skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Crypto is just so mind boggling hard from what I gather, there are probably hunderds of ways attacker can mess up the system."

One of the problems that is really hard to get around is the "timing attack"; by passing various values into a crypto system and seeing how long it takes to either return or error out, you can learn things, often entirely decoding a message in surprisingly short amounts of time.

To defend against this, a crypto system must make pervasive use of operations that take the same amount of time whether they succeed or fail. For instance, if you are comparing one string against another, you must compare the same amount of string regardless of the input; you can't bail out at the first difference, which is what you would normally do.

Unfortunately, as hardware gets more and more complicated this gets harder and harder to guarantee. Surprisingly small differences have been demonstrated to crack messages. And the worst part is, this is all advantage attacker; the attacker does not need to know why he's seeing timing differences, he can just figure out what they mean and exploit them. It's the defender that has to figure out (for example) that some predictive algorithm on the CPU sometimes preloads the next chunk of RAM and sometimes doesn't according to the alignment that your buffer happened to receive, depending on the (attacker-controlled) size of the first packet, and then figure out what to do about it.

The upshot of this is that crypto implemented in darned near anything other than assembler is probably flawed. C is the standard because that just isn't practical, but almost anything higher than C is dangerous. Many of the things that a high-level language consider a feature make programming proper industrial-strength crypto either difficult, or simply impossible. (Good luck preventing timing attacks in Haskell. The language and runtime fights you with every fiber of its being. And the ways in which it is fighting you are good thing the vast majority of the time... just not this one.)

It's relatively easy to produce a crypto library that emits the correct streams and decodes the incoming streams into the proper values, but that is merely the beginning of creating a truly robust crypto library; it's not even the halfway point. It's the easy part.

Go's crypto is built by people who know this stuff, so for instance: http://golang.org/pkg/crypto/subtle/ However, they do not claim it has been vetted by anybody in particular. Proving their implementation correct is very difficult, and I'd still worry about whether GC is going to bite somebody somehow in the implementation, nor is there any particular proof that they didn't miss a place they should use one of those functions, and I wouldn't bet my life the functions are 100% correct in all cases, either. (They're simple, they look good, but one stray compiler optimization and.... who knows?)
Pretty interesting to look at the last transaction date. For the most part it looks as if they've been pretty inactive lately.
IF bitcoin will materialize as common internet currency, these guys/girls will have some jolly good time. Until this happens this list is is nothing but a high-score in a web based game, for there is no way to exchange your BTC into real currency.

Of course, anyone who has invested in BTC is highly interested to push the hype button and spread the word of BTC as universal payment system. This is the only way to bring more hard currency into the BTC cashflow.
Unfortunately there are also plenty of bar owners who are voting for carbon filament incandescents with their wallets. They are even less efficient than tungsten, they last less and the glass gets black from soot, but they look oh so hipster.
Heat does degrade incandescents. The filament eventually vaporizes and as it gets closer to the end of its life it reaches thermal runaway in a split second. Filament resistance goes up because it is evaporating, heat goes up because the filament increases in resistance.

I have a 60W bulb I run through a dimmer that is in its 4th year. It is a nightlight for the kid's room so is never really turned off.
Scrolling down, there are addresses with an even 10000 bitcoins. If these all belong to the same person (trying to mitigate risk by spreading across wallets?) then it adds up to about 186 million...
I don't know of a good framework to cache an app in localstorage so its available offline transparently. IE, you want it so once someone runs your "app" once, and adds it as an app (a .desktop file, whatever the equivalent in Windows is, etc) so that it only ever pulls the pages from the network when an update is found.
It's fairly obvious, that you and the guy that runs the channel in question are witches... prepare to burn!

Seriously though, this is pretty cool... I am fairly surprised that there hasn't been a DC standard for lighting fixtures come into play yet... Which could be much more effective in terms of cost over time, and temperature control. Given the shear number of wall warts, and other fixtures common in the home, it would make sense for a more common interface for DC (especially low watt)... USB seems to be becoming that standard, but for lighting, and safety for internal wiring a new standard is probably needed (or an old one revisited).
What are some good surveys for data science programming?
The recent post, How Python became the language of choice for data science, got me wondering about data science again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6779323

I've never had to do anything like what I think data science and programming might be, but it seems interesting.

What I've looked at so far is mostly resources on how to do what you already know what you want to do.

What I'd like is an exposure: here are some things that you can do with data programming/science. Here's what people are doing.

A high level roadmap?
Ditto on Firefox for Windows.
Not a board game, but Bridge.

Backgammon is also very rich also, although there is a random element there which, depending on your preferences, is either a good or bad thing.
It seems that with every passing day, another prominent institution or business starts accepting Bitcoin for payment, Virgin Galactic being the latest example. In just a few years, Bitcoin has gone from experiment to global phenomenon.

