skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'A botnet consists of many (usually hundreds or thousands) of normal home or work computers [running Microsoft Windows] that have malicious software installed on them.'
Sat Nav for iOS when there are no roads beta testers required
Hi chaps, im developing an ios app that is primarily for when you are out on your bike and you want to go on a route, but dont want to need to look at your phone. The app works by accepting a gpx file and giving audable notifications if you go off route. Im looking for beta testers to get this app into a pristine condition. If you would like to test please send me an email address that you can open on your ios device to mcbontempi@gmail.com
This seems a bit like the Planned Parenthood tapes: approach someone with false pretenses, and then report the things they say in the worst possible way.

I would find it much more damning if they found a professor that would change their position for money, rather than finding people that will accept money to forward a position they think is correct.
Mailbox is dead. Where do we go from here?
Wonder if anyone is going to do the opposite - try to buy off pro-global-warming professor to produce exaggerated doomsday prediction - and what the outcome is going to be.
Meet the Man Who Did LSD with Steve Jobs in College
The problem is not that Will Happer's positions, nor is it even that he accepted industry funding for his papers laying out those positions.

> In Happer’s case, investigators said they were part of a “Middle East oil and gas company” and asked to ensure that their commissioning of the report could not be traced. Happer reached out to a friendly Exxon lobbyist who suggested channeling it through Donors Trust, the shady donor anonymity organization that has been called the “dark-money ATM” of North American conservatives.

The problem is the deliberate process of hiding conflicts of interest and of especially hiding funding from foreign organizations.

> Clemente referenced past articles and even testimony in front of state legislatures and said, “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is publised as an independent scholar.”

At the very least, it should be illegal to not disclose such conflicts on interest when testifying under oath.
I appreciate your honesty, thanks. Yes, you have framed my personal hypothesis: the sun has varying radiation even throughout its predictable cycles and has changing magnetic field strengths that interacts with earth's. That variability and the water cycle on the earth accounts for the variability of our climate.

I haven't discredited anyone, that's just my opinion. I'd like to think I've read enough that I can chat confidently at parties, that's all. I think your opinion is fine too, and you have lots of friends at the parties I go to which is always a nice thing.

There is not anything sacred about "scientific consensus". There's always new hypotheses to test coming from outliers in any scientific field, always unexplained measurements to explore. Whenever I hear the term "settled science", I flip my wig. There's simply no such thing. My experiences with researchers at university is there is usually a pet theory chased by the lead researcher and you better toe the line or you get no grant funds. If most researchers are on the anthropomorphic global warming band-wagon then that's where everyone's head is at.

Yeah, well, the ugly vitriol flows both ways, I can attest. What you observe may be people who are grumpy being called idiots all the time and they're just lashing out, and probably just as many intellectually lazy people who like to troll. I wouldn't normally say anything in a forum that counters the popular viewpoint because I don't care enough to take insults, but people are mostly civil here at HN, thank goodness.
Because that, long-term, is the only thing that drives people to Facebook?

"Come join Facebook and get some auto-playing video ads in your face, but no actual content from your friends will be shown!" is not a compelling value proposition for the prospective new user. (Applies to Twitter too.)

It's got great metrics though! So pointy-haired bosses love it.

It's like a restaurant beating and mugging all their customers before allowing them to leave the premises. Average check size goes from $32 to $250 instantly. Awesome metrics! And absolutely no comeuppance could possibly occur.
Yes and no -- if you're bad at A/B testing and analytics, then maybe. However, given that FB is growing to 1.5B people, I'd say that they're doing something right in terms of balancing short-term moves with long-term gains.
Alphablocks and Numberjacks are both great IMO; I think the kids like(d) it too.

The last couple of years of Christmas lectures have been really good family viewing (for our family!), as were the RSC lecture series last year.
When I'm in LA and it's stop-and-go traffic, I find it's best to follow the trucks in the right lane. I average a much higher speed because they don't have the ability to tailgate and slam on their brakes like the most aggressive drivers in the fast lane who are actually causing the traffic jam, and consequently go an even 15 mph as opposed to 0-30-0-30-0, etc.
Apparently Gizmodo has been investigating this for even longer (!) and has a lot of other evidence for Wright=Satoshi too: http://gizmodo.com/this-australian-says-he-and-his-dead-frie...
Dada Mail 9 Released
Also Gizmodo was separately leaked to, it seems, has a bunch of screenshots

http://gizmodo.com/this-australian-says-he-and-his-dead-frie...

if it's a hoax, seems like an awfully long and meticulous one.

[edit - Dang this fell off front page fast! Thought this one was going to be almost Steve Jobs in terms of having a life of its own]
Dora is kind of good for little kids. They learn some problem solving, get introduced to Spanish.

