skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to play Devil's Advocate, real total surveillance might not be bad. If you were hooked into a system that actually monitored all minds in real time and connected you directly to whatever other mind you wanted to reach out to with no misunderstanding, you'd have a hive mind that was no longer human but might be capable of more complicated thoughts.

It's been done plenty of times in science fiction, but now we're getting to the point where we can actually transmit some information directly from mind to mind. I think there's room for voluntary connectivity without being invasive. There should always be a way to have total privacy whenever it's desired, and that should be true for the near future without question.

But there's a chance that at some point, people won't even want it anymore. If it happens voluntarily as people become more comfortable with each other, I'm not sure if it will even be bad. Forced is no good of course, and using surveillance to impose oligarchical control is terrible, but if we move gradually, I don't think anyone can really predict how it might turn out.
Ask HN: How valuable is VBA in your skillset
I am currently working as an Electrical engineer and I have been asked to develop a Microsoft Access based application which in the long run will save us a lot of hours by automating the work. So I will be relying mostly on VBA for Access and Excel to complete the task.

I have the following questions
1. Is VBA a useful skill in the long run? Or should I try my hand at .NET applications. I have some experience with programming so I am making decent progress.

2. I have been thinking of freelancing for a while and was wondering if VBA skills are valued in the market?

3. If Not, then what should I be learning? I want to do a little of side business outside of work and thought this might be a way.

Let me know your thoughts. Thanks
The real lesson is that you should be using modular frameworks, not monolithic ones.
Reminds me of Qwikster. The Twitter handle was already taken, and wasn't the avatar Elmo with a cigarette in his mouth?

Knowing Google the decision was probably about as hasty as Qwikster was.

It's not that holding company names aren't important. Kraft realized otherwise. They certainly thought about it before they picked Mondelez.
Haskell is not the Next Important Thing, but rather the ideas that it reifies. When Haskell is yesterday's news, the successful ideas will remain, but in the next generation language. That said, learning Haskell will put you in front of these big ideas, and I believe will make you valuable. That said, keep an eye on Idris, and dependent types.
front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043152
Permission/forgiveness for what?
http://www.cisco.com/web/offers/lp/2014-annual-security-repo...

"91% of web exploits are targeting Java"
Intel tried to trademark their processor model number (80386, 80486) to prevent AMD from using them. The trademark was denied and they switched to using names (Pentium instead of 80586) since then
Nope. I mean desktop linux.

So you're saying that 2015 is finally the year of Linux on the desktop? That prediction has been made before. That prediction has never come true, and never will. IMO.
ChaCha20 is slower than RC4 in my testing (176MB/s vs 213MB/s). Since I have AESNI and PCMLMUL, aes128-gcm is the fastest-- 430MB/s.

$ for c in $(ssh -Q cipher); do echo $c; dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=8K | ssh -o Compression=no -c $c localhost dd of=/dev/null 2>/dev/null; done
MP4 usually means MPEG-4 Part 2 or MPEG-4 Visual (ISO 14496-2). That's the codec that DivX and XviD implemented.
> There will be dozens of frameworks for ES6/7

Sure, but you don't have to have all your application logic written using a framework-specific class factory, linked through a framework-specific module system. That means code will be more portable.

> Not sure why you're talking about material design, and why it matters when it's some vague UX spec produced by Google.

It's a very precise UI specification, so theoretically a single implementation would be enough. I am just saying that there is no universally compatible Web Component package format in wide use yet.
There is a massive cultural difference between Japan and China, however.

Much of Japan's industrial transformation came after massive US post WWII investment.

(Note: same happened in Germany as well).
On the matter of microaggressions I think the author doesn't use good examples for them.

For example, telling someone they speak good English in a situation where you're both native speakers is a microaggression. Asking where they're from or where they grew up isn't a microaggression.

Another good example of a microaggression would be to ask someone if their hair is natural (as I've seen commonly asked of African American women). Or if you're transgender (like myself) the common microaggression is to ask for one's "real" name (as if the legally designated name isn't sufficient).

It's not much to ask to figure out what is and isn't a microaggression, really. I hate the word since it doesn't best describe the behavior but the nature of it is very real.
What the internet has done is remove scarcity from the equation (to a large degree). Prior to the internet, when all we had was magazines and newspapers, there was actual value in providing what you and the previous poster consider "low quality" journalism. If some of the articles in a tech magazine were little more than slightly reworded press releases, those articles still had value to me because I had no other way (i.e., no medium) to ever see a press release. Similarly, when my local city newspaper published AP articles, that had value because that newspaper was the only place I could read those articles.

