skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ...it does make clear that, like the unidentified parties behind those hacks, the agencies found ways to penetrate the “NetScreen” line of security products...

It does? Sounds like this is a rather normal, expected, analysis. They're just reviewing products; probably they already had similar capabilities on IOS and wanted to make sure they could handle other targets or a shift in the market. This does not sound like getting backdoors placed, at all.

I hate to be suspicious or cynical here, but is this just The Intercept being opportunistic? Is there any reason to relate this to the recent "unauthorized code" issues?
I like her writing style. Fun read. Never heard of sonofusion or thought about using sonoluminesence for it. Sounds like some potential albeit with careful measurements & checks. Something that odd & difficult to measure is likely to trip people up anyway. Just the nature of the thing.
>If they hadn't already published it, why not?

I must be naive in thinking that you just don't have a billionaire fund an organization to leak secrets in any timely fashion ;)
Awesome thanks for sharing.

While working at Boeing, their EPP allowed you to purchase Boeing Stock, or invest in a managed fund. This was post 9/11 so their stock was hurting, so I invested 90% into their stock.

These days in the startup world, folks are given Restricted Options, which don't offer a lot of flexibility.

Even with a public event, employees have a 180 day lockup period before they can sell any vested options.
I suppose this is what separates environmentalists from non-environmentalists.

You have a fixed belief that any and every human life is more important than all animals or plants.
I had an issue with this as well. The author implies that startups "often" fire employees before they reach their 1 year cliff to avoid paying out equity. That's silly on so many levels.
They are relying on the employees not knowing better.
Humans like parsing - witness the love for mathematical notation. It takes time to learn the grammar, but after that it's a background process.

Simpler general parsing (eg Lisp) is more powerful, but that's a negative for learnability of the language.
The main problem, as stated in the article, is that he was flying right above the head of the competitors instead of from a distance as he was suppose to do. But that cameraman/marketing company decided instead to go for the better angle, ignoring the risk for the competitors.
I think FreedomBox is a Debian "pure blend" configured to provide self-hosted communication services such as blog, dav, tor, voip, vpn, wiki and xmpp on low-power open hardware such as single board computers, and any other hardware that runs Debian.
It'd be great if they showed us an example of the medium that the talks/communication would happen at a virtual summit like this.
I'm not sure why everyone makes such a hero of Dotcom. He's a jerk who got rich by monetizing other people's work without compensation and in direct violation of their terms and wishes. I'm sure the same people lauding him would be angry if I, say, pulled their open source work and stripped off their copyright and name and claimed that I wrote it and used it to make money. Same thing.

If you want to praise heroes of the open Internet or encryption, there are tons of far more deserving people who create original work rather than profiteering off the work of others.
Using state lattices for motion planning was new to me but seems like an elegant approach:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/rak/www/sites/default/files/pubs...
"No conflict, no interest" -- John Doerr
N64
Does anyone know how to make a portable n64? And if so, can I send you all the parts and you can build me one for an amount of money that we can negotiate over the price. Thanks!
So You Want to Work at SpaceX?
And lobby for more sane tax for employee share options.
I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. This is my opinion; I didn't expect it to receive a warm reception.

If you went to a horse and buggy convention 150 years ago and told them that it would all be gone soon, they would have virulent reaction, right? They would say that metal contraptions have been tried before and failed, that humans have been using horses for travel for thousands of years and if so if humans are involved, it will mean horses. This isn't to prove my point but to draw caution to yours.

Note that I understand your position quite well but that you clearly don't remotely understand anything that I've written. That should raise a flag. Instead of getting mad, you should be getting curious.
I had no idea it existed, very useful, thanks!
Source? I would think things like strict gun control in other countries could lead to a different ratio of murder to other violent crimes.
> my current job pays about $250k, and one year, I invested $100k of that into a startup, leaving me with ~$150k of salary.

Sorry to nitpick, but how exactly does the math work out if the $100k is presumably drawn from post-tax income?
I have been a bit 'off Python' for a while, but this list article prompted me to take a renewed look at it because of Jupyter Notebook, and I have to say I'm quite impressed .. this is a really nice way of working on code, wow .. especially using folium this way is very cool.
how thorough, this article. thought provoking. wow.

gag me.
I think it's funny that everyone is stuck on your $250k salary and not focusing on the point that you were making.
Let's get specific: which actions do you think the USG will take against tech companies and users? Will they really try to make general computation illegal? Surely there are examples among the more totalitarian countries of the kind of thing you're talking about. I think your argument would have more weight if you ditched the rhetoric and focused on reason.
> Who should I be going to in order to have legislation drafted, sponsored, and co-sponsored in the US to prohibit the pursuit of debt that is time-barred (and enforce penalties for attempting to do so)?

Your members of Congress (in both Houses) would probably be the most natural place, but note that the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act goes pretty far in this regard already, in that collection contact activity must stop once the consumer notifies the collector that they refuse to pay the debt [0], and if the statute of limitations has expired, the collector has no further remedies available at that point. Further, the FDCPA prohibits mischaracterizing "the character, amount, or legal status of any debt" and a variety of other false representations or implications; I can't imagine that collection of a legally-unenforceable debt is generally attempted without prohibited false representations and/or implications as to consequences of non-payment. [1]

[0] FDCPA Sec. 805(c), 15 USC Sec. 1692c(c), https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/fa...

[1] FDCPA Sec. 807, 15 USC Sec. 1692e, generally. Same link as above.
To poorly paraphrase Bruce Lee: "When I first started to learn Lisp, I thought it was all just parens. After I truly learned Lisp, I realized it is all just parens."
> Can I ask what the damage is by allowing collection agencies who have purchased a debt to attempt to collect said debt past it's SOL? If you touch a debt (e.g. make a partial payment) it resets the SOL, so it seems there's precedent that a debt past its SOL is still a valid debt.

If the law says you can't collect, you should not be able to ask either. You're relying on someone's ignorance to collect a debt.

> It also seems like a beneficial negotiation tactic for the consumer. Some states have an SOL well below the ~7-year period where it falls off your credit report. So if I live in Louisiana with a 3-year SOL on consumer debt and someone tries to collect a 4-year-old debt, pay-for-delete obviously becomes a much more likely scenario. My credit goes up a lot with the removal of a delinquent account, and the collector makes money off something I could otherwise ignore without penalty.

Again, you're assuming a shred and educated citizen who is attempting to use a loophole (pay-to-delete, which violates a collector's agreement with all three credit reporting agencies).

No. Asking someone to pay after the SOL has passed as the debt is time barred is tantamount to fraud. I've already placed called to Senator Warren's office, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
I think the language itself here is a problem.

Effective regulation is what makes markets.

More specifically, free and open markets work wonders -- but dominant players seek unfair advantage to eliminate the free and open market almost as soon as it starts working.

Some regulation is required to keep the market free and open to all participants, especially as leading players actively change the rules as they gather more resources. But the critical point is that those same players are far more likely to use regulation itself as an unfair advantage as they are anything else. Government is the biggest stick in the room, after all.

So yes, free and open markets work, and yes, regulation is required to keep them working. But regulations do not make markets any more than speed limits create the interstate trucking system.
They must have published it previously, because it's been floating around here for a couple of days. A slide just showing that they targeted Juniper products.

edit:
First picture here:
http://boingboing.net/2015/12/21/juniper-networks-backdoor-c...
I'm not arguing, but I would like to point out that you've just fallen into the same trap I was discussing. According to the article the employees had a chance to sell shares at $3 a share, later it came out that an outside firm felt the shares were worth less. The trap is using information from later to beat yourself up about what you didn't do then.

It is an easy trap to fall into, you're in your own future looking back with more information than you had then, and you are seeing how you could have acted differently for a much better result. And then you beat yourself up for not acting differently. But the truth is it isn't your fault.

But the learning is, be more mindful of choices (and non-choices) and their future financial impact. It is much easier (and desirable) to see the "success" scenario, than it is the "failure" scenario, but if you work it out and sell half when you have the chance, then you reduce future outcomes to "only capturing half the value" and "giving up half the gain". Both of which are more tolerable than "losing all value".
Gender Study Women Pay More for Almost Everything [pdf]
I'm not sure about that. You'd need to research or test to determine that.
The social aspect is what hurts the most. If you refuse to spend money (whether it be alcohol, coffee, or whatever) to meet with someone, you quickly run out of places to meet at. At the more metropolitan cities, luckily there are sometimes still parks you can visit (weather allowing, at daytime), or you can go for a walk. But to live in a suburban wasteland felt like the possibility of doing anything outside of your homes together was slim.

I think this has gotten better, as country starts to address how un-walkable, un-natural much of it is.
The only force, and therefore the only acceleration, when you're in orbit is the force of gravity. And therefore, the only acceleration is towards the center of Earth.

The thing in orbit is already moving with a high enough velocity that it isn't able to get closer to the Earth.

I guess maybe what you're saying, is if you take the velocity vector and apply the acceleration vector over time, that changes the velocity at the same rate as the curve of the Earth.

Either way, there is exactly one force vector (which causes exactly one acceleration vector), not two.
He was also hoping I think to debarb his relentless search to know philosophy. Everywhere he looked it seemed despair, even finding out his famousness in Vienna, did not help him. He was utterly lost, and so looking to children, found some light in their innocence. I've read quite a bit on Wittgenstein, and he seems to always be wandering, as if there is no one thing to explain anything at all. What is energy? Well it exists within the usage, as in, how would you teach a child to use the word?
New CMOS chip can process both light and electricity
Ok everyone is stuck on the bitrate argument and consumer choice. However I'm more focused on if this plan is even possible.

Could Netflix really want to throw so much money at transcoding so many ways? Are there various tricks to do this at a reasonable cost? Like grab random 10 seconds across 15 points in a movie and try just that? Work with top n most popular first? Sort by existing biggest movies?
Major question about this comment.

> They all have the same server farms. Owned by Amazon, no doubt. And there aren’t any technical hurdles. It’s just more computation.

Does Apple use Amazon's servers? I thought Apple ran its own hardware/data centers. I've definitely heard war stories of Apple towing trucks full of racks into the desert so they could bump their capacity for cheap.
Presumably you should direct your anger at the parties responsible for the occlusion and uncertainty here.

If that fails, let's hate on Juniper. In any case, the linked PDF says that they do indeed have current exploitation capabilities for Juniper products and are working on more, even if it initially reads like a product brochure.
> One of my proudest moments was hearing from one of my early employees that even if the company tanked tomorrow that she would not regret it for a moment.

This as noble as you can get in business: truly something to be proud of.
It is quite something that the best objection HN can offer to "Equity has no value" is "Surely it's worth at least five cents an hour."

OK, equity is worth five cents an hour. I admit it! Let's all negotiate with that in mind.
I agree with you on finding branch comments post-merge. I found using merge requests makes it easier, but to be honest, I don't look at comments much after the fact. Making more small branches with merge requests was really helpful for us.

As far as commenting on HEAD, I think they've intentionally avoided that given how fast it could change and not having a deterministic way to anchoring comments to the correct lines.

Related: Tom Lehman from Genius explains some of the problems of fuzzy annotation anchoring in a 10-min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJyqfRcyYIQ.
+1 :) Fortunately this comment is the least expensive way to learn that lesson.
If you can't ask for more of a raise, then yes.

The article clearly wanted you to ask for a raise at at least the granularity of real negotiations. Try getting a $10K raise in exchange for giving up equity.
I think they're trying hard to connect dots that aren't really connected. Glenn gets a little overzealous at times, in my opinion.
You suggest making better the life of the sentient being even if it kills a non-sentient being? What about a mentally handicapped person who is not sentient?
That's how British government "doesn't use drons". They tell US to use drons to automatically bomb a target and kill hundreds of people, whole attack is organised by UK, but technically, it was done by US. In such case UK says in report they didn't kill anyone and US say they rented weapons.
VBR with a mininum bit rate != CBR.

And, to be clear, the article is making a guess that Amazon or Apple are imposing a minimum bit rate to insure some lower bound on file size. I don't think there is really any solid evidence that Amazon or Apple are making decisions based on trying to make file sizes bigger to convince consumers they're getting "more value". I took exception to the premise, which is why I commented above. I don't believe Apple and Amazon are making decisions based on trying to increase file sizes, and I find it weird that the article suggest they are. I believe they are trying to maximize audio quality at smaller file sizes. Evidence seems to indicate that is what is happening.

And, we've come full circle to the point of my initial comment. I don't think the argument he's making about maintaining large file sizes is backed by evidence or a particularly good understanding of consumer behavior/preference. I do think his guesses about the Netflix algorithm are interesting, but his digression into consumer behavior is less so, IMHO.
> …against the constant threat of criminal hackers and foreign governments.

Foreign govts? Rather, "against the constant threat of criminal governments and hackers."
Author seems to think that they'll choose one file as the winner - that's not the case. Each video needs to be available not just in a few bitrates but also in different resolutions, codecs and profiles for broad compatibility with the various player apps many of which aren't updated any more.

While I haven't keep that abreast of video encoding tech I'm surprised people are saying animated shows will take less bandwidth. Typically video codecs use DCTs which are great at roughly approximating complex patterns but do a bad job at solid blocks of color and contrast. The result is ugly artifact especially on the edges. Perhaps things have greatly improved with h.264
> Even with a public event, employees have a 180 day
> lockup period before they can sell any vested options.

It varies, when I was acquired in 1999 we could choose to dispose up to half our proceeds, it was negotiated as part of the deal. I also had an insane 18 month lockout which took me from pre-crash to post-crash and a 144x difference in stock price ($120/share vs $0.83/share)
There are a few people who say that, but I get the impression that most people just want to see some due process, and don't like the undue attention he gets.

Quite a lot of money has been spent taking down pirate bay and Mega and dotcom and etc.
No, we should give up because the goal is bad.
I mean Coursera of course!
I was making a rhetorical point against the idea that it was worth zero. I was not attempting to actually put a value on anyone's equity.

It's quite something that you apparently couldn't tell the difference between those two things.
the transcodes is not where the money is spent. Its primarily on streaming costs. Every company wants to maximize quality and reduce cost to stream. Right now everyone wants 4k streams. The size and cost are becoming ridiculous. Its worth it in the end to use better encoders as well as do what Netflix is doing.
//Edit: Welp, looking at the wrong number is going to hurt my karma a bit. Thanks for the corrections, I'll allow this slip-up to remain for posterity reasons.

One screenshot hurts their entire argument, because I cannot take the rest of what they say at face value. Notice that the $18.49 package gives five razors while the $14.99 package gives four razors. The $3.50~ markup is due to an additional razor being provided. The package is misleading because it is called "Hydro 5" but provides 4 razors as indicated in the bottom right corner of the packaging.

http://i.imgur.com/p3Z2lnJ.png

//End Edit - The above was my mistake of looking at the wrong number on the women's packaging as explained by the replies to this comment.

Tacking on a reasonable counter-argument to the tail end of the article hoping people will miss it is also an annoyingly common practice I see these sorts of hatemongering articles.

And you know what? They probably have a valid point. But they couldn't take the time to carefully make their comparisons, clean the data of any faulty issues (like the razors), and give any counterpoints some proper space. So I'll dismiss it like I would any other topic that tried to do this.

>Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management, said how we perceive “women’s” products could help explain why gender markups persist in the marketplace.

>“Many men's products are not seen as men's products,” he said. “They might just be seen as products in the category.”

>Which makes the “pink” version a specialty product, he said.
reading will make difference
>> The board turns down an $825M offer because they feel it is their duty, given they expect the company is worth more than that.

I remember when Blackberry was in its patent fight with NTP and they made them some insane offer and NTP turned them down, much to the shock of Blackberry. I remember one of the Blackberry lawyers saying, "I'm not sure what they're waiting for, the offer we gave them would give every employee of the company $40 million dollars."

It was a total PR stunt to show the company's employees they were getting screwed by the owners.
> the archives

https://search.edwardsnowden.com/ https://search.wikileaks.org

what more you have?
DagCoin : a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency with a "decentralized" blockchain based on directed acyclic graphs - https://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/dagcoin-v41.pdf

Visual Search at Pinterest - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.07647v1.pdf

Fast Search in Hamming Space with Multi-Index Hashing - http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~norouzi/research/papers/multi_ind...
Have you read about the corrosive effects of welfare on black communities?

No. I have read about welfare reducing poverty. I'm sure you have, too.

Have you ever joined in complaining about the inability of public school systems to successfully adapt and harness changing technologies?

No. I have read about public schools outperforming private charter schools.

Have you noticed that our biggest social problems just "happen" to also be located right where Democratic policies were enacted (i.e., the policies preceded the social degradation)?

No. I have read about liberal policies solving social problems, as usual.

All of these things are certainly at least debatable, but they are also certainly not so obviously false that they can simply be discarded without consideration.

Why not? I just discarded them without consideration, and you can, too.

The question isn't whether or not liberal policies solve problems far more effectively than Republican policies. The question is how quickly you will accept that truth.
Slack ping pong and chess bot
The document was created in documentcloud.org today.
Except I'm reasonably intelligent and still get CBRs because irrationally I don't trust VBR files (and VBRs with DJ software)
I knew Russia lost a lot of people, but I didn't know the difference compared with other countries was so drastic including military and civilians.
Well written article. Good stuff.
> Try getting a $10K raise in exchange for giving up equity.

This will be possible (for people operating in the eng compensation band) at almost any startup you might want to work for. If you ask for this, and they don't at least discuss it with you, it's a pretty strong sign that you don't want to work there.
> Am sure when the first cars hit the road, similar news made it to the newspaper front pages then.

And they were right beyond their darkest dreams. Thirty-two thousand road deaths in the US in 2013.
Do your own thing on the side. Much better than a few stock options. But make sure to have your project excluded in your IP and non-compete contracts with your employer.
Of course startups are a special case, since they often do not last long enough to require a laptop refresh policy at all.
I think somehow Facebook wants to kill the competition , do not want to let innovate the world and want to rule on the internet. There is whole startups group which want to innovate and evolve but due to shitty ideas of Facebook and other operators this will change the whole game only because or their selfishness.
While I don't doubt that's true for closed-source products, would it also be true for open source products? I've heard that some methods of IPSec key exchange are compromised, but don't know details. Would it also be good to suspect OpenVPN's method of key exchange?
"Bachelor of Science degree in physics at Penn's College of Arts and Sciences." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

Sure, he does not have a MS or PHD but he was trained in physics.