skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spot on! Agree completely. Americans have this strange idea lately that all of their companies are squeaky clean when it's really people like Alex that put America on the map. Most of them hide it behind shell companies and lengthy contractor lists.

In fact, all of the big name American companies all started out with terrible practices until they earned enough money and enough ire to hide those practices away from the public eye. And judging by my downvotes, far too many people really believe the world is a much nicer place than it is, and where you can really compete without getting a bit dirty yourself.
I'd argue that there aren't any good reasons to use MD5 over sha256 today, but either way -- the plain checksums are mostly useful to make sure that iso's etc downloaded without error. The chance of a bad network connection or other random problem leaving you with an ISO and matching md5 in case of some random download error are extremely slim.

For verifying downloads, you should be using the gpg signatures. And again, I don't think there's much of a reason to provide both signatures and plain hashes today, but: you might be in a jurisdiction where gpg is illegal (but then, you wouldn't be allowed to use Ubuntu anyway), or you might be bootstrapping from a system without gpg installed (eg: vanilla windows), but with sha256 installed, and a set of trusted CA-certs, so that you feel you can trust the downloaded hash. I'd argue it's probably a false sense of security -- in general the gpg-signatures (or more precisely the secret keys behind those signatures) -- should be easier to secure, and easier to tie to the trust-worthiness of the builds, than some random web server not being compromised. Or, put another way, in a scenario where the gpg signing key is compromised, it seems likely an attacker would also be able to to other stuff, like embed a back door etc. While there are many, many ways a mirror might be compromised, or TLS subverted.

That's not to say that gpg is perfect, I just think verifying the gpg signatures get you closer to verifying what you (probably) care about: that you indeed have an install iso that is made in good faith by the Ubuntu release team, and to the best of their knowledge is ok.
Yeah it's a clone of the trivial parts of the Echo, but not the difficult parts that are necessary to make it great, specifically:

* Beamforming microphone array (this is a real clone: http://www.xmos.com/products/microphones )

* Wake-word / hot-word detection ("Ok Google", "Alexa", etc.)

* Intent recognition / NLU
Let’s Encrypt Leaves Beta – HTTPS Statistics
Sites that detect ad-blocker usage have bigger problems to worry about, at least here in Europe.

I haven't seen this reported in the media yet but here is a Twitter message from privacy researcher Alexander Hanff with photos of an official letter confirming that detecting ad-blocker usage client-side is illegal in the EU. https://twitter.com/alexanderhanff/status/722861362607747072

Here's his initial message from yesterday, kicking off the thread: https://twitter.com/alexanderhanff/status/722506381451010048

I've got my popcorn ready and I'm waiting for what may be a very amusing discussion between publishers, advertisers, and lawyers in various European countries. Fascinating, regardless of which side of the debate you are on.
You're making assumptions. You're assuming that your position is "reasonable", and you're assuming that most people (at least in the western world) agree with you. And then to make your logic work, you're assuming that there's a vast conspiracy to oppress most people to prevent them from having freedom of speech and press.

The reality is that there aren't a lot of places where there's anything close to an absolute freedom of speech or the press. America really sticks out as an anomaly there, by having it written into the constitution. If it were really a strong part of a nation's culture, you'd think this wouldn't be so unusual, but it is, and in fact other western nations have laws completely contrary to this to some degree. Just look at the UK, where the truth is not an absolute defense against libel.
> Do other people feel the same way?

I find the back button as you implemented it handy.
Rewriting Uber Engineering: The Opportunities Microservices Provide
I guess the idea is to say that, generally speaking, boys will be encourage to tinker with electronics and computers even from an early age without any recrimination. On the other side, girls won't have the same "luxury". Even their toys reflect the kind of life society chooses for them: taking care of babies and taking care of the house.

This isn't to say that your statement isn't true, but I would bet it is just an anecdote.

[edit]grammar and more ideas[/edit]
Apple and Spotify Clean House, Remove “Soundalikes,” Covers and Live Recordings
There are many things that I believe not to exist, which doesn't mean they've be useful if they were, in fact, to exist.
I fly my quadcopter in the UK. It would be nice to have an app that told me about the airspace I was in based on my current position.

However, right now I am not flying higher than 10 meters from the ground.
We're talking about voluntary geofencing here, by the companies themselves.

Much as I like the idea of keeping drones away from planes, just look at how governments have abused other "voluntary" restriction systems. For example, ISPs install filters for ostensibly noble causes, then governments commandeer them for more questionable uses.
Is 'plastic bag' not a derogatory term for drones anymore?
Agreed, I even disabled the ad blocker but couldn't get the site to load (still got stuck in the warning page)
Better Security for Ruby Apps
Yes, you pointed out the main advantage - it's a bet against the stock price of the company. This lowers the volatility,and it doesn't lower expected earnings too much because if things go up you can just hire more people at lower RSU amounts.

