skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Simple! When a bug is found, someone (or even everyone) involved with the contract loses their money. It's one of the many downsides to handing control of your cash over to an irreversible computer program.
Webwatch
>In 15 years, those hard-won skills will be obsolete — if they ever stuck in the first place.

Whoa, holy shit, if you don't learn new things, you'll stagnate? Who could have guessed? Good point, bro, no one has made that observation ever before and it totally only applies to people who graduate from bootcamps, not to, oh, I dunno, literally any coder in the world.

Know why I like coding bootcamps? Because I left teaching, went to a bootcamp, and doubled my salary. And my job's fun and rewarding and I get to learn stuff constantly and then go home and put that stuff to use on projects that I do for myself.
Often the stupidest limitations in passwords come from the backend system being an ancient banking/insurance/healthcare system running on a mainframe using rules that were prevalent 30-40 years ago. Having worked for a smallish financial/banking company we had an AS/400 with code mostly written in a 4GL tool as the system of record. The database didn't even have unique keys. Everything modern (like web apps) was limited by what this system supported.
Truncation: The browser could have warned users for years already. Pasting something that gets cut off is data loss. Relying on a JavaScript implementation to do this is a hack that only covers some sites (yes, you could have an add-on, but no, that would require JavaScript, and it's still a hack).

Binary Passwords: I could just copy/paste blocks of hexadecimal digits into the password field using a fixed number of digits corresponding with the key size, and they would be interpreted as a stream of unsigned binary octets. The only thing you'd need to know was the length.

A suitable format is using hexadecimal. If you're using a password manager, you already don't care about what the characters are, only that it is secure.

Passwords are also no longer limited to use printable characters.

How would you implement that for all users? Adding a prefix like 0x to enter hex mode?
Do you have any data on this? Last I check pick to was a slightly better option.
Google operates in a bunch of languages, they can't necessarily just assume you're using codepoints on accident.
I'm liking their moves towards the option to pay to get rid of ads. Like with Youtube Red and I believe there is this option for Google Ads too, though I doubt in practice this means they track anything less about you. It's a dangerous dance for them to start supporting new business models that are alternatives to their cash cows.

I suspect part of it is them hedging against real backlash against concerns about advertisement as surveillance.
This and Prezi and many other infinite zoom tools are a little intimidating to me ... too much choice.

I like "Paper by 53"'s solution to zooming, finite zoom levels that it snaps too. They only use 2, but for an app like this, maybe just limiting it to 5 or 4 or 3 zoom levels could provide a backbone of structure for creativity.

It helps in 53's case that it's pinching, but I think the same "finite zoom levels that are snapped to when you let go" could work with a mouse too.
It also helps them that zooming further "out" goes into the app itself, first showing properties of the current document, then going up to a "list of lists of documents". This pattern could be followed on desktop, but is unexplored.

"Snapping finite zoom levels" I'm sure others must have done in some apps before?
I just can't think of any.
How to Enable USB Debugging Mode in Android
Rooting is not an unfamiliar term for any Android user. There are many pros and cons of rootings, and we have discussed about it earlier. Only drawback I personally consider about Android is that
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2015/08/scien...
Is this also stereotypical? Read what the researcher(a woman by the way)had to say. For 20 years, she actively avoided studying sex differences in the brain until her own data showed her that differences between females and males were real.
Let science be about cold-hard facts and let it not be muddied by "feelings".
Could you point to a good article or tutorial on statistical significance, sample size, confidence intervals etc? I'd like to know how to analyze experimental results myself.
Here's a fascinating documentary on the phenomenon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg
“gcc will quietly break nearly half of all the packages that it compiles”
there's a pretty big difference between "debunk[ing] the ... myth" and showing the effect is real and can be reduced via training. in particular, your second link says the differences are probably real in its conclusion!
A "Privacy & Security" category for extensions in the Chrome store would be an interesting first move.
I also hate companies that won't let you use a space in your password. What kind of crazy stuff is that?

Stuff like "I like spaces" would not work.
This lifevac is a total joke! No way the tongue and cheeks don't get in the way. So, really we are supposed to plunge down on someone's head and hope a toilet plunger works. Is that legit, seriously
Top 5 Natural Bodybuilders in the World
That probably reflects the fact that Europeans tend to drink far more than Americans anyway. Over here a pregnant woman is far less likely to drink than a not pregnant woman. (Page 12 of linked PDF)

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ghs/opinions-and-lifestyle-sur...

http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB14184/alc-eng-2014-rep....

