skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect that there's a threshold effect going on: if you naturally read faster than a certain speed, certain design tricks will actually make you read even faster. If you naturally read slower, then those same tricks slow you down.

Would love to see it confirmed or falsified.

(As a note, I am probably under this hypothetical threshold; I'm not a slow reader, but I find that efforts to speed up my reading speed generally push it down instead.)
>>>> It's not speculation

"Rytilä says the move will be done in order to unify all of Microsoft’s branding, which I’m personally translating to only one thing – the Lumia line will become the Surface line, and Microsoft is absolutely planning on releasing an actual, honest to god Surface Phone. By name.

Of course, that’s not really confirmed – that’s just an assumption"

So when the author admits it as their own assumption, that's not speculation??
This actually strains my eyes quite a bit, but that's just 1 personal sample.
Not only did it happen before, just TODAY I had to fight back an attempt by a Red Hat engineer who wanted to add a configuration option which would once again allow RDRAND to be used directly, bypassing the entropy pool: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/5/212
GDP revised down dramatically in Q1. Q2 revised up to 2.5% on inventory growth and export growth very one-offish events. Q2 consumption part of GDP lower that Q1. With Fed induced spike in interest rates, mortgage apps are way down and housing sales figures are cooling fast. Emerging market currencies are being routed. Europe continues to languish. Employment is a lagging indicator.
Wikimedia Privacy Policy draft needs your feedback.
> More recently, it had been in acquisition talks with Square, which also fell through, possibly because Braintree is asking for too high a valuation.

> According to industry sources, Braintree has been asking for $1 billion, which seems unrealistic.

It would seem that other suitors are trying to pressure Braintree to lower their target
The source article does not say this.

"Microsoft will purchase the license to use the Nokia brand on mobile phones for ten years. It will also buy the ‘Lumia’ and ‘Asha’ brands.

On smartphones, we’ll be seeking to create a unified brand across Lumia and Windows. But we understand that the Asha and feature phone range will carry on the ‘Nokia’ branding."

That is the totality of the text relating to this. The "unified brand" may very well be "Introducing the Nokia 1030, powered by Windows Phone" for all we know. Am I missing a piece of the discussion here? It seems like it would be massively wasteful and callous for Microsoft to throw away the cachet Nokia has established with its highly recognizable, warmly regarded smartphones.
Android Browser on Google TV, and Java libraries hitting our APIs. Google TV and Android browsers are critical to our business.
The majority of legal adults now have the choice of what consensual sexual activity they wish to take part in, up to a point - you can choose today to have homosexual sex or heterosexual sex, to live a bisexual lifestyle, to dress as hamster and masturbate with watermelon in your underwear or ...

and you can choose to label yourself according to the sexual activity you partake in [or the complete opposite, or any label you like it seems; not that labels make something true of course].

So you can be homosexual, bisexual, arthrosexual, heterosexual, autosexual, or whatever and you don't need a medical procedure to make you that way you just need to take part in some consensual sexual activity.
Toy helicopter lops top of man’s head off
I try to write the simplest code possible. It always end up being shorter than if I didn't.

Also, of two okay-looking pieces of code, I noticed that the shortest is almost always the simplest. Which makes size a pretty good metric.
How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?
> relentlessly applying a critical eye on everything I write and others write

Honestly, I believe that this is one of the best habits I've developed at my current workplace. We use Code Collaborator (a code review tool) for about 90% of all commits; I like using to get at least one pair of eyes on my code, but even further, I only even send out a review after I've gone through my own diff with a fine-toothed comb.
Encrypting DNS traffic should also be considered:

http://dnscrypt.org/
The timetable, guarantees, etc. hold no relevance outside of a courtroom. Banks do not hold a trial before honoring a request to reverse a charge; they take the cardholder's word. Unless the merchant can provide a signature and proof of delivery of some item, they're not going to be able to dispute the chargeback either; the bank is leaving it up to the court system to resolve payment disputes outside of a few narrow circumstances. Nobody's going to take every funder that charges back a payment to court to prove they are not owed that refund, so in practice, everyone involved in crowdfunding has to deal with the fact that some of the money is going to disappear no matter what is written.
I said exactly this to my girlfriend about a year ago: "I've got a genius idea, what about a netflix for books?" She said, "You mean a library?"

Now I'm not sure who was right...
Two eyes shined greenly.

Muhahahaha
BeeLine Reader applies a color gradient to text that helps reduce "line transition errors" [...] This increases reading speed, particularly on mobile devices that have small screens and short lines

Err. Line transition errors are common on mobile devices, not because lines are short (the shorter the line, the less common line transition errors are), but because people are usually moving, walking, etc while holding a mobile device.
Credit Card Chargebacks. It's easier for a card company to agree with their customer who says "I paid for this thing on the internet and the company never delivered", than to dig into the details of a random crowd funded project, and read through any promises or lack thereof of deliverables, etc...
This is a natural outcome of prioritizing 'safety' over 'freedom.'

