skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A naive person googling about TrueCrypt and stumbling on this article (well written with an authoritative tone) will think that TrueCrypt is completely cracked, and not bother to use it.

This research is interesting and useful, but do we really want to scare off people from using TrueCrypt?

Couldn't you add a paragraph at the top or to the side that says, for example:

"If TrueCrypt is used in the intended way, i.e., you finish your work with TrueCrypt, dismount the TrueCrypt volume, and then shut down your computer, then the data protected by TrueCrypt is secure if your computer is lost, stolen, or copied at that point."

I understand your intended audience (I'm one of them). But TrueCrypt is the best protection we've got (in terms of price (free), quality, license terms, multi-platform support, algorithm choice, etc.). I presume the author likes it and uses it himself too.

We want more people to use it, right? So let's at least make it clear that it isn't cracked or broken when used in the intended manner.
It says 5% of "farms" ; is that farmers, farms, farm hands?

The farming automation stuff happening now is fascinating. I saw a piece on Bloomberg or somewhere similar that had old farmers just sitting in a room monitoring their equipment on computers.

Edit: another note in terms of "old" people using computers -- the guys that are in their 70s now were in their late 30s and 40s when the IBM PC was released in 1981.

I think the abilities of the 65+ market are under estimated both by younger people and the older people themselves. Modern interfaces just tend to be designed very poorly for people who poorer eye sight, hearing, and so on.
that would mean you would have access to the source code. Or do you mean the software is stored in the memory as well?
It may be in some cases. In many cases people are quite open about the hybrid nature of their process and the reasons for it.
DOGECOIN WILL REMAIN ON RADAR.....WATCH THEM BILLIONS DISSAPEAR;)
Sorry I couldn't resist the jab. Thanks for contributing.
Better cables == sharper corners on your bits. Fact.

;)
You were talking specifically about possible explanations for people placing subjective value in Bitcoin. The fact that some of these explanations are "uses" and some are "features" isn't relevant.
Definitely more context, but I don't think that paper really backs up the assertion. He asked finance professionals or students, not social scientists. And he asked them at a seminar where I'm guessing they didn't have access to a calculator or computer, so it looks like a lot of them just used a rule of thumb.

The question they asked reads like a trick question to me. And coming up with the right answer would have required working backwards through statistical formula It's the type of thing you do an "Introduction to Statistics" class and then don't think about too often because it doesn't have a ton of practical applications. It seems a lot easier to just ballpark it.
90% of the data fall between this point and this point. 50% of the data fall between this point and this point. etc.

MAD is more accurate than Standard Deviation to me, if you ask me.
Interestingly, Fahrenheit has 180 (212-32) degrees between freezing and boiling. Zero is set to a brine solution -- a reproducible metric about as cold as you could make. So it's not an insane system.
Doesn't it make a stronger guarantee, that you cannot cause an invalid dereference? In addition to what you mentioned, this would also cover bounds-checking, trying to dereference a pointer that was never allocated, etc.

Also does it enforce that memory is consistently used as a single type? Can you allocate a byte array and then cast it to an appropriately sized array of integers?
Warning to consumers on real world currencies
The article was, sadly, missing a lot of stuff. When it said "(most arrays don't check parity by default on every read)" I knew the author was not up to the task of writing this article. FWIW, a RAID system has to calculate parity every time it reads a stripe so that it will know how to change it if something in the stripe changes. There are of course file system errors that are invisible to RAID, if your FS writes corrupted data (as it might with ECC failures) the RAID subsystem will happily compute the correct parity for the stripe.

