skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't bother me if they used remelted chocolate, because it's possible to produce fantastic chocolate bars using ingredients from some of the European suppliers. If the bars are labeled in a fairly ambiguous way, (for example simply saying "Madagascar") one shouldn't assume too much about the ingredients.

That being said, the PR coming out of Mast Brothers is unbelievably arrogant and off-putting. As a chocolate lover, I was excited to read their cookbook when I saw it at the bookstore, but I closed it after reading a few pages. The self-promotion and self-centered attitude was absolutely disgusting, considering that their product is only average among their peers. Producing the best chocolate requires deep respect for the bean as well as for the tastes of the consumer, and my impression is that the quality of their product will continue to be limited by their attitude.

In the big picture, Mast Brothers is still better than 99% of the chocolate out there, so I'll still buy it and enjoy from time to time.
just so we're clear, you're claiming that the Congressional Budget Office -- which creates baseline budgets twice per year -- is operating outside of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 (which requires it to create baseline budgets), and is instead creating budgets that are completely arbitrary.

That's quite a claim.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, you're clearing confusing budget requests with baseline budgets. Everything you've said applies to budget requests.. none of it applies to baseline budgeting.
That's part of the experience you are buying there's nothing wrong with it, there are tons of very subtle things that can make food taste better from how it's presented to who made it (whether it's your mother, S/O of a famous chef).
Those attributes however very rarely survive blind tasting.

Making chocolate in small batches doesn't have anything to do directly with making a better chocolate bar.

There are plenty of very large scale chocolate manufacturers that produce premium products and they have a much better process of ensuring the consistency and quality of their products than a small batch manufacturer, unlike small boutiques they also have the resources and the science to be able to tailor the taste to specific pallets much more consistently.

Going to a chocolate boutique however and buying expensive bars is an experience on it's own which most likely has just as much impact on the final tasting experience as the manufacturing process it self.
Good micromanagement isn't micromanagement, it's just management. At the point micromanagement is beneficial, that means either the manager should be doing that job or the employee should not be doing that job. Both of those are managerial failures.
That's against Hacker News policy to only use the actual title of the article (even if it's a worse one.)

I wonder if integrity will win out.
Bingo. When we think about the steps intuitively, we tend to gravitate toward the median. "How long does this usually take?" is asking about a median in surprisingly precise terms.

Instead we have to understand the distribution, and the mean as well, and add up how long it takes on average, rather than just in the most numerous case.

Further, and perhaps more importantly, by understanding each distribution, you have far greater knowledge about what the expected time will be, and where the delays are most probable; and you can begin to start analyzing where those delays might be coming from in the interactions of all the parts of the system. This is straight-up quality talk right out of W. Edwards Deming, and it's how you start to improve how you produce in general. Good stuff.
There are zippers that cannot be closed like that - the zipper keys lock is fixed on the bag[1]; you can open it with a pen, but you cannot close it again - so you can see that it was tampered with.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t5MPTpy3xU
I suppose technically it could be worse -- he could take Ron Paul's position of forcibly exempting the states from having to respect guaranteed basic rights (Ron Paul has campaigned on literally rolling back that part of the Fourteenth Amendment).
Thanks a lot to the team for these improvements

As a normal man, in addition to the technical changelog, what would be interesting for me to have is a list of software that can now be run by wine, or that have a significantly improved experience with this version compare to 1.7
I'll bite, downvotes notwithstanding :)

One advantage of the Java is that the interfaces are named, type-checked documentation. Yes it's more verbose, but a maintainer of that code can understand exactly the intention just from the interface names, without having to decipher it line-by-line.

For the Clojure code, after you've added enough comments to explain what you're doing, so that the code can be reasonably maintained, then it's the same size as the Java code, but without the type safety.

Granted for some of the simpler patterns like strategy, Java's verbosity just gets in the way, though much of that has been simplified in Java 8. FWIW I prefer Scala over both in all cases. But if Scala didn't exist, I'd prefer Java for the enterprise use case, and Clojure for the small applet use case.
Basically, Dual EC is never something you'll choose willingly, given alternatives (it's quite slow and has had a slight bias demonstrated). So no one* did in practice. This made the backdoor almost a non-issue (so no heartbleed-like panic to patch, etc.).

However, having it in the standard (since removed) is perfect for fallback-like attacks or surreptitious changes (in the best case, your target has already implemented and deployed your exploit code and all you have to do is throw the switch to enable it!). That's what this is demonstrating (though some of the details are still speculative).

* Exception being those paid or required to do so by NSA.
Perhaps, but this does not help one own an electric car in the near term.
How'd you know!
Dads Behind Bars Hold Their Kids for the First Time
Why not just scan for cameras and simply tell that there are some cams in the local network?

You can then search for them and simply place some cloth on it? Might be more legal.
It's also a pretty good summary of the role that the military fill.
In fiction hunches work well, in the real world there far less valuable.

In terms of mass shootings Muslims are far from the most common profile. Seung-Hui Cho aged 23 for example killed 32 people and wounded 17 in VT on April 16, 2007. Jeffrey Weise, a 16-year-old killed 10 in Red Lake, Minnesota. 21 died at Columbine.

Go though: http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-rampages/ they don't really fit just 1 or 2 profiles.
It happens in New Jersey too. What typically happens is there is an unexpected layover (say, due to weather), so the victims take possession of their luggage (with firearm) without malicious intent when they go to a hotel, and get arrested the following morning when checking in. In that situation, the proper (only?) course of action is to refuse to take possession of your checked luggage.

While traveling through a state, one is supposed to be protected by FOPA [0]. An uncharitable (technically correct but against the spirit) reading of the law is used by New Jersey and New York to harass gun owners, as in this case and in other more egregious cases.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act
Untethered lowRISC release
Stop and consider for a second how crazy this page is:

https://kb.juniper.net/InfoCenter/index?page=content&id=KB28...

Dual_EC is a PKRNG. PKRNGs are a kind of crypto random number generator (CSPRNG). All the crypto keys in modern cryptosystems come from CSPRNGS.

PKRNGs are special because they embed a public key in the generator. Anyone who holds the corresponding private key can "decrypt" the output of the RNG and recover the generator's "state"; once they have that, they can fast-forward and rewind through it to find all the other numbers (read: crypto keys) it can generate.

Juniper is here saying that they recognize the problem of Dual_EC --- it's a PKRNG, and the USG may hold its private key.

So instead, they generated their own private keys and embedded them in the CSPRNGs of the VPNs they sold to customers.

WAT?

But see also this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10764359
So let me get this straight. In order for attribution (credit to researchers) to work correctly, we should require them to publish anonymously?

I don't think there is a free lunch here. Either you are using publication record to determine who should get paid or tenure, and then you will have problems with bias, or you are not doing that, and then the authorship of the papers doesn't really matter too much.
Yep there have been many submissions critical of AirBnb that were silently removed from the front page in the past.

I am surprised this is still holding up.
Refactoring is a breeze when your editor is connected to the repl, you should try clj-refactor for instance.

I'm not sure what you mean with the typo story since most of the functions in your program should be free of side effects you should be able to test them as you write them.
What makes you think this isn't?
There is a lot of software for Windows. The time it takes to test even a small set of software is likely significantly larger than producing a new release.
Apple CEO Tim Cook Is Absolutely Right (And Wrong) on U.S. Corporate Tax Policy
It looks like the script uses arp-scan to detect cameras. That is an ethernet-level tool so it will detect only devices on the wifi network your computer is connected to, not all networks within range.
Is this going to become the primary case study on why back doors are a bad idea?

If so, it's important to get a quality layman's explanation out fast, and this is the framework of a great one.
The slogan of the project is right now "Start a movement". That's also the start screen, at least on the FairPhone 1. So if you think modularity is good because it's fair, then you should consider buying it.

The FairPhone 1 also has its drawbacks, in particular not all materials are guaranteed to be fair. Also the GPS driver/software sucks. I guess if you buy the FairPhone because of hardware/software, you'll not become happy. If you buy it because you believe that phones should be fairer, than you might get really happy with it... ;)
Which stops them from happening again.

Edit: also, cameras don't have to be secret. Knowledge that they're being recorded can often stop it happening the first time.
No. It is vitally important for NSA not to call attention to their crypto backdoor --- remember, this was inserted in 2012 --- and external tampering with the PKRNG in a VPN device is a smoking gun that Dual_EC is not a benign standard (still a plausible claim in 2012), but rather a surreptitious key escrow mechanism.

No. It is not at all plausible that NSA backdoored ScreenOS in 2012 in order to rekey their backdoor.
Python 3 Statistics Module and Salaries
I wonder if that's going to be demonstrated to be a true statement, and further whether the tampering Juniper discovered will have disabled that second step.
It occurs to me that the folk most likely to see this advice are those least likely to follow it.
Amazon Seeks Cargo Planes for Air Freight Operation
This doesn't have to be an either/or situation. There is no reason you can't go looking for a part-time job in the industry and frame it as "looking for a job to help get your through college." Sometimes, employers have a hard time filling weird slots where they want and need quality candidates, but it isn't a full time gig or has odd hours. That might be the perfect thing for a full time student.

If you get said gig and feel like the usual course load for full time is a bit much, you can look at what the minimum hours are to be considered full time to keep whatever grants and the like you may have that are dependent upon full time student status.

When I was in college, typical course load was 3 classes each worth 5 credit hours for a total of 15 credit hours. But one quarter I took the minimum of 12 credit hours because I needed a break from the pressure but did not wish to drop out. Later, I took an overload, 4 full time (5 credit hour) classes for a total of 20 credit hours that quarter. I had to get approval to do it. I think 18 hours was the point at which it was viewed as an overload.

So dig around in the college policies a bit and consider looking for part-time jobs that would help you get your foot in the door.

Best of luck.
> You had a fair amount of their time allocated for you solely and more of that time for your class.

Talking (and not teaching) to 200 ppl over 2 hours is not time allocation to "me". That is something I could watch without the presence of the teacher. There is no added value in this case compared to any MOOC class.

University courses should follow the possibilities what technology has to offer and focus on really teaching. The rest can be watched at home.

> Now, it was 100% your responsibility to extort all the bleeding edge knowledge from them.

Yes, 18 yrs old kids have the power and character to chase and force teachers without a backfire. You might be such character, but not everyone is such persuasive as you, yet they can be a great scientist.
The typical PERT three point distribution is better than assuming the mean, but does have a few drawbacks when modeling joint probable outcomes. I honestly can't remember if it over our under represents the optimistic or pessimistic result.

The other quirk is that it breaks down when you map from effort or work to duration, the actual time something takes when you factor in availability, interruptions, communication costs, etc.
I've played with Scratch with my kid. Diagrams quickly get cluttered. I have never seen DRAKON before. I like that there are visual rules to decrease clutter and impose a logical ordering. Very interesting take on visual programming, I'm glad I took a look, and would urge others to do so too! Thanks for the post.
Would definitely love to have a web site where I can go and look up a no-nonsense report on the quality and truthfulness of "artisanal" brands.
Section 103.(a)(2)

103(a)(3) also requires them to share, when possible, with the general public.

In the Senate CISA draft, the language about "entities" is a little confusing. "Entities", unqualified, are private companies; government agencies are "Federal entities".

One the few changes in the budget bill CISA is to have the law now refer to "Federal entities" and "Non-federal entities".

I'm sure Techdirt found a way to spin that into a conspiracy to chopper away the Open Whisper System developers in black helicopters.
That's a good point, but it has two issues you should consider.

First, the industrial world also had significant issues with project definition and understanding. The problems were not already solved, and the process, inputs, outputs and the whole system was constantly changing. Every project was already about problem solving and scoping. So there's a bit of rose-colored glasses toward the past here.

Second, the idea that time estimation is no longer applicable is probably off. There are two separate problems: problem definition, and problem solving, and estimation is extremely useful in the latter. Problem definition is a different problem that still needs much focus, but it doesn't preclude the need for better understanding of time to coordinate other processes and dependencies. You might be saying that those dependencies aren't as important as we think, and I tend to agree, but that's a different argument.

Generally speaking, the idea that knowledge and skills from the industrial era are no longer applicable is untrue. There is a huge body of knowledge about how products are made and built that have 99% applicability to software and technology in the post-industrial world. This is because the problems are the same: management of people, leadership, understanding interactions within complex systems, understanding statistics (the importance of which this article proves profoundly), and improving the spread of knowledge. This is the way that Toyota began operating in the post-WWII era, the way W. Edwards Deming modeled companies, and the way that the current Lean movement guides you to improve almost any business. It's highly relevant.

The main point we should take away, is that time and estimates are not constraints on a system; but rather outputs that are predictable and follow statistical patterns. We can use those outputs to make better decisions, especially if we understand the whole process of production in a systemic way.

Estimation need not die. It's a tool for good in the hands of a systems thinker.
The backdoor possibility was known in 2007 and the standard included a way to set your own constants (which no one used, true, but just because it was true for Dual EC in general).

I disagree that following the standard on that point and creating your own would be a smoking gun that the standard is malicious. Rather, it could be a smoking gun that this implementation was. If the tampering would likely be detected anyway, I'd argue it's better to avoid attribution.
Is there any reason to use a triangular distribution these days? I can see it made sense in the 1950s, but now it should be trivial to use a more accurate distribution.
A typo would yield a "Unable to resolve symbol" Error in Clojure and a Warning in Clojurescript. Both at compile time.

Cursive IDE (IntelliJ based) has no problem renaming functions.

These are all tooling issues, not specific to Clojure nor Dynamic Typing. Give it time & give it a try!
What begets all three?

Improve the system, improve the world [cheap, fast, good] lives in. Still have to balance, but you're now balancing cheaper, faster, and gooder.
The 4s is now in the 4-5 years since release category.
I wish we had something that tracked news articles and noted when they changed without either an inline note about the change or an update at the end. It would be like the snopes of news journalism, and we could get some really interesting statistics from that with regard to the journalistic integrity of different sources. There's a large population of people that could do with some good evidence to force them to be more critical of certain news sources.
A somewhat related tip that works in SqlServer (not sure about other dialects) is to put the column alias first rather than at the end of a calculated column. E.g. rather than:

SELECT
Foo,
Sum(Baz) AS Bar
FROM Quux

Use instead:

SELECT
Foo,
Bar = Sum(Baz)
FROM Quux

The advantage here is that the names also line up neatly and the shape (column names etc.) of the result is obvious.
Great idea and execution; already discovered a super-useful service, Bulk Resize Photos.

Not sure if this is a feature or a bug: when one clicks on the "comments" line, it opens a right-side panel for the current item; if one clicks another comments line, the right-side panel is updated with the new item => so far so good.

BUT, when one clicks on another item while the right-side panel is open, it doesn't update said panel; it opens a new tab to the item's website, but the panel doesn't change, so that when one comes back to OH, the panel doesn't match the last consulted item.

It's probably not an easy fix, because, what should happen when one opens more than one item?

However, since the comments pane is super simple, maybe it would make sense to open it under the corresponding item instead of to the side, so that it's visually related to the correct item instead of being in a generic location?

My 2 cents. Very cool initiative anyways.
How 9/11 almost didn’t happen
Costa Rica boasts 99% renewable energy in 2015
I shared this with my bosses on slack and the subtitle for the link on slack is 'Possibly because your boss is an idiot'. FML!
I'm just here because my compile times are slow. 3 hours later… after 12 tweets, reading 6 articles, filing a GitHub issue, and watching a show on Netflix… what was I building?
My son keeps telling me about some study that found that optimists fall further behind than pessimists, but it wasn't what they expected. They expected (as a made up example) that if it required 30 days, pessimists would estimate 40 and perhaps come in on time and optimists would estimate 20 and not make it. Reality was more like it would require 40 days and pessimists would estimate 30 and optimists would estimate 20. They both got it wrong, optimists just got it more wrong.

Another issue: It is really common for people to "take some well deserved time off!" when they finish some piece of the project earlier than anticipated, thus flushing away time that could have helped out on parts that will take longer than expected.

Cuz: Humans.
Excellent, definitely going to read this. I would like to see this for Haskell, though. And some Lisp idioms (from On Lisp, for example) could be thrown in for a good measure, too.
Run, Hide, Fight, is true in stress situations.

In normal situations the human mind is a lot more complex.
But in stress situations, it's actually a good description of a humans capabilities.
Your thing is too hard man, you need to break it up into bite sized chunks :)
There's more to it than your easy fix, the article alludes to it but does a poor job of covering it: if you know the distributions of the intermediate steps, but you only sum the means of the steps, then you are throwing away data that could help you calculate a better estimate.
The fact that you could use Dual EC to implement a backdoor was known in 2007, but it wasn't taken especially seriously; Schneier, for instance --- long a critic of elliptic curve crypto --- publicly cast doubt on it.

It is certainly not the case that any part of the US Government acknowledged anything hinky about Dual EC in 2012. The notion that Dual EC was a cryptographic standards backdoor would have been one of the more closely guarded secrets in the entire government.

Virtually everything we now know about Dual EC is a result of the Snowden disclosures and the followup work people like Bernstein and Lange did in the wake of those disclosures. When analyzing stuff like this, it's important not to project knowledge we have now back before we had it.
sure, I'm not saying the team should take the burden of doing the testing on a given set of windows software (even the 100 most popular one, whatever it means)

What I wanted to express is that, as I guess the development is followed by a community of people to which it has been said that future version of wine will fix their current compatibility problem, they may have got some feedback of said people "hey cool now whateversoft version x.y works" and gathered a list of said software, especially if it does include some big names.
Why the Juniper Backdoor Problem May Be More Complicated Than It Seems
> it just doesn't work at an enterprise level
Elaborate?
This is what I do for my tool bag. I also leave a note inside with a couple more zip ties taped to it, asking whoever is going through my stuff to please zip it again. Somewhere near 80,000 miles traveled this year and it seems like a decent solution.
Most bags can be opened and closed with a ball point pen WITHOUT A TRACE completely bypassing any locks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpIJVWXsBBI
Let rich fucks get cheated. If the shit isn't good you don't need a "service" to tell.
I was drinking in that pub a couple of weeks ago! Inexplicably, it has no monument or plaque commemorating this feat of equestro-aerial navigation.
If the 'shills' are wrong, then the peer review should take care of them.

The whole problem that this proposal is trying to eliminate is a combined problem of discrimination (for various reasons) and cargo-cult/groupthink; calling someone a 'shill' is an example of at least the first of these issues.

If the peer review process cannot successfully refute claims in a paper, and has to resort to name-calling, that is a sign that the reviewers are either incompetent or lazy (, and that there may be fundamental flaws in the peer review system).
Or use HN to "sharpen the axe": focus on reading stuff on HN that is actually useful to your goals.

Voila! Guilt-free slacking.