skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that strikes me with this malware is that it hits pretty much every single country. Don't hackers try to follow the proverbial "don't shit where you eat" proverb? They have nowhere to hide if they are identified now.
The quote bombshell here, and what hasnt yet gotten much attention since sysadmins the world over are busy dealing with fallout, is that the NSA and therefore the US government is directly responsible for the current global cyber-carnage. We developed the capability, we chose to keep it unpatched, we tried to keep it secret, we lost control of it.

This has similarities in type, if not in horror, to the development and subsequent spread of nuclear weapons. When we lost control of those secrets, it was a BFD [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies
No.

The problem is not a lack of access to a general-purpose computer. The problem is the lack of control over the computers you're forced to use in order to manipulate their attached I/O devices such as lights, refrigerators, screens, speakers, insulin pumps, steering and brakes, Internet connections, etc.
> tech investor and app innovator who believes that if used right, technology can bring an end to income inequality and a hosts of other social and economic problems.

If this implies using technology to deliver greater public services more efficiently, it is unlikely to solve structural inequality.

If you deliver public services more effectively and make California a more attractive place to live, then land values will rise, and landowners and mortgage investors can charge even higher rent.

The primary driver of inequality is housing costs and the only combination which would allow for high public spending on services and low rent paid to landholders and banks is switching state revenue from income, sales, and personal property taxes to a land value tax.

You can incentivize an incremental switch to land value taxation by sponsoring legislation which would allow residents to obtain an exemption from all state taxes if they lived in a county which made quarterly payments to the state on their behalf.

If a county can figure out how to get around Proposition 13 and raise local revenues from quarterly assessed unimproved land values sufficient to pay for both local and state services, it should be allowed to forward a portion of the money to the state in exchange for exemptions from state taxes for residents.

From a technical standpoint, it would be great if there was a public map of a single land value tax rate for every parcel of land in the state. However private developers could build this using data published by the county governments.
your link appears to be broken. On chrome it says "This site can’t be reached" when I hit submit. Thanks
I don't know what relevance that has to anything I said. Aside from the cherry picking aspect of how you (mis)quoted me, I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I am 51 years old. I deal routinely with women who look down upon me because they chose to put their careers first. In some cases, they chose to not have children at all. In their eyes, I absolutely am not their equal and unequivocally not deserving of any real respect.

Dealing with such women is usually a worse experience for me than dealing with most men. Such women are typically pretty toxic.
Yup. I'm in this club too. Born in '83, not exactly a gen-xer nor a millennial. It's a weird spot to be... I, with all due respect, find that a lot of my older colleagues are too stuck in their ways, and find that the younger ones are self-entitled "everyone gets a prize" whiners :). Tough to navigate; at least the ones my age and older appreciate when I tell it like it is. The younger ones I feel like I have to be careful around, lest there be hurt feelings.
Great to see you here. I do have a few questions:

Baseline: that super amazing cookbook that I truly loved, which at the time retailed for $50 and had won every award imaginable, cost $3.83 per book to print, shrink wrap, and ship to the US.

First book: All told, the cost per unit was around $10.80 laden for the first edition run of 30,000 books.

Second book: Initial estimates for a print run of 15,000 and 30,000 are about $13.80 to $15.20 per unit for the basic book without any ‘extras’.

What were the factors that increased the printing costs between these books? Was it mostly photos vs text, or was something else the main driver? And at the volumes you sold, how does this difference end up comparing to the total cost of producing the book?

And I’d be happy to work under those terms again. But then 10 Speed Press, a great independent publisher that could adroitly make an unusual deal for a cool book, got sold to Crown Publishing in 2009. ... I really doubt any publisher will make a deal like that again anytime soon.

Why do you think this is? Presumably, the deal worked out well enough economically for 10 Speed. While the current incumbent publishers are based on a low-risk high-volume corner-cutting model, might there be room for an upstart to take 10 Speed's place? Or room for a publisher who cares about books as art?

If you haven't seen it, the documentary "How to Make a Book with Steidl" is a nice look at a German publisher who appears to stay in business creating books with high attention to detail: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/steidl_documentary_imprint. And at the extreme high end, the Spanish publisher Siloé has a facsimile of the Voynich manuscript coming out that attracted a lot of attention and preorders: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/23/491033798/....

The end results proved that customers could tell the difference. Alinea is in it’s 6th printing edition with over 100,000 copies sold. It won a James Beard Award for Best Cookbook from a Professional Point of View.

How does the "super amazing cookbook" that "won every award imaginable" fit into the theory that the attention to detail made a difference? Do you think it would have done even better on the market if they had used the more expensive printing processes you did? Or would it likely have done just about the same, but produced a few hundred thousand dollars less profit for the publisher?

