skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That seems to be pretty clear evidence that things get better

There have been many collapses throughout history and attitudes of invincibility usually precede them. There's also the evidence of us being born in this period of history, implying it is likely the most populous. I'm not asserting that collapse is going to happen, simply arguing against confidence in either outcome. Past performance does not guarantee future returns.

> The longer it takes for that [challenging the social machine] to happen, the more entrenched and harder to change it will get.

So yeah, let's get those non-molesting pedophiles to stand up next week and publicly proclaim their desires. I'm suuuure there will be some enlightened discourse, after which they will be accepted. (BTW, if you don't want the social machine to become entrenched and harder to change, doesn't giving it omniscience seem like a poor idea?)

> Outliers like people who don't pay fines they were legitimately assessed

Outliers like people who drive too much. Or go to too many fast food restaurants. Or hit the liquor store in the middle of the week. Or who don't go to church. Or who do go to chuch. Or who play hooky from work. And yes, outliers who are going to work so they can afford to pay a ticket. Every specific situation has a direct "fix", but the entire point is that these things should not have to be lobbied for for decades to change everyone's perceptions (or people can simply never agree). Our society is kept moving by white lies that reconcile the difference between reality and the prescriptive model dictated by social norms/government. Your viewpoint assumes that perfect enforcement will cause the prescriptive model to have to adjust to match reality, but would-be social engineers have never worked that way - the entire reason the present model is far off from reality is because they believing that imposing top-down visions is desirable.

> [Government is] an abstract concept with no will of its own

The organisms we call governments do, like all organisms, whether conscious or unconscious.

Getting back to the crux of the matter, we are never going to see eye to eye. The "example" I keep stating and you keep brushing aside is simply that _I_ would like privacy where possible - for at least self-contained situations. I simply do not wish to trust everyone else to completely empathize with me (having similar computational power, how could they possibly simulate me?), but really I need no further justification for my desire. If you cannot respect my (and others' like me) desire, then you are yet another social engineer with a grand plan for everyone - exactly the type of person I desire privacy from!
> License plate recognition software is often touted as a way to catch terrorists

Huh? How does that work?
Did you pick these companies to work for, or did they approach you?
That's not what the courts have said.

"Advertising is indeed protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."[1]

[1]http://www.lawpublish.com/amend1.html
Alternate viewpoint: the proliferation of guns in the US is a factor behind the militarization of the police force. If the police can argue that when they execute raids the person on the other side of the door is armed, then that can be used to argue the need more powerful guns, armor, armored vehicles, etc.
They didn't do it with gumption, they did it by getting armed by other foreign powers on the other side of the proxy conflict. Without massive support from global or regional powers, the guerrillas wouldn't really have had a chance.
> A competitor could easily produce a leaner, better product.

There are several competitors in this space. Pages, LibreOffice, and Google docs come to mind. The only one I've ever heard described as better is Google docs. I'm not sure reality supports your statement.
Userspace access. Not access via yet another pseudo-filesystem. Especially not access via yet another pseudo-filesystem automatically mounted read/write at boot time. GRUB works just fine on other systems that don't have a pseudo-filesystem for EFI access.
I picked all three. The first was a medium sized startup (90 employees, mostly sales, only 5 devs). The second was a small startup (15 employees, 5 devs). My current job is a huge hosting company with like 3000+ employees in my location.
Change your lifestyle temporarily, go heads down and pay off your debt in 12 months. Probably could.

Alternatively, there are plenty of places to work that won't make you feel like a small cog in a giant machine.

Self improvement comes from, improving your situation. No one will do it for you.
>Browser JS insertion on HTTP is pretty novel; it was done with ad networks a few times, but never at the scale of the GitHub/Great Cannon attack. Using an existing botnet certainly was fine, but for most sites, blocking botnet IPs doesn't cause as much collateral damage as blocking compromised-browser IPs.

But the "great cannon attack" was absolutely minuscule compared to the stuff that happens every day, attacks of similar sizes were already reasonably common years ago (See: http://i.imgur.com/0quYBdV.png a graph of an attack on reddit, from 2013).

Today we're talking about Mrps, not Krps.

>If you did a watering hole attack, doing JS injection on a really popular "show HN" post on HN, against HN, you'd be effective in getting HN to block the IPs of a large percentage of real users, which would hurt, even if HN could repel the attack entirely. Blocking 50k random botnet IPs wouldn't really affect many regular HN readers.

That'd just be sloppy filtering, there's no need to drop L7 attacks on IP basis.
I actually got bit by the opposite of this early in my career - I have a knack for solving algorithmic coding challenges, which meant interviews tended to go really well, and led me to think my self-taught web dev skills were much better than they were.