I wouldn't be surprised if in coming years at least some bitcoin users start measuring their wealth in bitcoins, and therefore also evaluating exchange rates, not in terms of how many US dollars, euros, etc. they can buy with a bitcoin, but the other way around: what is the cost, in bitcoins, of a single dollar, euro, etc.?

Looking at exchange rates in this manner changes people's perspective on volatility, which is always a relative measure. For example, since the beginning of this year, the price of a US dollar has declined by more than 98%, from BTC 0.074 to just over BTC 0.001, which makes the dollar look extremely volatile!

--

PS. I'm NOT saying the dollar is extremely volatile! I'm also NOT saying that Bitcoin is more stable! What I'm saying is that if and as Bitcoin adopters start measuring their wealth in bitcoins, their perspective on what is and isn't volatile will change, as demonstrated by my example.

--

Edits: expanded second and third paragraphs; added PS.
Tech-wise, they all have pros/cons, but really, this isn't a tech question imo. It is business/organization specific;

how large is your company (human-wise/not servers)?
what technology is your org most familiar with?
Do you have a budget?
Is enterprise support important to your company?
are you dealing with any rules/regs (HIPPA, etc)
I wrote Learn Julia in Y minutes. Is there anything unclear or that you'd find useful to have included/changed?
how many times do you have to be wrong here before you question your chess knowledge?
Boring compared to chess? As a Go player I take this as an insult. Go is way more interesting, there are more fights, more complexity and you make a lot of tactical and strategic decisions in one game. Also you have a great handicap system, playing stronger players is no big problem. Did I mention that there are no remis and pro matches are often decided by 0,5 points which is really little.

I am ending my rant with a quote: "Rather than being the image of a single struggle as in chess, Go is much more like the panorama of an entire campaign, or complex theatre of war. And so it is more like modern warfare where strategic mass movements are the ultimate determinants of victory. … As in modern warfare, direct combat, without supporting tactics, rarely occurs. In fact, to engage too soon in direct combat frequently spells defeat." -- Oscar Korschelt
Looks great, I'm excited to try it out on my next project.
Your conflation of TDD with automated testing is not helpful.

As software developers, the essence of our profession is to automate repetitive tasks. If you have a rigorous manual testing methodology for your software, it should be a trivial task to turn that test specification into automated tests. The absence of a suite of automated tests is a major red flag in any non-trivial software project - it strongly suggests that either the developers do not care about quality, that they do not understand their work well enough to manage quality in a systematic way, or that they are too haphazard and disorganised to manage their project appropriately.
Knob & tube is notorious for causing fires. I'd get a second opinion on its safety.

http://www.oldhouseweb.com/how-to-advice/knob-and-tube-wirin...
And you defeated the purpose of hellbanning by pointing it out to the user. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning
One million dollars is less than 1400 BTC on gox at the moment. There are several transactions a day in this range.

And contrary to the popular folklore, you can get USD out of gox, it just costs you a fair amount to do so. If you're dealing in million dollar transactions, it can be arranged.
Yeti, a Bootstrap theme inspired by Foundation
i'm not comparing LEDs with incadescent bulbs, i'm comparing them with the coiled tubes - cfls. these things - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp

[i thought that was obvious - are you trolling?]
collision detection is based on full bounding boxes. this is especially annoying on the big ships.
It's maybe true for his company because he is a VP in Google. Lack of privacy is very beneficial to the company.

I wouldn't even consider any shit from a salesman from an ad broker company.

If he really believe privacy is anomaly he can fix it first.
Maybe he can broadcast his own house 24hrs. Maybe he can open his all the incomes and outgoings on the internet.

I never seen this kind of people are doing what they say themselves.
Is that part of the problem though? Is anyone actually trying to enforce patents against people whose plants get cross-pollinated with engineered crops?

EDIT: I realize Monsanto has sued farmers who took advantage of the cross-pollination to apply Roundup (which otherwise kills the plants) to their crops. But as far as I know, they're not suing farmers merely because of the cross-pollination by itself.
Part of the 99%, yo.
yeah this is close.... i just wish that it could be a layer on top of C++ or Java rather than js only. The point is that I want to make an app as powerful as a desktop app, just with this type of UI.

