skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's establishment politicians on both sides who receive massive lobbying efforts from big hollywood and the recording industry.

There is some young blood taking these issues seriously though: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-party-of...
I really like this. It seems to me to be an early approximation of Neal Stephenson's A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age.

A commensurate companion, guide, and teacher. Sure this may only be a few activities but the responsiveness and seeming magic to it is fantastic.

I particularly like that you can set down a toy in front of the camera and it renders out a flat illustrated version of that toy.
I've read some great books from Packt, this wasn't really one of them. When the first thread was on HN, I got excited because I love Python and had been looking into starting some investments. Namely, I want to implement a low-risk, low-frequency automated trade strategy. Naively, I assumed this book would be for people who knew Python and were interested in learning finance, but it was the opposite. A lot of concepts were thrown out there with little to no explanation. I gave up reading it until I actually know finance, and can use it as a cookbook.

The code in the book is also shoddy. I don't have it with me, but two examples come to mind. I didn't run any of the examples, but eyeballing them I some of them wouldn't run because of syntax errors -- rather unfortunate for a beginner's text. The section of naming conventions. To write a program using a financial expression like P(1+r)n (exponential growth/decay), the book recommends against using confusing variables like p... in favor of P. P stands for Principal in this case, and I doubt many of you knew that off hand.

For those looking to do finance in Python, I recommend looking into QuantLib[1]. I'm also watching a series of videos from the University of Michigan's online Intro to Finance class on YouTube[2]; however I realized a few days ago that they're probably pirated. That makes me feel bad, but its still a good reference.

If any quants on HN have some better book recs, they would be strongly appreciated.

Edited to add; To be fair, I haven't really touched the section on Monte Carlo simulations, which seems to be the bulk of the value.

[1] quantlib.org

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQeZqn-8yM8&list=PL07D40483B...
To be fair, tangrams are pretty fun. Young me would rather it just show me the silhouette than showing me where to put the tans though.
CouchDB Weekly News, May 22
This is a great way of finding all sorts of bugs in your support of Internationalized Domain Names.
This product definitely relies on the video to convey it's magic. If you don't watch the video, you won't get it.
Buses are what really punches a hole in the idea that these lanes hurt the poor. By letting buses skip traffic, they are actually more likely to help the poor.
NSA Bill Missing Key Reforms Passes House
Why Startups Shouldn’t Sell Grandma Panties.
Mel Brooks considers making "Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money"
Makes me think of the Centralia PA underground coal fire that's been going for almost as long. Not QUITE as spectacular though.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/01/pictu...
In 1995, I worked on getting a large piece of enterprise software to send output to browsers in HTML format. The product took off pretty quickly and is still being used today by big companies. HTML had only very basic markup (no CSS yet) and the only method for talking to a web server was CGI programs. But you could do tables, and those were adequate for generating business reports. Java 1.0 had just been released.

This was long before the web had become a popular culture phenomenon: most people outside of academia didn't know what the internet was, and search engines were in their infancy (Alta Vista was founded that year). Windows 3.1 did not have a built-in TCP/IP stack, so you had to be a geek just to figure out how to connect your home machine to an ISP via a dial-up modem (Windows 95 made it much easier) and install a browser. However, the web was starting to catch on in the business world as companies started putting useful information on the web and their intranets. It was an exciting time to be working with that technology since the potential was largely untapped.
I thought along the same lines of what having the internet would have meant in terms of supercharging my progress as well, but also thought about the number of easy distractions it provides. Would you have been where you are at 32 in terms of knowledge, or would you have spend 80 percent of your time leveling up on Wow or some other easy temptation? Always helps to reflect on the total context of the situation.
Did anyone else get excited expecting something related to this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Osmo_and_the_Worlds_Beyo...
looks like a google product
Seriously. WWDC starts in a week and a half. If Apple is really embracing WebGL, we'll probably find out on the first day. Is it so hard to wait?
Does Marcus end up Putin's lapdog against the West? As good as his disclosures are, fleeing to a state with much worse human rights records and pretty much a one-party klepocracy obsessed with annexing territories and controlling its neighbors isn't how most good stories end.

