skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How did four separate companies come into the market in the first place if "new competition is basically impossible?"

Many businesses are extremely infrastructure and capital intensive. Should the government also run shipping carriers like FedEx? What about retailers like Amazon?
"You aren't looking at the bigger picture" is just an arrogant way to say "I think you're wrong and I'm right". It can be safely omitted in favor of actual arguments.

>Do we really want to commodotize​ the simple act of walking down the boulevard?

It's not a boulevard you are walking down, but a bazaar. The only difference is that modern technology allows you to visit the bazaar to be "sliced, diced, and scrutinized by God knows how many data munchers, middlemen, analytics brokers, and ethically challenged people in order compel as much thoughtless consumer spending as possible" without physically travelling there.

>Allow incredibly detailed profiles to be built up on every person, spanning the decades of their life?

Sure. It's called a relationship. Or a memory.

>And of course, there is always the danger of governments co-opting and abusing this information years or decades in the future, after adminstrations have come and gone, and laws have been overturned, drastically altered, or ignored.

You can safely replace "this information" with virtually anything useful and get the same effect. Do you feel the same about, say, nuclear weapons? Or legal authority to lock people in cages? I would say either of those is far more dangerous than data. Yet we recognize that the power exists regardless, and the government can at least put it to good use.

>I believe our societal institutions and corporate entities are not mature enough to safely handle the power granted by unrestrained, high resolution data on the entire populace

Then the obvious answer is to improve societal institutions and corporate entities, which is useful in and of itself, rather than futilely trying to impede the progress of technology.
Old stereotypical analogy, but Legos haven't become obsolete, either. My kids can pick it up and "just build" without boredom at any time.
The health of the sensors will become part of the safety inspection.
You have to be careful what you say:

http://www.crimeonline.com/2017/04/04/can-you-hear-me-phone-...

And, anecdotally, I live in the Chicago area and have noticed a significant increase in this garbage the last couple of weeks.

I once had somebody splice a conversation they surreptitiously recorded with me to sound like I was agreeing to a service I never agreed to. Messing with them can be fun, but it's still risky.
Yeah. It's much more likely you blab about it to people you think are your friends, or random strangers on the internet with a pseudo anonymous user name that's trivially linked to your real identity!
Not the commentor, and also don't have data other than some anecdotal, but what benefit do the hackers gain by not unlocking data? If they stop unlocking, then people stop paying. It would become a lose lose situation if they didn't follow through with their promises. Even criminals understand that.
I agree with you. I think we are just speaking about different things.

I was more thinking about the things that happen in a configure script, for example. Not a "hoot loop" like a big grep over millions of lines or something.

There are situations in shell code where the difference between a case-match or string-suffix-replace written in shell and a process spawn matters. Not only because forking a process for one simple string operation is wasteful (cost: about 1ms), but also because of the semantic problems that come with child processes (error handling).
Sounds like Netflix should open their own competition up then.
It could also just be a stock photo from a much older attack.
I burned out in 1999 and never really recovered. I miss some of the work, but not the stress, not the politics nor gamesmanship. Instead of creating capital value for faceless shareholders I've spent the past nearly 20 years creating financial and personal value for myself.
First Look at Elon Musk's Boring Company's Tunnel
Over 8 years, with billions of dollars at stake, it has been proven that proof of work cryptocurrencies can only be compromised under a few very well defined scenarios (51% attack). What happened here was simple theft. People sent Mohland money, he said he would hold onto it for them, and then he stole it. I assume you also don't trust any other form of money, because it can also be embezzled in that way.
My family lives in the wealthy eastern suburbs of Sydney. My mother can only get ADSL and it caps out at around 3.5Mbit. She can hardly have a skype call. They say she won't be able to get NBN until at least 2020.

I live in Northern Thailand and have 100/30 uncapped fibre for about $70 a month. I've got a friend who has gigabit and he lives out in some rice fields and its all dirt roads.
Nah, that's actually sane behavior for a SPA.

If you scroll into a different article, they push the last article's URL into history and pop that until different domain is reached when pressing back.
This problem gets a lot worse when all you see is a thumbnail of the cover. At least the image on his blog post is large enough that you can figure out what it means if you take a second. But in search results, the text "Seventh Edition" is nearly invisible.
It seems like for that amount of money, you could have tried doing a bug bounty instead :/

I get that this is probably social hacking/phishing, so not really analogous -- but I wonder if there's a way to apply that kind of mentality to good. I wonder if there's white hat phishing (though I guess that might be oxymoronic).
No, just the odd HN user
Microsoft has a history of screwing up every other OS releases. After being slight successful with window 10, It's their chance now to screw up again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415403

UI Looks back to Aero/Glass effect of Windows Vista: I wish they had learnt their lesson.
> Sounds like a good idea, but then when you have an outage, you have to scramble to find multiple people to unlock the access keys and watch over your shoulder while you make fixes on production systems.

