skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Much thanks to everyone for the insights! You have definitely given me some good reasons to go ahead and learn it.
But the internet is not a public domain; most of the infrastructure was built and paid by private actors.

If society considers it a real priority, should an actual public ISP be built, instead of forcing rules onto others'?
wonder if this has anything to do with the npm maintainer who is missing. Hope he's ok.
I am not following you. Concealing? do you mean physically hiding the media on which it is stored? Like a flash chip in a tie clasp?

If you mean concealing as in hidden partitions, data streams, or digital Stenography - these are all easily detectable upon close inspection. If there is extra bits where none are expected, this becomes a giveaway. Perhaps enough misdirection and a custom strategy of hiding could further obfuscate the location and content of the data, but as for hiding it's existence - this is not easily accomplished (if even possible).
> int types are in JS and have been since 1995, due to the bitwise logical and shift ops.

That's like saying int64 is a subset of float64 because you can use two floats to encode it.

> arbitrary jumps are a deoptimizer and verifier hazard

True, this would be one of the decisions to be made when designing a bytecode format.

> You mix speed ("just as slow" -- wait, we're fast at asm.js input, faster on startup than PNaCl -- did you read the post?)

You misunderstood. Asm.js running on a browser that doesn't have support for it is just as slow as output from bytecode-to-JS compiler would be. And for browsers that do have support, both asm.js and a hypothetical bytecode would behave the same.

The major differences with a bytecode would be requiring two "executables" and a better semantic model.

Also, I'm not necessarily defending PNaCl itself, nor did I even bring it up.

> No ad hominem fallacies, please!

I'm not sure where you got that, the Trojan comment was meant positively.

I think it would be nice if Mozilla introduced a bytecode (superset of asm.js semantics), once asm.js itself was accepted.
If I come to a carrier and say "Here's a codebase for your baseband.

The carriers don't want baseband code, they just want finished products to sell.

It's OSS, well tested, secure, and supported. Buy support from me." why won't they go for it. Surely, an OSS solution is cheaper for them than developing an in-house crap solution that I'm sure it is now.

OK, assuming you get a current-generation baseband chip for free (it actually costs a ton of money to develop) with full documentation, you're still talking hundreds of millions to develop that software. GSM (a 2G technology) is complicated. UMTS / HSPA (one of the 3G techs) is an order of magnitude more complex. LTE (4G) is another order of magnitude more complex than 3G. The baseband code, plus all the testing code, plus all the testing required by the FCC, standards bodies and the carriers is a ton of money.

It costs millions to take an existing chipset (which has already been approved), an existing baseband codebase (which has also already been approved for use with that chipset) and put that into a modem and get that approved.

The chip vendors have their own baseband code now, and they are all in fierce competition with each other. They aren't going to just use your code, and they aren't going to let you use their chips either.
A Technoskeptic’s Take: Makers Are Suckers
Awesome, so glad Isaac gets to focus on what he loves. Congrats to TJ on his new role!
I dunno, sometimes going back to waterfall sounds kind of nice. I'm tired of the lack of direction, the attention-deficit school of project management where every 3 months there is some new starry-eyed vision we all chase after. I know this means my company is "doing agile wrong" and all that shit, I just would rather be on a slow train wreck than a fast one.
When big companies are at odds with consumers, bet on the consumers.
I didn't mention the word language. That's folly as one of the top comments says.
Interestingly, this is something Julian Assange worked on several year before starting Wikileaks:

Starting around 1997, he co-invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption
system, a cryptographic concept made into a software package for the Linux
operating system designed to provide plausible deniability against
rubber-hose cryptanalysis;[68] he originally intended the system to be used
"as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in
the field."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Computer_program...
> You're not supposed to like (or dislike) asm.js, it's intended to be written and consumed by computer programs, not humans.

The fact it's executed through layers of an OS, a web browser, a javascript parser, an ASM parser, is just worrying. What about libraries ? What about opening files ? What about access to the hardware ?

