skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hashes never increase the amount of information that's present, thus if there are 10^10 possible phone numbers, there are 10^10 possible hashes of phone numbers (with a given algorithm). How many bits you encode the information in doesn't matter.

The only way you can stop this attack is by rate limiting (I would use some sort of exponential slowdown based on number of requests in a given period) or by not doing it in the first place. It's not hard to determine that if you have a function X -> Y, you can find all the Ys by putting in all the Xs, and correlate the two; that's what's happening here, and it's a privacy trade-off, but not a security issue.
> Make Messages work correctly

I've had no problems at all with Messages over the last 6-8 months. Multiple devices (iOS/OSX) all messages synced, in the right order no less, and unread badges updated.

> Make iCloud better

IMO iCloud Documents is a lost cause until the document silo problem is fixed. I can't even consider using it knowing that my data may end up being inaccessible on different devices. I don't like having my data locked into a specific application. I think Apple should just throw in the towel here and let other cloud service providers plugin to iOS. Maybe they should just bring back a revamped iDisk for power users.

> Resurrect iLife and iWork

They should have prioritized iPhoto/PhotoStream.

> Reassure Mac Pro lovers

They need to do the same for Mac Mini & iMac lovers next year. Desktops are just going to become more and more of a niche product in the future. I don't know if Mac desktops can continue to exist if they are just MacBooks in a different form factor. What's the point? Apple should be targeting them towards the hardcore desktop users left. For the iMac that's obviously a big Retina display and for the Mini it really needs a discrete GPU option again. It would give people a reason to actually buy Mac desktops again.
Ask HN: How do drawing programs work?
I have a decent idea how the web works. From the DOM to the database, I have a fairly solid understanding of each. Now I want to learn something new.

Drawing programs. How do they work? How does MS Paint work? How does Photoshop work? How does Autocad work?

What kind of architecture do these systems have? What kind of systems and subsystems is needed for this to work? How different are drawing programs from MVC and network architecture?

Can anyone point me to some good resources?
I've likened "post-vacation blues" to Drapetomania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania) since I knew about the latter.
It looks to me like its a static sculpture on a rotating base.
European CS graduate here. I will never do salaried software engineering work in the United States. The countless stories like this one, and the horror stories in the comments under this story (most of whom aren't even consciously described as horror stories) describe a toxic culture which would ruin my mental health. There is no way in hell I will subject myself to this kind of pressure, even if the pay is 30% higher. (Per year at least, per hour it looks very even since 40 hours a week appears to be a pipe dream in most places).

I never thought I would type this out, but there you have it. I did actually have some vague ambitions of working in the US once, but I have eventually realized that the work environment is a bad fit for my style of work. Declined an on-site interview with Microsoft this fall due to a vague feeling that my questions about vacations and overtime were answered too vaguely, and after reading this thread I think I finally have a grasp on what stopped me.

It's really too bad. You guys have the most interesting environment for software developent in the whole world, with a huge amount of opportunities for growing and learning. But it's just not worth it.
If you have the power to hold management responsible, great. But you probably don't. See your sibling comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6999303 . Documented concerns ignored, including after they were proven right. Credit rises, while blame falls.
I don't think you fully grasped what I was saying.

This won't damage SnapChat's image. At least, not among most of their userbase.

They don't need to focus on fixing this or on coming up with a better response because this isn't important to enough people.
My hometown in Indonesia has a lot of such unnecessary merging and widening. And they are because some guys don't want to sell their land / the government not offering them enough money (depending on whose side you're on)
The problem is the two of them are really smart but have no reference level for how secret courts, indefinite secret detention etc. can affect a nation. Their reference frames are limited to their current state and nation (USA). I don't want to see two smart people go and work for a government agency that has upended the values of America's forefathers.
Access to Health Care May Increase ER Visits
As far as I know, IE9 is the first version of IE that does away with XP support so MS redid a lot of the rendering code to use Direct2D + DirectWrite which opened up hardware accelerated rendering.
... and the second is called "constructive dismissal" and ends up in compensation for the employee in most jurisdictions, where the employee knows his/her rights.
> "Sure, but you hit the problem twice as often in git, because you have to do twice as many things."

Well no, I don't...

If this really is a frequent problem for you, then you might want to consider adding a note to the end of git-commit's output to remind you to push, or even just aliasing git-commit to push by default. I would recommend that you instead learn how to use git, but failing that...

> "In SVN that doesn't show up as a merge in the history."

If you don't want to resolve those situations with a merge, then don't resolve those situations with a merge... Rebasing exists for a reason.
you can reach me at justin.s.gray@nasa.gov
Mmm full duplex...

