skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of public universities had a homegrown dropbox lurking somewhere in their infrastructure. Thankfully they were already abused to the point that schools have been shutting them down over the last 5-10 years. (Usually abuse not in the form of malware, but in the form of file sharing movies, etc)
I am usually for openess, freedom of speech no matter what. But I would make an exception for Wikileaks. Started off fine by leaking things journalists wouldn't get their hands on thus doing their job in a way. Which was great.

Now they just turned out to be ill-intended malicious Russia-sponsored mouthpiece. Only thing they do is harm, harm peoples computer by releasing malwares and hacks.

PS. I am not from US at all.
Cost-Based Optimizer in Apache Spark 2.2
Obviously words are a matter of intersubjectivity; we can only understand them from their use, so anything can be money if enough people call it that. If you want to understand why cryptocurrency is not a financial asset, that's because it's not a liability of its issuer. And of course, cryptocurrency is not state money because you can't use it to pay taxes. It seems to me to be most like a sort of nonconsumable commodity, which is strange enough.
Keep in mind, the US Government is the primary underwriter of Flood Insurance in the US. [1] In many cases, even if you are buying your Flood Insurance policy from a private company, they are buying National Flood Insurance on your behalf. If your insurance company's pool directly covered the all the extremely variable risk (part of the discussion here), it would be a lot more expensive, so the US government takes on a lot of that risk.

The US government is in the best position to take on a lot of that risk in part because in most states the flood plains are also actively managed by the government. A lot of flood plains have levees and dams and reservoirs that are at least monitored by the US Army Corps of Engineers, if not built and/or maintained by them as well. In the case of a flood event too, it's the US Government that is supposed to act as the primary active management agency (FEMA and in turn it's delegations to the National Guard), presumably mitigating risks during the course of an event (assuming proper management) or taking direct responsibility for mistakes in crisis.

[1] https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program

(Disclosure: Working as a consultant for the USACE on a semi-related project. I do not speak for my government or my employer; any mistakes or opinions are my own.)
Personally I enjoy seeing a candyjapan link because it doesn't fluff on the details. The write ups don't hide numbers and other information just for the sake of hiding them. On top of that the write-ups are interesting

Not all geeky things are directly tech related, some of us are just geeks through and through :)
Well that's a gotcha on AES-CTR too.

GP is asking about mistakes that could happen on AES-GCM that won't happen with AES-CTR+HMAC.

I'm no crypto expert, but I'd say there are more opportunities of messing up with AES-CTR+HMAC like forgetting to MAC the IV.
Inject Detect Is Launching Soon
They are essentially using blockchain for settlements. Things do get confusing as the money exchanges many hands with many strings attached.

The problem being that somehow every blockchain needs a "coin", so they now have "utility settlement coin" or cryptocurrencies.
I'm just saying go join the Peace Corps and drop $10,000 on time tested pedagogically rewarding audiobooks (and maybe another grand on Excel or videography courses) and you'll be perfectly horizon broadened and entry level ready without 6 figure debt.
Stuff goes wrong everywhere. The only problem is thinking that any cloud vendor or service is 100% reliable.
I'll be giving this a spin. Looks neat.
It's really sad that the ios/android model COULD be more secure than the traditional desktop software model, but at the same time it has normalized all sorts of creepy snooping behavior on the part of apps.
I guess I feel it would be easier to trust the motives of skeptics if they weren't constantly shifting the goalposts and fighting the data. A couple years ago there was plenty of denial that climate change was happening at all. Now the data has made that position indefensible so now they seek to cast doubt on what the impacts will be.

I'm all for good science and skepticism, and for legitimate issues with the models. But all of this reeks of the same type of "science" that tobacco companies bankrolled to fight the lung cancer findings decades ago. Their motivations just make it very difficult to take them seriously.
At this point I think it's largely a lack of viable alternatives. Despite increasingly loud noises of complaint from Windows users, it remains the only reasonable thing for a vendor to preinstall on a computer. OSX only comes on (expensive) Macs, and they tried Linux on netbooks back in 2007 and it was a disaster (partly due to vendor fragmentation, partly due to marketing that papered over the whole "different OS" issue).

We so nearly had it with Ubuntu. I suspect sooner or later Google will pull it off in some form or another, if ChromeOS doesn't already count.
AutoPi IoT platform for your car
Wow, thanks for this comprehensive summary. Don't forget that counterfeiting formula is easy to do (as a google search will attest). Also, strangely, a blackmarket http://nypost.com/2016/01/07/theres-a-thriving-black-market-...
I grew up on King's Quest and its ilk which were similarly "hardened" against blind clicking that became common in later games of the genre. I don't think I'd have the patience to solve KQ1 from scratch today.

Anyway, I too have a fond memory of text parsers in games, graphical or not.

