skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Selfies reveal your smartphone PIN
I mean sure, yeah, but...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=changes%20brain&sort=byPopular...

so does meditation, walking in nature, inactivity, porn, drugs, focus, menstruation, Alzheimer's, cellphones, the iInternet, The Knowledge, programming, football...

changing it's structure is how the brain reacts to basically any regular stimulus. Thats how it works.
It's not quite like that - even if you don't try the more readily accessible combinations before the longer ones, but simply split your computational effort on each one in proportion (you'll find all of the 4 word ones have been tried when only 1/250000 of the 5 word ones have).

Not to mention that "chili dog monkey" are not exactly rare words and even a 10k word english dictionary would contain those.
I think we fool ourselves into believing there is external pressure for quick, dirty, please everyone, "will fix it later" solutions when no one sane asks for that.

Modern management is trying to apply command and control to creative endeavours, and usually forces everyone to fail.

Sometimes it's possible to wander around, rejecting the views of everyone else and creating a perfect product. More often you get something no one wants.

A better approach is to have enough time and money to walk in the right direction, carefully. No matter how many times I think of the idea of a start up running ahead I think of disorganised mob, not a disciplined army.

The goal is to take a disciplined army into the unknown.

not a rabble egged on by a crazy guy, or a goose.
Programming by and large is NOT creative. As a software engineer, I don't understand where this idea comes from.

Sure if you're coming up with cutting edge machine algorithms or coming up with the product features or designs that you're then going to implement, there might be a great deal of creativity involved. But most programmers are simply solving technical problems assigned to them by a product manager. There is nothing "creative" about fixing a bug, adding a new feature to a website (that you didn't design yourself), streamlining your deployment process, or reducing the latency on your server.

As a software engineer, the one thing I dislike about my job is the lack of creativity, which is why I find myself pursuing arts in my free time (eg. video game design, music).
Basic income is not going to be able to provide housing in the absence of other programs; it will just end up captured as increased rents against a static supply of deteriorating housing stock.

This model of BI (replacing existing programs) is nothing but a giveaway to landlords, which I assume accounts for the PR juice behind it.

It's possible to have social housing that's not terrible or stigmatized. Having moved from the US to the Netherlands, the contrast is remarkable. Social housing here is integrated in most neighborhoods, not a "hood" of its own. There are definitely exceptions of course, but even the Schilderswijk or Bijlmermeer are very pleasant places compared to most NYCHA projects.

It's mostly just rent-regulated housing, be it owned by non-profit housing corporations, coupled in case of direst need with a subsidy payment, and with agencies responsible for placement. Not, actually, much different the administrative structures present in most American cities. The main difference appears to be first an explicit goal of avoiding segregation, and second, scale. Most rental housing here is in the social sector, so the benefits extend beyond the very poor, which is critical for avoiding stigma and maintaining political support.

Replacing landlord oversight with cash payments to tenants is not going to do anything to improve the lot of the tenants. I'd rather see the US invest directly in expanding affordable housing integrated with neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, this is a political loser until a majority of voters stand to benefit directly from it. Things are going to have to get a lot worse before that happens.
The music industry status
I like your analogy and I think it's got its merit. A good plumber might be able to solve a problem faster than an average one, though.
Time to pay up!: https://www.linkedin.com/in/snicholsio
I see this a lot now, with the proliferation of libraries that allow for arbitrary passwords. Possibly some form of systemic trickling down of bad practices into software with horrible consequences

"Your password must contain the seventh circle of hell, and a Taco Emoji"
Hopefully this will also happen at lower levels.

The "I'm the smartest person in the world, because I work at Google" attitude is a reason I don't interact with/communicate with/contribute to Google-related projects. Their hugely inflated egos are just off-putting.
Tobacco and Psychosis: not quite a smoking gun
XKCD's diceware argument fails under certain conditions. Computationally very hard to crack, but when plucked from actual phrases that have been uttered; weak.

So to give an example, any natural language phrase like:

"I took a walk in a park" is easier to crack.

I am certain there is somebody coding an infinite-monkey-type bruter to crack diceware as we speak:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Important****************
Facebook.com/directory In site item button people not work (hack) when click people not open page message iran to usa please remove the sanctions people are waiting for a truce with the world mark zaberg I love facebook help iran and Google you can big company help iran
totally agree. just to make things worse, the password rule on the client side sometimes does not agree with the one on the server side. XD
Can you explain why the XKCD scheme is weak to dictionary attacks?

Using the 2048 common words example from the comic, there would be 2048^4 = 1.8e13 four word combinations. I don't see any possible attack that's faster than brute-force here.
The thing is, is making a website with those services faster than with code? Even if it is slighly faster, they only work well for the 80%. The last 20% of features are impossible and you're back to code.

