skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question is: would it be feasible to search for them? Scan every single video on youtube looking for noise with some elevated probability of containing hidden text? What happens when you find a candidate? Pick random pixels out of every frame and then try and brute force it with every known symmetric cipher and every single key?

You could flip a single, random, least-significant bit on each frame of a 1 hour movie. This would allow you to store a 10.5KB encrypted message within. I'd like to know how anyone could possibly find those bits, let alone decipher them.
I think the tricky thing is that many Health IT people aren't really interested in what's going on on the other side of the fence except sales people scoping out competition. I only know alot about other Health IT software vendors that I've replaced their software with the company that I worked for. Someone that knows a lot about one vendor might not know anything about any of the others. It makes it easy to make sweeping generalizations sometimes; some of which aren't always warranted.

You could also say the same thing about HN, but it always has this feeling of articles that are either "Academic or things the Valley would care about". Most Health IT topics are neither.

But, I do love the idea.
Agreed, but the definition of money isn't constant worldwide nor for all groups of people even in the same country, and it's definitely not constant through time.

In Nazi Germany everyone used the Reichsmark except for American POWs there, who used cigarettes. Right now in Argentina they use pesos and dollars. Furthermore the official exchange rate set by the government isn't the true exchange rate that you can get on the street. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner-of-war_camp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso

Even here in the US there are plenty of people willing to trade or barter or accept slightly alternative currencies. I might argue that something's money-ness is related to it's acceptance as a medium of exchange. Probably not linearly, but in some way. There are network effects for money just the same as everything else that humans do.

At home I've got US coins that are labelled as dimes but I can take them to quite a few places and exchange them for at least $1.25 in today's paper dollars. Why? They're pre-1965 dimes and they've got some silver and that makes them worth more.

To try and pin down "money" as "absolutely this one thing always and forever" is a bit of a fool's errand because money is as one friend of mine put it a "shared delusion". It's a decidedly human construct and while you can pass laws, you can't actually control people's behavior. If everyone decides that bitcoin is money it doesn't matter what the law says about dollars, they'll be just as worthless as this author thinks bitcoin is now.
You can do it without trust using nlocktime.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/NLockTime
At the recent growth hacker conference, essentially every speaker dedicated time to idea that product quality matters. I certainly did when talking about the Dropbox referral program. You can see a version of my talk here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECvLsimoSjU
Webzeitgeist: Design Mining the Web
Not to mention that it's a very opinionated, elitist, offensive essay. How calling people "Blub developers" can be taken serious and not as elitist posturing is beyond me.
Nope, it's basically any device with the Play Store on running Android 4.2 or later.

Chrome being the only browser on Nexus devices has become another reason to avoid Nexus devices, along with the Hangouts as only messaging app and the general lack of storage. It's merely that the alternatives are arguably worse.
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830080
I feel bad about it. I shouldn't have called him out by name; I should've concentrated solely on why this tool falls short. Sorry, Bram.

I'm just worried that people will see his name, see that he's saying things like "this tool is ready to be used," and then actually use this, just because "It's Bram Cohen," and end up getting themselves caught.
From the README:

Q. Can someone detect that a file has messages encoded in it?

A. That depends on the encoding used and the properties of the file the data is being encoded in. There's a whole field of academic literature on steganography, none of which is invalidated by this code. What this code does is vastly simplify the implementation of new steganographic techniques, and allow a universal decoder and encoding of multiple messages to different keys in the same file.
Responses to Sneezing
You would also have access to their development branches which would give insight into future product features and bug fixes that have not yet been released. The former would be useful information to give to competitors and really put the company into a tough position to compete down the line while the latter could be used to find possible critical holes to exploit.
The article actually says it is using Apache Cordova which is Adobe PhoneGap. I wish they would just contribute to the project directly, though. There's already quite a bit of bullshit platforms built on top of PhoneGap, like a business applet one by HP, and using the actually thing is always better.
When you say "unduly verbose" I am not sure what exactly the interviewer/you are looking here. I purposefully made it verbose so that anyone who calls himself a programmer should understand what I am doing.

Even I dint spend any time in refactoring or optimization as this is just a hack to get past a job interview.

When an interviewer gives you tasks like this do they expect optimized and refactored code?
Yes, I saw that before I commented.

I'm Ben Burns. I run benjamincburns.com. If I'd made this exact post there and submitted it, would it have been voted to the front page (if only briefly, apparently)?

That's an actual question. Rephrased, am I misinterpreting the guidelines, or is Dan's status as a YC alumnus buying some leeway?

