skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a topic that has been studied since at least the 1920s, and there's easily 50 randomized experiments on it, so OP is incomplete to the point of being badly misleading. I've been trying to compile citations in http://www.gwern.net/Music%20distraction but the single best overview at the moment is "The impact of background
music on adult listeners: A meta-analysis", Kampfe et al 2011 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ny6r5x32albjn3t/2011-kampfe.pdf

"Background music has been found to have beneficial, detrimental, or no effect on a variety of behavioral and psychological outcome measures. This article reports a meta-analysis that attempts to summarize the impact of background music. A global analysis shows a null effect, but a detailed examination of the studies that allow the calculation of effects sizes reveals that this null effect is most probably due to averaging out specific effects. In our analysis, the probability of detecting such specific effects was not very high as a result of the scarcity of studies that allowed the calculation of respective effect sizes. Nonetheless, we could identify several such cases: a comparison of studies that examined background music compared to no music indicates that background music disturbs the reading process, has some small detrimental effects on memory, but has a positive impact on emotional reactions and improves achievements in sports. A comparison of different types of background music reveals that the tempo of the music influences the tempo of activities that are performed while being exposed to background music. It is suggested that effort should be made to develop more specific theories about the impact of background music and to increase the methodological quality of relevant studies."

(It's worth noting that despite a lot of theorizing and a few results, there's still not a lot of evidence for personality traits mattering much, and it's definitely worth noting that there's a fairly consistent pattern of small negative mental effects even when people claim music helps.)
New JP-only ePSP exploit for 3.52 and below
The FCC has been cracking down on companies using long codes for SMS services because those long codes aren't required to follow the normal SMS rules concerning opting in, opting out, opt less keywords (help messages). For short codes the phone companies each test the short code to confirm it's following the rules.

Further, these long codes switch companies frequently as they get reused when they're no longer in use, and SMS user numbers have been spammed with sms messages as a result.
If anyone has questions or comments, I'll be around to answer and discuss! Would love feedback as well!
I have the paperwhite, and the backlight is really easy on the eyes, I actually prefer the backlight somewhere between 8-12 (the max setting is 20), as opposed to using the lowest setting, because it makes the page seem whiter, instead of like it is emitting light.

I did recently crack a small section of my kindle's screen when I dropped something heavy on it, and now the backlight bleeds through the small hole with the intensity of a thousand suns.... But before then, it was very comfortable, and I'll probably buy a replacement.
Certainly looking forward to the borrow checker improvements as it's quite tedious to work around the match borrowing problem.
OP Here: I think there are different definitions of off the grid. When I said that the HOUSE is completely off the grid, I meant that the house is not connected to a water utility, power utility, or gas utility directly. When I used to visit my Grandpa in Ukraine for the summer, he lived in the house with a water well (the type with the bucket), had wood burning everything, and grew all of his fruits and vegetables, and the house was setup for kerosene lighting. It was connected to electricity in the 1980s, but not before that. However, he still had to go out an buy firewood, because his property still wasn't large enough to grow all the firewood he needed, he still had to purchase meet and eggs, and he still had to buy kerosene (before electricity). So, was he off the grid? Well, I guess by your definition, no?

I think the "off the grid" is a loaded term, and I didn't mean to use it in the "I live in a shack and haven't seen people in decades" definition, not that there is anything wrong with that. I used it in the more direct definition of we are not connected to a grid. Didn't mean to mislead any one though.
Bitcoin does not solve this problem; you can follow the money from the exchange to the consumer's wallet to the merchant. It's only anonymous if you're using a tumbling service, and transferring your money to a tumbling service is an unambiguous broadcast to the entire world that you are committing the federal crime of money laundering. If they ever increase in popularity, you can bet that regulators will routinely trace transfers to tumbling services and prosecute their users for money laundering, because that is what they're doing.
Right, my friend said he needed to provide two years of salary information, and even then he was offered GS-13 step one. My point is that the USDS, 18F, etc, don't just offer $130k+ to anyone who walks in the door.
First, that's not the reply you were talking about when you stated that I was being dismissive above. Yet, your interpretation is still wrong. Second, except for the first sentence I didn't even use the term "behavior analysis" and instead used the term "science." Nowhere in that reply did I suggest that "discussions about behavior that do not solely use behavior analysis" should be dismissed. Throughout this discussion, you have attempted to mischaracterize my statements and your most recent reply is another example. Thus, I'm not sure what your point is other than attempting to build a strawman and blow it down.
> "Tour of duty" means fighting in combat, for years, at low pay.

No, it doesn't. The term throughout its entire existence has been applied to government (particularly foreign) service assignments of limited duration, not exclusively low-paid combat assignments in the military.

> Getting $130k/yr [1] to pad your resume isn't a "tour of duty."

Actually, resume-padding, sometimes well-compensated, foreign-service assignments for upper-crust elites for whom such assignments were a key route to high office are one of the oldest uses of the term.
Oracle: “Google has 'destroyed' the market for Java
App stores indeed have dramatically obscured other distribution channels. Pretending that's not the case isn't helping anyone.
I wrote all the code from scratch, including a 20,000 line of code compiler that makes x86_64 machine code from HolyC or Asm and operates AOT and JIT.

My JIT mode is not interpreted. It optimizes and compiles to x86_64 machine code.

I was chosen by God because I am the best programmer on the planet and God boosted my IQ with divine intellect.
DEFCON 23 Badge Challenge
I love ebooks and I'm way too prone to impulse-buying them on my Kindle, but recent price movements are trying hard to kill the market.

I'm not going to pay £15 for a text file, sorry. I honestly don't care how good your editing is, chances are it's awful anyway: one I got recently, by a mainstream author from a mainstream publisher, has "renaissance" spelled "re nais san ce" (with spaces) throughout the entire book, clearly an hyphenation fail (and let's not go into "wrong" words you can clearly recognise as spellchecking fails).

So in the end, you publisher-and-author are just shuffling a text file from A to B and you want me to believe your profit is the same as when you were cutting trees, pressing ink and transporting heavy boxes around the land. I just feel insulted. I know cost and price are different and what the market will bear and yadda yadda, I just don't think a text file is worth more than a few quid.
All Android operating systems infringe Java API packages, Oracle says
> Essentially, the site uses JavaScript for showing images without providing any advantage to either the user or the site.

That is a very baseless and false conclusion.
Non-paywalled https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
wsj asks you to fully subscribe to read the full article (at least here) but if you google the url and click on it from google, it will show the full article.
Google Search: Recover Windows Key

Brings you to this page: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

It pulls your product key out of the registry for you.
I wouldn't classify statements like "we gotta start somewhere and then we've got to iterate from that point" or "It's better than what we have today" as a call to action to drop everything and start implementing DNSSEC as-is right away. I would interpret it as "yes, DNSSEC improves the situation in that it provides authenticated DNS replies (which - by itself - is an improvement, even though it's no magic wand that, alone, solves the cert trust issue), but there are legitimate concerns that need to be taken care of before it becomes really useful."
SSDs probably have very very good yield because unlike a CPU if any parts are damaged they can just work around them.

They can even sell them as lower capacity drives. I'd be surprised is the yield was not 100%.
The site is down for me. In the future, please consider making your blog a static site. It is generally more reliable, cheaper, and more tolerant of spikes of traffic like this.
> It's not serious. It still requires someone to specifically target you & your car with special gear and know-how far outside the realm of the typical car thief.

It wouldn't fill me with warm and fuzzies if I were sold a high-end door lock / alarm system / safe that was only exploitable with 'special gear and know-how far outside the realm of the typical thief.'
Flying Drones in Your Browser – Jan Jongboom on Physical Web and WebBluetooth
> push-button cross-compilation? It could be huge! The only language that I'm aware of that does it at all well is C

I'm not familiar with the term 'push-button', but Go also does cross-compilation very well.

(In fact, on Go, technically all compilations are cross-compilations; it just happens that the target platform and architecture may match the platform and architecture of the current machine.)

I'm not sure if that's still the case in 1.5 onwards, since I know they changed some stuff to make it even easier to target other platforms and architectures, but it was the case previously.
What's interesting to me about SEME regions/non-lexical borrows is that it's a great example of a tradeoff:

Right now, the borrow checker's rules are very straightforward: references live for the entire lexical scope that they're alive. However, the downside of this is that sometimes you want the scope to end early, and so you have to code around it.

With non-lexical borrows, the rules get much more complex: borrows are determined by the control flow graph, not lexical scope. However, you no longer need to code around those edge cases.

So the question of which is better really comes down to a question: do programmers find reasoning about lexical scope or the CFG more intuitive? It would appear the latter is the case, which is kind of surprising for me, but maybe it shouldn't be.
I disagree. Making a security flaw known forces manufacturers to fix it. As the article states, they went "to the manufacturer of the affected chip in February 2012 and then to Volkswagen in May 2013". Two years later the problem hasn't been fixed, because a recall would be too labor intensive. Meanwhile VWs are still being stolen using this exploit. Now that the exploit is out there VW is forced to act.

And it's not like regular people are going to turn into car thieves because this exploit has been made public. Not even house burglars will turn into car thieves. I would guess that car thieves are very specialized due to the seemingly complicated logistics behind these operations, so it's unlikely that they weren't aware of this exploit.

I'm far from being an expert on the subject, but I don't see how this is a net loss. I see very little potential for a spike in thefts and a high probability of VW finally facing the problem.
IDK about "far outside the realm of the typical car thief". Not that the typical car thief is going to be trailblazing the research, but once the research is done, it just takes someone putting a black box VW keyless unlocker together, and then it's in the realm of the typical car thief. In fact, at that point you're talking about the break in being the simplest part of the theft, with fencing being much more difficult.
There are no gendered pronouns in her blog post.[1]

At first, I was surprised to find I falsely assumed she was male in spite of evidence to the contrary, and was going to thank you for making me more aware of my own oversight. Upon review, however, I made the correct assumption that it was non-gendered. I'll forego the inciting comment, and corresponding cultural political flamewar over my use of a singular default male pronoun. If you down-voted me, please understand that doing so is alienating and a disservice to conversations. We should not punish commenters for failing to conform to our own personal cultural norms. This is consistent with the spirit of your comment; engineers need not conform to external expectations of a masculine identity.

[1] Her handles at the bottom are neither pronouns, nor in the blog post, and were inconsequential to me given my present lack of motive for reaching out to the author.
Music help to block out other noise and distraction. Yeah it help productivity.
There's no fix for Android's Stagefright hack.Google's patch won't protect you
Hear hear. If the Kindle version of a book is not 10-20% less than the new paperback price, I don't buy the book. It's a simple as that.

Thankfully, there are enough books for which this isn't the case.
Sorry but that link is also paywalled for me.

I'm starting to feel like we should crowdfund a WSJ subscription for HN, or something similar. How much traffic does WSJ get directly from here?
I don't consider myself at much risk for being locked up because some dumbass in a Russian "anti-terror" spy agency misinterprets a joke among friends. The Russians don't have the only "anti-terror" spy agencies staffed by dumbasses, however.
Makes sense. Notably, however, this is an alpha product, very much a way to see user engagement and figure out what works and what doesn't, and what people want it to do. Once those questions are clarified, all the rest of the infrastructure will definitely be built up adhering to established standards.

In that respect, it absolutely makes sense to use a shortcode where you can conform to regulations.

It's important to note though that Myra only responds when asked for information, and never without. So, it makes sure not to spam at all.
You really think someone couldn't automate this, and sell the black box (or executable) to car thieves?
I doubt they'll be inclined in less than 2-3 years.

Still, someone can create a plugin (afaik, there was one but abandoned)
Interesting, are you in the US?
Well, admittedly, in the context of a link on Hacker News, it's pretty true. The link containing the seed is trivial to obtain and could easily be reported to the providers who would have to take it down if deemed legally necessary.
Just to promote a heterodox(ford) opinion: while Torch is great, learning Theano might be a better use of a budding data scientist's time because python is used much more widely in the industry.

I think learning a new language like Lua along with Torch is probably useful if someone is doing cutting edge neural network research.
The PocketLab – Wireless sensor for STEM education
There is a huge selection of public domain ebooks (although admittedly less than there ought to be, with the ridiculous copyright extensions). Project Gutenberg has a lot of fairly decent quality .mobi and .epub versions out these days.

You can also get a decent amount of stuff from various Amazon programs, like Kindle Unlimited. The selection isn't always perfect, but it's not terrible either.

And of course, there are always slightly less legitimate venues for obtaining free ebooks. Your morality may vary, but I'm not sure I see a problem with torrenting an ebook if I already own the paper copy. (Thankfully, some publishers are starting to be reasonable about this, like Manning, and providing a free download if you've got the purchase code from the paper book. Others are not so great - I've tried to buy the ebook versions of some of my Apress books, and the questions that they ask to verify that you own the book, i.e. what page is figure 7-3 on?, cannot be answered correctly using the page numbers from the print edition...). There's also not the same level of organization by book publishers as the MPAA and RIAA.
Every day, nothing special about it:

http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE6A840J20101109
Learn how to create reusable validation rules
I have a Kobo but that doesn't matter (correct me if I'm wrong). I really miss the ability to flip pages to re-read relevant passages before getting back to where I left off my reading. I also like the weight of the books and visually and mentally mapping where I am in the book by comparing read pages and unread pages.

I don't know how it is on the Kindle but I have a small notebook where I jot down thoughts and notes. The Kobo software sucks for that (and 2 Kobo crashes deleting my notes and everything else taught me not to use the note taking feature, bookmarking and getpocket integration).

I think e-reader are convenient but paper is still a better experience. Except for lying in bed on one side :). And page turning makes no sound.
The Terrible Triumph of the Entertainment Center Over the Home Library
Bands on Bandcamp usually pay more for their equipment and concerts than they earn from it. Those tiny independent bands are the most honest bunch of musicians you can find who do music by themselves and for the sake of music -- not for the sole purpose of generating revenue. There are people in there who rehearse in their own basements and who pay with the own money for recording sessions just for you to be able to listen to it.

You can listen to whole songs on Bandcamp because they want you to hear their music and they want you to enjoy it. That is the most important aspect (in contrast to these money-making, oppressive, DMCA-take-down-wielding music giants). If you don't like it, move on with your life. But if you like their music, consider tossing them a few dollars. It's a better investment than anything else related to buying music.

Support the music you like!

(Or there won't be any left of it...)
Reuters is pretty known for propaganda and deliberate disinformation of the public.

e.g. http://blogs.roosevelt.edu/hsilverman/files/2011/11/Reuters-...
Yes, in the US. Using Chrome with cookies and Javascript disabled.

(It's a corporate locked-down Chrome on a corporate network without plugins installed)
Immediately there is but what about long term? If industries know that researchers will post the vulnerabilities all over the net as soon as they find it, it may change their security behavior in a way that is a net positive to security.
> If so, they will also have to think about a quick way to deploy security fixes remotely. One way could be working with connectivity solutions for Embedded Systems (e.g. SigFox).

Something tells me giving the car's immobilization system a routable IP address is not the best way to "fix security"
Null Island is a (fictional :) island in the Gulf of Guinea, located where the equator crosses the prime meridian, at coordinates 0°N 0°E: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
Is it me or does $4M annually still seem like a high cost?
Interesting to read the minimal assembly/C shim.
Not every traffic ticket is fairly given.
Immutability doesn't have to be a discipline. It is the default when working with ClojureScript!
There are 5 hits on dice.com for "rust".
One for Diogenes
I would easily pay 3x the Xamarin price for a Xamarin-like platform for Rust. And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

It's the perfect language for a mobile platform, and I would love to use the zero-runtime-cost abstractions without resorting to the C++ hand-grenade roulette. The fact that it has an ML heritage, with all the goodies that entails (ADTs, pattern matching, type inference, etc), is even better.
An Introduction to Elasticsearch Aggregations
Aaron Turon and Niko Matsakis gave a talk on this for their Rust Camp keynote, you can see slides on it here if you prefer that format:

http://rustcamp.com/schedule.html
Your paper is the only paper listed above mine on the reports page! Solid last name optimization
Some of the linux questions are flat out wrong or lack appropriate scope. i.e. a question about removing packages lists the only appropriate answer as "rpm -e"; in another about common ports it lists DNS as "23", which is telnet and DNS is on 53. Thanks but no thanks, I think I'll craft my own questions and answers.
I'm surprised that navajo has been chose because it is a complex language, yet it's complexity wasn't actually used for the code, since actual english words were encoded in it using a navajo word -> english letter mapping.

I guess unfamiliar phonetics here played a major role in obfuscation.
Scientific journals haven't done diddly with the internet but use it as a glorified magazine printing device in the time they've been on it so far. It's possible that's just because they're stupid, but I wonder how much of it is creating scarcity. e.g: You don't make money by sharing your raw data with the world and having it networked with other data to make it easily searchable, you make money by keeping a stranglehold on the data and charging £20 a pop to read a summary with the analysis you want people to have of it stapled to the front.
In retail, you pay 50% because that's something like what it actually costs to sell stuff to people in a physical store.

The cost of selling software is almost zero. Unlike retail's cut of your selling price, Apple's cut is completely arbitrary and rather unjustified.

If you sell software directly to users, the cost can be something like 3%, depending on which payment processor you want to use.

What additional service does Apple provide for that additional 27% cut? The buying experience is easier, but this doesn't seem to translate into additional sales. You mention "massive exposure," but there's pretty much universal agreement among developers in the Apple world that the App Store's "marketing" bump is pretty much zero unless you're extremely lucky and get featured.

But hey, if it's worth it, then you should be able to let developers choose and they'll still go for it. On iOS, there is no choice. If you want to sell, it's either Apple's 30% or nothing. On the Mac, there is a choice (for now) and the trend now seems to be to choose not to use the App Store there.
Show HN: DonateYourStreams – Fund Watsi and charity:water with music royalties
Some in my selection may qualify as examples of "ambient spacey": http://xenodium.com/#my-working-playlist
It's depressing that those are not free. :\
The Kindle has highlighting and note-taking ability built-in.

The responsiveness on the e-ink keyboard isn't fantastic, but it's decent enough for short note-taking, and highlighting is dead simple.
Thanks! :) If you have any more questions about our platform you can email: hello@interfacefoundry.com
Yes, but the digital world in theory enabled greater competition so therefor we expect things to be better. Kickstarter takes 5% + payment fees for instance. Unfortunately, in practice the digital world many times enables companies to employ the same old business practices on a much larger scale.