skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I boil this down to a few categories of people in positions of government. There is a certain word, don't say it too loud or they might run or grab pitchforks, but the word is... cough... accountability.

Looks around carefully. I spent some time contracting in DC, and the conclusion I came to is that there are three main types of people around the government and financial centers of power.

1) Those who are aware of the coming shitstorm and the complete corruption and subversion, and are just trying to "get theirs". This usually ends up in a "I got mine, fuck you" attitude. They don't push back because they know they would get punished for it, so they instead use their knowledge to further their career at the expense of their duty, and principles. They know, but don't care (enough to risk anything) about the status quo.

2) Those who know about the situation, and agree with it. These are usually indoctrinated extremists on either side of the spectrum, neocon, ultra-lib, the kind of people who now think capatalism in it's current form is the best gift from god and they speak of peace while selling massive amounts of weapons to dictators they setup all around the world. They know, and they care (for the wrong things), and actually perpetrate many of the abuses of the system.

3) Those who are too ignorant or stupid to know, or the slightly modified, those who have an idea about how bad it is but would rather stick their head in the sand and pretend reality doesn't exist. They don't know and don't care.

Don't tell me where all the true patriots went. I have told my friends, that "I know not one brave soul, not one." (keep in mind I'm not talking about media figures, like Snowden, Manning, Drake, Binney, Tice, Edmonds, all of whom I do consider brave souls) To me, that is the real problem I faced when I had my Descartes reset, in that I started to realize that while I still believe in the power of an oath, and the duties that come with them, the majority of the people around me and in positions of real power pay tons of lip service to principles, but never actually do them. Personally, I think this is causing a kind of mass cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization that we have yet to realize the full impact of.

When I think about the leadership traits I learned in the Corps, and how little of them I see in our leaders, I fear for the future of my country.

(in case anyone is wondering, they are: Justice, Judgement, Dependability, Initiative, Decisiveness, Tact, Integrity, Enthusiasm, Bearing, Unselfishness, Courage, Knowledge, Loyalty, and Endurance.)
Longtime listener, first-time caller here. Okay, maybe this is just a naive idea, but in Fry's spirit of going-backward-to-go-forward, I think that a very subversive, Internet-thwarting tech would be a device that did point-to-point communication (ie., like ham-radio packet broadcast). Like, go to place X, tune into your point-to-point USB dongle and tune in to the chatter -- constrained by the broadcast range of the device's power and antenna. You'd have the efficiencies of a social networking system paired with the place-ness of a particular physical location. This would tend, I imagine, to link people up IRL after they "sniffed" each other electronically to determine whether they were same tribe/interest/affinity/perversion/whatever. From there, they could pursue the more authentic/place-based/dreamy/serendipitous youth more resonant with what Fry experienced in his youth. And since the communication is point-to-point with no IP address or Internet implied, no advertiser/analytics authority could interpose itself in those conversations.

Is that an insane idea?
Thank you for linking, I had come across this before but couldn't recall the name.
I'm more interested in Project Vault, which seems dead since the project leader quit Google soon after he announced it:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/29/googles-project-vault-is-a-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6qrQzn8uBo
Article Extraction with Python's Newspaper Library
I'm actually curious how that works with Monsanto breeds.

A lot of seeds are actually hybrids which don't breed true. You plant two varieties in the same field, detassel one, and use the seed next year as your hybrid crop. You cross (say) a big growing breed with a fast growing breed, and because the two parent strains were uniform, the children will be uniformly big and fast growing, but the grandchildren won't.

This is why most farmers nowadays prefer to buy their seed corn: it's better but a pain to produce (anyone here have a summer job detasseling corn?). I'm curious if the pirated Monsanto breeds have third generation degeneration.
#thingsYouMostlyOnlyHearFromAnonymousAccounts
Something I've always wondered about dolphins:

They are widely regarded as ranking among the most intelligent animals. At the very least, they seem to be much more trainable than a wide variety of other mammals.

But why? What about their lifestyle, diet, hunting methods, etc requires cognitive ability greater than that of (say) a shark or an antelope?
On Job Titles:
I think it is unfortunate that Senior Engineer is a title that is often now in the middle of the career ladder[0] but I feel that has more to do with the fact that historically most companies didn't have a technical career path like some do now.

Those companies that only have the three levels (Junior, Intermediate, and Senior) are generally speaking not looking for Finders to fill their senior-level positions; their business model just doesn't call for it. At most, their looking for Solvers who can also give direction to the more junior engineers. In many places that's all you need.

However, I think at companies where technological innovation is a strategic business value, you need to be able to distinguish between different levels of Solvers (Senior vs. Staff engineer) as well as identify and reward Finders (Principal and beyond).

