skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NBC replayed a John Kerry Cyber Security sound byte and the Zenefits logo was in the background. They were a sponsor of the Virtous Circle Conference. Not sure if Zenefits should have been asked to sponsor this event.

"A virtuous circle is often described as a self-reinforcing system that creates positive benefits throughout the economy."
A really sneaky method would be to create a USB suppository, that looked like a large USB key but would leave the active part inserted inside the socket after the target pulls out the seemingly defective key.
VR Is Here to Stay: Announcements from Oculus Connect and Google Daydream
It doesn't have to fail. Its administration can be taken over by a purpose-built entity (or the army corps of engineers, who cares really) and all sales and marketing can be halted while everything is liquidated in an orderly fashion.
https://www.amazon.com/Fragile-Design-Political-Princeton-Ec...

Read that then form an opinion.
Build Your Confidence and Succeed: Essential Tools for Bloggers
How about something like an Explosively pumped flux compression generator, I'm thinking there must be bits of EEPROM or equivalent in the phone that hold important info like the imei number, that if damaged, would render it unusable?
I learned just enough vector calculus in college to know I didn't know enough to actually understand Maxwell's equations & electromagnetic fields, or most of the other fun mathematical techniques introduced in mid-level physics and engineering classes for modeling interesting "real-world" systems.

Later, when I realized what I was missing out on, I tried to teach myself the missing concepts. I failed, until I found H.M. Schey's "Div, Grad, Curl, and All That: An Informal Text on Vector Calculus." It's a pragmatic, friendly, slim little math book that reads more like lecture notes than a classic textbook, and I can fairly say it's taught me everything I know about those operators (which isn't much).

So if you are like me, and got to calc III, vector math, and/or liner algebra without learning div, grad, curl and partial differential equations... check out the book. it's great: https://www.amazon.com/Div-Grad-Curl-All-That/dp/0393925161

Also: can we get three cheers for HYPERPHYSICS?? http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hph.html
That problem was solved by a non learning AI system decades ago. Current theorem provers (a related field of AI) solve problems like this in fractions of a second.

The progress in the article is getting a learning system to do so, eventually leading us to handle unsolved problems.
Hello, sorry for the incoming information dump! You are probably familiar with all of this, but I've still typed it out for any passing interested reader. I've listed my responses in decreasing importance, feel free to stop after the next paragraph:

Unicode doesn't have to be complex; it is simply a single map of characters (such as "a" or "ﷺ") to a codepoint (such as "97" or "65018").

"Encodings": Encodings predate Unicode, and we had to deal with encoding before Unicode was ever invented (eg. "is this text in iso-8859-1, or is it koi8-r?"). Unicode has actually simplified the problem of encodings, for two reasons:

1) it's increasingly likely that any text sent over the internet is in the UTF-8 transformation of Unicode.

2) there is a mapping for any encoding into a Unicode transformation such as UTF-16 or UTF-8, therefore you only need three routines for text work: transform_encoding_to_unicode, process_text_as_unicode, transform_unicode_to_encoding.

"Planes": Planes are an aspect of Unicode that you may not need to concern yourself with, if you work in UTF-8 (as most Unix software does). However if you're in the world of Windows, Java, or Javascript (which use UTF-16 instead), then you may need to know that characters in planes other than 0 are encoded as 4 bytes instead of 2 bytes. Hopefully the tools available in your language of choice hide this implementation detail from you!

Misc: Beyond that it's true that there's an infinitely complex system of rabbit holes (think normalization, hyphenation, character ordering, right-to-left, ligature decomposition, and so on) that you can delve into when learning i18n, however Unicode wasn't the cause of them; they all existed before Unicode was invented! They're simply the messy but rewarding aspect of dealing with the written word.
Setting up a server has a sufficient learning curve to significantly delay a project launch for someone who's new to the task.

