skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And then we have fingerprints, which are very secure and onerous to imitate

Aaaaand there goes the article's credibility. A pity, because there's a real need for a cogent debate about this panopticon-as-password program.
My point is that google's claims today cannot be trusted any more than when those same claims made three years ago. Google was wrong about it's abilities then as it may be wrong about them today.

Google is now so large that 'trust' is impossible. Google's attack surface is now so vast, the data so valuable, and cross-talk of personnel with government so common that the likelihood of another undetected breech is too great to ignore. (Same for apple/facebook et al).
From 2011. Perhaps title should reflect this.

Also, alt.suicide.holiday is a Google discussion group? Sigh.
I have the perfect project for this! Generate a signal using the GPIO ports to drive a mirror and camera in a synchronized fashion.

Does anyone know if the RPi GPIOs can be driven at around 80KHz? I've seen reports that this is possible, but that the USB or video driver tends to lock the CPU for long times, messing with timings - but hopefully running on bare metal would take care of that.
The website doesn't function without like 5 different JS libraries from another 3rd party, so it's not just Google logging your visits. Unfortunately, this is considered totally acceptable for some reason

edit: Just noticed it's also loading fonts from Google
Of course, but there are multiple collectives. On hot divisive issues, both sides routinely get flagged. Neither side is "the HN community", though each sees the other that way. That's not objective; it's a cognitive bias, and it leads people to get angrier at each other and at the community because they feel the community is against them.

In reality, on most issues where society is divided, HN is also divided, with a few exceptions (like mass surveillance) where there's a fairly clear skew.
I thought the name Dunning sounded familiar in context of ignorance studies. He is the first half of Dunning-Kruger effect. [0]

And the money quote from the article: "Dunning warns that the internet is helping propagate ignorance – it is a place where everyone has a chance to be their own expert, he says, which makes them prey for powerful interests wishing to deliberately spread ignorance."

It's a sad thing media literacy is so rare, but then again, there are 5 spin doctors for each journalist. (Can't find the reference right now, but it was an article on HN maybe a year ago.)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
This might make a good "Show HN".

Is the source code public?
> we have to worry about everything running on the system, because it is all surface area for attacking kernel privilege escalation bugs

Usually "everything running on tbe system" is trusted code. The threat would be a bug in your software that allows remote code execution and could potentially be combined with a kernel bug to achieve privilege escalation.

The game changes significantly when you're giving arbitrary user-supplied code immediate access to make kernel calls. Now you're only one bug away from game over. And you're trusting the security of your whole system with a mechanism that wasn't really designed for security against untrusted code in the first place.
And what about those situations where there is actually a case, why is a bad thing to use decryption to find the truth?
What languages would you personally pick over C?
Blaming someone else for your own poor design decisions is cowardly and irresponsible. Better languages than C++ can easily be built on top of C. For example, Objective C is a better language than C++, also built on top of C.

Implicit type conversions could have been eliminated by having a "use strict" mode for new files, as was done in Perl 5. C++ didn't do this because the designers didn't see implicit type conversions as a problem. In fact they dramatically expanded the number of types that could be implicitly converted to include all user-defined types, as I have just described. But I guess the evil C designers somehow forced them to do that? At what point do you start taking responsibility for your own mistakes? It's sounding a lot like "never".

By the way, C++ could have had a module system too. Objective C does, and people are talking about adding one to C++. But then again, Objective C had good designers, not "I just work here" type people who blamed all their problems on the previous engineer.
I suspect you are vastly overestimating how systematic IT in an average hospital or doctor's/dentist's surgery is. Medical IT is a scary field to observe.

Also, we seem to have latched onto medical records somewhere along the line, but please remember my original point was much more general. These technologies are relevant anywhere you have a need for access to sensitive information but also a need to control how that information can be used: finance, corporate R&D, obviously defence and security related fields, criminal justice, and the list goes on.
What in there was actually a crime though? The people who try to sell you timeshares with high-pressure sales tactics are also pretty scummy, but we don't throw them in jail for selling bad investments. The slideshare mentions they couldn't sell them to 'windows and orphans': I'm assuming these needed to be sold to accredited investors.

Accredited investors get pitched bad investments all the time; many people here may work for startups that are one of them. Some startups get growth using scummy marketing techniques just to offload the company to investors like Google before it implodes. Some of those investors may be VCs managing, e.g., the Northwest Plumbers' Pension Fund or the Kansas School Board. None of those VCs should go to jail, even if they are mismanaging the money in some cases(I'm not making a claim that they are, overall).

The depositors at the banks should be covered by the FDIC, so they aren't really at risk. The FDIC threaten to recover some of their money from the executives and accountants, and agencies tend to follow up on this sort of thing.