I have no hope for change until I hear people standing up and saying "I'd rather die than live without privacy." Or even more powerful "I would rather my children face danger than fear their own government."
On Schneier's blog here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_s...
Square processes $10b. BrainTree processes $10b.

How is Square valued at $4b and BrainTree can't sell for $1b?
Yes, from the New York Times:

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.
We do not live in an episode of 24, and a world where Jack Bauer exists. We live in reality. A reality where governments abuse mass surveillance to squash political movements all the time. If the NSA had the power they do today, back in the '60s, there would be no MLK Jr. or civil rights movement. It would be interesting to see what role the NSA played in the fizzle-out of the Occupy movement. My bet is, they had a prominent role in not letting it truly matter.
And I would imagine that your password is complex enough that it would be hard to recite in a moment of passion. That being a rather single-thread activity.
Yes, and I think anyone who is reasonably good at math is qualified to do so. I'm not saying I could build undefeatable crypto, mind; I'd have to spend a year brushing up my number theory before I'd make an attempt and I don't fool myself that I'm smarter than the average NSA analyst, so I might well fail.

But if you want proper crypto and are willing to invest some time in it, I'd say take a strong open source algorithm and then rewrite it. Sure, maybe there's backdoors in the compilers, in the chips, maybe they have quantum computers and there's backdoors in the fabric of reality.

My point is not that I know unbeatably secure crypto, but that I have always assumed the NSA was using any and all means available to defeat crypto, and if you ever thought otherwise you were telling yourself fairy stories.
In poker optimal strategy is not winning strategy.

An optimal strategy’s goal is to loose the least against any arbitrary strategy. It is a strategy that is impossible to exploit in poker because poker has antes.

Poker players must seek maximal strategy. A maximal strategy’s goal is to win as much as possible against a specific strategy.
Applying the gradient when you select text might work. For some reason I already have a habit of obsessively selecting text when I am reading, and I've seen other people that do it as well.
They really shouldn't call it "Netflix for books" because then they'll just get a constant stream of "you mean a library?".

They should call it "Netflix for ebooks".
IANAL either, but I believe. MPL can be imported by a GPL project, but not the other way around, as the importer would need to be licensed as GPL, too.
From what I can tell it is for ebooks, so not quite a library. :)
Consumer Electronics Show is storing all attendee passwords in plain text.
That is a really weird conclusion to draw from this article. I don't know who you think is "vilifying" encryption as an application of mathematics.
I agree. I would be much more excited about this announcement if it sounded a bit more open for other browsers to join in.
Both (leaning more heavily towards bad)

Bad:
Paypal as a potential suitor will make some existing and potential customers very nervous and that won't be good for customer acquisition. Other potential suitors may see other heavyweights passing on the deal as a negative.

Good:
The attention may increase the pool of suitors.
Why you should prefer placeholder selectors in Sass
Growth, and probably Stripe plays no small part.
/r/askscience is infested with a bunch of literal-minded and narrow-minded individuals, with groupthinkers, and with group-up-voters and group-down-voters. Heaven forbid you use a metaphor to make an abstract concept easier to understand. It's like preaching to the "Bible is literal truth" crowd.
The thing is...

...nothing is being sold.
Your point would come across better if you had mentioned monopolizing markets illegally and other MS actions rather than the silly straw man there.
That was one theory behind the rise in traffic. People purposefully generating fake traffic.
Parsing is one of the most competitive areas of research in NLP and yes, you are correct, doing it well is very difficult. State-of-the-art performance on newswire data is around 95% if you score local structure.

miket has already replied with a well-established lexical parser. The Stanford parser is one of the most robust out there, you could also go for the BLLIP (or Charniak or Charniak and Johnson) re-ranking parser [1] that although a bit old and fiddly (the GitHub version is very solid though) tends to perform well.

However, both the Stanford and BLLIP parsers are constituency parsers (now we are going to go all linguistic here) and there is an alternate paradigm of dependency grammars [2]. I have heard a couple of times that Google is running a variant of the MaltParser [3] in-house and it is a very solid piece of work (the command-line interface requires some patience though, but there is plenty of documentation). People for example in Information Extraction (IE) tends to favour dependency grammars, probably since you get relevant modifiers closer to your point of interest in the tree.

Now, we could also go into richer grammars like Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) [4] and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) [5] but I think this reply is long enough by now...

