skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have zero evidence, and am simply working through a though exercise, but it could be targeted?

Maybe a group on behalf of a nation state is testing out its muscle. Or sending a warning. Maybe the UK did something recently a nation didn't like, and this is the new form of "diplomatic protest". Or sending a warning shot.

I remember reading last year that the large Delta airlines outage was cyber terror related.

It really feels like we're not too far off from a war between two nations without a single bullet fired. What happens when a country is hit with nation level ransomware? Ie not, "give us $300 bucks and you'll get your PC back", but "sign XYZ treaty and you get your country's water system back"? Or "we'll restore your internet and turn your powerplants back online"? How much will a wealthy country (like us in the US) be willing to stomach of seeing people going thirsty and hungry before they want their govt to capitulate?

Of course the world will condemn and complain, but as has always been the case the country with the largest Army makes the rules. And we might be using the wrong measuring stick. Microsoft missed the boat by thinking (along with most of the industry) that measuring computing meant measuring PCs. It wasn't until it was too late that it realized that computing was about to be dominated by Mobile and smaller. They were using the wrong measuring stick.

Are we on the verge of an era where an army should be measured in its digital strength and not its physical strength? It's a very scary thought.

As an American I think first of the risks to my own country. How long could we sit with a nationwide blackout, and the internet down (for anyone using backup generators)? Food rotting in shipping containers because no cranes can offload it. No easy communication or flights for quick way to move people or things around.

As a country (and as a world) I can't help but feel we're really not doing enough to take a risk like this seriously. It's just a feeling, but based on small incidents here and there it really feels to me like something in the next 5-10 years is gonna happen that'll make us all drop our jaws and say "I didn't think this was possible."

Regardless of your political beliefs, a lot of people around the world didn't think last year's US election was possible. I was shocked by it as well, but it also opened my eyes to how much more really is in the realm of possible.

As engineers we have much a deeper knowledge of the risks involved and as a result a much greater responsibility of raising awareness and getting the problem fixed.

EDIT: I'm not sure of the original location I saw the Delta stuff, but a quick look now turns up this link.

http://observer.com/2016/09/did-a-cyber-attack-ground-delta-...

And yes, I'll repeat this above comment is purely speculative by me.
articles are often the work of The Economist's hive mind, rather than of a single author[1] . [1]http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...
My point is that the murder may not have happened if the perpetrator had grown up in a better neighborhood.
Google is a federal contractor. These documents are being requested because they do federal business, not because of any civil or criminal inquiry. Now of course these documents might lead to a civil case, but it's within the bounds of each agency's Office of Civil Rights to request this data.
"The Economist is 160+ years old, and back then anonymity was the norm. Then the industry went on a slightly disturbing path toward writer celebrity, and we simply chose not to participate."

https://andreaskluth.org/2008/11/20/why-the-economist-has-no...
So the American TV show "Person of Interest" really isn't that far off the mark. If FB is a known and readily available commercial product, imagine what DARPA, NSA, NGIA, etc. must have.

God bless George Orwell.
It's a combination of that and our Puritan background. There aren't many societies more bent on shaming and excluding than 17th century Puritans.
Educated adults should understand: just because it's written in a contract doesn't mean it's enforceable. The viewpoint of "contracts uber alles" (which I hope nobody holds as anything other than a tactic to pursue their own self interest) may have cheerleaders, but is just incorrect as far as the legal system goes.

On the meta-discourse level: is it appropriate to make fun of a belief that one honestly believes is Bad if I don't say that person X holds that belief and hence is bad?
Managing resources for large-scale testing: Facebook
It seems like the idea is that a hurdle is guaranteed to be met by the financial firm, and, so long as that hurdle is met, everything else is gravy. The firm could choose to take everything over the hurdle or share the surplus with the client for goodwill boost. It's not so much a charge as a bonus.

It would look like a good deal to the client, who gets legibility and reliability, and for the firm, which can get a reward for its efforts.
Ugh. FEWER.
This study is more than twenty years old. Smalltalk would score very low compared to today's languages.

Function points are a pretty useless metric anyway.
Google explains refugee crisis with 360 degree photos, satellite imagery, video
> if it was decided by the executive or legislative branches that it was absolutely essential that Facebook turn over all their data to the intelligence agencies, due to the need to crack down on dissent, social unrest, then, yes this could be bad.

This already exists, it's called the patriot act. Snowden showed that the US government has its hands in facebook and google's data. And you may have heard of the foreigner who got refused entrance on US soil at the border based on their facebook private messages.

> It's interesting to note that so far FB and Google haven't suffered massive data breaches.

More like such data breaches have not had much if any media exposure. IIRC gmail suffered a few of those from China and Russia alreaddy, and both facebook and google were tapped by the US agencies.
Imprisonment is not really about moral retribution, or vengeance. It serves mostly to ensure that the criminal can't commit his crime again (at least during the time he spends in prison), which gives his victims and the whole society some peace of mind.