> There's no denying this, ASM.js is an awful hack but that is for a good reason.

The whole idea is to get around the fact companies will lock their system and force some technologies and languages down the throat of programmers who have other solutions and ideas. You can't completely avoid the restrictions and not run into problems. I don't call that a "good reason". You can solve those problems by finding alternative techs and platform to reach an audience.
Would something like TRESOR[1] along with RAM encryption help? Or would this just move the attack target to the CPU itself? (Certainly this would be harder to attack than sticks of DRAM, like was demonstrated by a group a few years ago)

I guess the number one thing is to prevent physical access, and failing that, make an attack that targets RAM take longer.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRESOR
That's always been impossible.
In a professional kitchen, scales are mainly used for baking.

On "the line" where food is cooked, measurements are mainly by hand and by eye.
Apple Agrees to FTC Consent Decree Over In-App Purchases
Black People & Blonde Hair Lol
Handybook acquires Exec
FTC release: http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/01/apple-...
This is awesome - only wish it were faster, and that I could save my favorites.
The original intention for parchive was to split files into multiples for posting on usenet. The bonus - you get n extra files, so that if any of the sub-files are broken, you can reconstruct it.

I use it for my backups, both automated and manual. For my photos, I write a set of 10-15 DVD-sized tar archives containing files that haven't been backed up yet, using a tool I wrote. I then run parchive to generate two or three DVD-sized ECC files, so if any one DVD gets trashed I can recover it. Then it's just a matter of burning the DVDs and stacking them somewhere off-site.
About the Oculus Rift app, I saw some years ago a documentary about phobias, where some investigators used a VR headset to treat height phobia for example.

It was really primitive (doesn't had head motion sensors and the 3d rendering was nothing realistic) but they said it had positive effects.
How would you treat your RAM contents as precious? Just making sure you're on a pristine machine, and nothing else is running? Can other unrelated processes access the key from RAM?
Imagine all the people...
I assumed from the title this would be an announcement about Node 1.0, but I'm not terribly surprised to see the trend continue of approaching 1.0 asymptotically.

Still, this is interesting stuff. Does anyone know if any similar repos (Ruby Gems, etc.) have their own for-profit companies?
A friend of mine was part of the team that made the decision for UHC to participate in AT&T's new sponsored data program. When I found this out, I tried to point out the broader implications of a shift towards pay-to-play, but had trouble getting past the narrow vision of "but we just want to get our content out to people that can't pay for mobile bandwidth". Just wanted to say thanks for this article for demonstrating what some of the implications are of a shift to a pay-to-play model. Non-techies really seem to struggle to get their heads around what happens to the entire ecosystem if net neutrality dies, and articles like this are helpful for making the consequences clearer.
You actually wish you could hold it up to your ear? Or are you thinking more along the lines of a Bluetooth headset or speakerphone? Using an iPad as a camera for the occasional picture is not too bad, but I can't imagine holding a 7" device to your ear for any call exceeding 30 seconds.
It means if you're worried about the contents of your encrypted drives being uncovered, you need to make sure no malicious processes gain access to a dump of your system's memory while it's booted / running / encrypted drives are mounted.
How Are You Feeling? This App Tells You
Send me your photos and I'll encrypt them for you!

I think the law is very vague due to the people writing it now knowing much about it. I imagine they have a use case of this guy and want jail for anything other than seeing some incriminating evidence.

I guess it doesn't help that it turned out he did know the password and it had a load of incriminating stuff on.
A brief history of cause marketing [infographic]
What about the bnoordhuis story?

It seems not to be active again for his lib: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors

For people who don't know, bnoordhuis exiled himself 2 months ago after the bashing the node.js community imposed him for not merging a pull about gender. It was a shame because he was in the top 3 contributors. (all details: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015)
Excellent point. I had not thought of it like that. The way you put it makes it seem akin to learning new mathematical techniques, which is almost always beneficial in that it facilitates more possibilities when approaching a problem.
I think this is probably the most common "style" in most large enterprises. The people footing the bill still demand macro level waterfall estimates, but when it comes time to execute the project, it's split into smaller phases (perhaps 4-6mo) which are in turn split into 2-4wk sprints.