Now, however, press releases are published verbatim on countless sites, show up in google searches, etc., and AP articles are published on hundreds of sites, plus Google News, and so when any one particular news site publishes any of this stuff they are providing me with essentially zero value. (It makes me laugh when I click on a link at Google News and it takes me to some newspaper's web site like the Akron Beacon-Journal and then that newspaper throws up a paywall barrier preventing me from reading the article, yet I can see that the article is from Associated Press -- why would I pay money to access content that has nothing whatsoever to do specifically with Akron, that the Akron paper had no involvement in creating, when that content is freely available on a hundred other sites?)

The second way the internet has removed scarcity is the well-recognized fact that there's now far, far more high-quality content available than any human being could possibly read, and much of that is free. Which means a publisher better be offering something really spectacularly special and exclusive, because it makes no sense for me to pay money just to increase my list of stuff that I'll never have time to read. The New York Times is an example of a site I would pay for, if they charged a reasonable amount, instead of the completely ridiculous amount they're actually charging (several hundred dollars per year) -- there's so much other good stuff to read that I'm not going to suffer any pain from not being able to read a few NYT articles a week.

Of course, if there was a workable micropayment system in place, I'd probably pay for even mediocre content, I mean, if it was a penny or something to read an ephemeral opinion column about, say, a sports team I follow, I'd do that sometimes. I'd probably pay several dollars a month even for "low-quality" content, if it relieved me of intrusive craptastic ads, but I'd never pay a whole dollar to a single low-quality publisher, let alone the $5-20 per month that a lot of paywalled sites are trying to get.
Don't panic, but the universe is slowly dying
Google -> abc.xyz -> alphabet -> a to z -> a2z.com -> Amazon
Understanding Web Notification API in JavaScript
The world produces ~three times as much food as we need to feed the world. Sure, we can push efficiency up further, but there is no real need for more calories and current practices create huge short and long term problems.

Not that fuel ethanol is drinkable, but you can get similar amounts of energy with other processes. Anyway, just the US ethanol production is over 2 gallons of per person on the planet. We are talking ~23,000 calories per person on the planet produced in a horribly inefficient process which is then burned.
Maybe we don't have one because it's a poor business model?
You're correct in interpreting his claim to mean: Declaring that icon design is being lost is sure to stir up some senseless and unproductive controversy and will fit nicely into my series of equally unsubstantiated and sloppy critiques of design/designers/design industry.
This is the case virtually military-wide, including infantry units in active combat. I received Red Cross notices twice while on orders (once in an army school, once in Iraq), and leadership scrambles to accommodate soldiers during these events. Army (and other military) leadership doesn't mess around with Red Cross messages or a soldier's mail.
You've simpified pi, that's fo' shore.

But rivalry says "level-up score".

With competitive drive,

It's yet higher I strive.

The value I'll use shall be four.
Imagine the savings you would see by taking shorter showers, alternating days, and using a misting shower head.
I don't even know what you are rambling on and on about esoterically in the first paragraph, but as for your argument in the second paragraph, there are actual existing "businesses" that do sell showerheads. You bought it. I bought it. Everyone who lives in a house with a bathroom bought it. Otherwise we wouldn't have showerheads. It's not a comic strip.
tl;dr: Xeno Kovah, Corey Kallenberg and I ported several previously disclosed vulnerabilities from Windows UEFI systems to Apple's EFI firmware. Using the 2014 Darth Venamis ("Dark Jedi") vulnerability we were able to unlock the motherboard boot flash, write our proof of concept to it, then scan the bus for PCIe Option ROMs and copy the worm to them as well. This allowed it to spread to other systems via shared Thunderbolt devices, possibly across air-gap security perimeters or via evil-maid attacks.

Like the original Thunderstrike vulnerability presented at CCC last year[0], firmware passwords and FileVault encryption don't prevent infection, reinstalling OSX won't remove it and it changes the RSA keys in the ROM so that Apple's firmware update routines can't remove it either. The only way to remove it is with a hardware in-system programming device connected to the SPI flash chip.

This is a transcript of our hour long presentation at DefCon 23 / Blackhat 2015 last week, which is why it is too long to read... Here is a shorter overview[1] and a demo video[2].

0: https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike_31c3

1: https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike_2

2: https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike2_demo
Apple Introduces Ad Blocking with iOS 9 Further Hurting Publishers
I don't what this says about people who frequent HN. Bitnami has dozens of different applications, and the discussion is about WP.
Apparently having a programmable operating system that allows reading/writing to RAM and system devices and that is rarely updated running under your own operating system allows easy exploitation, who would have guessed?

