skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LEGO has been on the ropes before. Generic blocks became a race to the bottom. LEGO pulled a Hail Mary and saved itself mostly by associating with popular kids' brands (and leveraging that association to create their own popular brands, like Lego Friends, Legends of Chima, and The LEGO Movie).

The irony of that is that most LEGO brick sets are now pre-cut and specially made so that they're hard to use beyond their specific design. Kids don't really buy giant sets of generic, inter-compatible LEGO anymore. They buy licensed LEGO that allow them to rebuild a single figure (potentially with minor customizations), and it seems completely powered by imitating the characters and properties they enjoy, and not the joy of construction.

First row of results on Offical LEGO Google Shopping page is 6 pre-cuts: Mercedes AMG GT3, "Expert Assembly Square", Cinderella Castle, VW Bug, Ferrari SF16-H, and "Winter Toy Shop". Screenshot at https://i.imgur.com/c0tP7b4.jpg . Notice all of these are pre-cuts, and only two are non-licensed (Toy Shop/Assembly Square).

Minecraft is different in that to this point, licensing has made only minimal excursions (the Mario packs probably being the most prominent example).
"EULAs on a book" is basically the practice that the First Sale Doctrine is meant to curb. To wit:

"This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of without the publisher's consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published."

from https://books.google.com/books?id=v-yrLmQNRvsC&pg=PR4 , but there are many other examples.

Many publishers really didn't like used bookstores and libraries making a single book available to many people over time, replacing the covers as necessary due to wear instead of buying new copies of the book.
12 Nations that did not apply security patches
Surely that's the point of hooking them up to the network, so you can e.g. get the pictures out of your CT scanner on to the doctor's PC?
I have a 1080 Founder's Edition, and have no had any problems. All of the founder's edition cards are pretty much stock from NVidia reference design, so no matter who you buy it from it's a pretty safe bet it will be well supported.
Using Visual Studio with Conda would be a really good compelling way to get it into Enterprise projects. Conda's packaging requires much less effort.
Apartheid: When you occupy/hold power for decades in a territory and you don't give the same rights (such as voting) to about 50% of the population.
"For more than 7,000 hours over the past five years, Mitchell has slowly exposed the fossil’s skin and bone. The painstaking process is like freeing compressed talcum powder from concrete. “You almost have to fight for every millimeter,” he says."

Wow! I had no idea this took so long.
Gotcha. So yeah, we're seeing it wake up. The first little increase (up to 600) was about the time the article was published.
How do these things decrypt?

Couldn't someone take the "already paid" bitchain address from someone else, put it in and click "paid" with that to unlock it?
Simple: because of Ruby on Rails.

Business loves easy-to-build websites. That's how Rails got traction. It promises a quick way to market -- and that's not a lie -- but the maintenance cost over time grows way too much for it to be worth it. Rails is awesome for MVPs, prototypes and small projects. An argument can be made for mid-sized projects; depends on the other dependencies, but IMO it shouldn't be used in the mid-sized area.

Still, businessmen prefer short-term gains over saving costs in the long-term. And that's how Rails gained popularity. And that's why many devs, me included, are having a very hard time moving away from it -- in my case to Go and Elixir.
I think you need a bit more competence to get into the training realm though, because it's a bigger step to create a new model - especially the hard step of data labeling.

Unless you have a novel data set and a way to quickly train you're probably better off using existing trained models in most cases.

I agree with the transfer learning piece wholeheartedly though.
President Trump's Tax Returns Show Some Income from Russian Sources
Thanks for the detailed reply! That was kind of par of my question and interesting to read, but I actually referred to the booring head. It said he wants to increase booring by 10x.

I now read elsewhere he does not want to stop booring while putting in the supporting wall, so he'll advance continiously, but I doubt that's what takes so long.
So basically if you have a population of any size it's a problem.
The solution is for there to be no OEM changes, just like Windows.
This is part of the Stanford start-up course https://blog.ycombinator.com/author/y-combinator/
That's actually a .09MP screen. Makes it sound as pathetic as it is.
Just like Libreboot laptops are 'double-priced' ThinkPad laptops [0]. If you can sell user-respecting devices cheaper, go ahead. There are buyers.

[0] https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-x220/
It's either turtles all the way down (backdoor of the backdoor of the backdoor..) or you always strive for secure software.
I always keep my card out when they're giving me the check. I send them back with it.
Well, the bigger problem would be ensuring that the criminals used known broken encryption. The only advantage is that many of these attacks are copy-cat, so if you released the source code for a broken ransomware implementation, it will probably get used more or less verbatim… as has been shown in the past. (https://threatpost.com/bitcrypt-ransomware-deploying-weak-cr..., https://www.utkusen.com/blog/destroying-the-encryption-of-hi...)