Also, it can be argued that prisons really don't have a reason to exist, justice system could function with only two types of punishment:

For light offenses, like shoplifting or small scale drug dealing, or white collar crimes like insider trading you could go with community service, fine, asset forfeiture.

For serious crimes, especially those that include significant amount of violence (armed robbery, rape, murder) you could go straight to death penalty, with relatively short waiting period between the sentence and actual execution.

That's how it worked for most of the human history, and proved to be simple, cheap and effective.
I got "page not found".
I was reared that it is in poor taste and even wrong to talk about someone. Period.

You may not violate a freedom but the bigger question to me is why would you even contemplate the thoughts to infer, etc.

What is "wrong" is that people think it is ok to talk about others.

Next time you get together in a group take a poll on how many conversations are just talking about people.
The WHO guideline for copper is 2mg/l which is the same as in the German guidelines "Trinkwasserverordnung". The article linked by batter says right in the abstract:

We found that the disease can even be caused by copper concentrations below the allowed concentration given by the German Guidelines for Drinking Water (Trinkwasserverordnung).
US workers generally don't work on "contracts", that's more of a European phrase. I'm guessing OP probably works in a European environment which probably has different rules around this.
Government shouldn't be able to accuse a firm of something, then demand the firm spend money assembling data to prove the governments case.

First of all: when you sue someone, you do get to demand exactly that. They also get to demand it of you! It's called "discovery", and it's a bog-standard basic normal everyday part of lawsuits.

Second of all: if you have a look through the reporting on this, Google was being audited for compliance with equal-pay laws and refused to supply records the government said were relevant to the audit. So the government is now suing to force Google to hand over the records. Auditors are allowed to do that, and being required to assemble and hand over information is pretty much the literal definition of an audit.
There's a little insider knowledge on the Flyertalk forum.

See this post, for example...a BA employee: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/28366141-post168.html

Later, there's some talk about a power outage and/or lighting strike, again from BA employees.
Would a prison dichotomy be a good idea? That is, the reformable criminals go to rehabilitation, and the ones for which there is no hope go in for life (or at least until old age)?
That's the requirement prescribed by EN 61131-2. We test with 60°C, so an additional safety margin of 5°C.
They don't understand the move probably the AI has a memory depth that is way beyond any human, some of those moves are the best possible look aheads for that situation
some people don't want to live in a world where that sort of aggressive behaviour goes unchecked. whether it affects you or not personally, it's still a negative effect that we can look to minimize.

"bullying" takes on many forms, and while I tend to think that just words alone may not necessarily cause harm, I've seen it escalate to physical violence enough that it makes me want to nip it in the bud earlier rather than later.
Through a family connection I know quite a bit about how salary data is analysed inside silicon valley companies. That analysis, in turn, is largely driven by the need to comply with various DOL regulations.

Based on what I know I find it inconceivable that Google doesn't have this data in a spreadsheet that could be emailed in a few seconds to whoever needs to see it.
>Does storing water in pots mean that Cu goes into water

It's not automatic, but depends on pH. Acidic conditions will be favorable to metals leaching into water. The paper cites an initial pH of 7.84, and final pH of 7.94 - so the pH increased slightly as a result of the copper entering the solution.

This pH change correlated with 177 ppb Cu concentration in these pots after 16 hours. If initial pH was lower this concentration would see a logarithmic increase in relation the lower initial pH over the same time interval.

"Since distilled water is slightly acidic (pH 6.7±0.05) which might enhance copper leaching, we have demonstrated the effect of copper pot in regular drinking-water"
Yet several studies have shown multicultural policies are better than assimilation ones when it comes to integration. And saying most of them want a free ride is just nonsense.
Just last night I saw a message scrawled on a bathroom wall that said, "for a good time, call Mirimir."

Don't know if that's good or bad from your perspective, but I chuckled at the old school hyperlocal anonymity of it.
> and were proven long ago.

Can you back up your claim?
One advantage the Norwegian prison system has is that it is filled with Norwegians, I would be careful generalizing conclusions from it.

That being said, one concept I rarely see discussed is the use of basic income as an incentive against crime, particularly violent crime: if you lost your citizens dividend after conviction and slowly earned it back every year upon release that would act as a powerful and immediate incentive to avoid violence.
Afaik it hasn't. Therefore, I look at some colored, randomly placed smilies from to time time to elevate my mood:

function smilies(){
while true; do num=$(( $RANDOM % 80 )); for i in $(seq 1 $num); do echo -n " "; done; echo $(tput setaf $(( $num % 10 )) ) ; sleep 0.17; done
}
Hardware is the new software [pdf]
This is missing the point as metadata is way more sensible than actual message content. Besides, being contrary to ToS you'd get your facebook account blocked or banned.