Why isn't he railing against Russia's SORM-1, SORM-2, and SORM-3? My concern here is that his disclosures won't change business as usual and will provide political cover for nations with just as bad, if not worse, human rights violations because the US's critics can just point to Snowden and deflect the conversation, which is EXACTLY what's happening now.
And more here (from the list of public pastes):

http://pastebin.com/YA2b6xCZ

http://pastebin.com/u4feDLAQ

http://pastebin.com/NQWEnW2v
The reason why aerospace stuff sometimes looks dated is that it goes through an unholy amount of testing -- same for essential nautical equipment. Until a few years ago, you'd get on the bridge of a cargo ship and see these big LORAN navigation units built into the console, usually buried under GPS stuff on a swivel mount... because they liked GPS but wanted to be able to quickly get back to the system they KNEW worked in case the new stuff didn't.
OK, here are my immediate thoughts about solving the problem. It comes in two parts - setting up, and finding.

Setting up ...

* Take a photo of your front door (or where ever it is you're meeting),

* Include your lat/long,

* Create a unique, private ID (or URL of some sort),

* Share it.

Finding ...

* Point the app at the URL

* The app guides you to the lat/long

* The app displays how close you are, and the photo.

Is that what you do? If it's slick and usable then it could be really good. If it's something else that you do then it would be fascinating to see a compare-and-contrast.
Let's do the math:

A PBKDF2 cost factor/iteration count of 12000 and 32-byte output means each candidate passphrase costs 12002 SHA256 blocks.

I can buy a crappy bitcoin miner which will do 2GH/s for about USD19.

Let's say we're going to use the Gawker leak as our dictionary. That's ~200,000 candidate passwords.

For a given user, I can therefore find their password (if it exists in the Gawker set) in 12002 * 200000 = 2.4GH SHA256 applications. That will take 1.2 seconds.

So for all 125 million eBay users, that's about 4 years. This work is trivially parallelisable, so buying more or faster hardware is brutally effective.

Note: there is obviously, and hopefully, a non-negligible probability that a user's password isn't in that set. Brute force of (say) the whole 8 printable-ASCII character password space would take longer but would be guaranteed to find to find about 50% (from Adobe leak) of user's passwords.
Worth more than $1000, wouldn't you think? Or perhaps Ebay will buy it regardless of the price, in hopes of quashing this?
What's with the weird space between "Pre" and "Order Osmo" in the header? Also, the percentage doesn't add up. Or is it supposed to be with shipping?

By the way, the price is ridiculous. Even the discounted one. That puzzle sells for about 4$ (that's with profit), let's be generous and say that the app itself is worth $10 (which it isn't) and we are left with $85 for a mirror embedded in plastic? Shipping not included?!

That being said, nice idea, I haven't seen it done before. Possibilities to extend this are great.
"The bipartisan compromise on patents was headed for a markup on Thursday. But Leahy suddenly took it off the table after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) intervened at the last minute, according to multiple people close to the negotiations."

Would these be multiple Republican people? Kill the bill and blame it on Reid! Twofer!

Not saying its true, just awed by the credulity of some of the comments here.
Yeah, sounds like numerical apophenia to me.
Term limits seem like a good idea but have been shown over and over again at the state and local level not to work. What happens is that power moves to unelected party bosses who control the sources of money.

Sorry but there are no simple technical fixes. As long as politicians have these powers special interests will find a way to influence them. In my opinion the only thing that will help are limits on political power.
> It could also help individual people to cope with social anxieties by being "busy".

