skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Having to decry ever racist that pops up on Twitter with "reason" when they had no intention of debating in good faith in the first place is exhausting

That sounds exhausting. Maybe you should pick a couple of the ones that do appear to be interested in debating in good faith?

> letting them run wild just means that other people are going to stop going there and contributing to the discourse. So now all you've done is succeeded in silencing marginalized people, which was their goal in the first place.

And the alternative is to ban everything from twitter that people find offensive? I think that is a losing proposition. I'd much rather focus on promoting and spreading content from silenced and marginalized people to make sure their voices are heard and amplified.
Not only those aspects of the petrochemical revolution, it's also the total pervasiveness of plastic products in our lives.
This is just "feel-good" bullshit that doesn't actually solve any real problem.

In my life, I have only reported two different vulnerabilities to two different vendors.

One of them didn't care at all. They were transmitting usernames and passwords in plaintext and I actually showed one of their engineers this, live, in person, and he just shrugged.

The other one told me something to the effect of "yes, this is very serious. We'll look into it right away" and actually fixed it... 3 years later.

Your biggest hurdle isn't reporting vulnerabilities. That's the easy part.

The biggest hurdle is getting someone to care.
The rest of Europe is still an option.
XYZ coords done.
I am right-handed, and I also hold the phone in my left hand. It goes in my left pocket.
IRC had this what, a decade before AIM even existed? I love reading about the great innovative features of the huge multitude of modern chat apps we have these days, which were present in software from the '90s. The more things change...
How can an independent security researcher be aware of such a breach ?
Those are not metallic and are naturally formed, with the "precise" examples cherry-picked from the minority not obviously lopsided or malformed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klerksdorp_sphere

> As proposed by Cairncross, the grooves represent fine-grained laminations within which the concretions grew. The growth of the concretions within the plane of the finer-grained laminations was inhibited because of the lesser permeability and porosity of finer-grained sediments relative to the surrounding sediments. Faint internal lamina, which corresponds to exterior groove, can be seen in cut specimens. A similar process in coarser-grained sediments created the latitudinal ridges and grooves exhibited by innumerable iron oxide concretions found within the Navajo Sandstone of southern Utah called "Moqui marbles".

> Similarly, the claims that these objects consist of metal, i.e. "...a nickel-steel alloy which does not occur naturally..." according to Jochmans are definitely false as discovered by Cairncross and Heinrich. The fact that many of the web pages that make this claim also incorrectly identify the pyrophyllite quarries, from which these objects came, as the "Wonderstone Silver Mine" is evidence that these authors have not verified the validity of, in this case, misinformation taken from other sources since these quarries are neither known as silver mines nor has silver ever been mined in them in the decades in which they have been in operation.
You can say the same thing about global warning.

A lot of worry about the fact that global average temperature will increase by 2 degrees in the following 50 years which will cause widespread disasters (50 years from now)
The bureaucracy will always need to create more of itself.

And it isn't always about the money, either. Sometimes the petits Napoleons just need to lord the tiny bit of power they have over those who don't even have that much.

My cynicism is bleeding through. The US government has a tendency to just throw money at a problem instead of actually doing something to solve it. Failing that, they throw on a half-assed patch that is only funded well enough to partially address the unintended consequences of the check-writing fix.

The only realistic way to keep BI out of the pockets of rent-seekers is to pay it as the basic necessities rather than as cash. Nobody will raise your rent from 20# of corn to 30# of corn, but they sure will raise it from $200 to $300. And the best way to do that is to hire people to produce the necessities directly. But congress is skittish about doing anything that looks too much like communism. Hence the vouchers. So they can control how things get done without actually doing anything.
Search bar doesn't work in latest Firefox/Edge.

Or am I doing something wrong? I type a keyword in there, but there is no search button, the list doesn't change after pressing enter.
Significantly better than using MD5 or storing in plaintext in 2012 (both of which would have been likely in 2012).

And in 2012 the current breaks from this year were not yet known. Some considered sha1 to be in its twilight, but it was not 'broken' yet at that time.
Flexport’s plan to build a freight empire with its $110M raise
When I was in school Internet wasn't a thing yet.