But for goodness sake, all of the programmes talked about here are ENTERTAINMENT.

While I certainly enjoyed the shows I saw as a kid, the current crop seem more suitable for kids to me (ie, more balanced in terms of gender issues, racism and violence). I would rather my kids watched what is available now, than what I watched 30 years ago.
Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money.

You're missing the point.

It's not that this guy was paid off and therefore changed his views.

It's that he published research that he claimed was independent that was not, and in the process neglected to disclose his sources of revenue and conflicts of interest.

Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results. IMO that's getting awfully close to academic misconduct. It's certainly extremely unethical.

Edit:

BTW, "Merchants of Doubt" has covered this territory extensively, so to be honest, I'm not sure Greenpeace has added much to the dialog, here, aside from flat out catching folks in the act.
I hate the fact that no matter how many times I click the "I don't like this" button after closing "While you were out", it keeps coming back.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695695
Could you add an option to edit each value as a number as well as a slider? Sometimes you want to get the same value again, and you can't get the slider in the same position as before.

Loving the app :D
It's become common in Mexico too. I don't know exactly when I first started noticing it, but certainly I've seen it lots in the past year. Most recently an ophthalmologist asking a specialist colleague for a quick second opinion with respect to a condition I have in one of my eyes.
I'm pretty sure people do still care about privacy. It just might not be readily obvious how to profit from such people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10692310
Saudi Arabia accused of trying to wreck Paris climate deal
After having spent almost a year here I have to say that it's striking to me how much old-school tech I meet here. Ppl just starting to dip into cloud, Go/Rust hardly heard of and Rails+jQuery still perceived as the "new" thing.
That said, good ideas and an entrepreneurial culture can flourish on oldish tech and there's no need to obsess over the latest, I just felt the difference compared to the us west coast was striking when i came here.
This convinced me to sell my remaining stock in Twitter. I've been holding out hope that we'd see a return-to-roots focus on what made Twitter great in the early days (an open platform that embraced user-driven innovation). The willingness to experiment with this change indicates to me that they've lost that thread.
Watching the video:

"I've got a couple doctorates... I forget what I've actually got these days".

It's hard to take seriously someone who is trying this hard not to appear self-aware.
We're a group of folks interested in solving this problem - perhaps by building a stable self-funded business around the most widely requested email client features, or perhaps by driving an open source movement in the community. Maybe both. Help us help you.

http://goo.gl/forms/9AVIGXNgkc

Note: All responses to this survey will be shared with the Hacker News community within 24-48 hours after initial posting.
These are good points. If I could, I'd revise my post above to say that we shouldn't de-orbit the ISS until we've used it to build something better.

MIR did not de-orbit until the ISS was well underway. More importantly, while building the ISS we had the Space Shuttle, which was like a temporary space station in terms of its habitat. The Space Shuttle pressurized volume was about 75 m^3, and it had an airlock and a big robotic arm.

In contrast, every orbiter currently under development is a little capsule without either. The SpaceX dragon is only 10m^3 of pressurized habitat, and every other is within 2x of that. These are ferries, not platforms for long-term construction projects in orbit. The ISS is the only option for the foreseeable future.

So I hope, if we want to build an interplanetary spacecraft or more-permanent space station, that we find a way to leverage the ISS to reduce the cost and effort.
Nah, not good enough.
Starts at $5k per month last time I checked.
I suspect that the Xbox's communication with servers is validated using an entirely different certificate; it almost certainly doesn't use DNS to lookup Microsoft servers to connect to (I remember the Xbox 360 didn't). At the very least updates are (and I would be shocked if that key wasn't in an HSM inside a safe).
Fair use means someone can take your creation and build on it. The exact limits of that are determined by the judicial system. Basically under U.S. law you don't have a right to control artworks that you publish—you are merely granted a temporary exclusive copyright with exceptions for fair use.
No, that's crazy talk and I'm sure you know it. It's simply not letting a crisis go to waste.
I don't think the problem is reading tweets. It's in getting followers and how tweets you create are acknowledged.

You are a tree falling and no one is around to hear it. There is a lack of interaction unless you're a celebrity, have outside friends on there, or spent some effort in gaining followers. They need to find ways to break users into small groups who can interact with each other (pretty much the entire appeal of IRC).
Strange—in New York I pay TWC $83 a month for 300/30.

Edit: 300/20
No worries.

Actually, when I checked just now I saw that I can share it since they actually have published a nice brochure about the scheme :).

http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/5572/205427/ve...