(I'm on mobile at the moment so I'm having trouble finding rates for dependant drinkers who don't cut down while pregnant. That first link suggest 2% of pregnant women don't cut down or even drink more, but that doesn't tell me how much they used to drink - someone drinking one glass once a month moving to one glass once a fortnight has doubled their consumption but probably isn't doing any harm)
This is very interesting. Imagine this gets shifted to on demand work/labor. mechanical turk or temp worker options outside the courthouse.
Based on the strings output, I'm guessing that these are Hikvision DVRs. Another problem with these things is that you can only set the admin/root password to a numeric pin through the normal UI and if you use passwd to change it to something reasonable it becomes impossible to log in through the normal UI.

Also most users have no idea what telnet is or that there DVR is running it. These things should really be put on an isolated network/VLAN, but again their target customers typically have no idea about those things.
> Except, how can you be sure your password was stored securely? You should never assume that.

You don't have to. You can use a password manager with an open protocol (like 1Password) where you can tell the db is encrypted using a key correctly and slowly derived from your master xkcd-style password.

If done correctly, it's a much better scheme than randomly generated characters because at the same level of entropy you wind up with a password you can actually remember and type quickly and use consistently in conjunction with a password manager.
It's a little weird to say males have higher IQ on average.

As I understand it (I'm not an IQ expert, just some internet know-it-all), women score better on some categories of questions, as do men, so when you put together a test, you try to make sure it balances out so both get the same average.
The Aluminum Beverage Can (1994) [pdf]
> The desire to believe in equality is weird sometimes.

It's not that weird. If you look back in the HN archives, you can find one or two submissions from transsexual authors who argue, essentially, that after changing genders, they were discriminated against more, and that this proves that society/Silicon Valley/etc must be extremely sexist & discriminatory because nothing else about them changed; many of the HN commenters agreed with the claims.
Your daily supply of the best front-end-related links
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper
What about fingerprints? You don't need to buy anything, phones and such are already coming out with fingerprint readers and the technology is improving all the time. Finally, you can't lose your finger print (except in the case of extreme accidents, which exist for any type of security).
"never seen it" is not the same as "it doesn't happen".

Smoking during pregnancy has been on the decline for years, and 2014 was the lowest it's been.

http://www.hscic.gov.uk/article/4788/Prevalence-of-mothers-s...

> Today's report shows the prevalence of women who classed themselves as smokers whilst pregnant fell to 12.0 per cent (75,910 out of 632,960 maternities)3 from 12.7 per cent (83,490 out of 658,110 maternities) in the previous year4, and this continues the steady decline from 2006-07 when this was 15.1 per cent.5

Lowest on record, but still 12% is pretty high. I suspect the reason, as you say, is the taboo. A pregnant woman who smokes faces a lot of judgement, so she's probably going to smoke at home.
Literally the only question I wanted answered anywhere... can't find it.
If you are a manager, your job is to get your team to produce the right outcome - the right outcome being not just a good product but a good sustainable team.

If your team feel insulted/humiliated/upset, they are less likely to produce the right outcome in the short or long term.

Any decent manager can ask the right questions and make accurate observations whilst still making their team feel positive and valued.
The role of Nigerian romance scammers in the IRS data breach
This recent publication about evidence for a proposed model for basic grammatical processing in the neocortex, was also fascinating: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11732.long

An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left mid-superior temporal cortex

Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of words to compose
structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of
“bite,” “dog,” and “man,” we can think about a dog biting a man,
or a man biting a dog. Here, in two functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) experiments using multivoxel pattern
analysis (MVPA), we identify a region of left mid-superior
temporal cortex (lmSTC) that flexibly encodes “who did what to
whom” in visually presented sentences. We find that lmSTC
represents the current values of abstract semantic
variables (“Who did it?” and “To whom was it done?”) in distinct
subregions. Experiment 1 first identifies a broad region of lmSTC
whose activity patterns (i) facilitate decoding of
structure-dependent sentence meaning (“Who did what to whom?”)
and (ii) predict affect-related amygdala responses that depend on
this information (e.g., “the baby kicked the grandfather”
vs. “the grandfather kicked the baby”). Experiment 2 then
identifies distinct, but neighboring, subregions of lmSTC whose
activity patterns carry information about the identity of the
current “agent” (“Who did it?”) and the current “patient” (“To
whom was it done?”). These neighboring subregions lie along the
upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus and the lateral bank
of the superior temporal gyrus, respectively. At a high level,
these regions may function like topographically defined data
registers, encoding the fluctuating values of abstract semantic
variables. This functional architecture, which in key respects
resembles that of a classical computer, may play a critical role
in enabling humans to flexibly generate complex thoughts.
good point. wikileaks was a small organization which managed to create an uncensorable system, AFAIK among other things by using a wide net of ISP's relations. one can solve some of these problems based on votes. currently google and ICANN largely defines where the boundaries are (who-is policy of domains, what constitutes trademark, etc.)
Bare Metal Erlang “Hello World”
"It's social taboo. I've never seen it in the UK."