I think its important to have the larger list of job titles because I think it communicates valuable information to non-engineers, but I also think separating out this notion of autonomy is really useful and I think can help a lot of technical people think about where they want to go with their career. Thank you for sharing.

[0]http://changelog.ca/log/2013/08/09/software_engineer_title_l...

edit: minor grammatical issues
> Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed.

So if I wanted to create a GMO and sell it in Argentina, I'd have to pay a premium? At what stage of development does payment occur or is it a tax on sales?
What's the memory bandwidth of the Xeon E5 v4? NVidia made a big deal of their increased memory bandwidth due to chip stacking.
20GB? What kind of disc are they using? Why not use a 200GB MicroSD? That would be way more efficient.

2 200GB MicroSDs would give you 400GB of storage weighing in at only 1 gram.
Regina Dugan now works for Facebook.
Glad you showed the TI-99/4A there at the end!
I was just thinking this. Again, I haven't been able to read the article but I was under the impression that the FBI paid to crack this one phone, I didn't realize that they have this tool that could 'hack' more iPhones with.
> Basically, regulators don't have the balls to go after the big guys.

The other component to this, is that regulatory compliance becomes a significant barrier to entry for new firms. Incumbents end up gaining even more organizational power as market power increases, and competition on price and service quality decreases.
For people complaining about revolving doors, how do you get regulators with current industry expertise without.... industry experts?
Before Building Your Product Roadmap
http://news.ycombinator.com/active seems to be pretty unadulterated, although it goes by comments not votes. Controversial topics that get flagged as flamewars and drop off the front page (they hit 40 comments before 40 votes iirc) stay on the first page of /active as long as they're still... active.

Also, HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net, it's far from secret. And while I don't necessarily share the view that moderation of discussion is a GoodThing™, I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
> You should consider the argument you'd make that downloading, possessing, and publishing (if seeding) US government employee credentials doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

As usual the rest of the world is not a place within the US. It's a shame some people keep overlooking that.
Can anybody explain me if the online pharmacy business PLR had was legal or not and if not, why? Why was DEA after him? Thanks.
The approach you described is largely security theater. Supposing an attacker has compromised a machine and is capable of retrieving stored data, it reasonably likely that the attacker will be capable of either capturing the key as it is transmitted or reading the key while it is stored in memory.

If you start with the assumption that a machine is compromised, then there's not really a way to guarantee secrecy of anything done on the machine. Homomorphic encryption resolves this, but (as far as I'm aware) it is too computationally expensive to be viable at present.
> two competent researchers assessed the system, one of them reported what he found to us and got a good bounty, none of them were able to escalate access.

Are they allowed to escalate access, given the bounty rules?

Also, isn't the periodic collection of login credentials completely out of scope? What I mean is: once the initial vulnerability was located and the pentester got shell access in the system, shouldn't he have stopped there and reported?
I don't know what your "language of choice" is, but here in the Sacramento area, the selection of languages which there are jobs available to be worked is somewhat limited.

Yes, ES/JS suffers from its "look like Javascript/C++/C" * heritage, courtesy of the usual suspects from a marketing group. But get past the cosmetics, and you can do some nice FP things with ES/JS.

* I'm in the camp that Modula / Delphi were MUCH better language(s) than C. But few groups were hiring for those skills back in the day - C and its spawn won out, sadly. At least C++ is pretty much dead outside of the video game industry. Good riddance.
I am not aware of a way to get into a "scientist" level position doing biology research, in industry, without a PhD. This alone would answer the question "Why do so many people continue to pursue doctorates?"

If somebody has evidence to the contrary, please fill me in.
This sort of reminds me of the bikini island footage.

What is shocking with that footage isn't the devastation of the nukes but rather how damn robust the battle ships sacrificed are. Some of them never sank even after direct hits from a nuke.

So I have to think a carrier might just completely ignore your flying bots and let them attack/hit :)
>paying outside technologists to find ways to access highly-encrypted messages on phones used by terrorist suspects was not “scalable.”

Good! I don't want it to be "scalable". That means they want to expand the data that they are collecting to include more a more phones. There is no need to do that!
Yup. For what is possible, see reddit's colorizedhistory subreddit. The old pictures become much more interesting.
Because the question is literally answered by the first half a dozen results from any search engine?
"As we don't have full control of it, we ran it isolated from the systems that host the data people share on Facebook."

"Neither of them were able to compromise other parts of our infra-structure so, the way we see it, it's a double win: two competent researchers assessed the system, one of them reported what he found to us and got a good bounty, none of them were able to escalate access."