Yes, and sometimes meetings serve only this purpose. For example, oh I'm sorry Mr. X is in a meeting that he has scheduled for every time you call.
I've got the exact same history in terms of my academic career and being a "job-out" but I keep wondering about all the cool research work people like us could be doing if they would actually be able to study with discipline? I can't study, never been able to without out-of-proportion-huge investments in time and energy - I can't even finish books I really like anymore without brutally "hacking" my ADHD induced distractability and mind-wandering.
I don't watch videos unless I'm first convinced by the text that they're worth watching. I doubt I'm alone in this. Why is it so hard to put one or two sentences that just tell me what you're talking about?
From Zero to Backbone in 48 Hours: Backbone.js web app using CodeIgniter & Grunt
How to say thank you at work: for managers, peers, employees, and clients
The title originally was "Ebay user data has been put up for sale :s". We changed it.
Although "educators" being excited about technology certainly doesn't guarantee that it will be great, it's not a negative signal either. Singling this out for such cynical focus when there's so much other content here to comment on seems unwarranted.
I could label capitalists as muggers just as easily as you label socialists. Let's have a reasoned and honest debate instead.

Seems to me a libertarian of the Ayn Rand variety. Your splitting the world into capitalist and communist zones (as if those were the only two options!) as well as your use of the terms "makers" and "takers" are right out of Atlas Shrugged.

Can you answer me one question: Are you a real libertarian, or a royal libertarian?[1] Read the referenced article and then tell me where you stand with respect to land as private property?

[1] http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
Nobody said s/he would only sell it once. It's $1000 per copy. Assuming it's true, of course.
Unless he was following me around I don't think so. Though I do admit to being a huge fan and reading the guide multiple times around that time.
More specifically, all the sample data is from Malaysia. So you'll get mostly Chinese, Malay and Indian names.

(I'm Malaysian).
Here's a free "magic" iPad app that I'm developing, which doesn't require any gadgets!

http://pantomimecorp.com/

https://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa...
Except prior to his whistleblowing he was the NSA and helped enable that kind of data collection. It always seemed odd that defectors suddenly get absolved of their crimes. If the NSA, as an organization, is guilty of felonies, then their employees must face time, including Snowden. That's justice right? Or does the "I was just following orders/paycheck" defense suddenly work as well?

Serious question, if we do round-up the NSA, who gets in trouble and who doesn't? Just the leaders? Are we also absolving Congress and POTUS? Please explain.
That seems like it might have some negative effects on the pool of people willing to take those jobs.

One thing that would probably help but will never happen would be to figure out how to make committee chairs service positions that had less influence over the output of the committee than the other members.
It's always seemed odd to me that most people douse their skin in antibiotics every day. I'd love to see a study on flora, like this study on gut flora:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19018661
He took down his reply, but he shares a name with a fairly famous actor. Gonna take a stab that the "amateur ... xxx" was related to that guy.

Also, you're an idiot.
In addition to his blog post, which will probably be great, my reading list would be:

* First, the McCanne BPF+ paper.

* Then, the pcap source code, particularly pcap/optimize.c, perhaps starting with the peephole optimization stuff.

* Finally, one of the BPF JIT projects (there's one on SourceForge). Amusingly: the Linux BPF JIT was at one point used as an aid to memory corruption, by jit-spraying kernel memory. So also consider reading any of the jit-spray papers.
Well it depends on wether 1 company employing 100,000 people is better or 10,000 companies employing 10 each. Of course it's easier to represent the will of 1 vs the not-always-overlapping-voices of 10,000.
I'd wager (and please correct me if I'm wrong, your experience no doubt means you'd know better than I) that resilience in the face of EMP was probably a big factor too. The B-52's primary mission was nuclear bombing for a long time.
Sun shipped could which _could_ link dynamically to GPL code.

