skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have anything to say about the geopolitical or moral importance of Russia hacking the US to influence elections.

But I do have something to say about the attribution here:

A very common sentiment on HN is that the US intelligence community has decided that Russia has a motive to hack the US, and spends money on offensive security, ergo "it was probably Russia".

That is not how attribution works. Officials (and the firms they hire) are working with vastly more specific fact patterns than the news stories about these incidents convey. They are matching Russian means, motive, and opportunity at a far more precise level of detail than is commonly reported.

The major attribution firms --- FireEye/Mandiant, Crowdstrike, &c --- have for years prior to these breaches been collecting huge volumes of information from a pretty significant fraction of the Global 2000, who deploy their tools as part of their anti-malware strategy. That's the entire idea behind Crowdstrike†: you deploy their agents, and they hoover up IOCs and malware samples from around the world and analyze them. These firms have been involved in thousands of compromises we've never heard of, and have staffed large teams of experts (both FireEye and Crowdstrike have gold-plated reputations in the infosec community) to analyze and develop signatures from that information.

The DNC compromise is analyzed in terms of IOCs --- network traces of command and control channels, captured backdoor and malware samples, vulnerabilities employed, IP addresses of staging servers --- and those IOCs are matched to previous compromises. When DHS says they're working with a "high degree of certainty" about who's behind the compromise, they're saying that they've matched the compromise to a set of IOCs --- many of which are not public --- that are tied to previous known Russian compromises.

That doesn't mean everyone involved here --- multiple departments of the US Government, the executive branch of the government at the very highest level, and several of the largest security firms in the US --- couldn't be lying. It could all be a conspiracy. If it was, it would be the largest conspiracy ever carried out by the US government. But I guess that could be what happened!

† Crowdstrike, by the way, is run by a conservative Republican.
A lot of philosophers really are quite funny; David Hume could be particularly sarcastic, especially when discussing religion.
Remix (YC W15) is hiring engineers to build better cities
Silicon Valley Relief for Haiti
Zenefits Settles Insurance Investigation in Washington State
Comcast's 1TB data caps start to roll out nationwide
> In the US the word "liberal" does not mean laissez faire oriented, it means leaning toward statism.

I'm not sure this is completely true. It's how conservatives frame liberals, but that's part of scoring political points. It does have some truth, but the mainstream of the Democratic Party, for example, is strongly free-market (ask the progressives, who despise them), and conservatives prefer a powerful government for security and law enforcement, religion (prayer in schools), abortion, etc.

I'm saying this in as non-partisan a way as possible: Encapsulating the opinions of a hundred million people in a sentence is tough, however. The best generalization I can come up with is that 'liberals' seek progress and change, and 'conservatives' seek to protect what they already have - and those perspectives apply to the economy, culture, and much more. Liberals want to develop clean energy to deal with climate change, conservatives want to preserve existing oil and gas industries. Liberals want to promote integration and the rights of minorities, conservatives want to protect traditional mores. Liberals believe the world can move forward and become more peaceful, conservatives believe humanity will never change and want military power.

Of course, very few real people actually fit those definitions.
Deep Learning algorithm to swipe Tinder profiles
You need to go one step beyond attribution. You need to make BCP 38 and other 'behave nicely' protocols /requirements/; and to block any ISP that isn't following them.
The NFL. They started pushing political issues into sport and now they are surprised to see it backfired.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ratings-fumble-for-nfl-surprises...
Several interesting ideas to ponder due to the RethinkDB shutdown.

1. Business model / strategy is as important as the technology. Way too many people believe that all they need to do is build a great product (by all accounts it seems RethinkDB did) and the rest will take care of itself. Enterprise software is a very difficult business and at the moment going through tremendous change and while there is good opportunity it takes much more than good tech.

2. I would put RethinkDB in the "hard tech" category - the category that YC recently said they'd like to fund more of. Given the success of the technology but failure of the company it raises the question of what value YC brings to the table for a hard tech company? Many hard tech companies are very different than the companies that appear to enjoy the most success from YC (e.g. very different than AirBNB, Dropbox,...).
An even more interesting problem is how HN will deal with 55 Savushkina Street
Art is a totally subjective term, and "What is Art?" is a question that has been debated for thousands of years.

I think the best art is always an acquired taste.

I see well written source code as art. I see music as more artistic than poetry. I can appreciate paintings visually, but a machine that produces a painting (like the deep dreams) is more artistic in my mind.

The two are not mutually exclusive - mix them up!

The more fields you learn the more you can appreciate - Right now I look outside and see a tree:

- A biological organism in a different time scale, it's evolved as it needs to be, and continues to propagate. I think of the evolutionary tree of species, I think of it's niche. Its physical position on the globe, its symbiotic relationship with bacteria, and the parasitic relationship with the fungus.

