently acquired by a more established, traditional company based on the east coast. There are rumors that I'll have to start wearing something other than shorts and t-shirts at the office, but nothing has been handed down yet.
Please don't invent motivations for the statements people make when you don't like what they've stated so far.

If you don't want people browsing your passwords, you can't ever give them access to your user account or your unlocked desktop. That's it, that is the entire solution. Any other method of protecting the passwords is vulnerable as long as the potential attacker has physical access to the unlocked desktop.

Now, perhaps some of this is mitigated by the fact that most of those friends, coworkers, significant others won't know how to install a keylogger or install extensions - but some small percentage will anyway, and those users who were lulled into a false sense of security will have been just as exploited anyway.
I guess its just the complicated production method? How does lithography work with this vertical stacking?
The cool generalized version does exist :). Check out https://www.mepin.com/

We've got RSA 2048 keys on iOS, Android and a separate smartcard USB key, and do 2-factor login and transaction authorization with a simple tap in an app + optional direct login without a password + trusted messaging. Available as an app or an app SDK.

What I'm wondering is whether Twitter is actually protecting the private keys? That's the real tricky part.
There's a kickstarter for that:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/uchek-universal-the-medica...
Your last sentence can really explain it all: television and mass media.
Pretty much all of the WMs and DEs I've installed just to check them out over the years (on Fedora, but I would bet on Ubuntu) have just worked out of the box.

I mean they put the package in the repo! The whole WM/DE thing is a derail, that stuff is just claptrap, window dressing, extremely easy to replace and we have a huge selection of choices.
I don't believe that e.g. JPEG compression can ever take a clearly readable 17 and turn it into a clearly readable 21. Lossy compression implies changing the data, obviously, but it does not have to imply changing the data in that particular way.
What if the Universe is a Computer Simulation? [Youtube]
Game developer salary trends and forecasts
I find the planning of the trip is often the best part. Sometimes the trip itself can be a bit trying, but you've got the memories forever. Plus you tend to remember the positive parts or laugh at the negatives (I've had my passport stolen twice abroad and I actually laugh now, although it did suck at the time).
>"Second, if you spend time helping others only so far as it enriches your life, that is literally the definition of selfishness."

Everyone does selfish things, some of those things make people happier. The author doesn't say to help people to be not selfish, the author says to help people to feel better about yourself.

>"This is NOT an approach to life that should be encouraged or applauded."

Any reason why not?

>"If you are the world's most efficient and productive marble bathtub designer, and you only help others to the extent that it makes you happier, you are a jerk."

What if you are the world's most productive and efficient designer of water systems to help save people in third world countries, and you only do it to the extend it makes you happier, are you still a jerk?

I like the way you pass judgement on people and at the same time try to get people to not help others because you view it as selfish.

[added] scarcrowbob (below) has such a good comment it is quotable.
Kickstarting at the Local Level
Xerox is oh-so subtly shifting the blame on to the user. How slimy.
New microchip sorts white blood cells from whole blood
My Burning Man packing list from last year
Session id in a secured cookie and then loading the session from db/memcache/ram/custom-backend is standard practice and is something that is provided by most frameworks. What exactly did you gain by using a non-signed cookie other than opening yourself to replay attacks? If you felt like directly setting a cookie instead of just `session['user_id'] = some-user-id`, why did you forgo signed cookies?
Let's take that premise to OCR then. This whole debacle started with JBIG2 settings that I guess duplicated(?) one section and inserted it where similar text exists. Only it was marginally similar.

According to Adam (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156418) this is a known problem that Xerox, who call themselves document people for crying out loud, should have known and compensated for.
WigWag Home Automation Device Monitors Your Home
SQL Case Study: Removing bias from customer analysis
The big news: Once Ciavarella was convicted, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed out 4,000 convictions issued by the judge. Will the kids or their families get any restitution for wrongful imprisonment?
This is true in Android as well, at least on my Galaxy S III running Android 4.1.2. The preference setting on my device is in Messaging > Settings > Emergency Alerts.
Common beginner Python errors
Based on what I read about Valve, it is not surprising that they have a lot of politics going on. That's the issue with flat structures - when authorities and accountabilities are unclear, you need make alliances (seen as "cliques" from the exterior) to get your projects moving forward.