What exactly is so wrong with selling bad investments to other companies that we should throw them in jail? That the investments were AAA ratings should be irrelevant: they are just rankings from private companies, so they should carry as much legal weight as asking your bartender for advice on the stock market.

(edit) My assumption that AAA ratings carry no legal weight is false. I found this, which has a good overview:
http://www.sec.gov/news/studies/credratingreport0103.pdf

This is a mess: You can't use private companies to set regulations, even if it appears to work some of the time. It's just as bad as making laws that require me to only use my bartender's highest-rated stocks when investing the local college's endowment fund. They need to either scrap it from the law or set up a separate government agency that does nothing but evaluate creditworthiness of securities.

Still though - where is the actual crime? Private companies scumming each other for money is to be expected, and would only be a problem if they actually lied on a contract(rather than merely neglecting to do due diligence).

Was the suggestion to send the thousands of people who made fraudulent loan applications - after being egged on by salespeople - to jail(possibly with the salespeople)? That's plausible, but not a crime of the bankers.
This is so on point. After graduating college I found myself in the "loser" layer surrounded by the "clueless." The org was so big I didn't even get to see the "sociopaths" at the top. 2 years of putting in the "bare minimum" I quit only to find the same structure in my new job. I'm now planning my second exit this time hoping to find a lower paying but cushier job were I can serve my 8 hour daily sentence without having to talk to anyone and in a real office probably browsing HN all day (I already have a couple of apps out there).

I've also been working on FIRE, entrepreneurship and hobbies that could provide income. But the most important thing and what I wish I knew when I was starting my adult life is that obtaining true happiness from a career is bullshit. I now enjoy spending my time with family and on my own interests. I just wish I had more of that time.
This is a worry that's mentioned in any article of business models. Do you know if anyone has collected actual data on how often a community version got parity with enterprise edition and significantly burned the sales?

It's a good hypothesis but I'm not sure it happens often in practice. Most companies I found that had a premium model still have a premium model. Mine wasn't a large sample, though.
How to Explain Net Neutrality to a 5 Year-Old
First of all, yes the frame really exists. :)

If I get around to pulling together build photos (which by the way aren't that exciting), I'll post them here. For now, just imagine a big hole in my wall (I had to reframe it), a photodiode sticking out of a hole on the right side of the picture frame, and an iMac.

The software is just a simple Objective-C / Cocoa app running on Mac OS X. I use a Kensington presenter clicker to advance the images to change them remotely. I drop new images into a Google Drive folder from another Mac, which the picture frame automatically picks up and puts into the image rotation. And if I want to make major changes, I just use a wireless keyboard and mouse to work on the frame like I would a normal iMac. It is very unsophisticated.
Comets can't explain weird 'alien megastructure' star after all
The U.N. Knew for Months That Madaya Was Starving
how do you write like 1500 words saying the same thing over and over and over? Read this article for 1500 simple little examples!

In before "say something positive": If whoever wrote this gets to write a long rambling complaint about some random website nobody has ever heard of having a bad error message, I can equally complain about my pet peeve: "people writing long blog posts whining about things that set them off but aren't the real reason they are so angry to begin with".
Yes! What I really want for a future version of this is a 12-bit color depth, HDR, 8K OLED monitor, so you get true blacks, great resolution, and very accurate color reproduction across a very wide dynamic range. Maybe in a few years.
That's not really true though, if the access to both of these accounts is granted with the same credentials it does not matter whether those credentials are a password or biometric data.

The bad part is when the account disappears completely and you only have the option to use the biometric data.

So there is a middle ground.

> And, I trust Google... today.

I don't. Todays google is the google I saw coming quite a few years ago and it is as bad as I feared it would be and too large to be able to get around without losing out on valuable participation. Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are a lot easier to avoid than Google.
Indeed! If you think alt.suicide.holiday is a Google group, please, don't quit the world --- but do quit Usenet. Thanks!
Seattle seems to be one of the worst markets for this. We have a huge number of job openings in tech, but very few entry level openings.
Are ants capable of self recognition? [pdf]
"The vast forest littered with space junk" is very good metaphor of modern Russia.
Yes, it's ridiculous, and we've taken it out of the title above.
His point is - if I may - that if they could not foresee that this was the case in the past that there is a good reason to assume they won't be able to foresee similar things in the present.

It's not as if it took a great feat of imagination to suspect that data flowing between datacenters would be tapped.
A Dictionary Packed with Stories from Eighteenth-Century Delhi
The key bit from the abstract:

As long as they could not see themselves in a mirror, ants with a blue dot painted on their clypeus did not try to remove it. Set in front of a mirror, ants with such a blue dot on their clypeus tried to clean themselves, while ants with a brown painted dot — of the same color as that of their cuticle — on their clypeus and ants with a blue dot on their occiput did not clean themselves. Very young ants did not present such behavior.
In addition to the texturing & filtering argument Eric makes in this article, I think learning and using pre multiplied blending is extra important in WebGL because WebGL canvases are always composited over the page, and the default compositing mode is pre multipled.

I mocked up a fiddle to demonstrate this point. https://jsfiddle.net/dahart/m4z61tz1/

*edit: a little explanation, the fiddle shows, in the top half, blending using the most commonly learned method for non-premultiplied colors/textures, with gl.blendFunc(gl.SRC_ALPHA, gl.ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);

In the bottom half, blending is done with pre-multiplied colors, and gl.blendFunc(gl.ONE, gl.ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA).

The main point is how, using WebGL's default settings, you can see through what should be opaque areas on top, and the stuff on the bottom looks and behaves correctly.

The fiddle has enough toggles and comments in the code and fragment shader to get the non-pre multiplied blending & compositing to work correctly.
The word you're looking for is "chroot".
I completed 76% Goals in 2015. Here is my plan for 2016
Yes, I have to crop the images to the aspect ratio of the display. I considered doing a simulated digital mat which could change given the aspect ratio of the work being shown, but it wasted so much of the display that it was not worth it.

I end up not having to crop much, because the aspect ratio I chose lines up pretty well with those of many good paintings and photographs.
Maybe, but at least someone higher up than a random loan officer was prosecuted.

Look at this site to get stories of what the banks are still getting away with: http://4closurefraud.org/
>Aldi owns Trader Joe's

Not quite. They're owned by different branches of the same family.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/12/02/aldi_grocery_...
Right. It's can be quite fun/useful to quickly look up this type of information for e.g. random website hostnames, without having to manually look up the IP first.
That's the rub. I don't believe there's a "plausible future" where production is independent of human labor. Manual labor in assembly lines etc, sure. But humans are cheap. Cheap to build, cheap to feed, cheap to house. Compared with a robot, a human is extremely adaptable to situations and circumstances that far exceed robotic solutions. Now if you handwave and say "but AI" then you're not being realistic.

And never mind "work" that requires more creativity and intelligence. Programming, writing, art, sales, marketing, policing, military, the list goes on and on. There's a reason that humans are at the top of the food chain, and that's our brains and adaptability. The idea that these traits will have no or limited value doesn't track with history.
Nowhere in this thread/article is any mention of the Credential Management draft[0]. This is something I expect to see in canary in the next yr and a half.

[0] - http://w3c.github.io/webappsec-credential-management/
I didn't watch the linked I/O presentation, but I clicked through to the Ars Technica article. Are there any details that suggest this would be more than just v2 of fingerprint unlock?

aka optional, local and circumventable with a password if my fingerprint isn't recognized?
iOS 9.2 and 9.3 Jailbreak Both Possible, but Will They Release
How about hostname lookup as well as by IP? Otherwise, pretty neat service.
I got a Livestream notification about it.

Here is a link to the Livestream Event: http://livestream.com/spacex/events/4695903
I've never been prompted to reauthenticate to Facebook or Google based on travel, actually, and if I was, I would be paranoid about a MITM attack. Has this happened to anyone?
Insurance Agents?

So, Mr. Owl, I'm afraid that your insurance premiums are going up. Why? Because of that slip on the ice two days ago; our monitoring indicates that you have injured your back. Yes, I know you haven't even seen a doctor yet, but there's a 62% probability that you will be making a large claim shortly, so up with your premiums!
Would be curious if anyone with knowledge of the various meltdowns that happened in Iceland can tell us if the Wikileaks disclosures from that period contributed significantly to the unravelling, as it happened.
The revolution of urban mobility: 85% less emissions, 60% less traffic
On-demand public transportation using electric minibuses: sustainable, efficient, flexible, quiet and economical at the same time - http://www.indiegogo.com/at/seemo
Oh, duh. That would make sense.
it doesn't take three paragraphs. here, watch this: "ASH began as an internet discussion group about why suicide rates increase over the holidays,"
I've been fooling around with Go bindings to GL and also want to do something similar.

I still find it kind of uncomfortable that I'm copy-pasting variable names as strings between (the middle of!) the shader code string and the use sites (e.g. `setUniform` calls) -- I'd like it if I got some sort of quick compile time sanity check that those references match up. Had you considered going that far, and if so, what were your thoughts?
I was actually curious if this is true, and it appears that Unreal Engine 4 reimplements std::string (FString) [1] I think this qualifies as a modern library.

My yardstick for "pretty solid" is actually meaningful Unicode support, so I will reserve judgement as to whether the C++11 STL qualifies.

[1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/UnrealA...
The best thing about fingerprint authentication is that you can (literally) hack up a way for up to ten people to share a device.
PoC||GTFO 0x10 [pdf]
Setting Up a New Mac for Development (a List in Progress)
Man, some of you kids should have been around in the late 1990's bubble.