- The chemist in me thinks about DNA, Xylem and Phloem. It thinks about CO2 consumption and O2 production. I think about photosynthesis and the electron chains.

- The mathematician in me sees fractal patterns of the branches. I think of my first OpenGL fractal program. I see symmetry and asymmetry at the same time. I see the golden ratio and powers of 2 in the lengths.

- The darkness in me sees only the shadow, it sees a man hanging in a noose. I see waves in a pond, and a dolphin.

- The survivalist in me sees fuel for fire, and the makings of a bow. I think about how to make activated charcoal to purify water to drink.

The more you know the richer your perceptual experience.

Learn both!
Ah you are correct. I've had cryptocurrency on the brain the last few weeks and was hasty.
"The web: getting crappier and slower by the day. IMO because the frameworks are increasingly abstracting the underlying dataflow which just gets more and more inefficient. Also, down with autoplay anything. Just make it stop."

One of my favorite features now on my iPhone is "Reader View". Have a new iPhone 7, which is very fast, but some pages still take too long to load, and when it finally does, the content I want to read is obscured with something I have to click to go away, and then a good percentage of the screen is still taken up by headers and footers that don't go away. The Reader View loads faster, and generally has much better font and layout for actually reading the content I'm interested in.

All of which is to say, the sole purpose of what a lot of web developers are working on today seems to serve no purpose other than to annoy people.
The real criminals are the people making prostitution illegal
GitLab 8.12 Release Webcast: Cycle Analytics and Global Code Search
There are three superpower poles in the world.

1. The United States, as the primary hegemon.

2. Russia, which is still powerful but in 'wane' after containment and the costs of the Cold War.

3. China, the preliminary rising power on the world stage.

These three powers have found cybertreaties between China and the US and China and Russia.

But Russia and the United States have not yet found a good framework for cyberagreement.

Is there a candidate or administration today in the United States that considers finding a cyber treaty between the US and Russia a priority?

It seems to me, based on the past few decades of cyber war and the conversations and priorities inside of the beltway that the US considers it's cyberwar activities against the Russians more important than a cyber arms armistice.

Given the US's superiority in cyberwarfare, total as it may not be, this recent surge in Russian modernization and activity looks a little bit like "complaining" and less like "moral acumen".

The United States should consider drawing up stronger garuntees for Russia about it's cyberweaponization. Handled correctly, the results from superpower agreements could percolate down to Middle Powers, regional powers and third world nations to become a basis for global cyber norms and eventually a basis for international law.

It seems to me that complaining and upping the ante, while it might theoretically lead to "peace through conquer", will work to undo any concept of cyber norms or international law.
I would agree that adding a new layer of complexity is to no one's advantage. A strangler application that becomes symbiotic with it's host can be a terrible thing.

I think the key angle to always consider: how will this new thing reduce overall complexity, now or over time? Maybe it means biting off a smaller chunk of the problem then you would like to keep the overall system sane. Or on the flip-side, keeping the new thing under wraps longer and running it in parallel with so you can thoroughly vet it before attempting to replace it.

And sometimes, you just have to decide that you won't be the person to try to 'repair' an application, particularly an old and stable one. Make the point change necessary for your need, call it a day and look for better opportunities elsewhere within the environment.
Is there an easy way to figure out if it's possible on my ISP's network?
Με χαμηλούς ρυθμούς στο στοίχημα
I'm not remotely a fan of hillary clinton, but she's currently blowing out Donald Trump in the polls (538 currently has her as a 4-1 favorite to win)
Chelsea Manning is missing
> In the USA, long distance passenger trains are very expensive …

This is mostly true, but:

1. "Frequent traveller" programs can take some of the pain out of the price, just as they can for flying; and, as msandford (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663241) points out, it's not entirely unreasonable, if you're optimising for comfort (since it's not for speed!), to compare the price of a coach seat on a train with the price of a business-class seat on a plane.

2. Short-haul trains will usually beat any possible flight; and even relatively long-haul trains can be competitive—an upcoming trip from Michigan to Maryland for my brother's wedding is $81 one way.

> … and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains.

This is also true, but, I think, misleading; it's not as if planes always run on time. At least, when the train is stuck, you're on the train, which is nice and comfy, rather than in the airport, which is miserable!

I have also never been bumped from a train due to overbooking, and once had a lovely train ride that simply plowed through snow falling thickly enough that most flights were grounded.
So what's the better topic: apparmor or selinux?
I'm under the impression that in modern airport design, the door-to-door travel time from landing to baggage carousel is purposely lengthened so that you feel like you spend less time waiting for baggage handlers to get your bags off the plane (because you spend more time walking than standing).
There is also the problems of how to prove discrimination, which is why I suggested this particular compromise.
Did you read the article?

