skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a (maybe naive) question: why is the person draining ETH from DAO called "attacker"?

I seems to me that the idea behind smart contracts was to have unambiguous description of what are participants agreeing to. The "attacker" is doing precisely this - I had not heard of any bug in Ethereum implementation that is used, only "bug" in DAO's smart contract. So he is allowed to do this, by contract definition.

Isn't the whole idea of that kind of contracts worthless if people are still rolling back effects of it when "it does not what it was meant to do"?
I think some of the most interesting (and hard!) problems are behavioral, centering around "spotting the bad apple." Which employee is most likely to steal, and why? What sorts of activities may be deemed suspicious, and merit closer investigation? There's a dangerous place in that direction, shades of 1984 - but there's also some pretty fascinating stuff too, i.e. "this guy just deviated from his routine in a significant way right after a big fight with his significant other, and now he's buying large quantities of ammunition; flag for increased surveillance."

I don't know where the proper line lies, exactly, between protecting privacy and building the magic "bad apple detector." But the geek in me desperately wants to see more time and cleverness invested in human heuristics...
A Turing complete blockchain was used to create a crowd-funded venture fund [TheDAO].

There was a bug in TheDAO's code. It got exploited in order to siphon off cryptocurrency worth many millions in USD.
ASP.NET Core Library and Framework Support
Remember that when they say it's a suggestion, it's truly a suggestion. If a majority of the miners refuse to accept the update, then what anyone at the Ethereum foundation wants them to do is irrelevant.

There is definitely a lot of social pressure to consider here, but there is still no central switch. I'm generally not a huge fan of cryptocurrency (as currencies that is, I love the tech), but I fail to understand why so many people who are oppose this move so rabidly. They're in the same situation with respect to forking that they were yesterday: whatever 51% of the community decides to do will happen.
I find it endlessly amusing that people are willing to bet their cold hard cash on "this code has no bugs".

When widespread old and tested code like OpenSSL has massive security bugs, what chance does something as new and in-development as Bitcoin/Ethereum have? An in the case of Ethereum, the contracts themselves?
for data objects (no methods) you could at least use Object instead of any, this should prevent anyone from calling methods on it.
Under new management, SourceForge moves to put badness in past
Coriandru PLANTA MEDICINALA
Equality is a mathematical term. Men and women are equal under the eyes of the law. But as for our bodies and minds, men and women are different. The book is written from a time where women still didn't have equal rights. Its just a relection of the time, not sexist and well.. not something to stick your fingers in your ears for..
Decentralized versus Distributed
They sorta do have that. If most of the community agrees to run a software update that rolls back the theft, then it'll happen.
Could you point me to some resources showing recently added opcodes?

Last time I looked at the Bitcoin code they had actually disabled some of the original opcodes due to security concerns. I'd be interested to see that this trend had reversed.
Mars Rover Curiosity Poses on Mount Sharp
They recently took around $3m off the table if I recall correctly.
And how are they going to do that?
FasterPath: Faster Pathname Handling for Ruby Written in Rust
I share your bitterness.

The meaning of the word "safe" seems to vary from person to person. The ETH and contract devs think safe means having a static PL to capture contracts.

But in reality it is safe as in, whoever exploited the vulnerability now has a "safe" source of income in a few weeks.

Perhaps it is a lesson better learnt now than later when the stakes are even higher.
Not the OP. Just found this very interesting.
Lose the high-school dramatics. I put you in camp #3 as well.
Grandfathering? Yeah, it's how it works here too.

And I don't know about the rest of the US, but the city from the article, has a fair bit of mixed used zoning.
Unfortunately even these kind of fines are still pocket chance for such large corporation. Moreover, this is always the same issue of imposing a penalty without offering an alternative. In this case offering a hardware/software platform competing with the long established Wintel.
They are proposing a soft fork for one specific case and one specific hash. It's a house of cards.
Ctrl+shift+v maybe?
Last time I checked it had pretty much no documentation in english and even most of their website was in chinese.

Let's see if they did any better this time.
There's a lot of people who disagree with the hard fork idea and instead only want miners and clients to soft fork boycott the stolen coins.

What will happen depends on the collective decision of the community which is still being actively hashed out.
I spent a year on Marion Island, it sounds pretty similar. It's quite a strange feeling adapting back to civilisation afterwards. Going 60km/h in a car feels terrifying. Having to remember to take money everywhere with you in order to get everyday things like food.
The "free market"? I don't think that's what "free market" means.
Generally, yes. The phrase is "grandfathered in." If you have a building, and they change the zoning so that building your building would now be illegal, your building is grandfathered in, such that it is legal for it to continue to exist.
This comment doesn't even make sense. A wealthy society over-indulging doesn't need it's wealth curtailed in order to stop over-indulging and the comment you replied to didn't imply that it did.
Yes, getting a pet from a rescue or shelter can be difficult but from a private seller it's just a cash transaction.

