skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The simple answer is no. If you think about the amount of work it would create for somebody to refactor your code vs. getting you to do it right in the first place.

Can you imagine what the source would look like if every developer used a different coding method? If there was no consistency in the API? It would be a nightmare to try to use if you couldn't consistently know that methods are camelcase or underscored, etc. etc.
FreeBSD package server was compromised quite a long time ago. Have they restored it yet? It not being there is sort of a deal-breaker for me, since I really cannot be bothered to compile all the 3rd party packages I use from source.
> You become a customer, when you start paying them. Until then you are just a user.

^ The problem with free software: you're not supposed to expect it to work correctly.
I often read that argument that NoSQL Databases are Schemaless and yes the Database is but your Data is or it isn't. YOU must know your Data.

"All the while moving work onto the developers to standardize how they handle different migration cases."

I know a startup is fast and bla bla...
BUT your team should know the tools that you are using...
For me SQL DB's force me to add a new field and some kind of value and i don't like to be forced to a solution.

"In document stores, you have two choices: store related data as sub-documents, or store related data as separate documents with references. It is up to the developers to understand the trade-offs of both approaches. Selecting one over the other can lead to performance gains or issues, scalability issues and above all, make asking certain questions of the data a lot harder."

Again know the tools you are using.
And for example MongoDB has good ORM's too.

"But that takes much more forethought and is dependent on a particular problem."

If your startup is doing something new and shiny you don't have the knowledge and forethought and you often dont know what particular problem will come at you.

Most of the point's look like:
You learned at your University SQL now you know it(but in really life you don't) and now use it because you know how to normalize a Database. This argumentation is often used to say why java is so great or why javascript is bad.

I personally started with php then moved to rails and now to meteor(uses MongoDB) and we never before meteor could make so fast a good prototype which for a startup is very important.

So yeah if you are comfy with SQL use it if your comfy with NoSQL use it.
A little bit off topic, but I tried to get a developer API key for Bittorrent Sync, and never heard of them.

Same thing for Bittorrent Live.

Has anyone been successful in getting those ? Also, with the twitch flop (quality of the website, lags, 60 sec delay, PR problems) why don't we hear more about the Live service ?
I know that the idea is enlightened self-interest.

Is it in the enlightened self-interest of a person that after they died, there is still life in the Universe? Is it in my enlightened self-interest that those who starve and have no water have a better life?

What, exactly, is the difference between self-interest and selfishness? Is one not just a euphemism for the other?
>Common Lisp has multiple return values and it's quite useful:

Ditto for Perl:

sub f { 1..$_[0] }

my ($x) = f(12); # $x = first value, rest are dropped
...
my ($x, $y) = f(12); # $x & $y have first two values, rest are dropped
...
my ($x, $y, @rest) = f(12); # $x=1, $y=2 & @rest=3..12
Everyone who has been criticising Telegram would actually love for them to do what you've suggested. We want good, secure encrypted messaging. Telegram is not it, and people are worried, as their actions so far smack far too much of a project that ignores best practices...

In the crypto world, projects like Telegram have popped up over and over again. A new protocol, designed by non cryptographers, that turns out to be heavily insecure. I wish that wasn't the case, but that is why people have reacted the way that we have. This is literally life and death, so it pays to be cautious.

I hope Telegram learn from all this, and go and get audited and tested by reputable experts. Then, fix all the issues raised. Then release their apps to the public, when they are proven secure. Until that time I personally will not trust their application.
A brief glance at this thread and the other discussion showed only 1 substantive comment that told me something I didn't know after a cursory read through(that I saw at least). The amount of people who didn't even read the paper is mindblowing
Nonetheless, these statutes even if only adhered by a small population of Denmark and Scandinavia are repulsive and eminently worthy of disparage.

This is not what a technologically progressive society would want more of.
An annotation nightmare
The Telegram guys chose to view it as a proof of inherent superiority of humble Russian programmers over NSA-backed American haters (I wish I was kidding!).
Here is what Pavel Durov had to say on the matter (translated from his public post on vk.com http://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858):

> This story makes me once again admire Russian programmers. For a whole week esteemed American cryptographers on HackerNews were picking on the protocol fruitlessly - mostly demanding to replace our own solution with algorithms from NSA-backed Suite B [sic!]. An yet a Russian programmer, who calls himself "a novice", could immediately recognize the weak spot in the secret chats, in the context of an article on Habrahabr.ru.

Edit: To make it clear, that is not the whole post, just the first paragraph relevant to my point
Good God.. Россия - родина слонов.

As a programmer from that neck of the woods, allow me to use this opportunity to distance myself from these clowns.
Is it being maintained? Last release seems to be from February 2012.
Unless the energy companies get to make a profit on solar power they will fight it tooth and nail with lobbying and legislation, no matter how good it is for the environment.

