skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PDF was not an open standard until 2008. Just saying. It could have been abandoned by Acrobat/Adobe while it was still proprietary and you would have been left with unreadable files in 2013. That's not the first time these things happen either.

HTML is way more solid in that aspect: as long as you have a browser you should be able to open the document on any browser, any platform and get a very similar access to contents. There's nothing much comparable here... your "doc" example does not make much sense either on platforms where official Microsoft software is not available (Unix, anyone?)
Yes, this is true - but we are looking at a very specific case here: Sold, and my understanding is that there marketplace never really took off. That means it is doubtful there are people depending on Sold as a means of support.
The way we managed to fund fewer startups was to train ourselves to pick better. So essentially we said no to startups we would have mistakenly said yes to before.

Unless we can improve our ability to pick winners at the same rate the number of startups increases, which is unlikely, we'll have to grow.

Fortunately we can now. The reason we tightened up our filters in w2013 was to buy ourselves time to figure out how to shard YC. We've now done that, and we can probably grow another 2 or 3x before hitting the next bottleneck-- which will probably be the format of Demo Day.
Unless the extorter was a "third party" "hacker"
Neither it's the same as "we listen what we want".
"So what do we think they're manufacturing with sapphire?"

This is just fun conjecture, so take it with a grain of salt the size of a racoon's head, but considering you can make sapphire panels large enough for vehicle windows [1], you might be able to cover a TV with it (among other things).

Consider that Jony Ive is credited with a design for a TV where the display slides inside a glass enclosure [2][3]; Perhaps you'd want to coat the enclosure with artificial sapphire to maintain a strong protective layer, or even use a thin, strong sapphire enclosure to reduce thickness while achieving good-enough strength.

We know that Apple was happy to build its new Mac Pros in the US because they're expensive (high margin) and the largest number of buyers would be in the US (video production, music production), thus a reduction in logistics costs could help balance higher worker costs. We can make the educated guess that an Apple TV would cost a lot - perhaps approaching or exceeding the cost of a new Mac Pro. So it's not hard to imagine a chunk of production moving to where the customers are.

Either way, looking at [3] we can see that Apple is interested in glass enclosures for its devices, so sapphire would be a good way to minimize scratches and general wear.

[1] http://www.photonic.saint-gobain.com/uploadedFiles/SGphotoni...

[2] http://www.patentlyapple.com/.a/6a0120a5580826970c0192ac6465...

[3] http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2013/08/apple-fi...
"But it's probably not worth the effort, they wouldn't do it"
We need to get away from the idea of intrinsic worth. There are somethings that are worth a lot that you wouldn't pay money for, such as honesty. Converse applies too.

Furthermore, even money itself has no intrinsic worth. The old Indian adage of "when all the trees are gone, ... try to eat money" reminds us of the mania of collecting things that have little value on its own.

What does this mean in the context of Snapchat? Firstly, snapchat trades in the attention of a particular demographic. The market has shown that it is willing to pay for the attention of this group - witness how much advertisers spend on tv. However, the younger set are watching less TV than their predecessors. Ergo, the advertising spend will have to follow where the youth are. When young people were in cars, billboards were real estate. Bill boards themselves have no intrinsic value, but it didn't stop people from making money (Ted Turner's dad ran a billboard business).

The real question is whether Snapchat will endure past a couple of seasons in its present format. There was a time when Twitter was cool, but now it has repositioned itself as a real time news feed. I think Snapchat has creates real value. Kids get the validation they crave for in a social network, but not have to worry about a permanent record of their activities being archived somewhere. Even if this is not worth money to kids, it generated value to a concerned parent.
One of those does not belong on that list...
Sorry, that was from memory. (Can't you interpret the BFPRT as a de-randomization?)

Anyway, slightly modified my point still stands: BFPRT is way more complicated (and harder to come up with) than randomized QuickSelect.
Adobe, once again. The gift that keeps on giving.
After inflicting Flash on the Internet for 15 years, now this. Has any other company caused as much grief on the Internet as Adobe?
I'm curious to hear when exactly people think bcrypt became accepted best practice? And how much of a grace period did people have to switch? Were you incompetently negligent if you didn't use bcrypt by 2003? 2007? 2011?

