skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Computing has become so banal. We used to be working on important problems. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher, formerly at Facebook.

(There are more people working on important problems than in the 1980s. Computer science research used to be about a hundred people each at MIT, CMU, and Stanford, with a few smaller groups elsewhere, plus internal efforts at IBM and Bell Labs. The whole field was tiny. Now, it's larger, but overshadowed by the massive level of activity associated with ads.)
I think here are two things in play:

First the other end of the Dunning Kruger effect where competent people underestimate their competence rank.

Second, only good mathematicians[1] can recognize the massive gap between good mathematician and a real top class mathematical genius. For the mere mortals they both are so far that they look alike.

[1] Mathematician can be replaced with any other talent/competence. Actually I realized this phenomena first in sports. The world's ultimate top and a very good amateur look perfectly as good to a complete beginner. But when you get to the very good amateur level, you start to realize the massive amount of work (and maybe talent) that makes the difference between you and the ultimate top.
> However, my biggest reason for avoiding Amazon.com is simply that it has become incredibly confusing to shop there. Searching for just about anything will yield thousands of results and it takes (me) a lot of effort to determine which one is appropriate.

On the other hand once you have figured out what to buy once, it is trivial on Amazon to buy that again when you need more.

Consider toothpaste. I use Crest, purchased at my local Walmart. They seem to stock a bazillion different kinds of Crest, emphasizing various combinations of promoting/preventing/improving/accommodating one or more of:

• cavities
• gingivitis
• sensitivity
• plaque
• tartar
• whitening
• fresh breath
• surface stains
• acid erosion

They also come in a variety of flavors and textures (gel or paste).

I care about cavities, gingivitis, plaque, tartar, and acid erosion. I am indifferent to the rest, except for whitening. From what I've read there are at least two different ways a toothpaste can promote whitening, one of which is arguably bad for you (weakens enamel or something like that) and one of which is neutral, and so I prefer to avoid whitening products unless I'm sure they use a definitely non-bad method.

The last several times I've bought toothpaste at Walmart I checked my current tube before heading to the store and attempted to buy one that matches it, and have failed. I have no idea if I failed because Crest reshuffled the combinations or I botched the matching, but whatever the reason I end up spending 15 or 20 minutes in the toothpaste aisle trying to make a choice every damned time.

The last couple of times I've checked prices toothpaste was actually cheaper locally than via Amazon, but I'm probably going to switch to Amazon anyway just to be able to use the "buy it again" feature.
Dynamic binary translation is not exactly a huge tech thing.
I was given Gabapentin when I started having seizures. My seizures became worse. We didn't know why, so months go by. Until one day I had enough and stopped it - no more seizures since then (and they were calling this treatment resistant epilepsy.) It took me about a MONTH of insane withdrawal effects and maybe 3 months to come back to baseline again.

I've had benzos, painkillers to help with the after seizure care, and their withdrawals were absolutely nothing compared to the gaba/prega. Most medications give you maybe a week at max of physical withdrawals, not a month...

However, it's absolutely great for anxiety! I would really exercise caution to everybody. If you don't believe me, Google first hand accounts on Reddit, Bluelight etc.

I would never touch it again.
> Al went to the walk-in medical clinic located next door to NR. Little good that did.

This doesn't give me confidence in the health system. How is it possible that they couldn't diagnose a life threatening condition? Are these clinics being audited?

What an unfair and unnecessary way to go. RIP Alex.
Plutonium triggers have nothing to do with nuclear power. The nuclear bomb industry has a horrific environmental record, which isn't surprising considering what they were building.

If the plutonium is valuable fuel instead of waste, then a commercial operation has a good incentive to hold on to it, even aside from the regulations that commercial power has to deal with.
Interesting article, nice to see some more practical examples.

For those unaware, SirCmpwn is responsible for sway - https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway - which aims to be an i3 compatible compositor for Wayland. In my experience it's not production ready yet, but it's definitely a pretty cool project to keep an eye on if you do use i3.
Why are you calling these 'fakes'?

Uh, because they are? Words mean things.
So you really think intelligence can be accurately measured using a single number?

Do you not agree that different people have different talents? Some are good at constructing clever arguments, some can compose beautiful music, and some can solve partial differential equations in their heads.
The common side effects for most TCAs and MAOIs are also much worse than SSRIs, as demonstrated by both incidence rates and (more importantly) discontinuation rates. The second in particular removes doctor choice from the equation.
Best modern language to learn object oriented programming
I'm a programmer who was introduced first to the functional paradigm. I'd like to better understand the object programming paradigm.

In the past, people have suggested Smalltalk as the best medium for learning concepts central to OOP. However, I've found the tooling has regressed in recent decades to the extent that I find using the language unpleasant (please correct me if I'm wrong).

