skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, come on. We have our problems as a society but this is a little much. I have two specific objections.

* The financial crisis was partially a result of mortgages being given to people whose financial data would have suggested that they had no business borrowing so much money. In that case, the opposite of your point is true. This shows that attention to data is beneficial to a mortgage system because it helps avoid questionable loans.

* My friends don't rate my worth, because I don't have friends.
> I see academia as somewhere where people can make immense contributions to human knowledge

The problem is just like the industry (or even more so), academia is plagued with infighting, personal vendettas, skewed incentives and lots of politics.

I think many believe academia is more pure, more rational and calm environment where it is all sharing, and peaceful pursuit of knowledge and so on. The reality is very different from it.

> but they have to jump through certain hoops to do so

The hoops are part of the problems. It seems he cared for focused more on teaching and administration instead of sucking up to other faculty or just cranking out publications like crazy.

The most important bit is probably him trying to improve things.

Improving things mean undoing something that is already there. Due to tenure and length of time people with tenure hang around in academia, the status quo was established by many of the tenured people there. Saying "I want to improve that" was read as, "what you did sucked, I will make it better". That stuff is never acknowledged publicly but come voting time, it won't be forgotten either.
Often feeling that any criticism of your work is unfair can blind you to what the real criticism is.

Yeah, there's probably a few folks who you can't win over no matter what. But, there are also valid and real takeaways that colleagues are offering, and holding your hands over your ears saying the system is rigged isn't going to help one to continue to grow.
You are just a few twists and turns before arriving at the land of cryptocurrencies. All the usual issues with "hard to execute" and other unintended side effects apply.
As sad as it is, there are lots of places where these things are met with skepticism and argument.

I know people who specifically waited years to redesign courses until they had tenure.
NYC subway usage is high.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/nyregion/surge-in-ridershi...

You need a good system before people are going to use it. The US population is going up by another 100 million people by 2050. Think more cars is the answer?
Whats the alternative?
So poor American blacks/whites rape people and beat their wives because they don't realize how nice their lifestyle is compared to the lifestyle of Mexicans in Mexico?

Personally I don't find this particularly plausible.
Luke 21:4 All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.
As far as I know, none of the agencies you mentioned have individual numerical scores for 330M+ Americans and US residents. The closest thing is credit scores (which the article mentions), which are metered and tracked by private companies under a broad set of federal regulations.

More to the point, your potential employers don't get access to your personal life, beyond what you divulge to them and whatever information they get from public records (sex offender lists, states with public arrest records, &c). They don't know how "good" of a citizen you are, your mental health record, or if you've ever gotten a speeding ticket. China's proposed system opens all of that.
really? eta? source?
Tenure is shrinking because universities are realizing that the core of their workforce isn't tenured scientists - it's assistants and adjuncts, post-docs, and grad students. In the business model world of big science being publish, get grant funding, take overhead, tenured professors are mainly just project managers.

Why make a commitment to support 2x more tenure track positions when you have 1-2 good enough to attract wide-eyed grad students? This is the market correcting itself to shrinking federal budgets and ballooning workforce supply.
turn your phone off if you have the chance, iphones require passcode when turned back on
Do we have any idea of what proportion of devices are "owned" via default or unset passwords, as opposed to actual exploits?
To deliver their content to some of their customers. AT&T only controls ~30% of mobile and a lot less than 30% of the landline ISP market.

Google and Apple control much more of the market via handset OS's. And we let them control media on their devices.

And after Net Neutrality, it's not even legal to discriminate against competitors traffic.
This is something beyond the sesame credit score talked about before.
And if Google had already put two million miles on flying cars in major metro areas, I think I'd sit up and start paying attention to flying cars, too.

Unfortunately it's impractical to maintain a minority viewpoint in a conversation on this subject. HN imposes aggressive rate limits after a few downmods. People on HN regularly use downvotes to express disagreement, and they reeeeeeeeallly like their trains.

So although I find the topic interesting, I probably won't be able to respond further in this thread.
Couldn't you just reverse the order then, and create an xz.tar? Maybe I don't understand the benefit of taring the data first.
Breaking the Internet is probably a bit more undesirable.
Agree with that.

He set out to improve things, which is a good goal. Improving means criticizing the status quo at some level. In case of academia, with tenured people lingering there for life, status quo is probably the result of their work (for better or for worse). Wanting to "improve" that was probably perceived as an insult something like "what you did before sucks, I'll make it better". Unless he was dealing with unusually rational colleagues, that stuff is never forgotten and surfaces at voting times.

But also playing devil's advocate here. It could also be that this is a "well the grapes are too sour anyway" type story. That is, maybe his research wasn't seen as very good, innovative or interesting to deserve a tenure. Maybe he knew it too so set out to instead focus on teaching and other aspects. I've seen people do that. Can't code so they become really strong proponents of documenting everything, or they look for other busy work to justify their salary. That is not necessarily all bad or wrong, but it is interesting to consider here. We haven't really heard from other side so to speak.
I've had it happen before, what's likely happening is that you're scrolling an element behind the article due to a bug in safari with z indexes.
It is. My views on contracts and law suits changed when we got a trademark infringement suit against us.

It became a function of "how much is this going to cost us?" We ended up changing the name of our company even though we didn't think the accuser had a case. It wasn't about who was right. It was about how much money did we think they would be willing to put up because we'd have to match it.
On the other hand, why? The article jives with my own experience and understanding from college and talking to people that went to other not top tier schools. Most schools are not equipped to teach CS, certainly not to increase diversity, and they don't really care. Change is scary, especially if it might work. He can make more money in industry and move around more fluidly to find like minded folks, sounds like a great life decision. Honestly, most people don't know when to cut their losses. I think he does.
I don't think this piece is that bad, and it doesn't sound like he is fighting his department.

I think you're right that viewing public pieces like this as "bad" is generally not helpful to anyone, but there seem to be lot of people in academia who are afraid of pieces like this and initially jump to the interpretation they're a fight or some way of circumventing the existing processes.

If this guy is as good as he says he is - then yeah he should be able to find a job, but posting this could make some of that searching harder, or at least cause resistance.
Speaking perhaps a bit abstractly, a "union" is just a group of people whose interests are better represented by banding together than by all acting independently. I hear you; there a lot of connotations attached to the word. Most of them negative. But what if they're mostly bullshit? Maybe they're not. I don't know. But regardless, it seems to me short-sighted to dismiss organization of like-minded interests because it "limits the ability of another human to feed their family" when, in fact, that's the very right a union ought to be fighting for.

> Unions, as of late, have been overtly political in action.

Isn't that kind of the point? Unions are why an 8-hour workday became standard, instead of 10-12, for instance. (Wait a minute....)
Unfortunately this is par for the course. DFAS' accounting systems are antiquated, involving 2200 individual systems, manual re-entry when data needs to be moved around, and "fudge" entries to fix the errors in the books. When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers.

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1

Another similar situation that came up when I was searching down the first article: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pentagon-bomb-squad...

It's been happening for decades now. On the whole, the Pentagon budget is one of the few (perhaps the only?) Federal budgets that is so screwed up that it can't even be audited. The pay for soldiers is just the tip of the iceberg here, contractors are also getting massively overpaid and the USG is not nearly as good about clawing those back (since contractors can fight back). Literally hundreds of billions of dollars each year are moving around these systems, and we cannot even reliably trace where they are going.

There's no political will to fix this because people automatically assume military = classified and golly we can't audit classified books. Another huge part of the population has a totemic fetishization of the military and criticising their books translates to criticizing the military itself. So in turn we end up tolerating terrible bookkeeping that would never be allowed in another Federal department let alone the private sector...

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/07/31/Pentagon-s-Sloppy-B...

The USG civil retirement system is similarly weird and terrible. Please reference: the giant cave system where they have to keep multiple hundreds of thousands of square feet of cabinets full of paper records.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhol...

This terrible mess of ancient, individual systems is replicated all over the USG. The VA system operates similarly (cited above). During the 2011 and 2013 default crises the Treasury systems had no way of controlling individual payments, knowing the overall reserves at a future point in time, or even knowing when individual payments were going to happen.
From this other page https://blue.cse.buffalo.edu/ , it looks like he can take his grants, research, Phd students and courses with him to a new job! I'm totally amazed at that. Don't they belong to his old university? Is that how it usually works in universities?
I know this is a rough situation, but perhaps there are real merits to the decision that I wish we could've seen discussed in the post. For example, I went ahead and watched a few of the videos from his internet course and very quickly grokked what kind of professor he might be.

On an industry level, yeah he's right. These things are happening throughout academia in departments everywhere. Tenure is a poorly designed system. Most likely, UBuffalo is missing out on a great teacher. On a personal level, it'd be a shame to walk away from an experience like this as being cynical and defensive.
League of War Hack Tool 2017 (Android/iOS)
In the U.S., the courts can't decide whether something is moral or immoral. If we throw people in jail for corruption, it won't be because they were found guilty of having a bad moral character. It will be because of an illegal conflict of interest or anticompetitive practices or something like that. That's what a separation of church and state means in this context.
China lacks almost any societal pressure valves at all without online dissent and armed revolution is all that's left if people become unsatisfied. "Praising the government" makes people less safe, since honest real public sentiment is well obscured.
The specifics vary by state, of course, but actually very few states protect political activity, either inside or outside the workplace. In fact, only 3 states specifically protect political activity, and two others protect "lawful conduct outside work."[0]

But, yes, you can always fire your employees for being too attractive[1], if firing them for their political beliefs is too risky or distasteful.

Broadly speaking, unless the employee has contractual protection; or the reason is discriminatory against members of a protected class, is in retaliation for exercising other workplace rights, or is contrary to public policy; it's legally acceptable to fire anyone for any reason.

[0]: http://www.workplacefairness.org/retaliation-political-activ...

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/fashion/Some-women-are-fir...
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Installing Windows 3.11 on a modern system
> I bet that a greyhat will find a way to brick a lot of these cameras.

A chaos monkey for internet security - now that's an interesting thought!

That could actually work. Market forces aren't strong enough currently to force manufacturers to get security right, since the average user doesn't really care that much about it. But if it became common for any poorly secured product to turn into a brick as soon as you connect it to the Internet, users would pretty quickly figure out what brands to buy and bring some serious pressure to bear on the others...
> Full disclosure: I'm coming up for tenure myself, and one lesson it has taken me 5 years to understand is that people who disagree with me on campus aren't doing so out of spite, stupidity, or carelessness, they often just have different priorities than I do

In my experience, one problem is that the priorities are frequently rooted in the self-interest of powerful PIs or staff and are to the detriment of the department / university as a whole. As a staff scientist working on many different types of projects, I frequently bump up against stupid problems which should be fixed at a university level. At one point, I tried spear heading a number of these projects (creation of a central index of core facilities and support services for our university so people can actually find resources efficiently, centralized billing and training services for shared facilities across departments, secure storage and an EMR for investigators working with patient information).

All of these projects failed to launch for selfish reasons:

central index: powerful PIs feared discovery of their private core labs which they were abusing; core labs feared institute-level data would lead to institute wide optimization and loss of local control.

centralized billing: financial admins feared loss of control and had job security issues

centralized training: core labs feared loss of control

secure storage and EMR: PIs thought this was too inconvenient, preferred leaving shit on external hard drives with no access control. Feared if this were created they would be forced to use it.

I don't ever try to fix anything now beyond the lab level, and even that is frequently challenging.

I've also seen two talented investigators passed by for tenure in our department because my PI is powerful and other PIs fear that having another person from our lab in the department will further consolidate power in my PI's hands. Our department recently spent an enormous amount of money renovating a single floor in our aging building. That floor had the departmental chair's lab on it. In my experience, academia is full of people who for the most part are in it for themselves and have no interest in improving the situation of the group / lab / department / university as a whole.
If only I could find the old Diablo CD-ROM that I had owned. Not sure where I put it, but if I find it I will give this a try.
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Most times, grants stay with the department and they have the discretion to use the remainder however they want.
A real alternative is to push ipfs and ipns
Economically disadvantaged members of U.S. armed forces are not in some special moral category. Whatever their motives, they voluntarily joined an organization that initiates force against others on behalf of the political and economic ruling class. They aren't solely responsible for the aforementioned "contemporary crimes", but they aren't innocent either.
> I bet that a greyhat will find a way to brick a lot of these cameras.

It's draconian, but it would sure make users sit up and take notice of which manufacturers are slacking on security.
Some people simply aren't politicians and will NEVER have any "tact", nor could they look themselves in the mirror if they faked it.

My suggestion to them is to start their own business or find one to work for (with a willing owner) that needs its core rocked or is full of straight-talkers.

We shouldn't typecast ourselves for a paycheck of it leads to misery.
I am reliably informed (by Kayak) that the cheapest direct flight from JFK to Heathrow, one week from today, costs $901 in economy class on British Airways, while the cheapest business class ticket costs $5451 on Virgin Atlantic.

The saying "A fool and his money are soon parted" extends to corporations, too.
The East Coast Attackers, 'New World Hackers', Have Resigned
Well, I guess I am generally one of the worst performing employees. But why would you post such a statement in public? Maybe he is right in everything but in making this public I would never hire this guy. Probably would like to hang out for a beer with him. But hire?
On Death – Pt 1
This DoS attack kills the Internet Of Things as a cool new phrase.

There is already https://twitter.com/internetofshit of course. But that is more whimsy and fun "Oh look my toaster is tweeting, that's silly".

This attack is more like "Oh-oh, my toaster killed Twitter".

So even though as a thing IoT is here to stay, I think the phrase itself will sound negative and will be avoided.
> Many of the problems with cheating stem from the data passed between client and server. Though many of these design choices have advantages for other client performance/features, they allow cheating to prosper.

Could you tell us more? What is one of these design choices?
Given that all these devices were 'hacked' using just the default credentials, exploits in the software aren't as relevant here.
I wonder if there is any professional psychology on this kind of thing (link me!) but my layman observation is that most organizations tend toward median smoothing at best or lowest common denominator at worst for performance. That is of course not how you achieve high performance. But high performance scares lower performance, the conflict is bidirectional. From the article it's pretty obvious he was a high performer. High performance means having opinions. Opinions are contestable, and create conflict. Conflict is part of a high performance organization. Lower performers are terrified of conflict with higher performers. Therefore median and lowest common denominator organizations force high performers out. It's kind of ridiculous to think about that happening in academia, but today I learned!

When you switch to the arts and sports we LOVE to see extreme outliers and go to great lengths to assemble and prop them up. It's visceral excitement to see 320lb freaks of nature face off on a line of scrimmage in an NFL game. It would be cruel to have them face off against a highschool team or even just mix them in on the same line. Yet that kind of disparity happens all the time in other types of human assembly.

So I look at this from the other side. He did his deed at the University, made a mark, and got rejected for having high impact good, neutral, or bad. Some people were uncomfortable with high performance for reasons which could range from pettiness to valid criticism.

What you would call lack of tact I might call integrity. I am sure he will land somewhere else and do great things. Industry is more fluid and amenable to assembling high performance, especially in startups.
More clown scare: Site lets users text scary clown pictures to friends
It's not clear to me whether the curriculum work as all his vision or whether that was a fight, or he simply felt that others didn't view it as something helpful to his tenure case. It's not even clear whether it was all his vision or whether he was mostly trying to volunteer to lead the effort.

Every department is different, but I've definitely seen cases where the expectation is that you wait until you have tenure to participate in some changes or take on service work.

You're absolutely right about respecting others, but from his perspective others in the department also should at least listen to him, so it's hard to say whether "speaking out" is fighting or just trying to voice what he believes - which he should do if he does believe it would be helpful. (Doesn't mean he has to "win", but stopping speaking out or questioning things leads to problems.)

> Everything listed under "speaking out" gives me the same vibe.
> then encouraging a student petition and getting your name in a local paper about the incident? That's just asking for trouble.

On the whole, it sounds like there's a clear view he's "loud" about his work, and this sounds like the biggest probem.
Nevada’s $35B fund manager does as little as possible, usually nothing
Container Tabs in Firefox
It's upto Facebook what they want to do.
Do you know if there's companies or initiatives to provide security for IoT devices?
> The financial crisis was partially a result of mortgages being given to people whose financial data would have suggested that they had no business borrowing so much money. In that case, the opposite of your point is true. This shows that attention to data is beneficial to a mortgage system because it helps avoid questionable loans.

Were credit score non existing in 2008? If so, were they completely ignored?

Also, in comparison, European countries with non existing credit scores didn't have a crisis with subprime mortgages, probably because they paid attention case-by-case to the loan applicants. They surely used data, but it does not mean that this data has to be centralized and behind black box algorithms.
I was also wondering about his chance at appeal, but it's not clear how close he was:

> I knew that I had made a few enemies, but I was surprised that the final vote was so lopsided: 6 yays, 2 abstainers, and 8 nays.

What's the bar for passing? A majority of yeas? A plurality? Is there any sort of standard or is it different from school to school?