skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> users want to sit in the driver's seat.

> We need more Firefoxes.

> We need more browsers that treat their users, rather than publishers, as their customers.

Until they started talking about DRM I was hoping that we were "saving Firefox" from mandatory extension signing.

As of Firefox 47, you will not be able to install any extension which hasn't been digitally signed by Mozilla. There will be no about:config setting to override this. They claim that this will prevent adware from disabling the digital signature requirement. But it's also taking power out of the hands of users, with the justification that supposedly Mozilla knows better than their users do what code they want to run.

This is the death-knell of Firefox for me. I'll be switching to an unbranded fork and hoping that the security updates keep coming.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing
IMHO, that's the lesson -- your mental model of the world shouldn't have sharp categories. [1] If you use concepts such that things are either a heap or not-a-heap, "you're gonna have a bad time". Instead, you should recognize a smooth boundary between categories -- things are more or less heaplike, so you should be able to continuously reduce its rating as grains are added or removed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687391
Saudi officials were 'supporting' 9/11 hijackers, commission member says
Russia launches first rocket from new spaceport
I believe the protocol here is to not complain about the title without suggesting a better alternative for the mods.
The big problem with this Facebook controversy is the amount of people getting their news from Facebook. There are a thousands of other places to consume news, and they do a better job. I almost never click on the Trending topic on Facebook, because I always that it has been curated/customized based on my profile. I actually use NYT / Twitter / Washington Post etc. to get news and trending topics
Old spaceplane design will finally fly
I personally don't see why rating the service is any of my business. If the service sucks, I don't go back. If the owner of the establishment wants to know why their business is tanking, they can do the same thing anyone else would do and keep an eye on things, making changes as necessary. Maybe their employees would do a better job if they were paid enough to respect it.
I agree in general. But in this case - look at the actual source code:

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/qemu-seccomp.c

There's also no further refinement of seccomp privileges at runtime, so that list of syscalls is statically whitelisted up front and nothing else is done (search 'seccomp' in the repository). Is there anything I obviously couldn't achieve with that list of syscalls?

Given the list of what's whitelisted for the whole process, I wouldn't put much stock in it, for now. qemu would probably need some real upgrades and significant work to make this more fine grained and reduce the attack surface using it (both against the kernel and for rogue programs attacking the host qemu instance itself).
Very little. A couple of graphs, maybe. It is, as you say, a well presented rehash of his previous interviews and writing, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The only thing that's wrong is to call it a documentary, which it clearly isn't -- at least, not in the ordinary sense of the term.

Until you pointed it out, I wasn't aware that Chomsky didn't write it himself. I would ordinarily find that troubling, but the script is closely based on Chomsky's previous writing. I'm confident Chomsky would have checked it carefully and would not have agreed to participate if there was anything he was unhappy about.
Sure, if your customers don't mind, raising prices helps everybody.

But by replacing tips with a 20% cost increase means the customer stays at the same cost to them.
California Franchise Tax Bureau
I need some help! Can the California Franchise Tax Board hold a single owner personally liable for not paying the $800 annual fee for a foreign LLC formed in Florida and registered with the State of California. It was registered in California in 2012 and legally stopped in 2015. The company has never made money, but lost a lot. No money was given back to the owner. They are threatening me saying they can pierce the corporate veil and make me pay. I know California needs money but I put so much money into this corporation I don't have anything left. I think they are trying to scare me!
The Microsoft one was one of the tihng I thought they got right.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-job-levels-in-Microso...
It's the other way 'round. Someone has a pragmatic stance on something, and the SJWs label it as political, and ban it. They also ban or not ban people because of their politics. It's one thing to ban all politics, another banning just those you oppose (and bonus if it's just an excuse and the real reason is money or connections).

You don't have to look further than Twitter for examples of all of the above.
Lobsters are probably on the way out of the possibly immortal and into the negligibly senescent category. They were only in the former category because there was no way to measure the age of an arbitrary sample of lobsters retrieved from the wild. Researchers did find a way to measure lobster age reliably a few years back, so data will emerge on their life spans over the next few decades. It isn't a well populated or well funded area of study, so results tend to lag.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/12/tree-rings-lobsters
Works but doesn't seem to make any comments that relate to my photos, also talks a lot about American only known Celebes?
Airbnb, Palantir Markdowns Split Mutual Funds
NYT and Washington Post are subject to the same kinds of biases - in fact, moreso, since what comes up is ultimately in the hands of the executive editor.

Twitter also likely uses manual curation.

If Facebook improves an algorithmic system augmented with human consensus (that diffuses the editorial control among a group of curators), it will be the least biased of all the mentioned systems.
Is this a joke? SEO consultant at Google? Backlinks? It's just a simple way to give it context, and I barely noticed the links.

