skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. If it's two or more factors then the weakness of the fingerprint factor is not such a big deal. Is the iPhone 2 factor?

I think there is too much of an emphasis on using uniqueness for security. The idea is that if "It could only be you!" you are secure.

The sci-fi vision is a world where a fingerprint or retina scan is taken and that's it. There's no username needed, just the fingerprint itself is enough to confirm your identity. In reality, the idea of uniqueness for security actually would create security problems, because it removes the other factors involves, and biometric codes like fingerprint cannot be changed as needed (technically a fingerprint can be changed 9 times. A voice on the other hand cannot.)

An NFC tag/card/ring, seems much better to me, since these can be changed as needed and would be more difficult to hack than taking a fingerprint off the phone.

An armed thief could steal your ring or fob along with the phone, but they could also make you use your finger to unlock your phone for them. So I don't think that's really any added protection in that situation.

The thief that just grabs your phone off the counter or out of your pocket will have a much tougher time with the NFC tag than with the fingerprint.
4096 is the largest key size gpg offers today. It was the largest key size gpg offered in 2009, which is why that's the key size I'm using now. In 1996 the largest key size pgp supported was probably 768 , which is why my first pgp key is that size. I know for sure that in 1999, the largest key I could manage to make was 2048. Looking back at those older keys, I would prefer if I could have chosen larger key sizes for them. So I suspect that in 10 years I will wish I could have used a 8196 or larger key today..

I suspect that gpg partly doesn't offer insanely large key sizes because then people like me will naively use them even if we don't need them. And perhaps partly because dealing with the math for such large numbers is harder to implement. I'd rather it offered much larger keys even if they came with warnings that it might make operations slow.
A small startup that invests in some ops talent is going to run rings around a small startup that optimizes for developers.

People think that staffing up devs creates agility and speed, when in reality it just increases product features.

Scope creep without someone around to voice the needs of operations is a crazy-efficient generator of technical debt.
I think it's a way of rationalizing the insane amount of money they make and fighting off the guilt they have for basically not deserving most of it.

But of course, I'm not a banker.
- It's ok if a "horse carriage" manufacturer goes private after cars became commonplace

- But Ford doesn't need to go private because Toyota came along
Drinking beer does not equal binge drinking. Few people I know are truly talented enough to binge drink on purely beer.
This is most certainly _not_ capitalism, nor it's a friction-free economy. Banks' purpose should be making money go around, not sucking more and more of it off the rest of the economy...
From Haskell to hardware via cartesian closed categories
It's not because it's finite that the number of combinations possible is limited. Just like for passwords, the more bits involved, the more possibilities you get, and a DNA or RNA is a molecular version of a very, very long password. So "finite" is a very poor way to describe the complexity.
Dell's going to have to step-up their mobile front to stay competitive.

"Research group IDC said tablets will outsell all PCs in the three months to Christmas, and by 2015 they will regularly outsell PCs as consumers' tastes shift towards the more mobile format."
Yes I didn't realize the gas pipeline. I think I saw the bond movie on the subject then just thought that any reference to that pipeline I found was a reference to the movie.

But yeah that does look like a pretty serious issue. (Although fossil fuels in the middle east will run out long before 50 years pass, so I doubt it's all that accurate)
Can we please leave stupidities like this off of HN?

PHP is a programming language - it would be a pretty useless programming language that can't do anything.

Go read that list - they are all useful functions. You would be hard pressed to make a usable language without them.
I was referring to: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatHaveYouDoneFo...

Anyways, you speak truth. Microsoft and DELL are set up for enterprise. IT departments love them and are right to do so.

However, the market is changing. Already, there are more smartphones than traditional computers. Tablets are outselling traditional computers. Many of those devices will need to connect to corporate networks. As a result, IT management is changing. Because of BYOD, the needs of users are taking front-seat to those of IT managers. They might not like it, but I believe the trend is irreversible.
God, you're whiny.

If you want a conference without drinking, organize one without drinking. The vast majority of people clearly enjoy the drinking, and they're the ones that are organizing them.

I live in Alaska, so I can't go to meetups or conferences or such without spending an additional $300+ on a plane ticket. Am I being "excluded" by my choice of location? Sure. Am I writing whiny blog posts insisting people should do meetups up here? No - and they won't happen, because there isn't a demand. Same thing with you and your strange aversion to other people enjoying themselves in the way they see fit.

Don't get me wrong - I personally wouldn't drink as much as seems to be typical at these events. But that's a personal choice, just like your desire not to drink is a personal choice. I actually get better at programming and technical discussion after a beer or two, generally.

If you don't want to go, don't go. But stop whining about it.
The same, except "pass on" can also refer to dessert.
Almost every complex AND specialized adaptation has an advantage.