But I admire the click bait headline.
E3 2016’s dirty little secret is the same as yours
TheDAO. It's a flaw in the way they wrote the contract.
New “Data Journalism Accelerator” to Support Stories Like #PanamaPapers by Neo4j
"They say 'there are no atheists in foxholes.' Perhaps, then, there are also no libertarians in crises." [1]

[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/jfrankel/CatoRespCrisesJun07+...
Sounds like inet.d, or CGI behind a webserver.
DUMPED= “Transgender for Trump” Facebook Page Is Suspended
Near-Threshold Computing
New stock images site with unlimited/lifetime accounts
I am thinking the same, this is all hieroglyphs for me.
The world was just fine 4 million years ago. An Ice age would be way more devastating.
Thanks, is this something you have to be aware of when setting this all up or does Amazon do this for you?
At first, I assumed that this had something to do with http://www.yakyak.org/
The "weekend" question is a good one. But: think about this. It implicitly carries your own agenda, but doesn't reveal it.

What do I mean? The person answering probably wonders whether his weekend adventures will compare favorably with yours. "I went to Tahoe!" "I caught a pop fly ball in Candlestick Park!" "I stayed home and binge-watched Gilligans Island." "Loser!"

Asking about the future is less competitive. Answers can range from "I'm going over to Sand Hill Road to get my investors to sign off on my IPO papers" to "StoopidCo sends this corrupt XML feed...I have to figure out how to ingest it" to "I'm going home sick, I feel terrible." In each case the answer is about the person speaking, not about you the questioner.

Do you see the difference? It's really important.
Thank you!

Making everything public runs the risk of other modules using internal implementation details, and that entanglement makes changing things a lot harder.

For a small project where you can easily control this, it's likely not an issue. But we are big enough that no one person knows all the code changes that are going on in all modules.

Exported vs non exported also serves as implicit documentation, it makes understanding things easier when you can tell right away what is internal and what is not.
This argument can be made for most/all software vulnerabilities.
I'm kind of tired of the criticism on every post about an up built on electron. I mean, we all know the disadvantages it has with respect to native gtk or qt, but we also must remember the advantages it brings to developers to write multiplatform and VERY (not highest) performance apps in an easier way.
Like it or not it is the era of websites. For people like me who always preferred desktop apps, this is good news because many website-like apps are ported in a "almost native way". Anyway, web technology like html+js+css is not that bad and it's evolving and improving fast as front-end.
Web component challenges
If you're not saying, "it's not worth solving," then what exactly are you saying? What other problems pose "similar if not more immediate, or greater risks to humanity" than climate change? It'd be nice if you could name a few. It seems like your post boils down to, "we have other problems to solve too, besides climate change." Ok. Great.

You do 2 things in your post: you prioritize climate change below other problems (apparently without naming them, which I mistook), and you criticize the behaviors of climate change activists. Please correct me if I'm wrong in understanding your assertions.

I replied with 1 and 2 to show how climate change is the most dire and threatening problem we face. And I replied with 3 and 4 to address your criticisms of climate change activism.

I view climate change as by far the biggest problem humanity has on its plate. I think the alarmism is plainly justified.
Reading their blog about "smart contract security" [1] is just mind-blowing. Like, I thought that was the core of the product, but somehow they've designed a language which makes it extremely difficult to not get your smart contract hacked? And now the solution to this situation is going to be better documentation and IDEs? Oy.

[1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/10/smart-contract-security...
So that means if you are against majority thought you are shit out of luck. Just think of any time when majority consensus hasn't been the optimal solution.
This is what concerns me about contract programming. With human contract law, if there's a minor typo or loophole, participants can generally see the spirit and intent, and at worst go to a judge who will usually enforce the intent. But with software contracts, only the characters matter and there's no intent anywhere: either you get paid or you don't.

ETH is advising, "Contract authors should ... be very careful about recursive call bugs, and listen to advice from the Ethereum contract programming community," which indicates there's some subtle behaviors to be aware of and secure contracts are apparently not easy to write.

Lest you think, "we'll just be careful, review and QA it", consider the bug[1] in the "Programming Pearls" binary search. Bentley was clearly an expert who had proven the algorithm correct and the algorithm had 20 years of careful study by thousands of professionals. Yet it had a simple overflow.

How do _you_ know your contract is secure?

1. https://research.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all...
I made a replicate of the iPhone announcement poster they made, but without the black-censors and timestamps.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxdt7NWvLqR9Z1J3U1BIQkxfbG...
Apple iPhones Found to Have Violated Chinese Rival’s Patent
Operation Daybreak
Meet Rambot, my friend's randomizer bot
I think the secret sauce may be in things like 'call ahead seating' or 'get in line, online' that some restaurants and hair styling places do now. You don't typical get that capability on facebook, and it's a differentiator.
I have implemented (with a group of two other people) a slightly fancier version of something like this at school, for an exercise at DSP implementation course.

