TheEskimo

In regards to the 180 degree spin, this demonstration shows exactly the opposite of what you say. At about 1:34 (elevator in portal 2) he performs a 180 with a single swipe from left to right.

That is not true. The people who contributed the original Shunway code own the copyright to it. They are choosing to license it under Apache. You cannot change that since you do not own the copyright.

They may choose to "relicense" it under GPL if all the contributed agree.

What you suggest cannot legally be done. However, Apache is GPL compatible, so it can still be used in a GPL project, though its license will not change.

IANAL

Doubtlessly he's bemoaning the lack of support for linux.

I would also like linux support, but it still looks like an impressive suite regardless.

I don't fully understand why

It's pretty simple - Apple owns the hardware and software they're pushing updates for. Sure, they don't own the carriers, but that's not the problem.

In Google's case they neither own the hardware nor all the software because each third party phone manufacturer slaps in its own stuff and maintains its own fork of android.

Microsoft might own the software, but they don't fully own the hardware. Microsoft is a lot closer to managing it than Google though.

This isn't that Apple has more power over carriers and it isn't hard to understand - it's simply that they have more ownership of all the devices and there are far fewer types of devices (very limited set of software/hardware combinations).

If you trust distrowatch's pagehits then yes, it's significantly beating/overtaking ubuntu. http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

SpiderOak does have one problem. It has no arm build for linux (and they apparently have no plans to make one soon). If you frequently use a Raspberry Pi or linux on an arm Chromebook then you'll be out of luck on syncing your files.

I wish they'd release simple sourcecode for a headless sync client or that someone would reverse engineer it enough for that to happen. As it is, you can sshfs mount a folder synced by one of your x86 computers, but that's definitely not ideal.

Other than that complain I've enjoyed using SpiderOak and it's a great piece of software.

I personally use keepass and keepassx (the alpha compatible with keepass2.x) and sync my passwords with SpiderOak. That's worked pretty well for me, and I don't actually have to trust a website with my passwords. Even if there's an insecurity in SpiderOak, they'd only get my encrypted keepass database which they'd then have to also decrypt.

I definitely recommend keepass over lastpass.

https://github.com/clvv/fasd

I used to use z, but I've since switched to fasd. It's much like z, but also so much better. In addition to being able to do "z <part of directory>" you can do "f <part of file>". So, for example, if I've got a rails project I've worked on a lot recently I know its config.ru is high on frecency, so I'll just do "vim `f config`" to edit that file. If I want a file that's not so recent I can always do "vim `f -i config`" to pick from a list of files.

fasd is leaps and bounds above z in functionality, and I've thoroughly enjoyed using it.

Vertical space on linux? That's simply not true. Exhibit 1: The default firefox and chromium running on my linux (ubuntu, i3wm). http://i.imgur.com/paE173H.png . 6 pixels by default in favour of firefox.

The real problem though is chrome's interface really is completely inflexible. I like a thinner browser than either of those. Hence, my firefox setup: http://i.imgur.com/XAyc8Tu.png .. 17 pixels more space than chrome can be gained easily (firefox with only the extension 'pentadactyl'). And further more, since firefox's appearence is all just XUL it can be styled to be as thin or thick as I like.

So yeah, firefox you can change the ui to be vertically thin. It's simply impossible to do that with chrome.

I've always felt ghostery is the poor-man's noscript. If he wants to know about all external calls (which he presumably does) then noscript will actually do that while ghostery will let 'good' ones by untouched.

I believe that there is an even more important practical issue.

What if someone manages to embed something very much like the EICER string[0] in it? How many people do you think would use the bitcoin client on windows if their AV automatically deleted the blockchain as it downloaded in a misguided attempt to protect them?

Of course, first we have to know if this is possible at all. Does anyone know if there's either a) 20 bytes with a very high AV detection rate or b) some way to embed more than 20 bytes in a row in the block chain?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

This is a bad idea. I believe that hn actually will weight every comment you make based on your total karma to a degree. I've certainly heard people make anecdotal claims that if they have a lot of karma their comment, even if not heavily upvoted, appears near the top frequently.

This algorithm makes sense. Since upvotes are supposed to mean something like "I want to see more comments of this type and quality", it is giving the majority what they want to promote people who typically make such contributions.

As soon as you try to value an upvote as something different (here as an impromptu poll) you damage the entire system. What if I would dream of this but don't want to see more comments like yours since it's effectively spam? What if I like the idea and want to upvote it for visibility but would 'never dream' of this somewhat specialized idea?

The point I'm trying to make is that this is a bad idea without even going into how incredibly inaccurate such a poll is. This comment will not give any useful data, actively "abuses" hn's value system by asking for upvotes, and doesn't breed meaningful or intelligent discussion. Good for you I can't downvote yet :-). (notice how I added a smiley so that it would seem childish but friendly? Excellent tactic!)