While I can understand that seems like a huge pain for a legitimately acting company, this is exactly the type of thing I would want to see a law like this enact. Sure, it slows down fixes when there are problems, but it sounds like it might have helped with past stuff like the Crazy Eddie fraud[1]. There's likely a spectrum between what happened there and what a respectable company like yours does, and requiring few keys to change this data and oversight while doing so likely helps quite a bit with operational incompetence as well.

> Another great example is password rotation. The law demands you have a password rotation policy. It doesn't say what that policy should be. Most auditors have settled on 90 days.

I've experienced this with PCI Compliance. It's annoying, but you have to realize that there are a lot of people and companies out there that have no idea about proper security, or continuously deprioritize it in favor of some other thing they need to get done. It's never a big deal until it is, then it's a huge deal. Making it mandatory, even if it overshoots a bit and is more cumbersome that it needs to be is beneficial overall because there are a lot of people like I described.

And that's sort of how I see these laws overall. For the people that are already mostly compliant it's burdensome, but if those people and companies are actually 10-20% of the market and the other 80-90% aren't really following best practices and are ripe for problems, whether they be security, management, operational or criminal, then I don't really care if it's somewhat burdensome for those 10-20%. If the companies that are using best practices already are 80-90% or more of the market, then sure, the law might be too burdensome for the benefit it infers (but it might not, depending on how bad the problems it prevents are).

And that's really the crux of the issue. How burdensome the law is to responsible companies is irrelevant without the context of how often it is useful to force the hands of irresponsible companies. How big is the group your company, as a responsible actor, represents? That's the missing information here.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844316
Why can't Elon build an efficient public transportation system as opposed to a tunnel that is meant for cars? Does anybody know the details?
As a Canadian, our common perception of the UK is that it's always cloudy and rainy. If that's true, would it make sense to put solar tiles on a home if the ROI is negative or would take a few hundred years?
Trump Lawyers State He Had No Russian Income or Debt, with ‘Few Exceptions’
What about really old ransomware where the payment release systems are no longer maintained? Are there some cases where old dead ransomware is still infecting people, but the scripts to unlock things on payment are no longer running?
Agreed. Mods, could we please change the title to something like "Telefonica Is Target of $600,000 Bitcoin Ransomware Attack"?

I know the current title is the actual title of the article, but it's misleading.
The Many Faces of Functions in JavaScript
Software development seems to be one of the rare branches of engineering where people and businesses are ready to accept such low quality standards, both in terms of functionality and security.

We wouldn't accept from a civil engineer that "the bridge might collapse" but that it's "no big deal, takes a moment to rebuild".

It was one thing when software was controlling some random machinery in a basement or fueling our BBSes, but nowadays large-scale software failure can end a lot of lives, nothing less. And yet, society is largely oblivious to how fragile it all is...
Imo the thing with the public sector, is that it is so large that it probably could fund both an OS and a productivity suite easily and that would be a net gain, both from a freedom perspective and for the economy at large.

I am all for entrepreneurship and I do think that companies and competition create progress. But when one company reaches the level of Microsoft, where every year we learn how many billions Bill Gates' bank account increased —I do know that he helps with his money but still, his bank account does increase—, it just takes money off the market. Hoarding is bad.
Which I already paid for as part of the operating system. If they want to advertise to me, they can give me my money back.
I wasn't sure if you were serious about posting to HN about adblock haha, I complain enough as it is about my pathetic life.

In the case of the videos, they're sourced from other domains, it's funny the site's argument is "Google does this too technically so why are we different?" But I think the embedded iFrame's that contain the video players have their own ads. I don't know, it's hard to read JS code when it's minfied (un-minify it).

You mentioned python?

Anyway thanks for the response.
I'm not sure I agree with the "don't do it often". Having jane-script (which is our OCaml scripting system) has allowed us to greatly reduce our dependence on Bash.

That said, there are still little things we use Bash for. But our tolerance for large bash scripts has diminished greatly over the years.
This is really fun to see two ransom threads on top of HN.

This one asking for $300 to the NHS and the other one asking for $600 000 to a phone provider.

Either the criminals have no idea what the NHS is or $300 is the limit of what middle managers can pay without much approval.
Looks like interesting work, but the main chart doesn't work for me in Firefox or Chromium - it seems to be yoked to your scroll position (why?!) so by the time you've scrolled down to the '2014' paragraph, which makes it chart the full time-series, you can't even see the graph in the first place... Data viz run amok.
Little pictograms for buttons are often extremely vague and open to interpretation.

