skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alrawi can’t be downloaded from Google Play. Instead it must be installed from shady back alleys of the Internet.

Well, there's your obvious solution. Get a copy of the APK, wrap it with some spyware, then propagate the bugged version. If ISIS won't host the source or can't provide an "official" outlet to grab it, you've got no way of knowing whether your version is legit or not.

Who'd have thought the paradigms of shady Russian download sites could one day save the world?
You're right, I just created an issue on Github. It should be fixed soon.
Well, I spoke to MS licensing person from Warsaw 3 months ago and she was sure about the need for an external connector license if you don't want to pay CALs (costs around 100 CALs if I remember correctly). What is your source of information if I may ask? Or maybe you can point me towards a publicly available document?
Too good to be true: when overwhelming evidence fails to convince
And there go the arguments for putting back doors into commercial encrypted messaging platforms. When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.
There's no psychedelic automatic color-cycling, but you can cycle colors with the "Offset" slider in the "Colors" tab.
David Bowie honored with his very own lightning bolt constellation
> Apple and Google could easily kick apps used to organize violence out of their official app stores. But would they be willing to build further barriers to usage directly into their mobile operating systems?

Similarly car manufacturers should stop making models that are used as getaway vehicles for bank robberies...

It sounds silly now I put this like that doesn't it.
In terms of resource use, that is a spectacularly efficient solution. They are not "shouldering" a burden, they are using existing capacity to a fuller extent, which is just about the most efficient solution to any problem anywhere. It's cheap and gets the job done.

Also, frankly, if you're unwilling to follow the local code of conduct, you deserve an asbo/death sentence/stern tut-tutting and disapproving glares.
We recently explored putting about 25 of our VMs in Azure.

For our workloads, Azure is a worse deal. Broadly, we found that compared to EC2 instance types, you paid a slight premium of 20% or so to get 2x the RAM and 100s of gigs of ephemeral SSD storage (vs little or no SSD storage), while taking a perhaps 30% hit in CPU performance.

It's not terrible, and depending on your workload, might be better than EC2. I'm personally very partial to Amazon's spot instances and t2 family types, neither of which Azure offers.

Even so, compute only represents ~25% of our AWS bill. For enterprises who have significant Windows/AD investment, Azure might be a no brainer from an ops cost point of view.
Had look and I get totaly different pricing (higher mostly), Central US/USD prices and couple examples:

INSTANCE	CORES	RAM	DISK SIZES	PRICE
D1	1	3.5 GB	50 GB	$0.14/hr
(~$104/mo)
D2	2	7 GB	100 GB	$0.28/hr
(~$208/mo)

So D1 same and yet D2 twice the price!

A2 is $134 for same setup.

Note they mention discounts for 12 months prepaid, though not exciting and talking 5% discount and you have to be spending $6000 to qualify for that over the 12 month period.

Certainly seems, use of proxies and your location effect what you are quoted and I'm located near London and used the Opera browser, so who knows.

Certainly indicates that shopping around, even if your hitting the same price page, is prudent.
I'd be curious if anyone evaluated the fluctuations to look for a signal. If aliens had the technology, dimming a star might be a smart way to communicate with less advanced civilizations.
International sanctions against Iran lifted
Iran Releases Four Americans in a Prisoner Swap
> But rather than address that spillover issue with money/time/new bricks, yet another code of behavior is to be enforced

Well it's the opposite isn't it, the current code of behaviour is being removed if anything. You suggest simply building more escalators? How would that not cause yet more congestion problems due to infrastructure upgrades?
Not a fan of these lengthy "storytelling" articles so I stopped reading and did a quick search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Dinke...
Couldn't you store the energy? Perhaps as antimatter?
Whether or not you like the delivery, it is a reasonably good point. Personally, I'd have loved to read a little more how to do it right and a little less why.