Sierra's maybe weren't the best with some maddening quirks where certain word orders wouldn't work and the responses were nonsense. Sentences that had direct and indirect objects were frequently problematic: "give the mouse the cheese" would result in "you aren't carrying the mouse". I should probably blame my pre-teen english for the frustration however. Infocom games were smarter, as I recall.

KQ1's puzzle requiring writing the alphabet forwards and backwards and encoding the name "rumplestiltskin"... have to admit I never figured that out on my own. They dumbed down that in the VGA (and all later) releases accepting the name simply spelled backwards.
10 Random Ideas for August 25, 2017
I have to disagree your assumption about breastfeeding being usually upper-middle class. Maybe you're just talking about the US? But in Argentina at least (maybe more of Latin America too), it's common to see lower/middle-class women breastfeeding on the city bus.
Google Has Become a Major Threat to Democracy in America
In Postgres, you'd simply have a table with a JSON column for the snapshot-in-type contract.

You can then select fields from that JSON for invoices, reports, etc with the arrow operator:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/functions-json.ht...
This is more realistic because I believe the US government is mostly restricted from using the .com TLD. That decision came from:

"Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People". United States Federal CIO Council. May 23, 2012.
Navigator Paper Launches App Idea Challenge. $20,000 USD First Prize
True but I need my research with a giant dose of WIN and exploding diarrhea cats, else I'm bored.
Interactive Editors in Beta – MDN – Mozilla Discourse
Then again, this is government we are talking about so buying a $10 domain is probaly three weeks worth of paperwork.

It's not that bad.

It is slightly annoying that the procurement rules don't let sysadmins buy multi-year domain registrations---not even for .gov domains.

Ultimately, there's nothing stopping a federal employee or contractor from buying another domain except ignorance of good infosec practices. Even a .gov domain isn't all that expensive---$400/year is a drop in the bucket of federal spending.
> This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new.

The same can be said for any good or bad idea.
This is a fairly good article, but it's a rundown of a computer science topic, not really "news".

Also, even though this is written with JavaScript in mind, it really applies to most any language.
It was actually one of the stated secondary goals, with an appeal involving such currency being used by terrorists. However

1. While a higher than usual fake currency was detected the total fake currency detected was roughly 1 in 100,000. So there wasn't a fake note problem in general circulation.
2. The new notes launched do NOT have any additional security features, and hence while there will be a latency in getting the fakes right, it will continue to be a problem(albeit a small one).
Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana Join Forces
Monaco Launches Mobile App to Bring Cryptocurrencies to Every Wallet
So it was an unrefined (and unmonetized) version of the mindless grinding(1) required in Farmville and the like?

(1) As opposed to RPG-style grinding.
The issue is not finding the exploits, but exploiting the exploits.
Closed-source just ups the uncertainty about security. I'm not saying open source is a panacea, but I think in general it increases certainty about security to some extent.
EU is about to make their 500 EUR illegal http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36208146 in a sense. If you're a drug dealer or a politician (no need to add the corrupt label in certain countries) I can help you with a few of them ;)

Yeah, making your cash illegal--it is unless you're willing to explain in year 2032 how you ended up with a 50 gallon drum full of 500 euro notes--will help. But in many countries where the government is corrupt and cannot provide the basic needs, IMO, they need to let the people try to make a living. Social contract: we cannot give you much, but we will not impede you as you try to feed your kids.
Looks promising to me!
I feel like the FedEx guy actually went above and beyond here.
I tell people it's about focusing on inputs and outputs rather than worrying about inputs and side-effects.

It let's you develop complex programs with clear separation of responsibilities without having to try to keep the model of the entire state-space in your head at once.
My issue with it is more practical. When my connection is anything less than perfect, instead of taking a few extra seconds to load, AMP pages just don't load for me.

AMP should have been a separate link like cached (maybe have the icon link to it?)
Completely different scenario - But even if it was similar they are fighting it hard [1] so I doubt they will end up paying anything close to that.

[1]http://fortune.com/2017/07/10/google-eu-fine-lawyers/
But without immutable data structures, even in a language like C you end up with a very expensive copying for FP work.
FYI: Article can only be read by signing in to or subscribing to WSJ.
Does disabling Wi-Fi prevent my Android phone from sending Wi-Fi frames? [pdf]
Other than biological research, I honestly can't think of any reason somebody would want to mail bees without a queen.
It’s Time to Let Go Your App
Linux.Cephei: a Nim virus
Floods: Recurrence intervals and 100-year floods (USGS)
Without immutable data structures, FP will be much much slower.
Not URS?
> However, overall it had pretty strong positive impact on economy. Many of the roadside merchants who used to be exclusively cash only, have started accepting dizital payments.

The evidence is that it had a strong negative effect. Also, anecdotally, the roadside merchants who used to accept PayTM for the duration while currency supply was squeezed, have now gone back to cash[1]

However PayTM's CEO is now buying a house in the poshest part of New Delhi, so I'm sure it wasn't all bad for him.

