skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just finished reading the paper. It's worth reading - it's well written and they've already put a lot of effort into characterizing the star, and modelling/ruling out any explanations they could think of.

The thing that makes this star _really_ peculiar is the lack of any excess infrared - if there was as much material (dust, asteroids, debris) orbiting the star as you'd expect from how often/how much the star is being occulted (that is, there should be a lot more material on orbits that don't intersect with our line of sight) - then there should be quite a bit of excess infrared radiation from all that material, but we don't.

The most plausible explanation they could come up with is comets - but the profile of the occultation events doesn't match comets very well (sharp dip initially corresponding to the optically thick head of the comet, then a slower rise back to normal from the tail).

My question regarding the comet hypothesis is - could there even be enough material in the oort cloud to produce the amount of occultation we're seeing? Given that Jupiter apparently only occults our sun by 1% and we're seeing 22% occultation here, it seems unlikely.

You'd have to assume an average object size to calculate % occultation -> mass of occulting objects, but we should be able to make a reasonable assumption on that from observations in our own solar system. And apparently our own oort cloud has been estimated at a few earth masses, so if that's typical we've got a rough upper bound for the amount of material available. I wonder if anyone's done that calculation yet.
The fact that some Sat Nav companies like Tom Tom have so many devices in use, they are able to report traffic in real-time.[1] It wouldn't surprise me if similar averages over a longer period are used to identify speed limits (e.g. What is the mode speed rounded to a multiple of 10, when speeds do not appear constrained by traffic).

[1] https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/licensing/products/traffic/real...
Currency Wars: Is a Weaker Currency Good or Bad?
> Like when taxi companies are outsourcing their iOS applications to agencies

Uber keeps trying to tell us that it's drivers aren't employees, so they're trying to outsource the drivers themselves.
There is a really good book out there on one person startups called the $100 startup by Chris Guillebeau - it gives loads of examples of startups around the world, which were started by one person (http://amzn.to/1Kb63VH)
The best periscope list on PC
Good point. You only get a compile-time error if the strings in the switch collide with each other.
"It is usually called a printing programmable calculator or desktop calculator [...] in order to be able to overcome the fears of computers."

We still do the same, but now we call it a smartphone.
Don't even try raising money for your startup without a CRM
Developer by accident – Overcoming the impostor syndrome
I work at a agency in the UK and like you, I was surprised first when I heard that word, But yeah its an easy word for clients to understand.
Social Engineering is absolutely hacking. This wasn't a sophisticated example, but it's still a very real threat.
The article I've linked to has enough details that refute these assumptions. The modes are trustworthy for the purpose they are made but not for short term weather forecasts (e.g. the effects of one particular El Nino), they are based on the proper science, the deniers confuse short term weather forecasts with the climate trends and the climate trends match the models.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201412

"The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2014 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880."

What do you mean under the "fuzzy binary answer"? The scientists of the whole world produced much more detailed material:

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/index.shtml
It's anecdotal, but enough reliable anecdotes do actually turn into "data".

My personal marker has always been, when visiting a city for the first time, to pay attention to the roadside advertisements I see on the ride from the airport to the city center.

Aside from obvious things like payday/title loan shops, the most reliable indicator I've seen of a neighborhood being badly off is ads for cheap dentures and dental implants.
How could I forget Assassin's Creed? Can you count the ship environments as architecture? The "sync/viewpoint" spins were one of my favourite parts and showcased how much work had gone into the world.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution had some beautiful architecture. The original Deus Ex was very good for its time, too -- the architecture really supported the game, even if it looks like crap now.
TCache – Scalable Data-Aware Java Caching Within the JVM Heap
The Basics of Building a Mobile-Friendly Website
“Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series
Ever checked the T and Cs to see if they are capturing audio?
Peckham is up and coming though, so it seems to have worked to some extent, albeit a year too late.
I think "close to a minute" is far too optimistic for the time required :-( -- note that the prime for DH is supposed to be a safe prime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_prime

You can contrast

openssl dhparam -5 2048

which generates 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman parameters, to

openssl genrsa 4096

which generates a 4096-bit RSA key (containing two 2048-bit primes) and note that the second is dramatically faster than the first. On-the-fly DH parameter generation is really slow.

However, generating 1024-bit parameters is probably fast enough to do on launch or install. Under the authors' estimates this might be fairly safe today because the adversary will have to spend many millions of dollars to attack your individual service (and you could change the parameters once a day or something if you wanted). But I think the authors agreed that large predistributed parameters make a better tradeoff for most cases.

There is an RFC about to issue listing such parameters

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-negotiated-f...

Edit: I possibly shouldn't refer to "the authors" in the third person here, because you are the lead author.