System integrators shouldn't be trusted to write software. If you've ever installed software from your various BIOS manufacturers you surely know that
I found various types of old graph paper in my father's desk when I cleaned it out. I've kept most of it. He's an EE and a ham radio operator, so he had lots of things to graph.
Reason #78,429 to join the I-hate-Oracle-club http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/17.aspx
https://what.thedailywtf.com/t/please-stop-poking-holes-in-o...
I wonder how it copes with calcium scaling?
It seems reasonable that this device may not only be used to drop bombs, could be replenishing munitions or dropping food on target. Point being, a simple "are you too close" does the complexity a disservice.
Which is why this will never be viable. Internet content providers are radio stations, not performers. They aren't going to Spotify themselves.
Even better, use a Sigma Point Kalman Filter.
Same for me.

When I'm on my deathbed, I don't think I'll say "Damn! I wish I had enabled Javascript back in 2015 so I could read that clickbait article on Windows 10 privacy (or lack thereof)."

All hyperbole aside, I'm glad for HN threads like this. I don't need to read the article to get the gist. And I also gain perspective from all the comments posted here.
Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner.

Both patents and copyright are failed experiments. They weren't meant to 'benefit creators' or 'guarantee an income', and they cannot take that role in a healthy society.
For developers testing mobile applications and responsive sites nothing beats testing with real devices.
They want me to run an infinitely misconfigurable copy of windows directly on hardware too slow for virtualization? Uh, no. Android tablets are much more likely to move into chromebook's position. With the gradual merger of APIs and store contents, I don't think that will take away much from my netbook experience.

Given the specs, I would be very interested if I could separate an RTU onto a virtual machine on a desktop and then install something else on the laptop. But even a minimized Linux with a very small VM may be sluggish and would quickly cost me more time than just finding a way to install chromium OS directly on something.

Also, I hope this doesn't signal another campaign to sabotage netbook RAM capacity in vendor designs just to push another budget license no one can actually use.
But wouldn't Alphabet's cars be called something else?
I second this. Tried to use it to sync a picture directory between my desktop and NAS device and after the original sync, it never managed to complete any further attempts. It's great for smaller directories, it's horrible at lots and lots of small to medium sized files.
Kali is a pretty poor distro.
Merely a fork of debian for no other purpose than to create clickable icons/menu items for cli applications that require sudo. So 99% of the security apps they install are presented in an unusable form. Nothing you can't do with debian and a few runs of apt-get.
Journalist needs to create Article, types Alphabet into Google.com.
The British Library Has Released a Million Free Images
It has paid staff and volunteers. More volunteers than paid staff IIRC. Reviewing stuff correctly takes time :-( sorry.

This can be mitigated by having more volunteers (or paid staff (or both)) to help though.
You mean wordpress is totally fine on a self-managed VPS assuming you know how to manage it.

Same as literally every other application?
...and then its the same overhead because they are the ones collecting. You are just shifting who bears the cost of customer service.
Yeah, to imply that the leaders of a massively successful company didn't think to look into naming issues is extremely naive or grasping for news straws at best.
Show the Linux tools. I'm genuinely interested.
In this hypothetical, you have the superior product, so you would prefer to rely on honesty.

The alternative situation where everyone bullshits is one of the reasons people are using ad blockers.
Show HN: I write a book about RethinkDB in one year
Hi all,

I like RethinkDB a lot. One year ago, I started to document it because I want to learn more about it. At first, I blog, at one point I started to writing it in markdown, using pandoc to convert it into PDF then I switched to Leanpub.

At some point, I almost abandon it. But finally I make effort to go back and almost finish it.

Here is the result of one year:

http://leanpub.com/simplyrethinkdb

I also open source it on here(But it helps if you make an purchase on leanpub anyway :D):

http://github.com/kureikain/simplyrethink

The book is still WIP though.

It would be great if someone can help me to review it, or/and write a foreword for it. drop me a line, my email is on github.

Thanks.
I see where you're coming from, but I think there are still a lot of possibilities for innovation here.

We waste 50% of food, with a big portion of that waste happening at the retail level. Food distribution services like Good Eggs have a pretty good shot at eliminating that waste.

Just to give an idea of the potential, attacking only food waste, without any other improvments to our food system, would comfortably allow earth to have a population of 10 billion.
> I don't think "the backend APIs, etc. etc." are typically the things with longevity, either, as very few of them do much of anything with real novelty or complexity.