Eg. Heres a random game where upon opening it I was immediately confused
http://mobile.cdn.softpedia.com/apk/images/color-switch_1.jp...
(also the icons are all animated / rotating, making it even more confusing, made this game menu stick out in my memory as an egregious example)

Some designers seems to love the minimalism of if though, from an aesthetic reason, I assume.

Imo Text is the clearest thing you can put on a button to tell the user what that button does 'save' 'load' 'new game' etc. Yes, it will need to be translated, but thats simply putting in more work for a better product.
A particular section (to which I belong) is quite afraid with the direction India is taking. Reddit /r/india has many discussions along lines that I'll summarize.

- Aadhar was forced into being without legislation or check/balances.

- The guy heading it is Nilekani, a not so ethical dude, who once ran Infy, and has quite a lot of
influence with the right people, both in the US and India.[1]

- Previous admin. was likely planning on making it mandatory "citizen id", but was
pushed back by the courts.

- Current admin. has magically turned back on their erstwhile opposition due to "a presentation"
and have finally made it mandatory, for everything from passports, SIM cards, and tax refunds.

- Aadhar has no legislative curtailment. There is nothing stopping them from forcing the
collection of my DNA, and then selling those to some insurance company in a few years.

- There is also nothing stopping the vogons in the Indian state (and the corporatocracy it serves)
from getting hold of all my data... because you know "national security". Accountability is the
last thing you'd expect of the Indian state; transparency probably being penultimate.

- This means that anyone who declines to be part of the Animal farm, can neither leave the
country nor work there. Jaitley really screwed us over. Naturally this is dressed up as a "us-
vs-them" "nationalistic" "black-money hunting" "anti-western/left" move, and this is what
comments on Indian newssites reflect. Ironic that the system will be used to clamp down even
harder on the people who belong to a English colony run by Brown sahibs, which has made it
its goal to destroy every culture, language and religion that are its heritage.

- Next stop is likely the complete destruction of cash (and thus opposition), by tying it all back to
Aadhar (which the parent is cheering for). Very very scary future.. will be moving out before the
prison cell closes shut.

[1] India's IT Industry does not serve India; now that the outsourcing play is coming to a halt, many are looking to diversify. One way out is to secure massive contracts from the state.
We don't even know of all the attacks (because it makes the victim look bad), adding a fine would drive reporting down even more.

Legislate proper security more, enforce it, fund an electronic police to help combat it.
What is the law regarding who you can dig under?
GPs absolutely do use nhs.net; that's how they communicate. It's supposed to be secure enough to send medical records. If you go for a blood test or something, that's how the results come back.
FreedomBox, Private Cloud Server
The new "Radeon Instinct" cards are about to be released:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10905/amd-announces-radeon-ins...

The mid-range has a lot of potential as it's based on Fiji which NVIDIA can't match in terms of memory BW with any of their existing ML products (nor near future ones). This is important IMO because ML inference is memory-bound and GDDR5 on NVIDIA's cards is no match for even 1st gen HBM.

The big cards is announced to be 12.5/25 Tflops SP/HP, so as long as it's not "tensoring" it should be in between P100 and V100. If they get the price right (and given that even P100 is currently still $5.5-6 w/o tax), it will hopefully gain traction.

A lot hinges on their fully OSS (!) software stack, but they are getting things done, just had a new release: https://rocm.github.io
Yes, programs are there to be used. Literate programming as a technique, however, is designed to facilitate those programs being understood. I'm not sure how you conclude that this has anything to do with programmers "admiring their programming."
I've tried to play the iPad and iPhone portable versions of Minecraft, and only having touch-screen input just didn't cut it for me.

The Switch has real gaming inputs, and I think that's going to make a huge difference in the basic comfort and playability of the game.
Here's the most important part of the story:

"In October, the government announced plans to let the ICO fine company directors as well as their businesses.
"Making directors responsible will stop them avoiding fines by putting their company into liquidation," the ICO said."

Awesome!
the Other Valleys newsletter[0] may be of interest. Their description:

"Creative/technology-related news and ideas, that are by and large NOT from the US/UK/EU. Inspiration can strike from many other places (the multiple Other Valleys spread across the world), and I like to know about them. Now you can too."

[0] http://tinyletter.com/othervalleys
Only communicate inside a walled garden. Forgo public anything. For example, do all your communication in Facebook Messenger. It's not because Facebook Messenger is the best messenger ever, but instead, it is because there are so many hoops for the person to jump through ( for example getting accepted into your social network and meeting all the security requirements that are managed by Facebook for you - SSL, 2FA, etc ) that you end up with 100% signal and no noise.
How is this attack being distributed? It can't take much user involvement, or it wouldn't be hitting large numbers of systems that only run in-house applications.
We've fucking killed them all, just like the predators.
Thanks. We updated the title to reflect that.
There isn't such thing as Apartheid (racial discrimination) in the middle east. Though there are soaring up terrorism trends. Where a minority governs its own people and teaches them to kill the other side.