I'd rather worry about higher and higher level programming tools that make programmers more productive. Hobo comes to mind (http://www.hobocentral.net/) and Meteor, both making roughly orthogonal aspects of web programming easier and faster.
I doubt he's lying, but you have to trust that what he's saying is accurate and stays accurate. Some helpful dev that doesn't get the privacy issues could switch it to process the clipboard on the server, or accidentally add some logging code which happens to log that value remotely.

I'm more concerned that iOS gives this ability without any warning or notification to the user, because even if Facebook is virtuous (now) about this, other future apps may be less so.
I use pwsafe for iOS (yes trusting some guy built a binary ok) to keep my many passwords for each domain. It will generate (no I don't know the RNG) passwords based on policy settings (length, characters, etc)

And like the author, flat out my number one bugbear is that no matter what random(ish) password I choose before signing up, some idiot will decide that my 12 letter password is too long or my password must have an upper case, or a number of a special character - but never in a consistent manner.

I really want to just move to google authenticator and one factor auth. Just stick a QR code up, let me photo it on screen and I will give you a HMAC code right back.

No passwords. Just illusion
I mocked CSI's "enhance enhance enhance enhance ah we can see the face of the killer reflected in the dirty wheel nut of that truck driving past" for years but these techniques are amazing.

Edit: will SF now include matte contact lenses for people in secure areas?
While I appreciate the intent - to warn people about a scam - I find the content lacking in both insight of software engineering history as well as practice.

1. The message that automated tools will replace text based coding has been repeated every decade since text based programming languages were invented. Visual programming has found it's niches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language but somehow I'm still producing new code in C++ - and not only due to historical baggage of large organizations (while it does have a considerable part to play as well)

2. The view that visual programming will take the hard parts away from coding is highly misleading. It applies only to the stupid parts were one needs to connect input to output b as nauseam. On the large scale it will still be about systems design, and on the individual operand level about understanding, designing and debugging algorithms.

I understood the last point very strongly when observing my 8 year old progressing with his hobby programming in Scratch. At first he was quite flabbergasted at what to do with all of the blocks - then he followed some examples, but was still baffled. After a while when my wife found a book about Scratch programming for him (we're not native english speakers so it's not as trivial as it sounds) he was extatic that he found all these examples that finally explained to him how he could implement things.

But the thing is - he's not copying the examples verbatim, he parses the examples in his head, then figures out a new interesting variation of the technique with his own art and then implements it.

Clearly he has skills far beyond simply "connecting wires". The blocks take the tedium of parsing and compiler errors away but the algorithms he needs to still implement himself.

And the familiar categories of bugs are present there still. "Why is not my spaceship moving - Oh, I'm initializing this variable inside the loop and not just before it" - a simple mouse drag - and suddenly the space ship he drew is flying across the screen.
> Some approach the issue from a Kantian perspective, and ask 'what right does A have to take B's money and give it to C?'[1]

What right does someone have to reap the benefits of society and not give back? What right does someone have to accumulate wealth from a system based on hundreds of years of driving people from their land and means of existence (enclosure), violence (anti-labor/union action), political misgiving (anti-labor laws), collusion and still not contribute?

Stratification to this extent wasn't possible without stripping people of their ability to bargain with capital for a share of profits from increased productivity. It wasn't possible without whittling the system down to the point where the wealthy pay a fraction of the taxes they did or could compared to other classes and to the point where raising their taxes is political suicide.

> Others (of a more utilitarian leaning) wonder whether redistribution will 'kill the engine of prosperity'. The USA has overtaken Britain in per capita GDP by growing 1% (point) faster per year for 100 years, and many believe that redistribution reduces growth.

Evidence for this? Countries with a strong social safety net sure don't seem have killed their engines of prosperity.
Should We Trust Computers? Lecture (and Full Transcript!)
Whether you agree with it or not, calling the German demands "asset stripping" is sheer propaganda.

The privatisation of these government properties is EU policy Greece signed up for long before the crisis, and like so many other policies and agreements simply refused to carry out.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442937
Maybe I'm missing the right articles or I'm thinking about this the wrong way, but I can't seem to find any resources on how people run databases in these kinds of infrastructure stacks. I mean I have no problem understanding how I can deploy my 12 factor application on kubernetes for example and load balance to those, but persistence seems to be missing. Do people just use Amazons/Compose/etc Database offerings and don't worry about it themselves?
In the sense that "ego" is understood in both psychology and spiritual circles, low egotism is associated with the qualities you describe.

High egotism -> high conscious opinion of one's self (compensating for low subconscious self-worth), need for external affirmation of self-worth, and propensity for aggression and meanness in the pursuit of that affirmation.

