skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a really, really bad explanation. You have

Bill: Says: 5
Bill: hmm Now I know the key is: 5
Monika: hmm now I know the key is: 5
And they encrypt their communication
with this number 5, Hillary does not
know that the number they have chosen
is 5.

But Bill said "5" and Hillary is listening!

Really, really bad.

I admit that it seems at the beginning that Diffie-Hellman is complicated, but really it's not. You can implement the basics in 3 lots of 8 lines of python. Follow the logic.

Using uppercase for secrets and lower case for openly visible information, and we're talking about Y (for you) and M (for me):

We openly agree b (small prime) and n (large prime).
All calculations will be done modulo n.
We each pick secrets, Y for you and M for me.
We each compute powers: y=b^Y and m=b^M
Exchange these powers openly.
We each raise the others power to our own secret,
y^M and m^Y, and we get the same answer!
Use that as a key in blowfish or similar.

That's all there is. There are some details about "good" primes versus "bad" primes, but really, that's it.

So, a longer explanation:

Together, over the phone, you and I pick two numbers, n and b. One's a 500 bit prime, the other is a moderate prime, say, 53. That's not too critical. We agree these openly, everyone can know them.

Now you pick a really big secret number, Y, and I pick a secret number M. You compute y = b^Y (modulo n) and I compute m=b^M (mod n).

We exchange these, quite openly.

Then I compute y^M, and you compute m^Y. The fun part is that the answers we get are the same.

Why?

You computed m^Y which is (b^M)^Y which is b^(MxY), while I computed y^M, which is (b^Y)^M which is b^(YxM). (using "x" for multiplication, because asterisks change to italic)

Modulo n, everything works.

Now we share a secret, and we can use that in a symmetric cipher such as blowfish, or whatever.

It is believed that no one can deduce the shared secret, or the individual secrets, from the visible numbers.
Sounds like you have a future in literary criticism then. Seriously. The whole point of the post is "don't fight it," and I for one agree.
How to Overcome Internet Addiction
Steps to beat your internet addiction
you're burying the lead, so to speak:

Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all.

These groups even want compensation for iTunes' 30-second song samples.
Physical simulation without differential equations
It appears to be an upgrade version for $30.
I like the story about premium Gmail coming soon: $25 for 6 gigabytes of storage. Instead, now I get 7+ gigabytes for free. I love living in the future.
I think most people don't unsubscribe. We wait for these TC50 updates all year like it's startup-news Christmas. And we run the ustream video throughout the day too.
Tell HN: Did you know there's a lean startups group?
I really liked the 50 items per page format. Could be even more. I suspect there is a price to pay for that somewhere though.
Acceptance testing tool for embedded Java
I think Arrington's favorite publicity stunt is the "argument".
I'm interested in what knots/skills you use to do things like keep your headphone cords untangled.
You're not gonna believe this but I was going to say the same thing. I speak German and was going to mention Naturwissenschaften/Geisteswissenschaften but I figured no one else on HN spoke German so it wouldn't be that helpful :)

BTW I wasn't using math as an example of why computer science is a science, but rather why it can be justified that computer science gets placed in the school of engineering and one earns a B.S.
Google Reader - Bit.ly Mashup
I am definitely glad to see the feature added -- I just think the amount of attention it gets is a little excessive.
"People who are doing what they love and don't need discipline because they're already doing it don't ask this."

Even passionate people go through periods when they don't feel like working, or they're working on some boring task, or whatever. The answer is not always to self-immolate, but to be self-aware, and to figure out why you're not motivated. Sometimes discipline is appropriate; sometimes rest is the better prescription.

The world marches to your beat because your beat is inspiring, not because you beat your drum harder than everyone else.
I don't get that from the site:

http://drh.img.digitalriver.com/store/mswpus/ContentTheme/pb...

I could be wrong though.