Also in the interest of full disclosure, I have a personal pet peeve against editorial news aggregators where editors/authors are expected to churn out article after article in an effort to profit from long tail traffic without adding anything meaningful to the content they aggregate (read: steal). Of course there's a broad spectrum of aggregator sites, and I wasn't familiar with Techendo, which isn't at all in the category I'm describing, before I saw this post. Seeing this very brief article as my first introduction flipped that "oh great, another shitty Gawker Media clone" flag, and I instantly wondered why it was on the front page.

So Dan, I'm not saying that you suck, or your site sucks, or even that your post sucks, but I am wondering aloud about how the community here works.
SpaceX Successfully Completes First Mission to Geostationary Transfer Orbit
The prefetch is only serving as 6-byte padding here. The nopw instruction performs no memory access, it does not double as a prefetch.

There are remarkably few memory accesses actually being performed in that loop. The CPU is using store forwarding to cache the 'memory' accesses in the store buffer, which means most accesses are not even accessing L1 cache (if this were the case, we would not have such a low count of cycles per iteration).

The best result I've got is by inserting a 6-byte nopw right before the store:

.L3:
movq	counter(%rip), %rdx
addq	%rax, %rdx
addq	$1, %rax
cmpq	$400000000, %rax
nopw 0x1(%rax,%rax,1)
movq	%rdx, counter(%rip)
jne	.L3
Depends on your use case and threat model.

If I'm the Secret Police in some oppressive state, then I just need to find out whether you seem to be using stego — which is naturally against the law, itself, and hence grounds for arrest. Then, I can use rubber hoses, bamboo splinters, the threat of violence against your loved ones, and what-not to "brute force" your passphrase.

If I'm the NSA, I just detect the presence of stego and stash the container for later — say, when my quantum computer finally works as advertised, or I can plant a keylogger or turn on the back door on the your computers and sniff your passphrase, or simply mine your social graph until I find some other means of compromising you.

The possibilities are hardly limited to a naïve, brute-force search across the set of (crypto algorithm, passphrase) tuples.

EDIT: But, to your point: yes, using video makes finding stego harder. It doesn't change the nature of the problem, though; it just changes its scale. Against adversaries with the computational power of a modern nation-state, however, if you're relying on scale to hide your behavior, licit or otherwise, you're only deluding yourself.
Every time someone iterates and releases the code on github, law enforcement will then be capable of writing a DissidentX encoding detector for that encoder. Every time you publicly release stego code, that stego code becomes ineffective.

At best, this framework provides a way for people to write stego encoders that they don't plan on releasing publicly. But you should say that! Warn people how dangerous it is to be releasing their stego code. And warn people not to trust any of the default encoders.

It's not as easy to iterate on stego techniques as you're implying. There are only so many ways to creatively hide a message. And if people happen to come up with a scheme which has already been broken in the past, then their encoder will provide no security at all. They'll trick themselves into believing they're secure, when they're not.
"When you are still small, you can spend a lot of money marketing or advertising and have a big impact on usage growth. But eventually, you get so big you simply can't spend enough money to move the needle..."

Well, that depends. Specifically, it depends on how scalable your advertising channel is. If your customer acquisition cost through that channel remains below your customer lifetime value, the only limit on your scaling is the working capital you have available to spend on advertising.

Advertising can take you a very long way in some cases.
Perhaps this is a dumb question, but wouldn't the water freeze?
I think statistically, if you punt from the 9 yard line, the other team is going to get excellent field position (around the 50 yard line). The difference between failing on 4th and 1 from your own 9 and the other team getting the ball around the 50 yard line is 41 yards of field position.

That may sound like a lot, but I'd imagine the actual point difference is on the order of 2 points.

The more interesting thing to consider would be whether taking a safety there is ever a positive.
Huh! I actually started working on a system that does something very similar, which ended up being morphed into Bitrated after a few people convinced me that it wouldn't work.

This idea has been brought up in the Bitcoin community from time to time [1] [2], usually referred to as mutual assured destruction, risk deposit or nash equilibrium.

I personally really like this idea and think that it could work well with rational players.

The problem is that there is room for abuse - one party could tell the other party "okay, I'm not going to finish that deal with you. we can both either lose everything, or you pay me 70% of the risk deposit and get to keep 30% of it".

In the long run, rational players should always refuse to such offers. If scammers would know that everyone always refuses, they'll quickly get into a loss and stop doing that. The problem is that I'm not sure how people would react in such situations - why not take the 30%?

As to your idea of publishing history - that could work, if that system could somehow know who's a fraudster and who isn't. Its kinda hard to tell by just looking at the blockchain and seeing what happens with the coins, there could be multiple reasons for the funds getting split.