[1] http://www.pymnts.com/cash/2017/cash-usage-india-post-demone... ... "March data from RBI poured cold water on proponents of digital payment. The volume of overall digital transactions, which had increased by 42 percent from 672 million in November to 958 million in December 2016, declined by 20 percent to 763 million in February 2017."
It was the other way around, it went badly because they didn't collaborate from the start. Android was a huge code drop when it was published and upstreaming wasn't exactly their primary focus.
Configuring Database Mail Notifications in MS SQL Server
Taylor Swift and scalpers
Alright, here's my truncated, hashed phone number, in E.164 format and SHA1: 4bbd8

What's the full number?
I'm working on an app that makes use of this in a good way (to add new contacts and remove duplicates with explicit action by the user).

While doing some research on similar apps, I didn't find a single app that does not give the user an option to not upload the contacts to the app's servers. Basically if use doesn't give this permission, app is useless.

I'm hoping the app I build will get a sustainable revenue without needing to uploading all contacts.

But in the long run, for contact management apps, there's exponentially more value in handling the contacts data in the cloud, so that its users get the max benefit. But imo any app that's not for contact management (e.g., Facebook etc) should have limited read only access to the contacts data.
For people who can't access the link:
https://archive.fo/ynouY

I am confused with the article though. What would have been a successful result? That the all canceled currencies wouldn't have been exchanged or deposited?

I am reading this link:
http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/all-rs-500-rs-1000-b...

The wording is confusing at best:
" nearly 99% of the high-denomination currency notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 that had been withdrawn on November 9, 2016"

My comprehension says all currencies withdrawn on the date - Nov 9, 2016, when demonetization was started has been returned.
Agreed and this is probably true for most "legacy" languages - for example there is still very much a market for COBOL, REXX, etc and it does pay well. However the flip side is that the size of the niche market gets smaller over time.
The problem is that the big companies are not interested in phone numbers and names. The real gold are the connections - who you talk to more frequently, who are your real friends vs. random people you added, etc.
What is the possibility that this was a deliberate leak meant to obfuscate the true state of the art of what the CIA uses? Would that be too much of the trap of "hyper-competence" or the kind of thing you'd hope-for/expect-from an intelligence service?
New Puzzle Game Craze – Combination of Crossword and Sudoku
tl;dr They were prepared to and did modify their operations as necessary to meet their SLA. They did their jobs.

Emergency preparedness isn't rocket science even if your organization's mission happens to be rocket science.
Why? What would the CIA/NSA gain by telling Microsoft what they're doing? It's not like it's impossible to find serious security flaws without colluding, independent researchers do it all the time. It seems like asking for a quid pro quo would open up a huge risk of discovery without very much gain.
Surely there are companies out there that use local ants, and only ship locally? (Something something organic free-range...)
Nine Inch Nails solved the scalping problem, and I'm not sure why their solution isn't more widely adopted.

You had to give your name to buy the ticket, and you could only buy two. Then upon arrival at the venue, you got in line, went through security, and then went to will call. At that point you couldn't leave the venue. You never even took the ticket. Will call handed it to the ticket taker who let you in.

So if you were a scalper, the best you could do is scalp your second ticket and then attend the concert with the person you just screwed with an overpriced ticket.
I agree with all your points. I think, if anything, the study should show that JS is not inherently worse than any other language. It's got a bad rap, that mostly has to do with weird quirks in the language (i.e. == vs ===), but those quirks are easy to avoid. I do think testing in general is a good way to build more reliable programs.
FDA Approves Gene Modification Treatment for Children with Leukemia
Basic survival cannot force a person to work more than full time.
That's the point. You hash the number, and keep the hash. Send the first few digits of the hash to the server, it sends you a bunch of full hashes back. If your hash is in that list, then you know the server knows that person.
I'd hasten to add "don't attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by people having to deal with more than one problem at the same time."
Command Injection/Shell Injection [pdf]
It cropped it into a square. It has to be a square image you upload?
full-time on my projects and maybe go back to school
Good eye 11
The story of the Jewish codebreakers who helped win the war
Show HN: Iroh – Analyze JavaScript at Runtime
Internet traffic changes hands between ISPs and backbone carriers before reaching destination.

What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements?

If someone from Malaysia accesses your site, you would have to have agreement in place for the entire route. Or think other way, anyone can start extorting money from site owners at any point in time.

It's bad for you as a end customer.

It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal.
How to Inspect Every Piece of a Widebody Airplane
I don't think Taylor Swift is attempting to solve scalping by this. This is nothing more than promotion.
Hey mate thanks for the kind words. I think you may be right, I'll take your advice.
What is the prerequisite?
The input dial is cool, but there is no mention at all of what kind of switches they're using.

