skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For security, somewhat. The current de-facto standard mode of operation for disk encryption utilities is XTS, which effectively encrypts each block on the disk with a different key, where the blocks are of the same size as the cipher block.

Whether this is of any significance depends on your adversary model. If the adversary controls your storage medium (imaging putting an encrypted container on Dropbox or Google Drive), they can mix-and-match (e.g. copy-paste) different versions of blocks from your history. Imagine your disk to be in a version control system; the adversary could pick the value of the block 1 from version 50, the value of the block 2 from the version 42, the value of the block 3 from the version 100 and so on. They could also potentially discover usage patterns (seeing e.g. that the value of block 3 remained constant between versions 20 and 200, while block 5 remained the same). Additionally, they could corrupt any of the blocks, by turning the corresponding plaintext into random bits.

Having a smaller block size means that they can perform any of these with finer granularity. Increasing the block size thus increases your security; ideally, your entire disk would be just one block (the only thing the adversary could do in that case is to completely restore an old version of the disk); but this is hugely impractical, since the performance would be abysmal (you'd have to re-encrypt the whole disk to change just one byte). So you have a spectrum of performance/security tradeoffs. Where on this spectrum the 1024-bit blocks lie, I'm not sure, but I suspect that they are better than 128-bit ones.

Note that we do have schemes which can do sector-level encryption (the EME mode), but they're not used since they're 2x slower than the schemes with smaller sizes.

Edit: in conclusion, for pretty much every scenario, other security concerns are much more significant than the block size :)
Wonderful timing that this vulnerability popped up smack in the middle of tax time, eh?
I'm glad that you said, "can be" because language flexibility is a two way street. You can abuse dynamic typing for good and for evil. I, personally, don't think that's a case for declaring it not worthwhile, rather it reenforces investing the time to properly understand the language.

Fortunately, at this stage, we get the best of both worlds with syntax validators and linters. Abuse as appropriate (whatever that means) and be warned about the rest.
Blood Recycling Machine Developed With 3D Printer
This. This is the reason why I never say "We can build X". We can never know because the requirements always get pushed an order of magnitude higher whenever we can actually build X.
First Total Lunar Eclipse of 2014
When comparing the intel and arm architectures, GHz doesn't mean much. Transistor technology has evolved to a point where most processors are clocked in that area.

The reason that the intel processor is so much faster is that with a higher power envelope, you can have extra transistors. There transistors can be used to have better branch prediction, have better prefetching, have better SIMD instructions and have more cache. This is what really impacts performance.

If you compare the performance per watt of both processors you see that they are somewhat similar. Keep in mind that ARM processors are also made to be much cheaper than their intel counterparts. Both ARM and Intel do a stellar job in their respective markets.
I don't know if they're international or not yet (I doubt it), but an Austin startup is trying to professionalize this unsexy market:

http://www.sparefoot.com/
TBH, I agree with everything you said but was hoping that maybe you could convince me otherwise. I guess not. It seems everyone hates ST's vim mode.
In the US, most white-collar jobs have contractual clauses that grant the employer rights to IP produced by the employee, even after work hours, if such IP relates to the work the employee performs for the employer.

These clauses are enforceable in every state, though some states such as California limit the breadth of "related" to the specific industry or industries in which the employer operates.
Failure Detectors, and Non-Blocking Atomic Commit
The way I remember it is ten years ago was the tail end of an era in which hosting was expensive and bandwidth was even worse and small sites that got a little more popular than expected would regularly go dark at the ends of months because they hit a resource cap.
_Is_ Java significantly more 'modern', than Objective C, though? How? It's not like it's much newer; development started in 1991, vs early 80s for ObjC.
Either you don't quite understand the purpose of a non-compete or there's an entire class of them I'm not aware of (which is entirely possible), but in my experience, their purpose is to explicitly bar employees from poaching customers from the business.

Working on something in your personal time that's similar to what you're working on for your employer -- unless your employment contract is entirely unreasonable -- isn't and shouldn't be a violation unless you are using company resources (including but not limited to trade secrets learned in the context of your employment and not legally available through other sources).
We've also been there done that (about 10 years ago though), we had a very powerful scripting approach integrated into our game engine which gave direct access to game play systems in order to let our level and game designers build scripted behaviour into the game. In the end we ended up with a terribly huge mess of script code (I think it was about a third of the actual C/C++ code) and the majority of the per-frame performance-budget was lost somewhere in this scripted mess. The game sometimes suddencly crawled to a halt when some crazy scripting construct was called, and we had a lot of trouble getting stuff into a shippable state until the gold-master milestone (this is the game: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/project-nomads).