Low egotism -> content with self-worth, unreactive to external criticism or praise, willingness to do what is "for the greater good" regardless of short term challenges and resistance, trusting one's self to achieve the best outcome in the end.
Redis is great but I think this is a bit too complex for that specific use case.

Forgive this shameless plug but have been working on a distributed transactional key value store that has native secondary indexes. Feedback welcomed: www.quasardb.net
Mouse gesture application (like FireGesture) for Mac OS X
What do you mean when you say "dictionary attack", because I think you're talking about something to me.
I would think so. Eclipse attack relies on a node selection algorithm vulnerable to selecting malicious nodes. So as long as the nodes here don't ever become malicious...

The next logical attack in this scenario would be to spoof IP addresses, which is much harder.
Not very related, but it reminds me that there are a lot of people who rack Mac Pros in data centers. Not Mac Mini. Mac Pros. Yes, the cylinder one. I guess it's mostly for graphics and rendering capabilities or when testing requires the original machines. People come up with all sorts of tricks because it is very inefficient - like vents [1] - or this other company who 3D-printed pieces to keep the Macbook Pros open at 7mm (=0,05 banana) [2].

[1] I especially liked this blog: http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros

[2] https://simbimbo.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/well-im-at-it-agai...
Strange Attractors Demo
It calculates 18 quintillion years because howsecureismypassword.net is simplistic and doesn't realize english words are being used. It categorizes each character into some categories (see https://howsecureismypassword.net/assets/js/app.min.js):

// Standard ASCII Characters
add('ASCII Lowercase', /[a-z]/, 26);
add('ASCII Uppercase', /[A-Z]/, 26);
add('ASCII Numbers', /\d/, 10);
add('ASCII Top Row Symbols', /[!@£#\$%\^&\*\(\)\-_=\+]/, 15);
add('ASCII Other Symbols', /[\?\/\.>\,<`~\\|"';:\]\}\[\{\s]/, 19);
[...]

It sees the password is 22 characters long, and contains a-z chars (lowercase) and a space char (other symbols) so it estimates each char is drawn from a set of 26+19 = 45 letters. And it assumes the default bruteforcing speed is 4 billion passwords per second. So:

45**22/4e9/3600/24/365.25 = ~18 quintillion years.
Agreed. Also, I've not read the paper yet, but I'll be very interested to see the effect size. Lots of sex differences neuroimaging papers rave about significance while ignoring the minuscule scale of effects.
Almost NO ARTIST in the history of EVER has EVER DRAWN an original image. They always draw depictions of things you can see in real life. Picasso did it in a very original style, for example, but he still drew THINGS HE SAW. By your logic, if I put a bottle of wine next to a pear and some cheese and draw them, I should pay the wine producer, the pear grower, the glass blower, the cheese maker, the table maker, the cloth weaver, etc. etc. etc.

Why should drawing an artistic illustration of a block of cheese be different from drawing a videogame character? Both had substantial investment in their appearance. Both have a primary function different from being simple pictures. I am not copying a picture, I am making an illustration of something I saw in real life.
https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-best-managers-are-boring-manager...
until all functionality required to build apps is available to consumers — without having to write a line of code.

All functionality required to build old apps, that is.

This is nothing new: most people can build a website these days without understanding anything about HTML. I suppose Graham's Viaweb was similar in its user experience. You can probably write simple games without writing code by weaving together parts, objects and modules graphically and wiring up some logical connections between them from a pool of supported interactions.

But the thing is that all those are just using the machine. Programming is, by definition, creating and writing something that is new. If it wasn't new, it would've been written already and could be reused with minimal effort. Programming is about building that machine.

Thus, programming is at the edge of new, and you can never automate that. However, the edge of new might certainly change, and also change bias.

In the future, there might be less of the "new" that we do now (figuring out how to load and store data to physical devices) and more of the "new" that only a few people do now (for example, programming a deep neural network to do new things).

Yet as long as humans and computers are inherently physical, someone has to care about the lowest level of new (where the bits go) and about all the intermediate levels up to the highest level of new (someone dumping his brain into a cloud computer). You can not free a human from having to deal with bits――or qubits, or whatever we will have――as much as you can not free a human from his physical existence.
Sometime, Google employees also show this kind of attitude in their social life which makes other people hard to just have social interaction with Google employees.
Most Basic Income systems I've seen do not do away with existing social services. BI is a supplement to them.
> But most programmers are simply solving technical problems assigned to them by a product manager.

Solving technical problems is a creative process. No technical problem that I have ever come across requires the exact same solution for it. You have to think about how you want to express the solution to a given problem. How complex or verbose do you want it to be? Sure there are patterns, but what design patterns can you use to solve this? How do you modify a design pattern to really suit the given problem.