Granted I spent nearly 10 years immersed in storage systems (5 at NetApp, 4 at Google) but still there is some easily checked stuff missing from this article and so its point (which is hardening in the filesystems is good) is lost.
I bet you hate startups then, and all their pivoting!
Actually, that's precisely the opposite of my point. To have value, an abstraction need not have "uses" in a pragmatic sense. It's easy to list some more common things of ascribed value that have no clear use: hobby collectables, keepsakes, Steam badges and other virtual commodities in video games, Xbox experience points, Ph.D. diplomas, etc. One simply needs to nucleate a community with some irrational desire for an abstraction of value to manifest extant value.
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The A in MAD stands for 'absolute', so no, the MAD for those two stocks is .3 and .5 respectively - versus standard deviations of 0.35 and 0.58.
Are you sure they don't already do this, and just only use it on Google Maps?
Can't tell if joke or not.

Have audiophiles gotten The Onion treatment yet? Seems like such low hanging fruit.
Unfortunately, I have no idea about Time Machine, the one Mac I have is running 10.4 (pre Time Machine).

SMB, SSH/SFTP (even set up key-based auth), regular FTP all work great. Transmission works great and has a decent web interface. UPS support seems to be okay, haven't really tested it.

DLNA/UPnP (fuppes) crashes all the time and I only tried it with the very buggy VLC for iOS, so I'm not sure how stable it actually is.
Practical cold boot attacks
You still need private insurance to get around the quirks and delays of the public system. Saying that private insurance in AU wont cost you an arm and a leg like in the USA.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110709154812/http://iq.org/~pr...
They enhance your Word documents! Really!
Ex-Google exec Hugo Barra on the Chinese market
Looks like I edited out my $5 an hour remark before I saw your reply. :)
I still wonder why the people who design and sell these products aren't all in jail.

"Audiophile" nonsense is a prime example of how consumer protection laws don't work if you invoke any kind of pseudo-science in your marketing.
I'm pretty sure it is (I might be wrong though)
Diamond USB has a relaxed quality that fosters deep musical involvement.

It's a parody.
I was actually shocked at how badly Apple handled Retina, and even more shocked and disappointed that Windows did it worse.

Apple basically made everyone rewrite their apps instead of doing something sane - though admittedly they never had real support for multi-dpi, so perhaps that's an at least understandable solution.

Microsoft have always had support for changing the DPI in the operating system, but in Windows 8.1 instead of reusing that support and improving the code so that you don't need to log out and back in to change DPI they instead started doing Retina-style scaling - but far worse.

High-DPI apps (edit: non-Metro, I should clarify) in Windows 8.1 actually don't look good on a low-DPI screen. (You need an e.g. Retina main screen and a standard external monitor to experience this.) Sure, they look a lot better than the pixelly stuff on the main screen, but instead of rendering at standard DPI Windows instead renders at high DPI and linearly scales down the resulting image in the window manager, resulting in text that looks strangely off because it has been rendered at high DPI with appropriate hinting and then scaled down.

This is not to mention what happens when you have a program half on one monitor, half on the other... it's either tiny on one screen or humungous on the other. Retina at least does this beautifully.
2 months is old?

Key node members fighting amongst themselves is pointless news?

Or how about Joyent saying they would sack Ben even though he didn't work for them?
Vedis - embedded redis
I've personally seen rot from junky DVDs. I'm pretty sure the that the actual data isn't redundantly stored on a DVD. On CDs data is stored better, because you're going to hear the difference if a small block of data is missing vs watching it. Similar evidence has been stated before, and be sure to read the pdf in the last paragraph. [1]

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2012/feb/23/as...
In that specific case, I'd submit that the word "average" doesn't belong in a conversation attempting any level of rigor. It only encourages the confusion between median and mean.
I'm not sure if you're American or not, but it's a fairly common meme of sorts in U.S. discourse. "But what about 9/11" is shorthand for "I'm bringing up some random political point that is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because I hope I can outrage people."

For a period absolutely everything, whether at all even distantly related or not, was somehow tied to "because 9/11" or "what about 9/11". Not because people actually thought it was relevant, but because politicians can't pass up a chance to grandstand by invoking something that people have strong opinions on.