Personally I favour dependency parsing since there is more annotated data for it across plenty of languages. Also, the paradigm can cope with a lot of linguistic wonkiness that is very much present in language other than English (free word order and non-projective structures for example)

[1]: https://github.com/dmcc/bllip-parser

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar

[3]: http://maltparser.org/

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_categorial_grammar

[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_gr...
Don't underestimate my multi-tasking ability.
I agree it was probably redundant; however, I was the first person other than OP to upvote the post and comment on it. I thought it was a good read, didn't want it to get buried, so upvoted and left a brief comment. Will refrain from doing the commenting next time.
That's not how valuations work. There are a lot more factors than current revenue. Their business models are somewhat different.
Maybe it's because Square has a higher percentage of small merchants on their service, who can't negotiate better rates?
Ok, this is awesome
It sounds like it's close to hurting performance for legit users. Also, since we don't know what the botnet operator's planning, it's probably safest for Tor to try to stop it.
Most security researchers use Windows because that's where the 'action is' so to speak. If he wasn't running Windows, he'd be firing up a Windows VM more often than not.
But in order to create a disguised compiler, you need to know what method a compromised system uses to decide whether something is a compiler.

i.e., you actually have to have an example of a compromised compiler, which pretty much solves the problem in the first place.

If you decidedly don't-trust the only compiler on your system, and don't trust outside sources, the only solution is to hand-assemble a new compiler on the system, and hope that at least the hardware is trustworthy. which it isn't, necessarily.
I'm not sure how Indiegogo or Paypal are on the hook for anything. Suppose for the sake of discussion for a second that MP is a complete and overt fraud, and they intend to do nothing but take the money and run. So I contributed to the project, in hope to get the product eventually, but instead I just out of $X and have my faith in humanity dinged. But both Indiegogo and Paypal are just middlemen, as far as I can see, they guarantee me nothing. How are they on the hook for anything?
WOW, I just tried this on some text and although I think I'd need some more objective tests, it FEELS faster, like significantly so.
Assuming this is a botnet, it would be quite interesting to have the botnet controller simultaneously turn all of those tor clients into tor relays.
This would be a strange step considering that Google spent so much time, energy and money to convince developers to use a very specific design language and application flow to give users a unified experience of Android across many apps.

If they would do this we'd have a new set of apps that behaved and felt very differently which would probably cause a lot of confusion among users.

What I could imagine is some kind of framework that makes it easier to share data and state between a Chrome app on the desktop and Android apps on mobile.
I have written lots of Java code accessing HTTPS sites with 2048 or 3072-bit RSA. This is perfectly supported. You do not even need the Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files to use such RSA key sizes (other algorithms are restricted).

I can't comment on Android Browser on Google TV, but I very highly doubt it fails to support 2048-bit RSA keys. If that was the case, half the HTTPS websites would be unbrowsable(!) [1]

[1] Per the EFF SSL observatory dataset, roughly 1 in 2 websites uses key lengths strictly higher than 1024 bits.
Security and Hacking apps for Android devices
Amen. The continued use of the asinine, glaring white background with dark text on it doesn't make sense. It's a failed product of the late-'80s/early-'90s "desktop publishing" fad in which developers sought to make the screen an analogy for a piece of paper.

The error here is that a piece of paper doesn't EMIT light. Current default GUIs are the equivalent of reading text off the surface of a light bulb all day. Stupid.

At least every GUI except the Mac's lets you set up a readable system-wide color scheme. Sadly, Microsoft's engineering has degraded to the point where they don't remember how simple color settings work; many of their UIs are unusable now because of hard-coded colors and invisible text: http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/5115887665/in/set-...
Migrate On-Premises MySQL Data to Amazon RDS (and back)
This would let you run tests, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctest

On the other hand, why not just make it statically typed and list the types for each function?
You're assuming no fraud at all exists on Indiegogo.

Someone could demand a refund because:

1) Their credit card was stolen and used to fund a project. They never agreed to the charge,they're entitled to a refund.

2) The project was fraudulent. The creators never intended to fund the project using the money. They ran off with it instead. Those people were deceived, and are entitled to a refund (in general, but also under the credit card associations rules).

Some potion of transaction on Indiegogo will be fraudulent. Paypal or Indiegogo must have a way of recovering that money.. if they don't then they will have to cover it themselves. That's the way it works. That's why payment processors create reserves for high-risk businesses.
I would also love to see Clearly integration! I use it for everything, and you don't need to fuss with background colors or anything.