However, me and some friends "hacked" the program that blocked virtually everything interesting unless you had the password on our school computers. The first thing we did was boot up in DOS. There we found the secret password file for the blocking program. Alas, when we tried the password it didn't work. It must be encrypted! So we went back into DOS and renamed the password file. When we booted up Windows again the program thought it was running for the very first time and asked us to enter a password. We entered "AAAAAA" and exited into DOS again. The new password file now contained the "encrypted" password: "GGGGGG". Hmm, there's a pattern here... We then restored the old password file and "decrypted" the original password. From that point on we had full access to any system! Those were the days!
I did. It's a principle thing. That odd notion that if you can't feed yourself you don't deserve to be fed.
Which is what the article says Discus did, they moved /from/ sha1 /to/ bcrypt in 2012. Same as the companies you helped, in 2012.
I've got a relative in the music/movie business. He was pretty successful at both, most people in the US over 40 would probably recognize him. He and his family live well, but he still tours; usually small venues, travels by tour bus instead of fancy planes. Small crew, just a manager, sound guy and his wife. I figure he might pull $5K a stop, maybe 2x that depending on the size of the venue. Not bad, but not FU money. He still acts in movies, even some that have not held up well over time. I doubt he makes a ton with those roles either. But he still does them. My mom asked why he still does it, at his age; he replied, "I've got kids to put through school."

I saw him perform for the first time in 40 years, and realized how much he lied to my mom. On stage, he was (as the kids these days say) lit. He clearly loved the music (he still writes and performs new material), but the light in his eyes showed that what he really loved was performing and sharing his music with the audience.

Most musicians can't count on a career lasting 50+ years. The era of singles is gone, and performances are where the next generation will have to make their living.
The article keeps talking about "the size of the proton", its "radius", etc., but I would like to point out that the proton is not a sphere and does not, in fact, have a size in the normal sense, being an aggregate of three other particles; so in this case the notion of "size" itself must be defined in some pragmatic fashion before any meaningful statements about it can be made.
Most salespeople take a product that exists and convince you to buy it. Steve took a product that didn't exist and convinced you to build it. His talent was organizing people around a common vision, not just selling the result.
Jobs definitely saw the bigger picture: computers must be tools for everybody, not just technical people. The work that was done by Xerox PARC, Apple, Microsoft, Google and countless others over the years to make complex tools usable by everybody is simply phenomenal.

I don't think this would have been possible elsewhere on Earth. There was a unique combination of people, places, events and things that allowed all of these innovations to flourish.
I don't know that Chubby Checker did so well. I saw him at a county fair 25 years ago. He was performing in a tent the size of a large restroom, with only two rows of benches, at about 2pm. There may have been only 3-4 people there altogether.
> ...keep the working copy itself on DB, that would be silly!

I don't think it's necessarily silly; it can be very useful in some scenarios.

I keep all my local working copies in a folder synced across several machines. I use Resilio Sync because it is better[1] than Dropbox for this purpose, but it's basically equivalent.

What this lets me do is stop working suddenly, at any moment (baby crying upstairs, or I lost track of time and have to bike to the office for a meeting) get up from my computer and move to another one (in another room in my house, or across town at my employer's office).

The code doesn't have to be in any finished state, needn't compile, I can literally be right in the middle of a line of code. As long as I've saved my work to disk, it will have synced before I reach the next computer, so I can sit down and resume work.

Before I had kids I didn't need this as much, so I just did git push/pull.

But then you have to do the work of pushing your half-finished junk to a different private repo, or rebasing to avoid polluting the git history with a bunch of crap commits just because you had to move, or not do that and just accept having a git history filled with crap.

Frankly I wish more of my work was capable of being distributed like this, but it's really only suitable for collections of plain files, which are amenable to being synced file-by-file. Luckily that includes almost all my programming work, however.

[1]: Resilio Sync is better than Dropbox for this because: it is much faster to sync than Dropbox, it supports symlinks so it doesn't corrupt your data when syncing folders containing them, and it syncs my data only among computers I control, not to any cloud service.
Would love to hear about these actions and statements that allow for use of the term "nazi".

Spoiler: I've watched every single one of his speeches. I would bet money you're understanding of him is limited to Buzzfeed gossip.
Yes I was - never been to India but I have been to Bulgaria.
I think it's genetic.

I never really liked beer, until I discovered hoppy ales. Thanks to the trend, I can now find decent beer almost everywhere.

I recently tried some sort of dry-hopped lemonade - no beer at all, and I found it to be very nice.
It was never cutting edge. It was half informed lazy coder homemade crypto in 2012.

SHA1 is a fast hash. It's designed to be tractable to calculate lots of SHA1 in a small time. This is independent of whether it has collisions and is considered broken. It was fast from day 1. Fast hashes are not suitable for protecting passwords. They were never suitable for protecting passwords.
The rate at which these security breaches are happening is very alarming to me.

I don't know what the effects are of them (including this one), but my gut tells me they'll only increase over time; perhaps the severity of them as well.

It's honestly making me re-consider my use of the internet, technology, and electronics.

What's the future hold with regard to security, breaches, and keeping our data and information safe?
This comment crystallizes my concerns.

I use and write open source because software is clay, not shiny spheres.