If you want to do a poll I believe the polling option google docs provides will be much better suited (if perhaps slightly tainted by evil).

Well, the "Featured Systems" tab conveniently lists the GPU. It happens to be a GeForce GTX 645 on the cheap end and a GTX 660 on the high end. A 660 costs roughly $200. In addition, if your 'scientific computing' includes hashing or any of a number of other things, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an AMD card.

Overall, it's slightly overpriced. In addition, OEM hardware is invariably uncustomizable (no extra PCI-E slots, lowest end power supply possible). If you wanted to do scientific computing then there would be much more efficient options. This is no better an option (and probably worse) than other run of the mill OEM hardware. I especially like how your comment began with "I don't know anything about <related topic>. But...".

This is windows 7. Notice that neither of them are maximized. The behavior you talk about only occurs when you maximize the window, not when it is "half-maximized" as shown.

Chrome's UI is also completely and totally inflexible. As you can see in this screenshot, http://i.imgur.com/D8rMRBa.png , my firefox's UI takes up less space and is only two rows. Chrome has three rows (the close/max/min buttons, tabs, and navigation). There is no way on windows to reduce that top height. Firefox is flexible enough that you can trivially do what I have with only some simple css. The defaults for firefox are roughly as minimalistic as chrome too. Also, on my linux box my firefox is thinned down even more, while chrome just looks horribly out of place since you can't alter its appearance to closer match the native environment.

I prefer firefox for quite a few reasons, but since you bring up the UI, that's the only one I'll mention here.

The article's title is misleading. I read the linked study (pdf and prweb summary of results) and found nothing to support that they are the "Most Trusted Internet Company"... In fact, Amazon, eBay, WebMD, and Microsoft are all above it on the list. All of those I'd consider to be "Internet companies". If you alter it, as Mozilla did in the paragraph below, to read "Internet & Social Media" then it's right according to the linked pdf, but that's hardly the same thing as the title.

I do trust Mozilla far more than the other companies that made this list, but I can't help but feel their title is intentionally misleading.

I do find it odd that Mozilla didn't end up higher of course. Out of the listed entities I don't think any of the others are non-profit (nor have something like the Mozilla Manifesto as a guiding principal), and if any are I doubt that they understand crypto anywhere near as well as Mozilla. I trust Mozilla because they not only have the desire to keep me safe, but also have the technical know-how.

They also give you +1GB per referral which is quite big. It's a little unethical, but you could invite yourself a couple times to double the storage space. Or get actual referrals.

I do hope this is a joke. "some fancy acronym like AES"... I can't tell if this is a failed attempt to be funny through saying something so ridiculously stupid or if you're serious. There are lots of acronyms that are BS, but AES isn't one of them. It's mathematically backed and has been thoroughly tested to be strong.

Dropbox being a YC company means absolutely zero other than that YC liked their idea and supported them. That doesn't give me any assurance that they won't make a mistake or that an employee won't sell my data.

In fact, Dropbox, despite being a YC company, already slipped up majorly once to the point that every account was completely passwordless. You could just type in random emails at the web login and view some stranger's files. Story here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-p...

On the other hand, AES has yet to slip up. My AES encrypted data will take a significant fraction of the life of the universe to crack and, YC or no, a single programmer error won't break it.

Use SpiderOak[0] then. They assure strong zero-knowledge privacy and, while the client isn't technically open source, much of it is completely unobfuscated python. I definitely trust SpiderOak with my data. It also has more features than Dropbox or Drive... You can set syncs as between a subset of all devices, create an arbitrary number of syncs, and create some backups which aren't syncs too. It's quite nice.

Another service which is open source is Tarsnap[1]. It doesn't do syncing or have a free tier, but it's definitely trustable online storage.

In both of these cases the encryption keys are not on the servers.

An additional provider which claims to offer cloud storage/backup with zero-knowledge is Crashplan[3]. I wouldn't trust them as much as either of the previous options, but I still think they're telling the truth. I note it partly because I really like their approach. You can a) let them keep the key and thus you can still reset your password etc, b) let them keep the key so you don't have to transfer it manually to all crashplan-using computers, but have it encrypted on their end with a password only you know (can't be reset), or c) provide your own key which they claim they'll never know. These three tiers make sense and at each one you sacrifice some usability (such as the web-interface being unusable at (c) I think) in exchange for security.