I thought it was a succinct way of conveying the point here. "But what about the node.js gender incident??" isn't as widespread and not as big a problem as the "but what about 9/11???" crowd, but suffers from a sort of isomorphic logic.
FullContact Acquires Cobook with Pot, Ski Passes and Dogecoin
Funny I find your comments to be doing exactly what they are critiquing. And I think you are letting your hate to him cloud your ability to want to understand what he is trying to say.

I personally find his books mostly valid critiques of established "truths", probably because I agree with much of it. If that makes me a vile idiot I am fine with that. Each to their own.
Telepresence is likely the first killer app for robotics. It's been possible for quite some time now but very difficult to do well.

The ubiquity of good, low-power wireless networking was the holdup. Our phones and tablets have finally brought this about.

First the robots appear as a toy to watch your pets from work, then you personal assistant pops in twice a day from India/Africa/(low wage outsource of the moment), and finally Siri rolls around your house picking up your socks (and informing the NSA if your feet smell at all terrorist-like).

Welcoming robot overlords and all that 20th century slashdot yap...
They don't hold up terribly well anymore, but the one I have is still pretty reliable. I ditched WebOS years ago due to the complete lack of support and installed Android. It's running 4.2 I believe. Slow, to be sure, but it works. My SO uses it to watch Netflix.

I still use the HP Touchpad bluetooth keyboard that was sold as an accessory though. Nice keyboard, even if it's missing a lot of keys I wish it had (such as home, end, pgup, pgdn, delete).
It surprises me that there seems to be quite a few people who have genuine contempt for the Hacker News forum. I think that people here are for the most part reasonable, even though we don't always give out our viewpoints in a straightforward, snark-free manner (but few Web communities are free of that kind of stuff). Posts that are very unreasonable seems to tend to be downvoted. But then I think that maybe I've become too coloured by this forum to really have the outside view of this place.
For the cost, you could hire an orchestra to live in your basement. Of course, you'd need to wear electrum goggles and a visor of pure onyx for the best sound reception, because quantum mechanics.
That, and they have a $15 Belkin cable at the bottom.
I think you could in raw linear logic—you wouldn't be allowed to introduce a type unless you eliminated it later.
Ok, and you are welcome to feel that way. I'm just taking issue with what I took to be the suggestion that the phrase "active defense" is inherently a newspeak/doublespeak sort of thing.
Locust.io
If it was health insurance, then you'd presume places with national health systems (like the UK) to have drastically more entrepenureship, which is not the case.

There is something else going on here.
Whether or not it was your intention or the design of your extension, that was the behavior I observed - hence my factual claim.

I've looked deeply into your extension and you did a very nice, impressive job. I don't believe anyone is discounting the quality of your work here. The pattern you exhibited by enabling the ecolinks feature by default (right or wrong) simply highlighted, for many, the risks inherent in granting browser extensions such great permissions to the browser.
The year of Snapchat and Bitcoin
Standard deviation tells you how volatile measurements are not what mean deviation is. Those are both very real life things just not the same thing."

While I am not a Taleb fan (he had his own black swan and became exactly the reviled expert his own books warn us about), your hostility in this case seems out of place.

The root of his seemingly casual contemplation is that standard deviation is simply misnamed. That this misnaming causes a cognitive dissonance that confuses even knowledgeable practitioners to mentally conflate it with the mean deviation. Which -- as someone in the financial industry -- I can absolutely confirm. It seems like such a minor thing, but the name has tremendous influence on how we parse these things, and the shortcuts we take in understanding things.
This is bad advice. The password ends up in the program's binary where it is easily accessible. Also, users can't change it after it's compromised.
We could ultimately replace our internet infrastructure with something more distributed which makes it difficult for ISPs to determine what traffic they're carrying. Ultimately traffic analysis works right now because the ISPs can detect where the traffic is coming from. In a more distributed internet, that wouldn't be the case. If all packets are encrypted, it would also make it harder to snoop and shape traffic that way.