I suppose this might be the case for incredibly basic CRUD apps or your personal blog, but the server side is generally where the bulk of the complexity resides, especially in data heavy applications. Good "backend APIs" that you interface with and don't find very novel, are in fact taking care of the complexities for you.
For me, the problem is that the microaggressions that I've dealt with tend to be crude attempts to understand what it means to be transgender like asking for my old name, if I had a boyfriend or girlfriend before transitioning, and so forth. Many of the people asking the questions weren't intending to be rude, but our society has deemed one's gender identity as an immutable fact of nature (which doesn't really fit the facts neither of biology nor psychology). So, people have some default assumptions about the condition of gender which puts them in an awkward position when asking those questions which can be offensive (I've learned to deal with the situation by asking questions back to them in a more Socratic/positive manner instead of being offended) for some people.

I don't think it's too much to effort for schools and organizations to post information on what is and isn't a microaggression but I do think people who are the targets of microaggressions ought to consider a more proactive approach to correcting such social missteps.
America’s Non-Existent “Spike in Crime”
I'm not sure this tragic example is actually a good example. If I replace the battery in my alarm clock, I check whether the alarm is still set, because I know I can't rely on it. If you set coordinates for something as vastly more important as an airstrike, shouldn't it be par for the course that you doublecheck the coordinates if you replace the battery between setting the coordinates and pressing 'fire'?
Dell Hell.

iSCSI purchase that was promised to be supported on CentOS (it wasn't: RHEL only, despite no deltas), and which Dell itself didn't understand. Ended up getting RHEL just to get a comparison baseline install.

At one point, got cussed out by Dell's support manager in the process (the front-line support team was good). The quote was "I'm not here to support you." Ultimately cost me my job (though we did get the product running).

I'm usually pretty free with sharing my documentation, but in this case made an exception: Dell's support was so fucking crap I refused to provide any assistance for them at all.
Y Combinator’s non-profit mission
The problem isn't money in politics, the problem is government. Nearly all taxes that don't fund a very limited set of government functions should be completely eliminated.

Your tax money is what gives politicians power. Leftists want more government, more taxes, and centralization of power into the hands of even fewer politicians and yet are puzzled - dumbfounded even - why things are "working". Bernie Sanders is a Hugo Chavez, a fool.
I worked in Oracle SOA product(BPEL) for 2 years. We had to do migration from 10g to 11g because Oracle wasn't supporting 10g version anymore. While migrating we came across a lot of issues that worked fine with 10g but failed in 11g. So we raised a lot of service requests with Oracle. Most of those got rejected by Oracle as they were not high priority meaning there were terrible workarounds existing for them. They only bothered fixing those ones without which we can't work(I guess they had to or my company would have sued Oracle). We ended up writing a lot of horrible work around just to make existing code work.

Yes we did not reverse engineer that code even though I feel it would have done lot of good for us. Not to mention the tool set provided by Oracle is utter crap as in it barely works on its own.

So I am not at all surprised that Oracle have that kind of mentality here. In all our communications with Oracle I felt they never really actually cared for what we the customers really want. All they actually care about it protecting their investments.
-> abc.wtf
Wasn't Ogg Theora created under just the same principles? I'm not smart enough in all things codec to know how it stacks up technically, but best I can tell, it's unencumbered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora
Ask HN: Would you use an image processing API as a service?
Showing me a unicorn example is not proof that unicorns exist. It is evidence towards a hypothesis that they exist. After you present your unicorn, I may discover it is a modified horse.

Science can never prove truth or falsity of anything - it only provides evidence for or against hypotheses, but every single thing can be changed subject to future evidence. As such, there is no true/false in science, only degrees of evidence.

This article, which you claim uses proof "in the scientific sense," does not prove a hypothesis is false, only that is gets less and less likely and competing ones get more and more likely, which is what your examples are getting at. The article proves (in the mathematical sense) the non-existence of an item, only if a certain conjecture is true.

As pointed out above, this is math, not empirical.
I'm a cofounder of Couchbase. Almost all our code is Apache 2.0, and we make the Community builds available for everyone. Enterprise builds are free to use for a small test cluster.

Unless you are a business where $5k/node looks reasonable to pay for peace of mind, you are probably fine with the Community Edition. A lot of the customers paying for Enterprise Edition are moving to Couchbase from Oracle, so they are paying less per node and running fewer nodes than they used to.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it:

Does anyone else find it deeply suspicious that Wall Street (and investment bankers in general) remain mum about this? We're talking about a group which is one of the most powerful in the world, has tremendous influence over government, and has the most to lose by invasive NSA surveillance.
Thanks, Slava I appreciate you taking the time here.
Might as well upgrade to a ed25519 key while you're at it :) Smaller and faster!
Also: http://sparkleshare.org/ but it seems unmaintained.
I'm down with you about calling support when your hardware craps out. But an ML researcher who doesn't know the difference between Haswell-E and Skylake, etc., will likely make suboptimal choices when using the hardware. Using GPUs efficiently requires in-depth understanding of how they function and how they interact with the rest of the system.