From the write-up:

> After checking the browser, the SSL certificate of files.fb.com was * .fb.com …

You left a wildcard cert on this random internet-facing unaudited 3rd party linux box with no protection against data exfiltration, or an HTTPS proxy in front of it, or anything? I know it's not as critical as facebook.com, but this is still bad. Priv escalation CVEs for Linux come out like every month.

At the very least, using this cert, anyone could run a MITM on any * .fb.com service and compromise without ever breaking in. From the article that could include VPNs, Outlook Webmail, Oracle E-business and MobileIron. I'm hoping you did actually have a proxy in front of it and Orange just didn't catch that.
Given that these computers are so important for our culture/ history, it is surprising not more museums exhibit them. I'm sure they would make popular exhibits.

The UK has the national museum of computing in Bletchley Park, which has a nice collection, although not all of them worked when I visited. I guess it must be a nightmare keeping them running...

http://www.tnmoc.org
This. Anything with global interactions (i.e. low flops per byte transferred from memory to core) is poorly suited for GPUs.

There is a hierarchy of HPC-type workloads called "Colella's seven dwarves" that ranks different workloads in terms of being CPU bound or memory bandwidth bound. See also the "roofline model". Both of these heuristics are made to reason about CPUs, but are also effective for thinking about GPUs.
For some reason these stories keep getting demoted from the frontpage :(
The key issue here is equating a living organism with a patentable technology. That is, in fact, the reality we are now living in, but many people are uncomfortable with that.
the correct comparison is to yahoo answers, rather than stack overflow. it holds up pretty well if you consider it in that light (or used to; i stopped going there when they started insisting you log in to see anything).
Not Moscone West, where they have held IO in the past.
> try to convince them to enter commands in a browser over a web stack, as a "shell".

What? I had never heard of fish before and this is making me nop out pretty quickly.
That's only half a measure. What you transcribed as 1, 2, 3 and 4 are eighth notes.
That's 5p we'll never see again. What a waste.
I expected it to be a piece on people who bought a Mac in 2016.
>Because the future is whatever you're building software in today.

This is a seriously unhealthy attitude for software engineering. This attitude will create legacy systems and legacy systems that will live on forever.
The ability to verify trust and impose consequences on those who abuse it is imperative to society; Or, at the very least, societies where the repeated prisoner's dilemma has any bearing, which I'll argue ours is. The fact that we are willing to go to great lengths and invasions of privacy to do that is a tradeoff that we often make poorly, but is nonetheless a tradeoff we have to make for continued stability.
Power of positive thinking skews mindfulness studies
See my sibling post. We extradite (successfully) frequently for computer crimes.
The "march of death" method of product development?
> James Comey, director of the FBI, said on Thursday that the cost was “worth it”, but added that an accommodation needed to be made with Apple and other technology companies in the future, as paying outside technologists to find ways to access highly-encrypted messages on phones used by terrorist suspects was not “scalable.”

That is exactly what we want. If its clearly in the public interest to expended substantial effort as part of a criminal investigation, they absolutely should do so.

The problem is they want scalable access to everything.
There is no general test. A home for the elderly in Gothenburg with about 70 employees is trailing shortening working hours. It's done as a test to see how it affects productivity, working environment etc, and meant to serve as basis for future political decisions.

In Swedish: http://arbetet.se/2015/08/03/112559/

There's also a few other tests around Swedn but overall I guess way less than 1k people.
The problem is, for organizations like Greenpeace, they require that their supporters think the opponent is evil. When you can't engage your opponent on the facts, engage them on an emotional level, and accuse them of moral decrepitude -- then you'll never need to respond to their stances.

This is a common tactic on the far left and far right:

"You can't just ban all abortions, what about rape?"
"Baby killer!"

"Clearly some abortions are unconstitutional, like once the baby is viable."
"Misogynist!"

"You can't just have completely open borders, it would bankrupt the safety net."
"Racist!"

"You can't just close the borders, lots of industries rely on immigrant labor."
"Shill!"
About the idea of "bizarre dysfunction of modern "cross-functional" teams and "full stack" developers, leading to Agile/Scrum bullshit": I have never heard people advocate that this should apply to sales, marketing and HR, too. User-centered designers and graphic artists also often seem to be able to carve out a niche for themselves. So, it seems the only discussion should be about how specialized the specialists can be, not about banning all specialization.

I also don't really know any organization that goes all in on "all team members are interchangeable". I do know one organization that seems to go all in on "each team member has his own unique tasks, rights, and responsibilities", and that is disastrous (X writes SQL script, but is not allowed to know the name of the database or the server it is installed on, and isn't allowed to run the script; Y is allowed to run SQL scripts, but not modify them, not even to fill in the database name. Their manager compliments them because they refuse to get anything done/follow the rules to the letter)

I think it is examples like these that led to a swing to the other end of the spectrum that Scrum advocates. I also think the pendulum will swing back.
Is that a lot or a little?
What I'm saying is that any analysis is subject to a great deal of uncertainty, not that the impact is minimal.

