skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i had the same idea to create a social network for developers. I'm very curious about their business model. Will they provide a database of developer profiles for enterprise recruitment ?
The 62 year estimate is based upon an assumption of normally distributed data. Everyone in the industry knows the distributions are significantly fat-tailed. Maybe things are getting more volatile, but the 62 year estimate is just mumbo jumbo.

Edit: also implicit in the 62 year estimate is constant volatility, but the same article mentions changes in the volatility of volatility... third order changes in something he was assuming was constant earlier.
It's irrational if you do it for kicks. It's rational if you expect a strategic advantage for your group/nation-state out of it. Whether it is moral to do is an entirely different discussion.
Ok, so there are some cases where it helped stop the attack. Going a step further, how many of those had AKs and maybe bullet proof vests? Should everyone have armor piercing bullets too?

How many of the attacks happened because it was easy to get guns in the first place?

A terrorist will always be able to procure guns. But what about an unhappy employee, an angry teenager ?

Arming people is no solution to terrorism.
...unless they're starting to design TV's exactly for these "enhanced viewing experiences" and opening up a side-channel of profits to marketers and folks like Nielson.

Wasn't there one of the asian manufacturers the other month (I wanna say... Samsung maybe? please correct me if I'm wrong) that got caught building a SmartTV that recorded audio and sent those packets up through the network to who-knows-where? They eventually rolled that feature back, but not before they got enough press that they had to make a statement saying it was only for diagnostics or testing or something like that.

If you're, say, a multinational with a large mobile device division and a strong corporate mandate to make sure the mobile device ecosystem stays strong so profits keep flowing, is it too far fetched to think you would start looking for cross-division synergies that, lets say, grease the flow in this ecosystem? Perhaps you could introduce an extra component (or optimize an existing one for different parameters) that if, say, it saw a signal of a certain form, it might reproduce it in an invisible and obtrusive way. And if it helps major players in the device ecosystem, well, great, the ecosystem stays strong and mobile devices continue to roll off the shelf.

Complete speculation, but not an unreasonable line of thinking?
> "Apple started adding location services permissions 5 years ago. Android 6.0 has only just been released".

Location permissions have been in Android since the version 1.0 of the API.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...
Software Totemism
Obvious? I'm still not following. I can't figure out how somebody goes from, "The US is responsible for the death and suffering of my countrymen." to "Let's kill lots of French civilians."
It might not be a "competitive" alternative, but it does what CT and MRI do — takes picture inside the body.
> But there's also a view that computer security research can't really hurt people, so there's no real reason for sort of ethical oversight machinery in the first place.

Worse: there's a view that people who get owned "deserved it." Our industry, and its academic attachments, have a really strange vindictive streak towards those who it should be looking out for. (Which is not to say that those people should be looking out for people swapping child porn--but what about the thousands and thousands of people who were not?)
But on Windows, stuff like the "Install->Next->Next->Next->Next->I agree->Next->Waaait for it->Next->Finish" dance has conditioned everyone but the security zealots to click "Yes" without even reading the dialog box. I've seen people with twitch-gamer like reflexes for accepting Windows prompts.
His actual statement:

> Tor is having a fit of institutional pique that researchers are compromising the network's privacy guarantees by, well, looking at it.

> If you write security software, and you're not praying that loyal opposition hits you with everything they've got, you're not doing security

> Tor is intended to be, and is marketed as, robust against nation state adversaries. It cannot possibly be so if it worries about academics.

Two interpretations:

1. It's OK to go after Tor. This is dead wrong - attacking a network without permission is very bad form. Maybe it's OK to do the equivalent of checking to see if someone's front door is locked (this is a grey area), but only if you intend to warn them that their door's unlocked. Going through their stuff is obviously unethical (and probably illegal).

2. Tor should be more permissive, encouraging more attacks from researchers.

Obviously, the researchers crossed the line when they started gathering user data. But Tor should only be upset that the attack went too far, not that the attack succeeded.

I'm not sure of the context - was the Tor community pissed off that researchers found a weakness, or pissed off that the weakness was exploited?

Twitter is a pretty poor platform if you want nuance, so it's probably best to be charitable in your interpretations of what people say there.
Found on Facebook: Empathy
I'm trying to eliminate procrastination in my life. In the last three years, I had my ups and downs. I think that recently, I have positive progress. Here is some things/ideas/observations which helped me recently:

1. Core idea is that procrastination is unaware avoidance behaviour.

For example, I have great motivation to learn all algorithms in CLRS book. But at some point I got stuck on some proof, I tried to re-read it but got frustrated by some statement in the proof. On the next morning, I could watch Team Coco in Youtube and eat Pringles instead of attack that proof. Yes, I still love CLRS, but right now, I would like to watch Team Coco. And here is perfect example of my procrastination episode.