The problem with this "GPL infects across dynamic linking" argument is that you are therefore trying to make the claim that whether or not kadmin is infected by GPL code is dependent on whether there exists another library which is not licensed under the GPL. This gets perilously close to claiming copyright infringement, with the added wrinkle that the simplest way for someone to take code that was previously claimed to be GPL infringing is to create and ship a new library which is ABI compatible. So something could be a GPL violation, and then when a new library ships, et voila!, it's not no longer a violation. And something could orignally clearly not be a GPL violation, but when a new library ships which has a dependency (implied or explicit or even conditional in the case of an optional dlopen) on GPL code, now that proprietary binary can now run with GPL'ed code in its address space.
that's not racist at all, just unobservant. It's not racism to think a name sounds Asian. How did we get so confused about terms like racism and feminism.
No it's ruled by lawyers making a show of how much they love law and order.
It's ontologically subjective but epistemologically objective, in the sense that we can ask questions and observe behavior. Pain is a good example.
Does eBay even allow you to enter that? What benefit would that provide?
It's true. It wont provide anything on its own so I'm trying to be blunt to kill this misconception that keeps spreading.
Why Google Fiber, unlike Comcast, gives Netflix free peering
Natural keys are also a nightmare to deal with when you have to do complex joins. They are not guaranteed to be a single column value and can lead to joining across a half dozen columns when you need data from multiple tables.

Usernames are actually a very good example of something that looks like an invariant when in actuality is anything but. On top of that, they are notoriously inconsistent between systems so you can't rely on usera in one system being usera in another even when you control both systems.

Even if you do have a nice single column natural key, what happens when a business requirement changes and there's suddenly a completely new coding system? Or perhaps your coding system needs a new distinction, do you rely on hand or create a new column? How many tables to you have to touch to change to accommodate the new data? How much code is relying your tables be structured just so?

Natural keys look appealing on face, but they can all too easily lead to a big mess down the road. The larger and more complex the system, the more external systems that you have to integrate, the bigger the mess becomes.
Me too! I remember watching some little kids (who are now in their 30's) delightfully playing Cosmic Osmo, and explaining it to the adults.
How Twitter Uses Ansible [video]
How is it 'the next iPhone' when the novelty wears off fast and then there's not much use, when there is no killer app, when people react hostile towards it and it gives you headaches? I mean seriously.
Bitcoin miners can not be re-purposed. They take a header input and output only nonces, not hash results.
"That web dashboard that combines mail, notes, calendar and to-dos in one screen is great - I would like that today, and I don't think I can get it."

I have that. Minus the web part. It's all in terminal, in one screen, that I access over SSH. Haven't changed my workflow since ... 1998 ?

You'd be surprised how fast email is when you don't have to mouse around...
That could work... if Reid was stupid. Stupid enough to be manipulated by the Republicans, and then stupid enough to just silently take the blame.

I don't think that Reid got where he is by being politically stupid. Therefore, I don't buy your scenario.

[Edit: I just re-read the parent, and realized the claim was that Republicans did the killing, not that they manipulated Reid into doing the killing. I still don't buy it.]
There are definitely kids with ADHD for whom medications definitely help. However, from my personal experience, it seems like it is a little "over diagnosed". But I could be wrong - this is just my very limited experience.

Are there any material (video or similar) showing how an average ADHD kid behaves today vs. 20 years ago?
Great catch there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1453

"It is sometimes cited as the notional end of the Middle Ages by historians..."
NASA hands space enthusiasts the keys to a 1970s-era spacecraft
The best part of the hiptop IMO, was the development community. It was ultra tight knit and accepting of newbs. I have many fond memories of side loading apps from skdr.net and eventually reaching the point of uploading my own creations.
Full Disclosure: asb is the editor of llvm weekly
I'm here. Shoot me an message: bit.ly/hellllyeah
Backports of gems to Rails 2.3 or Ruby 1.8.7
I'm sure this would be fun on a giant screen, but it's not necessary. Kids play with tablets and phones all the time. Large screens are not a prerequisite for enjoyable playtime.
Enterprise Password Security: who will be around 20 years from now?
The screen shots of the app on Google Play do show streets and names on a map though.
There really isn't much day-to-day functionality left without it.
I wonder if there are other use cases for a little iPad augmented reality app on a stand beyond kids stuff
Cable Television. Please, for the love of science, someone disrupt this soon :(
It would be hilarious if the seller accept bids for that on eBay ....
Agreed. My favorite phone form factor is still this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Q

