skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have time to analyze it carefully, but you have created a stream cipher. It is actually quite fun to implement ciphers and learn about all of the various attacks. If you are to be serious about this you should really not start from a pure product of your mind, but learn about the latest and greatest techniques. The academic field of cryptography doesn't move /that/ quickly, so it is quite reasonable to keep up with it if you are passionate about it. You can do much better with just a little knowledge about basic attacks. You can basically keep designing algorithms that fewer and fewer people can break until you reach the point where no one can break it with known, modern, academic cryptanalytic techniques. And when you get there... you might be a Cryptographer :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_cipher_attack -- in particular, the period of your key stream is very weak. Also, without an IV, you will be in trouble.

Essentially, you need to take a key, and an IV, and feed it into your magic box (algorithm) and all that should come out is an incredibly long random string that does not repeat for a very, very long time. The shorter the period the worse off you are. I can't be sure, but I think you have a predictable, short period.

Even more interesting, read up on RC4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC4 -- there were small but detectable biases in the initial part of the key stream, which allowed an attacker to break the algorithm. The solution was to advance the key stream a bit to discard the initial, biased part.

And thus we get to the hardest part of cryptographic algorithm design and why these exercises are so hard. It is very easy for someone to build an algorithm they can't break themselves. Obviously, you did everything you knew how to do to prevent it from being broken. It might even take an experienced cryptographer a while to break it (the key stream bias in RC4 was not found for a long time). Check out some of the WEP attacks.

Another thought for you: http://www.rickwash.org/papers/stream.pdf -- just how easy it is to be wrong. Page 8: If the swap operation of RC4 is omitted, the keystream becomes cyclic with a period of 2
n+1 -- very small changes can introduce non-obvious periods, etc.

Final thought: check out how WEP got broken. Stream ciphers are hard. This is why it is often very good as an educational exercise to write your own ciphers (I have done it), but you sort of do it once and either decide to get good at it or realize it takes a LOT of knowledge and it is better to just know the attacks and not invest a lot of time in it.

Anyhow, hope you had fun with this. Read up on the various ways stream cipher design can be broken, and check out how AES can be used as a stream cipher. Not sure I had a point, precisely, just wanted to share some thoughts having seen a dozen or more of these crazy algorithms in use in live code meant to protect truly sensitive data. Some programmer always thinks he is clever and ends up creating some XOR cipher (I know that is not you as you have the right goals, in my mind, for doing this).
Ha, love it. I wonder if that's like receiving dividends on shares in a foreign currency. Your share value (weight in kg) changes over time due to currency fluctuations (lowering value of 1kg), but the dividends paid out (variable weight loss for a given time period) are also affected by the same currency fluctuations (lowering value of 1kg).
The RFC acknowledges this problem, which is why it kindly suggests you use DNSSEC ;-)

As another commenter mentioned, it all depends on who your attacker is. A MITM ssh attack won't necessarily forge your DNS request (maybe your router is compromised?), so even without DNSSEC there might be some use in enabling this.
I wish I had a screenshot of hubski.com at its inception. Since it began life as a port (albeit with completely different mechanics) the UI was essentially a clone. Quite quickly mk transformed that along with the usually feature and performance iterations to the point where you'd never be able to tell at a glance.

Just celebrated the first 100,000 posts milestone too.
I'm someone else who would love to cycle, but live in a very hilly area ...

Some problems with this: Electric bikes are expensive (like £2000 vs £200). UK Government regulations make the status of electric bikes dubious, particularly the more powerful ones needed to ride up hills. If no one else can afford to cycle or is allowed to cycle, this prevents a mass of cyclists which would make the road a bit safer.

I'd really love for there to be both government will and a solution to the price problem here.
Novel writer here (unpublished but I've written several books, writing my next one in a month).

The site looks intriguing but yeah, I agree with your points:

1. I do write in revisions. Smaller changes don't matter as much when it comes to the end product. However, what I WOULD love to see is a previous copy on the right of the screen and a text editor on the left. I tend to do my revisions that way so that I can look at what I wrote, copy/paste what's fine, and rewrite what needs to be rewritten while still looking at the original.
2. After trying out a million "distraction free" writers, I am still on MS Office. It's really worth it for me. I can't stand writing in Libre, or OO, or Ohm, or Monkey (whatever it's called). Scrivener may be the only exception but I usually just port my stuff there.
3. Exactly

Here are the things I do like:

1. chapter by chapter separation of concerns. I like that. Even if it's in the form of text files, it's great.
2. one-click publishing. I really appreciate that. It's a pain to go from Word to a properly formatted PUB file. Having a tool that does this for you from the get-go is awesome. I've spent way too much time reformatting Word to be accepted by Smashwords in the past.
3. Comments. I enjoy this as well. If I had someone to help me out with my book, this would be a great feature. If I was to hire someone to help me out with editing and critiquing my work, I'd use this tool. Definitely would.