Core idea here is to realize that you entered unaware avoidance behaviour. And not just force yourself reading CLRS because next time your avoidance behaviour become even stronger. But you have to be brutally honest with yourself. Then, you can turn off any music, sit down, and enjoy total silence by doing 5-10 minutes of mindfulness meditation. After that, it's much easier to become more comfortable with your frustration on that proof in CLRS and start attacking it again.

2. I noticed strong link between quality of sleep and procrastination. Better your sleep, less chances for procrastination episodes. After many years of wrong sleep schedule (2 am - 11 am), I started follow very strict sleep schedule (9:30 pm - 6 am), after two months of such schedule, I noticed substantial positive progress in my daily productivity.

3. No caffeine, no red-bull, no coca-cola, no concentrated tea anymore. Instead of fixing my sleep schedule and doing physical exercises, I consumed coffee and red-bulls. It gave me fake feeling of alertness. But in fact, I was just dizzy and my focus ability was completely evaporated.

Now, I don't even eat a chocolate. There is nothing better than good healthy sleep and being productive by 8 AM (i.e. 2 hours after I woke up everyday).

4. No music while your reading and coding anymore. I listened music all the time for years. Even when I really tired of music, I couldn't code in total silence.

Mindfulness meditation helped me to see beauty of silence and white noise (especially coming from nature outside of my window like slight sound of trees because of small wind).

I couldn't say I become perfect. But I substantially decreased procrastination in my life.

I hope these advices could help somebody to overcome procrastination.

P.S. By the way, note that I didn't use statement "fight procrastination". If you try to fight it, you make your procrastination stronger next time. You have to be honest with yourself and being aware about your weaknesses!
new flavor? did you just hint at Bitcoin
> If you think about it, don't you think it is a somewhat unnatural reaction to being under attack, to always end up fearing those who didn't initiate the attack?

It is, but natural reaction is wrong. I still have much bigger chance of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack. In general, the natural reaction to such events was fine 6000 years ago, but in today's hyperconnected, media-driven society, awareness of a danger is usually inversely proportional to the chance of it happening to you.

But I also know that general population has this natural reaction, and - as politicians follow the voice of people, instead of the voice of reason - it leads to very bad outcomes. I am afraid of those bad outcomes.
I use this extensively myself, but the one problem that I'm facing is that it makes some applications unstable. Usually, I just uninstall them as I'd rather sacrifice my comfort than my security and privacy.
Optimal Marketing Strategies Over Social Networks (2008) [pdf]
With C++11/17 these answers are now out of date

I had the impression that more often than not such questions also contain a recently added or edited answer, upvoted and all, pointing to the C++11 of C++14 answer. Also note that the accepted&highest vote and second highest vote answer to the question in your link both mention C++11 nullptr.
My dog always barks a lot during the ad breaks. Now I know why!
A lot of "may" and "might" in your reply, and absolutely no facts. The facts are that on ISIS' agenda, fighting Palestinian groups such as Hamas has a higher priority than fighting Israel [1][2], yet people in this thread still manage to "lightly" blame the Israelis, the US, basically anyone except those responsible, as if these people are incapable of independent thought.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/world/middleeast/isis-abu-...

[2] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/islamic-st...
We all sometimes have the urge to do or say inappropriate things, no? A big part of what makes you, you know, you is the degree to which you have a "filter" that screens out those inappropriate urges before they turn into inappropriate actions.

This filter is rather different in different situations, because what is appropriate (and what has consequences) is different in different situations. In a very real way, I would argue that changing that filter enough (and pesudoanonymity is usually 'enough') makes you, essentially, a different person.

Most people, in a pseudonymous situation, have much less of a filter, in part because bad behavior is more acceptable, and in part because bad behavior has fewer negative consequences, both to themselves and others, than it does in a real life situation. (I'm not saying that there are no consequences; people are hurt. But usually not as much as people would be hurt if the same people removed the same filters in real-life interactions.)
Yep... these are the good old days when you can think stuff and no one else knows about it. Enjoy it while it lasts little brother.
Abstraction != Automation. What does this have as a benefit over something like Heroku?
So many ways...
For small timers: inverse ETFs, put options, CFDs (for non-US folks)
For big timers: the above plus: short futures, OTC options, equity swaps, CDS, plus anything bespoke you can afford
Not the gp, but "pointless" killing would be more like someone killing people because they were bored and had nothing better to do. Extremism is all about ideals inspiring action. The hate and retorhic IS the point for them, even if flawed. I think "senseless" killing/violence is a better descriptor.
> [implicitly approximating numbers like `0.1`] is a widespread practice

Sure, but the key point is that it leads to approximation that may cause problems.