Configuring such a server to be performant and secure, and keeping the kernel and all relevant packages patched is another learning curve. It's also a major time-sink for a small or one-person team, and even more impactful if this is a side project.

A full server is also totally unnecessary if all you're serving is a static site.

Is all that stuff worth learning? Probably. If you're a technologist. If you're interested in web development rather than trying to advertise your mobile apps. Or if your time has no value.

But if you're just trying to get a static site hosted as quickly and inexpensively as possible, a $5/mo cPanel shared hosting account plus something like Cloudflare may be a MUCH better use of your time and resources.
GitHub Pages already have a CDN, so why add cloudflare?

And as mentioned in my post, Github doesn't let you have some kind of htaccess, so no 301 redirect are possible. And I need that feature.
What it’s like to work at secretive Snapchat
Also interesting are the resolution targets, using sets of black and white bars at varying widths in both X any X orientation, to determine the spatial resolution i.e. how high frequency a component could still be imaged separately as lines, similar to TV test cards. These are discussed in various blogs [1][2] with some amazing picures. I think these were for both satellite imaging and spy-plane (U2 and SR-71 plus less exotic surveillance systems) and not just the USA. This article [3] shows some satellite test targets in the Gobi desert, presumable for Chinese (PRC) spy satellites, and also has a cool picture of the world's largest compass rose, at Edwards dry lake bed, as well as explaining the crosses from the original article, and talking about radar altimeter targets (another dry-lake bed) that are mapped to centimetre accuracy in altitude for calibrating GPS and other systems.

I find it a really interesting area of industrial/scientific archaeology, with some fascinating stories.

[1] http://www.clui.org/newsletter/winter-2013/photo-calibration...
[2] http://www.bldgblog.com/2013/02/optical-calibration-targets/
[3] http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/landscapes-made-for-sat...
I'd rather wait a bit for something good than stream garbage.
Avi Wigderson’s “Permanent” Impact on Me
Unlocking historical Landsat imagery
For the air mail planes that used to fly through the night. Most of those arrows were painted in luminescent paint, and had a light tower nearby shining down on it so that the arrow glowed and was highly visible to the poor cold, tired mail plane pilot above.
IF you can actually delete it as cv.zip then that's scary because that's not its filename.
BiteSize Guru: an app to receive useful bite sized info
I work for a huge card company please tell me more about this.
>>ripping apart the lives of employees and customers

You don't think that's a teency bit mellowdramatic? That description seems perfect for Bernie Madoff, Enron, et al.
What is the rhetorical purpose of lines like these?

I'm glad we could come to agreement that the poor are predominantly high-risk no-income people who are also disproportionately violent

I've noticed you employ this assumptive-close rhetoric a lot, but always in such an outlandish fashion (in this case, for instance, coming within epsilon of saying "I'm glad we agree the poor are bad people") that I have to stop and wonder whether your point is that the argument you've been pursuing is ludicrous, and you're pushing it as an exercise in showing how ludicrous this kind of logic can be.

In a sales conversation, you lead a prospect gradually to the point where the assumptive close feels natural, and the counterparty is meant to feel like they've convinced themselves. But your assumptive closes are so clumsy and obvious it's like you're trying to hit people over the head with them.

You're not stupid, so I assume there's some kind of intriguing rhetorical strategy here I'm just not picking up on.
I invite you to try with various file managers.
But, to make up for it, we also consider driving a racing bike in city traffic at speeds over 15 km/h silly (although the outfit doesn't help either). And we look before we open the car door, because there's bikes everywhere. I guess that evens it out a little :)
This 10x! Car manufacturers are reinventing the wheel. I wonder how Tesla does this though, its display looks pretty cool but never had the chance to play with it.
Data analytics science, microservices, DevOpsSec – IBM news and resources
He's also chairman of the board. Not sure if he's relinquishing that role.
Well, how accurate are those cable lines?
Encoding text is not the problem with Unicode. The problem is the complexity at the higher abstraction level.