The basic principle was really the same with the circular buffer and a filter, the combo of which can be understood as a long IIR filter. The fancier parts included tunable harmonic bandpass filter (in place of OP's two sample average), and a fractional delay filter for fine-tuning.

By changing the parameters on the bandpass filter it could be made to sound anything from a plucked string to a church bell (minus the reverb since we didn't have that). We were quite surprised how good it sounded.

Unfortunately I seem to have misplaced all the materials related to that course. The hardware we implemented it for was some exotic audio DSP, but we had a matlab model that could produce output samples. If only I could find it.. =/
That didn't work either. Apparently, it has something to do with Tor Browser, where it didn't work although I enabled JS. Pasting worked fine on another browser.
Yes, that's true. With an expensive enough satellite, even a free launch would not compensate for 30% failure.
Ethereum is a P2P accounting system, like Bitcoin, but allowing users to upload automatic contracts that decide autonomously what to do with the tokens they possess.

For example, you could upload a contract that lets some specific set of accounts withdraw money unless the balance goes under 500 ETH (which is the basic Ethereum currency).

"The DAO" is such a contract but with more complex logic that amounts to a kind of venture fund. If you send money into it, you get to vote in proportion on proposals for "The DAO" to fund projects.

That contract was hyped enormously as the future of financing etc and indeed received an enormous amount of ETH from people who hoped it would benefit the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the first weeks after its recent launch, the contract logic was shown to have economic flaws that would most likely lead to bad fund performance, and it seemed as if the incentives for voting on proposals didn't work: no proposal ever made it past the threshold.

And now it turns out that despite the assurance of security audits, the logic (written in Ethereum's contract language Solidity) had a serious bug that allowed an attacker to start draining all of the fund's assets.
OK (sources on that being the case?), but the issue then remains that we have no way of knowing whether it is activated or could be activated, is that correct?
You are correct. The feature request for adding type-based overloaded function was denied: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/49#issuecomment-1083...

> If you need a different variant of a method, create a method with a different name. ... type-based overloading is a bad idea, creating brittleness and ambiguity.
You've obviously never watched 'Short Circuit' ;)
I think a lone hacker managed to look like he's a Russian. The DNC has every motivation to claim that they have been hacked by "the Russians" as it's significantly less embarrassing to be hacked by a state actor than by an individual.

EDIT: Let's assume Russian state level actor, and that the purpose of the hack is to obtain evidence that will lead to an indictment of Hillary, improving Trumps chances at winning the presidency (a Trump presidency would presumably be very susceptible to strong-man optics and influence form the Kremlin). First strike against that, is timing: You want Hillary to formally secure the nomination first. An (imminent) indictment against the presumptive nominee would surely allow some kind of manoeuvring to hand the nomination to Sanders (or even someone else) in a way that can't be done after the convention is wrapped up. Sanders/Trump is probably in Trumps favour, but not as much as indicted-Hillary/Trump is. Second strike is the publicity. Being hacked, especially by a malevolent foreign power, has several positive PR spins, standing up against foreign interference in a democratic election etc. If you just wanted to hit Hillary, make it look like an anonymous whistleblower from inside the DNC leaking documents to an investigative reporter (Russia certainly has the capacity to make such a plant). Best not to have Russian fingerprints at all on this.
I understand what you're saying and don't necessarily disagree, particularly as I don't know enough about the subject to form a strong opinion. I would intuit that one might argue the contract was in error if there's a clear indication of intent.
He wouldn't have that power in just any old circumstance. He could have the power to launch nukes, but if that power would only work if all of the world agrees, I'd still not be afraid of him.
This is what happens when you are the first cryptocurrency with a Turing complete scripting language.
No no noooooo! Long press -> open in new tab is a major reason I use websites instead of mobile apps for most places I go!
Most software does not constitute a contract. If I run an internet connected computer I don't enter into an agreement with anyone on the internet to use my machine even if its OS has security holes enabling this. The DAO was supposed to be a contract specifying and enforcing in a formal and automatic way what the participants can do.
I am not sure. I believe that in many cases similar activity would illegal or at least forbidden by Terms and Conditions.

I the DAO case I am not aware of any regulations or laws that the "attacker" has broken.
I used to like how overloading lets you call it sort instead of sortRectsByArea but over the years came to the opposite conclusion. Very short and generic names are great for locals or for truly generic functions but generally a function name shouldn't be too generic IMO, both because grep has its uses regardless of IDE support and because it makes it less necessary to look up definitions. mergeTableCells is better than merge even if you know it's passed a list<TableCell> because merge could be merging the cells or the cell contents or who knows what else, and because looking up the type of the argument costs in itself (as it's not always a local declared right near the call and even if it is, the type might not be spelled out in the declaration.)