It makes much more sense to interpret `0.1` as meaning exactly that number. Same with, say, `29/7`. If someone wants approximation, then have an explicit notation for that, like, say, `1.23e45`.
Totally on point. That is why 100-yr events seem to happen every 7 or 8 years :-) Normal distribution assumptions are great for coursework, terrible when you are managing real money.
I've never heard of this company. It appears to be Alibaba with a slick interface and a focus on discounts. Their merchant platform basically lets merchants import their eBay or Alibaba et al stores. They don't actually stock anything - they depend on merchants to upload lists of things they want to sell and shipping takes a long time.

So I get the business model, and that it would be very simple . But the real question is...how did they get 100 million users with no press and seemingly no advertising? I would say that I smell BS, but the app has nearly 2 million reviews on Android alone, and a very small percentage of people post reviews. So either these are fake, or the company pulled of the greatest growth hacks in history.
yes, but, obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1520/
the best way to record great audio ! Improves the quality of your video and audio ! Must have !
That was a pretty nasty time. The French military tortured and assassinated on very large scale in Algeria (thousands of people). On the other side, the FLN was fighting a guerilla war, combined with terrorist actions (mostly bombings) against civilian targets. To compound this, once De Gaulle announced that Algeria would be become independent, hardliners from the military as well as from the Pieds-Noir community (people living in Algeria of French descent) formed a terrorist group known as OAS, targeting both FLN, Algerian civilians and French authorities (including attempts to kill De Gaulle).
I love how they add HD to the title of the app. As if it wouldn't be!
It's a weak result. When I saw the title, I thought it might be useful for detecting jerks on blogs and Wikipedia. It's not. The mean age of their sample is 15.9 years. This result may not apply to higher ages, even college age.

Running a similar analysis on Wikipedia might be interesting, minus the age analysis.
Thank you for sharing your experiences.

> I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us

The problem here is that 'people who kind of look like the people who attacked us' are not foreign, they're here, in Europe. The hot topic of past months was the waves of immigration, and before that it was Islam minorities. I fear that people will retaliate on those communities and it will turn into a civil war. Or even if not, the tension between policies of various European countries RE immigration were high, and overreaction here may just be enough to split us apart.

> My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.

My experiences are informed by what happened to your country over the last 14 years. I've learned that such events can be very impactful.
> because Apple made it, natch

Or because it just plain felt better to use and was available on a heretofore unprecedented scale among people who shape public opinion. But that doesn't allow one to impute some kind of invalidity to the occurrence, does it?
Your numbers are meaningless. The German weapons were modern. The French were not and the UK's were virtually non-existent.

The UK had no reason to declare war in 1939 other than their promise to defend Poland. We went into a global war that lasted 6 years, took half a million of our lives, bankrupted us and caused us to lose a global empire (well that was a good side effect). Bear in mind that this was ~20 years after a previous war after which the general view in the UK was that we would never fight another.
True - which is why they did the cream as well. At the very least, this study tells us that the mindfulness meditation is a 'more effective' placebo than the cream.

It's very hard do really do in a 'double blind' way - I would not be able to think of something that is to all appearances equal to the real mindfulness mediation, but actually only a fake. There's no substance to it.

Do you have any suggestions to do it better?
All warfaring nations have committed atrocities, I'm not denying that and I'd be the first to condemn these actions if they'd be discussed now. What I'm unconvinced of is whether Americans would put their own personal survival lower than the prospect of martyrdom, as long as they don't get indoctrinated by religious beliefs of this sort. It's a similar argument of whether the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge were just a product of their circumstances - no, I don't think so. Their ideology was actively warped to a point where it was detrimental to human survival, detrimental to what our biology tells us to do, and something everyone with a clear mind is IMO obligated to stand up against.

There's a difference between terrorism with clear political goals and terrorism that's targeted at our very way of life. One can be attributed to circumstances and can be dealt with in a more or less peaceful matters (e.g. 'give them what they want'), the other cannot.
woah

> The Google On app will automatically find your OnHub. OnHub will then send a setup code directly to your mobile device via an audio tone. For best results, hold your phone right above your OnHub and reduce ambient noise like music.

Neat method of convenient no-setup wireless configuration. Thanks for posting, haven't realized they've started doing this!
FB's Ephemeral Messages (Pavel Durov–the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia–predicted It)
The prediction:
https://medium.com/@durov/how-to-predict-whatsapp-features-4...
Seems like more research needs to go into preventing traffic confirmation attacks: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay...

"A traffic confirmation attack is possible when the attacker controls or observes the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit and then compares traffic timing, volume, or other characteristics to conclude that the two relays are indeed on the same circuit. If the first relay in the circuit (called the "entry guard") knows the IP address of the user, and the last relay in the circuit knows the resource or destination she is accessing, then together they can deanonymize her."