The main problem with scripting layers is that you are basically handing programming tasks over to team members who's job is not to solve programming tasks, and thus getting a lot of beginner's code quality and performance problems which are almost impossible to debug and profile (unless you have a few top-notch coders in the game- and level-design teams).

And then there will be definitely those "creative workarounds" to get something done which neither the engine nor the scripting layer was designed for, which make entertaining horror stories the programmers tell the new hires when they inevitable ask why your engine doesn't have scripting ;)

A better approach is to give the level designers simple, pre-programmed, combinable high-level building blocks (AI behaviours, actions, triggers, etc), and let them customize a level (as in game area) with this. But never build the entire game logic with such an approach! With this, stuff can still be fucked up, but at least the performance-sensitive stuff can be implemented by the programming team, and it's much easier to debug and maintain.

[edit: typos]
I think the key here is how “in the course of the Employment” should be interpreted. Is it anything that happens during the dates you are employed, or is there a requirement of some connection to the employment?
I have had friends who work at the CRA. Apparently they are pretty good at monitoring activity.

For instance, one guy looked up the information attached to his SIN. Something like an hour later RCMP showed up, and escorted the fellow out of the building.
Show HN: Poor Man's VPN With a Cheap VPS
> I do know one company (Basho) that refuses to hire anyone who has ever had a negative experience at any job

Can you elaborate? I'm curious; I may have dodged a bullet here.
Twitter’s CEO And Other Top Shareholders Won’t Be Selling Shares
Thanks a lot. Added (https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet#embedding-im...).
> This was apparently (anecdotally) the case a while ago, but I've never seen a single employment contract that included a clause like this

It is in pretty much every tech company's employment contract in the US regardless of size. I've seen this in Georgia, New York, Texas, Washington, and California. If it's a Fortune 1000 company, they're going to have. If it's a startup, they're probably going to have it. A lot of people just aren't aware of it because they don't tend to read their 10+ page employment contracts full of headache inducing, legalese.

> I don't know whether it's just FUD, whether it's not as common as it was in the 80's or early 90's

It is not FUD, and it's a lot more common than it was before the 90s.

How did this get super popular? Someone can correct me, but it starts with Apple in the 90s. Hotmail was actually developed by an Apple employee during his off time. Well MS buys it and Apple gets nothing. Why? It's probably because they didn't have this clause or a more aggressive and broad version of it like what we have today. Apple really is a trend setter.

Anyways the legal clause is basically ridiculous, since the general legal strategy is to be aggressive early on. In layman's terms ANYTHING you come up with, at ANYTIME during your employment either on company time or your own personal time, and ANYWHERE either in the office or in your own home, belongs to your employer regardless of your employer's industry.

What mortifies me is 1. how prevalent this is, and 2. how ignorant everyone is of its existence.
It's a standard clause in Germany, and even if it's not in your contract, it's in the law. You even have to notify your employer if you make a discovery related to your job. [1] (patent, technical improvements or similar). As with a lot of laws it's not quite so simple to apply to IT jobs, but for anything that's patent worthy, it's pretty clear.

[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/BJNR007560957.htm...
Just about any host with IPv6 support will assign you a /64 block which is way more addresses than you'd need for this. Your case would then depend on the site you're scraping supporting IPv6, though.
It sounds like a UK thing because the inventor was Percy Shaw from Halifax in the UK. I went to school with his grand-daughter or something like that.
Same as traffic lights were first used in the UK
That's not completely true--if you load your route on wifi and start turn by turn navigation, you can be completely offline.
Configuring Hibernate JPA in Spring Framework
Mingleton is tinder for strangers in the room with you
google and privacy don't go together in the same sentence.
Do you think we'll start seeing people with bad livers/kidneys/organs pre-ordering new ones and having them frozen/stored? if i'm some rich 80 year old tycoon with a bum heart, i could see myself having new versions of all my parts stored for me at a lab for when i need them.
You can also modify the commit timestamps.

... which means that there is no way to prove that you worked on something in your personal time, I guess?
The Art of Stress-Free Productivity : David Allen
Askholes – Getting Rich Off People Who Don’t Take Your Advice
Just a brief correction - the upgrade cutoff is March 1 - See here: http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/support/faq/01-purchasing-s...
I think that as a descriptive (and not normative) explanation, this is right on the money.
Physician here. I read this paper when it was posted on Reddit a few days ago and it was very impressive.

I'll link to the discussion because the top comment was comprehensive and summarizes the published article:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/22qhob/laboratorygr...