In your opinion, which modern language best (and most simply) serves as a vehicle for teaching concepts core to OOP? I have no strong preference whether the type system is static or dynamic.
The largest confirmed waterfall in Earth's history
Making Arena93 full-screen (within Windows93) hard-crashed my Mac!
(MacOS 10.12.4, using Chrome 58)
Snake sex is every bit as peculiar as you would expect
Why are we talking about 100,000 years, when all we know with any confidence is that things will be so different in 100 that it is impossible to predict most of the problems that will face us then?

In fact I have trouble imagining a future where people still exist, but this problem is not solved or obviated well before 100,000 years from now -- in fact before 100.
My previous comment is RFC 2119 compliant.
If a bad actor gets your data in a breach, the article posits that only person that has to fall victim to any level of social engineering is the customer service rep of your cell provider or some other service you use.

So while you might be above nigerian prices, free cruises, and the like - do you have the same faith in the as-cheap-as-possible customer service rep from your provider?

That's what the article is getting at.
WebAssembly is supported as well. It has become much faster a few months back when it supported WebAssembly. On my system and using forefox it was 340 knodes/s with asm.js. With WebAssembly it is 600+ knodes/s
Counter-anecdotally, this worked the opposite way for me. I had a pretty shitty childhood and had panic attacks until I was about 24 and realized it by googling air hunger. Prior to that, I was so clueless that I thought that my regular inability to fill my lungs was due to my minor allergy issues or something, and had no idea why I would seemingly unpredictably start sweating and (separately) why my heart would beat rapidly sometimes.

Being able to identify the problem made it way easier to handle, even before I started actively trying to fix it with things like mindfulness. These days whenever I notice air hunger, I stop and think what I might be anxious about and am usually able to reason my way out of subconsciously freaking out (even if it's as simple as "this isn't going to make it _more_ likely that the situation resolves well").

It seems just as likely to me that more awareness of anxiety will work in the opposite direction from what you're describing, mitigating anxiety off for people earlier since they're able to start recognizing and managing it earlier through greater awareness.
As http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1604.0/03993.html states, you can get binary stability for in the order of five years from the likes of Red Hat and SuSe.

I don't know where you can get binary stability for decades, but it wouldn't surprise me if some military applications guaranteed that.

Since there's nothing stopping suppliers from selling it, there apparently isn't that much demand for it.
In the past couple years, Amazon.com has been a prime example of a company getting too big; because of its size, it can get away with consumer-hostile behaviors like implementing a terrible UX, shipping counterfeit goods, or allowing sellers to game the review system and put cheap products at the top of the search results with hundreds of bought-and-paid-for 5-star reviews. If Amazon had serious competition, I don't think they could get away with this stuff.

But is there any good alternative? I buy from Target.com whenever an order includes food or health products, because I actually have some confidence in their supply chain. But of course their shipping efficiency is years behind Amazon's.
Yes, this is precisely my point. "Safe" is a binary property in cryptography. But developers don't have much to go on, so even if they follow best practices they often interpret differentiating metrics as variances in "safety", when in actuality those things are only relevant for computational cost, implementation difficulty, adaptability and interoperability.

In general if you provide people with a list of possibilities and say, "Yeah, any of these is fine", they're not going to literally choose one at random. They're going to search a bit and read about differences between the algorithms, and unless they spend a lot of time reading about the respective properties of each algorithm they might eventually say something like, "Argon2 is safer than bcrypt."

"Safer" is a misnomer. There are meaningful reasons to choose one algorithm over another, but these generally boil down to performance impact, implementation time and how easy it is to shoot yourself in the foot with implementation.

This matters because people seek understanding, and if you don't provide a satisfiable amount they might draw erroneous conclusions that have a meaningful non-security impact. For example, you most likely don't need to be using AES256. People like to, because 256 > 128. But seriously - you probably don't need to. The impulse to just use the bigger number leads to decision making based on signaling more than real security, and has a meaningful reduction in things like usability and performance.

To rephrase my point here - "safe" is safe enough, and there should probably be better education on the peripheral implementation metrics for cryptographic algorithms, because you're far more likely to run up your AWS bill or inadvertently screw up your security by e.g. choosing a complex cryptographic algorithm with a huge security margin versus a simple one with a "good enough" security margin. If we're not able to provide more education about what to actually look for when discriminating between algorithms, then we need to find a way to decouple certain metrics from the perception of "safety", like key size.