In my personal experience as an enterprise apps director, this is significantly better than pure waterfall but still causes all sorts of stress on the IT side. I think the single highest impact change for the better would be to take a product-centric rather than a project-centric perspective. At least in my company, business "owners" don't pay for KTLO work, only projects, so there's no incentive for anyone to ensure high quality products.
...if you're interested, here's an example: http://papermine.com/samples/julskitchen/
It's a bit difficult, as the whole workflow is based on emails and phone calls, but I'd like to at least get a video up soon so people can see/hear how it works first.
I'm sorry, I don't think I understand the first 2 sentences of your response.
They seem to say that a language and an implementation of that language are the same thing. Am I correct that this is what they mean? (Apologies if something else was meant)

Say we have a language X whose definition says nothing about interpretation or compilation. We also have two implementations of language X, one which is an interpreter, and one which is a compiler.

Is X an interpreted language, a compiled language, or something else?

Sorry for the misunderstanding, and thanks for the clarification.
Why Everything I Thought I Knew About Churn Is Wrong
Google Adds Data Compression Feature To Chrome For Mobile
How does secure virtual memory work with this? If data in ram, or at least is encrypted when written to disk, wouldn't that stop this? Do I know what I'm talking about?
I think they will use that to put you away, if they don't believe you...
> But there are hopefully creative business solutions to be had here.

I sure hope so! I'll be sharing many more details about the specifics in the next few days. I just kept it brief in this announcement so as not to drown out the message about TJ taking over Node.

> Q: How does this relate to the money I gave to the Scale NPM project a few months back? https://npm.nodejitsu.com/

The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. I'll continue to be closely involved with Nodejitsu.

But a service of npm's scale and importance can't survive on handouts forever. At some point, we need much more continued investment and a focused team, and the way to get that is to develop additional features that people are willing to pay for.
It's not that we should retire the notion of standard deviation. It's more that we should understand the tools that we are using and use the appropriate tool for the job.
> My original comment was incorrect: I meant they can either not regulate or classify ISPs as common carriers and then regulate.

That's true of the non-blocking and non-discrimination rules in the Open Internet Order, which were ruled to be equivalent to common carrier rules and thereby foreclosed so long as the FCC designated ISPs as "information services" (which cannot be treated as common carriers under the Telecommunications Act) and not "telecommunication services" (which are common carriers under the Act.)

The FCC, under the ruling, still has power to regulate broadband ISPs in other ways, and the provisions in the Open Internet Order that were not found to be equivalent to common carrier requirements (and thus incompatible with the FCC designation of ISPs as "information services") were allowed to stand.
It's slow to start, but fast to run (usually). Just want to make sure everyone understands that.

So for a continuously running flask app, I think you could make a good case for it.
One thing that I know based on a recent trip to Singapore, is that Google maps is extraordinarily sensitive to where you're making a query from. For example, if I search for a location while I am physically present in Singapore, it will look in Singapore for that location. But, when searching with Apple maps, the same search will quite often return results from other locations in the world like Canada, or the United States.
What about 9/11?
I have a Drobo in my Amazon cart, was about to pull the trigger until I read this article.

Do you know if your NAS4Free solution a viable solution for a household full of Macs that need a shared Time Machine destination? I'm tempted: it's cheaper, and NAS4Free will keep evolving.
Agreed. What problem will this solve for me?
Show HN: web app to create flippable brochures/magazines
It's an editor that lets you create something like this:
http://papermine.com/samples/julskitchen/

The publications look stunning on tablets, but pretty cool on PCs as well :-)

http://papermine.com/

What do you guys think?
Don't take my words too much to heart - or the lack or response on HN. Folks here are probably not your customers after all.

Find your target customer group and do your market research there.

good luck.
RubyGems is funded through Ruby Central [0], a 501(c)(3).

I imagine Ruby Central gets a significant chunk through conference ticket sales? Someone more knowledgable here can chime in :)

[0]: http://rubycentral.org
If they're going to be anything like their desktops and laptops, the software will be filled with crapware and the hardware will be impossibly difficult to service.

> The devices will run Android 4.2, a.k.a. Jelly Bean.

Sounds like a cash grab to me -- yet another vendor charging for OS upgrades. Very depressing.
The Very, Very Thin Wedge of Denial
Windows has a CryptProtectMemory() function [1] that can be used to encrypt in-memory secrets using an OS-allocated session key. As far as I know the key is stored in non-paged memory in kernel memory space.

On Linux, libgcrypt can do encrypted malloc, which might also help.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa38...
I feel like we won't see anything like that become mainstream until IPv6 becomes the norm.

I would love the net to be more decentralized but everyone living behind NATs means we need central servers to connect the users between them.
> That's like saying int64 is a subset of float64 because you can use two floats to encode it.

No. (x>>>0) is uint32(x), (x|0) is int32(x). Please read http://asmjs.org/spec/latest/.

> True, this would be one of the decisions to be made when designing a bytecode format.

Indeed, no clean-slate design, we have learned from the past. Dropping goto leaves less to change in asm.js. You need to produce the missing semantics or else we're just arguing syntax.

> Asm.js running on a browser that doesn't have support for it is just as slow as output from bytecode-to-JS compiler would be.

No, asm.js on browsers that do not use AOT compilation is already faster than non-asm.js for the workloads of interest (compiled from C/C++, etc.).

Anyway, speed was not the issue. => evolution is harder with two syntaxes.

Trojan is usually pejorative -- beware Greeks bearing gifts and all that ;-). No worries, but really, it does not make sense to do a second syntax for asm.js, at least not yet. Maybe in the farther future when JS has reached some fixed point.

/be
Ask HN: A good modern Unix internals book -- does it exist?
In a response to the ZFS/FreeBSD VFS thread [1], I got to wondering, is there a modern (text)book on Unix internals, similar in scope to the excellent Unix Internals: The New Frontiers [2]? The Vahalia was scheduled for a second revision, but it never happened. Given that there are now fewer Unixes (if many more copies), and given how much Linux and Nextstep have evolved since 1996, it feels to me that the market could certainly bear an update.

Pointers?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7063993
[2] http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Internals-The-New-Frontiers/dp/0131019082
You don't need the random blob to get in trouble.

Please, they can just ask for the algorithm and passord for all that data you inserted in your photos through stenography.
Maybe I'm getting old, but the thought of a father tucking their kids in from the office does not sit well with me...
All of the english system measurements were built on "human" terms.

A furlong is the distance a horse can plow in one day. This also gives a relationship between horsepower and furlongs. A chain is the distance you keep crops apart, and one chain by one furlong is an acre.

If you had 20 acres of land, you knew a horse could plow the land in 20 days.

The aging English system of Feet, Yards, Furlongs, Miles, Rods, Chains, Acres, Horsepower... they don't mean anything to non-farmers. So, we can replace these with a different system: the Metric system.

However, everyone uses the Point / Pica (1/72th an inch, and 1/6th an inch respectively) system for font measurement. As we are computer literate people today, font-size measured in "points" is quite important.

12-Point font (aka, font one pica in size) is a standard font size. No one cares that 12-points is really 4.233 mm. Hell, saying 4.233mm font means nothing to me.

But the day, night, moon, and sun cycles (approximated by day, month and year) is obvious to everyone. As such, an arbitrary 10-base system like Metric Time ignores the "reality" for most people... that the day, moon, and sun are related.
No, this does not have anything to do with him. This has been in the works for several months.

