skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Practically, switching away from as many Google services as possible will help alleviate the most obvious issues like most of your personal data being in the hands of one company and the related issue of ads following you around the Internet."

Ads that follow you has absolutely nothing to do with Google services. These are retargeting companies using their cookies to track you. They use ad exchanges, so even that is not principally Google.
1Password and last pass are pretty awesome. Some people don't want to use a 3rd party and for those, I suggest KeePass databases at the very least.

I have all my two-factor reset keys in KeePassX at home and all normal passwords in last pass.

I actually lost a two factor code for Linode when I lost my phone with the Google authenticator app on it and having those reset codes in KeePassX was a life saver.
I, for one, endorse calculators wholeheartedly. I loved my TI-89, and I truly believe the opportunity to play around with it played a large role in my becoming a mathematician, of the sort which the "Calculators ruin math education!" brigade never acknowledges.
It's not normal, but this was an exceptional situation.
Well, a C#-only thing. It is available in Mono. It's a series of functional-programming features in C# that can also be compiled into SQL and run on a SQL server through an ORM, so you can use the same syntax for queries as you do to search local collections.
Very cool.

I made a web app that would show whether or not our table was currently in use based on the sound and frequency of ping-pong ball impacts. https://github.com/helious/rails-sound-spy
The TI-89 destroyed my ability to do calculus. It was just too easy to plug in a problem and get an immediate answer. Great calculator, but be careful not to depend on it too much.
I think the house does a wonderful job of breaking up the monotony of the streetscape.
The issue here is information monopoly. If one provider controls every bit of information about you than it eventually leads to a master/puppet scenario.

With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about - Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google.

That's the issue here.
Apart from the fact that it was sloooow, impossible to repair as it was glued together, the display was abysmal and you needed to drag the manuals around to be productive.

Not a big fan of HP nostalgia to be honest, despite rather liking RPL.
The bibliography stops in 2002.

Here's a 2011 book that's sort of an advanced, vs. updated version of it's 1996 predecessor: http://www.amazon.com/The-Garbage-Collection-Handbook-Manage... It covers the recent state of the art up to it's publication (e.g. Azul's Pauseless but not C4).
A million times this. Not only that, the Derive CAS was buggy as hell so a good tutor can set some traps to see if it was you or the calculator doing the work.
+1 for Ben and the Site5 team!
"Tools designed to silence people with unpopular views are being used to silence people with unpopular views."
I forget the term for it, but it's exactly like Terms and Conditions. Always expect the user to solve any puzzle put to them using the least amount of energy/effort. It's quite honestly not worth it to anyone to go through the work of securing their information/data/whatever until it's actually genuinely at risk or they have lost something in the past. Until then it's an impedance and an annoyance that makes them very unhappy.

Once something like this happens it's impressive how much cognitive dissonance there is behind the excuses those very same people make or their claims that not enough was done to protect them. Don't get me wrong, these individuals were horribly victimized and it's not ok, but we can't allow ourselves to be satisfied by just blaming the company, especially if they otherwise provided the tools that would have kept the account secure. We can only realistically expect the companies we entrust our data to be responsible for making it possible for us to secure our data and not leaking it through other systemic failures. If we choose to shortcut it then it's our responsibility to learn from that and do better next time. We can't blame anyone involved here for doing what they should otherwise be motivated/expected to do. Apple provided the tools to protect the accounts, and as far as we know didn't allow them to be otherwise compromised. The victims set up their accounts in a way that they could easily access/recover them in the future (honestly, it's now required to remember around 20+ account passwords to manage our lives and it's only getting worse) regardless if they knew the risks or not. Security education is out there and it's as loud as we could hope to get it, people just won't internalize it until the risk is tangible. We can demand that companies like Apple, but it won't actually improve anything if people can't be bothered to use them or more importantly find it WAY more inconvenient and seek ways to bypass them in whatever way possible just to get them out of the way.

It's a shame that this is blowing up for Apple as if it's all Apple's fault, but maybe some good can come from it.
I'd like Caltrain to accept mobile payments.
Does anybody get the comment about Bill not actually sitting on the notebook? I've re-read the original several times, and it still understand it as Bill sitting on the notebook.
Apart from having real buttons, I don't see how that doesn't apply to people's phones just as well. Nonetheless, I agree that the TI-89 is a great product. It's also a 16 years old piece of electronics; there's no good reason for it to be as pricy as it is. And the value proposition for the TI graphing calculators which lack CAS abilities is even far worse. The pricing does not seem to reflect a truly competitive market.
And why Casion not makes a clone of TI-84 ?? Same layout of keys, same programming language.
In any case. I never had a graphing calculator. I was happy with the typical cheap Casio calculator. The last calculator that I bought, when I was on school, is an old fx-85WA and it keeps working perfectly. For doing some quick calcs works perfectly, and if I need something more powerful, I simple open a python console or gnuplot on my computer.