Bit Torrent already does this with Message Stream Encryption/Protocol Encryption, and it can potentially hide on port 80/443. But why stop at just Bit Torrent traffic? Why not build a new web out of something more akin to this?
WebOS devices were great for software tinkering because they were able to boot a kernel over USB. If you "bricked" the device and it wouldn't boot, you didn't really brick it. You could load the kernel over USB and flash the proper software back to it. Loved those things.
I would expect blueray to be worse life expectancy than DVD since it is more dense. DVDs have worse life expectancy than CDs. CDs have somewhere between poor and acceptable lifetimes. Good luck.

Ref:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#Lifespan

* Library of Congress "CD-R and DVD-R RW Longevity Research"
http://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd-r_dvd...

The actual study: http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/NIST_LC_Optical...

* http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/opticalmedialongevity.html (references the NIST study above)
I see. I may have failed to really understand the index; In my defence the article seemed to dwell unduly a small part of it's composition.

At the least, these guys need better PR. That article seemed pretty out of touch with those of us in the rest of the tax brackets. Instead of complaining about top tax rates they should be convincing me that net prosperity will increase, even for middle class chumps like me, if we deregulate, lower _everyone's_ taxes, abolish the minimum wage, get rid of medicare/medicaid, get rid of public health insurance and unemployment insurance and welfare and food programs and social security, and &c.

That sounds like a hard sell, and I think these guys are afraid to address those issues head on in a public forum like WSJ, so they complain about other stuff that's less relevant.
CoinMKT lists Worldcoin, Megacoin, and Quark Coin on their exchange.
How about this thread being about changes to the organisation of npm and nothing to do with the drama the OP tried to crowbar into conversation?
I know how it's done, I used to be a chef, at higher end restaurants than most people will ever eat at.

Yes, during service you're not busting out scales, and a lot of things aren't precisely measured. But anything where precision is necessary, you weigh it. Where it isn't, you don't.

Good luck ever finding a cup measure, or a measuring teaspoon in a professional kitchen though...
I've often wished for this in C and C++, particularly from an optimization perspective. I always hated that the optimizer cannot assume that the the contents of a struct to which I have a const pointer won't change out from under me when I call another function. It means that it cannot cache members of this struct in callee-save registers; it has to reload them every time.

I don't know how much of a speed difference it would actually make in practice, but it bothers me that I cannot express this in C++.
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Coming soon! We aren't focused on engineers only. There are many social networks that have your contacts and profile information.
I don't think I've ever seen a linkbait headline for an acquisition announcement before.

>Just kidding, we didn’t use Dogecoin. Or the other two. But they are moving to Colorado, so infer what you will.
Ask HN: Whatever happened to Phineas & Fogg?
http://phileasandfogg.com/

I was just reminded of this project while cleaning house on an overgrown bookmarks list. Does anyone know what happened to the Phineas & Fogg project? Their website seems to be outdated and their twitter account hasn't seen an update since late October.
Two Weeks of Avoiding Cash
Charles is usually the best answer unless you are writing an app then the pony debugger from square is really a great tool.
My iPhone Has Been in Hiding
Thanks!

btw HN, AMA
Confusing headline if you don't know "Exec" is the name of a business. And how can anyone keep track of all the names of businesses around here.
Yeah, there's definitely some fuzziness around the edges here since general recursion can break invariants in hard to detect ways.
For that price I would expect the cable to follow me around the house/office, like a snake, and respond to my telepathic commands about where to plug in.
The sad part is I'd love to buy a $30 cable thats indestructible cable shielding and jacket, plenum rated insulation (just because) perfect dimensions so it fits great, anti-corrosion plated, visual and tactile indication of which side is up (which I can do with a paint pen but for $30 I want it done for me). Oh and superflex so in my car at -20F like last week its still flexy. And of course totally waterproof or at least if it gets wet, once dried out it'll work perfectly and undamaged.