At the top level of abstraction is the abstract character aka user perceived character and grapheme clusters (a sequence of coded characters that should be kept together). Mapping from code-points to abstract characters is not total, injective, or surjective.

Unicode is not just standard for encoding. It's also standard for representation, and handling text.

The exact semantics of UTF-8 string in all cases is something that only few programmers are able to comprehend. I know for sure that I don't and I don't know anyone who does. Interchanging and storing UTF-8 strings and hoping for the best is the standard practice and it works well, but it shows the overreach that Unicode standard is.
The apology didn't work and clients started demanding accountability. I am glad this happened.
With or without a golden parachute, he will still be wealthier than the total net worth of everyone I know, and won't risk prison.
I'll upvote the article if you build and test it :) (On your phone, in your lab).

That has a chance of working due the very fast rise time you might be able to induce a sufficiently large voltage to cause some actual damage, it will be a 'one shot' affair though. But anything involving regular coils and some push button arrangement will likely cause it's own insulation to break down long before it will do damage to a phone.

That's one of the reasons the spark gap is there in the first place, without it you'd hit the limits of the coil insulation very quickly.

Spark gaps are a pretty nasty way to generate EM interference so there is some truth to the story.

But even with my plasma cutter (12.5 KW, so not the smallest in the catalog) and stick welder I never managed to crash a cell phone.

The plasmacutter did have the habit of resetting the controller until I properly decoupled all the lines into it.
What is Computer Cases
The future of business. Some predictions of where society is going [pdf]
Microservices, DevOps and Operational Complexity
Updates cannot help against zero day vulnerability. A better solution would be not to allow anyone to connect to a device.
Listen to the episode, it actually isn't melodramatic. They were hiring young bankers, trading on their connections until they ran dry, then dumping them, for a new batch. That's just the start and the environment goes down from there.
Not to be overly dramatic but I would imagine it depends on who the jury sympathizes with.
No, it's accurate. Having a bank steal your money when you're a customer is devastating. Having a bank fire and blacklist you because you were an ethical employee is also devastating. The only difference with Madoff and Enron is the scale.
Just curious, what is the benefit of staying with the Zenefit name and brand?

It's fairly toxic, as it is associated with debauchery and fraud. Wouldn't you want to raze the brand to the ground and start with something else, even if you're keeping the same tech stack and sales contracts?
Just gave. John has given so much to all of us, good to give a bit back to him.
GW-BASIC blog generator
Drones: New mode for delivering drugs, porn and cellphones to prison inmates
Get fired or quit before it vests. (Conditional on your contract.)

Edit: If you are a C-level executive, your contract may stipulate that you get unvested stock, even if you're fired. It's possible that John Strumpf chose not to exercise any such clause, but I strongly doubt it. The man is a psychopath.
Does Carplay allow choosing which maps app serves the maps, or are you forced to use the apple maps? I'm sure people love Apple's app but it's given me many, many, many too many illegal directions for me to ever trust it.
What the heck is this neolibrial tripe?
This article is written years after the 16-bit problem was solved, yet seems to be completely unaware of the solution. (It's unclear if the mentions of adding "octet blocks" is a misunderstanding of the solution, or a dismissal.) It mentions Unicode 3.1, yet surrogate pairs were introduced in Unicode 2.0 five years before the doc was written.

In actuality we don't concern ourselves overmuch with planes, "octet blocks", and so on these days. There's just a single numbered list of characters* that we call "Unicode", and a few fairly minimal algorithms for transforming a list of characters into a bytestream ("UTF-8", "UTF-16", etc).

Still I love it as a historically interesting document. It's jarring to see "Oriental" used, I suspect the same author would never use that word in a professional context today.