But yeah I helped on the Montreal meshnet and I think we either have or really want to have a RONJA link, because it's cool as hell as well as very useful in general.
I've just recently set up GPG for my family using 4096 bit keys. How long do I have, assuming no hole is found, before needing to change?
How much coverage do you get for ground buried, twisted pair shielding and integrated magnetics in the RJ45 jacks? (Just from EM, direct strikes I would assume to be handled via lightning rods)

This is not my area of expertise by far, so I'd love to know what I'm missing.
What do your friends value? What options which are competitive with "join the NSA" are better at achieving their values than joining the NSA? Sell them on those other options.

Be prepared to discover that people of good will can have sharply different values than you do, for example believing that "'service to our nation' is a key priority for me", or might have sharply different estimates of the utility of joining the NSA in effecting values such as "I desire a future in which Americans continue to be afforded privacy in accordance with the intentions of the framers of the Constitution."

Do your friends value earning lots of money and not having to run their dates past their bosses for approval? If so, getting a job at Google strictly dominates working for the NSA. etc.
If that's what you want to do, that is fine, but you are no longer using a centralized process if you do it that way.

Git allows you to follow a centralized process perfectly fine. However if you choose to not follow a centralized process, it will not force you to.
This looks super impressive. Angry I just left my iPhone in a cab :(
I'm not sure exactly what the grandparent comment meant, but I think I have an idea. I only skimmed the contents so take this with a grain of salt.

Your book is focusing on a pretty narrow part of distributed computing. I would rename it "Managing State in Distributed Systems", or "Distributed Storage Systems". Your examples are Bigtable and Dynamo, which fall in this category.

The book seems to be aimed at sort of a "beginning" audience. But the topics are inappropriate for a beginning audience, and skewed for an expert audience.

Real distributed systems try to be stateless wherever possible. You need "big computer science" to manage state in distributed systems, but most code in a distributed system should not manage state. These techniques should be confined to specialized storage systems.

Here are some examples of real world distributed systems that don't use the described techniques to manage state:

- clusters of stateless web servers + single master database (99%+ of websites people use)
- message queue / work queue. A single machine can productively manage 1,000 - 10,000 stateless workers, depending on the workload.
- MapReduce
- Original GFS
- Napster
- BitTorrent (tracker and trackerless would be interesting to write about)
- BitCoin

The title seems to imply a practical bent, but it seems more like a collection of ideas (which are important and interesting, but not really what engineers need to know. IMO the #1 skill for distributed computing is to be competent at BOTH programming a single computer and at system administration).

If I wanted to be harsh, I would say it looks like you read a bunch of stuff and didn't work with it or implement it? At the very least, the ideas don't seem to be put in the context of commonly deployed distributed systems.

People need to understand these simpler, more robust, and more performant techniques, and how to apply them to their specific problem domain, rather than blindly throwing consensus at every problem (which is a disturbing trend I've seen).
Yeah, Readability doesn't get them all.

My primary use case, though, is in organizing content I find online related to a research project -- the ability to tag, star, and archive content is particularly useful. Though I do wish the management and search tools were more powerful.
Looking for technical cofounder(s).

We are the reCaptcha or Duolingo of semantic information. We crowdsource semantic data with educational and fun learning tools designed to identify and capture the semantic information revealed in the game play.

For first and second level concepts (the least abstract) we target children aged 3-6 with games that their parents deem educational and worthwhile in preparing the child for traditional schooling. Our tools will be free but we generate revenue by licensing the semantic data we capture. Distribution will leverage the US federal government's new Universal preK policy.

A proprietary, difficult to recreate, conceptual structure provides some protection from others copying the methodology and developing the semantic dictionary.
So, say, throw $80 million or so at the problem?
Show HN: One Click Code Selection
Is that a salaried corporate job, or something else?
In which jurisdictions in the US is the burden of proof for constructive dismissal permissive enough to include enforcement of company policy as detailed in the Employee Handbook, no matter how onerous, (unless the policies are not uniformly enforced or are arbitrarily enforced)?
That's not conceptually simpler, that is just easier to learn. Git's concepts actually are simple. You can explain the concepts and guts of git to developers with a whiteboard in a few minutes.

The standard CLI UI is admittedly a weak-point, but it does not appear to have slowed adoption...
AK-47 underwater at 27,450 FPS
Ezra Klein Is Said to Plan to Leave Washington Post, Wonkblog
Show HN: IPython-inspired JavaScript environment
I don’t know what to do with all the marketing knowledge I have
Actually their recommendation engine is a little too accurate. It drives as much as 70% of their views. They have to purposely randomize it. For those curious how it works: See the brilliant talk from the guy who heads it up himself (this was a great talk to attend in person) http://www.mlconf.com/mlconf-2013/mlconf-2013-agenda/xavier-...