Also, reusing names through overloading without providing actual polymorphism, either run time or compile time, is IMO bad, as in I don't get what's there to like. If one open function gets a file name and another gets a username and a password, what's so great in that they have the same name?
1) we live in a purely material world

I explicetly and repeatedly did not say this.
I've been wanting TCPFO for a while, but I'm wondering seeing if QUIC will arrive first and have fewer issues.
BRIGHTEST MINDS.
Introduction to Sysdig Falco
The internet is 25 years old today in Ireland
Property tax caps can be a good thing in inexpensive areas. Indianapolis instituted a property tax cap almost a decade ago when some unscrupulous politicians used the appraisal office to gain tax revenue by artificially raising everyone's valuation. I suppose the same thing could happen in California, but at least you have the potential to sell your house for a profit there.
The DAO's 'terms and conditions' were the contract code itself. During the crowd sale, it was often said that 'investors' need to look at the code because that is the only binding agreement. I guess it turns out that's a lie too.
and natural keys!
This is the most exiting and innovative product we've ever created.

Very creative use of glyph substitution though. :)
> How do _you_ know your contract is secure?

It most likely is not, looking at the recent post on contract security, most if not all examples ever posted as best practice are flawed and can be exploited:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/10/smart-contract-security... (currently down, cached version https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...)
The link contains my affiliate link

Direct link: http://www.stockunlimited.com
Fair enough! I definitely wasn't trying to suggest that is a completely new feature, nor that it is the only feature of Mirage OS ... really was just trying to make the point that there is more to the unikernel story than just figuring out whether it is better or worse for running my buggy crud application than some other virtualization technique. Thank you for the info though, I will have to read up on those things you mentioned.
Since when programming languages are considered safe from logic flows?
Plus one on material design and bootstrap. I've found that I'm able to churn out releases quicker since there isn't much learning. I just include two/three lines at the top & I'm good to go.
And as such, the contract would include clauses to protect against that. If the contract did not, one of the parties likely can take advantage as they wish.

It is the same with Ethereum. If the DAO 'contract' does not include the terms, the 'lawyer' who wrote it just didn't do a very good job and it is open to taking advantage.
Finally, an explanation of ethereum that makes sense!
You're criticizing a released project for their technology choice, advocating that they should have waited to build it until some other tech was ready... Maybe take a step back and just appreciate that they built and shipped something. If you hate Electron, move on and don't use it.
Killer Design Tools to Enhance the Scope of User Experience
The screencast in which a guy just copies and pastes statements doesn’t help at all. If it is just copy and paste I can copy myself.
this reminds me of an old idea I had: a TL;DR; for books. Initially humans would mark sentences / phrases as superfluous (later a bot / AI would do that). You'd be able to view the book in various levels of verbosity.
I agree completely. 'Smart' contracts are terribly flawed in this regard. Operating outside of contract law is a weakness, not a strength.

No-one can write bug-free code, so why are these people building a huge, expensive system that relies on no bugs being found?
Cryptocurrencies are digital tokens. Ownership of these digital tokens are kept in a ledger called a blockchain. Every transaction or transfer of tokens is recorded in the blockchain. Everyone can also see the blockchain as it is a public ledger. Both Bitcoin and Ether are cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was the first to demonstrate blockchain technology. In practice, these tokens function like programmable money. However the usefulness of Bitcoin is limited. Ethereum was developed to expand the original concept so more things could be done with these digital tokens. Ethereum made the programmable tokens more powerful with features like smart contracts. It is worth noting that each cryptocurrency has its own blockchain which can be confusing.

DAO is an autonomous corporation that runs on top of Ethereum. The digital token in the Ethereum ecosystem is called Ether. So the DAO raised somewhere around ~$150M USD in equivalent Ether funds during its IPO-like phase.
Buffer raises $3.5m, $2m for founders (2014)
FBI: Business e-mail scam losses top $3B, a 1,300% increase in since Jan
How Kik Predicted the Rise of Chat Bots
> Anyone who has worked on payment systems – as I have – knows that a payment system consists of two essential components: a ledger, and a means of sending and receiving messages.

She missed the most important this a payments thing depends on: you trust the person to pay you. Without that you have nothing. The blockchain is about staking your reputation on previous work done. It's a way of saving and transferring trust.

We can and have automate ledgers and sending and receiving messages. Automating the transfer of trust: this is new. But that's difficult to recognise if you don't realise trust is involved.
The alarmism comes from reputable scientific research saying that the outcome will be terrifying catastrophy.

The politics come from the fact that in many places, everybody but the strongly left have decided they don't give a crap, so many solutions you hear about are intertwined with left-wing politics.

I bike to work and I eat vegetarian. I'm not impressed with the rationalizations people come up with for doing nothing.