I also hope Luke's ok. Thanks.
Why, it is pretty good in describing probability distributions. What we should retire are idiots, who assume that it predicts an outcome of the next event.
I would definitely second Khan academy. I did this over a year ago and it was well worth the time and effort. I also supplemented with Purple Math. What was great about doing it was that it really filled in gaps in my own knowledge for things I didn't pick up in high school. For example, I know trig well from writing a lot of video games, but for some reason I had never learned about 30-60-90 or 45-45-90 triangles.
He makes a good point about infinite MAD vs. STD.
Jikes RVM was an absolutely amazing project. Superb work.

googles

Jikes RVM is an absolutely amazing project. Superb work. And i'm very glad to see it's still under somewhat active development!

http://jikesrvm.org/
So we shouldn't encourage its addition to open standards.
Until brain scanners become a thing. Then we can all get potentially charged for thought crimes.
While the mean deviation as presented is slightly nicer than sigma for intuitive purposes, it isn't as appropriate (iirc) for statistical tests on normal distributions and t-distributions.

More importantly, it doesn't fix the real problem, which is that the mean and standard deviation don't tell you everything you need to know about a data set, but often people like to pretend they do. It's not rare to read a paper in the soft sciences which might have been improved if the authors had reported the skewness, kurtosis, or similar data which could shed light on the phenomenon they're investigating. These latter statistics can reveal, for instance, a bimodal distribution, which could indicate a heterogeneous population of responders and non-responders to a drug, and that's just one example.

I'm not a statistician, so some of this might be a bit off.
"In fact, whenever people make decisions after being supplied with the standard deviation number, they act as if it were the expected mean deviation."

Boy, is that statement useless without any kind of context, example or citation.
Won't someone please think of the children!
Handybook Buys Exec in a Deal for the On-Demand World
Hunger artist
Google's Schemer is being shut down soon
Reminds me of Hubot http://hubot.github.com/

I suppose you could also use twitter DMs for notifications from services.
So according to you, the USG not being able to spy on everyone, everywhere, all the time compromises "national security"? By that logic, you're threatening your neighbors by not having surveillance cams in your bedroom and bathroom, because you might be doing something nefarious there.

I have a better idea: the US should stop interfering in other countries and violating people's rights - then it wouldn't have enemies.
Would that help? Wouldn't the use of a safe language make hardware-level memory protection less important, not more?
They would probably be entitled to asking for your wallet password, yes.

No, they shouldn't be entitled.
Huge kudos to ZFS and btrfs, but I am very disappointed with one detail of next generations file systems: Why, oh why, do we still not have a file-type metadata field? We are still using silly file name extensions and magic mime-type detection. In the Age of Types (OOP and FP strong type systems) it only makes sense for the file system to do the same.
To expand on this, does anyone know of a reliable service provider (accepting bitcoins is a bonus) for SIP Trunking[0]? Or any VoIP workflow that can perform calls to PSTN[1] (the regular landline/mobile telephone network). Or even any VoIP provider that offers a basic answering service, where the voice mail box can be checked over the internet a la google voice/skype voicemail?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIP_Trunking

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pstn

Edit: A quick search gave me this[2] by Plivo. Does any one know of any other options?

[2] http://plivo.com/blog/sip-trunking-to-replace-my-landline-ph...
I can understand if you don't want to talk of that anymore, no need to be agressive.

[I don't know either of you but I think that's a sad story.]
When I was in India I got antibiotics OTC a few times for myself after I self diagnosed using the internet. Because my mum went to med-school I was always very aware about the need to complete the course. I am sure that not everybody is as careful:
http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/shalini/211/65030/anitbiotic-res...

In India there are lots of doctors running small individual practices, due to this for simple diagnosis and prescription they would charge a small fee in cash and be done with it. Infact, I know for a fact that the Ayurvedic doctor near our house used to charge less than the standard Doctor.

When I came to the US, I found things here to be more restrictive - but I guess in the interest of safety we have to accept these restrictions.