skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The computer explosion happened not because of computers per-se but because of the internet. Email and the web, and later Facebook, Twitter, etc. made computers able to do useful things. If that had never happened, the majority of the public would have little use for computers.

So you're right, the electric car will become practical for people not because of any capability of the car itself, they are already more than adequate in that regard. It's the batteries. When we have some way to get similar range and speed and ease of recharging as pumping 10 or 20 gallons of gasoline, they will be practical for most people. Not really before and until that happens.
Okay, can they get Boeing to acquire one of those companies? Because those are the kinds of relevant players in most of these areas.
How much karma do you need for that?
> Latex source

Check the github link you posted, the book is right there. I also like looking at other people's tex files. The book was written with orgmode, so this could be a double treat, you get to see the tex as well as the orgmode used to generate the pdf.

UPDATE: The choice of non-free fonts is a peculiar choice. The math text looks a little strange in places. I am not sure if there is a package to fix up the math font for caslon, ie. one similar to the minion package. The euler fonts would work for a mathfont. Why not use something from texlive so that anyone can build a copy of the book that looks like the original and/or submit improvements? Everything looks nicer when you turn on microtype.
Agreed. Apparently, unaware of the whole extensive spirtuality and simplicity movements that characterized previous generations in the 1910s, the 60s, and 70s, among other generations.
And they are made safe (like electric traction on railways) by not letting the general public any where near them.
In any startup, there's broad categories of risk. One is whether it's a market risk (we have the tech to solve problems, but we don't know if anyone has this problem), or if it's a technology risk (we know this to be a problem, but we don't know if we can solve it with tech).

For the last couple of years, we've been taking existing technologies, and applying them to different markets or creating new markets. AirBnb, Uber, Homejoy, Twitter are good examples of this.

This can't last forever on any one existing tech, and so @sama's just calling for startups that are technology risks instead of market risks. Such startups may be more capital intensive, but not to the point where it's a non-starter unless you have 100 mil, like others are talking about.
No comments to read here. :/
Crytek announces its CRYENGINE-as-a-Service Program for 9.90 USD per month
Vigenere is useful in practice for breaking real constructions, but that's all I can think of.
Yeah, but low level systems stuff isn't anything that's going to change anytime soon. My operating systems professor had been teaching that class for years!

If you write code, you should know what your code is running on. You should understand some of the layers of abstraction or at least be curious about them! Even if it's not related to your job, you shouldn't take the magic underneath for granted.

I see a big correlation between programmers who take a lot of this stuff for granted with cargo cult programmers - people who tend to think of things as "if I do x, y comes out" instead of "if I do x, this will trigger y, which causes z".
yes, you have to pay the $20,000 bloomberg subscription.
I guess I won't be able to faithfully simulate having to put on my reading glasses to read the cockpit instruments in a flight simulator then... ;-)
Regarding the seed he's arguing against, there is a definite irony in using twitter to argue that blog comments shouldn't be read because they are poorly written.
The U.S. Cities With the Highest Levels of Income Segregation
I didn't renew my paid App.net subscription
And your repo will get a takedown notice... So what?
This thread seems to be generating a lot of fuss, so let me weigh in quickly.

This seems to be expected behaviour for generating RSA keys. An RSA key of length 4096b does not provide you with a security level of 4096b. That is, you don't have to straight-up guess the keys, you work at it via factorisation.

The issue is arising from the fact that entopy and key length are both commonly measured in bits. The entropy of an RSA key is much lower than the key length. 256b of entropy seems to be more than reasonable at first glance.

Normally, I would not defend openSSL, but I will do so here, having not even looked at the responsible code (nor has the submitter of this bug), and not even looked at the mailing list link.

Seriously, do not panic, let the cryptographers look at this and decide if it's really an issue. It's probably good that they're getting 256b of entropy from urandom, it's likely that they're seeding a CSPRNG for prime generation & testing.

I would wager some small sum on this being closed by the end of the week, and us looking back on this and shaking our heads at the uninformed knee-jerk reaction of people in here:

"If I ask for a 4096-bit key, I should get one, or an error message. I shouldn't get a 256-bit key that looks like a 4096-bit key." -- taejo, 15 minutes ago
This is probably a stupid question, as I don't know much about /dev/random and /dev/urandom (and that article doesn't seems to address it fully), but I'll ask anyway: Doesn't /dev/random block only when it estimates that the entropy pool is empty, aka when it would create unsafe numbers? The article says that the estimate is likely wrong and there is still enough entropy left, but what if it's actually empty?