People often need to blend and mould code.

Tracking which bits of clay end up where is a huge burden.

Those fragments of code that Oracle sued Google over? That's where this leads.
You can ask the same question about copying the .git directory with rsync over SSH, and the answer for that one applies to your original qustion as well:

* You can take a look at the packets (using e.g. tcpdump).
* You can take a look at what the binaries (rsync, ssh vs. keybase and git-remote-keybase) read and write (using e.g. strace).
* You can read the source code.
* You can read the white papers and other analyses about the crypto used, and decide if you trust it.

The average user probably won't bother with these, because they need time, effort and experience.

If you can imagine a fundamentally better possible way for the average user to verify crypto, please let us know.
It's possible the researcher managed to get into a position to download the same database snapshot.
That depends on what license Jane used for her contributions. A contributor license agreement (CLA) would make that a lot clearer in the case that she submitted her contributions back to the main project. If I used L0, I would definitely have a CLA.

If she forked it and maintained her fork separately, it seems simple enough how things work if she updated the license file. You'd just end up with the combination of her new license and Bob's old license. However, it is a little unclear what it means if she didn't change the license file. How can you be sure that she just hadn't yet gotten around to updating the payment information?
I can say even more: if an armed group of people can influence the decisions of the government or Congress or any other institution then something is very wrong (or you are living in Somalia). There cannot be two authorities.

You can remember American Civil War for example. There were people opposing the government, they had weapons but it didn't help them.

There may be cases when weapon can be necessary: for example if you live in a remote uninhabited area. But I don't think people should have a long range weapon when they are in a densely populated city.
I remember that glorious feeling :)
You're betting everything on vacuous what-ifs. I mean, let's turn this around:

With no way to define intelligence (except by pointing to ourselves), we don't even know if we're good at it. For all we know human intelligence is a dead end. Maybe any entity that is not a product of evolution, free of genetic detritus that becomes maladaptive around advanced technology, will outstrip human civilization like human civilization outstripped evolution.

I don't doubt the book is full of entertaining soundbytes, but given these two quotes I am unconvinced that it is any more than entertainment.
In some countries, your solution is more expensive than the BTC CC fee.
No, those companies did not use SHA1 in 2012 or any time close to then. They used bcrypt until they upgraded to scrypt.

SHA1 was useless for passwords long before then.
(1) Annual revenue if successful. So, it's number of users/customers times average revenue for each.

(2) Ease of getting first users/customers before virality, a marketing/sales effort, etc. can work.

(3) Some form of lock-in. E.g., once a company has all their important data in database manager X, they will be reluctant to change to Y. E.g., once all the office is good with office suite software X, they will be reluctant to change to Y. Once all your friends are on Facebook, you want to join Facebook and won't want to leave all your friends. And there are more cases.

(4) Various barriers to entry to keep out competitors. Technological secret sauce can be one such. Also some proprietary data. Sure, have to count some forms of lock-in as possible barriers to entry.

(5) Ease of developing the product or service to get to good profits, e.g., your wife is pregnant, your three year old needs braces on her legs, your nine year old needs braces on her teeth and wants to ride horses, your 11 year old wants to be an Olympic figure skater, your 16 year old wants his own car and to go to a private high school that will let him race ahead in computing, and your 18 year old has done really well in violin, e.g., much as in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvtibhCdepQ

[October 27, 2017 will be exactly 100 years since he did that, fresh off the boat, at Carnegie Hall and got a remark from a violinist in the audience "Isn't a little hot in here?" and a remark "Not for pianists!"]

has been accepted to Julliard, and wants a $500,000 violin (down from th $15 million he really wanted). And, by the way, you need a larger house and want an enclosed, Olympic pool. So, you want profitiability. Oh, yes, everyone in your family over the age of 5 wants the new iPhone for Christmas. Your wife needs a new SUV, bigger than the last one. You want a Corvette, e.g., just to save time driving to work you understand. Oh, yes, the new house needs a four car garage.

(6) Technology is your friend that helps you make money and not your enemy that threatens to run you out of business.
That write-up seems to mainly try to shrug off the "what is intelligence" issue by virtue of "maximization", while ignoring that when dealing with human intelligence, selecting for maximization of a single field gets you autistic savants, not Lex Luthor-grade manipulative geniuses.
This is a very standard format: Action, quantifiable result. Action, quantifiable result. I think one of the best edits one can make to their resume is to at least convert to that format.

"Responsible for C++ implementation of WhizBang Product's codebase" = ???

"Implemented BarFoo feature resulting in an additional $50M in revenue and 3 industry awards" = ahh, here's something this person can do for me!
> I don’t know, should it be special to be able to explain things?