The how to do it right is important because WebGL adoption is growing, and plenty of sites actually require it, as opposed to only having a tangential demo or fancy logo on it that isn't strictly necessary. If your site absolutely requires WebGL, and you block browsers incorrectly, you're hurting your site drastically.

I don't know what the best way to do it is, and I'd love to hear what other people do. My current thinking is: don't screw around with user agents, of course. This might be where the OP's complaint came from, because if you try to whitelist compatible browsers, new ones will always break immediately.

A better approach is put a canvas on your page, try to grab the webgl context, and check whether it failed. That way, if webgl can work, it will, and you only block people who have it turned off or actually have on old browser.

The message that announces the reason for failure is important, IMO. You can put up some explanation for how to fix the problem, because sometimes its fixable, or you can do something off-putting that only says 'fail' and chase people away.
If there’s one useful outcome of the research of Pavlov and Freud and their peers, it’s the scientific discovery that humans are distressingly easy to manipulate into wanting things they did not want before. Ten years ago, the modern smartphone did not exist, and now I bet you don’t want to live without one.

In this case, we have the big media, big industry, and big government in a huge orgy of bribery and self-interest, that all benefit from people accepting authoritarianism. There’s a relief valve, a small minority of people getting their political analysis from Comedy Central or their security analysis from Bruce Schneier, but the vast majority get their talking points from people who are funded to act like there is still a debate about climate change.

It’s not technically against our will, but our will has been manipulated.
If you walk while on the escalator, you spend less time on it, and gain less of an advantage from using it.
More likely, someone who hasn't programmed C++ in the last 10 years. Forgetting auto, and using the cumbersome 3-part for loop with iterator boilerplate when you only need value shows age. Initializing the list is also easier now, with initializer lists syntax, so you could just do:

list<string> lst = { "tomato", "grape", "apple", "orange"};

and cut another 4 lines, making the C++ line count half of C version. Not a negligible difference, as the author claims.
> you can't turn a C string into a std::string without copying.

C and C++ use value semantics by default. std::string is a value., a char* is a reference, so this shouldn't be surprising. If you want an immutable, zero-copy, drop-in replacement for std::string, use boost::string_ref (a variant of which will soon be standard). It'll give you a memory unsafe (just like a char\) reference to a C string or* a std::string. Want to wrap a C string safely? Use it in combination with unique_ptr or shared_ptr<char> (for exception safety).

> Copies of std::string use copy-on-write,

Actually that's explicitly forbidden by the standard, since C++11. The interface for std::string always assumed mutation, which made COW really inefficient.

> which may create hidden race conditions when sharing data between threads

The COW versions of std::string, that I'm aware of at least, were always thread-safe.
> What are the chances it was created by one of the intelligence agencies?

I came to the comment section to say that exact same thing. If I were one of those intelligence agencies it would be tempting to use the information right away but for it to be truly effective, you'd need to let it propagate pretty far. What a field day for intelligence agencies even if wasn't planned by them -- just one thing to bust and they have everything.

Is this story even serious?

Using modern smart phones for "business" at all doesn't seem like a good idea if you are in the cross hairs of a modern military force.
I think your view of what science is is a little too narrow. "Aliens did it in a way we don't understand, yet" is a hypothesis, which could be supported or refuted. The famous quote by Asimov is 'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That's funny..."'

We've got something funny here, which may be (probably is?) nothing new, or may be exciting.
For what its worth - "More than 20% of Azure VMs run on Linux" (Oct 2014) [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/msftnews/status/524262781592539136
It is efficient only when the escalator is running near capacity, not when the escalators are less than 1/2 full. I suspect that this experiment will result in new rules to be applied 24/7 no matter whether they are anywhere near capacity.
Here's where the casual Bayesian reasoning that Daniel Kahnemann champions in Thinking Fast and Slow can come in handy.

What's the base rate probability for believing that unimaginable alien supertech exists? Is it even 1% at the moment? Now tweak that base rate based on this new ambiguous evidence -- evidence which experts seem to think has a natural explanation.