"Wow, you can spell 'internet' without sticking an A in there? Here is a job!"

Didn't go so well for those people when it burst.

But that's nothing to say of the surrounding jobs. I was in this company that blew up to something like a 3:1 ratio of sales/marketing to developers. Eek!

Company parties had live bands and free booze, with unlimited repeats (no two-drink-vouchers bullshit).
Sponsored by:
Lloyds Bank

An article sponsored by a bank trying to persuade you to get a mortgage. How original!
Preprint download: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networ...
For this site, you can simply load with Javascript disabled and then disable CSS.
> Cisco engineer Shawn Cooley countered him saying, "very cool until I break my leg or hand & can't auth to any services to get healthcare info since my behavior is diff." Messina said, "you presume that your health records aren't being managed by Verily. You would be wrong."

So Verily would be automatically sharing information with Abacus to modulate its user identification, and they feel can just start doing that because it's also an Alphabet company.

This sets off alarm bells in my head. Is this the attitude toward privacy and data isolation at Alphabet/Google? How long until these health records are also shared with Google's advertising department? It tells me that they have no business managing health records at all.
Spotting and deflecting asteroids away from earth is challenging, but feasible with present technology and there are groups working on it. (A feat tardigrades could never hope to accomplish, but they get to freeload off our achievement in this case.)
Boarding a flight with an NFC implant
That's what I mean. It's not a conservation violation, but I could see it as a very interesting way of transmitting energy across long distances. Even if it were inefficient it could still have some fascinating applications.
Facebook in the past has required me to authenticate during travel by showing me pictures in which my friends are tagged, and asking me to name them. Of course this was made more difficult by my friends' tendencies to abuse the image tagging feature...
Supernova Has Energy of Hundreds of Billions of Suns
Given the sheer breadth of approaches and features in C++, any one codebase will only touch some of it.
Inevitably this means that if you get used to C++ in one project, you will have more difficulty moving to projects using a different subset.
Hardware accelerators or appliances that do it faster and painlessly is another option. Safenet makes a nice living on stuff like that. Plus, it's harder to "fork" hardware. These usually have support contracts, too.
I'm nostalgic for those days, I learned assembler and made simple demos and games which lead to a career in video games. But I'm not sad. Look at the current generation. They have game development tools like Unity and Unreal Engine, cheap fun hobby computers like the Raspberry Pi and perhaps most importantly they have the internet; youtube, twitch, forums, chat programs. When I learned to write assembler I had magazines and a book and I was on my own. Nobody else I knew was programming.
Absolutely right on the complexity and loopholes. As I said - very hard to collect this in practise. But then again there are ways of legitimately avoiding income tax too.

I agree with raising consumption taxes.
Well, at least around here, after the first six months, you never have an obligation beyond one month (you must give two months notice, but since you must usually pay two months in advance at the start, you don't pay the last).
Since you ask, I'll admit it: I enjoy trolling C++ users because the language has so often thought of itself as superior to C. Beating on the language always gets lots of discussion going, which is fun. I've nothing against the language, or any other language, as such. Good tools, in the hands of good developers.
Let's hope we won't find out and that if we do find out that you're right and I'm wrong.
The current administration is doing it's level best to use their time in power to serve their owners (donors) knowing they will not be in power after the next election. This involves lowering taxes, doing away with fees for fishing quota, changing the tax code to be flatter, selling public assets to cronies and the head-scratching propensity of the prime minister has for involving himself in minutia of regional planning of the capital and preservation of "monuments". The Pirate Party is polling at roughly 35% for almost a year now with less than 18 months till next election. The left-leaning parties have taken a shellacking and most on the left don't trust them after the terrible job they did last time around. There is a real thirst for a change in politics because there are many things rotten in the state of Iceland.
I've stated elsewhere in the thread that there would need to be privacy protections, e.g. require Google or anyone using biometrics to be HIPAA compliant, make it opt-in only, but if anyone is actually going to implement this, medical research should benefit.
How is crawling WebAssembly any slower than crawling JavaScript?
Rural areas in jurisdictions that have big cities, such as the UK or the state of New York, will of course be impacted by such laws (if they pass). However, rural areas in other countries/states that don't have big cities are less likely to ever get such laws.
Start Up India: As it happened
ISK/BTC ratio has been severely inflated against USD/BTC or EUR/BTC.
Oops, I mixed it up in my head with Morrisons.

Morrisons do all their own logistics rather than outsource but their local stores did not fare well.

> The supermarket chain sold 140 shops for £25m. The stores made an operating loss of £36m last year.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-34637187
From my experience, old (>15yr) convictions that didn't require time served are a non-issue. Especially given the recent small business operation.

Investors do care about the group they are investing with. I think you can make a clear case that this party is a low risk.