They do tell you to run the upgrade checker to insure that your computer will handle Windows 7.
looks interesting, thank you for telling us.
Linkers haven't changed since the invention of the relocatable program in the late 70s, though. None of the mainstream languages and operating systems implement Java's security or JIT features, so Levine's book is still valid and relevant, it just needs to be supplemented with the reading up on one's executable header formats of choice.
Hewlett-Packard Names Marc Andreessen as Director
I stand corrected. The caption for central screenshot is "Edit side by side in widescreen", but no matter what I tried I during the initial test-drive, I couldn't make it happen with the same file. I finally managed to do that now, so for those who haven't discovered it, the option is in the File menu and it's called "New view into <filename>" (where <filename> is the name of the file in the active tab).
IPhone Sales Figures - 78x One-Day Jump
Who are your customers. VC? or the people using your service?

Its an important decision.
Part of this stems from the amazingly messy rights situation that most music falls under. There are rights to text, rights to music, performance rights, neighbouring rights, sometimes the text gets translated and so on.

You have to make deals with many parties if you want to use a piece of music.

What I don't get about the hypothetical case against Apple here is that Apple made a deal with the labels, does that not mean that the labels compensate those who were in on the creative side as well ?

A single licensing entity would be a great idea from a rights perspective, even the rights organization do not know if they are the right person to represent the rights to many songs / texts. But they can offer indemnification in some cases, which is really weird, they don't own the rights, they'll take your money and if you get sued they indemnify.

Great business model.

In Europe the market is even more complex, almost every little country has their own licensing agencies, usually pseudo-government. And now the market is 'open' so these compete with each other.
The people using our service, of course. But that's not really my question. I'm wanting to know what people pitch as their competitive advantage.
http://lifehacker.com/5037175/musician-ryan-adams-success-se...
My school (UIC) is a part of msdnaa so we get windows 7 for free.
I have yet seen a way to scale having a beer with a teacher after the class is over and chat about the field of study. Email or IM is just not the same thing.

I've seen people teaching online classes, and I've been in online classes. There's a difference between learning a series of facts and truly having access to an expert in the field.
Competitors are those that provide you with the inspiration to innovate more on your products and solutions. They usually are trying to solve a similar problem for the same set of people.

edit: for the more pragmatic, add "Be grateful to your competitors and then have them crushed."
Just needs a little Facebook integration..
It's obviously way late to post this here, but I was right - hand washing does nothing for the flu: http://www.newsweek.com/id/215435
It's weird how many of these links I remember as if I just saw them yesterday. Generally I have a memory like a sieve, but something about this format makes things stick in my mind.
Post-Medium Publishing
No but too many of them are an indicator of poor design. An example of this is C++ and the sheer number of gotchas presented by Herb Sutter and others: http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/
Why Gopher lost to HTML
They are all there, just clipped away. I'm preparing other similar visuals, and I'll be sure to add views from the "other side".
Multi-select seems really cool to me, but I can't find any way to engage it with the keyboard. It seems there should be some way to do that.

Another really cool feature: Visible whitespace on highlight.

There are some things that bug me though. One, there are bugs. The "All Hallows" theme gives an error when loading, and any time I've turned on the console, I've managed to get it full of error messages pretty quickly. Also, there should be a way to move the cursor to the next/previous whitespace line like on emacs.

The minimap should be resizable.
Or work at Gap. http://www.businessweek.com/careers/managementiq/archives/20...
Is there a free API for TV listings
Anyone know of a free API for TV listings or a way to use TV listings in an app without violating anyones copyright etc. From what I understand Tribune Media controls most of it and its pretty costly. Any thoughts? Thanks!
The Lost Oaks of California Ave
There aren't any "corner cases" or "gotchas" in these examples. I even fed the examples to javac to confirm my answers. Just to see if something changes, I then translated the examples to Python, and found that Python does exactly the same thing as Java. It's really, really simple stuff, and anyone who ever wrote a "finally" clause to clean up a file handle should understand it.