Can't work out if this is a joke.
Not a money grab. All $$ paid by the winner of the gTLD are divvied up to the losers of the auction. ICANN isn't just printing money here or pocketing the price.
That's grossly misleading. The first problem with it, is it assume that coal fired plants release their fly ash up the stocks, they don't, not anymore.

The second problem with it is the radio isotopes are Uranium and Thorium which as far as these things go are a nothing burger. AKA they are very weakly radioactive and they don't bio-accumulate.

Third problem with it is fly ash is about as radio-active as plain dirt. Because dirt also has similar levels of thorium and uranium in it.
Superficially that's a common difference that will be noticed.

The thing that sets generators apart from other iterable types in Python, though, is actually the fact that generators are units of code which can suspend their execution, then resume it at a later time (and in more recent versions of Python, can have additional information passed into them while doing so).

Formally, a generator is a callable whose body contains at least one yield expression. So for example when you pull the values out of it (the way you would with an ordinary iterable) what happens is that it executes until it encounters a yield, emits whatever value is specified by the yield, and suspends execution. The next time it's asked for a value, it resumes execution until it encounters a yield again. You can continue in this way until either 1) the generator executes a 'return' statement, or 2) control flows past the end of the generator's code, or 3) the generator raises a StopIteration exception (and in the first two cases a StopIteration gets raised for you by Python, so that you don't have to explicitly do it if you don't want to).

This means generators can be used to implement lazy iterables, infinite iterables, etc., but also means generators can be used as coroutines by taking advantage of their ability to suspend/resume and pass control flow around.
I don't think this site will make me a company.
Looking at the site, it looks like this focuses on US politics. Being a US citizen, I'm totally fine with this. An easily searchable archive of political ads should make it easier to call BS on our politicians when necessary.

I find myself wondering, however, what it would take to extend this effort to other countries of the world. I have a few friends in Canada and in Europe, and speaking with them, I get the impression that the politics of their respective countries are just as susceptible to shenanigans as that of the US. I think someone politically active in say, Sweden, would want to be able to call out his or her leaders for supporting puppy-kicking or baby-eating just as much as someone in the US would.
How this process actually works is you apply to carry a gTLD (ie .blog) this application fee costs $185,000. If no one else applies for the same string, you are good to go. If they do there is an auction. The auction works like this. N parties participate and must provide an escrow account (to bid in good faith) they may bid up to what they want (and whats in escrow) and the winning bid pays out to the auctioneer (a minor fee) and the losing parties.

IE 3 parties to this auction (making this up)

automattic - 19 million paid
Party 1 - 9.5 million earned
Party 2 - 9.5 million earned

You are essentially paying off your competition to go away. There are some other details and this was the initial process a few years ago, I have not heard if there are any significant adjustments now.
Someone register law.blog as Bob Loblaw
Helicopter-mounted ground penetrating radar perhaps.
Ometa is amazing. Ohm, the successor is even better.
Is it the magical solution to all of life's problems? No. It is damn impressive. Yes.

Right now we live in a world where everything we do depends on multiple layers of 10s-100s of millions of lines of code each for the compilers, the operating systems, the browsers or platform libraries (ex Qt). It's physically impossible to read a significant amount of the code in any of these layers, much less understand it. Then we get to add in modules and libraries like Boost or Js-Framework-Melange-Of-The-Week and we don't even know how anything we are doing with the topmost platform level even works. We've gone from Fortran to this in 60 years. What is this going to look like in another 60 years?

An alternative future is something like Nile. Reading Nile's code requires some up-front study. That sounds like work compared to "I can look at a for-loop in any package and know instantly that it is for-looping er... something... for some reason..." But, it's the kind of up-front study that is reasonable for a smart high schooler to pull off. With reasonable effort, that kid could understand literally every character of the Nile source and start making major, sweeping modifications. Contrast that with Cairo --which at a high level is not much more complex than Nile, but I'll be damned if anyone but it's maintainers can claim to understand every line and make major changes.
AFAIK the part I'm the most interested with the "word processor" (Frank) isn't available, which I find very annoying: this is a programming research project yet the programs aren't available!
1) Commits don't have to be blocked. The action items from a review can be a separate commit.

2) Reviews can be done privately, with comments entered electronically. There doesn't have to be a four-day meeting.

2a) Organizations that use four-day meetings are likely full of people who need something to charge that time to. It may be worth delegating a representative from the engineering team to attend those.

3) Action items must be triaged. Ideally, each action item would be assigned a number and numbers grouped together as a statement of work for a commit. This is much less painful than it sounds. Test provenance would also be nice per commit.
"The HL-20 would be replaced as an emergency escape vehicle by the Russian Soyuz capsule, which did not land on a runway but rather thudded into the steppes of Kazakhstan upon return to Earth."