It has nothing to do with trying to get unbiased information. They've classified some of the negotiation information, i.e. they think a Danish national is more likely to leak sensitive information to the Danish government than a British national is.

Given the strength of feeling across the EU on these topics, I can't completely blame them.
Theory of Constraints 102: The Illusion of Local Optima
The key word in this definition is "absurdly". Whether or not there is a shortage depends on what people think a reasonable price is, which of course is going to be a matter of debate.
From the perspective of someone who can't play the popularity contest, it's effectively a lottery and the odds are stacked against you.
And yet unfortunately, LibreSSL still doesn't support any safe curves ( https://safecurves.cr.yp.to ) like Curve25519. Nor the ability to choose between multiple curves for the 99% of browsers that only support the NIST curves (only the most recent Firefox nightlies and Chrome support it.) The former landed in OpenSSL 1.1.0, and the latter in 1.0.2, whereas LibreSSL is a fork of 1.0.1. And after Dual EC DRBG, it is negligent to trust more curves that the NSA has tampered with.

The curve has been out for a long time now, and it really doesn't take much code to do this. Here's a recent implementation of it that I wrote, which runs in constant time and is based in part off curve25519-donna-c64 and with some help from MerryMage:

http://hastebin.com/raw/lutiloyaxa

As you can see, most of the work is just simulating a 256-bit type efficiently. But they should already have the field element types in their signify code (which uses Ed25519), so they'd only have to write the first 86 lines of that code.

At this point, I've pretty much given up hope of being able to use the even nicer Curve448 within the next five years with TLS. I'm unaware of any TLS libraries or browsers that support it.
The techniques they used in the post actually try to overcome the lack of labeled data. (by using semi-supervised techniques/label propagation)

You are right that Google has a lot more raw data, but that is much cheaper to obtain, and depending on your problem domain, there could be a bunch of public datasets that are available for you to cobble together.

Some of these big tech companies don't necessarily have the right training data for their applications either. For example, Adam Coates from Baidu outlined some of the ways that they generated a better training set for their speech recognition use case here:
https://youtu.be/g-sndkf7mCs?t=3817
Yet people spend time leaving comments like your grandparent, deliberately virtue signaling.

I can bet dollars to doughnuts that if someone said "Whites" he would not have left a comment "More white people".
If it is awkward mis(use) and I don't think it is, then pretty much every invocation of Sturgeon's law is also awkward mis(use). The typical invocation is "the type of music I like" vs "modern music".

And like any popular adage, what counts is popular usage, not original intent. Most popular adages have generalized and shifted over years of usage.
(Though the problem also happens on OS X.)
It seems new users and people who saw the ease of querying, distribution, good docs, solid architecture jumped on board. Lots of HN articles were written. The technology is really solid. Come to think of it, don't recall seeing a single negative RocksDB article on HN, ever.

However databases are hard and they are a bit like operating systems. They are so important that people expect them to have a long track record of stability, and that they should also be be completely open, or have someone like Oracle behind it.

If it is open and completely free it doesn't make money.

And large support contracts are lucrative with enterprise customers, but they will not buy into a relatively new database product and entrust its crown jewels to it.

Another, probably the most important, element is timing. MongoDB was there first and it made a huge difference. They shipped with really terrible defaults, lost and corrupted people's data. And they are still around. Had RocksDB come at that time, it would have been a different database market today no doubt...

It is really painful to see this because technology is there, people working on it are really smart, it is just this market is fickle.
Run tcpdump on an ec2 instance and send spoofed traffic to it to see if it shows up. :)
I think Rethinkdb although having quite a lot of ambition and delivering on a lot of that ambition just wasn't compelling enough compared to the strides made by competitors.

One example I keep referring back to is postgres. Postgres is soon going to be getting distributed capabilities, and I think it corresponds to the need in having highly available systems.

Now, this was what was missing from postgres all along as postgres already has LISTEN/NOTIFY, so if you slap on a system that can properly replicate and shard it, then what you have is a product that is open source, free and has years of strong engineering to back it up.

Its hard to compete with that.
I guess I don't see how dumping DNC databases as "Guccifer 2.0" is really doing much negative influencing if it is actually providing legitimate information and making the process more transparent to American voters. Isn't transparency into the political process a core part of what makes a democracy? The parties should want to be as open as possible, ideally.

This feels like a deflection and a way to point the finger politically. If they're causing a denial of service on election day by taking out voter registration databases, rooting those shitty Diebold machines, etc., well, that's really influencing the election.