(I ask this as a fairly big fan of bcrypt myself. Somehow I just have the impression that half the peanut gallery comments come from people who literally switched over from md5 hashes yesterday and suddenly feel the need to crow about their great accomplishment.)
While you're waiting, will you guys please remind yourselves that it's not the end of the world if you don't get invited to interviews? Drew Houston didn't get invited the first time he applied. And a good thing too, because the idea he applied with was not Dropbox, and if he'd used YC to launch it, he would probably never have started working on Dropbox.
Why is SHA-2 in the list? [Looks like cperciva beat me to it, 0 minutes ago]

Something I've always wondered about SHA and MD5, though: if you feed the output of a hash function into its input enough times, will you eventually reach the original value? Will you have traversed the entire output space of the hash, or will there be multiple closed loops, or perhaps even multiple starting points converging on a single terminal loop?
As someone point out in the comments, repeatedly rubbing your fingertips across a surface, often at high speeds, for long periods of time does not sound very nice for your fingertips. [Controller usage in gaming is very different than typical app pointer control usage, so the use of touchpads for laptops isn't really comparable.]

The handles that "curve up ... leading to greater accuracy" also sound very uncomfortable; I'm not sure "greater accuracy" is worth long-term discomfort ...

I really wonder what their testing regime is like.
"8 rentals not more than 6 months per year" seems just as arbitrary and ridiculous to me as the "under 30 days disallowed unless present" rule. So the problem is "common sense regulation" varies a lot based on perspective.

For me, the common sense rule would be: let people contract however they want. Let them talk out or complain/negative-review/sue for any actual abuses that develop.

A parade of responsible short-term tenants incurs little negative impact, while a single bad tenant (or even house-guest) can be a disaster of crime of destruction. Let the right checks and balances evolve, rather than trying to dictate beforehand what formulas might work for wildly different tenants, properties, landlords and neighborhoods.
It had excellent VESA support though. Ran any software-rendered hack you threw at it, no exceptions.
Is it ironic that to check if my email is vulnerable i'm typing it in to a website that i'm not sure whether to trust?
If Photoshop, basically industry standard in image-editing software, isn't an achievement... then nothing qualifies as an achievement. And this is coming from someone who prefers GIMP on linux. I would love to produce something even a quarter as popular & usable as Photoshop.
HiBot Demos New Amphibious Snake Robot
Nice post Alex, thanks for that.

A lot of people forget how important two particular industries have been in terms of pushing the envelope when it comes to computer processing and Internet bandwidth technology: Pornography and gaming.

While porn and games are certainly among the more hedonistic (and certainly less virtuous) of products, because people care so much about them is in large part the reason why we have more powerful CPU/GPUs - for example - or faster connection speeds. (I guess you can thank U.S. military investments for some of this stuff as well.)

My point is, gaming is important. Like, really important. It might not have the direct impact on African schoolchildren that Kiva or Doctors Without Borders does, but one could argue that those organizations would not be able to leverage the technology that they rely on so much if others hand't paved the way. Keep doin' the good work, son! ;-)
Well, blink tag was not part of the standards anyway.
I had to laugh when I saw this. It made me think of the Joshua Bloch interview in Coders at Work:

> Seibel: I was reading Java Puzzlers and Effective Java and it struck me that there are a lot of little weird corners for a language that started out so simple.

> Bloch: There are weird corners, yes, but that's just a fact of life; all languages have them. You haven't seen a book called C Puzzlers. Why not?

> Seibel: Because it's all puzzlers.

> Bloch: Yep. It would take up a shelf. In Java, the puzzlers are worth collecting precisely because you think of it as a simple language. Every language has its corner cases and Java has few enough that they're for the most part fun and interesting.

Interesting, maybe. But I hope people are not using all of these. [0]

[0] http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exit-status.html
Good post!

I specially liked the "Why should people bother playing the game I make?" part. I keep making myself this question over and over again, and your answer really clicked with me.
Google Helpouts aims to improve your life
God says...
C:\TAD\Text\QUIX.TXT

never had any second, because with him sleep lasted from
night till morning, wherein he showed what a sound constitution and few
cares he had. Don Quixote's cares kept him restless, so much so that he
awoke Sancho and said to him, "I am amazed, Sancho, at the unconcern of
thy temperament. I believe thou art made of marble or hard brass,
incapable of any emotion or feeling whatever. I lie awake while thou
sleepest, I weep while thou singest, I am faint with fasting while thou
art sluggish and torpid

----

God says...

expounded mazes closed *BEFORE forth what_luck Mail capacities
darkest inexperienced gulf objected approveth disperseth
hand-writing cease adoption unlocked auditors feared Eagerly
The guarantee terms and conditions exclude damage to common areas and units not owned or controlled by the host. Water damage or a truly abusive guest still leave the host exposed to claims and the landlord exposed to damages for which no solvent party has liability.
It's not. Have a look at what it's users have to put up with on a daily basis.

http://bad-adobe.tumblr.com
Interesting. So hitting a bottleneck was an external constrain which forced you to be better at picking startups (your core thing).

Is this another example of arbitrary constrains as a forcing factor for effectiveness? (as in don't raise too much money).
I feel inspired now. Thanks PG, needed that.
Xkcd said it best, this is going to make the best cross-word puzzle ever with the password hints and hashes :)

https://xkcd.com/1286/

"Weather vane sword" and "sexy earlobes" indeed.
How did the people who read that paper get to the point that they are able to quickly decipher what the authors had written? Brute force repetition.

Back in high school I played a musical instrument. I practiced my scales, was quizzed on them, then practiced them some more for years. I got pretty high-school-good at this instrument, enough to earn a small scholarship. I never continued it into engineering school though, and one of the milestones I never reached was the ability to improvise within a key. You see, despite practicing the fingerings of the different keys hundreds of times, it wasn't enough to gain the intuition needed to just feel it out on my own.

Those people who read that paper and could decipher what the authors had written HAD practiced their scales enough times to develop that intuition.

Bret isn't trying to provide the most compact representation out there. He's trying to present the best model that helps you build that intuition the fastest. In music, you had to spend hours repeating the same scales so your fingers would get hard-wired into the valid combinations for a specific keys... the question is how can we build tools and techniques that help us reach that level of effortless mastery faster.
(Sorry for the accidental downvote -- #%?!!@% tiny arrows, right next to each other)
Don't know how good they are but waybackdownloader.com seems to provide that service
Is there a way I can export the entire document to a PDF?
I've noticed this effect (based on the title) when I close my eyes in a very dark room. I can sometimes "see" a very faint silhouette of my arms, and sometimes the object they're holding, roughly where they should be if the lights were on, slightly darker than the eigengrau[0]. I've wondered whether part of my brain is generating an "expectance mask" (my made up term) in my visual system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigengrau
Thank You everybody at Y combinator
For giving us a platform to do great things
Latest NSA leaks may show Google's internal RPC protocol.
I couldn't help but feel that this was a blog post that I've been meaning to write for a while.

This, mixed with "beer culture", and measuring productivity based on hours sitting in the office as opposed to features produced/bugs fixed. Complete disregard for security vulnerabilities that may put our users at risk because "we don't have time for that shit", issues of "you are not 100% committed" when you leave on time one day because your mother is terribly sick. Stalking your LinkedIn then making a huge fuss about it when it clearly hasn't been updated in a long time, adding the fact that you have a website to not "100% committed", etc.

Guess it's time to finally go write that blog post.
There has to be at least one loop (or fixed point that maps to itself). There's only a finite set of outputs, and the input space of strings as long as a hash is at least that large (in theory, some output hashes may not be possible to generate). Ideally you'd have very large, long loops, which implies few collisions.
He is 87 though. And your great grandmother is still alive.

You're gonna do just fine.
curious what that idea was?
[Comment comparing software nobody likes and software nobody uses.]
I think the parent comment's argument is that improvement on specific items isn't well correlated with "better health". Even interventions aimed at specific metrics have shown to have no or negative consequences. For example, niacin in the AIM-HIGH trial.
An SAT preparation tool: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/accolade-prep
I wrote a slightly different but perhaps relevant article about this here - http://krrishd.github.io/blog/post/cant-we-do-it-all
Thank you so much, that's enough for me to sink my teeth into for now. I appreciate the feedback.
What kind of traits now make you say no that would have previously made you said yes?
I'm imagining that just because Apple puts a plant there won't change things much. Yeah, people will talk about it for a few days, but that's about it. I remember Google had an office in Arizona but then they closed it.
Adobe has only owned Flash for the past 8 years. The first (and I'd say, most relevant) 9 years of infliction were caused by an independent Macromedia.
The issue is not bcrypt vs. some other hash. The issue is hashing vs. reversible encryption.

Unix has been using salted hashed passwords since the 70s. "one-way hash function" is a common phrase in the first edition of Applied Cryptography published in 1994. http://books.google.com/books?q=isbn:0471597562
It might be more of a reflection on my colleagues and I, but the phrase "industry standard" is basically used to mean something is crap by us. This is in radiology. UI inconsistency, buggy, crashy (as in 40 minutes to reboot the damn system), incompatibility with other systems etc. When you complain, you're told its industry standard, or similar. And this is just one system
I use. There are other standards too. The company formally known as Kodak supplied PACS system which relies on IE6. It is also an industry standard. And it's as bad as things get. In healthcare IT industry standard = rock bottom standards.
It would be a drab, depressing existence to live out your slightly longer life on a planet where everyone was a doctor and no one a novelist. Kudos for making beautiful experiences.
Considering Australia's immediate neighbors and the likelihood of them attacking, that's not exactly arbitrary. (Not to say said likelihood is high anytime soon, but it's higher than, say, needing to bomb Auckland.)
What's worse, see http://xkcd.com/1286/

They use a technique similar to ECB, which results in completely linear cipher text blocks.
It's sad that since AoE Online the main site got broken :(, same with AoC's homepage.
I've been playing around with MonoGame and it's not too bad. Considering Microsoft has stopped developing for XNA, it might be time to look into it.

I've been using a component based approach to building my game from scratch and it's been an excellent development experience. Too often I feel like I'm in the deep end and unsure if I'll sink or swim. So I try, sometimes an idea works, sometimes it fails but it's all fun.

It's all very beginner but I've started to blog what I've learned.
http://andrewjamesbowen.wordpress.com/

Source code is available on GitHub too
https://github.com/abowen/MonoGameOpenGL
I read this treat protocol from a dr. on a heart forum :

"I use EBT calcium imaging to identify who needs treatment and serial EBT calcium measurements to document adequacy of treatment. I use low dose statin or bile salt sequestrate plus ASA, high dose fish oil derived omega-3 plus frequently add nicotinic acid. In addition I screen for sub clinical insulin resistance, sleep apnea and encourage daily flossing and dental hygiene, regular mild exercise, and lots of fruit and veggies. The calcium score helps motivate compliance and the result is the near elimination of heart attacks and ischemic strokes."
http://www.theheart.org/article/1269619.do
For x << 2^(N/2) and a random oracle H which produces an N-bit output, H^x has approximately N - log(x) bits of entropy.

So it is a real issue, but not one which is serious enough to matter in practice. This is, however, why we use PBKDF2 instead of PBKDF1.
New Kepler analysis finds many Earth-like planets; total 3,500 exoplanets
I've tried several well known (and regarded) JS Frameworks. They are great up to a point. Then I get stuck - digging into the source code, re-reading the doco etc. The corner cases brought up by my projects means writing some core JS. So I did learn a lot of neat techniques, etc. So there is value in that.