So the author's assertion, that most people in his audience had no idea what that code does, really just shows that his audience consisted of idiots.
Try Psiwin 2.3.
I think when VC's talk competitive advantage they are obviously looking for what sets you apart from the competition, but I suspect they want it framed in such a way that it speaks to the lock-in factor.

If your competitive advantage is that you have the best UI, that isn't good enough, because that can be copied. What sets you apart which your competitors can't replicate, or which puts up barriers (assuming you have some market share).

Those are my thoughts.
If you're doing break or return from within a finally{} block, the problem of design is your own doing if the results are surprising to you.

The only real life gotcha I had with Java very early on was the realization that a++ isn't an atomic operation :/
But that is clearly not the case here. There are no gotchas. Basic scoping rules and an understanding of "finally" and "break".
I'm curious. Given what you're going through, are you nonetheless finding it beneficial to produce/sell software in this new paradigm (where a third-party vendor is so dictatorial)? I continue to find it amazing that developers are accepting (if not in fact embracing) this bizarre, new, vendor-moderated marketplace.
Please understand that I am not defending the article. I am merely replying to the parent comment.
I did the same (for Java). No surprises.

But this did surprise me:
try { throw new Exception ("exception"); } finally { throw new Exception ("finally"); }
Programming on paper
I know that Edsger Dijkstra preferred to write his papers longhand:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF

I was wondering if it would be possible to write a complex programming project in longhand on paper until everyone in the group signs off that it is bug free? Has anyone ever tested this? I am just curious what would happen. Thank you.
This is the feature that I, for one, was waiting for. Considering how great the rest of Posterous is, I expect I am not the only one.
Or: http://www.bioeddie.co.uk/Psion/main/Programs/pc_tools.html

Rec2wav
I wonder if sound could be added via the HTML5 <audio> support?

You can actually use the data uri scheme for <audio> src. So if you generate WAV data on the fly via JavaScript, and encode it as Base64, you can play it immediately.

Here's an example of on-the-fly WAV generation w/ <embed>, but I just tried it in Firefox with <audio> and that works as well:

http://sk89q.therisenrealm.com/2008/11/dynamically-generatin...
Both Tumblr and Blogger support JavaScript and they're doing just fine.
No -- it's not them being accidentally racist. It's you misunderstanding something you read, and _leaping_ to the conclusion that it's racism. This is a very common reaction, unfortunately, in recent months.
Andreessen joins HP board
If your university doesn't have MSDNAA - and almost any decent CompSci/IT/etc dept should have it - you can get MSDNAA through IEEE. I don't think there's any program requirement for IEEE other than being a current student. IEEE student membership for one year is $15.

MSDNAA comes with multiple copies of every version of Windows, Visual Studio, and all sorts of other pricey MS software,
I can't say your diet isn't involved, but that's what most people experience as a part of their circadian rhythm: http://ride4ever.org/images/normalsleep.gif
BBC have one for non-commercial use:

http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/feeds/tvradio/
I wouldn't be too concerned... The number of people using Flashblock is vanishingly small, and their eyeballs are worth less for many products. Also, Flash cookies are more advertiser-friendly than browser cookies.
I might do that, although it seems overkill. The Psion is dead, I couldn't connect with the laptop because it doesn't have a serial port, and I just want a sound file (or two) converted.

It's hard to believe this problem hasn't been solved before, and it's hard to believe it's so hard to find a good solution.

More ideas still welcome - both ideas so far are workable, but non-trivial.

I appreciate the help.
Sure. But most of Apple's customers have never seen a single one of Steve's keynotes.

It's amazing the lengths people go to "explain" why a lot of people really like Apple's products, coming up with all sorts of fantastic reasons, all the while ignoring the most obvious one: Apple's customers like technology that don't come bundled with headaches.

And, you know, as long as Apple's competition continue to explain away Apple's success, their competition will continue to come up short.
Ping. Ping. 3/4 flank. Steady as she goes.