I never saw that a teacher enforce us to use a particular kind of calculator, except the prohibition of using a programmable calculator for exams.
Have you looked at https://github.com/al3x/sovereign/?

Disclosure: I'm a major contributor.
I think people in finances know of even more extreme example of calculator monopoly.

My dad still uses HP-12C, a financial calculator made by HP in the 80s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-12C). He's been using the same calculator for over 20 years. Extremely reliable and practical. It's no wonder people still get them.
I've been surprised that there hasn't been a good, programmable calculator app gain wide traction.
It suddenly occurred to me that I live an intensely boring life. I'm unblackmailable, yay!
Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen
What is preventing competitors from releasing a TI-84 Plus clone, where the buttons are named and placed nearly identically, with a very similar OS?
Personally the "we go surfing every Wednesday" would be a red flag.

I'm not at your company to have fun. Beyond a paycheck, job satisfaction and personal growth would be nice, but surfing, nerf guns, pinball etc are things I'd prefer to do in my spare time with friends and family, thanks.

Sure, the annual company retreat or Christmas party are expected, but there's nothing worse than a bunch of co-workers trying to have "fun" because it's an unspoken requirement of the company culture.
Most Code Is an Ugly Mess. Here’s How to Make It Beautiful
Until recently, I also was very concerned with privacy, partly not wanting my personal data available easily to many large corporations, and also wanting to keep resources for client work very secure.

What changed is that I have retired (except for some mentoring and writing). Now, I would like the tech side of my life to be as simple as possible in order to free up my time for other activities. So for right now I am massively using Google services but I am considering, depending on how much I like the iPhone 6, just living in Apple's little walled garden. I trust both Apple and Google to generally do the right things.

I still advise friends and family to run Adblock software, and to be generally prudent privacy and security wise. But for me personally privacy issues are not as important as they once were.
All you wanted to know about types but were afraid to ask
Also, I doubt Apple would do something like Google's word gymnastics with the everchanging and murky ad profiling policy for student emails in the "free" Google Apps for Education.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...
I'm tired of the "lol lets mock NoSQL fanbois" behavior on HN. You fail to realize you are acting exactly like the people you are mocking.

Generally the use case for "scale" with NoSQL isn't that MySQL isn't technically capable. It is a cost/benefit for a specific use case.

For instance, if you are storing counters that are purely tracked via key/value ... MySQL is a terrible choice from a server-cost-to-performance-perspective.
Vinyl records are bulky, expensive to produce and fragile.

Now, what are the problems with e-mail that it's inevitable successor will fix other than, "it's old" ?
I dunno about slow. Once I learned its quirks, I became one with the stack, blasting in complex equations in RPN while my peers fiddled with brackets and mode keys.

Plus I'll admit to feeling no small amount of nerdy badassery at typing in what looked like alien gibberish to those around me while they slowly WYSIWYGed their way to an answer.
Go/Azul3D: Mac OS X Support
I'll bet you top dollar that's not what Jennifer Lawrence is thinking right now. She's not thinking "It was inevitable that someone will get my photos from iCloud". Instead, she's thinking "I should have never put my photos on iCloud in the first place".

Hence the point of this thread: don't expose more information than you need to.

Edit: just as I typed this, the top story details the perils of data theft, exactly the point I'm trying to get across here: https://www.nikcub.com/posts/notes-on-the-celebrity-data-the...
You'd want to kill yourself pretty quickly.

JSON is great as an interchange format, but there are many reasons editing it by hand is painful, lack of comments and lack of newlines in strings not being the least of them.
I never understood TI people; I used the HP 48GX from middle school through high school; by college it was usually permissible to use Matlab.

TI seemed to have good cheap multipacks for grade schools, thus getting them out there, but they were objectively inferior.
I'm sorry, I just don't follow this slippery slope argument. We have lots of examples of the government abusing their use of online information. For the haves, we have the still-minor indignities of the no-fly list and targeting certain political stripes for IRS audits. For the have-nots, it is terrorism fusion data centers, predatory civil forfeiture and, jeez, a lot of the criminal justice system. So that world does exist now.

Many of these excesses have been driven by "limiting the size of government" by defunding local governments and relying on private information brokers (license plate readers, etc), rather than passing better laws.
Microsoft's web based Office is surprisingly good.

EtherPad and EtherCalc for open source.
While I am complete appalled by the data breach and hope that similar things never happens to anyone again

I would like to propose a purely thought experiment:

The hacker reported sold the nude photos of Jennifer lawrence for a mere sum of $130 using bitcoin.

If we apply game theory here, these kind of data is very difficult to monetize. If you sell one copy of the data, it is then immediately distributed online for free. Although, nude photos of celebs are arguably very valuable.

The question is: What is the ideal path for these people to maximize profits?

I think the better alternative would have been a kick starter type model where the attacker will only release photos if reaches a funding goal (let's say $50k). The attacker might release less revealing photos to build interests in the goal funding.

I often hear about decentralized kickstarter models with bitcoin (mutlsig; or ANYONE_CAN_PAY hash type). But I always thought of them as gimmicky. This is actually a use case for it.

So going beyond, celeb photo breach, this similar model should be applied to many more scenarios. ie.

1. you have a valuable asset,

2. but it loses value immediately after the first distribution

3. so you must capture all of the value at distribution

Note:

Anyone can pay: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#term-sighash-anyoneca...
Vikram Chandra makes a lot of great points. He definitely is not a "hack first" kind of guy. I am of the opinion you build, then you re-build to be supportable, then you rebuild to be sustainable.

That doesn't always go over well, but if you keep code modular upfront it doesn't add much overhead, and gives you a good blend of Build once, or Build Fast.
I think at massive scale a lot of models break down, and I would agree sharding is the key to huge scale.

I often see "MySQL doesn't scale" posts which simply isn't true. I just wish people would stick with it longer and iron out their problems.
I was confused too, until I clicked all the links in the article and it was referring to this one: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/10/21/99102...
How to Make an Adblocker with BIND and Apache on Debian
Who else has wondered whether SIGINT types might allow things like this to run in order to bolster the perception that Tor is not traceable?

In WWII they allowed the enemy to sink whole ships to accomplish same.
My TI-83. First gaming system. First programming experience. Maybe first true love?
Yes. Google+, by default, likes to grab all pictures taken with the device camera (and most stupidly will then say they're ready to be shared - because every photo is for sharing . . . )

The worst is Google Play Services though. It's basically a way for Google to get your location data, and to generate massive global maps of WiFi networks, rather like what got them in trouble with the streetmap cars. Anyone doubting how important this is to them needs to check their reaction when Motorola wanted to use Skyhook on a device instead:
http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...
Here in Spain, in the school and high-school is forbidden using programmable calculators in exams. Even on doing the "selectividad", a pre university huge exam, is forbiden these type of calculators.
I'm very happy with my old fx-85wa. It have all the advantages of a simple programmable calculator (natural math expressions and edit the formula that you typed), but can't store programs or functions, so isn't a programmable calculator. Plus works on a small lithium battery + solar cell. I only need to change the battery one time in this last 15 years.
IMHO you'd have to distribute the data and the computation so that there is no single point to find.
Because schools require them. After that every sane person uses a computer with Mathematica/Maple/Matlab/Octave/etc.
What is the point of a proprietary, in-house, custom compiler?
WW3 RUSSIA MOVES INTO UKRAINE TO STOP KILLINGS? ALL OVER IN 2 WEEKS
You are so right on the money. We used to see hacking into celebrities' gmail inboxes, social accounts, dropbox stores - all through social engineering. We now see hacking into icloud. Next we will see hacking into gdrive, onedrive or some samsung cloud - if enough celebrities start using Android or Winphone. The pattern is the same, so is the weakest point - the actual user. Maybe it's time to educate people more instead of writing more security software.
Icloud hacking was mentioned and everyone has jumped on it. Many cell transmissions are unencrypted. MITM attacks should not be thrown out as a possibility. Malware is also a vector, including apps.
This was pretty cool. Was anyone else upset that there wasn't a full clip of them playing and showing this in use?
It's against the law?
This sheds some light on one of those things I believe, but can not prove...

I usually carry too much junk in my pockets, and when I dig around in my pocket for something it amazes me how fast I can recognize what I'm touching. I don't know why but I've thought that there is some other non-conscious system in place that, at a minimum, helps improve tactile recognition. It's kind of subtle, but it feels like my hand somehow knows what I'm searching for, and can recognize it much better than I can.

Also, along the same lines of thought, I suspect that there must be a whole lot of intelligence locked away in our bodies that isn't easily accessed consciously, but it's still there.
Essentials for Nonprofit Websites
> It holds a monopoly because mathematics teachers teach things by rote and procedure, not the underlying concepts from experience.

Really? That was never my experience.

Indeed, algebra got a lot easier once I just started memorizing it. Years later I learned that portions of our system of algebra is largely an agreed upon system for ease of communication and that other algebras also exist for working in other domains.

(Taking formal logic also helped explain things a lot! Having to prove the commutative property from a couple of basic axioms is enlightening.)

All in all, the entirety of my public school math education in the US was highly focused on concepts and theory.
Wonderful work.

Any chance of a C or C++ implementation?
This is a great example of a company building an ecosystem and catering over decades to that ecosystem to build an appealing computing platform - not for its technical merit, but rather for its community. It's analogous to the hold of Apple IIs on education in the 1980s.
Location: London

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C++, C#, R, Python, JS/jQuery, HTML, Oracle, node.js and much more

Resume: [PDF] http://goo.gl/pNIetQ

Email: cv@mikemases.com

I'm a software engineer in the consulting services sector coming up now on 4 years experience across a broad range of technologies. My role is mainly client facing so I've had the opportunity to broaden my skills beyond just development, but I feel now that I'd rather focus my skills back into in-house developing for a small exciting company rather than the large corporate clients that I usually see.

I'm interested in full-stack development, preferably in a company which is data-driven and could make use of my consumer industries data insight experience. A lot of what I've done in the past has revolved round analytics in one way or another so an opportunity to carry that on would be great!
It sounds like the TI-89 vastly improved your ability to do calculus, to the point where it would be a shock to give up that improvement in ability. I would also say sine tables vastly improved people's ability to do trigonometry, back in the day...

People will often express concern about growing dependent upon these devices, but I am in just the same way dependent upon pen and paper, dependent upon dictionaries, dependent upon Google, and a million other things. In a world where access to automated computation is so ubiquitous, what is the harm in, well, growing comfortable using it?
Article was behind a paywall, but they've been pointing these correlations for a long time, yet when they actually try to test the effect of benign pathogens (e.g. in Coronado's TRUST clinical trials) the results are disappointing. Also why don't routine vaccinations in rich countries have a similar beneficial effect?
I left my HP42S in the drawer at home and now use the Free42 simulator on iOS. It's insanely handy.

http://thomasokken.com/free42/

I know some here have mentioned the 48G, the 42S was always a bit more useful and compact for my day-to-day use.
I don't think there are that many companies with ~10^8 LOC code bases in the world, let alone for a single product[1]:

Facebook(webapp): ~310^7 LOC
Linux Kernel: ~210^7 LOC
Windows XP: ~5*10^7 LOC
My impression is that 10 million LOC codebase is relatively common... but past that the size of the organization (company or volunteers) needed becomes a major sorting criteria.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2013/04/facebook-windows/
The Excel backend of course.
Which would be CTRL-ALT-DEL backfiring in a whole new way. I really don't envy the devs trying to cover all those cases...
The Police Tool That Pervs Use to Steal Nude Pics from Apple’s iCloud
Hmm. There could be a market for a "disruptive tech" in this segment: programmable calculators that look exactly like scientific non-programmable calculators, and behave that way to someone who doesn't know some (user-configurable) keystrokes to "unlock" the hidden power. When this is invoked, it changes the meaning of certain buttons, like say stats functions or whatever).

There could be some connector on the circuit board for easy programming via your PC (say over USB). This would not be exposed unless the plastic is taken off. With that, you could conveniently cram the calculator full of useful code prior to an exam, then access it in the special mode.

Now imagine this was done as a mod kit for several popular mass-produced calculators ...
I believe that this applies to many products using digital distribution that meet the following:

1. The asset takes requires a significant amount of resources.

2. The asset will require all resources in order to distribute.

3. No further resources are required after distribution.

Music, books, art, and even software that does not require updates would fall into this category.
Call me paranoid, but my biggest concern is that things I do that are acceptable today may become illegal or persecution-worthy in the future. I recently read a story about a mother who was executed for her religious beliefs. The attackers knew she had been visiting a country with a different majority faith and used that information to single her out.

That kind of thing could never happen in the West... right? I hate to bring in Nazi Germany, but imagine how much more effective they could have been at rounding up people if they had access to Google's tracking data.

Full Disclosure: I am not actively avoiding any tracking, but I think about possible abuses a lot.
I imagine that poorly funded schools in poor neighborhoods have trouble getting students to buy these things (or buying them for students who can't). I feel like plenty of teachers would tell their students to buy a cheap graphing calculator, just so that they could teach a class where everyone actually had the device. There's definitely a market for this.
I run a small agency(currently 6) and we run monthly hack days to build something cool. The last was a dashboard that links to an ibeacon once we enter the room it says hello and says goodbye when we leave. Completely pointless but it was interesting to build and had some great side effects.

We received 6 applications for jobs that weren't advertised (5/6 were very good). But also we got a great amount of feedback from our existing clients interested in using it for their own companies!

Our next project is a drinks robot built into a globe!

As a CEO you need to care for more than the bottom line.
A big example of the intentionally murky and everchanging privacy policy confusion was in how it applied to student emails in Google Apps for Education:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...