Basically the scheme was: get lots and lots of users. Then go to each operator and say.. hey.. you know these users that you are having a really hard time to monetize because you don't have a direct in-app/phone channel to them? We have an app that (for example) 20 million of your customers use every month. Our offer to you is that for a cost for X USD/month/user we will expose your services in the default speed dial of this app that your customers love to use. This worked exceptionally well.
I'm saddened by this because I am not a fan of the current state in mobile where everything is an app. I liked their idea of having 'apps' be about the open web. Sure, native apps can be great but I don't want to be locked in to anyone's proprietary platform.
The Micro VCs Are Coming
Replace 'endmill' with 'precision aperture laser' and the answer is yes. Back at the Optics lab at USC we used an argon laser with a precision mask/plate to may 1uM holes in a substrate at arbitrary places.
most engineers are terrible at interviewing candidates

Well, interviewing shouldn't be their primary role. Skilled engineer(s) are necessary, though, as part of the vetting processes (fact-checkers, if you will) to ensure that skills claimed by the candidate via resume, CV, or recruiter are, in fact, genuine.

Also, including an engineer from within the team being hired for can give a feel for how the candidate may fit in with the team dynamics.
That becomes really obvious in people like Daniel Craig who has blue eyes that appear to glow.
The Power of Mozilla
Hear, hear. Instead of pushing for an alternative against data vampires like Google, they push their own weird cloud services ("Firefox Sync") and... videochat? Didn't they suddenly have some weird, pop-up-by-default videochat thing in one of their recent releases?

I actually always liked the idea of a FirefoxOS. Linux style operating system alternatives could need a proper fucking GUI and general average-user-oriented design. Firefox is amazing at that for a non-profit, they could actually pull it off.
Over half of the articles about Zoloft published in 1998-2000 were ghostwritten and funded by Pfizer ;)

Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation by Charles Barber
My start-up is in LA and we're been talking about moving to SF. This will definitely factor in to our discussion.
Coding as part of the interview process is a reasonable request to ask from the applicant and I'm having hard time to understand your objection to this step.
The new Safari View Controller can use content blockers, but it basically opens a Safari window over the top of the app you're viewing (doesn't adhere to the app's design at all).
No question that this matches the definition of manufacturing consent albeit if he guy was all ready on their side or not.

I wonder if topics like education, biotech, military engagements, and torture are handled in a likewise fashion? A dime per word so to speak.
Those were the actual goals.

Next time you want to spread theories and rumors, check background of who you are questioning ;)

Source: I work at Mozilla and on Firefox OS project.
yeah sorry about that, I'm blaming Wordpress for that one!!
So why should anyone make a content blocker, unless they're someone with a mission to do so, like Mozilla or the EFF?
Has Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Been Unmasked by Wired?
Gizmodo now chiming in and saying Satoshi was 2 people, but basically confirming the Wired article on Dr. Wright.

http://gizmodo.com/this-australian-says-he-and-his-dead-frie...
Just give us a toggle.

A permanent one, not like FB's deal you have to click each time.
I agree that my link isn't useful in light this clarification. I do appreciate you taking the time to expand on your opinion.
I'm not sure you're right but also not sure that you're wrong.

We don't know how many people are going to rely on basic income as main mode of income and why.
Meanwhile, my service cost jumped, so I re-upped for another Xfinity 12 month scam where instead of charging me $75/mo for 75mbit internet only, they charge me $55/mo for Internet in exchange for allowing myself to be listed as a "cable subscriber" in a sad effort to keep their TV subscriber numbers up.

That's right, their margins on internet are s huge they'd rather pay me $20 a month, plus pay the content providers (including HBO!) for another customer, than lose a "tv subscriber".

Nevermind that the cable box sits in my attic for another year.
I haven't noticed that, but I can certainly see that being annoying. I mostly use Tweetbot on my iPhone, but occasionally log in on my desktop PC which where I see the While You Were Out.
While most of us academics may be familiar with the problem here, it's moot in the end. No amount of education or public awareness will fix this. Our only hope are self-driving cars or other forms of transportation -- train, hyperloop...
Funny that today's TechCrunch Disrupt winner is an AI service for music generation http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/jukedeck-wins-disrupt-londo...
yeah.

And as a parent who has held back normal bodily functions for an entire day while they did all the "right" things for their kids, sometimes the safest and best thing for everyone involved is to sit the kids in front of TV and know they will stay put for 15 minutes, so you can go to the toilet and then cook their dinner.

Also, the other day our 4 year old told me he wanted to be a paleontologist so he can find bones and coprolite. He didn't learn those words from me.
It always surprises to me to no end when I see people get any real feedback from the interview. Do these employers not care about getting sued, like everyone els.
The beauty of DNS: No one was affected or noticed the problem. Resolvers just tried another one if they didnt get a response from one of the root servers.
Everything You Should Know About Dreams – Ever
YC Companies most likely. I've been doing C# for 3 years, none of which was in an "enterprise" company. Both were/are small software companies in a SaaS environment on the cloud (AWS/Azure).