The guess is just for fun. Do you disagree that the effect of NOx probably varies greatly between LA County and any place without the same amount of traffic or special geography? You're welcome to make your own guess for the purpose of discussion.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/damn-equities-sell-you...

> Noted eagle eye and EFF Investigative Researcher Dave Maass happened on an interesting item from earlier this week on FedBizOpps, the site for government agencies to post contracting opportunities. The Navy put up a solicitation explaining that the government wants “access to vulnerability intelligence, exploit reports and operational exploit binaries affecting widely used and relied upon commercial software,” including Microsoft, Adobe, Android, Apple, “and all others.” If that weren’t clear enough, the solicitation explains that “the vendor shall provide the government with a proposed list of available vulnerabilities, 0-day or N-day (no older than 6 months old). . . .The government will select from the supplied list and direct development of exploit binaries.”

http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-purchased-zero-day-exploits...

> The National Security Agency bought hacking tools from a security firm, based on documents unearthed by a FOI request.

The US is doing it. The GCHQ likely does it too and I bet at least some of this list was built via information purchased from others:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/gchq_catalog_...
Holding bankers accountable would not "hurt the industry." The health of the industry is driven by non-government market factors. Indeed, aggressive enforcement means more private sector job opportunities for regulators. SEC lawyers generally don't go to banks--they go into private practice law firms. Those firms make money when banks get in trouble. The recent financial collapse was actually good for financial litigation departments. Looking at it another way: the amount of demand in antitrust litigation is much lower these days than it was 30 years ago when the DOJ was much more aggressive about antitrust enforcement.

I just don't think the narrative about regulators going easy because they're hoping for a sweet gig at Goldman is consistent with what happens or even a theoretical analysis of peoples' incentives.

Ultimately, it's politics. Bill Clinton implemented massive deregulation in the financial industry. Regulation is seen as an illegitimate intrusion into the market's operation. So long as that is the case, regulators will avoid being aggressive for fear of provoking a political backlash.
Sure, but if they're driving for one of those companies, that company already has a high definition photo of their face and lots of other information - I assume that drivers are subjected to considerably more scrutiny than passengers.
I think you could do quite well with seeding areas with known colours. Provide data of x,y,colour at a few sample points where the initial guess was too far out. A very small amount of data might allow for quite accurate results.
I think the geofencing has the same value as a door lock; it keeps the honest people honest.
Golden rice fixes vit A deficiency, but nothing else. Since the target populations tend to have a general pack of nutrition, and not just a vit A deficiency, it seems odd to release a patent encumbered GMO (golden rice has something like 70 patents from 30 companies).

Camapigning from the hippies, but also from WFP and WHO, mean that terminator genes aren't going to be used, and that farmers will be allowed to reuse the seed, and that the manufacturers will do more testing.

Especially since you're probably going to continue supplementing iron and zinc and iodine you may as well keep supplementing with vit A and not releasing the GMO.
why would you reinvent yourself unless you already knew you weren't worth billions? and how could such a company succeed with any reinvention if they couldn't already succeed?

shiterest.
would be ironic since the number of plastic bags in the UK decreased dramatically since a 5p charge was introduced in October:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/12034574/P...
Who can sink all the flat tops without launching a nuclear war? That seems pretty unlikely. More likely, at most one or two will be sunk by suicide/guerilla attacks by small states, and super power conflicts will be constrained to cold & economical wars
The argument against planned obsolescence is not an economic one but rather one against the immense waste it creates. The so-called "fast fashion" model now employed by H & M and other clothing retailers also falls into this model and it's an established business model in many other spaces as well.

If you create products that need to be thrown out and bought again cyclically, you create a much higher volume of sales. The problem with this is that our current recycling capacity is not able to handle the excess in resultant waste products.
No. What you're describing is just a subset of preimage attacks.

Not having knowledge of x is just one type of preimage attack, a "preimage resistance". You can also know x, then it's a "second-preimage resistance".[1]

Which is not the same as a collision attack. Where you're trying to find x and y such that h(x) = h(y) without anyone specifying x or y in advance.

By definition a collision attack is an attack where you specifically craft both x and y such that they exploit weaknesses in the algorithm.

It's not enough to know an arbitrary x or y that someone else has made, because that value isn't going to be exploiting the weakness.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_attack
Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy
My own experience is that carse indicate something like 10% more speed than the real one. You can check that with a GPS, which gives very precise speed measurements. So maybe 9mph excesive speed will not trigger any radar.
This is more about Thoughts on Privacy than security.