It goes on but not so much in public though.
This is why I don't like to hire designers who haven't been to art school. They can't take criticism. For programmers I don't have much of heuristic for selecting ones that can handle the fact that "the bar is here and this code/solution/etc is under it".
One that comes to recent memory is Schwab. A few points from this (http://www.jeremytunnell.com/posts/swab-password-policies-an...) article from December 2014:

> "Schwab.com passwords are limited to eight characters, cannot contain symbols, and are case insensitive. "
> "I now know that on the backend, my secure 16 digit password got stored in the system as only the first eight characters."
> "So what they do is allow UP TO eight characters to represent the password, which is stripped from the contents of the password field. Assuming that the user is activating a token, there will be characters left over. Instead of using the LAST six characters to check the token code, they pull the NEXT 6 characters."

Seems like these companies just do not want to put the effort or deal with the customer pain of updating to a newer model.
Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords.

You can't lose your fingerprint, but you can't replace it either - so what happens when somebody clones it?
Last I knew, the T-Mobile registration form prevented typing the letter 'v' in the password field. It was a rookie programmer trying to prevent pasting.
Pick whatever high-entropy passwords you want, and tack on "Aa$1" onto the end of every password to deal with the silly systems.
A randomly selected member of the set of all of 8 character strings which contain at least 2 of [(upper case letter), (lower case letter), (number), or (Symbol)] has more entropy than the a randomly selected member of the set of 8 character strings which contain only lower case letters.

However, all bets are off if the respective strings are no randomly selected. 'Passw0rd' is worse than 'xmliicou'.
Strange considering IBM invented the utility model. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2578752/it-management/i... The thing to remember about the utility model (think electrical utilities) is that once you control the supply you control the price. During this adoption phase the prices will remain low, but they will likely go the way of electricity costs if adoption reaches critical mass. I think right now they want to get the message out that the "cloud" is profitable because I am hearing a lot of "trough of disillusionment" from decision makers. For the startup or web company the cloud has a lot of attractive use cases, but for the enterprise data center it's a bit more sketchy. And, today it's not hard for sysadmins to build their own private cloud. The only thing that will tip the scales for the cloud and attract the enterprise data center is if we can no longer purchase computing hardware. I certainly hope that day never arrives, but look at the common light bulb. We've been fooled before.
Twitter, #TwitterFlight, and Devs
This article implies that engineers who go on to work at Google probably enjoyed tremendously healthy sex lives before they went to work there.
That's an interesting and plausible take on it. Why do you think new companies still go the route of not allowing special characters (like <>;"()' and the other SQL injection types)? I would think that new companies would know better by now, but I guess not?
Hypnic jerk
Additionally, I thought that's what key stretching and PBKDF2 - to slow down brute force attacks.
He just admitted...

No he didn't. Since Square's filing didn't mention Urbanovsky by name, the reporter wanted to confirm that it referred to her. Urbanovsky's lawyer confirmed that, but he certainly didn't admit to any particular allegation made in the filing or anywhere else.

I don't think the legal strategy is to deny that payments were received, anyway. Apparently they're hoping to blame this scheme on insufficiently-supervised employees, but that seems unlikely to succeed. Bankruptcy is likely, which means the lawyer is correct that he should have charged more up-front.
Very off-topic, but Leveraged Sellout---a satirical blog about the financial industry---did a parody piece on YC called "The Book of Graham."

http://www.leveragedsellout.com/2014/02/the-book-of-graham/
So, they emailed your password to you? Plaintext? They store passwords in plaintext? Paypal?
99% of science today involves people self-reporting results, with tenure, grant money, etc. dependent on those results.

So are you saying that the credibility of 99% of science is at risk?

Note that peer review doesn't get out of this because it really is "peer" review, i.e., an old boys' network.
OpenBSD developers: Landry Breuil
I wonder if that incident is an example of their "clear-eyed view of the world and the competition", or if it's more of an example of their "remarkable lack of bravado".

More seriously, the cheating incident linked in the above article could be an example of the autonomy of people at Baidu. The breaking of the rules had to do with testing too many times in a single period of time, via multiple email addresses. They might have got a little over-enthusiastic letting multiple teams work on it in parallel.
Richmond, San Leandro, Pacifica, Freemont, Oakland (non-gentrified areas), Concord, ...

Pretty much the ends of BART.
First reported case of a paternity test fooled by a human “chimera”
What you are describing is "stupid." Why even bother to try to fix stupid?

Stupid people do stupid things and the more you try to support them, the more they do it.

People need to learn discipline.
I would consider "disregard for risk" to be the defining feature of bad decision-making.
More like 18m for the LA area vs 7m for the SF area.