But no, all we're allowed in a supposedly free market is $3 DX junk, $3 DX junk marked up to $15 at the brick-mortar store, or $700 audiophool stuff.
All I know is this reminds me a lot of high school where we had to always compute std dev in problems, homework, and sometimes labs, but nobody really ever explained how to interpret it. It was always like "This is std dev. This is how you compute it. Make sure you put it your tables and report."

Eventually someone (or something) did explain it, but once I understood it, it became clear that it wasn't always a sensible thing to be asked to calculate but was instead just an instinctive requirement.
You can all laugh, but I use these types of cables to copy data to my portable HD and I have never experienced any data loss since I started using them. So there.
Actually, the music playlist idea sounded pretty sweet to me!
> The reason Apple does not have these kind of issues is that their Retina thing is more recent and thus there are no legacy apps that claim to be DPI aware

Not actually true. Many games are fairly messed up in either windowed, full-screen, or both noises. Usually it's because of a bad middleware toolkit that either enables the Retina backbuffer our not but the OpenGL scaling doesn't match the window scale. Especially prominent in games that use the older, Carbon method of exclusive full screen mode.

Aside: full screen games manage to be even worse on OS X than on Windows. That takes effort. (Games as full screen spaces is a really nice, usable concept, but the performance hit is so nasty nobody wants to support it instead of the invasive and messy Core Video tour.)
What's the TLDR version of Megacoin vs. Worldcoin Vs.quarkcoin?
>>"...as it does more harm than good—particularly with the growing class of people in social science mechanistically applying statistical tools to scientific problems..."

Well, for sure there are problem with people applying tools without fully understanding them. It's not very interesting statement. As obviously many things in nature form normal distribution and standard deviation describes those distributions well while mean deviation loses information about volatility.
If you are going to propose abandoning of standard deviation it would be nice to give some alternative ways for handling those distributions and maybe show how using mean deviation in place where "many scientists" these days use standard deviation improve things.
His study shows that people weren't able to answer his question. That could be for various reasons, like reading it too fast. It doesn't really matter.
What matter are example of decisions/measurement which could be better handled by "abandoning standard deviation" or maybe showing that those people actually make financial mistakes due to not understanding the difference.

Even if he is right that many traders misuse or don't understand the term it's a problem with education and not with tools being wrong. "We should abandon standard deviation" is wider claim and to defend it you need to show how problems currently handled by using the measure should be handled in better way.
The popular example of this being skewered is Family Guy's take on Rudy Guliani:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YOh-rpvjYg
> I think because it's called "standard deviation" that it sounds like the thing to use or look for.

Yes! Because it's an awesome trick and lets you do good estimates on napkins.

The other day I was buying lunch at a food cart and thought about how much change the food carts had to carry, as a function of how many customers they have, under the assumption that they want to be able to provide correct change to 99% of their customers.

Let's say that the average amount of change a customer needs is $5, and a 99-th percentile customer needs $15 in change. If we pretend that the distribution is approximately Gaussian we can calculate that 1,000 food carts with 1 customer each would need $15,000 in change, but 1 food cart with 1,000 customers would need $5 x 1,000 + ($15 - $5) * sqrt(1,000) ≈ $5,320. That's math you can do in your head without a calculator (being a programmer, 1,000 ≈ 2^10 so sqrt(1,000) ≈ 2^5).

The standard deviation and assumptions of normality are so useful because of the central limit theorem. That is, if you have many iid variables which have finite standard deviation the sum will converge to a Gaussian distribution as the number of variables increases.

Then you say "Well, the standard deviation weighs the tail too heavily" and the response is "well use higher order moments then, that's what they're they're for".
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His criticism aligns with my experiences. I don't have the scientific background to back those up but I do think that reality proves many of his points correct if you try to understand him instead of mis-understand him.

But like with Wolfram I can understand why his way of formulating himself might get in the way of what he is saying.
On 4chan, "Jews did 9/11" is also a meme. Should I not consider that a horrible comment simply because it has some meme qualities?

Bend over backwards to forgive and explain all you want, I guess.