As Zach mentioned, quite a few interviewers like to use recursion-based puzzlers, and I actually enjoyed those - I seem to have one of those brains which is wired up for understanding recursion. On the other hand, I'm actually more drawn towards the product/UI side of things than the hardcore algorithmic tech innovation. These days I rely much more on discipline than on natural talent.
Yeah but you can normally recover from that without a soldering iron. Badly implemented EFI is out there.
Surely something like this: https://blog.linode.com/2016/01/05/security-notification-and... doesn't inspire confidence?
Seems like a way of discouraging any non-Silicon Valley parts of the country, which already have fewer developers available.
But that assumes a police force which isn't inherently abusive and corrupt, though. Events like that Fresno murder coverup story yesterday beg to differ.
Identity theft would be my guess.
Each of those groups was armed by another power at some point during the conflict.
Yeah.... Until the OP starts following any of the advice in this thread!
As much as the article makes this sound horrendous .. I'm not sure.

"Back in 2007, his bosses at the Port Arthur Police Department tapped him for a brand-new kind of job: writing up driving infractions full-time"

http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Port-Arthur-Texas.htm...

It's interesting to compare the actual data from the 5 years before, and the 5 years following 2007. It may be a coincidence, but .. something has changed. Something that's roughly halved their fatal accidents.
The problem is there doesn't seem to be a way for the left and right to compromise on this issue. You can't realistically police private party transfers without mandatory registration, and there are too many instances of registration later leading to confiscation for that to be palatable to 2nd Amendment rights advocates.

On the other side, there have been several attempts to open up access to the national background check system to private sellers, but every time it gets blocked by the left, as voluntary background checks are largely seen as an ineffective half measure.
Re Bintray isn't standard: There is no standard, both Bintray and Maven Central are just internet repositories. JCenter is bigger, so if you define "standard" as "bigger one", Bintray is the way to do.

If by "standard" you meant "default", like Maven Central is the default in Maven, here I have some news for you as well.
Bintray is the default in Mac OS' Homebrew, Android Studio, Groovy's @Grab, and first class citizen in Gradle, Ivy and SBT.
The issue here is actually bricking the device. It's not your standard "do we let people hang themselves or limit the user's capabilities" debate.

A filesystem is a perfectly reasonable way to implement access to the EFI vars.
No, that's not a possible headline.
No, you look crazy because all those Michael Moore shit peddled and force fed to us when we were young in school.

I found yesterday that full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US but that's the first shit any idiot brings up here when they want to paint Americans as "crazy".

Don't get more wrong, as things progress in Europe, we're eventually going to need those "crazy" American weapons.
The comments by Lennart Poettering, IMO, are a prime example of the schism between what is needed for reaching "the year of Linux on the desktop" and what some hackers think is best.

Nobody sells a chainsaw with safeties disabled, remarking "you can always attach the chain catcher" if people report a couple of accidents, but Lennart thinks requiring almost every user to change the default install ((note that you can remount it readonly at boot, simply by adding an entry for it into /etc/fstab, that is marked "ro") is a better idea than mounting it read-only, and requiring those few who need to write these variables to do some extra work by remounting it read-write.
Because everything is a file in unix derivative land. That is a common accepted practice at least but optimizing for the common case here is the right thing to do. How often do people need to manage EFI things through the filesystem and how much of an inconvenience is it to have the initial mount be read-only? The answer is obvious to me because I know people run `rm -rf` often enough that having a safeguard in place is the right thing to do.
I don't think this is meant to be a security fix, it's just meant to make it so you can't accidentally break your hardware with what seems like an unrelated filesystem command.

I agree that the stupid firmware is ultimately to blame, and mounting this stuff read-write is a fairly reasonable initial decision. But given the existence of this stupid firmware, the resistance to implementing an easy mitigation by mounting it read-only is insane. I can't understand why there are any responses besides "oh shit, we'd better change this."
I began writing a C++ compiler by thinking "it can't be that hard".
Does anyone know how important Facebook is when it comes to gun sales? It seems odd the gov't would come after Facebook when there are many, many other sites that offer the same opportunity to match up the buyer and seller of guns.
This is my third try at improving my situation, each time the money has increased and is helping me pay that debt off. So I'm getting closer on that front, but I don't want the money. I want to be excited to wake up every morning and go build something amazing.
Perhaps if they sign away their claims to the social safety net.
> I happen to disagree that owning an handgun (or even a semi-automatic rifle) will actually be very influential in the event of a dictatorial takeover

It can't hurt.
That's not what you were complaining about earlier. Shifting the goalposts is always fun.
A camera is more dangerous to a corrupt officer than a gun.
It's been a long time, but as I recall from memory, the U.S. started supplying them with shoulder-launched Stinger missile systems. Quite effective against armored helicopters (and, to a lesser extent, low-flying fighter planes).

There was considerable concern over whether and where to those systems might travel / be traded / be sold.

But it marked a turning point in the conflict.
Most people I know have acquired one or two things from Facebook. You get some great deals every now and again.

Instagram is another big services that hosts an extremely large gun culture.
"Modern manufacturing methods were used but uncompromising care was taken to ensure that the precision achievable by Babbage was nowhere exceeded." [1]

[1]: http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/modernsequel/
Jeff Bezos just lost billions of dollars overnight
There's a pretty clear difference here.

Saying that would make you a dick.

The linode comment doesn't make tptacek a dick.

Why?

Because it's trivial to figure out why he's saying that by simply typing "linode" into google, but as of right now googling starfighter doesn't immediately bring up any reasons to avoid them.

Edit: Didn't mean to imply that parent was a dick.
That's not accurate, but even if it was, you now have to argue why this time would be different.
16 petahashes/sec in 2-megawatt container
Also:

4. Some portion of the military would join the civilians, and bring their military toys along for the fight.
Wank Wipes-First condom shaped wetwipe that eliminates the mess of masturbation
> The number of issues surrounding the idea (customs, legal issues, etc.) are obvious, and the discussions around them reminds me of the questions thrown at many of the other major sharing economy start-ups initially (Uber, AirBnB, et al.), but with a good team and some experimentation they will figure them out.

The rules Uber and AirBNB were flouting aren't generally criminal. Smuggling, OTOH...

> People who have spent a good chunk of time in countries outside the US, already know people have been informally doing this en masse for a _long_ time.

People do this into the US informally, too. And its true that many governments don't seem to worry too much about informal importation of items for acquaintances that are within the existing allowances for personal use, but which are actually imported for acquaintances (and, IIRC, many actually have specific allowances for this if the importer is a local citizen, rather than a foreign traveler), technically for trade in that the receiver often ends up reimbursing the importer with perhaps a small premium.

OTOH, its really unlikely that any government is going to turn a blind eye to a massive, commercial, advertised end-run around its customs duties, or treat anyone they catch involved in such an operation gently.

> To me it seems Shypmate is just creating a formal system for these actions to take place

Formalizing informal exchanges often has substantial adverse legal consequences. Observing that gold-digging exists and is visibly practiced doesn't making opening an overt brothel a good idea.
Before the new AST module was added, I wrote http://dalkescientific.com/Python/python4ply-tutorial.html , http://www.dalkescientific.com/writings/diary/archive/2006/0..., and http://www.dalkescientific.com/writings/diary/archive/2010/0... . Those seem like something you're looking for.
You could've googled "linode", but here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845278
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845278
Yes North Vietnam received military assistance from China and the Soviet Union later on in the war, but the NLF had access to very little of that weaponry.

There are stories from American soldiers where they were confiscating WW2 bolt-action firearms from the NLF right up until the late 1960s.

Algeria is another great example where they kicked the French out of Algeria but had very little backing from a major superpower.

The point is that simple firearms can inflict a lot of damage on a highly sophisticated army.
There's something wrong with how you evaluate your potential employers, then. I understand how one can make the mistake that working at any startup would mean that it is going to be an exciting job. If you want to be excited about what you are working on, the fact that a company is a startup or a huge company isn't important; the question is always, what are they making, and are you excited about that?
White House denies clearance to tech researcher with links to Snowden
Lots of places are still unencrypted -- e.g. in NYC the PD & FD dispatch are unencrypted UHF. Looking at a huge waterfall of Brooklyn NYPD on a $20 SDR dongle -> https://imgur.com/VukYvB6
Sometimes people run rm -rf / just for fun before reformatting a system, just to see what happens. Given that its purpose in life is to delete files, it stands to reason that running this command on a system which contains no important data is OK. A default configuration which makes this command destroy hardware is not reasonable.
Considering facebok is a global site and selling/buying/marketing of firearms is highly regulated in most countries. It makes practical sense for facebook to be conservative and just pick the strictest rule and apply it to all content instead of having to enforce different rules for content created or viewed in different countries.

Otherwise if they got it wrong and broke some local firearms laws they might end up sued.
That's pretty much how FB sales go.

A: "I have this gun I"ll sell for $400."
B: "I will buy it from you."
A: "Ok. Let's meet at the police station parking lot. What time is good for you?"
B: "How about 5:30?"
A: "Ok, see you there."
Who would win in a war: all of the US armed forces, or local farmers, most of whom cannot read, all commonly equipped with 20+ year old weapons most of which are bolt action?

Yea, I guess we can keep lying to ourselves that we won the Vietnam 'conflict'.
If you're planning on getting DDoSd you probably should pick a provider that offers DDoS protection.