Interesting technical problem. They patched it, obviously, but similar attacks are still possible. It does say more research needs to be done, when that post was published. Obviously the method they used to send and receive signals from one side to the other doesn't work anymore, but statistical methods presumably do. Sort of like this:

https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=...

Seems like a very difficult problem to solve.
previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554261
Exactly right. The plight of the Palestinians is a significant recruiting tool but that's all it is. ISIS has no plans to liberate them.

The purpose of ISIS is exactly what they say it is. To establish their own state governed by hard-right Islamic ideals. And the reason they have so much support is largely driven from the perceived persecution of Muslims worldwide e.g. xenophobia in Western countries, drone strikes on innocent civilians etc.
Café, croissants, gouter d'anniversaire, et ce soir, j'irais voir Spectre parceque merde (i'm in Paris)

( Café, croissant, birthday party, and tonight, i'll go watch Spectre - as previously planned, because f.. them. )
Since last time this was discussed a few months back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10012360), this became an official Edward Tufte project, rather than just being inspired by his work.
Or more likely, the flowery language is just so much feel-good journalism, paired with the whimsy of a film editing audio technician enthralled by his own doings.
would the Carl Sagan's estate allow his name to be used in a video game made with that idea?

"Carl Sagan's Contact" sounds cool
or swamp gas reflecting off the ionosphere. it's probably nothing so nothing to worry about, move along.
Wait for it to tank, then buy.
> lightly" blame the Israelis, the US, basically anyone except those responsible.

This argument is so stupid.

Everyone is blaming the people responsible. That's a given. The reason people are blaming Israel and the US is because they are indirectly responsible since their actions are used as recruitment tools.
Vector Approximation Based Indexing for High-Dimensional Multimedia Databases [pdf]
Το+Απόλυτο+Πρόγραμμα+SEO+για+να+βγείτε+στην+Πρώτη+Σελίδα+
Context: the French king Charles X was in a difficult political situation and needed money, so attacking the then-Ottoman-dominated Algeria looked like a good idea at the time. The slave trade had stopped years ago, and the pirate activity, while not over, was way down.
Best tool for capturing ideas anytime, anywhere
What do you use to capture those genius ideas when you're on the bus, listening to SoundCloud, at the gym, whatever.

Ideally to collect text, voice, clippings, links, aggregate news, etc.

I've tried Evernote, Paper (albeit a while ago), Trullo, iOS Notes, iOS Reminders, Voice Memo, Jira, even good old paper and pen.
Biking The Ho Chi Minh Highway
The attackers mentioned Syria. The most likely candidate is ISIS, and they wouldn't give a damn to what happens to AQ or their affiliates.
Android 6.0 does those things for you too. (Doze and App Standby)
I love how you combat a shit reply with a shit reply of your own. As if Reddit is a single entity and not a collection of somewhat independent communities
It's important because to start to solve these problems you have to be able to see things from their point of view, you can't really do that if you think they are irrational.
It's not irrational at all.

If your goal is to terrify a nation in order to pressure it to change its foreign policy then it is quite rational. And there are quite a few examples of this approach actually working.
Nope. There were another one about 10 years ago when giant riots happened in many suburbs of Paris. And both these attacks and the riots have the same root cause: a lack of integration of France's african immigration.
Right, duh. I know who Sid Meier is, but I got confused as to his precise association with this article.

In any case, I think we have conclusively determined that neither Sid Meier nor Alex Recker is married to the CEO of Yahoo.
How Should Science Deal with Online Comments?
I love how Vagrant enables testing software on lots of different distributions and OSes. The large box catalog sure beats going through RandomLinux's installer. Unfortunately the successor to Vagrant doesn't seem to support this use case.
I am talking about the multiple versions shipped for compatibility with old apps. It is not easy to access, but look for /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.7.dylib I think. I think it is used for apps compiled using Leopard or older SDKs, which I hope no App Store apps are using, but... BTW, back in the PowerPC days they even used to ship with the even older 0.9.6 (only got rid of it when Rosetta was killed).
The problem with declaring the police as terrorist is that they also have legitimate use and the aren't necessarily directly politically motivated. That said, I could see how someone could claim that the crackdown of the civil rights movement in the US in the 60s could be considered a form of state terrorism. A more obvious example would be something like South Africa under apartheid.

This is of course a slightly academic use of the word. Many people have a hard time seeing even traditional domestic terrorism (like the unabomber) as terrorism.
To be fair the US et al has killed many innocent civilians in the Middle East.

It's not intentional but I doubt ISIS sympathisers see the distinction.
Agreed, reputation is critical for a terrorist organization, just like how gang members brag about how "hardcore" they are because the shot someone.
Just because you allow microphone access does it really mean they can listen to it without you being aware?