Why not set up a system where energy companies install and maintain solar panels on peoples' houses and then charge for the maintenance as a service (as opposed to individuals paying for their own panels in order to reduce their power bills)? That way they will be incentivized to not only offer solar power, but to invest in technology to also make it more efficient. Also individual home owners will not need to outlay such a large initial cost.
William Binney's keynote at HOPE 9:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8

all talks:

http://www.hopenumbernine.net/schedule/
Lithium batteries are interesting because they store 200Wh/kg, vs. 40Wh/kg for lead. But they're dramatically more expensive, about 500€/kWh vs. about 100kWh/kg for lead (difficult to compare precisely, due to different tolerances to deep discharge among others)
Psychotropic drug use among people with dementia – a six-month follow-up study
He's got a point though, theres quite a bit of precedence for this. E.g. all the random wiki articles posted that aren't 'news'.
I'm a little late to this game but I've heard similar stories years before (maybe California and Germany?)

Does anyone know if utilities are changing their installation design books? To me that would be the first place to start. I don't know about Hawaii but I know in other parts of the US massive subdivisions are being put in on a regular basis. I would hope that those new subdivisions would be geared to support this use case.
Any speculation going on amongst the HN crowd concerning Dogecoin? How high do you think it will go? Do you think it can maintain value, or is it just a fad?
I should point out that it was only for a few hours in the early morning on a windy summers night (low base demand, no AC or heating demand).

On average though 2013 renewables provided ~17% of total demand [http://www.eirgrid.com/media/EirGridAnnualRenewableReport201...].

System Non-Synchronous penetration (SNSP) is a real-time measure of the percentage of generation that comes from non-synchronous sources, such as wind and HDVC interconnector imports relative to the
system demand. In the Irish grid this is limited to 50% for stability.
They did give a prize.
Somewhat similar to the difference between C/C++ or enterprise Java and various dynamic or "scripting" languages in terms of structure, the "S" in SQL or NoSQL. The former tends to require more up-front structural design to do anything, which is a nuisance at first when you're not sure what you will end up needing. The latter tends to be quicker to throw together and repeatedly rearrange in the early days of its evolution, which is a huge advantage to a small startup trying to figure out what business it's in, but often runs into trouble later, once the needs have stabilized and the structure becomes more of a benefit than a cost.

For areas other than structure, the difference can be more like the difference between a general purpose programming language and a domain-specific language. SQL databases are general purpose, so they offer a large, nicely integrated package of features, while NoSQL databases often sacrifice some of those features to optimize for some niche. From this perspective, the SQL database can be the best choice for a startup trying to find its niche with the NoSQL chosen as an optimization once that niche has been identified.

The fact that a new business can't be sure what its business will end up being is an argument both for and against using a SQL database.
I've not found any attempts to help them apart from this bug report.

>TextSecure's interest is in security, whereas Telegram's interest seems to be in money and power

I can't read minds or even their messenger logs so I can't comment what is their interest but I'd be interested to know why you think so

> TextSecure completely safe app

Just wrong. How could you call something "completely safe" or bug free?

>Each of these messengers is safe to passive listening
>This is mistaken because Telegram has been proven vulnerable to MITM attacks

How Telegram is prone to passive listening?
you don't go tell you got the best thing in the world while its just another random thing that doesn't do what you say - its just for fame/ego/money - without getting hateful feedback.

And guess what, hate isn't always wrong.
You could try to save yourself or your family. Can't you at least flee to another country until the situation stabilizes a bit? It seems suicide to be working on a start-up events while people are being slaughtered on the streets.
A coding style is there for a reason, and Laravel even has a documentation that tells you in advance the coding style and gives you tips on how to submit a good pull request: https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/master/CONTRIBUTIN...

This is how contributions work. Not just open source. At any sane company, you will have a common coding style, and your patches will not pass review, or be merged, if you do not follow. Same goes for open source.
He's getting $100 000, and note that the vulnerability he found was outside the first contest's scope.

HN seems to hate by default.

https://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858
stable version, every value is string. No atomic incremental operations, no nesting, shitty index.
>Pavel, I am hopeful that you will reward the chap even though the discovery was not within the "guidelines". it is all about the spirit of the competition.

He does reward the chap—with $100 000:
https://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858

I figure it's fair.
I think it is quite a bit worse than "just anyone" else.
>Terms of bug bounty are very hard to satisfy even with bad protocol but Durov seems decided to play safe with such amount of money. Guy that found problem in MTproto doesn’t win money according to conditions of the bug bounty because message is not decrypted.

The guy gets $100 000:

https://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858

You may want to check before you post.
Any European citizen know what is needed for the European Commission for Competition to put a tariff to American imports so they stop destroying the European industry making undeclared and illegal subsidies?
I applied for BTSync API and ended up in my inbox that same night. You may want to ping them in their forum if you aren't receiving one...
HN readers might also understand it.
The flaw he pointed out renders one of the main advertised features of Telegram - end-to-end encrypted chats that they can't eavesdrop on - broken to the point of total worthlessness. Telegram had the ability to undetectably MITM and spy on the supposedly secure communications, as did anyone who managed to compromise them.

They'd have achieved exactly the same level of security by having no end-to-end encryption whatsoever and just promising that they wouldn't log or look at people's messages - this flaw is seriously that bad.
Telegram seems to be interested in money and power because they've turned down offers from Moxie (the creator of TextSecure and a well-known cryptographer) to join forces. There's no reason to do that unless they were interested in money or power more than security.

I didn't say TextSecure is completely safe. I said Telegram has been demonstrated to be broken.

Telegram is prone to passive listening because their design doesn't prevent it. There's nothing stopping someone from MITM'ing every Telegram secret chat when it's first initiated. It's in the design.

Their contest means nothing, because due to the way the contest is designed, it's impossible to MITM or other side channel attacks like timing attacks. These are the real attack vectors, yet the format of the contest prevents anyone from employing them.
It's still being actively worked on, due to a recent move to a different university a lot of the infrastructure (such as building new releases) is still offline, so the website hasn't updated in a while. Blame university IT departments.
The unhappy truth is that for many startups, relational integrity and transaction safety are simply not very valuable. Customers of an early-stage startup are by definition willing to take a risk on whatever they're getting from that startup. So simply not thinking about these problems - accepting that occasionally a partial write will happen, or two writes will collide, or a migration will not quite work correctly and your pages will crash until it's fixed - is a worthwhile sacrifice to increase development speed.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

The guy is rewarded half the bounty:
https://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858
That's interesting. Only about a year and a half ago when there was the leap second fun that disrupted so many people they were running on CentOS 5 (and so weren't affected): https://twitter.com/adrianco/status/219238574552387586
Yes, normally I get a full invoice from a seller, which lists VAT. Might be not something every mom&pop seller follows, but par the course with incorporated merchants on eBay.
I'm always amazed the BitTorrent DHT infrastructure has been working so well for so long:

Real-World Sybil Attacks in BitTorrent Mainline DHT: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/lxwang/publications/security.pdf

Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Proﬁt: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dht-woot10.pdf

Proﬁling a Million User DHT: http://www.michaelpiatek.com/papers/dht_imc_falkner.pdf

Lying To The Neighbours - Nasty effects with tracker-less BitTorrent: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4210.en.h...
In 2014, Mobile Web Will Die - And Other Mobile Predictions
I think Arielle Schlessinger was just an early stage grad student (a clue in that she doesn't use the word "normative" correctly), so she shouldn't be blamed too much for publicly disseminating pretentious nonsense. But the more senior person posting below her, Cathy Davidson, should have known better. In any case same criticism of both: they are damaging, not enhancing, women's opportunities in technical fields by seeking to associate absurd cultural theory with the advancement of women's roles in technical subjects. The sorts of women who will succeed in technical subjects will laugh/dispair at them, just like the sorts of men who will succeed.
I think Ripple is a another good idea. They are put down because I think they control their blockchain, but it really applies the blockchain technology. Maybe they are looking to be acquired, but I think it is useful.
>The language barrier has probably been responsible for them getting so many users.

What do you mean?
They're paying $100 000.

https://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858
Even on Arch, ZFS is awkward (btrfs is most of the way there but maturity is important in a filesystem), sound is still the mess that it always is on linux, and the system keeps changing underfoot.
EMC own RSA. We just purchased a bunch of EMC kit. Can we trust it?
ISmackdown: The Google guys vs. Steve Jobs
Exactly

Relational DBs may even be the wrong choice for some specific problems.

And about this quote from the article: "At some point, you will need to ask your primary database questions. If you chose the wrong database, this is where things get tricky. "

Yes, this is correct. However, I know how to read the manual of whatever db I'm using and maybe code something simple to process the output to the format of my liking.
Note to the title patrol: This is the title of the link on the WaPo's front page; the actual title of the piece is the more-prosaic "Two books on Apple and Google: ‘Dogfight’ by Fred Vogelstein; ‘Jony Ive’ by Leander Kahney"
At first my statement is still valid even after Durov decided to pay for bug report. This bug report has no connection with extracting plain message I've written.

Apart from that I can't check Durov's posts that from the future. My post was written before Durov's announcement.
This, a thousand times.