[1] http://nashx.com/HowItWorks (requires trust in the website operator, as he holds the funds. at least it was like that last time I saw it)

[2] https://gist.github.com/etotheipi/2305966
Posted 4 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819969
Thanks Dan. I've designed some visual interfaces for it, but I've been avoiding implementing them. I guess it does put off a lot of visitors, so now is the time.
Stop thinking that. Think of yourself as the last piece of wonderful on earth and that everyone is here to compliment you, as egotistical as this sound it will boost your morale.
I'm also a 16 year old high school student! I'm working on a website right now and i'm going to start adding projects soon. Regarding your website, my main criticism is the animations/transitions when you click on each tab (the page moves so fast-maybe slow it down). Otherwise, I really like your design-it's smooth and really refreshing to look at. You might want to consider changing the fonts though.

This is irrelevant to your website, but I noticed that you're from TJHS. Did you go to MHacks? I saw a few kids from that high school over there. I also noticed that you're involved with Pilot. I really want to get a hackathon started up here in Detroit, so we should connect.
What you don't know about hotel conference rates pt 1
Indeed. It would take relatively very little investment for UPS and gang to start doing night deliveries. I think the barriers to entry are pretty low for the big boys.
No, Google needs the future of mobile apps to be the web, which is very different.

Unfortunately, while they're doing this they're simultaneously changing the web into something which removes the very things which allow them to monetise it successfully today.

A web of WebGL based client apps which just ping servers for JSON objects of a custom nature will be even more impenetrable to massive data mining than the current JS infested mess out there, which was one of the many justifiable criticisms rightly thrown at Java applets back in the late 90s. The opportunity to rewrite the browser in itself and thus remove the HTML/CSS entirely will prove far too tempting.
I can't help wondering if back buttons should work differently. If you are here on this page as a result of a quick, automatic redirect and you hit "back", don't go back to the page that sent you here; skip over it to the most recent page that didn't automatically fling you forward.
Note that the bad programmer bit was a quote of the post I replied to, which I then thoroughly disagreed with. It was not a statement of fact on my part.
This is especially true of 4th down plays. A surprise play-action pass on 4th and 1 can go for an especially long gain and thus should have higher expected value. There's also the fake-punt scenario, which I suspect tends to be more successful than a regular 4th down.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

Amazon locker is great for packages that aren't too large. Of course, only works with products from Amazon.
Joy of code 2013, natl CS Edu week Dec9-16, lots of cool links
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Healthcare.gov actually loads now
The last time I checked Prezi was extremely buggy to the point of being unusable. So they should be very thankful for any bugs reported. Probably their app usability is the consequence of not responding to the user reports.

Are they still relying on adobe flash when everyone else moved on?
"You can cash out into Maserati, but it's also not a good store of value"

You should see what crazy things bad monetary policies make possible:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-08/argentine-protectio...

cached version of an Economist article:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_MKsBta...
SpaceX Private Crew Program
The funny thing is that I come from a physics degree background and hence have a tendency to stick with the more scientifically accurate "I think, maybe, probably, possibly, almost always", rather than going for absolutes. However, when you enter into the business world, you tend to find that this kind of language comes across as weak and uncertain. Even though you are merely trying to be correct and not give false impressions!

So now I actually appreciate more confident, strong language, because when I read a blog post or article like this, I can take the caveats as being there, but unsaid.

I sometimes think that if everyone took this assumption, Hacker News would decimate its comment count!
He just throws out the word "disorderly" out of nowhere like it's a magic word that lets him arrest whomever he wants.
After sitting through both launch attempts, I missed this one. Is there any way to view the launch video?
Your "counterexample" is young political activists, probably local party leaders. Those are multicultural, openminded and all. What about the average middle class, representing probably 90-99% of the buying power?

I agree that it's not impossible to sell in multiple countries at once, but it's just times bigger investment to get smaller combined market than US.

For Apple starting with US was a justification to spend probably billions on iPhone. Market was big enough for this gamble to make sense. You can't justify huge investments if your plan to start in Poland and then expand to Romania and Turkey. Or did that company go into all 3 countries simultaneously?
And, btw, combined GDP of Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Turkey is 1.65 trillion. GDP of USA is 16.86 trillion.
i've been working in mobile health for 5 years now. thank you for putting this together.
How delightfully elitist and condescending of you.
low pressure lowers the boiling point. Water is space will spontaneously boil (i.e. its molecules will separate and drift apart in a vacuum, because there is no background material to hold them together anymore)
I'm not sure, but I suspect that the Portal 2 reference might itself be a reference to the recurring Muppet Show sketch "Pigs in Space" (pronounced Piiigs innn Spaaace).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYjbkRktqIE
The Atlas V uses the very cool Russian designed RD-180 engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180

The documentary The Engines That Came in from the Cold is an interesting look at these engines and the NK-33's, and US/Russian collaboration.
I gave the poster the benefit of the doubt since they offered with the dist-upgrade comparison which one would only need for major release upgrades. The yum and library complaints however I didn't want to touch since I haven't experienced that with CentOS/RHEL.
I'm not convinced people should be writing applications in C if they can't call memcpy safely. (I say this not to downplay the many pitfalls of writing correct C, but to suggest that anyone giving less than careful consideration of the arguments to memcpy each time it is used is better off not using C at all -- we have many fine alternatives.)
> These posts are entirely the result of authors who didn't buy bitcoins when they were cheap. They want it to fail, and try to find any flaws in it that they can, because if it succeeds then they'll really feel like shit because they missed out.

I see it every day. One of my coworkers used to be into Bitcoin and owned a fair number and then decided to donate them away when they were still a few dollars a pop. These days he can't stop making predictions about how Bitcoin is going to fail and how it's all a bubble and ponzi.

It's unbelievable how some people are unable to deal with their cognitive biases.
As a matter of fact, most of the engineers on this project are regular committers to the Cordova project. (Cordova is the underlying project, btw -- PhoneGap is Adobe's build system built on top of it)

We're very committed to the Cordova platform, and we're very active in pushing it forward.

Though there are a lot of individuals, and companies, involved, I suspect that, by any measure, Google is one of the top contributors to Cordova these days.
How to Skyjack Drones In an Hour for Less Than $400
No, it's based on third down data. The likelihood of converting 3rd and 1 is probably similar to that of converting 4th and 1.
That is a different timer isn't it. That lets you make a delayed transaction, It doesn't stop a wallet holder from making an instant transaction.

The service would be to provide a wallet where the holder could not generate an immediate transaction. Any attempt to access would cause the service to contact the owner.

It's possible that nlocktime could allow it so that the service never reveals their private key, It auto approves time delayed transactions and notifies the owner that it has done so.
Holy shit, there it is. Thanks, man.

On side note: you can see how they follow OS X patterns in filling blank space: then that cloth, now just dark texture (like notif center)
Similar? compare California to Texas, and then compare Spain to Czech Republic.
Apple needed to partner with one carrier - AT&T to sell phones in all 50 states.
What's the minimum number of carriers you need to partner with in order to have a friendly carrier in each EU country?
Guardian staff may face terrorism charges over Snowden leaks
Those aren't "Microsoft functions"; they're C's optional Annex K functions which Microsoft happens to mostly implement (though in true MS fashion, they did manage to get a few wrong before the standard was finalized).
The E-Reading Software That's Better Than Kindle or iBooks
This is awesome. Mathematics struggles a lot from bad presentation, but this does an excellent job of taking well-known and interesting problems and explaining them (and their solution). Problem solving is a lot more fun than simply reading mathematical truths.

For the areas of math that I know well, the content is exactly what I would expect -- i.e. it's exactly what I would say to my non-math friends if they asked me what I was doing in, for example, my graph theory class.
Can you elaborate? I don't see why this must be true. Just as good encryption is indistinguishable from random data, good steganography should be indistinguishable from whatever universe of target plaintexts you've chosen. In both cases, the code is public, but the secret key is needed to see that the message is non-random, or non-plaintext.

I am interested in how this scheme is different from https://fteproxy.org/ though.
I'm a bit confused about the part of the FAQ which says "he's requested to enter his public/private key (which is automatically generated) and accept the terms"

This stuff left me confused about all the wallets and keypairs and things going around (not to mention the very idea of private keys other people have access to).

You could make a nice diagram with some arrows showing all the different things and how they're exchanged.
Complexity is not hopeless.

First, http://www.vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm and
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf (Personal computing,
which currently fit in about 200 Million lines, or 10 thousand books,
could actually fit in about 20.000 lines, or a single book.)

Second, as we make more complex systems, we could just prove that they
work as intended. (Provided the underlying hardware works as
intended, which as you pointed out is not allways the case). Okay,
it's expensive to prove your software. But it's not impossible: just
use proven libraries, and prove that your software works if the
dependencies and the hardware work. No need to prove the whole stack.

Sure, it's expensive in the short term. But think of the total
absence of effort you will need to invest over debugging.

---

Of course, right now, we're deep in the poo. Hail to Worse Sells Better!
Python on a microcontroller
Definitely worth backing:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/214379695/micro-python-python-for-microcontrollers
So ... Your response is basically YOLO?
I think it might be because satoshi cares more about changing the world than he/she does about cashing out - doing so before bitcoin has a stronger/stabler adoption might ruin the whole thing. My guess is satoshi's already making decent money somewhere being smart and is just sitting back with a smile watching the whole thing take off
So it sounds like fans and the media need to grasp EV first before coaches will be allowed to take the appropriate risks.