I'm worried that the correct conclusion is not that the publishers are missing out, but that maximum profit occurs at relatively low level of quality, such that anyone trying to create a worthy work-of-art in this space is by definition economically irrational. Not that this is a bad thing --- instead, what is the force behind this irrationality, and how can we ensure that it doesn't get drowned out further?
I doubt he’d have much chance of winning, but if he did it would be unlikely to work well for state residents. You want someone with decades of experience in state politics to be governor. Jerry Brown (on the second go-around) has been by far a better governor than at least the previous 6 were, including his younger self.

(Admittedly Pete Wilson and Gray Davis were both career politicians with plenty of CA experience, and both terrible – we might say that decades of experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a great governor.)

If Altman is serious, he should try running for state legislature first.
No one in the UK seems to be tying this attack to the Conservative Party's desire for backdoors everywhere, which is a shame because it's a nice example for the public of how the government have got this very wrong.
You can easily hire a professional copy-editor. In fact, in many instances publishers hire outside third-party experts depending on the subject of the book.

Publishing a text-only book with no or minimal pictures is shocking inexpensive.
Native advertising: you can’t rent your credibility, you can only sell it (2013)
It does work that way. You'll just end up getting billed for using the service. You probably agreed to pay until you cancelled it. Just not paying isn't going to change that.

Logging into work servers after being fired is sorta like coming back into the office and looking at stuff because they didn't change their locks.
How cyber-attack is disrupting NHS
I disabled updates on my Windows 7 last September when I feared that I'd wake up to a Windows 10 machine like my wife did when her laptop updated to Windows 10. Unfortunately I can't seem to resume updates and fear that I may be vulnerable to WannaCrypt. (Some recent updates succeeded but I don't know if i patched for it)
a distressingly large number of programmers are welcoming it in windows world with the encroachment of windows store lockdown. its really depressing.
What a beautifully written article. You explained me. You explained it well. I've never picked up a guitar, but I am a coder, and really, to learn anything, you have to at least be interested and wanting to learn. Most important, you could read a hundred books, but actually doing something with the knowledge is the only way to really learn.

I am a self-taught programmer and never had any dreams of ever doing it for a living, yet here I am, started off getting hired as a programmer for Visual Basic 6.0 working on autobody shop software. I eventually left that job ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/the-opportunity/ ) and got a job working in web design for a media company.

I had taken a few college classes in programming and realized it really was mostly just theory and little sample designs. Nothing that I have really ever used or that helped
me. Sure, I got a good grade.. passed the class, but that was about it.

Most code that has been useful has always come from me learning it myself. I tried taking a database course and ended up having to drop it because it just confused me. A few weeks later, I spent 3 hours teaching myself about SQL queries and adding, removing, editing, and deleting data. I completely understood it and that escalated me into actually making valuable web apps in which I am actually charging money to clients to use.

And as you said, "build and build some more" .. absolutely right! This is the project, a free web app, that got me started doing what I am doing: https://mypost.io

Solve a problem: I wanted to get a web page up on the internet in seconds without having to worry about registering for an account or having to share my email with yet another website.

Everything since then has only be escalating my knowledge and even helping me to enhance my code for the better.

Great advice!
Posthaven was started by Garry Tan, a YC alum & founder of Posterous. When Posterous, a blogging-ish platform, was acquired and later shutdown...

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/15/posterous-will-shut-down-on...

...Garry started Posthaven. Posthaven got press as the "never gonna sellout and/or shutdown" blogging platform. I still remember Posthaven whenever I think about starting a blog that I'd like to be around forever. It's a good pitch for people who value the longevity of things they write. I'm not confident Medium will be around forever, and major content sites do go bye bye: Posterous, Geocities, Vine.
> All the surfaces described by an equation of degree n are the same.

Hang on a minute, let's not get ahead of ourselves. First of all the degenerate surfaces (e.g. (x - w)^n = 0) are clearly different from the other surfaces. Second of all, while you can use simple linear transformations to transform most quadrics into one another, there are two cases where this won't work if you use real numbers. Up to linear isomorphism these are:

X^2 + Y^2 + Z^2 - W^2 = 0

X^2 + Y^2 - Z^2 - W^2 = 0

(to get all degenerate or 'trivial' cases you also need to include equations where some of the coefficients are 0, or all coefficients are the same, see Sylvester's law of inertia for more information).

Admittedly in 2D there is only one interesting case, X^2 + Y^2 - W^2 = 0 (note that this is a cone, hence why all 2D quadrics can be generated by slicing a cone).

And that's just the 2nd order, in higher orders things get complicated quick, although I suppose that in the complex projective plane all surfaces (or rather curves) of the same degree actually are equivalent, albeit only topologically.
>These are small companies not looking to scale

And this also separates what people call "startups" from small companies. All startups start out as small companies, but they don't comprise all small companies. They look and follow the value that will require them to grow.

