skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the only difference between lying and knowingly misleading the point in time of the subject in question?

If I say “this stock will rise in value” and then it doesn’t, that isn’t lying. If I say that while knowing the CEO is committing felonies, it still wouldn’t be lying, but it would be problematic. If I say “this is a share of Apple” when it’s actually Twitter, that’s lying. Bad forecasts aren’t lies, they’re mistakes.

The rating agencies’ role in the crisis is interesting and nuanced, and it is difficult to fault anyone other than the investors who over-relied on (and arguably misinterpreted) their guidance.

If you look at every security the agencies rated AAA, they performed as expected in cash flows. The underlying mortgages were mostly garbage, but some kept paying. That meant the top tranche of those structures, the tranches that got a high rating, kept paying.

If you held to maturity, the securities performed as promised. (Cf: if the government hadn’t bailed out AIG, they may not have.) The problem was they crashed in value in the interim because people began doubting if they would perform. That was a problem for liquidity-constrained investors, which was almost everyone in 2008. Rating agencies don’t say “this bond won’t trade at 50¢ on the dollar.” They say “this bond will probably pay you back.” And in the latter assessment, they were surprisingly accurate. The problem was people took the second to mean the first.
Broken Syndicates
There is something to be said for that, 20/20 hindsight is easy to classify and mistakingly so bringing reasons for things unknown or impossible to know ahead of time is silly. I get that too.
How a simple flaw in the Cox Communications website put all its users at risk
Some time ago, the beginner hacker Mark M. Leffer found a critical but easy to find flaw access exploit in the Cox Communication ISP website. Cox Communications, also known as Cox Cable, is an American privately owned subsidiary of Cox Enterprises providing digital cable television, Home Automation services, and telecommunications in the USA. It is the third largest cable television provider in the USA, serving more than 6.2 million customers.

Mark notified Cox Communications through email and the Twitter support page, but he did not get any replies and had no luck contacting the technical side of Cox Communications. He did not want to waste time, and he tried to protect the customers they are serving by thoroughly explaining the access exploit in a detailed e-mail and how to fully disclose the exploit.

Mark M. Leffer was asked about finding this access exploit. He said about being generally interested in learning more and training himself to become a better pentester and hacker. He read an article written about the company Bell having issues protecting pirates from accessing the database. Mark knew that Bell is owned by the same people as Cox Communications, so he decided to try various methods, but with no luck. As the time was passing by, Mark settled for the most simple thing called session swapping. He was able to access his friends account through a simple flaw successfully!

None of the huge companies like COX should have these kinds of natural to come around flaws in their website, said Mark. By his means, if he as a beginner hacker can find these access exploits in their website, then imagine an advanced hacker easily finding such easy to find exploits and actually having the wrong intentions and further exploiting this and retrieving the database or even a part of it putting many of its users at risk.
Gates liked to make strong definitive statements and have his employees convince him he was wrong. Arguing back was rewarded with promotions provided you were right. It was a culture that selected heavily for type A personalities.
It starts with the claim that this law could put Flappy Bird on the hook for decades of prison time. I rebut, and you say (paraphrased) "no, read the law, anyone with 1MM users could be sent to prison for failure to comply". This is obviously not true.

Actually, with specific regard to Flappy Bird, it is true because it had more than 100 million installs, far surpassing the 50 million requirement to expose him to criminal as well as civil penalties. So, in contrast to your statement, it actually is true.

Now, the proposal does not in fact have an auditor requirement, but also, the clause that discusses auditors goes out of its way to make it clear that the types of third parties they're referring to are technical experts, which startups already use.

I'm not sure what you mean here. There is an auditor requirement "where reasonable," and presumably "reasonable" would be entirely up to a court's discretion. Also, "technical experts" in the context of this law, wouldn't necessarily be the developer of the site, but rather technical experts who are trained in complying with this law. Likely, that means someone brought in by a law firm or professional auditing outfit, at enormous expense.
Evolution often makes viruses less deadly, as it wants to maximize dispersion, and killing the host is usually not a good strategy. They will probably just try to mutate to cover those inner parts of the shell proteins.
Show HN: CodeGrade – a blended learning application for programming education
Why is it so hard to believe the headline?
A database is simply an organized collection of data with a restricted interface for accessing and/or querying said data. This seems to qualify.
I’d argue there isn’t any legal basis for any law, as claiming so is circular reasoning.
> Touting the "free market" is the basis of their being employed.

How so?

> Of course they agree in this

Agree on what?