If this is true, then /dev/urandom might split out unsafe bits (as unlikely it is), which to me sounds like a terrible idea when creating a key or similar very importants secrets.
Does this thinking also extend to books? Maybe it no longer makes sense to speak of the ebook versus paper book debate—it certainly seems that ebooks' ever-increasing popularity speaks to their utility. But whereas the debate initially focused on obsolescence, DRM, and so on, perhaps we should just consider paper books' simplicity as their killer feature.
lol @ me hunting around the profile page for the last 5 minutes trying to work out if its a hidden menu or something.
Reminded me of what my grad advisor used to say -

If you ask an undergrad student, the answer is always a "yes" or a "no".

If you ask a master's student, the answer is always a "may be".

If you ask a doctoral student, the answer is always "i don't know".
Yep, my choice as well!
FIRST PUPPET KISS
With YC companies not solving hard problems in computing I don't see them suddenly solving hard problems in other fields. And with "hard problems" I don't (only) mean CS, I mean problems with the state of computing like security, robustness, cross-platforms tools etc. that could be huge enablers for other fields.
EA games web server hacked to host phishing website
Of course, the kicker is how they define "indies". Still, it seems like an irresistible deal, especially considering they have a free version as well. No source code like you get with Unreal Engine 4, but also no 5% royalty.

Anyone have experience using CryEngine?
close, the netherlands.
Even 64 bits would be sufficient as long as the entropy is good. It just needs to be large enough that bruteforcing 2^N isn't feasible. 256 seems like a perfectly safe amount to me.
Tobography 
Menswear styling & updated articles on popular topics
I was definitely seeing a Douglas Adams reference, but I was thinking more Sirius Cybernetics Corporation who gave 'Genuine People Personalities' to things like sliding doors and -of course- Marvin.

edit: and of course, Red Dwarf. How could I have forgotten about the toaster in that show? :)
WhatsApp AES decryption key for all chats leaked
What do you think about Factset's chances?
A Way To Sell The Photos You Take On Your Smartphone
Apple: Product Feedback
Making 2D JavaScript Games
Neither did I.

Now to decide if I:
a) Comment more
b) Throw down some custom css and get the feature on my own.
The Digital Mechanic: Dearest Boss, What Great Request Dost Thou Bestow Upon Me?
This one hit home with me. Having every waking hour consumed with obligations - fun or not - gets draining after a couple years. I wish my friends didn't get mad whenever someone says no to something, and I find myself regularly contemplating the merits of going off the grid to live as a mountain man.
9 Scenarios every Londoner goes through on the tube
This is such a lazy article. The central premise is we're due a big breakthrough in battery technology in the next few years because there are many groups working on it. Using the same logic you could say we can expect a big breakthrough in cancer treatment in a similar time frame.

There are promising battery technologies being worked on, but there tends to be a big difference between lab research and what makes it as a viable product. Let's make the most of what we have now instead of waiting for a magic bullet.
That would have never occurred to me. Thank you. (And...wavender...um. never mind.)
Silly article, I wish I hadn't wasted time reading it.

Strangely, the author thinks it's an incredible prediction that electric cars and their associated energy-storage technologies will eventually get better, easier to manufacture and cheaper to own. That a point will be reached where the economics make sense for the middle class to start buying such vehicles.

"Black Swan". Really ?!
It's interesting how Kay's "error-free internet" quote was truncated in this article. Here's a bit more of the quote:

"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."[1]

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...
Someone should make a list of successful companies that needed a long time to develop! Knowing they exist is encouraging to people who think about committing that much time.
Well that beats me trying to click on a color in that list... I'm like: "What an odd UI to select a color and this crap is broke anyways, nothing changes!"
Welp. http://cl.ly/image/13370z0l053H
Sure, there is a subset of science-oriented startups that don't require founders who fit that description, but for many of the industries listed in the article to be disrupted, you'd need doctors, lawyers, researchers, biotech engineers -- ie. seasoned experts who understand the intricacies and harsh realities of their fields -- and many of them would certainly fit my description. I'm assuming that the type of startups they're looking to fund include those that try to "fix" these industries, instead of building a product that sits on the periphery -- eg. a healthcare solution to help streamline the claims process vs. an app for patients to record bowel movements.
>9000.
Gap and scotch are the epitome of excess now? Uh oh :-)
What I Learned from Being on the Front Page
My faith in humanity has been restored a little bit with this article. I hope more of Silicon Valley focuses on breakthrough technologies, since the rest of the world tries to rip off the valley anyway.
Ha! My topcolor is pretty much the only thing left of my startup. It's also weirdly surprisingly close to my current employer's corporate color.
Disagree (Protestant here). Nothing stopping you from being diligent and working hard when all your financial needs are met.