This is linked to this article on the new Russian spaceport, Vostochny cosmodrome ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687445 80M rent per year for the Baikonur cosmodrome and less access to Kazakhstan.
How are you so sure [1] is promoted? That would be a HUGE scandal if it was. IMO, bigger than this trending topics issue.
Building an EmPyre with Python
Well, except for the elephant-in-the-room of the dread lord Requirements Traceability, which will frequently eat the entire design cycle.
Meh.

This kind of parser isn't all that useful anyway. Parts of speech are one of those things people use to talk about language with, but you don't actually use them to understand language.
I'm just confused about the angry implication that they keep doing this. Looking back 60 days I don't see a single other comment like that...
Theranos Executive to Depart Amid Regulatory Probes
"Note that output from .bashrc stuffs up rsync and scp, in case you use them. Enclose the lot in { .... } >&2"

I call a shell script from my .bashrc so does this have the same effect? I'll take this advice and wrap the script. I don't use scp or rsync but possible could at some time, thanks @emmelaich.
Stopping Self Harm in Corporate IT
Their conclusion is simply that "the major part has been fixed" in MS12-024, and that you should be careful if you write a self-extracting installer. No big deal.
I really hope they incorporate Google Input Tools at some point. Most of the supported languages only have very poor iOS keyboards.
No, I said it is possible to get rid of tipping at low-end restaurants, i.e. it's possible to have low end restaurants without tipping. Do such low-end restaurants exists? Yes they do. Fast food restaurants are examples of such restaurants.
Thank you for sharing that insight! Didn't know that.
How Far Can We Go? Limits of Humanity. [video]
I'm going to die from a bad implementation of bitcopy(). Great.
Hydra are not a closed system. They can lower their entropy at the expense of their surrounding
The whole media ecosystem in the USA is out of whack. The lefties crap on Fox, righties crap on MSDNC, but both could better be thought of as news organs of the same establishment, with emphasis on opinion shaping, and de-emphasis on truth. Each target a different population segment. Facebook targets yet another segment, and the question is, will it become annexed to the same establishment?
I've bounced my idea off my wife before and asked whether such a thing existed. I do recall her mentioning things like noredink and commenting that they weren't a match for one reason or another (the specific reasons escape me at the moment).

Visiting noredink.com now ... I can't actually figure out what it is the site offers from a cursory glance, so I can't even begin to figure out whether it matches my idea and what issues it may have had that excluded it from her classroom.

I'll bounce grammarly off her later though, in case that's new.
An official client implies that other implementations of the standard are unofficial. Building a monoculture around a single client isn't healthy for the project, and nobody wants to put an unofficial client into their security infrastructure.
> drunken biochemists' ball

what's this?

> an entropy catalyst"

should be "anti-entropy catalyst", yes?
Really, the mechanism of all these parsers, including SyntaxNet, is the same in that they use statistical training data to set up a neural network. Here's a paper on the Stanford CoreNLP parser, which you can compare with Google's paper: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/danqi/papers/emnlp2014.pdf

So, really all of the above parsers are weak in that they only output a single best parsing, when in reality sentences can have more than one valid structure, the principal example being the second sentence you've provided. I don't think Google's model has a better sense of humor than the others, no. I anticipate that they all have used relatively similar training data.

However, there is probably a trivial way to get the second sentence to parse as

Subject --- Verb --- Object
Noun Verb Article Noun
| \ | | |
Fruit flies like a banana .

and that is to provide training data with more occurrences of ...

> N{Fruit flies} V{like} honey.
> N{Fruit flies} V{like} sugar water.

than occurrences of

> A plane V{flies} PREP{like} a bird.

The more sentences using simile that the parser finds, the less likely the neural net is to consider 'like' as a verb. It's also impacted by all of the uses of [flies like].

That's the nature of statistical language tools.

The stock parser debuted here gives the same answer as CoreNLP, by the way.

flies VBZ ROOT
+-- Fruit NNP nsubj
+-- like IN prep
| +-- banana NN pobj
| +-- a DT det
+-- . . punct

So much for Parsey McParseface's sense of humor.
The linked summary of his work (https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/honors-awards/bates-clark/y...) is far more informative than the Bloomberg article with the clickbaity headline.
One problem I have with this tool is support for pre-computed public keys or CSRs. The client prefers to generate a new key pair for every certificate. Automated renewal that works the same way for existing CSRs as it does for regular certificates requires undocumented hacks.

Using the same key pair for multiple certificates is necessary for public key pinning, since Let's Encrypt only issues certificates that last 90 days. I would love to see this feature get developed further.
I'm pretty sure the borders between the two are fluid at google.