Look at how fast AdNauseam got the boot from google to get an idea.
Human plus bicycle is the most efficient.

Which may seem like a snide point (and a ripoff of Steve Jobs) but seriously it hints at where things could go with AI.
UNHCR, IKEA commission first PV plant powering refugee camp
I can imagine the founders or investors going " hey! bad publicity is good publicity, let's ride it out" without an exit plan
well the problem is that less woman want to be programmers

Would you like to explain why you think that happened? And why it's such a drastic turnaround from how things used to be?

(remember: in earlier days a much higher percentage of programmers and other computer-adjacent technical people were women, compared to today. The demographics we see today are a change from that, which cries out for explanation)
Yeah I understand, do you think the last paragraph in my first comment misses that point?

My point is that we have people already in prison for past violent crimes, many of them, so even a policy change that has a big future impact still isn't going to quickly reduce the prison population by 2/3.
Great essay (Orwell) takes me back. I remember learning Lear (and the other 'tragedies') at Rutgers in a night class in a basement of one of those impersonal brutalist buildings that sprung up in the 70s to replace 'quonset' huts in central Jersey by the Raritan. Inauspicious looking place to learn Shakespeare but was a class that really stuck with me.

The language and structure of "Lear" spin out of control and loose meaning - so by the end one of the more sympathetic characters becomes speechless after saying something to the effect of - "Is this the promised end/ or the image of that destruction?/ fall and cease". IOW: 'is this the apocalypse? there is nothing more to say or do...'

It doesn't bother me that Tolstoy thought Lear was garbage. I can see his point from his perspective. He had a different mind and different education from anything I could imagine. And he was fundamentally smarter than I am so I respect that. I think though I respect Shakespeare more and part of what he is doing in "Lear" is showing the heartbreaking limits of the mind when facing a reality that no longer makes sense.

I realize even from the relatively privileges perspective of one educated in dank basements of a decent US public university that I know much less about literature and philosophy than a comparably educated compatriot of Tolstoy (and much, much less than Tolstoy himself). Even in my reading he is nto wrong. Lear in the tradition of tragedy is a broken play. I am not sure that makes it bad...

The end of Lear renders everyone in the play dead or shattered, mute. We as the audience, receive that and go on. That gulf is awesome. Much is lost and it is almost magical that we go on. And this fracturing and re-wholing goes on.

An old story - the "Tower of Babel", etc

This gets rewritten - Huidobro, Faulkner, Julio Cortazar, and Beckett come to mind but I am lazy and years away from lit study. Writers that see a epoch passing (for better or worse) and are in the lacunae where meaning is exhausted and we are speechless and exhausted.

Like Beckett ends his trilogy

```
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.

You must go on.

I can't go on.

I'll go on.

```

There are echos of Lear everywhere.

I hate the weakness of relativism but I feel a humbleness wrt the greats - I reach into the bag of marbles and pull out a Sappho, LaoTze, TSEliot, Hegel and read something out of context and in translation. In the back of my mind I realize there is much I would never understand the gulf of experience. They are all failures: most drunk or unstable, leaving fragments that we puzzle over.
If the training set for your payroll AI is biased, your payroll AI will end up biased too.
Why would it be ? And don't give me that bs "if a guy comes into your home" analogy because a country is not a home.
is there any evidence that incentives like that work for violent crime? we know that harshness of punishment has no impact on deterrence.
Super great name!
> I remember reading last year that the large Delta airlines outage was cyber terror related.

Where'd you hear that? AFAIK, it was a botched failover to backup power.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/08/computer_fault_take...
Content is mostly irrelevant, metadata is way more interesting. In other words they do not care what you say, but who you say it to, when you say it, from where, at what time, and so on.
Could anyone explain what a "chroot zap" is (from the 'effective caching' feature)? Googling it just brings me to the same page.
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. YikYak's undoing was doing away with the features that brought people to it; it was a very popular application, and continued to be right up until the de-anonymizing aspects were brought into play. It's function a digital bathroom wall was pretty well executed and in most cases, seemingly a success for interaction. It wasn't really good for anything else besides shitposting, but it definitely was something that people wanted.

I was working at a University in the heyday of YikYak and yes, there were bad posts. Since it was tech related, our administration asked my department to keep an eye on it, but for our school (4500 some students), the attitude was more moderate than it was abusive. Threatening or harassing Yaks were almost always down-voted off the app before we'd even have a chance to see it.

Obviously, other institutions didn't have the same luck that we did, but from my point of view, there was a very good moderation system in place from YikYak - sure, anyone could post something anonymously that was malicious and hateful - but it was incredibly easy to clear it from YikYak.

