skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are ever going to commit a crime, don't use a computer. If you do, you will get it caught. It's that simple.

If someone has a warrant to seize your computer, and you encrypt it's contents, you can be compelled to remove the encryption. If you don't, then you have committed obstruction of justice, and you are going to go to jail anyways.

Strong encryption will protect against the case where someone has your computer, but not you. However, if they have both you and your computer, its not going to protect you.

Also, are you sure that the Windows 7 hidden partition is used for the Volume Shadow Copy Service? My understanding is that it's only used for storing system files, not user documents.

Your user documents (and their backups) should be stored on the system volume (not the hidden partition), and hence should be covered by your encryption software.
The part of my code soul that dealt with search requirements goes out to you.
As I've come to understand it --- and the term is used very often in the professional services world --- lifestyle businesses make the founders comfortably wealthy over the long run, but do little else. Most consultancies with employees do much more than $1MM/yr.

So, no, "lifestyle company" definitely doesn't mean "poor".
"Quantitative Valuation Of A Human Life (From A Guy Who Stinks At Math)"
If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like "it's inappropriate," while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations. -- (also from a Paul Graham's essay)
Cool. Prineville is kind of "out in the boonies", as they say, though. It was previously known as the HQ of Les "free beef" Schwab tires. We stayed the night there when we took my wife's (Italian) parents on a tour of Oregon ( http://padovachronicles.welton.it/2007/08/31/the-wild-west ). Almost makes me a bit nostalgic for 'home'.
I really wish more people would see things your way! If we all thought that selling 15% or more of your annual income was bad, imagine what we'd think of having it taken without our permission!

(Also, is there any price at which you'd call that a fair deal? What if I sold that 15% for twice its net present value? I could do less work, and still have more money! I always thought the problem with slavery was the involuntary servitude thing; knowing that slavery is morally equivalent to venture capital certainly changes things.)
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What does Western Europe have that makes it instantly capable of supporting any random-ass system? It's not like Europe's some magical land of milk and honey.

The fact that socialism works in Europe is because socialism is a potent economic system.
Thanks! I thought I checked that page...
An acid test for presentations like this: does it ignore the elephant in the room? The real breakdown is, "go for VC, or actually start a company?"

The overwhelming majority of people who "go out for VC" will never get it, no matter how good their idea, no matter how good their technical execution. The people who execute well enough as a business to get funded without a track record are, it seems to me, already committing to bootstrapping their company.
Yes, I too found it a bit irritating in how it was initially framed. The first page appears as mostly an unsubstantiated rant, but if you can get past the first page, she delves into the specifics. Not being an American but a Canadian, more broadly I worry that noise like this gets in the way of things like critical thinking, logic and reason - the antithesis of moves to enforce political correctness as this may or may not prove to be an example of. I am, however, interested in learning more.
Why are you deliberately choosing a market where you will make low margins?
I'm pretty sure Twisted's deferreds serve the same purpose.
Owning Your Tweets, Part 3: Make Way for Advertising
Linkedin Plaform Is Open For Business
imo "lifestyle business" is a silly label used in vc circles (to describe people who don't want their money)

A venture-funded business supports VC lifestyles as well as founder lifestyles, while a bootstrapped startup doesn't impact vc lifestyles (unless it competes with a vc-funded business).

vc-funding and bootstrapping are both legitimate options, but to describe the latter as a "lifestyle business" and the former as something else is absurd.
The real lesson here is the power of asking the experts. Over the years there are countless times when I've replaced a huge or messy work-around with a tiny fix someone on IRC or a mailing list suggested.

Googling is great, but it only helps when you know what you're looking for. Telling expert humans what you're trying to achieve is far more useful.
Freakonomics: Fixing Poverty
Perhaps resistance to the Green movement be a combination of

1. Plans for change are coopted by the government as a means of consolidating political power.

2. Plans for change are coopted by business as a means of rent seeking.

3. So many of the alternatives that are advocated are really no help at all (e.g., pollution due to production of the high-tech materials)

4. Recommendations are obviously stupid (e.g., contra the green movement, CF bulbs do not save energy during heating season, so are net polluters)

5. "Green" has become a meaningless buzzword, rather than indicating that anything of moment is being accomplished.

When people see these things happening, is it any wonder they become jaded?
To be fair, unless someone goes and posts the URL to Hacker News or something, the only way you'd get to this post is by reading "What You Can't Say" and reading the links at the bottom. His top-level essays do have the date on them.
One character. One friggin’ “J”. 8 hours. I hope no one is keeping track of “lines of code per hour”.

Sounds like he / you acquired some essential domain knowledge in those eight hours. Your code is more efficient, and you understand the problem space. That is what programming is about, not how many lines of code you write.

(When working on a large existing code-base, my goal is to remove lines of code from the project. Writing code means you are writing bugs. Removing code means you are removing bugs :)
A little off-topic, but I was under the impression that using the ffmpeg commercially was problematic, did you find you had to address that issue at all?
So when should you make [...] decisions? When you have the most information, when you're at your smartest: as late as possible.

Within software architecture, I've heard this called "late binding", also the Open Future Principle: "The best way to implement the future is to avoid having to predict it" [1].

1. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2006001a_colaswp.pdf
Prejudice against online degrees needs to shrivel up and die
I love posts like this, but I think the authors would benefit from a close read of the Microsoft Detours paper, which runtime patchers have been cribbing from for the past 5 years or so.

The general Detours approach:

* Disassemble the first N bytes of a target location

* Scoop N bytes worth of opcodes out of the target, and re-host them somewhere heap-allocated

* Replace the N bytes with an absolute jump to a heap-allocated trampoline

* Bounce to your code

* Execute the scooped-up N bytes worth of opcodes

* Jump back to the target

This approach (what the post calls "caller-side trampolines") works well when your targets are function prologues, and less well when it's an arbitrary bblock.

We have an implementation in pure Ruby, complete with a pure-Ruby ia32 assembler (which is one of the most useful little pieces of code I've written) at Timur's Ragweed repository --- google "Ruby ragweed github".
Related: http://raisethehammer.org/article/877/
Replace "memory profiler" with any other piece of runtime manipulation, and the point is just as valid with Smalltalk. It is not, in fact, "turtles all the way down"; eventually you hit the ABI, and that's what this article is talking about.
See also: http://rentzsch.com/mach_override

It used to be used quite comprehensively to add non-Apple-sanctioned functionality to Mac OS X. Hopefully it isn't used much these days.
It is unfortunate that none of the JS VMs have support for concurrency. Event driven programming can get messy (lots of state machines).
Telling expert humans what you're trying to achieve

This is critical. All sorts of "dumb questions" turn out to have been created by faulty assumptions or bad solutions to a larger problem. Often it's like traveling to the top of a mountain to boil water instead of fixing the broken stove. When asking for help, users should always ask the big picture question ("I need help setting up a server to do X, I'm getting error message Y when doing Z" rather than just the specific problem "I'm getting error message Y when doing Z").
What is Pivot? Cool-sounding Microsoft Research project.
ffmpeg is LGPL; it is used by hundreds of commercial applications around the world. For that matter, it has no commercial competitors for many of its use-cases.

Even On2, a competing encoder company, includes instructions with its encoder on how to set up mplayer (which uses ffmpeg) for decoding input videos.
In a dev/test environment, do whatever works best and fastest. If you have the skillset and toolset to jump right to the ABI to solve a problem, it's pretty silly to stay in the confines of MRI just out of orthodoxy.
I agree that the "hard vs. soft delete" debate is pointless. It seems the article sets up a false dilemma. The interesting thing is how to deal with archive data. There are a few patterns, but the one presented many times in this article is the "log it" pattern (if it has an official name, please let me know). Basically, this transforms all the data into a series of transactions, each of which is stored. It can occur at the database level (log each changing query, e.g. insert, updated, delete). At the data level (columns for is-filled, is-backordered, and so on, the soft delete in the article). At the application level (each transaction is in a different row, what it means is away from the data itself). Really it comes down to how often the data will need to be accessed, and how dynamically it needs to be queried.

In the modern age of hadoop clusters everywhere, and clouds being cheap, it may actually be best to keep the database as a maintainer of current state, and the transaction log as the historian (alternative 1 above), shipping off the logs for data-mining on the cluster at the analyst's leisure. The part I find amusing is: depending on which angle you come from, this could be a hard or soft delete :).
I think you're right that many of the companies listed are lifestyle businesses. For example, SquareSpace and Harvest are not interested, and never will be interested, in taking money. However, it's best to weigh every option you're presented with. I'll leave it at that. ;)
AppendTo aims to commercialize jQuery library
Wow, this is great. This is exactly the sort of language people insisting on C for systems programming need. It is basically the same language, but with a few bounds checks inserted by the compiler that eliminate almost all problems with C.

I hope this gains some traction amongst the large open-source C applications. (Things like emacs, xmms2, etc.)
Poll: Do you have time to work on a small project?
I'm interested in how people here fill their time, and how many might have time for a small side project. We occasionally get people asking for collaborators, co-founders, partners, whatever, and I was wondering how likely it is that these requests might succeed.

Missing options considered ...
My time is 100% taken with day job and projects
My time is 90% taken with stuff, and I treasure the remaining 10%
My time is mostly taken with stuff, but I'd be interested in a small side project.
I've got time to spend on something that interests me, but I'm not actively looking.
I've got time to spend, and I'm actively looking for a project that interests me.
I've got time to spend - call me!
That's a great point Spencer. However, I think companies that want to scale faster will need to take investment. Why wait a year to get enough cash in the bank to hire more people when you can do it now? Opportunity costs are tremendous.
+1 for OSSEC. It is my preferred one for sure. I use that to monitor my Apache logs, Wordpress, SSH and a few more.
I had the pleasure once of debugging an issue in C# that boiled down to the difference between a property "Percent" which was represented as e.g. 45.6, and a field "percent" which was measured as a fraction, e.g. 0.456. After correcting a reference to the field to be a reference to the property, I was proud to claim that my fix was a fix of a single bit - the difference between ASCII 'P' and ASCII 'p'.

Can't get smaller than that!
I had a similar case; a regression that lasted 3 weeks and took half a day of grovelling through code to fix... and turned out to be two one-character typos in a #define name:

http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=commitdiff;h=2389de25f...
We get around having to "clean up" hard deleted in VertexDB using garbage collection.

http://github.com/stevedekorte/vertexdb

For archival, we append "events" to a node.
How To Create a Conference Call in 3 Lines of Code
Please. This is not a "smoking gun." It's another comment that looks bad to the layman, but may well be legitimate science. I don't know because I'm not a climate scientist. And you don't know because you're not a climate scientist.
All I can say is that 8/10 are losers is highly improbable. Given no other information, if you enter a trade there is a 50/50 chance that the next tick is going to be up or down. But notice I said given no other information, there is much more information from the behavior of the charts. If you are a small player the charts will help you be right more than 50% of the time. The rest is how your algorithms and trading methodology take advantage of the information.
But instead, iPhone developers are eagerly bending over begging Apple for more because of their myopic obsession with bad APIs, the twin geekgasms of both objecty stuff and C, bloated SDKs, impossible layout mechanisms, and all the rest of the archaic nonsense we’re going to have to rid the mobile Web of in the next few years.

It's pretty clear he's never developed with Objective-C, Cocoa/UIKit, etc. if he's calling it a bloated and bad API. UIKit in particular is fresh, clean, and very nice overall, IMO. (I spent years in Javascript/HTML/CSS, moved to the iPhone for awhile and worked on some major projects, and recently started developing an app on Cocoa for OSX - which is a lot more crusty than the iPhone.)

I also find it somewhat ironic that he talks about "impossible layout mechanisms" whereas almost every time I've been involved with a webapp I've hit upon some tricky layout requirement that is a pain in the ass because of CSS' builtin assumptions.

This part reads like satire...
The trick is it doesn't ship until the offer is over check the user feed back page.. although it says that it ships in 24 hours
Is that really suspect? One comment (in two places) saying not to use some function beyond 1960 because it will give divergent results?

The author of the post says something like, "see, these programmer people leave comments in code to remind themselves later of what they really mean the code does. Armed with this knowledge, we can read some comments and find out what's really going on!"

No, dude, I'm a programmer and you can't just take random chunks of comments from code and authoritatively state what you think they mean.

It's also hard to take seriously a blog plastered with ads for $49 "Make-your-own-free-energy"-kits. The comments are a freak show of conspiracy theorists.
We are located in Bend–about 35 miles from Prineville.

If the data center there means local jobs for central Oregon, I hope they choose the location. Unemployment is bad here.
That's nothing compared to the comments that show up in "HARRY_READ_ME.txt": http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=118625&#...
I think starting a small side project with 'random people on the internet' is a way better idea than 'searching for a cofounder on the internet', as it's likelier to actually produce something interesting and really give you an idea about the person who you're working with.
Haha. Don't criticize the scientists cause "they are so much smarter than us!!"
' while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations' - one or all of which might be correct?
It's usually pretty trivial to create an event bus where you can publish and subscribe to events.
Another classic about how to argue:
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
You probably get 80% of the value of all these posts with just two bits of pricing advice:

* Don't charge cost-based prices; what you pay to build something has nothing whatsoever at all to do with your price. All arguments of the form "that's just a (wiki|blog|bug tracker|reddit clone) with a * attached" are themselves a subtle form of cost-based pricing.

* Charge more.

I liked the book though.
I thought the same thing until I saw this: http://www.notableapp.com/plans

To me at least, that seems waaaay overpriced for what the service offers -- but I admit I have not investigated it very thoroughly.
For Search, Murdoch Looks to a Deal With Microsoft
New Worm Attacks iPhones, Targets Mobile Banking
"In today's increasingly competitive world, we find only short gymnasts in the top tier."

That is less true now than it was 10 years ago. Nastia Liukin and Svetlana Khorkina are both of above-average height (5'4" and 5'5", respectively), as is Sandra Izbasa (5'5"), the reigning Olympic gold medalist on floor. You still see some very short gymnasts (eg. Shawn Johnson or the Chinese), but tall women can actually be competitive now.
Data Loss Could Be the End of Your Business
The Is No Do, Only Try
You know, 20 years ago, the place of "climate scientists" in the scientific hierarchy was (justifiably) about the same as the placement of dentists in the medical hierarchy.

The physics behind global warming makes a lot of sense. The warming models aren't pure physics, however, and require feedback effects. Now, are the models right about 6 degrees of warming in the next century? I don't have a clue because the historical climate reconstructions are so shitily done. I have no idea if the temperature anomaly over the last 30 years exceeds historical bounds for standard deviation. I have no idea what the magnitude of the Medieval Warm Period was.

This is an important question. A trillion dollar question. We need to throw the hopped-up climate scientists out, fools who were lucky to be in the field when it became important, and get some real intelligence working on this problem. Cause this ain't it.
LinkedIn Platform launch
It can take a few years (or more) to figure out what your ultimate end goal is. The first few years could simply be about acquiring customers in your market. You can then use those newly acquired customers to explore different business opportunities. Those new business opportunities could require new capital.
You wouldn't happen to know this crazy dude named Ken Ludwig, would you? Because he told me the exact same story, except it involved a lot more rambling.
As a corollary: when providing help, always demand the big picture. Frequently you will catch flak for this, in the form of "I am the expert in X, I know what I'm doing just fix the miniscule thing", but it is always great to see the look on someone's face when you say "Oh, dept. Y already does that and makes the result available at foo, it should save you a few hours of work".
Minnovating instead of innovating
3) An appstore app will (or at least could) continue to work even when I don't have network connectivity. A Web app won't.
Scala Basics - Byte-code Fancypants
TDD is not about testing
The funny thing about Sokal is not so much that he (supposedly) slipped a bogus paper past the editors, but rather in how so many people react to the event and take it as proof positive that the entire field is bogus or even that publishing that paper was a mistake of the editors.

The editors, by publishing the piece, were not saying "Aha! Brilliant reasoning in this text!" but rather "People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."

What didn't happen after Sokal's paper was published? Years of earnest, tortured academic work by others commenting on it as if it were serious on its face.

The Wikipedia article on it gives some balance.

-t
It depends on how the drawings are used. You can easily squeeze ten seconds of footage out of three finished cels, if it's a wide pan over a couple characters talking in the distance -- which is both efficient and cinematic. And this type of shot is common in anime for precisely this reason.

Gainax is one of the past masters/worst offenders in this regard, including: a sequence near the end of Evangelion where they just shot the back of a bunch of old cels; a off-screen sex scene near the end of Evangelion where a shot of only the background plate is held for at least a minute; back-to-back clip shows in Kare Kano, where they show cel counts for each prior show to pad for time -- one episode had 2300 cels (that's total cels, not just keys).
Great that they are moving to a more open approach finally allowing _all_ developers access to their API.

However it's not as good as it seems:

1. There is no support for contact details like phone-number, email etc.

2. The API is read-only, and that sort of beats the purpose of this API.

(At least judging from the limited documentation available at the moment.)
You know you can just bump allowed file descriptors up with ulimit, right?
technically, we are a startup, merging some small companies into one, website is under development
This has been debunked over and over already. The predictions based on the tree ring data in question are known to have diverged from actual, measured temperatures from 1960 onward. They're known to be fairly accurate prior to 1960, to the best of our knowledge. This is a scientific thing - if you can prove that tree rings were affected enough by non-temperature factors prior to 1960 to lead to inaccurate temperature predictions, you'd be making a huge contribution to the field of dendrochronology.
Time Mgmt: Postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, etc. & finishes by 5:30pm
> It's my opinion that JS is the new lingua franca of programming, and it's about time we replaced C/Java.

Steve Yegge beat you to it:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht...
I just fixed a "should be || was &&" logic error that manifested itself fairly mysteriously in a one-dimensional partitioning data structure I had made(meant for indexing things like collision rectangles that have a "canonical value" and a "represented value" which need to be synchronized).

When it removed elements, it was matching both the represented value(an integer) and the node(an object reference). Using && meant that it removed too greedily. Because updates always went "remove then add," this error went undetected until I hit the case where two or more objects shared an identical reprval. Then it removed all of the shared objects, leaving only one behind when I went to query the partition. After going through "Does my query function work right, does my list implementation work right, " I finally narrowed it down to the add/delete functions.
I am Feeling Lucky – 30+ Funny Tricks