For a real world example of this, look at the advertising with things like "bank-grade" or "military-grade" security which are heavily associated with phrases like "128-bit" or "256-bit." Sometimes a developer will see that AES128 is used and think to themselves, "I'll use 256 and be even safer!", all the while the public is slowly taught to associate safety with ever larger bit sizes. Then when a legitimately superior ECC algorithm comes out that uses 224 bit keys, people cling to RSA because they can use a 2048 bit key size and 2048 > 224.
I think you're right. Which is actually better news since now the "solution" boils down to "Be mindful of your environment." That is, try to avoid stress, bullshit people, bad food, bad stimuli (i.e., yesterday's TV is not today's mass+social media), etc.
This doesn't have anything to do with 'security through obscurity'.
> I want to understand what are the ACTUALLY NECESSARY topics required and in RIGHT ORDER to MINIMIZE the TIME WASTING and wandering in between topics so that the knowledge aqcuired is more practical in context of current vulnerabilities rather than being more theoretical.

To be honest with you? I consider that sentence almost offensive. I hear you, but I think you have absolutely wrong expectations. You want to learn something that is not a profession like plumber where a really good expert can teach you everything you need to know with all the little tricks learned over the years. The field is sooo huge diverse and complicated that this won't work. And I think my playlist offers a rough outline that you can follow, but without going down rabbit holes left and right, and getting stuck many many times, you wont become good at it.

I understand the frustration that you don't want to "waste time" and that you are busy already. But everybody I know who is good in this field, including my own experience shows me, that nobody learns this stuff through a straight path. And everybody knows that most of the time will be spent chasing rabbits through a labyrinth and getting stuck.

Also there is no clear path. It's a complicated web you have to learn to traverse. For example like "Learn C" - what the f* does that even mean? To what extend? Hello World? Drivers? Or Operating System? "Learn assembler" - which assembler? have you looked into the Intel Instruction spec once? I doubt any human knows every instruction. Also who said that intel is the way to go, why not ARM or AVR. All of these fields offer a lifetime of studying in itself.

The "art" in becoming good at security and RE is to get a broad knowledge of a lot of things and try to simultaneously go deeper 'n deeper in all of them. And if you are interested in a specific field, put more weight on those topics.

You know how long it takes to reverse engineer something? People stare on IDA for weeks or months at a time. You can't learn RE just by reading a book or a blog. You gotta start to just doing it, and hopefully find a few blogs and people to keep up the spirit.
That depends entirely on your income level. Someone unemployed will be well severed by trading his time for savings.
You know, you're not the first person to bring that up - and I am having seed problems.

Perhaps next rev I'll only include the .7z (smallest) and greppable formats.
NIST has already been discouraging the use of SMS for 2fa[0], but that apparently won't stop the subset of incompetent IPSec consultants who still recomment SMS based 2fa.

[0] www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/07/26/nist_proposes_moving_away_from_sms_based_two_factor_authentication.html
It's an effect probably at least as real as ESP:
https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/06/daryl-bem-prove...

Which is to say, I'm dubious as hell of this result: For something this click-baity, at this point in the history of psychology research, I'mma need some serious replication before I give itan ounce of belief.
Or what I refer to generally has "hygiene factors" -- removal of human and animal wastes, trash, smoke, crime. Various systemic negative consequences of activity.

Entropy.
If an exclusive handbag has many counterfeits made, the counterfeits are still "fake" $BRAND_NAME bags. That doesn't change if the counterfeiters made more bags than the company (as is usually the case).
I like the idea of genius as derived from genus, and meaning something like a particular kind of excellence, an exemplar of its kind, something's characteristic disposition. One can think of there being not one class of geniuses, but think of it as excellence of a particular kind, in a particular activity, that is related to the intrinsic and highly developed talents or disposition of the genius. So, Rafael Nadal is a clay court genius, because he is a great tennis player, and in addition he puts maximum effort into the kind of tennis that requires it, and his physical, top-spin heavy tennis is ideally suited to the surface.
SEC Intelligence Released Deal IQ
SEC Intelligence is pleased to announce the release of Deal IQ. Deal IQ is enabling Law firms and other professionals to find contracts from SEC filings, therefore helping them in contract drafting and negotiation.

SEC Intelligence is making products that derive meaning from the unstructured content of the SEC filings.

For more info visit : http://www.secintelligence.com
"Safari is the new Internet Explorer"

Accidental "works best in browser X" 90s reference right there.