These days, I mostly use core JS. I find it easier to use the tested modules that work with the types of projects I happen to work on.
A sizable contingent disagrees with this statement. For example, Tim Noakes says "never prescribe a statin to a loved one".
Love having extra justification for staying up way past 3am EST tonight :)
So, if Adobe engineers eventually realized that they needed to upgrade their password security, and they had access to the passwords in their DB (they used 3DES, and they had the key) - why did they not immediately decrypt and hash all passwords?
Actually blocking any potential purchase, not just Chinese ones.
XML gets a bad rap because of how much prettier JSON is, but there are a lot of cool tools associated with it. XPath is pretty awesome, I had to write a XPath parser/executor once (for a class) and it made me appreciate the value and simplicity.

Then there was XSLT, which was a pretty sweet way to turn a data format into a variety of "print" or "display" formats. Definitely been replaced by bigger and better things but it's a pretty awesome technology that does one thing really well.
Worth noting that Gawker got shat on precisely for using unix salted passwords, so what you're saying isn't the issue is at least some of the issue.
It's up to you at this point. I think it's a bit unusual that they won't accept it after being redacted. You can try just sending it redacted anyways. Leaving name/address/dob/photo seems reasonable. If it's sufficiently high resolution, I can't see that they will be terribly bothered.

For reference, by the way, I work at Quora, and have done a lot of work relating to enforcing real names on the site. We have asked for photo ID, but specifically ask for details to be redacted. The only things that will escalate something to this level of scrutiny are multiple red flags that signal a suspicion of abuse.

I imagine that because there is a financial transaction involved, DigitalOcean has different procedures and looks for different red flags.
Honesty, traction and $6196 MRR – Rocktober monthly report
Anytime I register anywhere, I do the following:

1. Use a new or willing-to-be-spammed email address.
2. Use a new phrase-based password.

I write all of this information down on pieces of paper that I keep at my desk. I have a lot of scribbled up paper at this point.
Are you sure you are not conflating DOM and browser idiosyncrasies with core JS. ECMA-262 is a well defined language, very much influenced by Scheme but in curly-brace (i.e. C, C++, C#, Java like) camouflage.
They'll spot this, so it's not worth it, it will only add to their suspicion. It's OK to 'shop it if you are removing stuff very obviously, but to hide/alter info they want will just cause trouble.
Lavabit was vulnerable to three attackers:

1) The server operator could choose to obtain access to plaintext.
2) An attacker who compromised the server could get access to plaintext.
3) Anyone capable of intercepting the SSL communication could get access to plaintext.

Incidentally, those are the exact same points of vulnerability for a normal (unencrypted) mail service.

One interesting question is why the US government requested Lavabit's SSL key rather than just getting a CA to sign their own. My assumption is because they were interested in past communication that might have already been deleted (perhaps by Snowden). We now know that the US government often logs and stores ciphertext, and we know that Lavabit was not selecting PFS SSL cipher suites.

So when Ladar did eventually provide the SSL key to the government, it's likely that the government was able to use that to decrypt all previously stored traffic and obtain the entire history of transmitted email.

So it's quite likely that Snowden (and all other Lavabit users) did have their email read by the government.
This site was probably targeted at IE first, and IE never supported the blink tag.
Introducing Super Secure File - One File, Completely Secure, Access Anywhere
The new "Save Page Now" feature is great, but there is still no way to add full sites to crawl. For example, I added:
http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW.aspx

But it would take hours or days to add every article from every issue.
You should still skim the paper (the answer to the title question is in section 4), but here's a one-sentence summary so you're not going in blind:

"As a scammer, saying you're from Nigeria drives off all but the most gullible (ergo, profitable) marks, allowing you to spend less time on ultimately failed scams."
I played with this in 2008, works nicely. I remember running into a 42k row limit with a single spreadsheet.
A town
Unfortunately, for large projects I have seen some bugs that currently prevent replacing valgrind with Address Sanitizer.
It's still live on MS's site and this comes up every year or so on reddit.
Implantable nfc Tag
Google Helpouts
try shyp.com
Mangalyaan, India’s First Mars Mission