Programming IS a creative process. It's a process where you cannot ever document how something must be done in a step by step manner which is applicable in every given situation that the document refers to.

If one's job feels like a job dependent on rote, then that's an issue with the job. The software industry does not encourage creative process in many ways, and that holds true even for the design industry. It's why so many people break away to become independent designers or developers. It's why there are so many sites and comics dedicated to highlighting the absurdities of clients. The discipline of programming or design both require creativity. We are however surrounded by corporations and people that believes that developers and designers should be moved to a factory line type process whereby any creativity you can express is effectively reduced to nil.

I totally get this. My day to day programming at work doesn't get me feeling like I'm truly exercising my brains. It's mostly handling instructions handed down to me. But when I get home and fire up my editor. Ah. It feels like I've just donned a superhero's cape and I'm embarking on an adventure. A superhero who can look at a problem, and with some lines in a text file can hopefully connect with another person in making their life better.

If that isn't art, I don't know what it is.

PS - If someone wants to make a comic around superhero devs, do make a husband and wife one. "Dev Dave and Dev Dana: Adventures in 4D"
Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it
She was probably paid double what I was too.

I had another colleague at a different job, a chemistry PhD so (on paper at least) a smart guy, but he genuinely could not get his head around the idea that software was something that was written. Software was something that was found and the skill was like the skill of being a gold prospector in the hills panning for that program that would do what you wanted.
San Francisco does as well. I'm going to sound like a rich white male when I say this, and it's not intended that way, but who do you think takes out the trash at all the tech companies? Where do those tech bros eat their meals when not provided by said tech companies? Who builds out all the tech companies' new offices? Who-- Oh.

The problem San Francisco seems to have is all the low and medium wage jobs appear to support the tech companies. There are few artisans and craftsmen in SF.
The XKCD entropy comic assumes dictionary attack. This is why he only counts 11 bits of entropy (2048 variations) for each word.
This is exactly how it feels for me too.
Second worst password rule: preventing to paste in the password field.

As seen at
The OS X FileVault dialog,
PayPal,
Blizzard
and many more....
Did your colleague know about mental rotation tests?[1] Men perform significantly better than women at these. And among men, mental rotation ability is correlated with testosterone levels.[2] I could see your buddy arguing that culture was responsible for behavioral differences such as violent tendencies, but the same dismissal can't be made of this test.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation

2. http://www.academia.edu/3118000/The_relationship_of_male_tes...
Integrating a React component with a legacy form
There may be an acceptable way to make this point, if you can find a way to do it with kindness. Snark like this is mean and makes HN less civil.
I was in Chicago with my family recently and purchased a one-day pass for the CTA. When I returned home I found you could create an online account connected to the card, ostensibly to be able to fill it up automatically, but also to track your ridership. I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of data a rider could get from the card.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to create an account only to receive a generic 50x error page each time. I tried disabling adblockers, completely unblocking javascript, disabling extensions, and nothing worked. I tried it in different browsers, and on different computers. I still received the 50x error. Then, on a whim, I tried using a different password. When that worked, I tried changing the password using 1-character-removed tweaks of the original. There was a single character that, it turns out, would cause the application to choke on passwords (I don't remember which character). Presumably it was an escape character or a semicolon.

It's not impossible for account systems to fail in unexpected ways, so there are probably more than a few (poorly-designed) websites which have seemingly arbitrary password requirements which are designed to avoid the kind of error I found above. Still, it would be better to fix the error in the webapp than to try to patch it by limiting the user input - that's an obvious security problem waiting to happen.
This is the fundamental change that you accept with using SAAS software - like twitter or so many other things nowadays. Whereas if you're running your company on something like office, you're guaranteed access to what you have in perpetuity. With SAAS software, the software can change, can be discontinued, can disappear without warning, can start spying on you, can ...

And the argument here is that once someone has a decent part of the market, they can't start eating the people that built the market for them ? Good luck with that one. Hell, it's Amazon's entire business plan (first, get everyone to use your platform by having ridiculously low margins, push every other distributor out of business, then, jack up prices), and I very much doubt Amazon is the only one doing so.

Maybe we should be arguing that Twitter's previous management simply weren't smart enough, and didn't find a proper way to monetize twitter yet. I do hope that is the case.
My point is that I don't think that's a problem that can be solved with a few posters. It doesn't matter if the deaths could have technically been prevented with the Heimlich manoeuvre unless there's a cheap and practical way to get people to perform it properly.
This sounds like a great advice. I've felt what you're talking about, I just wasn't able to reproduce it.