The other advantage is you can incentivize people to stay to at least the RSU cliff, which improves your retention and institutional knowledge.
I do. It's great. It's the best grid IMO.
Here's all you need:

@import 'bootstrap/variables';
@import 'bootstrap/normalize';
@import "bootstrap/mixins/clearfix";
@import "bootstrap/mixins/grid";
@import "bootstrap/mixins/grid-framework";

and then you can insert it:

article {
@include make-sm-column(5);
@include make-sm-column-offset(1);
@include make-xs-column(6);
}
Sites that block adblockers successfully forced me to... install a blacklisting script blocker.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541610 and marked it off-topic.
Same here. I didn't even study CS, nor did I own a computer until I was 23.

And this was back before the internet was ubiquitous so if you wanted to program you had to spend real money on books and developer tools. No free/open source resources at your fingertips.

My first real exposure to programming came after I bluffed my way into a temp gig building spreadsheets in Quattro Pro.
> I want telegrams nice-looking apps, with signals security. Could I use WhatsApp? Maybe, but Facebook owning it makes me uncomfortable.

Exactly, bots are an interesting and cool idea, and they're obviously putting a lot of effort behind it. But it just pales in comparison to the huge leap WhatsApp took, by implementing Signal's encryption.

TBH, I hadn't expected that move from WhatsApp at all--and I'm still a tiny bit skeptical, because it almost sounds a bit too good to be true :)

I have been using Signal for a bit, too, but hadn't gotten around to read up on how Signal's encryption protocol works, but I intend to. This too seems almost too easy, to get zero configuration and hard security. Surely there must be some pitfalls or trade-offs I'm paying for that? Ok there's the verification codes, and I can see if the protocol properly tight and secure, that might get you there. But I expect that to still leave some minor pitfall(s), and I just kind of want to know what exactly those are.

On the other hand, Telegram's Linux desktop client is just glorious. Sync is perfect and instant. The whole GUI runs super-snappy even on my 4-year old low-powered netbook. Which is something I can't say for WhatsWeb. Because it's so smooth and instant-sync I use as one of my primary means of sending text or data between my netbook and my phone.

The other reason is that, my data is being slurped left and right by big foreign corporations operating under very nosy governments. Currently that is mainly the US government, given the software platforms I use. Even if I can't help those powers tapping my (meta)data, it still makes a lot of sense to divide up my data-trail between powers that are very unlikely to share this data with eachother.

And then, about half of my friends are on Telegram. Many of them for the two reasons above, others because the rest is there :-P I personally don't mind using more than one IM-app/network either. I have all the "messaging" stuff (including GMail, btw) grouped in one of those "folder" like icons on my homescreen (Android/Cyanogenmod), giving very quick access to any I need.

So yes, Telegram. Make with the hard encryption. I personally prefer it over bot-functionality, even though I think it is very shiny. But what I would really hate to see is an IM network with mediocre encryption "win" (popularity) over a network with much better encryption, just because it has a shiny bot platform.
This (1) is my goto alternative. Mostly because it's easier to go through comments. The author has a react native app in the iOS store.

(1) https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/
I'd guess that Firefox is a fairly good candidate for this kind of packaging just because it has relatively few external dependencies, and lots of Mozilla-specific dependencies which are rarely used by other software
common response to why companies don't pay a ton of money for these exploits [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11249173
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. If you want to make a point here, please do so civilly and substantively.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11540857 and marked it off-topic.
Beware the gold rush of Q1 2016
Agreed. Similarly, I stopped even bothering with links to Wired articles after they started too.
I'd say $25,000 at least. It's a number I've seen a few companies cite for full-scope, penestration tests. Usually to sell their products they make the real money on. :)
To be precise, it varies according to the equation:

Delta-V = Exhaust velocity x natural log(mass full / mass empty).

As the "mass empty" is very dependent on the payload size, it will indeed change a lot!
I think the overall point of this article is spot-on: the goal is to iterate over the understand - design - build - use cycle, with each iteration working from the known to the unknown - by pinning down those design and architecture decisions that can safely be made early.

With regards to "when should one introduce interactions / logic / UI" decisions, I think it depends on the sort of application you're building, who is the user, and what are the risk factors that need addressing.