Also, I miss pcmcia cards. Just saying.
Facebook Login Guide
Pentagon report: scope of intelligence compromised by Snowden 'staggering'
This is probably to try to offset Moore's law, by keeping the hash cracking difficulty in line with technology progrss. But it's funny how this works. If you think about Moore's law, it's basically describing the number of transistors on an IC, those doubling every two years. But it doesn't address expansion in the ways we use our technology. If new machines come out which allow us to stack even more GPUs into a single machine, performance capacity per cracking host will rise even farther than double per year.

One person estimated an 8-GPU cracking machine two years ago at about 539 billion hashes per minute. At 128k hashes for one password, you could make about 70,182 attempts per second.

But here[1] is a five-machine cluster from a year and a half ago with 25 GPUs. Its speed? 63 billion per second against SHA1. This results in 492,187 attempts per second. Assuming SHA256 is about 50% slower, this would be around 246,093 per second.

Some password dictionaries contain millions of words. But if your password is '0Password', it'll probably be cracked in a couple of seconds on modern hardware.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/25-gpu-cluster-crack...
Meet the Regulators Trying to Make Sure Self-Driving Cars Are Safe
My point is, why do I need to dig to the bottom post of their blog in order to find out what they do. That should be clear on the homepage.
I have the book, though haven't spent much time with it yet. Initial impression was that it's quite brisk. You'll get a couple paragraphs on a new concept and then a code snippet to demostrate. You'd need to compliment it with deep study of the actual concepts.

Still, sometimes breadth is better than depth.
Where? What can you see that I don't?

The only feed I have on the right hand side of the page is displaying some 'trending' things (I have no interest), a couple of events I'm probably not going to and a couple of 'suggested groups'
I am surprised the Denver International Airport Baggage System fiasco (http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_id=2086) did not make the list. It is one the greatest failures of this sort ever, and is often used as a case study of what not to do. The baggage system cost tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars and it never worked a day. For that price in the mid 90s we could have gotten a light rail system in the entire Denver metro area (one that is finally being installed now for a much higher price).
Significant discussion on an earlier discussion of a different article on the same question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7772405
There is no evidence yet that this is real, so we're burying the post.
Ask HN: How feasible is it to encrypt user records?
With all the news around user data theft on an enormous scale recently, I wonder how feasible it would be to encrypt entire user records in storage. I imagine some data stores (e.g., key/value) would be more suitable for this than others. Are there any commercial/FOSS products that encrypt all identifying user data? Has anyone on HN tried implementing something like this? Is there a good reason (aside from obvious programming complexity and performance impact) that it's not a standard practice?
example+ebay@gmail.com and example@gmail.com point to the same GMail inbox; you can use the part after + sign to filter incoming mail. A quite useful feature, I must say.
I was part of a crowd gathering around this sort of thing once. The person playing it pulled the same trick of maxing out their score by skipping the very last move of the game until their last life, too. This was one of the local arcades in New Orleans, though.
It's there: https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/specs/latest/1.0/webg...
I think most people aren't aware of how significant these kinds of technologies will be, in mobile and embedded computing.
Having been the victim of this 8 years ago, this is something they should have changed eons ago. Waaaaaay overdue. Facebook isn't twitter. The expectation isn't generally that everything shared with your friends is shared with the world.
Well, I think part of the issue is: if the rich leave the world and don't take all the resources with them, doesn't that just mean everyone else can do whatever the hell we want in whatever's left behind?
Per https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/issues/detail?id=1 :
"Looks like the standalone build system is not yet present."
That one is easy, its called "don't use Facebook"...
C++ style: Casting – Dont use other cast formats like int y = (int)x;