Anyone who actually knows what they are doing, and are prepared to break the law, would just use AES. All of those law-abiding institutions would be forced to use a weak encryption scheme.

Sure, it might help stop script kiddies, but it won't help to stop professionals, and professionals are the ones that you have to worry about, since they end up hosing 45,000+ installations in a day.
Off topic, but is anyone else having trouble loading and reading the article? I tried 3 times and the website is utterly unusable. Keeps sending me to the bottom of the page.
In other words, time to stop talking about nations if it's about the global internet.
How much of the update problem is due to vendor customized UIs and apps, and how much is due to not upstreaming driver support for their hardware?

Which of these problems will Project Treble solve? Eg, have they actually added a stable driver KBI? Or pushed drivers to userspace? Or is this just about GUIs?
When you say 'the people who run IT at the NHS' you are aware that thanks to recent governments attempts to break up central structures, each hospital trust, each GP surgery is likely to have someone different handling IT - market forces are good etc.
One can argue that maybe networking functions shouldn't be part of the C standard library, but maybe a hypothetical "libos" instead, sort of like how Rust has libcore, libcollections, liballoc, and libstd separated.

I wonder if modularizing libc is at all feasible. Linux lets you use multiple libcs, so (at the expense of a more complex build) it should be possible there, at least?
Why only protect popular speech? The whole point of "right to free speech" is that one may earnestly believe something that another may earnestly take offense to; the state shouldn't be able to punish someone for saying something another simply doesn't like (say, "abortion is murder" which may understandably offend someone who had an abortion and be construe the comment as "hate speech").
I think one of the biggest problems in the world right now is how much money is simply captured and not moving through the economy. A huge amount of money is sitting around adding very little economic value. Redistribute that money to people who will use it to consume products and services and you get a much more active economy.
I understand that people love open source, but how is that relevant here? For example OpenSSL is open source, yet it didn't prevent Heartbleed and other exploits from happening?
Look at Alaska which has a long-term state-run form of UBI. It's about $100 per person per month. Even at such a low amount, to your point, it creates some measurable inflation and other distortions in the market. UBI may only work as a low, supplemental amount to start, so it could be a fair analog. The idea that we'll start with UBI that's enough for each individual to rent a studio, cover transportation costs, and put food on the table seems improbable.
I agree with you, but... There is a HUGE problem with this statement.

90% of the devices that are bought require windows. Every single microscope, ID reader, card reader, access system, detection system, defence devices, advanced cameras, radars, etc. provide drivers and/or software, that I know, offer drivers/apps only for windows.

Even they make a plan to move from windows, it will take years, in this time, every acquisition will be made for windows. A common use for these devices/pc's is more than 5 years. Heck i've seen tools that are used even after 15 years because they worked and no money/desire to replace them.

Of course you can negotiate, or request support for other operating systems, but that means extra money, training, etc. Even in the current state it's hard to get good IT people, programmers, sysadmins, etc. It will be harder to get linux admins. Also it will take years to teach people to use another OS.

And to end: have you seen custom software made for governments? 50% just slap a program that requires x version of .net, some c++ redistributable and requires to run only as admin or only xp, 40% just slap a java abomination or applet and call it a day, 9% make a nice piece of software but just like everyone else after they deliver the software they forget about the support or patch 1-2 things and they are gone. ALL OF THIS is happening mainly because the state doesn't have trained people and they don't know what to ask from devs & because they don't give a shi*t about they money they spend.
> from Kaspersky Lab

... the lab with ties to Russian intelligence, who are suspected of leaking the NSA tools.
Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.
Currently, only DigitalOcean, Linode and vultr links are support. Created a trello to track public interest for more links.

https://trello.com/b/umE6JH0U/reaffiliate.
This is awesome, I was actually just looking for a set of food icons I could purchase for my side project.
No, by counterexample of USA.

The 2015 average income per capita was $57,540 [0]. The 2015 poverty guideline for a family of five was $28,410 [1]. Clearly there is more income per capita than required to keep everybody out of poverty.

A second source, the Census, is pretty reputable too: "Median household income in the United States was $56,516 in 2015." [2] Edit: This statement isn't helpful since it is a median, not a mean. A better source from the Census is [3], which lists the mean average as $75,738. As a reply pointed out, the heavy income inequality in the USA is expected to cause this sort of skew in the median.

Either way, I propose that taking everybody's income away and then splitting it evenly would apportion enough money to keep everybody out of poverty, that it would be sustainable (based on trends of past amounts of income per capita and poverty guidelines), and that it would clear the poverty guideline, a well-known bright line for "basic life necessities."