Not sure why that pisses you off, but rage away.
How Microsoft’s secret user onboarding process fooled us all
Hmm, this is the second such post I've seen recently that lays out the company's infrastructure stack and after a few points, it mentions how they've outsourced all their logging and alerting to DataDog who solved all their problems in that area. DataDog seems like a nice product, and I know nothing about it, but after seeing how ... aggressively they were marketing at re:Invent, color me skeptical that these stack discussions are entirely spontaneous.
Decent Ubuntu laptop for ~$1k

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd
Talking about linear scaling does not change the percentages. I'm not saying you could replace steam with a $20 server, I'm saying that you can run some forums and leaderboards for $20 per game.

But that was just a number I threw out. How about looking at 5% of steam's 30% across roughly a billion sales, that is way way more than it would take to run some forums and leaderboards and cloud saves etc.

-

More importantly, I don't think you're following what my core point is.

I'm not saying that steam is a bad deal.

I'm saying that all those things mediumdeviation listed are pennies on the dollar of the value steam actually provides. If steam only gave that, everyone would go elsewhere rather than pay 30%.

Steam's value is in people finding your game, paying for your game, and downloading your game. Very little else matters.

So when Eevee says they charge 30% to be a gatekeeper? Yeah, that's a valid point. They have a minor feature list a mile long but it's nothing compared to the core feature of being a gatekeeper store.
No more McKinsey people?
250,000^4 is obscenely generous. A typical person's vocabulary is maybe a tenth that, and people will be biased towards common words.
With respect, while Hacker News does appear to be replete with attempts at subtle coercion, collapsible comments have been mentioned as a feature the devs are actually working on, so you might be reading the tea leaves a bit too hard in that case.

At the very least, I would suspect that particular bit of negative reinforcement failed at its job. A number of other features (karma primarily, but also the comments page and saved stories and saved comments) seem to encourage long term engagement far more than non-folding threads could discourage it. That downvoted comments alone appear on /newcomments practically makes it a flamebait generator. Tribalism, trolling, vindictive nastiness and even meme posting abound here.

On the other hand, I suspect (with nothing to back it up) that pg simply never considered thread folding, or else didn't consider it interesting. Meanwhile, any new feature will inevitably garner criticism from users if it doesn't work they way they expect, doesn't support their browser, etc. And, anything that causes Hacker News to look and behave superficially more like Reddit will cause more than a few users to rend their garments, put on sackcloth and ashes and wail in agony at the death of Hacker News.

That headache, combined with the 'unique' (and not really open) nature of the codebase, a staff with better things to do most of the time, and a strong cultural aversion to making even small changes in the UI, means otherwise apparently simple changes probably take far more time to roll out than many developers would consider reasonable.
I came across this phenomena in a buzzfeed article[1], thought this would be a more appropriate link.

[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/failed-paternity-test-van...
The patent clauses. They're so vague and untested a lot of corporate lawyers balk at having anything to do with them.
Dual N-Back : mental exercise ...

* Gwern (unofficial) Dual N-Back FAQ: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ

* Gwern: DUAL N-BACK META-ANALYSIS http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis

* Gwern: NOOTROPICS http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics

* Google group: Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/brain-training

* http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
And I have gotten my base IoT node down to about 2.50$. How?

Arduino Nano ($1.80)
nRF24L01+ (0.63$)

Both from Aliexpress. Combine it with MySensors library and off you go.

For secure connections, use the USB-serial gateway, change the default channel, turn on encryption as well as signing support.

I use Node-red to get the data and do stuff with it.
The article makes some claims about childhood language learning:

But some researchers argue that synesthesia, which appears in 4% of the general population, is actually an exaggerated manifestation of associations we all make from an early age—an ability most of us lose over time, and one that may help explain why children are so good at picking up other languages.

I clicked through to the linked paper, and I could find no evidence that synesthesia provided any specific, significant advantages during childhood language acquisition.

Now, other research supports that children do have real advantages when it comes to learning accents, and that they may have lesser advantages when learning grammar. But beyond that, the evidence becomes controversial. And adults who are socially and professionally immersed for, say, 5 years will often acquire a very solid command of a new language, especially if they're also voracious readers.

In general, English-language media often overrates the ease with which children learn languages[1], and it's insufficiently critical about scientific theories which claim to explain this advantage.

[1] Trying to raise bilingual children, for example, can be surprisingly challenging unless you live in a bilingual society.
I think BGP hijacks have actually been done against bitcoin.
Probably not. AFAIK the MBPs with PCIe SSDs use a proprietary connector. This SSD uses the standard one. It should not be physically possible to fit one inside the MBP.
Code running as a VM in the Xen hypervisor is not really the traditional sense of "Bare Metal".
ignoring the content for a moment..

the layout and color choices of this page make reading this unbearable.. they're distracting, annoying, and infuriating at the same time. please... for readers' sake.. stop designing pages like this.
Lol. Thanks for the correction.
The myth is that the differences (in mental rotation ability) are innate or "biological", not that there is differences (in mental rotation ability) in the first place.