Ahem. Excuse me, I was just trying to imagine what it is like to work aboard the PR submarine.
Yes it does. I made the same mistake, but read the title: 'value of units shipped for 1973 to 2008, in billions of current dollars'.
People still use COBOL, it has its place.
Can I write something faster that is more maintainable and readable in a different language? Yes. does it matter? Depends on the situation. That said, this article is really just picking on some odd cases which anyone can do in about any language.
I think there must be a nice middleground between your position and Sivers'. Even workaholics have periods where they need to spend a day reading a book or a weekend camping. In their case, they're just burnt-out somewhat, and need some "recharge" time. They know that they'll be ready to work again soon.

Others are lazier by nature, and would spend the majority of their lives doing little or nothing -- and that might include traveling, gardening, reading, playing video games -- and they do need to push themselves if they're going to accomplish anything ... if they want to accomplish anything.
I used to not understand Twitter either but now I'm a believer. Maybe not a $1 Billion believer but I know there are ways to extract value from the data they have.

Sorry economist, you fail.
That might be the best option - I'll investigate tomorrow.

More ideas still welcome - thanks.
I agree. I see no need to waste bandwidth and page size with an external library to add an image curl. If I wanted that I would add it using my favorite image editing program.

The JavaScript image processing libraries he mention also make the image grainy. I'm really not impressed.

If there is one possibly "essential" javascript effect it would be the spinning ajax indicator or a progress indicator for uploads and other time intensive operations.

None of the "effects" mentioned by the author are anywhere near "essential."
Interesting. Where I grew up (San Luis Obispo county in CA), you'd need an act of congress to touch a mature oak tree–even on your own property. Our church actually had to build around one when they did a building project.

I bet if an entrepreneur or real estate developer wanted to cut down oak trees for a building project, they wouldn't get past the first step in the permit process ... but I guess when city wants them gone, they can run it through a "Development" association and play the disease card.
I could probobly help you access the journals if you want to investigate further, I'd be interested in hearing the answer.
So, how did it go with Octopart, sam?
Has your opinion of the Kindle changed, pg? You used to think that in ten years it would be a forgotten curiosity.
I definitely find it beneficial to use the App Store, despite all of it's shortcomings. For better or worse, the new model allows me to focus on development (and appeasing Apple), instead of having to worry about all the stuff I don't care about (designing a site, doing even basic marketing, etc). Which is not to say that those things don't help, they definitely do, it's just that they're not a barrier to making money like they are in unmanaged marketplaces.
Thanks for that. Mainly looking for U.S. data.
It may be no good for documents, but I'd like to use this for code listings.
What is amazing to me is not the features this editor has, but that editors haven't had these features for the last 10 years.
Control and monitor the growth of vegtables with an Arduino (w/ code)
I would really like to see Twisted vs Tornado Documentation. The performances are close enough that I don't think it should be a deciding factor in which of these to use. Albeit performace is always an important metric that should be watched to keep things from getting worse.
To continue that train of thought it would be interesting to see a similar data visualization of consumption of all entertainment mediums (dvd video,blu ray video,video rentals,video games,video game rentals,etc) including piracy of those mediums as well.

I have a feeling that (other than the 'legal' vs 'illegal arguments) it would be very telling of the way that media consumption habits have trended over the past decade or so.
In the city of Thousand Oaks, CA (in socal, between LA and SB), it's actually illegal for anyone to cut down an oak tree.

Oak trees are one of the most distinguishing features of the California chaparral landscape - they cover the rolling hills just north of Los Angeles all the way up to the redwood forests in the north. It's actually one of the most important physical features that tie both ends of California together as a single state.
It will be. Not because it fails, but because it succeeds. The form factor is too close to existing devices - I think we'll see convergence with more general purpose devices, and the standalone book-reader will die out. (Of course, the Kindle brand might potentially live on.)
How did you know that first comment was spam ?
Heh. I don't think so. I'd rather be having sex than doing, too, but I'm not buying a bus ticket to San Fernando Valley.
Private owners respect and conserve their resources.