On the contrary, Holacracy has processes that push for clarity. It distinguishes people and their roles, and provides forums (e.g., clear meeting processes) to address misalignments and conflicts between roles, in service of the company's purpose. It's well explained in this 3-min video http://youtu.be/9U_XDin5tjI

Disclosure; I work with HolacracyOne. Hope that clarifies the difference a bit
The thing I see is that the customers who are most likely to ask aggressively for things are the customers I want the least. It burns out your support resources, and running a support organization is /hard/ - and it's really, really important.

Running a support organization is hard because people who have both social skills and technical skills are... well, they are very, very valuable, and quickly price themselves out of what you usually pay support. Most people focus on one or the other (the technical or the social) - so usually you end up hiring either socially optimized folk and try to automate (or teach) the technical side, or take the technically optimized, and try to put a level one 'shield'(of folks with social skills) in front of them)

You also get huge levels of burn-out in support. I think this gets worse the more you try to stick with policy (as opposed to "just help the customer") - at least for me, it's really rough when I'm supposed to just get the guy off the phone, rather than solve a problem. Even in the best of times, doing support is rough; everyone you encounter has a problem with your service. The phone support desks for larger services are usually places people go to become cynical.

My /goal/ (and I don't achieve this goal very often) is to go out of my way for customers who ask in a way that is easy for me to deal with on a logistical/emotional level (yeah, emotions are important here; I have... limited support resources) - and then to be more "well, this is policy" for the more aggressive, harder to deal with customers.

The hard part is that the customers who are best of all... those who don't ask for any extra attention at all, are the hardest to give something 'extra' to.

(now, I can identify about 10 ways that I'm failing those customers right now... I'm just saying, it's harder to know what people want when they are not aggressive about it... but those are the folks who burn the least customer service resources, both in the 'use' and 'burn out' senses.)
The site crashed Firefox almost immediately and died in Chrome after a few minutes on my laptop.
This has got to be a case of them being completely out of touch with the average user.

I've been using web browsers for over 10 years and assumed a browser wouldn't make it this easy to find passwords.

After reading this I quickly checked and saw over 50 accounts listed all with the passwords in plain text next to them.

I guarantee each and every one of my friends that don't work in IT don't know about this - I could ask them all if I could quickly borrow there laptop to check a soccer score and find out the majority of there passwords.

What needs to be done is make people more aware of what's happening when they save a password - and perhaps a quick pop up in the bottom right coming up notifying them which passwords are saved and if they want to clear them before lending out, or leaving it unattended.
This is an absolutely hilarious technical response to a real world customer issue. The customer does not care one iota that their photocopier uses one compression algorithm over another. And the fact there is not one mention of the word 'copy' in that entire post, is very telling of the technical disconnect exhibited here. The 'Xerox devices' in question are completely broken from a usability perspective.
Discussion last night ("Just got an Amber Alert ..."): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165026 had predominantly "think of the children, how can you complain about your minor inconvenience" prevailing tone.

I wonder what makes this thread so different. More people are focused on the costs as well as the benefits (I agree that the costs are significant). If it's not just a random difference in the initial seeding of comments, I'd have to guess that it's the authority of latimes.com talking about how (many!) Californians are startled etc. Now this is a safe, approved line of thought.

This calls into suspicion the independence of the typical HN comment. If you're just posting to be seen on the prevailing side, why comment at all? The less deeply you think before talking, the more you're swayed by subtle priming and attention-focusing trivia.

Also interesting, a years-ago attempt to shame Apple into enabling Amber alerts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509741

It sounds like a less intrusive amber-alert UI (a regular text, for example) would be accepted by most, although I'm sure if you tally up the attention spent vs. the increased odds of catching a criminal vs. increased harassment of near-matches, it's not a clear win.
Python’s new enum module
You sound as if you don't believe you can have adventures with a wife and a kid?
Strong feeling of deja vu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platf...
Triple-electron qubits provide a new level of quantum reliability
I'm using two ways to make my customers pay:

1st, I offer 2% sconto (discount/allowance), if they pay within 7 days. Customers who can count, and have no cash flow problem normally use this 2% discount.

2nd, I'm using a factoring bank, for those customers who payed late the first time. The bank will pay me immediate and has good attorneys to get the money from the bad customer. Factoring will charge a margin comparable to 3 month EURIBOR.

Normally a customer who has been contacted by my factoring bank phones back within a few days, claiming that they will pay next invoice immediate to get rid of the shame of a factoring bank registering a bill debt.

I'll then try the next (3rd) invoice in normal way. And if they dont use the discont and pay within 7 day, I'll stop doing business with them, regardless how much they beg me to complete the project.

My time is to valuable to fight bad customers.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoring_%28finance%29

and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounts_and_allowances