It sounds like you're grasping at straws here.
Midterm elections and blockchain
Don't Google fly remote candidates to the office? I assumed that was standard procedure at BigCorps (it is at mine).
Weird, I experienced the interactivity as completely broken on iOS Chrome. I couldn’t even scroll properly to just read the article.
wordpress plus buddypress - both free / open source. I've been wanting to find someone that could package those together with a few other plugins and settings to shore them up (added security and anti-spam settings) and make it a one click deploy for people via the popular services like DO, vultr, etc.

I think it would be easy to get one person in a family to pay for hosting while another person keeps an eye on updates and backups. Same with groups of friends, even if most are broke / not willing to pay, if just one would pay it would be trivial to host a few hundred friends on one install and a few hundred family members on another.

Buddypress is mature enough with enough plugins to do most of what fbook and similar offer all for free. Only thing I don't really know is what kind of mobile notifications options are out there and people would expect or need, as I don't use fbk the same way others do.

But groups, pics, vids, messaging, profiles, privacy settings, these things are fairly easy with BP really.
I wrote a similar comment before, viewing redux as a realization of the event sourcing pattern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17061827

You can go even further and use the exact same "events" or "actions" for event sourcing on the server side too. You just need to save the list of actions to the server. This lets you do realtime sync and multiplayer really easily!
> Diablo is just a goddamn video game.

The Super Bowl is "just a goddamn game" too. The Harry Potter series is "just a goddamn book" and Game of Thrones is "just a goddamn TV show". I'm sure whatever leisure activities you enjoy can easily be given a sneering dismissal as well.

Are we not allowed to have passion for our hobbies?
Much of what gets taught in public high schools is really with a theme of Manifest Destiny: the pioneers came and conquered, threw off the yolk of foreign royalty, sought to create freedom from sea to shining sea

I think that's what people remember when they think back to their own history classes, because that's all they were prepared to assimilate and remember when they were teenagers. This comes up often when somebody learns about something horribly imperialist the United States did, or something horribly racist or otherwise corrupt that happened here. Their first reaction is, "Why didn't they teach us THAT in high school? It would have made history class so much more interesting and personally meaningful to me!" Of course they WERE taught that in high school, and odds are they had a nice idealistic teacher who did their best to help them personally connect with it, but it didn't make any impression on them because they were teenagers and didn't give a shit.

tl;dr They did teach you that and you were bored out of your skull and forgot it as fast as you could.
The Duplication of the Square in Plato’s Meno [pdf]
Hi! I'm a project dev. In case it's helpful, there's lots of Q&A in this previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18330876

I'll try to answer any questions that pop up here as well.
Dislike the title. Not like there hasn't been other "real progress" in Parkinson's elsewhere. Yes, there is a burgeoning gut-brain line of thought in PD but it's not the only thing. Furthermore, the study that is referred is a retrospective case-control study - yes this picks out signals in historical records, but this would be considered a preliminary statistical sign that a prospective, randomized trial would have to try and replicate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=0+RESEARCH+ARTICLE...

Additionally, I would characterize this as one of many things to be excited about in the PD research / clinical world today:

For example - things that would be useful to patients - characterization of GBA mutations and new therapeutic compounds in the pipeline. Same with LRRK2.

For more in the gut-brain line of thinking - the use of GLP agonists medicines - first shown to be protective of islet cells in the pancreas in diabetes, in a human randomized control trial that showed decreased decline in Parkinson's disease vs. placebo controls.

All of these are something other than a "Me too" dopamine drug.

Plus RT-QuiC techniques for an actual blood test for Parkinson's....

I don't have to mention deep brain stimulation (DBS), which has been around for 3-4 decades, but the newer devices and techniques have an effect size in blinded trials that equal or exceed the effect size of previous trials that were open label...
> The chip comes with a hardware microphone disconnect feature that physically cuts the device’s microphone from the rest of the hardware whenever the lid is closed

Why do you need a chip for this? Can't you just break the circuit with a regular dumb physical switch? Or is this a much more complex problem than it first appears?
60% seems low to me
What’s your basis for determing status?

In my experience it massively elevated my status 15 years ago thru now, where it seems to have no effect and perhaps anchor me away from higher level jobs given the value of the output and scarcity of 10x engineers.

I’m happy enough as a simple IC if they pay and treat me well, but that’s not been the case in 5+ years which has me in retirement from the field.
This only protects when the lid is closed, but many people leave the lid open on their desk.