Governments (which is to say, politicians with short lifespans in their job) use up resources in a rush to accomplish short term, idiotic goals.

You can look at the environmental records of capitalist countries versus centrally managed totalitarian states.

...or you can look at golf courses (which don't "cut down all the trees to keep things tidy") and compare them to the government of Palo Alto.
Alfie Kohn Is Bad for You and Dangerous For Your Children
TurboGopher VR had such potential.
"Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts."

David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) has some very interesting remarks on the difficulty of doing this here: http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2009/08/080809-edinburgh-so-ho...

Quote: "In the past, live shows were viewed as loss leaders to sell albums"

The article (like everything on Bryne's blog) is interesting throughout, and well worth reading.
Not really. I think they'll be superseded by whatever little device people carry around to browse the web. E.g. the Apple tablet.
I see the that comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829044

which reads

In the city of Thousand Oaks, CA (in socal, between LA and SB), it's actually illegal for anyone to cut down an oak tree.

was marked dead.

Why?

This seems like it adds something to the conversation, no?
Karl Pilkington played with ladybirds for thirty-odd years of his life and then came up with Rockbusters.
How Journalists Misrepresent Scientific Studies on Weight Loss and Nutrition
In the city of Thousand Oaks, CA it's illegal to cut down oak trees, even on your own property. I believe the burden of proof is on the owner to demonstrate that property is being threatened by root growth, etc.

I'm sure many other municipalities in CA have similar laws, because the oak trees that cover much of the chaparral land from just north of Los Angeles all the way up to the redwood forests are one of the most important physical features that tie together the northern and southern ends of California.
You can't cut down a mature tree on your own property in Palo Alto either. But apparently the city can.
> this appears to be a re-packaging of http://www.yourfonts.com/

Unlikely, there's a dev blog: http://www.fontcapture.com/blog/
I always thought unobtrusive javascript refers to how it is written. For example, using the inline onClick attribute would be considered obtrusive, because it is in the HTML. On the other hand, unobtrusive javascript would assign a function to some control when the window loads, effectively making the HTML pure.
The MIT Guide to Lock Picking
Why does everyone likes bowline so much when eskimo bowline or kalmyk loop (http://dimview.org/knots/) is much better?
It's still going well! That was our first blog entry, you can catch up the rest of them here http://octopart.com/blog .

Wow, we've come a long way from then. When that blog was posted, Octopart was running off a desktop computer that I bought for $50 at a yard sale. And I was sleeping on a couch in Andres room in his apartment in Berkeley.
From Palo Alto Online - California Avenue trees get the axe:

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=13827
Interestingly, somewhere between July 13th and August 30th, 2007 it got renamed to "Hacker News" (I can't remember that happening, or why).

Also, I can't remember how I even signed up for HN in the first place, but it must've been mentioned by pg somewhere in the early days (I'm 939 days old on HN today, and the site was launched 940 days ago.)
firebug saves doing a refresh, and makes dynamically editing css a pleasure. The webdeveloper toolbar "edit css" functionality is ok too, if you want to copy/paste css.
It seems like there are good software suggestions made, but if they fail a last ditch effort would be to run line out from your SUSE 8.1 machine to line in on another machine (or with a sufficient soundcard the same one).
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Claudio+Stampi...

But hey, don't let me interfere with your blind application of heuristics.
What other people do to their blogs doesn't affect your blog right? As long as the simplicity isn't removed, I think you can still treat it the same way.
Excellent essay -- one comment though:

> Is software a counterexample?

No:

> There have always been people in the business of selling information, (...) People will pay for information they think they can make money from.

Software, it seems to me, is information that people think they can make money from. That's why Microsoft needs Windows on all new PCs (so it's a toll-booth to consumers), and student/home use versions of Office are very cheap -- only businesses will actually pay for it.

It's even more clearly seen in the graphical world -- I have yet to meet a non-professional with a legal copy of PhotoShop or any of the other Adobe flagship products.
people are excited by it, nothing wrong with that =)