To address questions of how this can be applied to other organs, growing tissue like a trachea or skin is becoming easier. They grow the cells on a scaffold and then you have a tissue. Organs are much more complex and a penis is an organ. We are not at that level of sophistication to grow an entire, functional organ ex-vivo, at least for human use.
Any particular chapters that contains the really important lessons?
The above two comments, taken together, indicate SO MUCH. For example, they show why feminism is so problematic:

Members of the same identified group do not by necessity agree on how they wish to be treated. There is no monolithic, "correct" feminism and there is no monolithic, "correct" "handicapped person."

Brilliant. Thank you for not just sitting there and keep quiet, tensenki. Good luck with your coding, etc.
Does anyone know if Tomb [1] or ecryptfs [2] is a safe choice for encrypting a local directory?

Everyone always talks about Truecrypt which is clearly most popular but both of the above are fully open-source. The latter is even part of the kernel. I'm curious what the appeal of Truecrypt is besides maybe portability (which is a pretty strong selling point).

[1] http://www.dyne.org/software/tomb/

[2] http://ecryptfs.org/
Even once they get the landing perfected, my concern would be the wear-and-tear of even a single launch of the rocket. It has to reduce the success probability of the next launch by some percentage.
An account of an around-the-world solo sail in a 31-foot boat, 1988-1991
They have policy against downloaders, but they only apply it if it's used on their product (YouTube) and allows it for other sites. And Chrome made it hard (for the not tech-savy users) to install extensions from outside of Web Store. So basically they are blocking chrome extensions that conflicts with their interests.
I worked food service in the early 90s. I remember a discussion coming up about a local eatery that started emulating Starbucks with the tip jar. We all found it incredibly rude.

When you work behind a counter you don't get paid via the weird US minimum cash wage/tip model. You get a full wage (at least in my experience). The idea that a full wage worker should get tips as a matter of course is strange to me. I wonder how young the defenders of this practice here are.

My upvotes indicate there are people who agree with me, but not many have said so in these replies. Try to look at it from the perspective of someone who grew up in a world where this wasn't normal.

In the case of table side food servers, tips are not charity. They're a customary component of the wage - wether anyone likes this or not - and that's why the government carves out special exemptions and tax rules for that case.
I thought so too.

You could call undeveloped, beach-front property empty space too, but it would be disingenuous.
This is what I was gonna say! I don't know much JS, but after @sgdesign 's recent primer, the answer to the first two conditions seems obvious, b=="2" and b===2. Herpderp is just a cop out, since you could have infinite other variables that b equals, if you set the value to the same thing!
work with angularJS is actually quite easy to find in London, write me an email if you want some contacts
Running firefox nightly on linux mint
A feature I'd like to see on both our laptops and mobile devices to protect their privacy from random and abusive border searches: being able to hide the fact that you have an encrypted account.

Use case: Say you pass the UK border, and they can willy nilly decide to check your laptop or mobile phone. But you have an account that is password protected and encrypted, and they see that, and ask you for your password. You say no - and you get arrested for it. If they couldn't see you have that password protected account, and all they could see is a "normal" (clean of sensitive stuff) account, then they'd just check that and move on. Or you could even password protect that, too, and give them the password to it, and they'd be none the wiser.

All you'd need is to be able to hide that account from the main screen when you turn on the laptop or mobile device, and you should only be able to re-enable it from a menu prior to booting into the OS. It shouldn't be easily accessible either, otherwise it defeats the point.

I don't see Microsoft doing something like this - ever. Apple might if enough people asked for it, but I'd incline to say they wouldn't for now. Google probably won't do it either for Android or Chrome OS, since they probably see no benefit to it. But it would be nice if that feature at least came to Linux and some custom Android ROMs like Cyanogen.
If the first stage reusability works fine and cost per flight goes down a lot, then it starts making sense to optimize the upper stage and spacecraft for lower cost per flight as well. (Because now, even if the first stage flight was free, the launch would still cost a huge amount of money.)

In manned flights to low earth orbit, since the spacecraft reenters, at least that part could be reused.

The second stage is hard to reuse because it flies so far downrange horizontally and reenters at very high speed. The engine also can't run low in the atmosphere, meaning somehow different recovery than for the first stage.

The parts of the spacecraft that are not heat shielded (service module) will be sacrificed, but in the future the whole spacecraft might be a monolithic entity or even part of the second stage and do its mission and reenter and land as a whole.
live updates with video:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/009/status.html

NASA live stream (higher resolution than above):

http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv

SpaceX live stream:

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/
SummaList
Update My VC
Sorry, but git logs prove nothing. Git allows rebase and modification of commits. Even a full log of when pushes to github happened prove nothing - I can work during the day and just commit later.
> If I have legitimate reason to believe that an exploit does not affect me (especially if it's because I acknowledged its possibility and programmed defensively against it), why would I automatically act as if I were breached too?