I would laugh if a company rejected my proven ability to build giant distributed systems in the cloud because they were built in C#.
You're not happy with an equity investor thinking that his investment should receive priority liquidation preference? Like I understand he might not come across as a good guy. But his comments are specifically about the scenario where a company fails - should the investors or should the founders have preferential bankruptcy treatment? What else could a VC say?
You'll need to get on archive.org then as he is currently going through and deleting all his blog posts.

Edit: well worth mentioning, on this note, that he asks for his associates to edit his public messages, seemingly aware of his terrible writing. Or a knowing attempt to obfuscate these matters. Or alternatively, yknow, not this guy.
I admit to having never watched much Sesame Street, but I think that's a pretty inaccurate characterization of the article. There are several convincing examples of the point the author's trying to make.
The less movement you have, the more you need fiber.
1. I suggest you choose a Java-like language as secondary to avoid cognitive burden. That way, similarities (semicolons, brackets, OOP, etc.) are closer. PHP, C#, and Node are examples.

2. Learn them both. Vanilla JS is good in Node and good enough in the browser. But for things that are really hairy (AJAX, DOM manipulation), jQuery will be your friend.

3. Yes, it is possible. It's all about determination.

4. Just do it. Going through a learning course does nothing if you don't apply it.
I agree that the trend of using false pretenses to "catch" someone is a bad form of journalism, but I feel like your alternative is even worse. What information is gained by showing that a random professor is unscrupulous? In this case, the professors actively helped the journalists obfuscate where the funding was coming from, and ran a think tank where he knew his work would be accepted.
Eh, not really, take this for example:

>The emails and recordings also outline how Happer ran a sham peer-review process through the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a prominent U.K.-based climate skepticist think thank. Happer admits that his papers would not likely be published through typical the academic peer review process. “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”

The headlines are actually somewhat mundane compared to the substance. This is the reverse of the Planned Parenthood tapes.
God, I am so tired of all this.

The things these companies build are inscrutable. Building your own community with these tools with your own values is impossible.

I'm sure they have their reasons, but what I wouldn't give for some stable infrastructure. Far too much ego in these services, far too little service.

That's the point of a service, right? To do what someone else needs, not what you think they need?

Sigh. I'm sure I'll perk up in a day or two, but these companies only seem to help me out when our interests are aligned. Why I should expect anything else, I don't know. But it saddens me all the same.
> Somehow we learned to read without SS :-)

But statistically speaking less of you learned to read, and those that did learned to read less well. The effects of Sesame Street were studied very thoroughly.
Satoshi's fortune (1.5Mbtc) is almost as large as the daily volume (1.9Mbtc) of the entire market... its sudden change from dormant and, for all purposes inert, to "potentially market-destroying" would be way too spooky.

Even a single satoshi leaving one of his known wallets could spook enough people to cause a crash. I can't speak for other investors, but even though I have been long in bitcoin for years, I would be out in a heartbeat, for at least a month.
That sounds intriguing. But.. how?
Microsoft continues to shoot itself in the foot here. Nearly two years ago at BUILD they announced universal apps for Xbox One. A year later the new term, Universal Windows Platform (UWP), was being used and another promise of opening up Xbox to app developers. Xbox has yet to really open up for app devs.

The second leg of UWP's 'write a single app and have it go everywhere' was mobile. We've all seen how that's been going.

The final (and biggest/main) leg is traditional Windows. They whiffed badly with the Windows RT devices. Now all the tablets are running the full-blown OS. That means they all run Win32 apps.

Win32 is good enough so why would a developer port their app to UWP when the first two legs are either unavailable or have a very small install base of customers?
The original iPhone wasn't a platform (didn't have "apps"), remember; it had value without third party support. Persona, meanwhile, has no value apart from its adoption.

Obviously, it doesn't need adoption to "survive", but it does need adoption to succeed in its goals: rescuing users from stupid hack-job login systems.

I would compare it more to Chrome: Google made Chrome with the goal of getting the web to work better for some people, so they could more easily consume Google's various services. You could say that Chrome's bottom line was "increased Google service adoption": if Chrome renders faster and provides more HTML5 features, then Google gets more and happier customers for their products.

Mozilla doesn't have "services" that Persona is a loss-leader for, but there's still that same ROI calculation of whether Persona is achieving its goals, and measuring adoption rate is a good proxy for that.

The important thing, that Mozilla failed to do, was to actually understand what an adoption curve for something like Persona should look like, and what things affect it. They needed to heavily advertise it (to developers, not to users!) over about two years, and then start looking at the adoption curve.
If you want to easily/quickly see how frequently someone tweets before following them a small side project of mine shows that https://www.shouldifollow.com/