I would...exist. Off grid, as back-to-basics as possible. Minutes ago I was looking up how to obtain & grind wheat with a hand mill, lamenting not having enough land to grow my own. Bottomless supply of money? would cover the basics of buying the land (cheap though my choice would be), ensuring taxes & recurring overhead take care of themselves, buying the tools needed which I'd not yet gotten around to making from raw materials, and (insofar as I'm a geek obsessed with things I've no hope of making myself) buying leading-edge high-tech widgets which would in turn be applied to pay for themselves. Should endless funds truly tempt me, they'd be applied to (again) ultimately self-funding ventures.

My problem now is being stuck with a "market peak" mortgage. I'm painfully aware of how vital - and how near - financial independence is. "All the money I'd need" isn't really that much, as I've already earned - and spent less than wisely - it. I was actually quite close to that point, then found that love can be quite pricy.
Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase
What's in a buzzword
Right from random(4):

>If you are unsure about whether you should use /dev/random or /dev/urandom, then probably you want to use the latter. As a general rule, /dev/urandom should be used for everything except long-lived GPG/SSL/SSH keys

Later:

>While some safety margin above that minimum is reasonable, as a guard against flaws in the CPRNG algorithm, no cryptographic primitive available today can hope to promise more than 256 bits of security, so if any program reads more than 256 bits (32 bytes) from the kernel random pool per invocation, or per reasonable reseed interval (not less than one minute), that should be taken as a sign that its cryptography is not skilfully implemented.

What exactly is the problem with blocking IO if you can't read faster than 32 bytes/min (or slower)?

/edit:

In your link:

>About 256 bits of entropy are enough to get computationally secure numbers for a long, long time.

I'm not a cryptology expert and therefor delegate that stuff to qualified people. But this sounds like utter bullshit. If your OpenSSL needs n bits of entropy, it does need it, and feeding it with more pseudo random numbers from that pools seems like a horrible idea. This post convinces me that /dev/random is the right thing, and not /dev/urandom, since blocking seems to be a very, very important feature. While I wouldn't trust me to get random generators right, i'd trust that blog a way less.
Could also be a free to play type thing. You get the door for cheap/free, then there's a service fee for use. Hell I can imagine it with a screen and being asked to watch an ad before egress. Even better is the poor guy stuck outside his apartment while having to sit through a horny ladies in your area ad while the neighbour walks past with her kid in tow.
The Top Invoicing Softwares For Your Startup
He has a very PGesque style of writing.
I find this sentence very weirdly written from a stat viewpoint and not helpful at all to the "average" reader.

>>>>About one in 14 tech workers is black or Latino both in the Silicon Valley and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, according to the most recent Census data.

Why didn't they say about 7% rather than 1 in 14?

1/14 ~=7.14..%

I accidentally scrolled into the comment section and my head imploded. Thank goodness for HN :)
> they walk you through coding, but they hide a lot of the process.

That's what they should be doing. Having been trying to teach myself this stuff since photo.net and Ars Digita were hot, I can tell you, I spent 10 years stuck in Windows not knowing where to turn. Then I spent ten years learning all about everything around programming: editors, OSes, managing remote servers, languages, what those languages are for, algorithms, half-adders, little-endian vs big-endian, blah, blah, blah.

And only in the last few years have I really gotten a handle on actually writing code that does stuff.

Now I'm at the point I realize I'm way behind the curve on data structures but I have to say, I really wish I had been learning about data structures instead of how Bill Joy developed vi to cope with a slow modem.

Sure, picking up Perl now, I can grab Padre and the Llama book and within a few exercises branch off on my own and add rewrite them with recursive functions and pretty interface elements, but I wish I'd been learning about advanced parsers instead.
$10/month, per user. Steeper than it sounds, unless the "user" is the indie dev and not all of the indie dev's app users... or is it each developer who works with the engine at the Indie dev shop? Not entirely clear in the article.
Most databases I see on HN are a case of take algorithm X and apply it to problem Y through interfaces Z[], which is fantastic if you have problem Y and no good solution. Infinitely scalable nosql db running on raw SSDs is fantastic, for example, but not even close to designing a theoretical spaceship.

Would or could ycombinator fund a company that could only tell you what to expect in 0.25 + n years where n>9 and Boeing, GD and ATK are all working on similar problems?
I'm not a programmer, but...I would want to work with this programmer in a heart beat. Smart, respectful, strong boundaries but not a jerk. A lot to learn from him for everyone on Hacker News, not just the devs.

Congrats to him on the new job and the H1B visa and to Stripe for hiring him. He seems to really deserve it.
I personally see no relationship between the title and the content.
Cool! That reminds me of the 10,000 year clock:
http://www.businessinsider.com/everything-you-need-to-know-a...
I was in an accelerator program a few years ago alongside a peer company who had a new process for refining carbon nanotubes. It was founded by a university chemistry professor, and he basically had a working implementation in his office and wanted to scale it. That was not a very prestigious accelerator program, so he really seemed out of place alongside the other crazy startups. Maybe that's an example of a "world-changing" idea that YC could fund.
Hm, I'd always understood "don't read the comments" to refer to large news sites and such, not small blogs where there are regular commenters and the comments are half the point.
#000000 is surprisingly high up there.