The student body also took a huge interest in making sure that YikYak stayed in the spirit of anonymous; lot of articles in the student paper about it, lot of rants on the random Facebook Confess pages, and YikYak itself was filled with comments about keeping "stupid shit" off of it. Did some kids still post stupid stuff? Sure, but the rest were more inclined to help with the upkeep.
I wonder if the "but that would.never work in america" people ever think about the old head and shoulders commercials
...they probably didn't get the joke.
It's the legal team's job to push back on any new requests for data. Obviously there _is_ a reasonable limit of what the government can ask Google to provide. This particular cost is obviously far less than that limit ought to be given the stakes involved and the size of Google, but again, Google should push back too early and the government should ask for too much, and the judge should find the reasonable middle ground. That's fine, that's how our legal system works, and I suspect this article is overblowing a typical procedural step in the process.

All of that said, Google is not coming out looking like the good guy by fighting this case so hard. Their compensation analysts ought to be running these sorts of reports themselves. If they truly aren't, then that in itself is evidence (in my opinion) that Google is willfully neglecting its responsibility not to underpay its female employees.
Ads means tracking a.k.a. no privacy.
On the contrary. <rapidly fashions tinfoil hat> The US is a representative democracy with only 2 credible political parties. In such a system, if you are one of the incumbents, it pays to polarise every issue: that way no third part can emerge. At the very worst, you are out of power for 8-12 years, but you always come back into power. If you manage to get you hooks into the media, then you can encourage them to polarise every issue too. They'll love it, because confirmation bias is a powerful force. It leads to rabid followers of the various institutions -- who deride the followers of the other institutions.

Hmmm... tin foil hats are comfy. I think I'll wear this one for a while...
>So when did the program loader change to ignore the extension entirely and just use the presence or absence of an MZ header to determine what type of program it is? Compatibility, of course.

Either "Compatibility" is a time, or they should have asked "why".
Nice info. My suspicion is this also explains why many corrupted EXE files cause the cryptic error "program is too large to fit in memory" error if you try to execute them:

The corruption mangles the header, removing the "MZ" magic number -> Windows thinks the file is a COM executable and attempts to load it into memory, COM style -> the file is not actually COM though and thus is far too large to fit into the memory available to the loader -> that error appears.
Back when I was a kid, in the days before Google, you tried to figure out how things worked just by poking around your computer. For example, I noticed that professional programs were always .com/.exe files, but I only knew how to edit simple batch scripts. So of course, the "logical" thing to try was to write a .bat and save it with a different extension and see what happened.

.exe files created this way wouldn't launch, but a .com created this way would instantly reboot the computer. Even more weirdly, this only worked for the specific command that happened to enter in my first attempt -- it might have been something like "cd games". If I changed anything at all, it no longer worked. Only years later I realized that the characters I typed were directly executed as machine code, and that I must have stumbled upon a set of instructions that caused a CPU exception!

For several years, this weird file was the only way I knew to programmatically reboot a computer, so I renamed it "reset.com" and kept it around. I think it stopped working only in the Windows XP era when DOS programs were finally sandboxed to some extent.
Imagine a gentleman decides to follow you for the rest of your life. He is always wihtin a distance but when you leave your home, there he is and see you him with his pen and paper recording your every move. You get it you car, he gets in his and follows. You stop by your lover's home. There he is the back recording. You go pick your child, save. You go to the grocery store, there he is recording again. So on and so forth.

Would you say there is absolutely nothing wrong with this?
The selling point of facebook is not the newsfeed. The selling point is that every other person is already registered on facebook.
That doesn't affect my core point: many of the things that humans have commonly associated with intelligence have been the first to fall. In hindsight it makes sense, we mistakenly assumed that there was such a thing as a universal rank of difficulty centered on what humans find hard to reason about.

More to your point, my decades remark had a weaker notion of amateur. For each game, we've had something that could beat most humans for decades. But you're right, that's not a useful distinction.

If we look just at Go the decades remark is somewhat of a stretch. Go has been especially difficult, requiring more intelligent algorithms in order to solve branching and state evaluation (and the latter in particular, is a function too complex to fit in human consciousness).

But progress has been occurring for years. On 9x9 boards MCTS bots have been stronger than most humans since about 2007, 10 years ago. For 19x19 it's true, if we pick 4 or 5 dan as better than most amateurs then that's 6/7 years.
death penalty is fine except if you find out later that you were wrong you can't undo it.
While this is all true, just because a lawyer can make an argument or typically makes a certain type of argument does not protect their client from the other bad results of making that argument.

This isn't just Google, it's important for all businesses to remember that the lawyers focus on the law, and done usually have access to the bigger picture. And even if they do, it's not their job to deal with it, they focus on winning in the legal arena.
Thanks for you technical input, it does explains a lot.