With that said, I would abuse the hell out of this for blog writing.
He's referring to telemetry (logging). It's like an Apache log. Nothing to be uneasy about.
Python Metaclasses: __new__ vs. __init__
I fully expect if my mail client is acting up, they'll turn on debug logs which have enough information to troubleshoot anything. The information he 'peeked' at was incidental to debug mode.
I am working on multiple things at the moment, though with my first year of college, progress has been slow.. After challenging C and a multitude of "introduction to programming" classes, I got into CISP 401 (java), so in order to get ahead of the class, I wrote a toy interpreter in java (deemed KjuScript). It is extremely slow, but based off the ruby language with full OOP implementation. Also recently I have been working on something in C++ with a friend that converts sound to color (to teach my dad music (he really wants to learn) who lost most of his hearing at 20, and so my mother who was born deaf, may enjoy my concerts in real time)
There is a prototype of it in python located on my github account:

Http://www.github.com/pholey
Why do you assume self driving cars have to communicate with other cars to be effective? The cars already have sensors far more advanced than us humans have.

And why would the roads need sensors?

I do believe it would benefit self driving cars to have areas where only they are allowed, and in the future I foresee that being the case as the cars can drive faster and closer together if not driven by a human. But this shouldn't be a necessity when cars gets more advanced.

Progress is fast and if history has showed us anything it's that history is impossible to predict. About 100 years ago flight was thought as an impossibility until the Wright brothers proved us wrong and look where we are today.

In 100 years what role will self driving cars have? I'm certainly leaning toward it being mainstream, even considered normal, to see them everywhere.

Then again, some would say we would have flying cars by then.
How To Make College Useful
Agreed, VPN via physical firewall is a particularly nice solution.

Sounds like you've offloaded mail, dns, etc. elsewhere if you only have at most 80 and 443 open.
AdBlock Plus get paid for not blocking Google’s ads
You're not going to be using a self driving car on a dirt road... and as someone that lives in the country, there is no way I would trust a self driving car in areas where there are jolting transitions between pavement and gravel roads.
I think you can still blame them. They're a corporation with a 470B market cap, designing machines for which email is a primary use-case. They employ thousands and thousand of engineers. They should be able to build a mail client. Many much smaller organizations manage alright.
We need to reload the New-CSS-file, because that older-version i.e stale-CSS file is causing this issue!

How to fix it?

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="news.css?1382794165">

Copy-Paste the above into your address bar & Reload HN. The new CSS file will be Rendered and issue fixed.

Hope that helps. :)
The author's argument seems weak. If anything in the medical field I see more support among professionals for PAs than in the public. Ask someone if their preference is to see a doctor or a PA and the vast majority will say a doctor. Likewise, most ppl would prefer to be represented by a bar certified attorney rather than cousin Jim who has several years of Law and Order under his belt.

There are two types of workers... One which makes a product one can evaluate before consuming and one whose product isn't. In the cases where you can't conservative approaches prevail. When the product can be judged than more liberal attitudes prevail, because one can always judge the product. This is why the software or art or writing professions are filled with those who aren't formally trained.
Advice needed on how best to promote free NoSQL unconference a ski resort
Hi all; I've been running snowcode, a free developer unconference since 2010; The conference is non profit and is run out of our passion for snowboarding, skiing & coding, sharing and learning.

This year a few of the core regulars can't make it, and I need some help to promote the event and fill the chalet. If we can fill the new chalet we're using this year then we have a good chance that we can make this our home for many years to come; hence my call for help on hacker news.

If anyone has ideas or suggestions on where I should be posting info about the event, that would be most appreciated; Also if people could help us with some mention on social media, blogposts or tweets etc, then we'd all be incredibly grateful.

This year's snowcode NoSQL unconference is being held in La Clusaz, France (19th-26th January 2014). More info about this year's NoSQL unconference can be found on the link above, together with links to photographs and videos from the snowcode 2010, 2011 and 2012 events.

Thank you all in advance, warmest regards & keep chilling, Alan and the gang at snowcode
The point of this piece is not that living in Barcelona and commuting to London is sensible -- it's that the North London property market has gone totally batshit insane.

No, seriously: renting a 2 bedroom flat in a not brilliant suburb of London costs around £25,000 a year, or US $40,000. Then you can add council tax (another £2000), water, electricity, and gas bills, and travel. Upshot: the fixed costs of living in London are on the order of US $50,000 per year (two beds) or around $40,000 per year (one bed). Note that I focus on the two bed option because that's the practical minimum for a family unit, or for someone who telecommutes from home. Note also that the average gross income in London is a little under £28,000 per year (before tax).

Upshot: normal people and normal families can't afford to rent in London any more. The only thing propping up these insane prices is the scarcity induced by the current bubble in the foreign investment housing market. The crash, when it comes, is going to be epic.
That's a new difference between US and UK English for me - "fenders" here are things that are used to stop boats/ships bumping into things, across here we call them "mudguards".

Having said that, I know some people who could benefit from fenders (UK) on their bikes...
A mayor-supported electric bike hire scheme for Muswell Hill in London suggests that they're legally ok: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24651760
https://kouio.com - RSS reader we built to replace Google Reader.

It's cool because it's been an amazing ride keeping it nice and snappy in spite of an ever growing data set - over 50 million feed items retrieved so far and still growing :-)
fascinating article, circa 2011.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_kilogram/all/1
Confessions of a Drone Warrior
So:

Bad press. Being killed by a machine is soo much worse than being killed by a fellow human. This won't be a problem. Yes, it will make the news, but if self driving cars turn out to be more reliable than human drivers, the numbers will show, and the insurance companies will follow. (Funny how talks about not controlling your car will die out in the face of monetary savings.)

Liability. Self driving cars are not the only thing that kills people when it goes wrong. Think airliner software. I think we'll get over it. Also, current cars already face similar challenges. I recall a sticky pedal problem that caused some Japanese cars to speed up until death ensues. As far as I know, unlike some unlucky drivers, the company is still alive.

Law. Not a big problem, as long as self driving cars are legal somewhere. Once they have demonstrated their worth, other states and countries will follow very quickly.

Privacy. It kinda sucks, but it won't matter one bit. If people really cared about not giving away their trip data to some for-profit corporation, they wouldn't be using Facebook in the first place. Or Gmail.

Price. It will inevitably go way down. Self driving is a software problem. A human driver could manage with only a couple web cams. So will programs, as they get better. Not to mention economies of scale.

Unemployment. Here be Unions. But they won't stop the advent of self driving cars. Driver-less companies will simply drive the Driver-full companies out of business. Unlike rail-road companies, they don't own the tracks. Now this will raise unemployment unless we do something about it. (Enforcing a 4 day work-week would be a good start.)

Overall, I expect all those problems to set us back about a decade, 15 years tops. But they won't even arise until we actually start selling those cars.
It has always bugged me that scientists consider this obviously terrible kludge of a standardization method acceptable.

A civilizaton looking back 20,000 years from now and translating our scientific literature would be able to figure out what we meant by "second" by measuring the decay of a cesium 133 atom. But a kilogram (or any unit derived therefrom)? Sorry, the prototype is at the bottom of a crater. You can't miss it - it's the size of a whole golf ball, after all.
You can be pretty sure that your emails (regardless of where it's stored, MS, Yahoo, Google or your ISP) can be read by the operations/support team at any time.
> Microsoft, for all their faults, is notorious for having fantastic QA and not breaking old apps when they update Windows, and would never have let that happen.

Windows 8.1 has had a number of severe problems.[1][2][3]

[1] http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/10/21/win-rt-81-pulle...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/10/17/windows-8-...

[3] Anecdotally, a coworker tried upgrading on two separate devices (after Microsoft pulled 8.1 for awhile and then made it available again). On both it installed fine but disabled all of his Metro apps from starting.
Agreed. How is Apple not to blame? If this article was about Gmail instead of Mail.app, every comment would definitely be blaming Google.
Okay some thoughts:

1) Some roads can have sensors embedded in them. People would have to get an account to drive on them (eg EZpass or SelfDrivingCarID). The sensors would recognize a self-driving car and allow it on the road. Those roads could have 200mph speed limits. Cars attempting to enter the road which arent self-driving, or too old of a version, would not be able to pass the tollbooth, and will be fined for attempting to and wasting everyone's time at one of the booths.

2) Parking tickets and metermaids should go the way of the dodo. Cars can easily be detected at the side of a curb, and the money deducted from the EZPass or whatever account. Instead of parking, though, you'd just timeshare your cars in a demand based marketplace (type of car, time you need it for, what the demand is for those hours etc) and then clean them up when you get out. They'll go on to pick up the next passengers.
About 5 years ago I did this. I flew from the south of Spain (flying from Jerez on RyanAir) to London once a week for 2 days a week (couch surfing with a friend).

Its a hard lifestyle - by about the 10th of these flights you will be sick of the security hassles (and RyanAir) - but it was way better than living in London full time (no offense).

I did it for 18 months before finally burning out on it and moving to a full time remote position (which paid less but I decided that that was worth the upgrade in lifestyle).
I was referring to areas where real estate is extremely expensive, and data demands warrant close proximity thereto - such as San Francisco. Floating a data center on "free" water surface may be cheaper yet still have thick short data pipes to intended customers.
"It seems odd to assume that just because throughout history we've unified more and more concepts that all of physics can be unified. What if there's a limit?"