If the goal is to build a simple blog-like site for a mom-and-pop shop, then you might want to start with paint & chrome, because while many platforms could suffice, the importance of front-end gloss might drive implementation choices.

If the goal is to build a geodetic-measurement app for plate-tectonic specialists, perhaps you want to start with the engine, without which the entire effort is pointless.

To me it's all about

- Achieving a shared vision early then refining

- Surfacing risk areas early then addressing

Past that, how many iterations you need and what you call them is mostly semantic, once you understand what you're trying to achieve.
Geoffrey Hinton's "Neural Networks for Machine Learning" on Coursera [0] is a pretty excellent course to cover the basics. There's a lot in the course, but if you just skim over the videos you'll get a pretty good "big picture" view of what's out there. As with any quantitive topic, it's best to take a first pass where you just glance at the math and come back later to really focus on the missing pieces

An important thing to realize is that much of deep learning is decades old neural networks research that has for one reason or another become more viable recently.
Great to see real-world examples of fixes for problems encountered.
AFAIK mdadm has been stable for years (one of the reasons why I prefer software raid to hardware raid). As long as you boot into anything resembling a recent Linux kernel along with a userspace with mdadm support, you should be fine.

If in doubt, boot from a live-cd/usb and see if you can mount your drives ok.
A future without code
Centralization and slack are inversely proportional. If everybody is reliably and unambiguously identified from birth by a single government-issued and -maintained key, and that government turns against its citizens (or is overthrown, compromised, et cetera), you're basically hosed.
It makes me wonder if lacking bigger problems to focus on dealing with (competing with the Soviets, overthrowing the Axis powers) is the reason people create these non-issues to fight about instead
I'm the original one that complained - and now that I used it as a bookmark reference (instead of being linked from HN) I do see the benefit of the back button. Maybe only have back button navigation if there is no existing history. That way, links to the tool don't hijack existing history items.
The author and Facebook, Inc are lucky that the earlier hacker was just a regular spam criminal, not some bigtime "Nation-State Hacker". The Nation-State Hacker probably would have been a great deal more careful and not left easy-to-spot PHP backdoors lying around.

This also points out a weak area in our knowledge of hacking - how often does a given exploit get rediscovered? This and other anecdotes show that it happens at least once in a while. Prevalence of rediscovery could put lie to the NSA's "NOBUS" assumption, though. So we're likely to never see the results of such research.
Thank you. Of course you are right. It is all very complex and western powers have a lot of fault of what is happening right now. Unfortunately those guys will never be punished and instead we, the populations of the world are left yo suffer the consequences. Even I knew going into Iraq and Libia would leave those countries worse off.
Prince dead
"Deputy Mayor and Moderate party spokesperson Maria Ryden, who is one of the politicians behind the motion told The Local she felt it was "unfair" to continue the project, because it was not sustainable in the long term.

"We might as well stop now," she argued."

This is nuts, don't they understand the point of a test?
Prince Dead at 57
How to Take Secure Credit Card Payments with Mobile EMV Card Reader
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11540389.
What terrible practices did Google, or even Apple, start with?
Whenever this topic comes up I always find myself thinking "why not?"

We know humans are animals, and as far as we can tell, toilet humor is universal across cultures. Animals aren't as intelligent as humans, sure--but does anyone think that poop jokes require a lot of intelligence to get?

I feel like the history of studying animal cognition can be thought of as long process of us just getting over how special and unique we think we are. First it was problem-solving vs. pre-programmed instincts, then it was "man, the tool user", then it was language, and now sense of humor? Well why not?
There's another article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11540648, which discussion we merged hither.
>[] == [];
false
Of course this was more of a fun example of something you can do with the Page Nodes platform than an actual echo replacement. And a way of getting started connecting services.

Definitely move on to some dedicated hardware if you're serious about this sort of thing.
Py 3 is not the future of CPython either. Even today the overwhelming majority of projects use 2, even new projects.
I'd have to say that it's pretty clear Facebook isn't offering enough, otherwise the first guy through the system would have claimed it.
only for ROI reasons.

Tim Cook was all about ROI when he implemented Apple's global supply chain.
She didn't say "all women", she said "many women." I attend the University of Texas at Austin. I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field. One of the reasons was the fact that although I'd taken AP CS courses in high school, I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late". This attitude came from my peers, the companies that attended our career fairs, and even from my first exposure to the online tech press/blogosphere- I remember reading an essay by Paul Graham wherein he essentially implied that if a woman hasn't started coding by 13 all hope is lost for her. The only people I didn't get that impression from were (most of) my instructors, but that wasn't really enough, especially in the 500+ person intro classes I was in at the time.

Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.
Installing ElectroBSD by exploiting “HardenedBSD”
Nice write up. Of course, this would be the team member whose photo is merely an Orange. Paranoid security people haha...

Part that jumped out at me, aside from obvious goodies, was this:

"FTA is a product which enables secure file transfer, online file sharing and syncing, as well as integration with Single Sign-on mechanisms including AD, LDAP and Kerberos"

...followed by...

"...web-based user interfaces were mainly composted of Perl & PHP... PHP source codes were encrypted by IonCube... lots of Perl Daemons in the background"

Wow. That inspires a lot of confidence in the "secure" product. I'd have doubted Facebook relied on such a system had I not known they built their empire on PHP. We all know its reputation. Their "secure, file-transfer appliance" fits right in.
Because it's has a huge ROI for society. Is there some criticism or implied alternative in your comment that I'm not getting?
Where Will Your Country Stand in World War III
Thanks.

From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF, the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read):

At the end of 1: While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely.

Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, especially with our successful campaign of economic warfare focused on energy, could not afford to build a new BM fleet (we can quibble about mid- and terminal ranges, but boost phase intercept (by far the highest payoff) counter measures tended to require new boosters).

2 is not in conflict with the Reagan Administration (you indeed need Civil Defense, and we still need it).

3 is very speculative, but, in the end, that's actually what happened. Before the decisions about deployment that SDI proposed to be able to answer in the '90s could be made, the USSR was no more, as was much of its BM fleet (besides the draw-downs, it was a shame about how a solid third of the most dangerous RS-36/SS-18 Satan missiles were exiled outside of the Russian Federation).

4 likewise negated, USSR collapsed, we didn't deploy.

5-6 and 8 are not particularly controversial.

Pretty much the same for 7, which doesn't say much to begin with.

Nowhere do I see the combination of "OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline.

And History has proven them correct., and it couldn't be, since the proposed decisions in the '90s were mooted by the USSR's end in 1991, which we could see coming in 1988-9 (e.g. Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall, and note how widely derided G. H. W. Bush's 1991 Chicken Kiev speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech was; talk about being on the wrong side of history!).
Been saying this for a long time. Health insurance in US is a fraud. Obama just made it compulsory for everyone in US to be defrauded.

Here's why:
Assuming that the actual cost of heart surgery in US is 10x India cost, it'll cost ~$10k to $15k in US for a heart surgery.

Now, a good health insurance premium, for a family of 4, easily costs upwards of $1k a month. People pay so much, because this fraud in US, shows the $100k figure, and those with good health insurance will be glad to see that they just have to pay their deductible (of $500 to $5k,based on their insurance).

Basically, Americans think it costs 100x for a treatment/medicine, and pay 1x towards monthly premiums, while the actual cost if just 10x. In India, the cost probably is just 1x.

Doctors/Hospitals in US lose because they have no pricing power. (Insurance company decides how much docs/hospital/group gets paid)

Patients in US lose because the Insurance companies dictate who is covered for what.

Insurance companies in US rejoice.

note: I'm not an American, so this is purely a dispassionate comment on what a ripoff healthcare insurance in US is, and how it affects the list price for medical care and medicines.
> most of our big flat-tops will be sunk in the first couple months

Carriers as they exist today may well become as obsolete as the Battleships of WW2, but there isn't a navy in the world that can currently get enough firepower inside the envelope of a single U.S. carrier battlegroup to sink a carrier, let alone all of them.
One may believe that the current system is not optimal, yet not believe that Bitcoin is improvement.

As for the transactions vs hashes correlation, while technically true, in practice the two are inevitably linked, as the currency must be protected proportionally to the sums it manages. As more value is stored and transacted, so the incentive to attack it increases, and so an increase in the cost of attacking it is required. Though it might trail off at some point, Bitcoin's history has shown this relation to exist.
It's a ceramic disc. Since there is no wind erosion, if it doesn't get direct hit, it should last quite some time. Footprints from first landing are still there - and are expected to be for at least next 10 million years - so you can expect finely-engraved piece of rock to last much longer.
I wonder if there are any industry-focused resources (meetups, mailing lists, etc.) available, to offer specific guidance.
Syncano releases beta push notification product
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542568.
I'm curious, anybody know if there's a simple way to wire this up to Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io)? My first thought was MQTT, but for some reason PageNodes doesn't have any MQTT output support, which is kind of odd for something claiming to be an IoT connectivity platform.
Pip statistics tells us they're not that many.
Seems like two factor authentication here would have helped.
yep. i dont even bother visiting links to wired articles anymore
Now I understand why they were begging for donations all the time