Further edit: "Close to a minute" is actually not a bad estimate, but the variance is very high! So it can easily be considerably worse.
Job+og+karriere
While not a homonym, it's still an effective word because of it's less than tasteful association. I don't think it's used often, but when it is, everyone knows what is meant.

Perhaps the distastefulness of the word might even encourage us to improve upon the character traits of "anal", so that we may avoid hearing the word.

It's an ugly word. But that's the point. The behaviour it refers to is ugly.
It's not as simple as that. NASA can update software on the mars rover or interplanetary probes, but that's one device at a time, and the amount of effort put into it is staggering.

At the same time, consumer electronics are routinely broken by OTA updates.

Cars fall squarely in the middle, high volume and high price. Additionally, failures carry a high risk. Nobody will die if your webshop goes down, but if your car decides to steer into oncoming traffic, well, bummer.

The support beam analogy is flawed in the sense that the beams are simply made bigger to ensure they're strong enough even with considerable material defects, but this doesn't work for software, where a single little bug can lead to a catastrophic failure.

I am not aware of anything other than cars where such a high number of devices carries such a high risk factor. Certainly doing OTA car updates in a commercial environment is possible, but there is not yet a relatively foolproof way to do it.
Surveillance is the opposite of privacy, the opposite of free speech is censorship, and GCHQ doesn't advocate that yet.
Microsoft co-founder backs $500M initiative to build an artificial brain
UEFI SecureBoot on Debian
Yes, fried chicken is stereotypically a southern-US (poor part of the country, for a variety of historical reasons) and even more stereotypically African-American (poor segment of the population, similarly due to all sorts of historical issues from slavery to overt discrimination to more recent covert discrimination). Which means that fast-food restaurants specializing in fried chicken are a pretty strong economic marker.

On the flip side, coffeeshops have a connotation of being more a middle-class thing. So tracking coffeeshops vs. fried chicken would be a very obvious way to map affluence in the US.
I think you're probably right, the inverse is seen in the US.

In the South fast-food fried chicken is sometimes a marker for not-yet-gentrified areas of a city, but often it isn't. Fried chicken is an ingrained cultural tradition of the south, for both whites and blacks, and if you count any place selling fried chicken in your analysis you're actually likely to see more fried chicken in richer areas. At least that's my anecdotal observation. I live in a section of town that's becoming gentrified and while chains like Zaxby's and Krystal are slowly disappearing, but pretty much every "fine dining" and even casual dining (i.e. one step over Olive garden) place that has some southern-cuisine related riff serves fried chicken
That's a rational approach, I'm not sure that many politicians think like that though.
When i bought my android tablet i spent a few nights at my girlfriend's place and google picked it up as my home. Years after that my "home" is still there even though i do not live there. I have found no way to change that manually...
How will the car pass inspection after that?
Not even necessarily GPS, they can use WiFi geolocation. Remember the Street View WiFi snooping scandal?
Intelligent life building something big "approx half the size of the star".. mh, either they gave up on nano technology or they have found out that macro technology is better:)
"Not many outlets selling fried chicken"... in Peckham?? I'm not sure the authors data is all that accurate.
Or Arthur C. Clarke's "moving ways" (Against the Fall of Night / The City And The Stars)
The rainbow table and the attack described here both do a lot of precomputation that can then be re-used for individual attack instances, but the rainbow table is a specific structure that only applies to reversing hashes -- a different problem from computing discrete logarithms.

I think the kind of precomputation you envision here is still too hard to do because the number of possible DH secrets is still much too big to examine all of them by precomputation!
It's not quite as simple as that. Mass surveillance alone harms free speech because it affects people's behaviour. If you know everything you say and do is recorded, you tend to say and do a lot less than you would otherwise.
Chariot (YC W15) is hiring its first Head of Growth
Some politicians already are: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/ministe...
I don't think you have ever read the entire thread here. It was drdeca who first introduced gas into the discussion, apparently suggesting that it somehow either solved, or at least mitigated, the verification problem (he was vague about exactly how he thought it helped), and it was I who responded that it made no fundamental difference. The whole point of the example was to demonstrate that gas does not materially simplify the verification problem.

You appear to have replied to the wrong person in your first post in this thread. Did you mean to say that @drdeca, not @mannykannot, misunderstands the purpose of gas?
Show HN: Tinder for Deleting Photos (Android)
Extending human lifespan is the solution. Think about this.
Like many of us, Elizabeth Holmes is smart and had a good idea to change a large industry. Unlike many of us, she has managed to convince several billionaires to make her one too, based almost solely on the strength of her idea. I don't know how much money she has personally taken off the table during her funding rounds, but for her sake I hope it's enough to last her for the rest of her life.