One reference I could find for the statistic from google: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-netflix-uses-analytics/

I don't think they'll have to worry about this anytime soon.
I personally like working with the same people day-in, day-out. Contracting is not the same as being a part of a company and forming a strong team to solve real problems.

It might work for small time "innovation" like snapchat and domylaundry.com, but I highly doubt you can get the kind of work we saw come out of Bell Labs with anything less than a well-paid team of long-term employees who'd been working there for a while together.
There are sub genres of the beautiful headshot as well. In the open GIS world, the trend is towards beautiful people hanging out on the side of a mountain. Although there are notable exceptions (my not-so-notable self included) most of these people seem to be from Colorado or Sweden.

Has anyone else noticed sub-themes within github headshots or is gis an anomaly?
Yeah basically. But if this is what the NSA were actually doing, I suspect they'd be throwing way more than $80M at it for a handful of devices, and instead be throwing half a billion at it for half a datacenter full of them. Why build a dozen or two crackers when you have the money for hundreds?

I think this sort of budget indicates more of a research project.
If you can't enjoy yourself that's up to you. Don't take your vacation but it shouldn't impact everyone else's ability to take one. Many people want to travel, spend more time with family or friends, or just have a more interesting journey in life. Everyone is different.
That's a better question for 'pbsd, but 4096 bit keys are infeasible to attack (outside of quantum computing) using any technique currently known to science.

I'm fond of saying that the thing that takes out RSA-2048 is likely to take out RSA altogether, so, over the medium term, look to Elliptic Curve instead of RSA. New systems should be designed with ECC instead of classical IFP/DLP crypto.
I'm not disagreeing, but even from my modest knowledge of German as a second language, I find myself inserting German words (or at least wanting to) into English because of gaps in English.

It's not that I can't say "create" or "make" and tack on some extra words to imply a craft/handicraft/tinkering meaning. I just find that without the word "basteln", a lot of times even though I could, I don't. "Basteln" is a great word for everyday speech that there simply isn't a good equivalent of in English. (Ok, for gamers, you can probably use "craft" as a verb and get the basic meaning, but most people don't use the word that way.) I don't find it hard to believe that I would use that meaning more often if I had a simple word for it.
For those of you comparing animal brains to human brains and how it relates to consciousness and intelligence take a look at the "Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness." (signed on July 7, 2012)
Why you want to ruin a good and nice site by making discussions look gender specific ? So you have vagina, how does that change that you are great or not ?
Ever heard of country called India ? 10MM female engineers pass out every year ( forget other issues country is having, those are solely due to different reasons)
No one would believe that there are no girl programmers. All such news is created for increasing traffic. You can be inspiration but don't rant about it. PLEASE GO now.
Bursts of genetic duplication may have paved the way for human evolution.
As someone who makes a lot of robots, I will support this on principle. I really like that the board can accept a high current power source and has a cutoff switch.

I am always a little nervous about building a robot around a board when I am uncertain about how it will be supported. If you are really building robots that are going to be used out doors or in rugged environments you want to be able to replace every part. Controller boards aren't really the expensive part of robots.

For Decapitron, an autonomous combat robot (http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/140197-Decapitron!), I have had to replace the controller board twice. That may sound like a lot but shorts and power surges aren't that strange in combat. But now that board isn't made anymore. So it is a big problem if the board gets damaged in combat. That's the advantage of using something really standard, like Arduino or Raspberry Pi. I can get one of those next year.

Still, I will try this.
Octopuses Gain Consciousness (According to Scientists’ Declaration)
Defacing OpenSSL's website might be low-value, but backdooring OpenSSL code (trusting-trust style!) would be about as high-value a target as I could imagine.
I was using the computer languages as a facetious example to illustrate a point, the idea being that a context one is immersed in colors perceptions, and I was simply stating that applied to a human language, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case.

There is actually quite a lot of evidence against a universal grammar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms), and I don't understand how one could even begin to say that everyone necessarily develops the same grammatical concepts at any useful degree of practicality. The idea of a subjunctive tense only exists implicitly in English, yet is prevalent in many Romance languages (and others). In Ancient Greek, the concept of singular and plural were joined distinctly by the concept of pair, which exists currently in no language that I can think of (and certainly isn't popular if it exists). In English, nouns are not explicitly marked to indicate role in the sentence (left up to ordering and ultimately subjective, implicit interpretation), which is easily taken care of in other languages like German, Russian and Hungarian with a case system. Hell, English doesn't even have a stand-alone future tense (i.e., a verb conjugation) ...how exactly can we make any argument for a universal grammar, when there exists so many grammatical concepts in other languages that aren't actually possible in any explicit sense even in English? If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.
There's an entire section on the problems of HTTPS in the OP because I anticipated this question in advance! :O
Sure, it's the same basic idea.
I thought that the author Ursula Le Guin dug into this in her literary work, for example in her book 'The Dispossessed'.