Your argument hinges on the word "legitimate." I don't do security, but "it looks good to me" is not a legitimate reason to believe that the exploit does not affect you (for any value of "me"). OTOH "I've never used the versions of OpenSSL that have this bug" is a legitimate reason to believe that you're not affected, e.g. Tarsnap's explanation [1]. I'd also recommend that post for another take on what defensive programming looks like in this context.

[1] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-04-09-tarsnap-no-heartb...

on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562125
Scalable Program Architectures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant

> Penal sanctions, previously considered perfectly in line with free labor, became in the 19th century a way to transform ordinary labor into "contracts of slavery."
The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler – version 7.8.2
Django Enhancement Proposals (deps)
Phones go back to the future
Git logs are pretty flimsy sort of evidence though. You can work all day and commit at midnight.
I don't have my MBP nearby to try it out, but this font + "Cathode" [0] seems like it'd be pretty neat.

[0]: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
I think that when it's sandboxed with the proper attributes, you can't do anything appart from trashing the content of the frame.
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. By asking specifically for non-tehnical books, I'm assuming you're a technical person looking for something to clear your mind. This book is perfect.
Dependency Injection, iOS and You
Digital had bumper profits just before they went under - it's typical, as they go upmarket, to get greater profits. But I'll accept that you get what I'm saying. :)

Another data point: id was killing it (and, to us, Carmack remains undisputed). But they completely lost out the next generation, to Unreal, because of vehicles. I don't think that'll happen here, just disclaimin' past performance is no guarantee of future success.

Though, to be fair, the Quake engine underlied Call of Duty, the most successful franchise (I believe), and it really showed in the framerate. Note: no vehicles. And yes, past tense.
I wonder if he is using ProGuard. He mentions having to manually inline functions, so I think not. It is built-in to the Android build process, nowadays, though, and can be turned on with just a property setting.
The Vim plugin Tagbar matches ozh’s description. The Tagbar site has some screenshots: http://majutsushi.github.io/tagbar/.

An equivalent plugin would be harder to implement in Sublime Text, because Vim has identification of “tags” (function/class names) built-in, and the Tagbar plugin just displays them. I don’t think Sublime Text’s syntax highlighting rules do any equivalent thing. So a Tagbar-like plugin might need to parse the code itself to identify tags.
This is a matter of non-compete agreements, signed by private parties. Personally, I think it's totally reasonable to ask employees not to work on competing products in their off-time. As an employee, I have signed such agreements myself. The author appears to have signed such an agreement.

We can disagree about this. You, personally, are free not to sign these agreements with your employer, because you feel the request is unreasonable.

(Trade secrets are different. That's typically governed by state law, no special agreement required: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Trade_Secrets_Act)
and the personal blog site of the only member of that repository accepts public anonymous comments... let him know how you feel: http://www.knockmeout.net/

he ASKED you to knock him out...... DO IT.
Ars Technica staff PGP keys
Which addon do you use? I do occasionally use Chrome.
You're right. The reason by the NYT is excited about it now is that Samsung recently announced a "breakthrough" in manufacturing which lowers the costs:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/04/samsung-claims-a-graphene-...

The article's not new, but the NYT isn't in the business of tech scoops.
"Bathroom Not Included" and other horror stories from renting in San Francisco
7 things you need to know before developing a car app
I'd be interested to see a description of the concept behind this -- it looks fun/pretty, but what is the concept and structure?
https://www.google.com/search?q=input+containerization

What does the inexperienced developer learn from the new search terms?

I don't know why magically using different, non-standard words would prevent a developer from being inexperienced.
It gets even funnier. The contract of my wife effectively bars her from getting any software developer job in the same country for a year after cessation. Now, this makes you think about enforceability, doesn't it?

That's exactly why you should ask prospective employer about their stance on open source/unrelated side projects before signing a contract.
WordPass – Hate passwords, love passphrases
Why debug builds (and assertions) are important
Is it really fair to call poor code an edge case? If not for the double-equals typo, which most code reviews would fix, this wouldn't work.

I'm more interested that this team has conversations where person A asks a really simple question that should be able to be tested in 11 seconds, person B gives a patently false answer that mistakes && for ||, which is the very thing person A is asking about. Meanwhile person C goes and spends 11 days looking for a loophole and writing a blog about it.

As a person gearing up for my first web dev position, I really wonder if this is what constitutes professional Javascript development and ask myself if I shouldn't be applying to jobs already.
You're talking about how you think it ought to be (which I agree with); the person you're disagreeing with was simply describing how it is. None of this is unusual in any way, unfortunately.