So yeah, dropbox and google drive are both obviously able to look at your data, but that doesn't preclude using other cloud storage providers. There's many that are trustworthy and have the code to prove it. In the case of Mega, I'd trust them less than the typical one. They're big enough that the government will notice them... they'll need to make it usable (allow password resets etc), it looks like you upload unencrypted data and then they encrypt it server-side (edit: turns out it's client side javascript encryption. Downside there is it'll probably be a bit slow)... All of these are problems. If it's not sent already encrypted with a key they've never touched then the government could court-order them to alter the software to store unencrypted copies or to keep encryption keys. Since they're the one giving you the key they obviously know it at some point, however briefly, and they are thus vulnerable. Forcing users to generate and supply keys just isn't user-friendly on a web-only application. The only way you can make that work, as SpiderOak did, is have the user download an application which seamlessly does all the crypto work.

[0] https://spideroak.com/ [1]: https://www.tarsnap.com/ [2]: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/articles/encryption_ke...

Not at all. This offers a completely different solution than java. With java, you write once and run on everything. This lets you write C# on OS X, but it won't compile and run on Windows or Linux. Windows software can't be as easily ported to OS X either, the entire GUI, at the least, will have to be rewritten.

I would argue that Python would make more sense as a java-killer. It has the write once, run everywhere thing down much better (though still not good enough) than this.

Java is not going anywhere, sadly, and the linked product does not offer a compelling reason to believe that it will kill anything. All I see happening is that people who use mono now will potentially switch to this; honestly this isn't really ground breaking.

Honestly, bubble sort isn't that bad.

Couple years ago I had a fairly simple program which collected some data into a linked list and displayed it at the end. It took about 2 seconds to load and process the data from disk. I realized it might be neat to optionally sort the output. Since I didn't feel like doing serious work, I just added a bubble sort to my linked list which took a comparison function and then bubble-sorted by pointer swapping.

Guess what time it added? less than a 10th of a second. Completely negligible. It saved me a few hours (as writing bubble sort for a linked list takes maybe 5 minutes and has no chance of complicated bugs) and I doubt anyone will ever notice any slowdown.

So what's the lesson? Little performance tweaks hardly matter in the average program nowadays because everything's disk or network bound (IO bound). For the average program it's not worth writing more complex code that will be quicker (once you fix the hard-to-see bugs) until you actually know the slowness is an issue.

>MU was the hub of piracy on the net

I'd like a source for that. I believe TPB is and was in that position. I also believe that rapidshare and all those other sites had a similar amount of pirated content. In general you'd have a mirror of a given file across 3 or so sites which would indicate MU wasn't that far different from those commonly used as mirrors.

>statistical sample of 10,000 random accounts, and correlate ... pirated content

Why? That shows that people downloaded pirated content (which makes the downloaders guilty, not MU). I don't see how that makes MU guilty.

>Anyone with access to the Apache or nginx access logs and the hosted files could do that in their sleep.

uhhhhhh no. Not at all. How the heck to you figure out if a file is actually legal or not? How do you tell if a downloader of a file legitimately owned that file or not? An artist once distributed his album to me via MU after I paid (I wanted it in a different format than was avaliable via automatic download). I was a legal downloader, but if I gave the link to my friend he/she would have downloaded it illegally. To do such a thing they would have to first catagorize all the content, determine the copyright holder, ask the holder if it was a legal download, wait on the copyright holder to look through his/her probably nonexistant logs, and so on. This is not easy.

> idolize this man who's entire history for the last two decades revolves around criminal activities and lawsuits.

His past doesn't matter in this regard. I don't actually see how any of what you posted matters. Sure, there's piracy on MU. That doesn't mean it was illegal since they apparently obeyed the DMCA.

>It's not something that was going to be ignored

Indeed, it looks like the US government isn't ignoring it even though it was likely legal and are using underhanded methods in order to destroy the business, probably due to the lobbying money from the entertainment industry. If the government not following the law to persecute someone who's not breaking the law, and isn't even a citizan of the united states, doesn't make you sick to your stomach then I'm not sure what our government could do to do such a thing.

>If apple not patenting things, someone other does...

No, not at all. Patents are only granted if there's no prior art and as such if apple uses anything (such as slide to unlock) in one of their devices without patenting it that also removes the possibility for anyone else to patent it.

>If Samsung or Google would lead the mobile Race...

There are already more android devices than iOS devices. Google also leads in various other internet spaces and isn't nearly as aggressive patent-wise as Apple.

You're right that patent reform is the real solution, but I don't think it's us who "dont [sic] get the reality of the whole patent thing" but you.

You are incorrect. It does not bypass adblock on firefox. Yes, the ad shows, but that's because it does not trigger any of firefox's blocking rules (assuming Fanboy's list. I didn't check the others). He triggers chrome's by the element of name="google_ads_try". Firefox does not block elements of that name. Firefox's much more powerful plugin architecture allows Adblock Plus on firefox to actually prevent ads from loading; it doesn't insert css to hide them. As such, javascript to try and prevent css injection does absolutely nothing against adblock plus.

As a proof of concept, visit this site (it's his modified to hit adblock plus's Fanboy's List by adding ?bannerid=100 to the end) http://pastehtml.com/view/bstgyxtln.html . Turn on and off adblock and notice how, even though I left his anti-adblocking code in, it's helpless to stop firefox actually blocking it.

That is not at all the question. The point of patents is supposedly to protect inventors and innovators. There is no question that it will (short term at least) hurt consumers; a limited monopoly means a higher price and fewer competing products (if any).

People don't argue that patents are good for consumers because they aren't. People argue about if they're good for inventors and technical progress; if inventors will only innovate and share the results with the monetary benefit provided by a patent.

It's a little more in depth than the shop lifting analogy.

I like to use the following: "A person tells the government that they saw a TV in the local pawn shop which is really theirs. They never asked the pawn shop owner for it back and they have no reason to suspect the pawn shop owner knows it is stolen. The government will then shut down the pawn shop without even talking to the owner first or having significant proof that the item was really stolen. Every phone book will be required to remove the pawn shop's phone number from it and maps will not be allowed to show the pawn shop. The pawn shop can then attempt to get their store back from the government but if it turns out that the item really was stolen then the government will not return it." In the analogy the pawn shop is a website, the owner of the item is the copyright holder, the item is copyrighted content, and the removal of the phone number and map info is dns-delisting and search-engine de-indexing.

I think the above analogy holds up fairly well and clearly demonstrates the ridiculous measures SOPA goes to. It's also much more easily understandable by non-tech-savvy people. Please tell me if it is not accurate in some way or is unclear.

Sorry, if you read the page linked you'd see that that is not the case. It is open to SELECT, UPDATE, and INSERT. if it were SELECT only that would be read-only.

As it is, that's just stupid as any user can wantonly edit anything. I could trivially edit every level's author to be myself or do intensive operations which result in a DOS.

The only smart way to give clients access to a database is through some sort of frontend entirely under your control which prevents them from having the user/pass and sanitizes the queries.

Edit: Whoops, while I typed this multiple other people did the same. Sorry for the redundancy.

Ah, you are technically incorrect in saying there are an infinite number of "nicetry"+i hashes. There are an infinite number of "nicetry"+i passwords, but eventually there will be collisions as the hash set stays a constant size and the password set grows without bound. "Infinite" isn't a term to throw around too lightly.

It's unlikely they stored plaintext passwords. That doesn't mean that the attacker couldn't crack the hash.

More importantly, if the hacker modified the ssh binary then they could make it retransmit passwords before hashing them. Once the attacker has such a high level of access to the system it doesn't matter if the system has otherwise sound security; that security can simply be removed or altered.

I think the announcement is made as it is because it's far safer to assume the worst than the most likely or best. Even if your keys and passwords aren't compromised it doesn't hurt to change them.

There are many valid reasons. For one, Apple computers are overpriced. The Air is a good deal and the MacBooks themselves aren't too overpriced, but the actual Mac computers are extraordinarily overpriced. They also offer hardware beyond what most users need. A lesser quality computer can browse the web just as well and can do it for a thousand fewer dollars. Price is just one minor point though.

Windows still has dominant market share and, as such, is still supported far better by developers. More programs come out for windows than for mac by a long shot. The consumers are also familiar with windows which further increases the chance of them not buying a mac.

Anyways, the point of this comment is to refute your last statement. I'll first say that "purchase a .. iPad for their next computer." is completely ridiculous. A tablet cannot fill the needs of a user yet. I'll focus on why many consumers would not want to purchase a Mac. 1. Software support. A large amount of software is available only for windows. 1b. Video games 2. .Net developer/other developer. Many software developers will work on windows because that's their target platform due to the market share. 3. Familiarity. That's a big one. People are familiar with windows and so they stick with it. 4. Price. Because pcs are sold by various venders there are many pricepoints. Apple doesn't allow that. 5. Business relying on legacy software for windows.

Do I really need to name more? "I cannot even think of a reason" .. You really couldn't think of any of the above reasons or one of the several more? Macs are great and all, but they aren't the answer to everything. They still have many issues. Apple's tight grip leads to higher quality but higher prices, reduced variety, and reduced content. For now, a windows machine can do almost anything an apple computer can do at less cost. The consumer also has far more choices. A mac can only do a portion of what a pc could do; if the user installs linux than the mac has almost no features left that the pc is incapable of. Perhaps you'll harp on hardware quality, but it's perfectly possible to get machines of similar or better quality to any mac aside from the macbook air.