I want again to bless my brother, who, I assume, is an arab and tell him that in order to fight for a better future and better world we need more people to do good rather than bad.
Snapchat apk Download Free
How a former Sony chairman erased an article based on his Sony hack e-mails
To be clear, the silly question I posed was not directed at avoiding copyright violations. What I ask is whether anyone is ever curious about the value of the derivative work versus the original work.

For example, the original work might be very valuable, a significant work. It could be the collective work of many authors. But it has been made available for free. The derivative work, maybe patches or some additional source code by a single author, is also valuable but on its own much less so.

Then the large original work is packaged together with the patches and additonal source code as a "derivative work". It is commercially licensed to an end user who sees the value as a whole, most of it coming from the original work, which of course was available for free.

Depending on whether attribution is given, the user may have no idea that the core of the product was open source and available for free.

More importantly, there appears to be no assessment of the relative "value" of the free portion versus the closed-source commercial portion of the product.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23915130 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22367734 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27960592
There's value in automated reporting but cities like Oakland, California, had trouble justifying the expense at current signal/noise ratios. Efforts to boost the signal are expensive and involve human analysts today. And the sales cycle with city governments can be long and labyrinthine, driving up sales costs and soaking up cash.

The business strategy is to keep revenue coming in. They need to fund R&D (and an IPO could help with that) and time to drive up signal/noise and drive down costs.
This could have been a shophisticated attempt to guess how much spare cash the NHS actually has these days
This shows just shows how stupid the guys who contract for (EU) government IT, and their political masters who are supposed to be directing them.
Any software that not built from the ground up to be secure is unlikely to be, it is not something that can be bolted on. Various version of Windows needed to be heavenly hacked to meet even the most basic DoD-CETCS (RedBook) standard back in the 1990s. And I doubt it is any better now. That some public services dumped Microsoft years ago suggest this lock-in problem is almost as old as commercial computing.
You are entirely correct in our competitive capitalist environment. Maximizing for short-term company gain outperforms those who would maximize for long-term social gain.

Companies must abuse every law, regardless of original intent, or risk irrelevance and failing to maximize shareholder value.

The problem is that what's good for the company often isn't what's good for society. It's a function of the basic rules of our society.

If we keep the capitalist model, then the problem is that risk/benefit ratios reward bad behavior. It's extremely hard to legislate soundly to prevent this.
The NHS does charge people who are not permanently and lawfully resident in the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-overs...
“Planning to jack this up to a factor of ten or more,” Musk writes in the caption. Not quite sure what that means, but it sounds pretty badass. Jack away, Mr. Musk.

Since this writer didn't bother doing any research before compiling Musk's Instagram posts, he's talking about the speed. He plans to run the boring machines much faster than has been done traditionally, and do so continuously. That's why he made the joke about the snail.

Source: Musk's recent TED talk, which was pretty fun to watch.
Ask HN: Where to find angel investors for funding below 100k?
Trying to develop a product but out of money.

Before you ask, yes I tried YC. Didn't get in.
Not to knock yc in any way, but despite their name I consider them a (benevolent) VC firm. Their conditions and the recent spike in highly accomplished founders with competitive entries means that they sponsor companies that would get VC funding anyway.

I am aware the traditional sources of this kind of money is the three F's but I think tech community could also be an untapped resource.

Looking for true angels prepared to put up 25k to 100k for negotiable equity in a very early stage company. My needs are mundane, office space, utility bills, internet etc

I'm based in Lagos, Nigeria but I'm sure there are other would-be founders on HN in the same situation from other countries.
So we should build backdoors into encryption to prevent this, right? /s
Corning gets $200M from Apple’s US manufacturing investment fund
The visualization animations as you scroll through this article are fantastic, and a great way to implement storytelling with data. Also, the content is pretty interesting too, I like the emphasis on aligning data metrics with intuition to really make the point.
You are over generalizing.

I am a bootcamp grad who specialized in undergrad in electrical engineering. I worked for a few years as a research for the one of the top tech universities in the country; I have found that I have a stronger math and physics background than many CS grads. However, many times when doing something I have been stopped by saying "wait aren't you a bootcamp grad? can you even understand this?"

I'm not alone; my bootcamp had plenty of STEM majors. One of colleagues was a biomedical engineer and worked in a research lab and now works in the front end at a top firm in SF. Another was a math major at an Ivy before working full stack. The top guy at my bootcamp went to Berkeley in Biochem and was way way smarter than me.

So stop generalizing. I understand that they are unaccredited institution so you get a wide variance of talent but you can't shit on everyone.

To be honest, your issues probably in how you screen talent. My current company has found success in hiring bootcamp and top schools in the area (Berkeley, Stanford).