There was a specific example of the difference between "This is the brush that I use" and "This is my brush". Ownership of the brush between the two statements is one of communal ownership and personal ownership.
http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/blue-and-white-collar-w...

Most people do not have white-collar jobs. Tech workers are absolutely not in any way representative of the general population.
> I did a vacation a few years ago where my wife and mother in-law went to Spain. It was awesome, my first time there, but I was 'pressured' by work to keep crankin on our app. It was such bullshit and I was really pissed about that pressure - vacation was not vacation.

I recently experienced something similar but possibly even stupider. At the end of November I caught the flu from my niece and took a very rare sick day off work. I laid in bed and slept and felt miserable, which is totally expected, of course.

The ridiculous part was the fact I also felt guilty for doing nothing all day except lay around and sleep. Here I was, totally unfit for doing any work at all, experiencing guilt for not working and also for not doing anything around the house.

This is unhealthy and I only partially relate it to being part of the tech community. I think another big part of it is my upbringing in a traditional, immigrant Protestant family with a powerful work ethic. That can help you get ahead but it also brings with it a lot of bullshit.
Tiddlywiki used to be my favorite thing for keeping todo lists and notes about whatever I am working on. It has not aged gracefully though. There have been several issues as web browsers have tightened permissions surrounding file:// URIs. It works on mobile but its very clunky. I wrote a simple http back end for it but every time I request the file ornsave I am sending 1MB+ of data across the network. The author of Tiddlywiki is working on a next gen version but its still lacking some things I want too see like offline use via indexeddb.

All that being said I have been doing something similar to the OP but using Google Keep. It works offline, on mobile, or on the desktop.
Levitating objects using sound waves
Harvard can afford to let disadvantaged students in for free, but many middle and lower tier schools would become averse to admitting/financing poor or otherwise "risky" students under such a scheme.
Hash the numbers and compare hashes instead.
Here is a pretty big one from 2012 that was discovered by Rafal Wojtczuk: http://www.vupen.com/blog/20120904.Advanced_Exploitation_of_...

It didn't get a huge press release and media coverage but it was a pretty big deal. Probably because there weren't any 0day exploits floating around at the time so this flew under the radar of the mainstream.

http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2012/06/13/the-intel-sysret-pr...

http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-0...

http://invisiblethingslab.com/itl/About.html
They should at least have a web UI as a fall back option. It's hard to trust in any cloud storage that presents roadblocks to accessing your own data. I want to know that worse case I can get at a very important file from any computer with a web browser.
Self promotion is no issue when you have high quality content! I started picking locks recently for fun and your guide on YouTube is one of my favourite resources. It's also my go-to whenever trying to show someone in a minute or two the gist of lockpicking.

To find you on Hacker News is a pleasant surprise =] Keep up the good work!
They won't see a huge amount of users deleting accounts, but I'm sure future users will think twice before joining.

Also, the value of the company.
Half a million acts of data science on one map
Show HN: New Eden Faces: Vote for EVE Online characters
Have you tried asking them what they think about this? It might be that they simply hold different opinions from you about the NSA and the historical context it fits into.
The current cost to send a Bitcoin transaction is about 35 cents.

In contrast, if you have a credit card merchant account (if you can even get one...) you will pay 3-7% in fees, plus often a 10% rolling reserve. This isn't counting the additional costs and risks associated with chargebacks.

This is why businesses who accept Bitcoin are often willing to drop the price by 10-15% for those who pay using that method.

IMAGINE -- 10-15% lower prices! Yet somehow Bitcoin is "expensive" ??

Nothing could possibly be more expensive, and more of a hassle, than the current legacy banking and credit card system, which functions as a massive tax on every transaction today.

Bitcoin is often accused of "wasting resources" but the work of the miners is what secures the transactions, and the balances, and the individual liberty, at a much lower cost than the legacy banking alternatives.
Here's what I have from about 6 months of Google Analytics. This is a line-of-business web application. GA is only on the login page.

Visits 5,645

% of Total: 4.25% (132,872)

XP: 62.37%

7: 35.57%

Vista: 1.52%

Server 2003: 0.53%

That Windows 7 number scares me a bit.
Think about any big project you've been a part of. With the benefit of hindsight, is it not true to say that you might well not have taken them on in the first place if you'd known what would be involved?
For an even starker example, look at the Google Books case. They scanned thousands of books and made portions of them available online. Authors guild sued them, and it was dismissed because it benefited society to have the works available.