Given that so few people can explain something, yes. The problem is that explaining requires a very deep understanding which so few people attain. This Feynman story sums it up perfectly[1]:

Once, I [David Goodstein] said to him, "Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics." Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But he came back a few days later to say, "I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it."

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-...
I thought the alt-wrong loved their frozen peaches. What happened to the 1st amendment?
If you go international to someplace cheaper and with any kind of tech scene you may be able to find at least a bit of work assisting software developers with English for apps & sites. There may be a bunch of people able to do that, but "local and able to meet" may have a quality all its own (along with "willing to be paid local rates in local currency").

You say you don't have skills, but at the least you write and presumably speak good grammatically correct English. You might also have at least a little bit of still relevant domain knowledge from your previous career - it may not get you in the door in that industry, but it may open doors in related ones.
The story has a few weak points, and having to fight against powerful adversaries with metric tons of vested interest in virtually all areas the AGI would disrupt is probably the biggest.

As you said, it would require much more chess moves.

I personally think the plot of the movie "Transcendence" is more believable -- if your AGI is fond of you (for one reason or another; you might even program it that way in a way that's not overridable) you can just freely let it loose in the internet and only give it instructions. The movie demonstrated how that AGI first made very sure to survive and then started to both expand itself and help its human creator and benefactor.

That being said, this story was still very enjoyable but I feel it lacked conflict. "As if they fell into a well-placed trap" is just not that captivating. And yet again, there are a lot of powers in our current world, most of which unseen and unofficial. For me to really like such a story, I want to see how the AGI will deal with them. I am 99% sure that any respectable AGI will eventually win but the journey to there would be extremely interesting!
> As you can see from the image in the article the traditional circular layout was the only one that had both significantly shorter keying time and significantly lower error rate.

The image in the article shows nothing of the kind, as you might notice if you ask "lower than what?" On your analysis, layout IV-A had a "significantly shorter keying time" than layout VI-A, but that's nonsense -- those are the same layout.

The answer is that "significantly lower error rate" and "significantly shorter keying time" refer to statistics taken within a comparison group of three layouts, and don't apply to comparisons between a layout from one group and another layout (or the same layout!) from a different group.
The same thing happens with coffee, where people will indicate on surveys that they like black coffee, but most people prefer something with milk and creme.

That said, the smaller breweries have to make a product that's somehow different. It's not surprising they're trying that route. Orchestras have been trying to one-up each other by making their music a bit sharper to get a "distinctive sound" for hundreds of years.
If there will be a group of armed people actively opposing government agents, then it will become a band of criminals. And if there will be larger united group of people (a whole state or region for example) then there will be a civil war.
> A defence of "reasonable excuse" would still be available to academics, journalists or others who may have a legitimate reason to view such material.

Reminds me of the bit from
Family Guy when the police bust in to stop an act of prostitution, and the John points to the camera and says that he's filming it, so it's a porno.

The cop responds: "As long as you're filming and selling it, it's legal. Enjoy your day."

So bizarre.
Worth noting here is that the approximation factor here is 5500. (I.e., the algorithm is only guaranteed to return a route whose length is no more than 5500 times that of the optimal route.) Much bigger than 3/2! But apparently it's the first polynomial-time constant-factor approximation algorithm at all for it, so...
Look at the team first. Ideas usually need experts in their fields, so the teams are usually different. Now imagine you're trapped on an island with cannibals. Who would you take?

Your idea is wrong. The market could be off, the solution is not a good fit, the product night be too expensive, the partners might not be receptive.

What are the consequences of that? It's like trying to shoot a small target at a distance. Your first bullet will miss. That's fine. But how will you hit it?

If you only have one bullet, very limited resources, are you accurate enough to not miss? Do you have a high firing rate? Can you do 3 prototypes/day? What are the odds of hitting other targets in the field even if you don't get yours?

But there's more.. most of your targets will actually be hidden. Now how well do you know your space? If you are building something for millennials, a partner be a millennial. If you build something for city councils, ideally one partner has managed a city council. The more you know your space, the easier it is in everything.
> run-time contracts and things like Clojure.spec come about to help fill the void of static typing

If you look at clojure.spec as a replacement for a type system, you'll be frustrated. The focus is on expressiveness, not proof. It's quite a different beast.

The leverage comes from the fact specs are data, and therefore usable at runtime, which usually isn't possible due to type-erasure.

Not having a chasm between compile-time and runtime allows extending the language. You can run clojure.spec checks, or a full type system (like Typed Clojure), etc. The entire mindset is based on "there's only runtime".

The discomfort comes from comparing that to a language that has a canonical type system, and evaluates type definitions in what is essentially a separate runtime only available in the compiler. Apples, oranges.