I would love to see a light come on if the camera or microphone is receiving power, and then only turn on power to these devices when a program requests it.
I've known this since I was a young boy and Tetris was new.

Knocking out 200 lines is faster acting and more effective for me than Hydroxozine, and I think that pill has done wonders for me for as needed anxiety.

There's a lot of factors. Music. The rhythm and speed of the game. Lower levels let you get in to a relaxing pace, while speed increases over the course of the game force you to become sharper and more attentive on the game.

But I think the solo experience of it is what I like the most. It's me against myself. Old high scores or speed runs. I watched the end of the Tetris World Championships this year, and I'm confident I could make a run at it, but would the competitive atmosphere and head to head play ruin it for me? Would it remove the therapy of the game for me, and actually bring about more anxiety?
As a most extreme counterargument I raise you the NBA players. They got it, we don't. No amount of training can make up for it if you don't have it.
None. He was distributing copyrighted articles from JSTOR. These are court cases which legally cannot be copyrighted (with any copyrighted annotations in the paper copies properly redacted). The two situations have nothing in common.
It seems like these issues are rarely solely due to unilateral technical incompetence; there's often at least one person who sees the true risk, tries to communicate the risk, and gets completely ignored. The Challenger disaster had several Thiokol engineers express major concerns in vain; this disaster had John Reidy (supposedly):

>A defense contractor for the CIA named John Reidy claims he warned the agency that it was using insecure communications systems in 2008, and again in 2010 when he started to suspect the channels had been cracked. A year later he was fired by the agency, a move he claims was retaliation for not shutting up.

>“It was a recipe for disaster,” Reidy said. “We had a catastrophic failure on our hands that would ensnare a great many of our sources.”

The person who could actually save the day and prevent the catastrophe gets ignored, marginalized, and/or fired. The people who were involved in the original disastrous decision keep moving up in the organization and usually keep their jobs after the catastrophe. So it's not like these organizations are lacking smart people: their institutional and bureaucratic incompetence just prevents those people from doing their job properly.
Who controls the switch? You need an entire secure system distinct from the untrusted CPU - or a manual switch on the side. The latter goes against everything Apple believes in design wise.
If they want to have different opening times for different times of the year painted onto their windows, they can achieve that without repainting:

8am-4pm (2nd Sunday in March - 1st Sunday in November)

9am-5pm (1st Sunday in November - 2nd Sunday in March)

In fact, many business already use this technique successfully to display different opening hours for different days of the week.
> To be fair, it almost entirely transfers wealth to the extremely well off

Wrong. Free trade benefits the poor the most. It is responsible for massive reductions in poverty at the global level, and is critical to the economic growth of developing countries. Trade barriers (particularly in agriculture) are a major source of harm to the world's poor:

http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/trade/publication/the-role...

I encourage you to open your mind on this subject and accept reality rather than hang on to a view that is fundamentally incorrect.

> Outsourcing is colonialism by another name.

What do you mean by "colonialism"?
This was also acknowledged by Greg Young a long time ago :) [1]

[1] maybe this talk? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHGkaShoyNs
That's neat. Too bad it's entirely buried and no one uses it.
It also means that a network based on PoS is much cheaper to maintain if we assume equal RoI between PoS and PoW. This is great and should give PoS a competitive advantage.
A recommender system is super hard because humans are hard. Even if the problem is well defined, like movie recommendations, it is exceptionally hard. Read about the Netflix challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize which took some of the worlds best researchers (trying to win $1MM) 3 years to increase Netflixes algorithm by 10%.
I feel like I need to correct you on a couple of things.

People being mean to you in a forum is not evidence of "a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male".

You don't have to be a genocidal maniac to be a white supremacist.

'White genocide' is not something someone yelled in the heat of the moment - it's an old neo-Nazi term and it is obviously intended to justify extremism - after all, what response is inappropriate if you're a victim of genocide?

The people Niemöller was talking about faced imprisonment, torture and murder. The oppression the owners of Gab face involves putting on pants and driving some servers to the nearest colo facility.

Aristotle was not Belgian.

The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself."

And the London Underground is not a political movement.
I've known many more or less unemployable people who started contributing to significant open source projects, and based on that got hired to well paid positions.
That is certainly a popular conspiracy theory.

It’s hard to believe, though. Cellphones have been around for a generation. The early ones had higher output power than modern ones. If there was any risk of harm, we would see it by now.
> And I'd much prefer to watch that than the harrowing "Head-On: Apply directly to the forehead" commercial.