It doesn't rule out magic alien tech. But it doesn't make it all that much more probable either.

If you want to be more rigorous about it, what's your confidence that we will discover compelling, if not irrefutable, evidence that alien supertech exists in the next 5 years? Wager on your favorite online prediction market accordingly.
This is a good question. I don't know of one.

There are some issues I've seen while trying to run systems there. Some of the network configuration there is very strange, and I've seen some crazy performance issues. Their API is very painful to use as well. Lastly, they run an agent on your node that can gain someone root access (worse than Linode's ability for someone to do that). Finally, their control panel has a basically unlimited session lifetime. I don't think I've had to log in once within the past 60 days.

I've found that systems running in Azure reliably perform worse than AWS. Systems in Azure with about the same CPU and RAM have worse performance by anywhere from 2x to 10x. I'm using this based on seeing things like GC run times in both Go and the JVM. The systems report 0.00% CPU steal, no idea where the bottleneck is.

Their network also leaves some to be desired. One of the biggest pain points is that they drop ICMP Echo / Echo Reply on the edge of the network. So doing network troubleshooting across the WAN is challenging. Another issue is that they seem to often either drop or de-prioritize UDP packets within their Fresno location. This causes some issues with software that uses UDP for communication. With that are the weird, and confusing, mix-match between NetworkSecurityGroups and Endpoints, with only one of them being configurable in the UI.

The last thing is their API and the SDK (at least Ruby). Their API is an XML behemoth with incorrect documentation (e.g., the example URL using a wrong path in the docs), and severe performance problems. There are times where the API takes over a minute to respond to a request, sometimes taking longer to respond with an HTTP 500. Their Ruby SDK, at least, isn't so much as an SDK as a library that's meant to be consumed via IRB.

Lastly, the nodes all run an agent called WALinuxAgent. This allows Azure to take action on your node without your approval. It can also do things like add new users to your node, and give then full sudo access. This is also done without a reboot, so you have no indicator that someone just took this action on your system. Scary!

I've also seen this agent get weird responses from the endpoints it talks to causing it to think it should reprovision your node. It proceeds to then rewrite your SSH host keys, vomit an exception, and then exit. It's brilliant.

Trying to get help from support is impossible. I've had issues with the quality of the responses given, but also issues with them just never responding to open issues. AWS's support team should be commended in comparison.
>perfect examples of Pieter's point.

Please consider the precise argument I was responding to.

Pieter's point is a stronger statement than just the existence of "different styles". (Every significant codebase by multiple people has multiple styles -- e.g. see Linux distribution.) He was stating that there was a cause and effect such that the different styles ("dialects") cause "isolation".

If so, it means Apple's Swift compiler written in C++ on github[1] should be getting near zero forks and pull requests. In his theory, Chris Lattner and his dialect of C++ should be "isolated". It's also possibly unintelligible C++ (although I haven't looked at it yet).

If it was just one of those throwaway sentences to troll people, then fine. My first impression was that he wanted his programming guide to be taken seriously.

I enjoy reading C++ criticisms. The criticisms in the C++ FQA by Yossi Kreinin has interesting points. I'd prefer it if the faults of C++ were accompanied by evidence.