I think, indeed, that a company must value engineering if they want to grow really big. If they don't, then engineering/tech is not made a priority.
Dr. Kay, do you consider Erlang/Elixir object oriented, in your original meaning of OO?
"At Bell, the financial motive was not grants but contributing to the company’s product lines. This seems reasonable to me, both because telephone
service is a public good and because, as Gertner notes, the challenges of improving phone service motivated technical advances that benefited other areas as well."

The thing is AT&T was the monopoly of telecommunication service in the US back then. When Paul Baran went to present his "packet switching" (which is also independently studied and proposed by UK's Donlad Davies, and both combined with Leonard Kleinrock's theoretical analysis became packet switching in the development of the "Internet") to AT&T, AT&T laughed it off and said no, mainly because AT&T did not want to adopt the digital communication and wanted to maintain its monopoly. The engineers at AT&T (not Bell Labs) pretty much said to Baran he lacked the fundamental understanding of how communication system works. Just to be fair, at work, in the beginning RAND Corp engineers were also not convinced, but nonetheless Baran was able to get enough support and appreciation from his fellow coworkers and the company's management that he demoed to AT&T.

This is a story of a classic corporate engineer who has the "know-it-all" mindset vs the classic researcher/engineer who appreciate challenges and differences.

I recommend reading "When Wizards Stay Up Late".

I think companies which allow some degree of hacker/research culture really do benefit from the openness and innovation. Google's 20% (although I read most engineers don't get any free time at all and 20% was not a formal policy, and 20% was just a spontaneous thing in the early stage of Google), FB's internal Hackathon crated some of the most-used features/products at the respective company. I think another modern example is Stripe, I consistently heard something great about its culture.
I was surprised to find the Central Intelligence Agency in my weblogs. This means they both leave JavaScript on and use the company IP for casual browsing. I'd expect that they make attack vectors as small as possible and have access to IP ranges that can not be so easily traced back to them, but maybe the rules are more relaxed for casual browsing/research.

Don't these agencies, militaries, and companies (BAH, Lockheed, Boeing, Dell) get micro-targetted exactly like this? I'd imagine foreign intelligence agencies use websites and ad networks to drop zero-days on persons of interest.
Not true. My phone is unlocked, the Netflix app was not installed, and right before posting my above response I installed it from Play Store.
That's really interesting. I'll try it out next time I have to wipe my Windows machine.
Sorry, what do you think I'm misunderstanding?

The GP is clearly suggesting thinking about role definition from day one rather than waiting until the 10-20 employee phase. I'm stating unequivocally that I think that is a mistake.

The "urgency of hiring and delegating" only kicks in once you have a level of certainty of what needs to be done. Every employee you bring on adds not only burn rate, but also communication overhead. The only thing that gets a startup from the garage phase to actually being able to series A and credibly hire more than 10 people is for every founder and early employee to ruthlessly identify things that need to be done and execute on them. This idea of documenting what exactly founders are doing and thinking about delegating them is what YC has dubbed "playing house"*.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html
That's all very nice, but it doesn't seem to be answering the question "How do self-taught developers actually get jobs?"

It dances around becoming good and having a lot of things to point to to demonstrate being good, but doesn't go near the actual question.
is it? 99% of the mods nowadays can be downloaded from Curse [1] without any ads and for easy mod management you can even install their launcher

those that can't, can be usually found on this site with their official download site linked [2]

[1] https://minecraft.curseforge.com/
[2] https://bot.notenoughmods.com/
Ok, having to scrap an excellent hp laptop that had vista (did not buy it in a month that Microsoft thought they had to offer free upgrades to W 7) My doorstop was not past it's prime. If car companies treated customers like window does, the brakes would fail at 4 years and the 40 page online agreement would say that the purchaser would not be able to hold the auto mfg. liable for intentional brake malfunction. Kind of like GM screwed Americans by filing for bankruptcy, getting federal funding and saving 10 cents on the ignition switch that killed many people. Microsoft and GM could be good companies, they choose not to be.
“Do we know any poor people?”
>and for easy mod management you can even install their launcher

Does that launcher ask for the username and password?

That's a pretty lousy message to be teaching mostly children about password security.
Should be renamed to "Wealthy nations, which don't need growth to be more wealthy, tend to be happy"

Big surprise
Were people not updating to more modern OSes because they didn't want new features or because they didn't want to spend the money on new licenses and testing software compatibility?

And how sure are we that they didn't install security updates out of sheer laziness or hubris?

People who run systems that store sensitive information and systems should take computer seriously more serious than the people on Hacker News. I would never allow my my smartphone, let alone computers and servers to run unpatched software. Why is this acceptable for people who have critical systems and data?
> Yet, if I sat down and decided to build my own computer language or operating system from scratch, I bet I’d learn a lot of interesting things along the way.