Think of that question as akin to Hilbert second problem[1]: he wondered if the axioms of arithmetic were consistent -- back then, it seemed likely. Gödel came along and showed that no proof of it can be carried out within arithmetic itself. In a sense, the problem isn't entirely solved; but we now do know that we can't know. Perhaps someone will come along one day and give a similar answer in physics.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_problems
It's a 4 hour commute!

Why would you live in Central London? You can commute for an hour into Liverpool St and get much cheaper rents.
Someone should tell this poor woman about Google Scholar, Libgen, and /r/scholar.
http://pineapple.io - I think it's cool because I don't know of any centralized locations for development tutorials and tools. Reddit is filled with mostly jaded posts and HN is filled with lots of news. Mine is only tutorials, tools, and assets.

Here are some tags to start you off. I guarantee you will find hidden gems here :) http://pineapple.io/tags/all
Also drawn from kouio, a nice little library I've called Hot Redis.

We use it for working with local Python objects like lists, sets, queues and multisets, which are then backed by Redis.

https://github.com/stephenmcd/hot-redis
> It's always seemed odd that kids get a free pass just because they're kids.

In my opinion one reason why they cannot be made fully responsible for their actions is, that they do not have the same rights as adults. They are not allowed to drive cars, to drink alcohol, to have sex, to vote, to marry, to become president and so on.
Another reason might be, that they did not have the same chance to develop an ethic framework as adults had, because they had less years to learn.

> age is often used as a (bad) proxy for maturity.

I agree, but on the other hand there is a need for a fair (same for all) measure. I have no idea what would be a better objective measure.

> That said, prison time for anyone, adults or children, for computer-related crimes is barbaric.

I would agree if this is limited to "crimes" that are only or at least mostly computer related.
You might have to let go of your belief that humans are any good at driving.

What ever humans do - reading the map, studying the surroundings, estimating the pavement/conditions, building on experience - a machine (with the right sensors, carefully designed algorithms and testing) can do much, much better.
If there are three cars beside each other

A B C

Car A is driven by a human and steers into car B. If car B could communicate with car C it could ask it to move over (or slow down) so that it (car B) can move out of the way of car A.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from a thermodynamic point of view the major problem is the entropy. You can't just convert heat into any other form of energy (light) without also caring of the entropy. In the case of solving some salt in water, the entropy is going into the chaos of the solved ions (versus the low-entropy crystal).
With all the other methods you need to get rid of the heat. With peltier coolers I could imaging "watercooling" the hot side.

On the other hand sweat (evaporation) is already a pretty good cooler and covering the skin with something else stops that effect. Additionally you enrich sweat inbetween which does not feel well. Completely absorbing the sweat also kills the cooling effect..

So maybe, as mchannon suggested, all you have to do is design a nice, flexible and good-looking sweatband with an integrated fan ;)
We have working self-driving cars today, and they need no special infrastructure. Detecting painted lane markings and other vehicles are the easy parts of the data processing system.

Furthermore, special infrastructure is unacceptably vulnerable to deliberate disruption. A system that depended on radio communication could be gridlocked with a modified $50 microwave oven.
Been watching something very similar now geared to social writing, but less technical.

https://editorially.com/
"Sorry for the snarky reply" is not enough, considering that you wrote it at the same time you could have gone back and rewrite the text into a polite, well-worded argument. That's just condescension - if you really were sorry, you'd have rewritten your text."

You are right. I am not sorry for the snarky reply.

"By replying like that you've ensured that your point won't come across - for all I know you might be technically right, but using that tone ensures that lots of people will refuse to read past the second paragraph."

Okay.

"If your argument is solid, that's all you need. IMHO, snark makes your point come across as bragging, and no one likes that."

Okay.
All languages have odd quirks. One can cherry pick from any of them: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
But implementing an IMAP client is vastly easier. Still frustrating, and the IMAP spec is a giant stinking turd, but most of the most horrific things in implementing an IMAP server is down to all the crap you need to support in case some weird client uses it (and one inevitably does), while a client can choose to stick to a very small subset of the spec.
Yeah, right, like an advertising company would develop a self-driving car.
Nothing, and it's cool because it gives me a ton of time to go out and meet people.
Your entire argument is based on the fallacy that children knows exactly what they are doing, just because you think you did.

You must get that this boy is not even a teenager yet. Destroying his life by throwing him into a prison will only result in him learning and befriending other troubled children. This will not do anyone any good.

The solution I would suggest is a minor punishment, say a week or so in prison - just to scare the living hell out of him. Meanwhile having a professional evaluate his situation and suggest a reasonable recovery plan (therapy, forced change of school in order to find new friends, computer banishment, or whatever).
i loved the interface and the technology behind it