If you could run a c++/java app in the background and make RPCs to it from browser events, that would be closer...
Me, my window was too short
Simply Statistics interview with Daphne Koller about Coursera
Race on the space - visit all planets
What about a composite of 100(?) layers of this separated by proper insulation? Hypothetically, the insulation itself could be quite thin as well
For web developers, Titanium won't exercise your existing knowledge base. The license is also not as clearly open source and free to use as Ionic, even for commercial apps. In terms of comparing to other frameworks, we have a lot of mobile-specific UI interactions that most others don't, like draggable side menus, pull to refresh, etc.
I think it was a default. Or, at least, with one formatting toolbar which I simply disabled. I never used palettes of special symbols: it was easier to remember some common shortcuts via "escape" key (e.g. Euler constant is <escape> ee <escape>)
I'm not saying that everyone has to lead the way, but that if enough people do then progress continues at a faster pace. 4k monitors will be commonplace in 3-8 years, for instance. The rate of early adoption will determine how fast companies invest in them.
afaik 90+% (100%?) of all the blocks mined by satoshi have never been touched. Satoshi's wealth would be in thousands of separate 50BTC wallets, not 1 big one.

Can't be bothered to find the source atm but someone did some analysis on the mined blocks in 2009/2010 and found the likely blocks mined by the same person who mined the first block, all unspent.
I think this is actually based on subjective measures. An annotated game[0] will have ?!, ?, and ?? added by human commentators to indicate varying levels of mistakes. A computer analysis can make use of these subjective move evaluations within an annotated game to easily measure which players cause their opponents to make mistakes at a significantly greater frequency than their normal rate of mistakes.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols#Move_e...
I might take a second look if they allowed it to float against other currencies and opened an exchange.
Ask HN: Who is my customer? Alumni Business / Product Directory.
I have a pet project I've worked on for a while and would love some thoughts about validating how to find customers.

The site is a directory of alumni products and businesses.

We have launched private sites for small liberal arts colleges harvesting launch data from publicly available sources, and advertising to alums. We have some decent traction of traffic, email list signups and user submitted alumni businesses / authors.

Many colleges are proud of, and feature these types of listings in their alumni magazines and websites. A handful have un-maintained sites with some of this data.

I'm interested in anyone's thoughts about how to
- Sortfolio Model - Free listings, pay for premium.
- Ads (same businesses that would advertise in an alumni magazine)
- Sell to college advancement / alumni offices.
(Most that we've talked to aren't interested in profiting off of their alums, and definitely don't have the resources to build and maintain this themselves)

What could we offer the universities as our potential customer?
Research of their alums? Just hosting of the site?

Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated!

Thanks!
Runoff of chemicals seems like a lawsuit against the upstream farmer. But that's assuming a just world, of course. :(
The Most Boring Article You'll Read Today
heh i don't want to build an APP!! that's kinda the point, lol.

i'm not an app developer. i make audio stuff with machine learning tools & I'm a web dev to pay the bills. But in this case all i really want is to build a desktop application (c++,java,whatever) and have a browser-based UI... but not have it appear as a browser tab.
From my quick review, Ionic is a framework for building mobile applications using web standard technologies (HTML5/JS/CSS). You then build your application using PhoneGap -- which builds a native mobile application wrapped in a WebView. This would be similar to writing a web app using jQuery Mobile and building a mobile app using PhoneGap. Ionic gives you a nice starting point, just like when you use Bootstrap for a website instead of writing all of your styles from scratch.

Titanium apps are written in JavaScript (using Titanium libraries) that hook into native functionality. Your apps are then compiled into fully native mobile applications (not WebViews). It really comes down to the differences between running fully native apps vs. web views wrapped in a native application. There is a good explanation of the differences between here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17249500/xamarin-2-0-vs-a....
Clearly both.
From the blog, it has the following piece of code:

def outcome(hiring_procedure):
allowable_candidates = [c for c in all_candidates if hiring_procedure(c)]
candidate_values = [risk_profile(value(c)) for c in allowable_candidates]
return candidate_values.sum() / len(candidate_values)

What happens if we get to the return line, with an empty candidate_values? ZeroDivisionError ?
Currently free. That may change in the new year, but right now interested in establishing a user base.
Creating a Monet with code
Thanks, will try to make it clearer.

I think the value proposition is this:

1) You can configure it in minutes, whereas it may take a competent developer several hours to set this up on your own servers (possibly $100s in wages = several years subscription).

2) One less worry.

3) If your servers are bogged down, google still gets served the pages quickly (point 2).

4) Bonus metrics.
What board games have you played? In the last 10-15 years, the U.S. has experienced something of a German-style board game renaissance. Check out Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Agricola, and many other less popular ones.

Kind of irrelevant, but board games seem like a great application of 3D printing. I wonder if there will be another surge in popularity when (if?) 3D printers become household items.
I consider myself a data scientist in bioinformatics field. I have to deal with several hundred GB scale data everyday. IMO, the best tool kit so far is the combination of Perl and R. Because these tools have the richest packages/modules, you can do almost everything with them.
As for python, I don't think it can deal with the data I have as efficient as Perl.
I own an email account that people could put for their email when they don't want to give an email. Something like test@domain.com. I have gotten emails that indicate people (not me) have signed up for services with it. I created it for throwaway accounts.
In my opinion, GitHub is not at all a "code portfolio". It is a "social git application", or a "social collaborative version control system".