Lookin' good: http://i.imgur.com/oMBwQma.png
Why single out Page and Google?
Actually exactly half an hour between when I got woken up and when I sent my report email.
SQLite vs MySQL vs PostgreSQL
I did not say nor did I imply at any moment that I pirate anything; not only pirates think about piracy.
Comparing pirates to common thieves is a fallacy since it attributes the feelings we have toward common thieves to people who can't see the ones they might be hurting, and so can't empathize with them.

Someone who downloads a pirated copy of a work is not similar to someone who mugs someone or lifts a wallet on the street because it requires a lot more to visualize the one's from who you are stealing.

That being said I would like you to retract your statement about me, not because I'm not a pirate or a thief, but because you offended me.

P.S.: This is a place for the discussion of ideas, not for personal attacks. Come up with an argument and I'd be happy to debate the issue with you. Insult me and you will be breaking (again) the two first guidelines for comments on HN
virtue and tranquility.
It's funny, I've heard of the term stoicism in the philosophical regard, but never knew what it was, and yet now I'm reading that it embodies a lot of what I've felt for years.

Growing up, my family never had much, and I always had to make due with simple activities. Luckily enough I got immersed in the Internet at a young age, because I was able to inherit outdated computers, but never had the fancy toys or gadgets or games that my friends did. I had to find ways to entertain myself with very little, and since then my interests have always revolved around a very small subset of simple, low-fidelity activities. Drawing (materials are universal), weightlifting (free-weights only), programming (self explanatory).. Things that I know could never really be taken from me.

As I'm preparing to graduate college, I've told friends and family that I never want to own a car, or a house. I haven't owned a bed in two years. The only major purchases I want are a decent laptop, which I consider a necessity for a software developer, and books. I want the tools I need to live and grow my skills and intellect.

In that sense, I probably take the modern translation of stoicism too far. But then again, I'm easily fulfilled.
License says if you sell your game for 10 dollars on the app store and Apple takes 30% cut of that Epic is taking 5% of 10 dollars and not 5% of 7 dollars.
It is less work to crack a 4096 bit RSA key than it is to guess a 256 bit random number.
> groovy being pulled more into use with spring

Within the Spring Framework 4.0 Reference [1], the Spring Expression Language takes up all of chapter 7, whereas Groovy takes up little section 28.3.3 only, with only one use case presented. Your statement didn't have any specifics, only sales adjectives like "great test frameworks."

[1] http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/4.0.0.RELEASE/spring-frame...
Alright, now I understand the appeal of flappy bird.
Because the average reader may be inclined to think the numbers are reasonable, and then they'd be less likely to spark an outrage, and then this newspaper wouldn't get as many ad impressions.
I wish this included the number of users that use each color, to see if anyone else uses the (harmonious) #f1e9d9.

http://cl.ly/image/040u3a1R342q
Angulartics – AngularJS Web Analytics
Inspired by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431180

I literally just made the display code use Math.pow(2) on everything, after discovering that changing the internal score by doubling instead of incremental would increase the speed exponentially with each hop, rendering it unplayable.
64 bits isn't enough to provide brute force protection, you need at least 80 bits, preferably 128 bits, and 256 bits if you're paranoid.
2014 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate
For some fun, grep your local dictionary for qualified colors :)
cat words |grep -i "^[a-f]\{6\}$"

or use 4 and add be, or ed etc...

I went with beefed, and it looks like that page is updated in real time.
I'm not missing anything. You quoted literally one line:

">Given that, as an employee, you are the seller in the relationship

Very serious question: Is that actually true, and why do you believe it?"

and asked if it's true. There is no other context in the line you quoted except that the employee is the seller in that relationship.
Bitalo is not an exchange, its an OTC marketplace. The tagline on the site - "NO FRAUD IS POSSIBLE IN A TRANSACTION" - is a flat-out lie. A fraudster can just reverse the bank payment (up to 6 months later in the US), long after the coins have been released from multi-sig escrow.

An exchange operates a limit order book, which matches and settles trades automatically. Otherwise you just have a forum where each user has to repeatedly, manually handle the logistics and security of a wide variety of payment systems. The exchange should do that, not the user.
4096 bit keys only make sense if they're asymmetric and those won't capture anything close to 4096 bits of entropy.

As for the strength of 256 bits, the Wikipedia page on brute force attacks should tell you how infeasible attacking even a 128 bit key is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack