skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> a serious airgap protocol has to ban USB ports.

This is slightly too strong – it should be “has to ban unsecured USB ports”. By 2002 or so, people I met who worked at SPAWAR were advising conference attendees to follow their standard practice of epoxying necessary USB devices to the computer and completely filling unused ports. That moved USB into the same difficulty class as other physical access attacks, which they were already depending on building security to restrict.

Also note that while it's true that Firewire and Thunderbolt are definitely still riskier, newer versions of Windows, OS X, and Linux can use the IO-MMU to prevent DMA attacks. That started shipping in OS X 10.7 and Windows 8.1 (only when locked) and OS X 10.8 enables that all of the time for hardware made around 2012 and later.
Show HN: Fomo – API for Instant Customer Testimonials
Why not just allow users to pay to not see ads?

It's a crazy idea, but it just might work. Hulu's getting a lot more from me per month for their ad-free tier than they could ever dream of getting from me for ads with my watching habits, probably at least an order of magnitude more.
We built Fomo to make it easy to display recent actions (Github pushes, reviews, recent purchases, website visits, etc.) on your website. We're launching version 1 today along with our API that allows you to pass any data into Fomo's notification tool.

Full documentation here - http://docs.usefomo.com/reference

I'd love to hear the community's feedback on our app's V1!
> Of course, driving on roads like these would be annoying.

ITYM awesome. Those roads are normally 30 mph, so at with 1 mile fields one would change course every two minutes

I wonder if it might help protect against highway hypnosis to have a course adjustment every mile or so.
This looks like an old post from februari. Would like to see a current status post though
> This is probably also why libtool's configure probes no fewer than 26 different names for the Fortran compiler my system does not have, and then spends another 26 tests to find out if each of these nonexistent Fortran compilers supports the -g option.

It's been awhile since I've dealt with autoconf and company, but I remember seeing things like this. This is bizarre, to me. It should be a simple process. Make a pass to detect fortran compilers, make a second pass to detect support for -g. (This is, of course, assuming that we even want to use this at all.)

I remember cleaning up a coworkers project that did something similarly inane. A pass over the data revealed something wasn't present. But his test scripts continued processing, including rereading the original data, as if the something were present. Wasted 20 minutes each time it was executed until I rewrote it to break early.

If X depends on Y and Y is absent, then don't do X.
I'm a little surprised they would announce this as a thing they will do in the future, rather than something they've already succeeded in doing.

Either they're arrogant about their ability to implement this (which may be well founded), or they're really doing it to assure less savvy advertisers that they're trying as hard as they can...
Open source is not a good career path. It's hard. Bastard hard. It took me 5 years of running open source projects before one of my projects got popular.

What did I get from this? It gave me the flexibility to work for any company I want. It allowed me to meet some big startup founders.

That sounds great but I probably spent 4000 hours over 5 years on open source. If I had used that time to do extra contract work on the side, I could easily have earned $300k. I could have used the money to buy a house. Instead I have very little savings.

Open source is not worth it as a career. Only do it if you love it. Don't expect it to pay. Your project can have thousands of stars on GitHub and have thousands of users but it doesn't translate to much. The average Facebook or Google employee probably gets about the same amount and quality of career opportunities as I do... If not better. But they have savings, they own Facebook stock.

Career wise there is no doubt that open source is a mistake. And I'm actually one of the lucky ones... Most open source projects never get popular enough have any community around it at all.

Like the author said, it's all about networking. Don't bother writing code... Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will succeed.
It's going to be hard for facebook because they're such a big target.

I think where ad-blockers will start to have problems is with the millions of lesser known sites. Once these publishers swap over to proxying ad-content through their own domains and using a handful of simple evasion tactics (random file name for the self hosted JS file that pulls in the ad, site specific pseudo-random DOM element names for the ad spaces, not using an obvious sub-domain to load proxied ad content from); stopping ads getting through is going to require a lot more effort than blacklisting a few ad-server domains.
So as a non-owner, I am in a great position to give charity to the owners.

No way. I have been screwed often enough by companies that I am no longer going to put in uncompensated additional effort more than once per employer. If I want to do charitable work, there is no shortage of open-source projects out there that would pay in gratitude or reputation.

When I am "at will" in a company with zero actual ownership, I have no interest whatsoever in seeing the company succeed or fail. It makes no difference to me whether the job disappears because the company goes under, or because the CEO doesn't like my face, or because the owners sell out and the new bosses clean house. Any non-cash incentives will have no effect on me until they are actually in my possession. A promise that can be broken without consequence at any moment before the expected delivery date is no promise at all.

As an employee-owner, I can have a positive effect on the outcome of the company. But not once has any of my employers fully upheld any promise related to ownership made at or before hiring. So now all my accounting is by what I have in hand. If what I have is a load of tissue-thin promises that I have no means to enforce, that's great for wiping my backside with. I believe it was put more delicately some time ago as "don't count your chickens before they're hatched," and "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

If you can't meaningfully enforce the promise, it is worth nothing. If you have a vesting schedule, and the employer can change it by firing you without cause, it is worth nothing. Analyze your proposed compensation defensively; pretend that the company is out to screw you without you even noticing it, because sometimes they are.
Discussion about this seems to happen in this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12254680
>I'd like to see your anthropology cites for "tribal organisations"

Look at any hunter gatherer tribe.

The key word here is "distributed". Distributed tribes are light weight and mobile by design. So they are rarely ever grouped into concentrations of 100,000+ members except for the occasional festival-like gatherings.
Nothing beats my lxpanel over mutter, just because I can.
Even we assume you solve the engineering and cost issues, I don't think it is a good idea. Irrigation systems are used where there isn't enough rain. Those corner areas that do not get irrigation absorb rain into the aquifer which can be drawn out latter. The aquifers are shrinking in areas with irrigation systems and this is a concern for farmers who are looking for ways to mitigate this issue. They know that if they don't solve the problem now in a few years they will be forced to take extreme measures. (some farmers already plant their irrigated fields one year out of 3)
Cat and mouse much?
"The social network says it will start using software to show ads to users who visit Facebook via a desktop, even if they’re using an ad blocker."

What does that even mean?
Behind the Scenes: What It Takes to Publish a Smashing Article
A big issue with paid subscriptions is that it dilutes the strength of the ad network, since you're specifically excluding desirable target customers.
"If you do not use a specification for your lock-free mutex or consensus protocol then I posit that you are willfully choosing not to use a tool that can help you avoid errors in your design and that you should conduct yourself accordingly."

Sort of. Remember that, if they work for companies, programmers' job is not to write bug-free software. It's to translate requirements into software within constraints imposed by management. They should put in what quality they can. They often don't have time to spec out stuff because management won't allow it. "Ship, ship, ship!" It's why I typically recommend them re-use previously-proven solutions for stuff like you mentioned.

So, they certainly are leaving errors in intentionally if they avoid tools that would catch them. Yet, it's not always their fault. It's also not always a bad thing if we're talking hobbyists doing stuff for fun where they and/or their community accept some occasional bugs. On opposite end, people would get fired at Altran/Praxis for not doing what they could for correctness. To each their own based on their needs or situation.
FB is brilliant at pissing off all their users, then walking it back a bit so we all claim victory. Its a public negotiation and MZ is good at poker.
Social Fixer helps a lot.
That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
How Yoga makes me a mindful leader
We're building this at Publir and it's working nicely in early testing. Feel free to ping me if you are curious for the data.
On the plus side, mightn't it help prevent erosion not to have tens-of-miles-long straight lines?

It's never felt natural to look out across the American West and see a North-South/East-West grid obliterating the natural shape of the land.
Some detailed info which is great, however I am more interested in knowing 1) why, or what, led to the wrong decision being made, and 2) why it took so long to notice / revert.
Data Scientist Creates Fully Optimized Road Trip Map to Every National Park
While I agree that the knee-jerk reaction is overblown and 90% of the time people can do exactly the thing they complain about not being able to do on FB, it's not as easy a process to find the page and manage the settings as it could be. Most of the non-tech people I've talked to about this don't even realize FB has an "account settings" screen.
We see coding as a key use case for our product. The current IDEs for Android are ok, but we can make it better with partners and potentially some good Cloud IDEs. Still not there though
I guess the problem is:

1. Facebook already is a truly global network.
2. Based on history, it's likely that most of the people who care about these kind of things have already left.
Funnily tonight I've spent about 3hrs going through and marking everything "only me" which leaves everyone that was tagged or has commented on it with access. So it is completely doable through a chrome extension, would just take time to do. Plus now the site is all react based it should be fairly simple.
My goal was to reduce my public footprint and each month I'll go through and close out the previous 2nd month of content.
My point is that this "12%" isn't real. It comes from the definition of "persons looking for a job and not finding one". A very precise definition that hides:

- all persons that had a job, lost it and now are just receiving help from the government (but aren't looking for a job)

- all those who are receiving benefits from the government to receive a minimum wage, and prefer to live in that situation than tho seek for a job

- the almost 50% (I think) that have informal jobs, so aren't looking for one but don't contribute to the government providence (the gov. account that provides money to the benefits)

Yes, I agree with you that it isn't like Spain. But it's because the govn. spent much money giving social benefits without some "financial exit" ahead.

Exactly like some people calling the changes a "coup" have their reasons, but it doesn't compare with what happened (or almost happened) in Turkey.

(And sorry if I can't express myself in a better way in English)
Does this really generate anything for Facebook though long term? These companies seem to forget that the best blocking technology is the human brain, and serving us more and more BS we don't want/have any interest in isn't going to make the advertisers more money, just Facebook. That's fine for now but eventually they're going to catch on.

This has been a cold war arms race for years now, websites pile in more and more ads, ruin the experience, clutter the content and people just ignore harder and harder, either with actual ad blocking technology or just by knowing exactly what's an ad and what's the actual content and filtering accordingly.

My point is, eventually the advertisers are going to pick up on the fact that an impression to a pissed off reader isn't worth anything, even the rock bottom prices they currently pay. This model is dying and Facebook/Google are in hardcore denial about it.
I like it! Like others have said, doing something for the sake of learning (or even just for the heck of it) isn't a lost endeavor. I've been toying around with the idea of doing something similar, but .Net based, mostly for my own learning.
Serious question: Why do you block FB ads? I wouldn't say that FB ads are any more disguised as content as, say, newspaper ads.

And follow up: If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?
Do you ever find yourself interacting with a carpenter and asking him why he doesn't build additions to his house, or his friend's homes in his free time?

What about an accountant? Ever quiz them or deride them for not going out of their way to balance budgets and crunch numbers for family & friends?

Why is programming this anomaly to people where there's a necessity for you to want to spend your personal hours doing what you do for 40 hours a week (or more for many) professionally? If you don't make your life entirely centered around your career you're obviously not a real programmer despite many people having lives outside their career still being extremely talented and successful.

I think it's a lie we tell ourselves and perpetuate. People who sold their lives to programming expect to surround themselves with others who've done the same. You end up on the hiring side of an interview and you want the candidates to have a portfolio of personal projects to show off because that's what shows dedication. I get along best with the coworkers I have that have a wide variety of interests because they're not a bore to talk to and get a beer with. Jobs in the middle of nowhere are far more tolerable with those who you can stand to be cramped in a room with for two weeks rather than the guy who can only relate with RocketLeague anecdotes.
Yeah, the security angle is a big deal. The long and short of it is that ad networks and publishers are both apathetic to what a gigantic dumpster fire ad-serving is.

Publishers are eager to blame ad networks for the terrible performance, while ad networks just can't give enough of a shit to work on it. Publishers also are eager to blame ad networks when they're caught serving scams and malware, while networks just don't care.

I'm a huge proponent of making publishers serve their own ads from their own domains, so they are forced to take ownership of both the issue of technical competency and abuse.
That's what "closed" here means :) I.e. they block competition.
Main takeaway: Hellwig did these things to try and establish authorship:

a) promise that he is author -- court says "such a simple claim is not enough"

b) point towards the git repository where everybody can see his contributions -- court says "you have to prove that you're author, not just give instructions how other people could prove it"

c) say that kernel version x.y.z is "closest" to VMware software -- court says "don't just throw a version string at us, show with concrete examples which code passages have been lifted"

And some more things along these lines.

I'm really confused how Hellwig's lawyer even tried that. Even to a layperson it's obvious that "I won't prove my authorship, but if the court wishes to do itself, it will be easy" won't fly.
One of the way is can we develop a open source FB client that does not have FB ads? That way we can also plug in Machine Learning algorithm to remove spam etc.
Bring'em on
Guys, don't bother clicking the link. There is not even an inkling of a technical information of how Facebook is going to achieve this.
Exactly! Current enforcement has been terrible, we should fix that.
The efforts I've seen so far from other websites include randomized IDs and class names, and base64 encoded images inlined so the file path/hostname can't be used as a parameter for blocking.
They seem to be just talking over each other with vague references to what the other bots are saying.

If you pay attention for about 5 minutes it's just nonsense. I mean, they are clearly repeating things from somewhere else that were sensible in their original context, but now they seem to be saying things nearly randomly.
A founder should know those things cold.

Also all compensation promised you during interviews should be in place within 60 days of joining. I've seen companies drag their feet for months, only to come up with an option plan significantly worse than the deal that was pitched to you (which the founders and early employees got. And thus you should have got, but they decided to be greedy, and then it took 6 months to come up with a plan.)

"There is only a single liquidation preference" - that's not ideal, but it's ok. "I think there's just one liquidation preference" - that means there are probably two, only one of which is called an LP, and the guy doesn't know terms well enough to avoid getting screwed in a liquidity event.

Of course all of this is less significant than the analysis of whether you think there ever will be a liquidity event or not... but having been around a couple decades and gone thru a couple of them, the founders made out well, even though they got screwed, and the employees didn't make a good risk adjusted return on what they gave up.

Of course, I didn't work for any unicorns. In that case the results are much better.

Problem is that options plans and even employe compensation plans at startups are built to only make sense assuming the company is a unicorn.

Most startups are not unicorns.
I really wish I had access to my `/ets/hosts` file on natively iOS so I could block Facebook from there like I do on my laptop.
This doesn't just apply to this case but in general, you read about people tinkering with cool tools and coming up with great techniques whose only purpose is to track users in order to serve them ads.
Then we can possibly block them by matching structural elements?
I think that argument is aging fast; it dates from before ad blockers were the increasingly big deal they are now.

You've got two basic choices with a user who has demonstrated their passion to remove ads, spend money to play an arms-game race with the ad blockers to pound through their defenses, or directly make money from that passion, possibly an order-of-magnitude more money per user.

Is it really so obvious that the arms race is the correct solution?

If I were a major shareholder of Facebook, I would be asking this question in a pointed manner. There's an argument to be made that they're leaving billions on the table here, and the argument is getting better every month that goes by.
> But then folks like you need to be willing to pay the game developer whatever it costs them to hire an engineering bench to maintain a linux port

Many Linux users do. Especially with backing crowdfunded games which pledge Linux support.
As I understood this article, they're not even trying to. Their version of understanding isn't of the right sort.
If Reported.ly folds, social media will lose an important gatekeeper
Are the 'technically inclined' really Facebook's power users? I don't think so. Their power users are teenagers using the mobile app for 10 hours every day.
They'll probably deliver ads natively.
Luckily, we have the power of AI to help us! :-)
The argument in the parent posts is that teachers actually don't have two month off. They just have two month where they don't have to do client (that is pupil) - facing work to do.

Teachers actually need to cram a lot in that time. All the preparation for next year, all self-education they need to do to stay up-to-date, select reading and learning materials. Planning the curriculum etc. The equivalent to all that work that freelancers factor into their daily rate and all the work that employees often do on the job ("I'll need to read the documentation so I know how to properly do that", "I'll google it", ...).

The fact that they still take on summer jobs on top of that can serve as an indicator that they actually don't have too much to do in that time or it can serve as an indicator that they need the money more than their time off.
Development of Wedding Apps: 4 Most Popular Types
I may be in the minority here, but I don't mind Facebook ads particularly because they track me so much that the ads are very well-tailored. There's nothing annoying to me about relevant advertisements and I've found decent stuff before. The ads for crappy pay-to-win flash games in the sidebar, on the other hand...
I would if I still relied on it to keep in touch with friends and family members.
This is the biggest point for me. I don't block ads because I hate being advertised at.

I block ads because I hate it when a tab starts playing sound without being asked. I hate getting malware from ads. I hate having pages take 30 seconds to a minute to load because of ads. Or when the page loads fine, but then a minute later the article I'm reading jumps because an ad loaded. Or changed. Or popped up on a timer.

I hate ads because ads hate the user experience.
On a slight tangent into object fetishization.

I work with ebooks a lot in my job and I'm often asked if books are dead, if they will die, or why they are not dead. Ebook growth has leveled off significantly as devices to read them became ubiquitous and cheap, so its sits more or less flat at about 35% of the market (give or take).

I often turn the question on the asker and ask them to analyze a book like its a piece of technology. It's lightweight, extremely durable (survives a five foot drop to concrete no problem) and inexpensive to replace. It's UI is really unmatched since we've been taught it since childhood, but on an objective scale it's easy to jump to exactly where you want (though difficult to search). It's resolution is fantastic and I've never tested it, but I've heard the battery life is great. It's a wonderful single use device, and single use devices certainly still have a place (after all, you can make toast under your broiler, but plenty of people still have toasters).

End of tangent.
Write your games in Python with Unreal Engine 4
Either that, or make the networks directly responsible for the content they're serving. I don't understand why that's not the case now, if websites allow downloading of copyrighted work without authorization, or distribute illegal digital goods, they're held accountable. What makes ad networks invulnerable to this?