My GitHub page is not my portfolio, neither a Coding Museum of Myself. GitHub is made for easily writing and sharing code, not __showing off__.

Except from that fundamental misunderstanding, the rest of the argumentation seems valid, and I agree: a code portfolio can be a good hiring tool.

But GitHub isn't one.
Tin fluoride is also commonly used in toothpaste under the name of stannous fluoride.
I realize this... the core principles of liberty are, however, universal. Even if a specific local government doesn't believe in it. Even in the U.S. it appears to be less and less supported by law each year.
YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage
Sorry if I'm off base or misunderstanding you, but isn't this exactly what Monsanto has done to get their claws into a lot of US farmers that don't otherwise use their products?
Good point about the licensing models. That is a very big difference as well.
You would have to make a deal one-on-one with a buyer. The current liquidity on the exchanges would mean that you tank the price and end up with way fewer dollars. And you would start a price panic.
Why are there so many at the EXACT same amount (71-94)?
Software is Reorganizing the World
Agree. And Wolfram surely is genius in some ways.

But ironically he is a much better entrepreneur than he is a scientist.

If only he was looking for praise in the former rather than the latter he would get all the recognition he seems to crave.
It's quite fun to see the media attention he has gotten here in Norway. For the last few weeks the sport segment of most news show spent as much time devoted to chess as football, which is not something i ever expected to see.

I'm not much a chess player myself but it still very satisfying seeing so much attention brought to a intellectual sport. I hope at least some of it will stick around.
Ask HN: what should I build
Hello fellow HN users. I am addicted to this site. like I have formed some kind of a habbit or something.

I am learning to build websites frontend as well as back end.

I am familiar with php codeigniter, and slim framework. I know css fair enough, and use bootstrap and jquery mostly for front end.

I have made smaller apps which can send sms.

now I would like to ask you for some ideas. What should I develop. I have thinked about it a lot, but I can't think of anything that can add value to user.
so insights and helpful comments are welcome.

please forgive me for bad english.
It's (nearly) tomorrow in Singapore. I imagine the U.S. will see it when we get there.
Touché. The comment was mostly directed at the hyperbole of "10 page manuals" and such.

I totally agree with what you're saying, though.

The issue at hand is that consumers want something that is impossible for manufacturers to give to them. That is, a 100% efficient lighting solution which shines light exactly when they want it, exactly how they want it, and lasts forever. Consumers have gotten used to a market where there has been almost no innovation for over a hundred years (in the driver side, fixtures are a different story). Now that there's some diversity in the market, consumers are unhappy because it's not matching expectations. The only way that will change is if manufacturers properly set expectations.
My experience was having used Mathematica years before I ever saw LISP, or really knew anything about programming beyond C & F77. A REPL, functional programming, lists, etc. -- it was pretty mind-blowing.

Now I know that none of those things were invented by Wolfram (the company or the man), but they were put into productive use, in a very slick and beautiful application with a slew of symbolic and numerical math libraries which were world class.

I guess to a large extent, you're not missing something, but the libraries are comprehensive, well designed, well documented, very consistent and reasonably intuitive.
Cool, it was held in Chennai, my home town. I remember some of my friends along with others (25 at a time) lining up to play Anand at the same time about 15 years ago. Anand was a Grand master at that time. Who else is from Chennai here at HN ?
DH0, then DH3. You can do better!

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Here's a relevant test: http://jsperf.com/queryselectorall-vs-jquery-jb
I find that this whole Github portfolio thing is getting blown out of proportions. A Github profile is a useful extra, but shouldn't be the only indicator of programming capability.

Neither should education and previous experience.

When hiring, people should talk to each other about something they've done (be it public code or private code). That should give a first impression.

Then you either hire or not on that first impression, and use the following 6 months re-evaluating your first impression. That's what it's there for.

If either side is not fully content, then's the time to decide to keep or fire.
I'm not sure exactly what constitutes a viable "chess alternative," but if you're open to going beyond two player and investigating other styles of games, check out the top games on BGG (boardgamegeek.com). Many of these have a great deal of strategic depth and subtlety:

http://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame
I know nothing of BitCoin, but could one figure out which Address belongs to the Winklevoss brothers? Does it matter?

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/09...
Can you imagine how many of these BTCs are actually lost forever.

Look at this address:

http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5...

The last time this address was touched was 2009, and has an even 8,000 coins (back in the day, this only amounted to 320 mined blocks. You could do that in what?... a few hours/half days?[1])
The owner probably ran his system for a few hours, collected 8000 coins, thought it was a ridiculous concept and deleted everything from his system.

[1]: https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&s...