I don't doubt that she is sincere in wanting to build this business and take over the blood testing industry. But Theranos is looking more and more like a cautionary tale about why VC's and angels shouldn't give any Stanford dropout with little more than an idea and a dream a multi-billion dollar fictional valuation and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in real cash to burn in the streets.
The cost of shipping the wrong thing is much higher than the cost of slipping arbitrary deadlines to ship the right thing.

That assumes you can tell what the wrong thing is before you ship e.g. without feedback. I don't believe you can. Agile is the process we use if we don't know what that 'right thing' is. It's better to ship the wrong thing and then fix it than to spend additional time on what you believe is the right thing only to find that it was actually the wrong thing and have to fix it anyway.

If you know absolutely what the problem is, what the best solution is, and the situation isn't going to change during the course of the project, then even waterfall will work. Agile is being willing to say "I don't know what the solution is" when faced with something and not being stopped by that problem - do what you can, put it in front of a user, gather feedback, and repeat.
Yeah... definitely worth trying, but there's good reason to be sceptical.
First thoughts on the decision invalidating Safe Harbor
It shouldn't be nor standardized nor hard-coded because someone with the funds (e.g. NSA) would need to break the encryption using this 'standardized' number only once.

If everyone used a random very large prime (spec suggests so)
then NSA would have to break with every prime number possible which currently is not possible
Well, China is definitely not an "up and coming" country. I've been here like a week and I already don't want to ever look at chicken in my life again.
Humans in Asia '20,000 years early'
How not to measure security
yup. https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/
I'm not sure incognito browsing actually helps much.

User tracking isn't a 100% accurate science, and your browser name, browser version, operating system, OS version, IP address, screen resolution, etc. are still getting sent along and they don't change by going incognito. It's no big deal for Facebook to just assume it's still you if the only thing that's changed is that you're no longer sending the same session cookie.
Since we don't exactly know what other ways to break crypto are there - why aren't we focusing on concatenated encryption(at least for critical apps) - while working hard to ensure no crypto vulnerable to malware type attacks, especially considering that malware isn't a good way for web scale surveillance ?
If the number of people who save enough money for retirement is any indication, people don't even care about their future selves.
Ask HN: Anyone has sample Gradle Projects?
Hi, I am looking for sample Gradle project [single module/multi-module] with Unit test cases. I am writing an experimental plugin. I want sample projects which has enough code to experiment [3-4 java classes] at-least.

Without Junit, not required :)
>> I think the main problem with aircraft is lack of redundancy. They still count on the ability of letting the pilots control the aircraft (e.g. .1% of the time as you mentioned), I think they should just try to go all the way as much as possible.

I'm not an airliner pilot, but I have the impression almost everyone is always grossly underestimating how often a human pilot is still required to safely fly a commercial airliner. Yes, the autopilot may be able to handle 99% of the flights without intervention, or even 99.9% of the flights, but simple math shows that that means there are still tens if not hundreds of thousands of flights every day where the pilot needs to take action, and that any individual pilot will get into a situation where the autopilot will fail to handle a situation probably once or twice a year. Likely a lot more often.

Large parts of the world have weather conditions, diversions, or airports with spotty or unreliable ground systems by the way, in those areas the need for a human pilot will be several times higher than once every hundred flights. There's ample examples of plane crashes that were caused by automated systems, rather than pilot error (I don't remember the exact location and date, but I know that e.g. not very long ago a plane crashed because the ILS beacon at the airport was malfunctioning). In other cases the level of automation enabled lousy pilots with bad training to fly the airplane (case in point: the Air Asiana crash at SFO), which IMO is not 'pilot error' because these people should not have been flying the plane in the first place.

All this makes me think the solution to improve airliner safety even further is not more automation, but better pilot training.

As for autonomous driving, besides AI assisted highway cruising, I don't believe in the concept at all, and my bet is that in 25 years we've realized that we've been wasting most of the time trying to build fully autonomous vehicles. Limiting the possibilities of driver error seems like a much better investment (e.g. automatic cruise control, automatic emergency braking, etc).
That'd odd, I've always heard it was called "garum".
good read.
Tandemploy – Jobsharing Platform
So isn't the next step opening branch offices in India, etc ? That way a company can enjoy both world ?
A Chennai Woman Opens Up a Food Bank
Understanding Aspartame and Its Impact on Children
I think a more important factor is what situations the human is expected to take over.

Car gets stuck in a cul-de-sac and can't get out? Sure.

Impending collision in 2 seconds? Bad idea.
> If you try to select your own parameters you're probably going to pick wrong, either in the sense of breaking the crypto

Is there any known situation in which generating parameters with 'openssl dhparam' will give you broken/weak parameters?