In this case it seems pretty obvious that gears can be better than friction at transmitting torque.
http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=22683&p=183195&h...

Someone said simple instructions are not microcode.
I finish off the blogpost by suggesting a toolset that's worked well for me specifically in terms of collaboration.
Schneier just did an article about public key crypto weaknesses and advocated to make larger keys. Its on his blog from an entry last week when he first got hold of the snowden docs. Did he sign the new key yet? At first he just generated a new key with no sig leaving ppl wondering if he was replaced by a NSA robot
Why not Hn. It is an elegant solution to a manufacturing problem, im sure many of you ask how it can be done more effectively requiring less space and material.
I think that just means DataRank is a market research tool. It won't mean companies that use it will spend less on advertising, but it will help them target specific demographics, perceptions, etc more efficiently. Not less spending, just different.
> Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off?

Good point. That's a good way to put it. Depending on task, unfortunately not everything is parallelizable.

But quite often, culture is the problem as well. If performance bonuses are large enough, people will compete with each other and will be at each other's throats over control of projects. Machismo and cowboy-like behavior is to be expected in some environments. I personally think those environments are toxic.

Anyway I see the a point about some tasks not being easily de-composible, but I think culture plays a significant role here as well.
Long Live Film
Perhaps the best option would be if you went out and grabbed a copy of 'Climbing mount improbable' - It will answer all your questions on this and then some
Well that's actually one of the main problems isn't it? Unless you're a windows user, .doc just doesn't work very well. Text based formats do.
Putting up with banking hours is all about the pay-off 7-10 years down the road.

If you can put up with the hours until you end up as a director or higher, you can pretty reliably makes over a million dollars per year (with continuous increases in salary) putting only 50-60 hrs a week.

People do banking because it's one of the lowest risk ways to becoming rich.
Gotta say, I'm fairly disappointed with Bellroys attempt at manufacturing a slim wallet.

Love the concept of a thin small wallet. Love many things about their Note Sleeve attempt. Displeased with it's dimensions.

It's at least 10% bigger then an existing 10 year old Polo Ralph Lauren wallet that does exactly the same thing:

Note Sleeve: 9.1cm x 10.1cm
Polo Ralph Lauren: 8.25cm x 9.25cm (10 years old and no longer in production)

http://imgur.com/Rs5x978,M33vuyf
http://imgur.com/Rs5x978,M33vuyf#1

* Standard credit card: 5.5cm x 8.5cm

All the alternative stuff out there looks even bigger then Bellroy:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/667392092/slimfold-micro...

http://www.amazon.com/Leather-Sport-Wallet-ALL-ETT-Billfolds...

Ugh, was so excited that someone was finally going to create something better. So disheartening because the ralph lauren wallet is no longer in production and if Bellroy had put a little extra effort into making their product smaller, it would be perfect.

rant over.
Evolution works by incremental changes, each of which to a first approximation must be at least neutral and preferably advantageous to producing offspring. In order for evolution to get from A to B, there must be a path of incremental advantageous changes to get from here to there. It can't magically leap from one optimum to another. So you see things like the way the same basic body plan is reused endlessly in the natural world; with only incremental changes available to create the next species, you can't create a whole new body plan from scratch, even if it would be completely appropriate due to, say, transitioning from land to water. It is also completely goalless; if there is a fantastic two-gene change that a species could make, even if both are individually advantageous, there's no particular force that will cause them to occur [1].

Evolution is both very powerful, with many people underestimating it, and profoundly stupid, with many people also overestimating it. Once humans really get cracking with the gene engineering (which has proved harder than we had initially hoped, but I'm still confident we'll get there), I'm sure we'll find a plethora of relatively simple changes we can make to natural organisms that may involve changing three or four genes simultaneously where no single change is advantageous, which is a thing that evolution essentially can't do.

[1]: Or at least, not yet... one bizarre-ish, "Selfish Gene" way of looking at human gene engineering is evolution evolving itself a way to make those multi-gene changes. Still not in a directed fashion, of course. But evolution will still apply to our own gene engineered creations, just possibly with a very different set of constraints, such as potentially severing the billion-year-old connection between fitness and direct biological reproduction... as I've said on HN before, you don't have to be a full-on "Rapture of the Nerds"-style Singulatarian to see that the future may get very weird....
The creature sheds it exoskeleton at it grows. Adults don't have this gear "feature" apparently.
In response to [1]: Men are victims of trolls, but there is huge difference in the volume and type of trolling that men vs. women experience.

There is a gaping chasm between the bullying experienced by men vs. the rapid, ongoing rape and murder threats are the _normal_ "trolling" that women experience.

We can't talk about the "plight" of men until we deal with the extremes - and that means as a community we have make people realised that threats of rape, violence and murder are never, ever acceptable. That being a creeper isn't funny, it's unhealthy and threatening. The guessing their social media passwords and defacing and defaming them is unacceptable.

Until the current attitude of men on the net changes there is nothing facile about the argument made in this article.
You are proposing one of the possibilities I deem unacceptable, albeit without explanation. Without going about a huge text, you are proposing that for the first time in 5000 years, this chart will go flat:

http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/world-ener...

It rather looks quite the opposite...
Very few things annoy me more than Googling a problem I'm having, finding a post where someone has the exact same problem and then them following up with "Nevermind, figured it out!" and not explaining the solution.
Webmail services could have jump-started WoT a decade ago, much like Hotmail jumpstarted popular email usage. [1] Had they "turned on" PGP for all their users, and then made it easy to tell when messages were being sent securely and when they weren't, it would have completely (and for the better) changed how we interact online (e.g., no need to "sign up" for web services, or "sign in" to every single site we visit; a lot less spam; and incredible other potential besides).

I think we can now surmise one big reason why they didn't.

(tptacek will say that web-based PGP is the wrong way to go because it's too insecure: fact is it's still way more secure than sending cleartext emails, and in any case the point of it is to bootstrap adoption and hopefully trigger an email "arms race")

[1] Gmail even began with some support for PGP signature verification http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/02/gmail-tests-pgp-sig... ... and then stopped. Anyone on the inside know why?
> This person has an effected PI3Kinase, or MAP pathway. We only have drugs for a few of the major mutations so once the cancer mutates to avoid drugging, patients are often out of luck.

Yeah, patients relapsing into cancer usually do not have much alternatives. Combination therapies often help since they can attach several pathways at once, but combo therapies are usually limited to 2 compounds at the same time.

Another huge problem is linked to medical practice. So many doctors treating cancer patients are just NOT aware of the latest studies and developments in terms of Standards of Care. If you have a cancer, the most relevant factor is the necessarily the drug you take but who's treating you and how much he knows about your condition.

Helping doctors make decisions may be another area for disruption, where Software may help.
Why did Khosla Ventures sued TheFunded?
Is TheFunded = Founder Institute?
That is so false, and if it's true is unbelievably stupid. It means that your work is so useless you can do it completely sleep deprived and burnt out.

Wow, a great contribution to a company.

I'd think that a company that needs to perform at the highest level should do so with smart people giving their best hours and resting appropriately so they can be sharp.

The number of hours is irrelevant. Great people are great because their contributions are of great value, not because they contribute mediocre work three times as much as everybody else.
I've thought a good bit about alternative revenue models for Twitter—Pro accounts that show statistics and keep your entire history, have developers pay for access to their API—I'm assuming they have gone through these ideas and realized they could make the most money from ads.
U.S. measles cases in 2013 may be most in 17 years
It seems to be treating all of the Morningside campus as one building with the address 530 W 120th St, built in 1901. But that address corresponds to CEPSR, which was built in the 1990s. :/
The ol' DIY Data-Diode[1]

I've heard of using serial lines/modems with the appropriate tx->rx cut, but I don't know if it would actually work for ethernet (maybe 10BaseT only?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
I wish there were a decent hardware PGP key token available now -- something which could support 4096 RSA and communicated via (ideally) BT but also acceptable USB to a host. The GPF stick is out of stock.
(v):

I was think about this being the final solution of my reusable code problem. I can't even describe how bright my eyes became: modularizing all my code and saving everything at somewhere in the internet (not in any of the three computers I use alternately), reusing quickly and easily.

So I thought: why not doing this with my Python micro-code-features too? If this is possible with javascript, why not with Python? (In fact, you -- and RequireJS -- use eval, don't you?) Tell me, you who are far more experienced than me: is there any problem with trying to make a lit-inspired Python module repository?
That's right.

The presence of what may be single knucklehead, in Houston, drives blacks to patronize their own restaurants to the exclusion of others.

(I do realize that the practice of compromising the integrity of the food of black restaurant goers is probably a pretty widespread practice, and not the work of a "single knucklehead".)

My only point is... I doubt, in a lot of these cases, that the restaurant owner him or herself is racist.
I like this post a lot, thank you for doing such extensive research. I agree with about 60% of it. Yes i think drinking is glorified in the tech industry. Yes the place I work at prides itself on company happy hours and every company event has alcohol (and we even have a new rule, no hard alcohol at large events because well.. you know). Yes it's backwards that a major part of conferences is the party scene, and somewhat disconcerting to hear JSConf was selling party-only tickets. This perpetuates a drinking culture that no industry needs.

However, even with those flaws, but I don't see it as mandatory, exclusive, or a barrier to entry. Maybe it's just where I have worked, but there are people I work with who are teetotallers - lets not kid around though they are in the minority. When my team celebrated a huge event, we had a bottle of champagne accompanied by a nice bottle of non-alcoholic sparking lemonade / beverage. It wasn't about the drinking, it was about sharing the celebration.

