skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sooo... we're putting a javascript frontend webapp wrapped in electron in to a wrapper to emulate a filesystem in the browser so we can use that frontend webapp in the browser.

Welp.
Bitcoin: Bitpesa Allows African Businesses to Trade with Chinese Counterparts
It would be nice if Mr. Tucker mentioned that in the article.
We're supposed to trust them that it was not just Russian geographically but the Russian government and also the highest levels of the Russian government.
The Sony hack had more evidence than this...

Someone explain to me why this is such an issue?

There have been many proven hacks from many states that are far worse (the Chinese Fighter plane that looks almost identical to the F35 come to mind) than exposing the DNC's dirty laundry. No one is denying that the emails are real. This seems like some sort of distraction.
>What exactly is this? A list of IP addresses and countries?

It's just a list of IOCs. IPs, file hashes, urls, a few traffic samples.

>presumably it's more than IP address seeing as how trivial proxying is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13280068
I cant speak to android, but I don't see how you are going to support a local workflow on chromebooks or iOS. You'd be fighting the environment every step of the way. So those users would be working over the network.
The intersection of can't install atom / works locally has to be incredibly small if it exists at all.
Is your prior for "The FBI would publicly make an accusation like this without any conclusive technical evidence" really higher than your prior for "The FBI would not include all of the evidence they based the accusation on in the public report"?
It seems notable that many of these comments are jumping on this for not providing proof that it was Russia, when that was not the intention of the report.

The first page states-

>This JAR provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations, suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government.
> 2) There’s a huge lack of incentive

This is THE big one for me. In the classic paper-clip-maximizer-gone-wrong example, there's no fathomable reason why generalized AI is necessary for such a specific, mundane task. But the organizations that have the (enormous) resources to develop such an intelligence are almost entirely focused on small numbers of tightly scoped problems.

It's very difficult to see any marginal ROI for any organization whose end goal is not some form of world domination.
Integer overflow is defined to panic in debug builds, and either do that or two's compliment overflow in release builds. The current implementation overflows. However, zero is not false.
No they weren't.

MS-DOS was written in Assembly, just like Word for MS-DOS.

Word got rewritten in C when it was ported to Windows.

EDIT: You can see early versions here

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-...

And the Lisa OS and the early versions of Mac OS were written in a mix of Assembly and Object Pascal.

http://www.folklore.org/ (Search for Pascal)

http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
Brilliant. Would love to see you do a video and post to YouTube
Instagram, you say? Go on...
NYT: The Year in Visual Stories and Graphics
Why is it surprising that women are really good at giving birth?

After all, the genes of the ones that weren't have not been selected for, tens of thousands of years ago.

Either way, contraception is pretty orthogonal to the actual mortality rate of women due to child birth.
The problem is that safety doesn't sell. If you're getting a new IoT heat lamp you look at the price and not the firmware's code. To your surprise, the first hacker coming along toasts your cat.
Who chooses when a UDP packet is dropped? The freaking network adapter device driver which is what I said in the first place!
I would ask for examples of alternative economies being built up and creating nice and democratic countries, but we both know that if you had any supporting data you would have started with it. :-)

Please note that experiments with alternative societal models often have failure modes like dictatorships and/or a large part of the population dying in horrible ways and/or... It is not something to experiment with lightly.

It is a pity that you proponents of alternative models are so full of hot air, good research and analysis would be needed; there ought to be better ways. Most of you guys sound like you are paid to discredit everything but the status quo.
I'll just be over here on i3wm not using a mouse...
> But there are very good reasons for why they operate the way they do.

Indeed there are, and no reasonable person would say that having intelligence agencies is a bad thing.

The issue in this case is that the US intelligence agencies have been leveraged politically to help convince the public to support various policies, when in fact there has not been credible evidence.

A lot of people put their lives on the line to end the cold war, and now we have a faction of US politicians who are trying very hard to galvanize the same historic antagonism. We should be judicious and skeptical, and not let them use the common technique of fake urgency to drive a big decision without adequate forethought.
I guess the real question is, why should these IP addresses from those countries make this attack attributable to Russia?

Unless you can answer that, yours doesn't really make much sense.
Clash of Clans is actually fairly balanced if you don't pay at all. The most common use case for buying gems is to make upgrades happen quicker (typically if you are in a close clan war), but it is completely possible to spend no money at all and still progress.
> The mujahideen was created when the US convinced Egypt to release their criminals (murders, rapists, some political prisoners) and let them gain freedom by fighting a war in Afghanistan.

So, Soviets invading the Afghanistan wasn't responsible for anything?

Also I'd like to see some sources.
Thanks, that is indeed so. I must say that the Chrome team have been really fantastic about it (they reached out to me after asking on twitter).

It's just the age old resources problem: not only do you have to change the frontend, you also need to make changes on the server. That more than doubles the work (quadruples in our case because the server requires far more QA effort).

That comes at the cost of other features, features which are more valuable.
I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of useful comments in the code.

I remember when the source code for Descent was released; not only was the code somewhat opaque (unless you were experienced with portal-style engines), but there were hardly any kind of comments to help guide you along.
17 Absurd (Tech-Ish) Predictions for 2017
I'd only use original pads and discs from the brake manufacturer. If you upgrade your brakes it's best to upgrade the whole system, not just the pads. Overbuilt components with more metal and more surface would normally dissipate heat better, reducing the prospect of brake failure. Also, mechanical brakes are easier to inspect, maintain and fix. You won't see if your DOT fluid absorbed humidity or you won't notice a leak until the brake fails, but you will certainly see a broken cable.
Rust is Software's Salvation
Hey - thanks for this recommendation - I will definitely look into it!
> The reality is that these days there generally isn't any packet loss

I don't know which reality bubble you live in, but this is utterly false. I live in the country side and get routinely an average of 40% packet loss on many, many websites. There are plenty of occasions for packets to get lost somewhere between a client and a server.
Did you read the first page? This report has nothing to do with detailing or justifying attribution
Understanding always trumps simple accuracy, because it defines new mental models which can tested experimentally.

I don't think it's about low-hanging fruit so much as the difference between analytical understanding/talent and deep creative insight.

Science-as-career has become institutionalised and conservative, and slanted more towards the semi-industrialised production of regular publishable refinements and less towards deep insights.

It's correspondingly less likely that a mind like Einstein's would be able to make equivalent contributions today.
Personally I'm more interested in the people with the green Solo cups :-)

On a more serious note, this is a remarkably good cup for its volume. We used to "stock" them at Blekko for people who were getting water or needed a drinking cup. One of my hats there was to keep the larder full and I ordered some alternate cups (less expensive) one time and quickly realized they didn't hold up well when full and were too easily squeezed leading to potential crack/leak failures. Clearly the guy had put a lot of thought into something which, on the outside, seemed fairly simple.
> It’s wrong because most real-world problems don’t scale linearly. In the real world, the interesting problems are much much harder than that.

And this is what has been nagging me about the Singularity and its associated predictions. Exponential growth in our problem-solving capabilities is explosive when the problem-space is linear. But what happens when the problem-space itself grows exponentially with each iteration? Then we're back to linear progress.

Futurism, thinking about the future of AI and technology is still important. Long-term thinking, planning, and prediction are always good. But progress will probably be much slower than anticipated.
Of course overflow and rounding error must be accounted for in your data type. Exchanges have price boundaries, price quanta, or risk boundaries that would guide this decision. My point is that you would not rule out a data type for trading based on an obscure currency like the Zimbabwean dollar.
What intrigues me about Joe Celko's book is that he is completely anti all forms of auto indexing (and it makes sense) but is the assumption for all the web frameworks that I come across. Most recently I hit this when looking at yesod.
The funny part about all of this to me, is that if most companies with data to lose aren't already taking these recommendations.. then they've already been cracked.

Most of this report is pretty simple social engineering tactics/table stakes.
They come to Western Europe :) Last year I hired two Romanian developers here in The Netherlands, both were very good.
I liked flash a lot. But the problem with Adobe/Macromedia was they never gave it too much development time. It took a long time for flash to start using the GPU. It took a while for flash to start its way towards mobile, before abandoning mobile.

Flash could have been a platform that apps could have been built on and displayed in an app store, but they never promoted anything close to it. Flash could have been a complete browser, but they never cared. Flash could have been a cloud desktop (like Goowy Desktop [bought and shut by AOL]). Flash could have been an OS (like Chrome OS or Android OS). Flash was already a pretty good PDF reader and worked faster than Adobe PDF in the browser, but no one knew.

Flash had so much potential, but Macromedia did not have much money to invest and Adobe bought it without any imagination.

All efforts in Flash went to waste and set the industry 5-10 years behind ... so far behind that we now have to wait for HTML5 to be better ... slowly.
As an aside, for those looking to understand YARA rules, [1] provides a brief introduction and [2] introduces how to write them. I needed to look it up myself, but seems relatively straightforward if you have a programming background.

tl;dr: YARA rules are a method of categorizing malware based on their characteristics. So the PDF here released a YARA rule to determine a specific piece of malware used in the hack (it's not clear to me what it identifies, other than a PHP script).

For convenience, here's the YARA rule presented in the PDF formatted to be more readable:

rule PAS_TOOL_PHP_WEB_KIT
{

meta:
description = "PAS TOOL PHP WEB KIT FOUND"

strings:
$php = "<?php"
$base64decode = /\='base'\.\(\d+\*\d+\)\.'_de'\.'code'/
$strreplace = "(str_replace("
$md5 = ".substr(md5(strrev("
$gzinflate = "gzinflate"
$cookie = "_COOKIE"
$isset = "isset"

condition:
(filesize > 20KB and filesize < 22KB) and
#cookie == 2 and
#isset == 3 and
all of them

}

[1] https://securityintelligence.com/signature-based-detection-w...

[2] http://yara.readthedocs.io/en/v3.5.0/writingrules.html

EDIT: formatting
I hate those in news sites, but I did find them useful for a couple of websites—mainly where I was waiting for a reply for an auction or booking request.
> Microsoft has not collapsed. In fact, it's doing better than ever. If Microsoft of all companies can reform itself, so can Google.

I don't know what you think of Google's process. A design doc is needed for any large user facing change or large infrastructure change, and it goes through sections and you skip the ones that are not applicable.

For instance, if you're not storing user information, you skip the PII section and so forth. If you're just making a change to adwords billing, you skip the entire I18N section.

Also, the areas in which Microsoft is revitalizing itself are green field projects like the cloud and some other interesting hardware/software integrations. You can play fast and loose with those, as opposed to Google, which doesn't really have any legacy code and has to support all existing users.

> When your developers are both smart and invested in the product's success, they learn about these things on their own. Sure, they can make mistakes, but so can some damned review committee.

The review committee does this for hours a day, and they see far more cases. That's like saying that it's better for you to assess the condition of the transmission of your car, because you care more and are more invested. I'd rather have the guy who rebuilds transmissions for a living, who has seen dozens of transmissions, and is familiar with common failure modes and pitfalls.

Specialized labor does help.

> The Brooklyn Bridge was designed to be six times stronger than it needed to be for its design load.

Well, heavier than air flight was impossible before the 1890's without investment in materials, engines, and construction techniques. Is it easier to build an airplane now? I still fail to see your point. We're talking about something where you have to invent the tools to make the tools to make what you want to make, vs. already having the tools available.

> Pseudolocalization and dogfooding help. I'd argue that rapid iteration helps most on UIs.

AB testing on wireframes helps and gets most of the edge cases. After you roll out to production things get hairy.

> It's a lot easier to back out a problem diff than to remove the staph you accidentally introduced into a patient's bloodstream.... The vast majority of programming errors are of the "easy to undo" variety.

Not really, when you're working on fundamental libraries that many products depend on. That can cause issues all up and down the product stack, and you're going to cause issues for developers who rely on your code who now have to throw away months of work.

> Uber recently delivered beer fully autonomously. In a truck. They're definitely planning for L5 autonomy.

That's a publicity stunt, and it's unknown whether or not they got paid or not. Also, Otto was based from Google expats, one from Google maps and one from the Google self driving car company. Your point is?
I nominate this HN post for most obfuscated title of 2016.
> You need an actual degree, if not a masters or doctorate to play.

The most highly cited CS researcher that I've worked with has an undergraduate degree in music and no graduate level formal training... smarts, focus, and a keen eye can get one pretty far.
Image-based modeling: Tool for realistic simulations of artificial bone cultures
Some things I've found help reduce my stress around science
You can of course build file management on top of the base Monaco component. Monaco itself provides only APIs to set or retrieve the content of a monaco editor widget. You can then build some kind of filemanager on top of it which loads file contents from whereever and puts them into an editor instance.
The bloomberg article I read (http://archive.is/j5wRd) presented it as evidence. Maybe other publications are doing the same.

>As part of the administration’s response, the FBI and Homeland Security Department also released a report with technical evidence intended to prove Russia’s military and civilian intelligence services were behind the hacking and to expose some of their most sensitive hacking infrastructure.
I've done security remediation for the U.S. Govt. About the same vulns you would expect on 2003 PHP apps that haven't been updated since (OS or otherwise). Congress doesn't budget for server/app maintenance, simple as that.
Problem is they want senior developers but only want to pay junior developer wages. There is a flood of junior developers out there that can't get jobs. These companies don't want them though. They want senior developers who don't have to work for those lower wages because they can easily make $170k on their own or elsewhere. If they really do want those senior developers then they need to pay up. Otherwise, hire junior developers and put in place a program to get them up to speed.
Isn't the whole purpose encapsulation?
The entire thing has been a politicized distraction and propaganda campaign ... the level of discourse in America is now at a terrifying and dangerous quality; we used to mock the propaganda of the Soviets, China, etc. but we are descending into their grade.
I'm in West Africa now and I'm experiencing this first-hand with regards to resource exploitation.

Interestingly, the large oil players (Shell, BP, etc.) do actually mandate some things - i.e. they are not really supposed to buy oil from countries that don't have functioning elections, some environmental protections, human rights, etc. etc. I believe this is a requirement of the World Bank, and the UN.

This is why you see shill elections in a lot of West African countries - they need it to look like they are functioning democracy, even though a country has had the same "elected" president for 22 years :)

Also, this is why Africa loves dealing with China, who doesn't get involved in their internal politics.
The corporation example always kills me because it's a terrible metaphor.

A corporation optimizes for shareholder value, market cap or some other X related to business/market goals. They do not optimize for global intelligence capability. They do not benchmark the company based on quantitative capacity to meet or beat human capabilities across the spectrum of activities. Corporations focus on one or a handful of market specific metrics where they meet or beat their competitors. Full stop.

You could argue that it would be in the company's interest to focus on general corporate capabilities, in theory giving them a major advantage in the market, but they functionally don't do that, and I would argue can't because that's not what they are designed to do. I think the only major company that might be doing something close is Alphabet, and even they are hamstrung by it.

What I do agree with is this part:
Lack of incentives means very little strong AI work is happening

Which is my primary frustration with the field. Most people don't even want to discuss it, let alone try and specifically work on it (even if it means working on subsets which could help lead to it).

I think there needs to be a philosophical MOVEMENT to create AGI. I think it will take that to get there in a short horizon. I think it will happen regardless, but without evangelical AGI proponents it's going to take a lot longer.
One could say the same for Bay Area salary of $150k.
To put the figure into some context for the UK because I know the base amounts more.

One of these arms at £10k would put it at less than 10 weeks of 24 hour minimum wage pay (18-21 year olds).

Assuming they had a total cost of ownership at (say) £3k/year, and ran for 90% of the time then they'd cost roughly £0.38 per hour.
Delete your account.
I love the phrase "powerpoint engineering" and I think I'm going to use it in my daily speech patterns now.
I think its probably the same for any large corporation. I'd check with banks, insurance companies, even Japanese manufacturers where you can start with a job in the US with the view to move.
Certain political ideologies - that seem to prosper in the most influential and wealthy areas of the United States - need to maintain a 19th century narrative that the plight of poor people is getting worse with time, not better. Such philosophies are healthily represented here on hacker news, and all manner of fact twisting and double-think takes place in order to fit facts to the narrative.

If your narrative is that you need drastic change and increased state powers to commandeer an economy and the individuals in it to reduce poverty, the statistics are not extraordinarily positive at all. They strike at the heart of your ideals. The fact that people are becoming wealthier despite most of the worlds economies tending towards a free market must be vigorously opposed.
In addition, the IAP can get you to a particular state faster but it doesn't really give you an advantage once you're there. So it's a fair fight between someone who's been grinding for a year vs someone who's been playing for 3 months but paid to speed up his progress.
Then why did the report attribute any of this to Russia without substantiating those claims? It's one thing to detail mitigations, it's another to call out Russia as the perpetrator without adding contextual value - the majority of the addresses involved aren't Russian.
Google product tips and tricks
What You Need to Know About the Latest Unicorn IPO
I think they should just recompile the whole Electron app-wrapper shell (with its whole own webview + JS engine) into asm.js via emscripten via LLVM for "putting Atom in the browser". What could go wrong! While you're at it, you'll surely find another 10-50 sturdy FOSS dependencies you can require for this to build --- heck, we're not reinventing Sublime Text here anyway, this is Cloud Scale 'n all.
Ask HN: Next step after GitHub Pages?
I currently host my blog and a small web store on github pages. It's worked very well for me, I love the ease of use of jekyll and simply pushing code to a repo for updates. Their web interface is nice, I can even make quick edits on the road with my phone.

I always like to have a contingency plan though, so my question is what are the other options out there? I'm more than willing to pay. Is there anything that gives me the ease of use and flexibility for github pages? The last thing I want to do is maintain a server!
U.K. Russian Embassy Responds to U.S. Sanctions with Meme
Researchers Develop Nanodiscs That Can Wipe Out Tumors
This is a tool that allows you to build processing pipelines in Python. You factor your code into small, easily testable components that are then wired together into a task graph.
The basic flaws I'd mention are:

- Multiple state actors (or well-funded non-state actors) likely compromised the emails.

- A state actor could also have faked the "trail" that points to Russia.

- The rest of the evidence is circumstantial.

Sure, if we pretend we live in a pre-stuxnet, script kiddie sort of world, this was likely a high level state sponsored attack, but it seems preposterous that a state actor would be so sloppy:

If you were Putin wishing to try to use spearfishing to get access to specific accounts, you would not source that work to groups that were known to work with your government. You'd set up a fake Nigerian operation so that if found it would look like the email address had been randomly chosen from a list of many used by some Nigerian person to try to scam a few thousand dollars.

This is not akin to thinking three or four moves ahead, it's simply thinking one move ahead.