Is anyone really buying rubber-dome keyboards for $200?
The State of the Web
You're again wrongly assuming that the public costs of all pollution can be tied back to the bottom lines of individual corporations within a timeframe that affects their decisionmaking, or even at all. If this were the case, global warming wouldn't be happening. Not all externalities can be internalized; that is the fundamental flaw in your reasoning.
Do You Really Need a JavaScript Framework?
Thank you for sharing. Crypto is an interdisciplenary field, and we (folks on HN) view it through the lens of CS, at the exclusion of the other ways to approach the field.

Any other courses / topics you recommend?
Your browser can auto-update, your OS can have backdoor, drone and satellite can fly over our heads and observe our every moves. The safest way is to hide in a cave and put on tin foil hat. If one does not trust the service provider, then don't use their service. Similarly, if one cannot trust their ISP, then stay offline. Trust is critical in many things in life. If we cannot trust anyone anymore, then we have to build everything ourselves. Shit, is the cup of water in front of me safe to drink?
>> If they'd keep BTC balance, it wouldn't ease up any hurdles

That's the thing - they don't want to keep BTC balance which means merchants or their payment processors have to deal with the banks who are very reluctant to deal with BTC-originating payments which is a pretty significant obstacle in the way of BTC payments becoming more mainstream.
New cryptocurrencies don't require as much energy to mine initially
An Introduction to Managing Secrets Safely with Version Control Systems
"I am confused with the article though. What would have been a successful result? That the all canceled currencies wouldn't have been exchanged or deposited?"

Yes - exactly - the assumption earlier was that a significant amount of money stored with the denominations that were de-monetised was "black"/unaccounted money. And this would not be deposited into banks due to fear of being scrutinized. If this had happened on a large scale and if the money had not been deposited - the liability of the exchequer would have reduced.
https://leanpub.com/hands-on-nodejs

This is hands down the best book I read about node. As long as you're already comfortable with JS, this should be more than enough to have you write your own Node apps. Best thing about it: it doesn't limit your to writing node servers like most other intro books. You start seeing node as JS removed away from the browser to a standalone language and not just a way to write javascript web servers.

When I went through it, it was all in es5. So, like I said, if you're comfortable with JS - this shouldn't be a turn-off
> I don't think any sane person doubts intelligence is genetic and inheritable.

Are you kidding? It's probably one of the most controversial statements you can make in the general population.
A monitor with deep blacks seems to show this well, but with high gamma or bright blacks it looks bad. I have two monitors and it looks way better on one than the other.
> Another thing that I am wondering is the lack of coverage on the blokchain technology on HN, I see articles every where except here?

Blockchain has become a word like AI, in that marketers have learned that inserting it allows them to capitalize on hype even if the use of the block chain is either overengineering or unnecessary.
This is a lot more time consuming than the average concert venue entrance. Doesn't it result in huge lines?
Probably has a lot to do with the fact that you have 30 years of music queues you can draw from now. Instead of having a 35 piece orchestra score each episode, they can just re-use.
I wonder what happens if you're holding your Windows 10 device, but you're still in hearing range of your Echo? If you say "Cortana, open Alexa", does the wakeword Alexa also cause the Echo to start listening, so that you end up with both devices attempting to service your voice request, and vice versa? Or do both Windows 10 and Echo devices have a sort of anti-wakeword when they hear the name of their counterpart agent?
Can you expand on your hatred of JS arrays? I don't understand how iteration semantics really affect anything with them since the spec gaurantees that numerical properties come first, in order, regardless.
My wife and I looked very carefully into this, and we came to the same conclusion.[1] We decided that the very real costs were not worth the tenuous benefits.

Deciding to bottle feed made life way easier. My wife has trouble getting to sleep, while I can fall asleep in economy class on a 90 minute flight even before taking off. Our daughter woke up every 3 hours like clockwork for more than a year. My wife would've gone crazy if she was the one who was charged with feedings.

Medical professionals are socialized to always err on the safe side. No doctor or nurse ever got fired for scheduling an MRI or CAT scan "just to be safe." They approach breastfeeding the same way--the studies are inconclusive, so just do it to be safe.

[1] Like every engineer, I feel totally qualified to opine on scientific studies regardless of the field.
The difference is it's earmarked money today. There's no potential to spend your food money on a phone and then claim you can't buy food at the end of the month.
Rather than taking a position, being agnostic seems more appropriate to me.

We don't know. We don't know what physics may enable, we don't know if there's other life out there or what capabilities it might have.

I don't see any need for coming down on a particular side, nor any solid evidence for doing so.
He published a document[1] on their website with the letter head of the FCC, signed as the FCC. He was trying to impersonate the FCC. There were plenty of other things he could have posted to show off the vulnerability, without the worry of legal trouble.

[1]: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/DOC-578d579d1f000000-A.pdf