Somebody finally expressed this thought politely.
This is a very respectable move.
Combining windows server backup with linux and luks for encrypted backups
^ The problem with randomly downloading stuff from the internet without reading the instructions: you likely won't know how to operate it correctly.
I don't think the response to catastrophic hubris should be back-slapping, crotch-grabbing praise.
If you rely on a single secure (for certain values of the word 'secure') messaging system or protocol you're absolutely insane. You'd want to be splitting your communication across multiple communication sources, with none of them ever seeing enough data to compromise whatever it is you're worried about. Deep and computationally expensive is great; deep, computationally expensive and broad is better. If one form (e.g. Telegraph) falls they've not got the full message, and they've still got a lot more work to do to get the whole thing.
He's getting $100 000.

https://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858
The "average joe" is not buying SSDs.
Not sure if the VK post was edited later on, but you are missing the other important statements by Pavel:

* There was no data leak, the vulnerability is fixed, there is no danger.
* It was a good idea to open the source and protocol for review.
* The founder of the vulnerability deserved a reward of $100k, and comparable rewards will be made for further attacks of similar grade.
He gets $100 000:

https://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858
Ipynb2viewer - Afternoon hack
> with the only reason that it has value being a state power or arbitrary group of people (as in the case of cryptocurrency) has assigned it one... also known as fiat.

While that's true, a state has much more power in "assigning" value to currency. They have the power to levy taxes on all economic activity in their territory, and the power to demand payment of those taxes in the national currency.

If you have a job, do business, or make any other sort of profit in the U.S., you must pay taxes, and you must pay them in USD only - otherwise the state will throw you into jail. This means that there is always a demand for USD, no matter which other currency you use for transactions.
If you have not paid them for support, and whine because you can't be bothered to read up on the product, why exactly do you think they'd consider that a loss?
This is a mess: lack of comments, inconsistent coding style, and outright wrong answers. If I got this from a candidate I would reject it outright as a bad example of uninformed copy & paste. [Edit]: not trying to sound mean, that's just my raw and unfiltered reaction.
On http://vk.com/wall-52630202_7858 Pavel Durov writes that the finder of this vulnerability will receive a reward of $100k, and that comparable awards will be given for other findings. It looks like they are slowly making progress from a rigged show to a proper crypto evaluation situation.
I don't consider that trolling, just statement of fact. But I guess it depends on what each person considers free. GNU has a concept of freedom that it tries to protect via the GPL. Licenses like the BSD or MIT do not.

Personally, I think this licensing difference is what makes companies use code from one but not the other. E.g. Apple's Darwin and it's kernel (XNU) contains code from BSD. While Darwin is "open source", it acts as the core/foundation of a closed source OS. Had they used a GNU kernel like Linux, or GNU libraries (glibc) then they'd have had an issue or two with certain uses in conjunction with closed source software (e.g. statically linking glibc). I reckon that influences decisions on what to use.

Perhaps the best example to fit your comment is JunOS, a closed source, FreeBSD based OS.

In Netflix's case, it does seem that they modify some of FreeBSD to fit their use case, and they boast about how they will contribute back to the FreeBSD project any changes that they make. The BSD license does _not_ require them to do so, and who are we to know if they're actually contributing everything back. If they used a GPL'd OS, they might be obliged to do it, but I'm not a lawyer.

I don't believe, however, that the license played any part in Netflix's choosing of FreeBSD, and I don't believe that what your comment points out should be considered trolling :)
Sure, the Stasi were more extreme in some respects. However, they'd piss their pants if they had the surveillance capabilities the NSA is using now.
HELP a 3-year old girl with Cerebral Palsy this Christmas
>> TextSecure completely safe app

> Just wrong. How could you call something "completely safe" or bug free?

Where did he say that "TextSecure [was a] completely safe app"?

Why are you misrepresenting his words?

He said TextSecure was not proven insecure (As was Telegram). That does not mean or imply that it is safe or secure.
The thing I find most surprising is that he attached the deck to the first email. I've always operated on the assumption that I should never attach anything to an email until I've established some trust with the person I'm emailing. I would imagine a high-profile target like Cuban is at high risk of a targeted malware attack.
Have you written up that protocol? Sounds pretty interesting.
I've just had panels installed (in the UK)[0] and we use a hot-water converter [1].

If we're generating 2kW, and only using 600W - the excess of 400W is not fed back into the grid; it goes into an immersion heater and gives us hot water.

That saves us on burning natural gas, and prevents problems with the grid.

Now, depending on where you live, hot water may not be the most pressing problem. But it's slightly more practical that spinning up a fly-wheel :-)

[0] http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/12/free-money-from-the-sky/
[1] http://www.solariboost.co.uk/
Yes, very silly. Why's everyone talking as if "psychopath" were a clear cut, clearly identifiable category?
Lucius Banda Releases “Wabadwa”: A New Christmas song
I also appreciate the posts.