[1]https://github.com/apple/swift
The author is wrong, Adorno for example heavily criticized mass culture (Disney, E entertainment, celebrities gossip, etc) as pure garbage that distracts the masses from real topics.
Read
The culture industry enlightenment as mass deception
Also: The Perverts guide to Ideology
And if you're feeling adventurous, John Gatto's books
The NFL in L.A.: Inside the long con
No, there are already satellites and other sensors that continuously measure slight anomalies and variations in the gravity field. They can account for that. The best known are the GRACE satellites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_E...
Is it productive for anyone here to track down the apk and look at it (and disclose findings)? This seems like an instance where the infosec community shouldn't shine a light on bad crypto. Let ISIS use (potentially) bad crypto if they want. Leave it to government(s) to identify and exploit weaknesses.
Ultimate++: a C++ cross-platform RAD framework
Couldn't this be an Atom add on? Isn't that there purposes?
Surely it can't be that hard to create a chat app with end to end encryption these days with all the open source libraries freely available for all kinds of applications...this is why I've always said banning encryption on major platforms like iOS/Android/Windows will get you nowhere when terrorists can just make their own encrypted chat apps if they really want to.
That's a straw-man. There's plenty of evidence that even limited non general purpose AI will harm the job market enough cause massive social issues; I was very clear, general AI is not necessary for these things to be problems. Self driving cars alone will cause massive unemployment across many sectors over the next decade as it becomes common and unemployment need only get so high before social change is forced.

As for the inevitability of general purpose AI, that's not an unfounded religious belief based on nonsense from the ignorant, it's an obvious and practical step that will be taken because there's every reason to believe it's possible and no reason to believe brains are magical and intelligence isn't achievable, and tons of the smartest people in the world are actively trying to do it. Informed and logical predictions are nothing like superstition and to say there's no evidence is just willful blindness.
It depends. Sometimes the best time to speed is when something else is already accelerating you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect
False dichotomy. I have never voted for a major party candidate for president.
Doesn't explain how to stick to the hard goal of burning a $100 bill every time you don't go to the gym. I just know that I would stop doing this as soon as it came time to burn the money. What do I do when I don't burn the $100 bill? Burn a $100 bill?
they are talking about restricting the OS from running third party or side loaded apps
>A program in a general purpose language cannot reliably continue after an error (without logic to handle that situation). Later steps depend on the earlier ones having executed correctly in every detail.

I don't understand this statement. Obviously, the program cannot preform correctly, but that may not matter. For example, if a web page caches content on disk for the future, but there is an error. It may not matter that the particular disk write failed without any additional logic. The error would just cause a slightly longer load time next time.
Yes, that's rather obvious. I'm pointing out why kabdib's perspective is mistaken. Kabdib makes it seem like companies and politicians are going to botch this, and that we'll soon see these measures rolled back.

I'm sure companies and politicians know very well that while you might not be able to organize a get-out-to-vote drive for privacy, you can do so for inconvenience. Compliancy with multiple devices is easy and already done.
I used to go through Holborn every morning at 8.50am and I could see them preparing the experiment a few weeks in advance. They placed people in all the corridors to count throughput.

However, as I was changing from the Central line to the Piccadilly line in the morning, like many others I walked through the much quieter 'No Exit' corridor (against the flow of traffic) to avoid/alleviate the congestion in the actual designated exit corridor. I'm not sure if I was counted in their stats as a +1 or -1?

Then they closed my local station anyway, so I switched to the overground. 5 mins more, but so much nicer!
$1.7M MISTAKE FOR FILING AN 83(B)
I see this university press release and the paper to which in points[1] both came out in October 2015. I wonder if there has been some follow-up on this by other scientists yet.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/23/1504020112
The R100 [1] that flew from the UK to Canada in 1930 in 72 hours used 6 of these monsters [2] in Wright's lifetime :

Dry weight: 1,380 lb (628 kg)

Power output: 670 bhp (500 kW) at 1,900 rpm

I wonder how he felt then

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R100

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Condor
That is a good point...
Hm. 1000% sure it's a Sales tactic. Price it high and cut "deals" for clients. Oldest trick in the book.
I didn't down vote you but here is the flaw. Rent typically trends upward with property values which eats away at a tenants ability to save. This is particularly true in markets like NYC, SF, LDN and HK where people are paying over 50% of their paycheck to rent.
It is a conjecture or speculation; it is not a hypothesis, in the scientific sense, because without something more than "some way we don't understand", it makes no falsifiable predictions of future observations.

