skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nowhere near this level, but India is pretty sensitive about maps too.

When entering the country the first "forbidden" item listed on the customs form isn't drugs or other illegal things, it's "Maps and literature where Indian external boundaries have been shown incorrectly".

Of course, I doubt they enforce that, especially since anyone with a phone who has opened Google/Bing/Apple Maps while in a different country probably has the "incorrect" boundaries cached on their phone when they enter.

(we have some border disputes with Pakistan and China)
At least they got a soundbite from some random Linguist before regurgitating a Reddit thread.
In all those cases they were a clear improvement. Bitcoin is almost always a worse experience though.

What ways has Bitcoin improved your life dramatically?
The difference I see with a lot of IoT devices is that they enhance something you could already do manually.

Having a fancy grill that automatically stops cooking my steak doesn't make me incapable of using a thermometer + timer + normal skillet + polling by hand myself. It does make it sound a lot less convenient though.
My one bit of feedback is that if this is intended for holiday gifts, you should not list items unless they are actually shipping. Pre-orders are not good gifts.
"We've coded up the application that will run your business. It has a 80% chance of working correctly roughly 20% of the time with a 95% confidence interval."
I don't know. If you dropped a human infant into a den of bears (more or less the equivalent situation), I don't think it would be the bears who would be at a disadvantage. So even if we were able to create an AI as far above us as we are above bears (a pretty huge if), it hardly seems certain that it would suddenly (or ever) dominate us.
This is how to look at it.

First you need to think of text and binary (bytes) as two distinct types.

The text most of the times is how you interact with user, so things that you will display to the user, or what user enters to you.

Now, the text is stored in unicode (how, it's not our concern, Python abstracts it from us), the bytes is representation how it's stored in files, send over a network etc.

Now if you need to store text in a file, or send over network you need to encode it (most of the time as UTF-8), if you receive data which supposed to be text you decode it. It might be helpful to think of a text as a sound and bytes as mp3. You encode sound as mp3 to store it in a file, and when you want to play it back you decode it.

There are some things can cause a confusion. For example if you write text to a file, python will automatically apply the conversion. Things like that are there so you don't have to do the conversion every single time.
More to your point, he didn't hire extras to port over to Clojure, in fact he fired most of the previous team and replaced them with 4 developers. So his point was that he gained BOTH developer productivity and server costs by doing the move, which improved the cash flow.
It's a great search engine, and gettig better with time ..
If you're dissatisfied with objc_msgSend performance, you can write C or C++ seamlessly - or use that other language that's partially designed to address the dynamic dispatch nightmare.

If you're dissatisfied with JavaScript call performance, you have no choice.
From the article :

"but for many jobs there are too many variables involved day‑to‑day to allow the construction of a representative work sample. All our technical hires, whether in engineering or product management, go through a work sample test of sorts, where they are asked to solve engineering problems during the interview."

Plus a number of other things according to the article.

Sounds like they are agreeing with what I said (at least to some degree), but still asking for something anyway.
You can use 26 bits integers for multiplication without fear of overflowing with IEEE 754 doubles.
Sitting in the theater now, waiting for it to start :)
Several years ago the Chinese government was confiscating lonely planet travel guides at the border

http://www.theage.com.au/news/news/hide-the-guide-warns-lone...
is it an article or is it an ad? who can tell!
To recover costs of licensing
Buying worthless taxicab medallions to circumvent political opposition seems like a fool's errand. 13,605 NYC taxicab medallions at a cost of $600,00 is $8.1 Billion, for an asset that's destined to be worth zero in a few years.
I was thinking more of the Zerodium/Gleg/BoozAllenHamilton class of buyers - who'd on-sell it to, say, the Egyptian or Thai Government, rather than run-of-the-mill carders or identity thieves.

(But yeah, I'm perfectly happy with my life where I have no real understanding of how the black market for this kind of thing works...)
Amen. Now if someone could get DVDs or streaming services to offer fast-forward and rewind that works as well as a VCR we'd be caught up to the 1980s!
Pocket is awesome. I have used is for ages, but can't justify the premium sub.
That could be an interesting weekend project.

I'm thinking roughly:

- scrape the list from http://yclist.com/
- filter the ones that sell a physical product (somehow)
- write a tiny scraper for each site's store (oh god) or try import.io
- (potentially) bake in your referral code for each site
Driverless cars don't have to be custom-built: you can add a kit to an existing car that contains a Linux box, LIDAR, cameras, and appropriate machinery to drive the car's controls. Most of the existing Google prototypes have been Priuses or Lexuses with the kit. IIRC, all the components are pretty inexpensive; by far the biggest cost is the LIDAR, but that's because they're not produced in volume and so you have to pay custom-built prices.
I'd like to see a service where a company's source code/database/confidential info is placed in escrow pending the payout from a bug bounty. Or, perhaps more likely, some sort of 3rd-party arbitration.
It's minesweeper, not an enterprise storage server. Spending 3 hours planning minesweeper would be insane. Heck even planning for more than 20 minutes, in my personal opinion, is overkill. You should be able to at least get started before the 30 minute mark and if you spent half the time planning should be close to being done before the end of the hour. At the end of the hour, just explain what you have left to do.
Sorry Alex, you're in the wrong here. Your threats to go to law enforcement completely undermine the credibility of your bug bounty program. Your publicly calling another professional "unethical" is a serious charge for what is a grey area at best, and the facts and history of issues reported by this person would not lead a reasonable person to conclude malice. And ignoring him but going to his boss, that's just petty.

Not even one attempt to talk to the guy like an adult about what he was doing? You couldn't even be bothered to say anything?

You'd be amazed how a polite reply to the effect of, "thanks, you've proven your point, and we are getting a little uncomfortable with where this is headed" might have solved all of this. If he ignored you and kept hacking after that, by all means steamroll him, but if you don't even have that much respect for your peers, I'm not sure why you bother with the bounty program.
What is China censoring on the web?
> If you're dissatisfied with JavaScript call performance, you have no choice.

Other than the topic of this article?
Apple Push Notification Service Update
What does a green handle indicate by the way? I checked the FAQ and there's nothing there.
Completely right. If the secret server token is compromised, it is presumed that you can fake any data. Should that allow for RCE? That's where Ruby steps in and provides the double whammy.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet working for them. Personally, I would avoid any company that forces you to use a specific type of computer/os without a good reason (such as iOS development or Windows specific). Good companies will let developers work in what makes them most comfortable, whether that's *nix, windows or OSX.
You just simply use it, if specific argument require python 2 sting you simply call bytes() on it.

For example

old_function(bytes(myarg))

if it needs to be a literal:

old_function(b"literal")

That's what I do, and works for me so far.
What the JavaScript job market really looks like in 2016
> How does someone so stupid make it to CEO of a pharmaceutical company at 32?

Same way as anyone else: meritocracy!
Show HN: Submit Your Startup
It pains me to see so many "first world problem" solvers. Nothing can illustrate the problem of the startup tech industry not tackling "real problems" like this list.

And hey, I can't even talk; I make freemium mobile apps so it's not like I'm solving real problems either.

It just sucks and I wish it was sexier and more profitable to go after real problems rather than silly stuff like e-sheets or digital frying pans that perfectly cook your grass feed beef steaks.
This so-called international law is often repeated online, with no evidence that random consumer maps have ever been used to resolve a dispute.

If official government maps shows a certain boundary it is evidence that the government at some point in time accepted that as fact (or pretended to accept it as fact).

Consumer maps are probably meaningless unless the government or local officials were using them and they had no official maps to contradict the unofficial consumer maps. I vaguely recall some embarrassment in India where officials were using unsanctioned maps (but I can't find a link).

As far as I can tell consumer maps (not used by officials) have never been used in an international court to prove a boundary. They can be, at worst, propaganda. There is not, as far as I can tell, any UN or other international treaty which mandate that any rabdom map is evidence of boundaries.

In the Shebaa farms dispute, for example, Israel and UN officials cited official Lebanese military maps as evidence [0].

tldr; It is enough for China to police official government maps and the use of maps by officials, without confiscating maps tourists bring in ... unless it's all about propaganda to support spurious claims, which of course it is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebaa_farms
Datacamp: Intro to Python for DataScience
Agreed. To me as an outsider, this escalation bug looks a max bug, definitely dwarfing any particular admin console vulnerability, and that the processes the researcher claims to have followed were pretty much necessary to show it. Whether or not this followed the letter of the policy, by responsibly reporting the escalation in the spirit of the policy, the researcher has fulfilled the spirit of the goal.
I think the real issue here is the idea that we need to check each and every one of these boxes before pot is legal. We didn't make sure to check each and every box, and think up contingencies for each and every situation that could ever happen before we allowed alcohol and cigarettes to be sold to the general populous.

> So if something comes round that's basically pot, but also sometimes causes instant death in people who take it, we should allow its sellers to operate under our marijuana legislation? And how do you even know if it's 'pot enough' to qualify for marijuana legislation?

e-cigs, vaping, etc. The same thing comes up with cigarette-derivatives, yet we don't ban cigarettes (and throw all cigarette users in jail) until there are laws in place covering all contingencies.
Linux UEFI TPM 2.0 security impacts
Super Mario Brothers 3 for PC by doom creators circa 1990
Lots of network devices don't do any kind of real validation of the updates they get from a remote server, beyond using SSL which only checks that the origin is correct.

A while ago I accidentally stumbled upon the file servers that served updates for a major router manufacturer. The host vulnerability itself was reported and fixed, but I doubt they told their clients (the router company) anything.

In that case, anyone who found the vulnerability could have modified the binary blobs, I wonder if this is a similar case.
The mystery of India's deadly exam scam
Baumol's Cost Disease: this phenomenon is very well understood and documented with great accuracy
Since I'm trying to keep a small footprint, I rely on the system version of Python on Mac OS X, which is 2.7.10 now.

To use anything newer, I'd have to ask users to install a different interpreter, or bundle a particular version that adds bloat. There's no point. The most I've done is to import a few things from __future__; otherwise, my interest in Python 3 begins when Apple installs it.
This response deepens my concern about the situation, rather than alleviating it. In this response, you make it sound like calling this security researcher's employer's CEO was a reasonable escalation of the situation, and that is deeply concerning to me, especially given the actual text of the post Wes published here.

It also appears, based on your post, that you think that stating, approximately, "I hope we don't need to contact our legal teams or law enforcement about this," does not constitute a threat of legal or law-enforcement action, and I also find that deeply troubling. While I think you could make a legal distinction that these weren't technically threats of such action, any reasonable person in the researcher's position would by positively idiotic if he/she failed to feel threatened in that way by such statements.
Genuine question: how exactly would a foreign "internet company" "lobby the Chinese government?" Google literally had to take their ball and leave China at one point because China wouldn't compromise on a lot of things.
I've been toying with the idea of asking for a reverse interview. I get to ask about the challenges they've solved in great detail and how they dealt with potential and actual issues. They get to answer and decide to I know what I'm talking about.
From feedback to live on production in under 4 hours. You rock.
I don't think the piping syntax is a big issue. If you use it more than once in a module, just define something like this: (haven't checked, may have errors)

def pipe_them(args*):
last = subprocess.Popen(args[0], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
for p in args[1:]:
last = subprocess.Popen(p, stdin=last.stdout, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
return last

proc = pipe_them(['something'], ['something_else', 'args'], ['final_one'])
proc.communicate()

Interpolation shouldn't be a huge problem either with `% locals()` (if it's a small one-off script).
Good luck finding an escrow to not only trust, but would be willing to take the heat for that one.

To be a trustworthy escrow, you must have a good reputation or track-record.

There's near no anonymous escrows that could provide a service trustworthy enough to handle this. And going the non-anonymous route would be near impossible, Facebook would litigate an entire country over this.
encrypt with a redundant parity data?
Not really.

Veedrac had a good analogy, think of text as something abstract, for example imagine text is an image or sound, if you want to store it in bytes you need to encode it, and to read back you decode it.

As to_bytes/from_bytes, actually python provides it too:

to_bytes -> bytes(<text>)

from_bytes -> str(<bytes>)
Love the product!
Ok, sorry, you are right. The article didn't show a recipe to get rich quickly. It was more about a "hot to get rich in due time" recipe.

Perhaps I'm just being overly sensitive and cranky.. I guess HN is different things to different people. I know most of us are doing this to make money. I certainly am. But when the discussion turns to purely make-money things that don't have a clear technology angle, I get antsy. (Yes, they obviously have parallels in the teach business, but still.)
That’s more true for Linux than other Unix-like systems. Solaris comes with Bourne, FreeBSD comes with that and csh defaulting to Bourne, OpenBSD comes with those and pdksh defaulting to pdksh, and so on.
Correct, the policy isn't clear and needs improvement. The bug bounty's policy definitely falls under the CSO's purview. So even if you approve of Alex's handling of the matter, you can't forgive him for running a sloppy bug bounty program. It's one thing if he claims mea culpa and says we could do better. But there's not one iota of regret, remorse, or apology on not making things more clear in Alex's response.

If you're going to persecute someone on details, you had better make sure your policy is very detailed, not vague, and not left open to interpretation. In this regard, Mr. Stamos failed.
if you don't mind me asking, how do you really learn about the different models of concurrency/parallelism well enough to be able to compare them based not only on API/programming model but also performance and low-level differences?

as an example,i want to build a web crawler. ive worked with akka actors, and that seems like a good fit because the messaging logic for scraping is simple and it gives me remote distribution for free.. but then i see all these other models and wonder - what is the difference in doing it with Rx or futures etc? is there any difference besides choice of programming model in terms of how these things actually map to low level primitives?
http://statetable.com will give you datasets with US states and/or Canadian provinces, current and/or historical, with or without DC, with or without minor territories & posessions, and with or without military addresses.

Data can be exported in CSV, a PHP array, or a whole mess of MySQL commands to build a table.

It's also open source if you just want the source data: https://github.com/daveross/statetable-com/blob/master/state...
The first one:

> If people's hopes of coding bug-free code in Python 2 actually panned out

Python2 developers wanted to write bug-free code.

code = for the purpose of processing text and binary data

> then I wouldn't consistently hear from basically every person

Python2 developers could not write bug free code. So they complained.

complained = complained about their algorithms having bugs when they rewrote those algorithms in Python3

> that they found latent bugs in their code regarding encoding and decoding of text and binary data.

Python2 code written by the same developers had bugs that they did not know about.

When the same developers rewrote their code in Python3, they found the bugs.

(If Python3 did not exist, then it would be very hard to write bug-free code in Python2.)

The second one:

> We assumed that more code would be written in Python 3 than in Python 2 over a long-enough time frame assuming we didn't botch Python 3 as it would last longer than Python 2 and be used more once Python 2.7 was only used for legacy projects and not new ones.

If we designed Python 3 correctly, then we expect Python 3 to live longer than Python 2. We also expect more code to be written in Python 3 for the same reason. We also expect only old projects will be written in Python 2.7.
Mastering Microservices &#8211; November 2015 Online Meetup
Great questions eecks!

> The problem is that that is not my job. The company wants business people to plan and developers to create - because that makes sense. Everyone's time is used for their strengths.

Why isn't it your job to ask questions and suggest better ways to do things? I'm not saying you should be contrarian, but in my experience the business owner welcomes suggestions for app improvements if done respectfully.

I had the illusion that I understood the business reasons, just because I was familiar with the terminology...but really, I didn't quite have the full picture.

> After you did your MBA, did you take up new responsibilities in work?

Actually, yes. Due to the confidence in my Accounting and Finance classes, I really started to stand out among my peers. It led to a promotion to a lead developer and then I was nominated for my company's "Emerging Leader" program (open to less than 2% of employees).

I have since parlayed it into a director of software development job at a small tech company. When I met with the founder and the management my MBA was a key reason why they offered me the salary I wanted. I get to sit in the management meetings and talk about marketing, pricing, hiring and team size. My Strategy class has given me a framework for focusing on our strengths. My Finance classes have given me an understanding of how to value different projects and their resulting cashflows. My Accounting classes have given me the ability to speak the language of business. My marketing classes have allowed me to talk about market segments and understand why the Marketing team is so insistent that we keep a brand message consistent throughout our products.

> Do you think it would be worthwhile for someone in my position to do an MBA considering I don't feel like you did?

I think I'd approach I'd ask myself the following questions:

* Do I keep quiet in meetings because I lack certainty or confidence about what the business people are saying?

* Do I have 4-6 hours a week for the next 2-3 years I can spend on class and coursework?

* Do I anticipate leading a software team someday or founding a company?

* Do I struggle to gain credibility with influential people?

* Do I think I'd like to teach at a community college or higher?

* Do I lack the motivation to read intentionally, forcing myself to really understand and absorb the information?

If you answer yes to 4 or more of these I think you could benefit from an MBA. I think you could get a lot of the knowledge by reading books from Drucker, Levinson, Carnegie, and Collins. I read a lot of these books too, before I started taking MBA classes. I had knowledge, but didn't have confidence (or a fuller understanding).

Sorry for the long-winded reply...hopefully it's helpful.
This is where I think the divergence between "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" really lays. These vehicles need to be able to generalize and understand motivations, not something that can be intuited via "more data," at least not practically.

Who wants to merge into highway traffic for 500 hours before a machine can do it well? Does it take a human 500 hours?

A tough problem to solve, no doubt.
named blocks in templates! and http/2 in core! it's like an early christmas!

OK I know I have to wait till February... but still
I don't think GNU Mach in itself provides any IO facilities, as opposed to other layers on top (e.g. GNU Hurd). (And neither is a fork of Linux.) I'm not particularly familiar with Hurd, but I had a quick look at the Hurd Reference Manual, and it looks to me like the primary IO primitives are synchronous, and there are a couple of additional calls which provide some asynch support. This is different from the NT/VMS approach, in which the primitives are asynch, and synch is implemented by combining an asynch IO call with a wait for completion.
Why do the policy specifics matter? A blackhat won't be respecting those rules, and won't need to negotiate a reasonable payday with facebook.

The real issue here is facebook's poor infrastructure security and slow response time. If the exploit had been previously reported, why was the privilege escalation still possible? Why did a (supposedly) known-to-be-vulnerable host have access to secret information at all?

The exfiltration of data may have been unethical, but facebook has no one to blame but themselves for it even being possible.