Please give more options for colors and gradients. I'm sure everyone has different tastes and habits.
In this context, an adversary is any encrypted data they want to be able to decrypt. Anything.
Politics and civil freedoms aside, I think it's fascinating that there can essentially be this black box, i.e. the NSA, that can make breakthroughs in new mathematics with only its employees and those on the outside sworn to secrecy. They obviously have brilliant mathematicians, but more brilliant than the best ones at the world's best universities or tech companies? Or are their suspected/hypothetical theoretical breakthroughs a product of the efficiency of academic thinking that comes from being under one roof, a la the Manhattan Project (which, like the NSA, obviously had more than just people brilliant in an academia sense)

When I studied cryptography in college, our professor said matter of factly that the NSA is likely at least a decade ahead in terms of known mathematical breakthroughs, but perhaps he was biased toward thinking that because he was in the field during the 1970s breakthrough that Schneier mentions. It seems more feasible that the breakthrough is in engineering and technology, but hey, I guess it's good to know the boundaries of mathematical reasoning can be pushed (hopefully, those gains will be available to the rest of the world for non-spying means)

edit: Case in point, Schneier's 2007 post that's now on the front page

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_s...

Schneier describes a random number generator, released as the standard by the U.S. government, that he concludes was likely back-doored through NSA intervention. This hypothesis was made by two independent researchers in the previous months, and others had suspicions a year before. My point being: in terms of open encryption standards, it's very amazing that the NSA (or any private entity) can make a purely mathematical breakthrough that's well-ahead of the field.
So...Would have to read books on an LCD screen instead of a nice-on-the-eyes Kindle screen? No thanks.
Nerdnit, but it's not like AES is based on some wholesome certified organic granola theory to the exclusion of number theory. Number theory didn't wait around 2+ millennia to be useful only to be dissed like that, man!
I think you should read this (about why we should take some comedy seriously): http://rajsivaraman.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/a-scientific-ca...

And importantly, also this (about one rape survivor's experience of this issue): http://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/60312620820/i-cant-go-b...

And then you might visit (for more recent history on this subject, so you have even more context): http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/09/penny-arcade-expo-dic...
Microsoft NSAKEY
The CEO who got ousted, in 2011:

“Without outside capital, we have to make do with less ... Constraints are a beautiful thing because they force creativity and precision. We don’t have the resources to throw after hit-or-miss hires or strategies. Bootstrapping a business requires a different mentality. It’s taught us to be frugal, hire slowly, and exercise caution as we grew the business. While companies that take funding can do those things, people have a tendency to behave differently when it’s not their money on the line.”

This was about 1 year before they raised a massive round from NEA/Accel. From "Bootstrapped, profitable, and proud" on 37signals blog: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2800-bootstrapped-profitable-...
But why would you ever have assumed this? I mean, I don't really care whether something was a mistake in good faith or covert sabotage; the useful question is whether something is secure or not as far as I can tell. Assessing the motivations is a complete waste of my time as an individual.
They are working on that specific sbt /play combo, tho this doesn't look like huge numbers

https://gist.github.com/jroper/6374383

If you dig thru the internals list, there are a number of fronts they're working on to produce fewer short lived intermediate objects, parallelize builds etc

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=forum/sc...
Exactly. We process over $1M a year with Braintree (that's why I posted this article). In my opinion, PayPal is the worst possible scenario short of Braintree shutting down.

The thought of forcing thousands of customers to re-enter billing information makes me throw up in my mouth a little.
"my own clothes were still all wrong"

I can't even imagine what this might mean in this context. It was pretty clear to me even on the first day that there's no right or wrong way to dress, it's just part of that (radical) self-expression thing.
I fly these things. A short time ago I got cut on the arm by a blade strike on spinup as a result of a cheap plastic servo gear which had missing teeth which I discovered after taking the servo apart.
I always loved how internal combustion engines can be summed up into 4 words: Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow.
Of course that means intake, compression, combustion and exhaustion :)
I would agree with the "bad" assessment. If I had accounts at BrainTree, I would be very worried about PayPal as a suitor. Ostensibly a fair percentage elected to use BrainTree because there were Not PayPal. I presently steer clients away from PayPal, and had previously recommended BrainTree. This casts doubt on that going forward.

This would be similar to Oracle acquiring MySQL.
It's not that clear-cut. There's a real reason to ask if there's studies here, because it's not easy to self-assess if this actually works. Reading is more than just "how fast can I scan the lines in order" - it's also about comprehension, eye fatigue, etc. All of which are hard for an individual to assess casually.

I think this is interesting, but I'd want to see studies on what the incremental cognitive load of "color matching" (not something I'm particularly great at) does to reading comprehension, and what the impact of this is on how much I can read in a sitting. It's no good if you read 50% faster but tire out 3X as fast.
The presentation on the vulnerability, from the two Microsoft employees, for those interested: http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf

Amusingly, from the PDF:

> WHAT WE ARE NOT SAYING:

> NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG

:)
The Future of Design at SpaceX (video)
Variables are certainly awesome, but it's easy to get stuck in a situation where you generate giant stylesheets. It also doesn't really solve the selector modularity problem :/
I tried it and it actually felt quite easier to follow along a line of text.
this will be a UX nightmare. windows 8 already has desktop, metro interface, and now CHROME APPS?!?