Or, in some fields, you would learn nothing at all, because you would hit
a brick wall of your lack of understanding basic concepts that are taught in
some of the classes you've dismissed in the article.

Though most of the fields in IT are reachable by people without external
training.
Should hospitals such as UK's NHS and other such organizations use dumb terminals (or chromebooks) instead of Windows? That way data is centralized on servers where it is easy to backup and harder for hackers to hold to ransom.
Here's one to add for training: False lane departure

http://imgur.com/a/KnsXU
The easiest way to understand homogeneous coordinates in general, IMO, is to understand the 2D case.

In that case, your homogeneous coordinates have 3 components, and it's pretty easy to visualize them in 3D space. The z=1 plane is your actual 2D plane. Now consider the set of all lines passing through the 3D origin, those are either parallel to z=1 plane or intersect it at precisely one point. That point of intersection is (x0, y0, 1), and if you multiply by any constant factor, the point just moves along its corresponding line.

Thus, any 3d point with z!=0 can be mapped 1:1 to your 2D plane by simply dividing by z. Points where z = 0 don't map to z=1 plane, they're considered "infinitely far away", and can be used to specify directions on your 2D plane (since they don't get affected by translation!).

Once you wrap your head around the 2D case, it's fairly easy to extend it to 3D.

There isn't anything inherently magical about homogeneous coordinates, it's just a convenient notation for referring to points in space that just happens to lend itself particularly well to affine transforms in that space.

For anyone interested, I highly recommend reading this article: http://deltaorange.com/2012/03/08/the-truth-behind-homogenou...
In order:

1) the different factors are: number of photos, quality of paper, quality of inks used (bigger difference than you'd imagine), 6 color offset printing, full bleed on every page, veneer on every photo, quality of binding. If you look at most cookbooks there is a LOT of writing and pages that contain no images. That's intentional.

2) I think 10 Speed did OK on our book since we sold so many. If you do the math from the numbers I gave you can see that they likely made something on the order of $390,000 on our book (this is a very rough estimate). And they took virtually no risk, beyond their time. That said, they did this as a vanity project in order to attract other authors to the imprint -- that was stated from the beginning.

3) Whether there is room for someone else to create an imprint to do this -- I'm not really sure. It's very different to do it as an individual than it is to take on a lot of overhead and put out dozens of titles per year. The point is that the winners pay for the losers... but as an individual you don't have to worry about that.

4) Thanks for the links! I'm going to order that Voynich now -- oh wait, no I'm not... it's $8,000! There are a few publishers that do amazing art quality books and do them very well. But typically they are priced much higher than mass market books, even high end ones at $50 or $60.

5) The 'super amazing' cookbook fits in because it proved to me that the margins were way better than I ever imagined. And frankly, after speaking with the editor that ran that imprint I really felt like she knew I would figure that out and did everything to try to convince me I was going to fail. At this point that book has sold something north of 500,000 copies and the restaurant / chef has IMO received a fraction of what they should have. You're looking at something like $12,500,000 of wholesale revenue from one book alone, maybe more, and the royalties were likely paid at 12% to 15% of cover price after recoup of advance. That's $6.50 per copy. Rough estimate: $3M to the writer. $8M to the publisher, lifetime.

I agree with your conclusion that max. profit occurs with a relatively low quality level... (Hollywood Sequels anyone?)... but that for an individual author it's easier than ever to spurn the system especially if you already have a following through your main profession.
No, that's not what's happening here.

While Qualcomm holds a lot of wireless patents and they are entitled to make money for what they have contributed, they also agreed to declare their patents as part of the ETSI CDMA, LTE standards. This is beneficial for Qualcomm because now everyone HAS to use and license their patents, so they have guaranteed income. But, at the same time, they are also required to license their patents at fair and reasonable terms regardless of who licensees are.

Qualcomm violated their FRAND obligations in two very blatant ways. First, they REFUSED to license their patents to competing baseband makers, like Intel, Samsung, and other baseband makers. KFTC last year also found out that Qualcomm barred Samsung from marketing and selling their own AP/baseband chips in certain market (US) for some 20 years. So it also runs a foul of US anti-trust/anti-competitive laws.

If Qualcomm wants the kind of legal patent monopoly enjoyed by pharma's for instance, they need to keep their patents proprietary, and not declare them to SSO's. Qualcomm is trying to force everyone to license their tech as SSO's standards, then break every rule they agreed to uphold to maintain their dominance.
There used to be a lot more innovation and variety in hardware following similar approaches. However, commodity gear was an easier deployment target for software and economics ensured commodity gear provided better performance per dollar than proprietary solutions.
Indiviudal investments, a 401k account and Social Security are all paid for ahead of time. There's no dependence on children there.