Not sure why you'd choose a budget provider for production infra anyway.
Fair point, but the US had a ton of civilians guns before the police ever started looking like an army.
I have a picture from when I was 11 standing outside of Borland HQ with my boxed copy of Turbo Pascal somewhere... I feel your joy.
The point is that personal gun ownership is irrelevant, if the government has the backing of the military, either you get some heavy weaponry from foreign powers or you're screwed.
I think a large fraction of raid targets would be armed even if you made guns illegal.
They're all making glorified crud apps, stuff that I could make solo. I'm not excited by it.
Once you have good police forces, getting people behind gun control is going to be a walk in the park.

So clearly, the rational thing is to fix the police first, come after the guns second, no?
Interesting. I knew it happened, I just didn't know it was that prevalent.
> Tell that to the poorly armed fighters in Afghanistan who kicked out the Soviets

You mean the ones that the US and Pakistan were arming, including with weapons optimized to counter the main heavy weapons used against them (particularly Stinger missiles to counter Russian attack helicopters)?

> and the North Vietnamese who kicked out the Americans.

The North Vietnamese were not only massively supplied by outside powers, but both China (before their falling out with the USSR) and the Soviet Union directly intervened in Vietnam -- as, to a lesser extent, did North Korea.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10471677

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10570069
Making 20% Time Work
By asking for books that affected science itself you set the bar pretty high. Here are some of my favorite popular science books that I think are all noteworthy enough to have been discussed by scientists.

- Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter

- The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose

- The Embodied Mind - Varela, Thompson & Rosch

- Don't sleep, there are snakes - Daniel Everett
Meh... nothing about that is in the first page of Google results when I google Linode. I wasn't aware of the older hack incidents, because we weren't Linode customers then and so there was no particular reason to pay attention to Linode news.

Anyway, if anyone is going to make a blanket statement like "Don't use X", there's no harm in providing at least a high level explanation of why you're saying that. One shouldn't assume other people keep up with the exact same news that they do.
I remember spending $350 for Borland C++, looking back its so strange to pay for compilers
I think it's just the latest convenience. I doubt very much that FB's move will make any difference whatsoever (not that I'm not bummed, because I find it convenient to follow gun trader groups in one place).
I don't understand the down votes you are receiving... your comment is one I have heard from relatives and friends from Europe.

As noted in the other response, the historical reason is that private gun-ownership (usually in relation to a local militia of some sort) is the only protection against a tyrannical government. In the era of the Revolutionary War, that was certainly true.

I don't happen to believe that is true any more, and that the 2nd amendment is an anachronism. But, I'm in a minority (where the majority in the US seems to prefer limited gun ownership - more so than what we have now, but not complete bans and confiscations, as Australia saw recently).
I'd actually be interested in trying this, since I have a lot of issues and I'm getting frustrated with Github issues. But I'd need my users to be able to file and comment on issues online - it looks like this is not possible right now. Is that planned?
Sounds good to me, and that certainly lines up with how I'd prioritize the issues. But I don't think it's hypocritical to prioritize differently.
The US also sanctioned the USSR, and the Soviets also only withdrew when Gorbachev became the General Secretary.
During WWII we produced guns en masse called "the liberator" which were air dropped behind Nazi lines. The Nazis ran out of ammo and so many of the jews in the concentration camps were guarded by empty rifles. If they had had basic firearms knowledge they would have known this, as the Nazis weren't even putting the magazines in the rifles. They could have over thrown their captors relatively easily, even being unarmed, because they outnumbered them many to one, and their captors were unarmed.

So not even having guns there, a gun culture would have likely saved lives.

(this is based on an account of an elderly man who was in the concentration camps and later came to learn about guns as part of his vow of "never again". There is an organization based on this principle called "Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership.")
> wilfully blind to the fact that for 99+% of the time evolution does not operate at the level of individuals

TSG hypothesis is that evolution happens at the level of genes (or memes, or whatever the replicant unit is). Not individuals, not groups, but genes. The individual level and group level evolutionary effects we see emerge from this, since a gene's prospects become intertwined with those of its neighbours. It is not well-described as a western, individualistic view. The 'selfish' is misleading if the negative value of the word is taken literally. Genes have no agency. The neo-darwinian view is simple but subtle, and is not well taught in schools. TSG is a great introduction to this way of thinking.
Yes, but these sales should be otherwise legal with records of the transaction now kept by Facebook.

Most states require you to show firearms purchaser IDs, called FID in my home state as well as a drivers license.

To acquire a FID, you need to go through a background check. This is how you are meant to know if the person is "safe to sell to".

If people in state X have a problem with that, then they should get together and find a solution to it.

Until then I don't think I can justify to myself censoring an otherwise completely legal discussion, especially when such a discussion can be used as a record of a sale that would otherwise not be present.

That's just my two cents.
Sure, but who hasn't been hacked at some point in time? The @tptacek post has an air of suggesting Something Is Really Wrong, like "Linode is a front of the NSA" or something.

Would it be that much harder to say "Don't use Linode, they have a bad history security-wise and just got hacked again"?