[*] I use "characters" here when "code points" would be more accurate, but the details of that comparison aren't meaningful to this argument. I also don't go into normalization and so on, as this article seems to be more about the feasibility of fitting >100K code points into actual-bits-on-the-wire.
You've also never eaten uncooked, raw soy beans. They make you sick.

http://www.ehow.com/info_8547477_happens-eat-raw-soybeans.ht...
Looks like the site is down. Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Iq7DDCu...
It also doesn't help that the classic LAMP stack has very confusing defaults and badly named functions:

* PHP has functions named "utf8_encode()" and "utf8_decode()", when they should have been called "latin1_to_utf8_transcode()" and "utf8_to_latin1_transcode()"

* MySQL for the longest time used latin1 as a default character set, then introduced an insufficient character set called "utf8" which only allows up to 3 bytes, not enough for all possible utf8 encoded codepoints, then introduced a proper implementation called "utf8mb4".

* mysql connectors and client libraries often default their "client character set" setting to latin1, causing "silent" transcodes against the "server character set" and table column character sets. Also, because their "latin1" charset is more or less a binary-safe encoding, it is very easy to get double latin1-to-utf8 transcoded data in the database, something that often goes by unnoticed as long as data is merely received-inserted-selected-output to a browser, until you start to work on substrings or case insensitive searches etc.

* In Java, there are tons of methods that work on the boundary between bytes and characters that allows not specifying an encoding, which then silenty falls back to an almost randomly set system encoding

* Many languages such as Java, JavaScript and the unicode variants of win32 were unfortunately designed at a time where unicode characters could fit into 16bits, with the devastating result that the data type "char" is too small to store a single unicode character. It also plays hell on substring indexing.

In short, the APIs are stacked against the beginning programmer and doesn't make it obvious that when you go from working with abstract "characters" to byte streams, there is ALWAYS an encoding involved.
The main behaviour is to add the DNT: 1 HTTP header. The JavaScript APIs are just a bonus to perhaps avoid sending unnecessary information. (But yes, it’s still a silly feature, because having to go out of your way at all to respect DNT isn’t really worth it.)
And this is why github won...
I used to love going to blockbuster to rent a flick, because I could do it on a whim (near-instant gratification). Because of streaming services like Netflix, blockbuster went out of business.

I don't plan for movie night days in advance. I'm not going to rent that shit in the mail. So after a few years of not touching my DVD player, I threw it out.

The content owners are the real ones losing out here. I'd pay $4 to stream any movie, there's just no service I'm aware of that offers them all digitally at that price.
Why would anyone want to do this?

Answer me this: if you needed or wanted a bike helmet, would you buy a used one to save money? Especially if it's never been cleaned? (Those foam pads inside don't seem to be conducive to cleaning.) What kind of person would steal a helmet?
+1 for "work on something that excites you is imho priceless"
One useful tactic that I use to give something "the smell test" is to reverse the targets. There have been cases where police acted improperly or illegally, so if this company was using cellphone data and aggregated social media data to let propestors know the identity and social media posts of all the police, would that be improper?

That feels wrong, so my "smell test" makes me also think that the other way around is wrong. Police should be acting on immediate actions of protestors, not potential actions based on some black box social graph algorithm that tells them who to arrest.
Lately I've been using Opera Incognito with free builtin VPN for all general browsing and I highly recommend it. (I use Chrome to stay logged in to email).
The point isn't just that debt would be paid off. It’s that consumption would remain at a similar level, except instead of being funded by a combination of debt and aid it’s funded by UBI. For sure there'd be some inflation, I just wouldn't expect it to erase gains. After all, UBI would have to be funded by taxes in some form, so it’s not really “new” money entering the economy. On the other hand wouldn’t be surprised by a quick spike in rent, home prices and private college tuition.

I have no idea whether UBI would actually be a good move, but it’s a lot of fun to game this stuff out.

For example I wouldn’t be surprised if it led to better wages & conditions for unskilled labor, and maybe suppressed wages for higher earners. If you’re in a minimum wage job, UBI gives you a lot of leverage - you can quit without facing starvation. Companies would have to do more to attract and retain unskilled labor. On the other hand when you’ve got a mortgage, payments on the lexus and kids in private school, leaving your job to live on UBI alone isn’t really an option. Could also be that UBI lets you eliminate the minimum wage entirely and let the market sort it out.
An extensive and very informative, though a bit sarcastic, rebuttal (from 2001 as well): https://features.slashdot.org/story/01/06/06/0132203/why-uni... (via https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/786324531828838400).
[Python-Ideas] INSANE FLOAT PERFORMANCE
But you are better off to get one of these: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK....

That looks like fun. I haven't played with a FPGA yet. My preference for using a microcontroller, as opposed to bit banging the FTDI, is that the MCU runs in real time and has peripherals such as SPI, timers, etc. Right now my favorite board du jour is the Teensy 3.2, though I just got a 3.6 to try out.
So then, one tactic would be to fill it with nested folder after folder of something that might be interesting. Like "Studio Rough.mp3" If you make it large enough, a lot of people will procrastinate going through it all.
You just made a great argument for investing MORE in GPS software in a car than in the phone: get it right the first time so you aren't stuck with useless software for two decades–that's a waste of everyone's time and money.
Being downvoted is usually temporary (random noise, until the upvoters a arrive). Comments complaining about being downvoted - which, note, are against site guidelines usually last longer. Don't write them.

> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I've been heavily considering starting my own message board like HN but about the North American recording industry. Now I just need to find a record label to partner/host it with. :)
Yes, and it's very likely they will sympathize moreso with a woman making 35k who was fired for reporting a crime.
Instead of saving the data, you could think of using a memory address as applying the identity function and saving the data.

Could it learn to use addresses that perform more interesting functions than f(x)=x?
Blue Apron’s busy New Jersey facility a real fight club
Would it be possible to make a browser plugin to do exactly that?
Probably safer to let somebody else try this... ;) A couple of Ukrainians made a cool YouTube video recently where they built something similar and used it to blow up some cell phones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIU8WZR9DNA
I get the paywall, even in incognito across all browsers. They must also be tracking by IP.
This same article is on 20 sites. No reason to pay wall it.
Remember WF was one of the banks that failed the stress tests after the 2008 financial crisis. I've been trying to get away from WF for a while now, but no other bank can fill its shoes in terms of online services and ubiquity. Yet it has a culture of predatory capitalism where "your loss is our gain".
Right, but that seems like it's being extremely deceptive: when you quit or get fired you stop vesting.

It isn't clawed back in any meaningful way. When you or I leave a startup, we don't talk about our unvested options getting "clawed back".
Why "640K ought to be enough to everyone"
Cyprus must have an extremely good internet connection :)
Are you arguing that crime would not have increased in the newly-integrated neighborhoods if the white residents had not moved away?
The entire situation is downright despicable.

If you listen to the podcast, they made employees stay in an active crime scene (bank robbery) where the thief defecated all over the floor to make phone calls to try to open new accounts.

Many employees (many with similar wages to Ashley) left due to health reasons caused due to the stress of the job. They were reduced to calling friends and relatives begging to create new accounts so they could meet quota. Ashley notes throwing up under her desk as fairly standard practice. If they didn't reach quota, they would be fired and blacklisted like Ashley was - though Ashley was fired for acting morally.

Customers may not be aware of the impact that such products had on their credit ratings. Given credit ratings are incredibly complex to "fix" and you may only become aware of them when trying to make a large next step in life (loan for a house) ...

And worst, the pensioner, who lived on minimal savings and who is not well equipped to sort out fraudulently opened accounts, was overdraft and unable to fix the situation himself. Who knows how many pensioners were sucked dry, what struggles they then faced on an empty bank account, unaware of what might even be the problem.
Communication is a technical skill
Maybe a foreign language speaker? The term didn't get the same valences in places that didn't colonize it
I almost lost 10,000 users