Haha that commercial is so entertaining in its absurdism
Good question. The framers of the US Constitution attempted to do it with a system of checks and balances... which works to a certain extent, but not perfectly. Point is just because it’s hard, that’s no reason to give up trying.
>My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than not.

Maybe that's correct, but is it more useful than the nurture view?

It's a debate; I mean, clearly, you don't want to spend a lot of time trying to get better at things you will never get better at, but sometimes it's not easy to tell you will be good at a thing until you spend a lot of time on prerequisites.

This is the argument that even if it's true that nature is more important than nurture, it is sometimes more useful to believe that nurture is more important, and that you can learn things.

I think there are a fair number of studies showing that people with a 'growth mindset' as they say, who believe it's about hard work and not just innate ability, tend to do better than people who believe it's fixed.[1]

I mean, in the usual case, of course, people who are smarter are more likely to think than anyone can learn things, 'cause their experience is that learning things is easier, and the way work and education is segmented, quite often people are put near others of their ability. but... I think a lot of these studies control for that.

[1]https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.h...
I'm suggesting the lid could control the switch, physically, as in when you close it the mic's circuit is broken.
My back of the napkin, middle of the night calculations put it at 8.5% (which I used in some other comment in this discussion). Googling by light of day suggests 12% is the correct figure.

I've studied this problem space a fair amount. I agree that the weather is a factor. But I also think the housing issues are another major factor.

At this point, I'm tired of arguing it. I run into this same argument over and over on Hacker News -- that the insane housing prices and shortages of affordable housing in California have no bearing whatsoever on the high rates of homelessness there. I continue to be flabbergasted by what looks to me like a ridiculous claim on the face of it.

So, I think I'm done here for now and it's time for me to go do other things.
Has Apple security record on electronics been ever broken? I don’t think so. If there is an exploit yet, at least it’s not publicly known and no-one has seen it for sale on the black market, so it would be in the millions. I’d say Apple is trustworthy as far as I’m concerned, perhaps not trustworthy enough if the threat model is Hillary-level politics, but trustworthy enough for a billion dollars business.
Your own biases?
What about a physical killswitch goes against Apple's design? The iPhone has always had a ringer/vibrate switch on its side since it was introduced. Obviously it doesn't do anything hardware-wise, but it's still a switch that disables some functionality.
For now we're stopping with volumes published up through June 2018. The Free Law Project (https://free.law) is a good source for cases published after that, although they're mostly unofficial versions scraped from court websites.

We're hopeful that all courts will switch to official digital-first publishing over the next few years, as a few courts already have. Once the transition is complete, it might make sense for us to go back and fill in the gap volumes.
Yes you are optimistic.
I tried one that didn't work before a friend with a Mac offered to lend it to me for a few hours.
Amen. Worse is better.
Just to clarify for anyone reading, when asked if the game would be coming to PC, the response from the guy on stage was “no, this is only coming to Android and iOS”.

The “do you guys not have phones?” remark was in response to the crowd booing. It got a few laughs at the time.
Yea that could work. I think this is cheaper for them surprisingly enough. Switches are expensive.
perhaps it's possible that it's not enough to be dangerous in isolation, but perhaps significant enough for those that already have a lot of existing dna damage (e.g. late stage cancer patients and elderly).
You are both right and wrong. Flappy Bird indeed had over 50MM users (in fact it had over 100MM users), and therefore its owner would have criminal liability under this law regardless of revenue. However you are right that the lower limit excludes people from criminal penalties. Having just 1MM user accounts still exposes them to the full brunt of the civil penalties available under this law that could easily bankrupt them. So if you have between 1MM and 50MM users, you won't go to prison, you'll just be broke.
Am I the only one that thinks staying in summer time is insane?

The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone.

We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit.

Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.
Haskell for all: Dhall – A non-Turing-complete configuration language
Yes, Spain is in the "wrong" time zone geographically and should really go back an hour relative to CEST. This would put it in the same time zone as Portugal, Britain, Ireland and Morocco.

Personally, here in the UK I'd like to see daylight saving time abolished, but we should stay permanently in summer time. In winter the sun is usually up well before I am, but in the evening it gets dark far too early.
Should be named "Crypto Currency Law Recap".
Am I the only one that thinks staying in summer time is insane?

The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone.

We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit.
Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.
I've used a MySQL table `event_store` with fields `uuid`, `playhead`, `payload` and `recorded_on`; works fine.
Yep. Plus people working in factories or cops or teachers or those working in stores or restaurants or any customer facing office etc are tied too.

Flexible schedule of programmers is more of an exception then norm.