I do drink on my own time during the weekends, but I do not drink at the office or at most work events - If I have a drink, it'll be A drink, not multiple. It's mostly because I go to the gym at night and it's a lot harder after drinking. So I avoid it, pour myself a glass of whatever else is available, and haven't had anyone ask me why I'm not drinking alcohol.
Well, I'm a professional security researcher, and I end up using ZIP+AES more often than I do PGP.
Yes, and they are still on IE7, poor souls. Doesn't sound like a place I'd work for... nope.
The last time I checked (2 minutes a go; I like to be sure), Ford wasn't doing so well. In recent years, they’ve had to sell a lot of their brands and all of their components factories. They're in debt and are selling half as many vehicles as they were a decade a go.

Going private wouldn't be a bad idea. Even better would be to sell the company to its employees. That has worked very well for similar companies.
Also, you don't have to compromise your data to a 3rd party like Dropbox.
Perhaps you should stop making the same point over and over in different comments..
Two things come to mind.

First, 99% of advertising, at least in terms of impressions we see on web pages, fail to convert. Which tells me that this waste has to be squeezed out over time. Which tells me that a lot of people overpay for ads and perhaps ad sellers are in for a surprise, not unlike that experienced by print media.

The other thing that comes to mind is that Twitter has the attention of celebrities and influentials, and they value what Twitter offers in terms of reach. Seems to me these are the people that will sustain it. It’s a specialized form of advertising, I suppose, but perhaps less buckshot.
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Websites that are particularly challenging to crawl and scrape?
(iii) I was thinking about my Angular callback madness and dreaming of synchronousness, but it isn't a problem at all! Just a question.
Seems that if you're really paranoid, gpg --gen-key --batch with an approptiate batch file can make 8192 or larger keys. Currently trying to generate a 81920 bit key, for general giggles and to increase my NSA rating.
"What could be more enticing than the insightful conversation being had by 50 drunk introverts telling "that's what she said" jokes?"

That's nice, remember to be inclusive of everyone except introvert beta males.
Guy...

look... the owner may not even be around when a cook or waiter compromises someone's food. How can you say that the owner is a bigot simply because he or she has bigots working for him or her.

I've run into MANY bigots in San Francisco for instance. Many work at Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo. Does that, then, imply that the senior executives at these firms are bigots? At some point, you need to trust your employees. You only know what you see, and you can't see everything. This does not make you a racist... it makes you a human.
That's a vey good point (and a key weakness in this analysis). However, a counter-point is that a racially homogenous population probably will have a lower incidence of racist issues since by definition their minority population is low, and the aim of this was try to gauge a metric for prevalence of racist issues.
I have heard they basically no longer want to be a web company but rather a service company. This means they could have lots of interesting ideas in the works.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788497
What exactly are those devs doing? I mean, aside from scaling to million and millions of users...which happened a while ago...it's pretty much the same thing as it's always been.
It is really sad that texting while driving is enough of a problematic to require such sensibilisation. If you don't understand the implications of diverting your attention to this point while driving, you shouldn't have the right to drive. And texting seems to divert enought attention that some people died walking in between the subway`s wagons.
Looks interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.
Update as to why the dates are wrong for old buildings: (hint, Y2K) https://twitter.com/technickle/status/378326979164241920
Oh, look. It's the government contractor sowing FUD.
You're quite right, in my head I'd accidentally lumped him in with fellow polar explorers Peary and Scott as a Navy guy.
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I think Leo Laporte might have a problem with that.
It could just be the case that everyone complains about their database and the HN crowd uses a lot of MongoDB. There's certainly more total MySql/MSSQL griping, whether or not gripers/users is higher for MongoDB isn't really obvious.
It's not a culture of exclusion when you choose not to do something...

Also, basically he's complaining because a bunch of 20 somethings drink. Nothing to do with computers. He would find the same "culture" anywhere else (except religious groups, muslims, etc. but you get my meaning).
FYI the sample size for Houston ~25K comments left on businesses categorized as bars or clubs. The entire sample set (across all cities) is >1M.
Whoa. That blew my mind.

So we're evolving in such a way to be able to make combinatorial multi-gene changes- by evolving brains big enough to be able to develop gene engineering?
The harsh reality is that at the moment advertisers will pay more for your attention than you will pay to use things.

I remember when popcapgames did a kickstarter to make all of their games ad-free. It was basically, "Look, we're making a great profit, but if you pay enough to cover our costs we'll take the ads off." It wasn't anywhere close to covering the costs, let alone to what the advertisers would pay.

There probably are some exceptions to this; people who have a passion or a love for some product, but for most consumer-facing products it's easier to tolerate a few ads than to shell out for everything you use.