I also wish middle management were a bit less afraid of such things. You can usually get cool ideas approved in the higher echolons (because a CEO doesn't have to fear too much, or possibly because these people actually are more imaginative).

Names that have meaning, tell a story are incredibly useful for marketing, even if they sometimes sound unprofessional. Exp: 'Plan B' (morning after pill), 'CockroachDB', 'Virgin'.

It's beyond me how anyone could have chosen the predictable public outcry instead of naming that boat Boaty McBoatface. That's probably the least offending name that ever resulted from an internet poll.
I would've liked testing this, if the signup prompts weren't so... aggressively displayed ? I almost never do signups, especially social signups via GitHub/Twitter/etc anymore for beta products because it's happened in the past that they ended up semi-abandoned with no way of deleting my profile/account, as well as for other reasons.

The alternative is of course, signing up with a temp email address and data, but it makes me feel uneasy going this route.

I suggest considering to make hyperdev.com/about the homepage instead (perhaps that's already the plan, once out of beta) or adding a link to it from the current homepage. People can read a bit about the product first, before deciding to signup, it seems more honest and empowering.

At least maybe display prominently on the homepage that this is a FogCreek product, I think it would make it easier for users to trust.

Try imagining a homepage visit is your first encounter with the product, having known nothing about it previously. It asks for your data, but it doesn't even tell you who made it. You have N other sites to visit or work to tend to.
Rich people have access to high-speed Internet; many poor people still don't
With Python 3.5 there is native support for concurrency by using the keywords await and async.

For simple usage if you are familiar with Go there is this library:
https://github.com/pothos/awaitchannel
It is not a bug. The windows driver contains KVM signatures, aswell as signatures for Hyper V extensions, and if they are enabled the driver fails to run. However if you modify the signatures in KVM and in HyperV devices, everything works fine. This is clear cut NVIDIA malfesence.
Have they updated the branded ones so you can't reuse them? otherwise why waste $20 when you can get one of the original branded versions for $5.
What in the W3C EME standard cannot be freely implemented? As far as I know, EME is just a communications standard between the browser and components that are not part of the browser to allow those components to provide media data for the browser to display.

EME can be used to communicate with proprietary DRM components, but those DRM components are not part of the standard, and there is nothing that I've seen in EME that makes DRM the only thing it can be used for.

For instance, couldn't EME be used to make a system to protect the privacy of people sharing personal videos? Encrypt the video and upload to a web server that all the parties sharing have access to. Distribute the decryption keys to the people intended to share the video. Use EME to interface the browser to a component that uses that key to decrypt the video on the fly.

From the browser's point of view there is not really any significant difference between a video that is encrypted for DRM and one that is encrypted for privacy. In the former case those who encrypted it want to keep the key secret from the viewer, whereas in the latter case they want to keep the key secret from third parties. To the browser, these look the same: there is encrypted video, and the browser needs something to decrypt that and hand it the decrypted data for it to display.
There is code in the client to reuse a keypair when renewing (without needing to reuse a CSR); there's just no way to trigger that from the UI so far. Maybe I'd better add one soon.
Now for the buffalo test[1]

`echo 'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo' | syntaxnet/demo.sh'

buffalo NN ROOT

+-- buffalo NN nn

| +-- Buffalo NNP nn

| | +-- Buffalo NNP nn

| | +-- buffalo NNP nn

| +-- buffalo NN nn

+-- Buffalo NNP nn

+-- buffalo NNP nn

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
The covenant they're proposing doesn't appear to distinguish between implementors, security researchers, and others. It just forbids, altogether, civil suits for circumventing or stripping copy protection (17 USC 1202-1203).

However, this only protects you from suits over circumvention. You are presumably still eminently liable for your PBS Nova scenario, for instance.
Kuhn's been on my reading list for a while. I think my fiancé has a copy of Ayer around

Plato/stanford is just overwhelming.
At the end of the day, the average person would be more exposed to radioactivity from walking by fly ash (in a pond, in a pile, in the air, wherever it is) than from shielded waste. "[...] fly ash most definitely is not more radioactive than nuclear waste. Instead, I think he is saying that if you stood next to a pile of fly ash you’d probably get a bigger radiation dose than if you stood next to radioactive waste that is adequately shielded." [0]

Also statistics helps frame an accurate picture when looking at it in terms of energy, not mass: "'In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.' Our source for this statistic is Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J. P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL." [1]

[0] http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410

[1] Ignore the incorrect headline: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...
y'know how every university department has a yearly "retreat"?

The parent poster made an incisive reference to: "living things are not closed systems, the inevitable increase in the sum total entropy in the universe.."; and so it is. A living process maintains its own internal order at the cost of the entropy and energy of its surroundings. Life increases the entropy of its surroundings at a higher rate than in its absence. (of course so does fire, and that's why this is only not the worst definition)