Now, speculation of this type can be the starting point to developing a testable hypothesis, so its not completely outside the scientific process, but it's far sorry of even a hypothesis.
I'd doubt users of an encryption app not using a simple checksum to verify its legitimacy before using it.
They're a lot more cooperative around BigCorp compliance related stuff than AWS. It doesn't sound like that big a deal, but it really is.
A hypothesis that makes testable predictions is perfectly valid science even if it involves aliens. "Aliens did it" in itself is not a scientific explanation. Aluen life is probable a priori just given the size of the universe; unfortunately we also have all sorts of other evidence that technological alien civilizations are nowhere near us.

With SETI, we explicitly make the assumption that any prospective aliens are using communications technology that can be intercepted by us.
But that's government surveillance, and HN comments are supposed to say that it's always bad and much worse than ISIS, right?
This. People forget that the US is a big oil producer and has an industry that benefits from high market prices set by OPEC. The OP's question strikes me as anti-Arab or jingoistic, or both.
...so I deleted the top comment.
In Argentina we have a more complex protocol:

* Outside peak hours: stand on the right part of the escalator and leave the left part for walking.

* At peak hours: stand in both sides of the escalator.

* At extremely peak hours: If most of the flux goes upwards, stop the downward escalator and walk on it (this is actually illegal)
This will break so much stuff, like you know, being able to click on things or move tabs around. Or minimize / zoom the window. It's possible to get it to work, but there are a lot of Difficulties, here's a similar PR

https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/10208
No dice. Conservation of energy and other thermodynamic laws say that [a] there are limits to efficiency, and [b] if you absorb energy you must re-radiate it. Among other things. There's no point in speculating about the blatantly unphysical. @Sharlin is right, it's just "Goddidit" dressed up.
I don't actually notice anything about them rolling their own encryption in the article (it doesn't even mention encryption other than that they use telegram to spread the link).

What are the chances if it is encrypted that they didn't actually roll their own encryption but used an open source implementation like PGP and made a wrapper around it? No reason to assume they're entirely dumb until the app has been dis-assembled and proven to be buggy (though I'd not make such a proof public, just let them continue to use it).
Will Bill solve it?
Didn't read the article, but the comments here remind me of initiatives like these: http://www.pactapp.com/
That's the worst of the mainstream. That is not a valid or logical argument against the position that the mainstream's best is better than academia's best.
The powerup can equally be used for "more speed" or "less energy", just because you prefer the first it doesn't mean others shouldn't opt for the second.
It depends on which infrastructure you upgrade. Adding more trains/lines/stations will certainly bring more traffic/passengers. But escalators just move people within stations, they do not add new routes/destinations and so aren't going to bring people to a station that would otherwise not be there.
You could do this with much less than an RPi. I would recommend using an AVR or better yet a 555 timer if all you need is an 80KHz signal. Let me know if you want help with this I'm looking for projects like this or something much more complicated.
I think the burden of proof is heavy and squarely on those who propose so lightly that "advanced aliens" do such things.
Rust FAQ
There are also plenty of children of wealthy families that essentially receive checks from their parents every month that they live on, in exchange for no real work responsibilities.

I would say that there's a fair sized wave of accomplishment coming out of this group. Has Zuckerberg ever had to have a real job?

They are both cherry picked groups, and have vastly different backgrounds that affect their level of productivity. Giving everyone $8,000 per year would have vastly different results for different people. It's hard to say what the net effect would be.
The "nothing new" vs "aliens" is a false dichotomy. It might be a zillion things that are novel and exciting astrophysically but do not involve aliens or completely new physics. Heck, there are novel and exciting things on Pluto that we don't completely understand but no sensible researcher is shouting "aliens"!
Senator Tom Cotton Accuses Tim Cook of ‘Omitting Facts’ Regarding Encryption
Sure, it's not hard, then you get into side channel, first-use-trust/update, MITM, etc territory.
I think he's really made because when developers write error messages the company doesn't like to suck it up and take the blame i.e. " we don't support your current browser" vs "YOU don't have webgl"