If the Obama administration is going to complain to the public about Russia fucking with American elections, they should be just as willing to retaliate for it in some public manner; if that's diplomatic, so be it in the realm of the UN/ICJ. IMO the foreign policy strategy against Russia is spineless, and Russia/Putin takes advantage of it; see Crimean aggression, the Syrian "ceasefire", this Guccifer nonsense. I don't personally have a solution, but showing teeth at Putin doesn't really seem to hinder him. Sometimes you need to bite so people know you can and will make good on your threats.
I wonder what will happen to products like SageMathCloud using RethinkDB now that the company is gone away.

Will support contracts end? Will people run into new problems and be stuck without help when this happens? Just curious to see what happens.
Open Source is really just a check mark in a list of things required for developer tools these days. It doesn't sell a product by itself. What people pay for these days in primarily service and not the software. If you want to sell software, the only place left is the enterprise. Enterprise sales is really about networking and connecting and not whether a product is technically good.

This is also why I am worried about things like CoreOS. Not sure who uses it. I hope their enterprise sales keep them ticking, otherwise they are screwed since they have taken so much funding.
Microsoft PR arm again on HN. We all known what Microsoft loves.
7 free newsletter services – How far can $0 get you?
>"We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities

Perhaps.

Russia and China have been "cyber attacking" my servers for years. Last server I set up for a friend I blocked both countries by IP range.

I can imagine because the intensity of what's going on with this election, it has drawn out a more concerted effort from your typical misanthrope probing servers.
Hard to say. Naturally this is growing cynicism in me that is talking.

I believe that in most cases data from smart device should not leave their local network.

Making a product that leaks data, especially from people homes is dangerous for the their users (I do not say owners, as who owns the data is an actual owner in my opinion) and even more dangerous for the society as whole.
It allows both ungendered and gendered approaches. It's really up to you to choose. So in fact my language is better in this regard, worse in others. Like any language.

I would prefer mentalese over Vangelis' direct to be honest ;-)
That's fine. You're totally allowed to downvote me.

But pulling celebrity names out of a hat is not an argument. It's actually a fallacy. It's called appeal to authority. You should check it out, but I doubt you will.

I'm upvoting you for honesty. You're not right, but you're honest about it. I approve.
This is awesome! Great way to get started with self driving at a micro level. I also really love the emoji in the commit messages :).
MeshLab is finicky, when it can't apply a filter it simply crashes. Best to import the points manually and tweak your filters in the main app. Then you can export the filter script through the filter menu. Launching from a terminal allows tracing of what exactly failed.
For all the scientific writing I do (ie, 99% of my output that isn't blather on the internet), i use LaTeX or markdown.
LaTeX primarily for peer-reviewed work, markdown for notes, informal documentation, and whitepapers. In both cases, i can use a powerful text editor (sublime or atom or emacs) with very rich and highly developed cross-platform support.

What are some compelling reasons to use this tool instead?
Try this band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-jN3vH26NQ

(Warning, NSFW!)
The difference is that the stuff they've opened source is not stuff they're directly in the business of selling; this is quite different than trying to sell support or enterprise versions of an open source product.
A big question is why government stays on the sidelines of cybercrime (and espionage). They said something here, but it's not usual, and what have they done about it? They don't seem to feel responsible for protecting IT assets like they do for older infrastructure: If someone was blowing up pipelines, it would be shocking if the U.S. government was so passive about it.

The government needs to step forward and do its job of protecting citizens, including in cyberspace - hardly a minor consideration at this point. I've been thinking about it recently after reading this article:

http://blogs.cfr.org/cyber/2016/10/04/risky-business-when-go...
"Operating a content neutral service in today's internet is a tough job. Some people dislike some websites, and they want to stop them from being available on the internet. The easiest way to do so is to launch a DDoS attack."

... which you can conveniently buy on one of the CloudFlare-protected DDoS service websites! I know this point has been hammered to death before, but I find it curious that despite their strong advocacy of being content neutral and not removing a site unless they receive a court order, their Terms of Service explicitly allows them to shut off service based solely on their opinion:

"SECTION 11: INVESTIGATION
CloudFlare reserves the right to investigate you, your
business, and/or your owners, officers, directors,
managers, and other principals, your sites, and the
materials comprising the sites at any time. These
investigations will be conducted solely for CloudFlare’s
benefit, and not for your benefit or that of any third
party. If the investigation reveals any information,
act, or omission, which in CloudFlare’s sole opinion,
constitutes a violation of any local, state, federal, or
foreign law or regulation, this Agreement, or is
otherwise deemed harm the Service, CloudFlare may
immediately shut down your access to the Service."

Does CloudFlare ever make use of this provision?
Difference is fitting the tool to your likes or fitting your likes to the tool. Some people prefer one of those, some prefer the other.
Your whole post is a straw man. No one is saying you have to ignore the sins of big ag because there are good farms out there.