Is this a good solution? Maybe. There's probably better ones. But they do exist.

Edit: Specifically, would this system remain stable? It's hard to say. We can imagine that anybody on the sad side of the Pareto curve, which is a majority of the typical employed people in the USA, would not mind effectively having a big check from Uncle Sam raising their income to healthy levels. At the same time, we could also imagine that the wealthy few who are hit hardest in this scheme would try to find some way to get their income to be non-taxable, whether by lobbying for a proportional tax or inventing new capital transfer techniques. I'm not going to claim that this scheme is in any way socially workable over the long term, though. I personally feel that any UBI scheme is still socially unworkable; we need more small-scale evidence that UBI works.

Still edit: As an example, imagine that the UBI payments were only sufficient to bring the impoverished up out of poverty, and not necessarily any higher. That means that over half of the income marked in my original scheme would not be needed, so the wealthy could keep it. This would effectively be a two-tax-bracket system, with the brackets labeled "below" and "above." Does it still work on paper? Yes. Do I think that people will like it? No. Do I think that people like taxes? Not really.

[0] http://data.worldbank.org/country/United-States

[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines

[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...

[3] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/demo/cps/hinc-06.htm... (Warning: XLS sheet!)
I read this as 'A cont of type r a is a function that, given a function of type a to r, returns an r'.
Cont refers to the continuation monad. For details see http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/12/the-continuation-monad....
The argument for UBI over NIT, as I understand it, is that if rich people but UBI too they'll be less likely to attempt to defund it.

I don't find this especially convincing, since from a purely rational point of view decreasing UBI increases net income for the rich. But maybe there are complex psychological/political factors at play.
I think you are referring to diversity, not obscurity. Diversity does indeed increase the resilience of the network, but there will always be enough common factors across the board, that diversity alone will not suffice.

In the end, the software that we depend on, must be reviewable by anyone who is concerned about it. A prerequisite for that, is that software should be as small, clean, and simple as possible, to encourage such scrutiny. IIRC, the real problem with heartbleed, is that the OpenSSL codebase was a mess, and no-one wanted to work on it.
Violence" is always somehow brought into the mix by conservatives.

Antifa's aggression is the fault of conservatives? Sounds like victim-blaming to me.

Ann Coulter is the same way, and the sheer craziness of saying a woman on the New York Times best seller list, on talk shows everyday, somehow is having her right to free speech stopped by not being able to give a lecture on campus at the most crazy liberal college in the nation.

The issue isn't Ann Coulter and her right to speak at Berkley. The issue is what it says about Berkeley and leftists in general: Namely, that they have no interest whatsoever in listening to or engaging with ideological opponents, and would rather just shut them up.

If this was an isolated incident, people would not care so much. But it's not.

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-so...
this is super cool
> Charlie Hebdo

That's not even remotely what "incitement to violence" means.

> Causing someone to doubt and/or lose their religion is extremely damaging.

People blaspheming is not generally believed to cause religious adherents to lose faith. And even if it did, losing faith is not generally considered to be harmful either.

> It can lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health crisis.

Citation please. I've never heard this argument before. And since you brought it up, I could just as easily say that losing religion can help cure mental issues. A classic example would be a gay person who has been brought up to believe that they're going to hell for being gay. Losing religion is probably the best thing that could happen to their mental health.

> Islam gets a lot more flak, than, say, Buddhists.

"it doesn't discriminate" doesn't mean all religions are equally blasphemed, and I can't imagine what sort of confusion would lead you to think that made any sense.

> Speech is a weapon and can be very harmful. That's one of the major reasons totalitarian governments are terrified of free speech.

Wrong type of harm. You're talking about spreading ideas that people don't like. I'm talking about the very words themselves harming the victims.
Most western social democracies already have an overlapping network of benefit systems that are essentially a patchwork UBI in disguise. The system is designed not to go without food and shelter, but the exact mechanism varies depending on what population group you belong to. There's assistance for the temporary unemployed, for students, for people with disabilities, people with long-term illnesses, etc. There's pensions for those that have aged out of the workforce, there's assistance for children. And this is only scratching the surface. Even working people get a fixed basic tax deduction under most taxation systems.

I'm not convinced that the sum total of all these benefits plus the current infrastructure that is needed to maintain, dispense and detect/punish abuse on them is significantly larger than the total expenditure on UBI.

Of course, all the people that you let go from the benefits departments initially will end up on UBI, so that's not really a big win. But eventually they will find employment elsewhere, hopefully.
There was this, recently: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/no-bones-no-problem-d...

That's only 50,000 years, though. Also, no idea what the quality of the DNA is at that point.
"If you want to build novel things, you really need academic-grade ML." is a bit tricky.

If you want to achieve novel (better than yesterday's state of art) results on existing problems, then yes, you really need academic grade ML. Especially for "solved" (i.e. well researched) problems - if the current solution isn't good enough for your needs, then you're going to need serious work to improve on that.

However, if you want to attack novel business problems, then it's quite likely that you can solve them without needing to solve any new ML problems. You have to know what "instruments" are available, and you have to be able to read&learn how implement a particular solution that you choose, but generally you just need to squint hard enough to map your business problem to one or more ML tasks that have a known solution.
Negative income tax is just Friedman's name for UBI. They're functionally identical.
If so, that is both scary and exciting.
> ... it's not the NSA's fault that software has faults.

But every time they ask for there to be legally mandated backdoors - they need to be reminded of these incidents.

The NSA actively wants there to be "faults" like these. They just only want the "good" guys to have access to them.
I agree with several other commenters pointing out that the comparison is badly made -- throwing Ruby, PHP, Perl and Erlang/Elixir in the mix would make for much more interesting and useful article.

Probably the author needed to let off some steam. We all do it and I think HN is being pretty harsh on people being people. I am convinced every single person criticizing has been flaming in the last one month, in one platform or another.
We use the Github API to retrieve public keys and teams to manage membership. Using this app to provision users on servers automatically and serve public keys. Read more here: https://github.com/cloudposse/github-authorized-keys

It supports caching to etcd (incase GitHub API is unavailable).
VTS is meant to address that concern.
Ask HN: Directory of boards of directors for Fortune 500 / Global 2000?
I'm looking for a public (or even private) directory of all of the boards of directors and executives of publicly traded companies around the world. Does such a thing exist?
STOKED!
Was going to say exactly this. Nothing out of the ordinary here. OP appears bilingual but must not spend much time translating between languages. You will face such problems (maybe they can be thought of as an example of an impedence mismatch [0]) whenever going between languages, especially when you're crossing language families.

[0] http://wiki.c2.com/?ImpedanceMismatch
She was convicted by a jury, who presumably heard testimony from multiple witnesses.

Were you there? Do you know what really happened? Do you know how to extract facts from narratives in a news article? Do you even read the news article or just the headline?
Using SQL and being able to think both relationally and non-relationally are a valuable skill.

Working with text based datasets is a skill I don't see enough of even though it is quite prevalent. (I have spent more time than I've wanted using tools like Monarch to make text databases relational through an automated workflow)

The reality of development is working with an existing, or multiple datasets homogeneously. Cool use of the JOIN command, a title like "Join text files using the command line" probably would receive a positive response here.

It'd be sweet if everything was a nice and clean API data call with a bow on it, but part of being a developer is enabling that where it need to be.
I am surprised to hear that you say that the difference between office 2000 and 2016 is not so big.

I find that sharing files between them is huge pain and that the UI is totally different.

Have you considered LibreOffice, it is at least as fast as ms office, but can work with files from any version of ms office or other programs. It also doesn't cost money, which you didn't mention, but is a concern for most people.

As for letting "your software", as the article made clear it is not yours. You keep them at the pleasure of microsoft. If they ship an update that breaks them you are screwed. If they decide that your version of office is too old for your new version of windows they can ship an update that breaks it and they are financially incentivized to do so.
>Products liability law applied to IT security would put a quick end to most vulnerabilities

No, it would make IT security about as expensive as good lawyers. Just to cover the losses. A method to reliably produce vulnerability-free software is not invented yet.
Not really, ultimately if someone has write to your network drive, it's not any different than malware having it. The best solution is a good backup and protecting your hosts from being infected as much as possible.

I believe some people were trying to do rate limiting and traversal detection, which should be possible, but also is common in many tools, like running grep or find on a network share, so it's far from a perfect solution. It could also probably be avoided by clever malware if it were to be widely deployed.
OpenSSL was an example of open source done badly; neither of our communities can claim to be universally perfect. The solution, was to fork and replace OpenSSL with a superior project: LibreSSL. That part of the story, is a success for open source. It shows us recovering quickly and permanently from the worst catastrophe imaginable.
I heard that China got a special treatment from MS on that, Windows 10 without the spyware...
Big companies get blindsided by new tech all the time. Think IBM vs Microsoft.
Is there an actual eta on the opening of the tunnel?
Even with a dynamically typed language, the IDE can do type inference to provide a lot of useful stuff, like go to definition of a symbol, or refactoring.
Yeah, it's called "install the latest kernel".

Upgrading to a new version of Windows was apparently not possible, which also means that upgrading to a new Linux version would also have been out of the books.

So the only solution would have been to hire someone to backport whatever fix was needed.