I find Safari superior to every other browser on any platform in every possible metric except for dev tools, which took a nose dive when they ditched the open source WebKit one for this calamity.
That's how biotech, in particular neural technologies, feel to me right now. In reality, it's still such early days there that it's probably closer to computers in the late 70's than the web in the 90s, but I think the spirit is similar.
I'm fluent with the stack, so this took me like an hour to build. The entire point is that it's ridiculous so I'm glad you picked up on that.
Most countries score an F on our LGBT human rights report card
Yeah, if your tooling is based on wood, stone, clay etc, any "waste" left behind is entirely benign anyway. No plastics, heavy metals etc
GUN 0.7.9 – 15M read/sec, 15K write/sec, 2K sync/sec MIT Licensed Graph Database
US military bases as well, which have "burn barrels", and seem to have resulting health impacts as a consequence.

https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/burnpits/index.asp

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02/12/16751/us-troops-b...
Two factor authentication is nothing more than a massive vulnerability. We've seen people somehow change our listed contact numbers through unknown exploits, then hijack ownership of properties using the new number to prove they are us. This wouldn't be possible if not for 2nd factor authorization schemes.
Does it do .NOTEs?
It's hard to think of a worse plan for spent nuclear fuel than burying it in an inaccessible location.

There is no such problem as maintaining nuclear waste for 100,000 years. In reality, events will overtake our plans long before then. For example:

* inevitable flaws in the design of the burial system may cause leakage that burial will likely make more expensive to correct than leaving the waste where it is

* we will want to burn up the spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors (which actually removes the problem, and simultaneously creates wealth)

* we will find ways to clean up leaks and spills

* we will find ways to prevent and cure diseases caused by radioactivity
you should package this up as a bloom filter and simple js routine web developers could use to do client-side checks to validate passwords.

edit: on 2nd thought looks like a bloom filter for 5B entries at p=0.01 would be ~5GB, so not exactly convenient
I think cheaper hardware is one possibility, but more importantly it's decentralized design, manufacturing, and auditing. It unencumbers it from one or a few companies, and governments. And it has the potential to increase trust.

With Intel ME/AMT, I think we're witnessing the limitations of the existing models.
Yes, after a few hundred years you've got a pretty good source for weapons grade plutonium
It's simply business. If people use likes as a proxy to mean quality or happiness about a product then fake likes can be used as a way to bypass those hard to achieve items so that others will buy a product.

That they won't be happy afterwards is the depressing bit. It's like spam, as long as the cost of the spam is substantially lower than the profits on even a single sale it is worth it.
I think the thing that really did it for me was seeing Windows 93 on the front page today. So much possibility and creativity lost.
Knowing Together:  the Emergence of the Hive Mind
You can distribute GPL things if you make the source available. The source for Linux is freely available. The source for NVIDIA's entire driver is not (the shim layer that actually interacts with Linux does have the source code in the .run file, that's how you build it yourself).
We are gonna start the liveblog for Xbox E3 soon at https://vaniila.com/cxchanV/ap3b1P. stay tuned for updates :)
This is a part of a big problem in consumer products - a tons of confusing or missing data. Prices are hidden. A lot of the specification isn't shown(what's the wind strength of that fan in cfm, vs noise in db ? no i don't need marketing terms like "strong"), it's hard to compare by spec, and we don't know anything about long term reliability.

On the other hand, many b2b markets have that, because the buyers there demand it, and usually only buy a product with a spec.

Maybe there's some solution to that problem. But i do wonder, if it exists, would consumers use it to purchase stuff?
There is a wide spectrum of possibilities here. On one end you have malpractice. On the other end, you have a patient that ignored the clinic's advice.
The sarcasm was more aimed at the fact that a company's good intentions are ultimately irrelevant. One of the reason we don't want to trust our government with all of our data is that even if the current government behaves perfectly, you never know what is coming down the road - either in terms of government changing, or the data falling in the hands of specific government people with ill intent.

Likewise, the big conglomerates' good intentions are not enough to make giving them access to all your personal data justifiable.
That's certainly fair.

Generally I've found that Amazon is rarely cheapest option, but I can understand paying the convenience.

In addition to my particular type of lotion, I only buy a particular type of toothpaste (because most toothpaste has SLS and that gives me canker sores). Basically my approach is to find the cheapest possible price and buy it in bulk. I have done that a few times over the past couple of years (I currently have 10 tubes, hah) and, I think, always with different retailers. That tends to work well for me, and I don't think Amazon.com's additional features are worth the extra cost, in that case.
Open credits.txt on the desktop.
thats just being butthurt because we chose to call it intelligence, and somehow not being classically intelligent is understood as a personal insult.

the IQ simply doesnt measure creative genius. if it was called "the test that measures how good a persons brain is at pattern recogniton", you wouldnt care. you'd simply state that you're not particularly interested in logical reasoning.

intelligence, in terms of IQ, is a more or less well defined metric. in popular language, its conflated with "not being a mouthbreather". thats why people get pissy when they dont score above average on an iq test. its kinda pointless, really. people only care about iq tests because of the name.
That's possibly false: the best minds are likely working at places like Genentech (no relation to my world) and other places where truly useful things requiring deep knowledge of multiple technical domains is a prerequisite.