> either in the sense of breaking the crypto or making people wonder if you selected your parameters to hide a backdoor

This is a concern if you're going to distribute your parameters with software, but it could make sense where a sysadmin controls both endpoints, such as a site-to-site VPN.
Not today. But quite possible in 5-10 years, which is kind of the point the article was trying to make.
The next step for a lot of office-based work should be "accept that remote working is a viable option, and hire staff regardless of where they live".
5 Areas Where Robots Will Solidify Their Presence
The UK government does block websites, but I think you are right that it doesn't amount to censorhip in the sense of blocking criticism of the UK government itself.

I'm not sure what role GCHQ has with regard to blocking websites or if we know what they actually advocate. They have been known to do things clandestinely ;-)
Anti-Portfolio of Bessemer Venture Partners
Peckham might be considered up and coming, but it doesn't look like much :-S

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4739728,-0.067718,3a,75y,268...
It's not an advantage per se, it just has a UI for managing the filtering of various requests:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-qu...

One way to use it is to set global deny rules for various things and then only turn back on what is needed for sites to function.
Continuous Integration on embedded devices
That would work, but there's still a problem when the client can't verify that the parameters are safe, at least when using client certificates. See the references in section 9.7 of

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-negotiated-f...

As a result, that draft proposes using specific much larger parameters, on the basis of scaling considerations for the attacker. I think the authors of this paper endorse this solution.

(It's OK in general if you share parameters with someone else, it just means that an attacker who can do this precomputation for those parameters gets to attack both of your DH sessions as a result.)
Whenever I need an arbitrary const int I use 1729. I've left a trail of 1729s in the codebases I've touched over the years, and I like the thought of other hackers recognising the number when they have to fix the bugs I've left behind.
I want this. A rollercoaster like experience on the autobahn, nice :D
That's a deficiency in native apps, not something to be taken away when it does exist for web apps.
Glad to see Chromebooks mentioned. I for one consider Chrome to be Google's last attempt to extract those last pieces of information from the desktop which it can't get from having tracking on 99% of the pages found on the internet.

That and subvert internet standards by giving Google the ability to push their own HTML on server and client in real-time, forcing other browser to follow their lead or be declared "legacy" or "outdated" in front of users on Google-websites.

I consider Chrome to probably be the worst thing which has happened to the modern web. It's much worse than IE ever was.

On a real laptop you have the freedom to chose a privacy-respecting browser, but Chromebooks are even worse in the sense that there's only one browser, you can't chose any other, and the browser there is spying on you real-time.

That these devices are not illegal to use in a education-context is really astounding to me.
My understanding is that was regional thing. Some called it liquamen and others called it garum. They might have started out as different variations of fish sauce but as cultural influences spread across the empire they became the same thing.
That's interesting. From the hiring company's perspective, are they hiring two employees with limited hours, or are they hiring a company (with two people in it) to do the work?
Celsius vs Fahrenheit seems to be the same as Aluminium vs Aluminum: the one you grew up with is the one that seems to make more sense.
Exactly. If people lived for 10,000 years, thier entire outlook on climate change would change. Another reason companies like Google, Craig Venter and Genentech are working on extending human lifespan via researchers like Cynthia Kenyon and CalicoLabs.
The main problem of the author is that he as a developer has not fought development to be perceived as stakeholder. Which is the core of all problems.

If every tech related decision requires dev to have explicit buy in and commit, and they are equal partners on the negotiating table - a lot of problems then disappear.

I have recently been very blunt in some exchanges.

"- How big should the project scale?
- Infinitely!
- In that case I will need infinite time and budget"

I got reasonable estimates the next day.

As a developer it is your job to get the problem right, to evaluate the business case for any feature request and give a better proposition if the initial requests sucks.

And for the hated waterfall - well some big decisions are made at the beginning of the project and are almost immutable - technology stack, module boundaries, module interaction, available hardware.

It is once again your job to make sure that recruiting can deliver the right people, that we can procure the needed hardware and so on.
It is more commonly called cascade encryption.

The problem is that in many cases you can't afford to sacrifice enough performance for it.

Also, malware and crypto doesn't "play in the same field". Malware is solved by secure programming, access controls and users that are educated to not fall for trojans.

Encryption handles communication and storage, and only to a small degree data processing.
Top 7 iOS FPS Shooters
A Blockchain Primer
Native performance for HTML5 games on iOS
You can't imagine working a French defence contractor? Or a bank anywhere on earth outside of the US?
I think you should read their About page[0]... they are partners of Emory University. Or so they say[1]...

[0] http://phys.org/help/about-us/
[1] http://phys.org/partners/emory-university/
Does your partner know about your debt?
Show HN: Trending Machine – Explore GitHub's trending page in the past
As did I. According to Wikipedia[0], "Liquamen was a similar preparation, and at times the two were synonymous."

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum