skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm normally not a fan of congressional hearings where everyone is trying to grandstand, but this one was particularly good.

The congresswoman asked the Equifax CEO to provide his birthday and social security number publicly for the record. He of course refused and when asked why, he said because that is sensitive information.

All the while, Equifax attorneys are arguing in court that there is no harm in leaking private data like SSNs and thus they shouldn't be held liable for any damages.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90312551/watch-a-congresswoman-d...
In the end, you're really stuck between two places. Either you have something static, in which case it's got all the negatives of a static secret. Or, you have something dynamic, in which case you have to manage the infrastructure.

The only thing that makes SSNs bad static secrets is that you should basically assume yours has been leaked at this point. Like others have said in this thread, they're not bad identifiers, but they're a terrible choice for confirming identity.

Your system is just another static piece of data to keep secret. Which is where SSNs started when this crazy train kicked off. And no, "rotation" is not the secret sauce, because SSNs can already be rotated under certain circumstances.

I also don't understand how the "unique ID" doesn't have value. OK, you can't confirm an identity with it on the centralized system. But as far as I can tell, it basically serves as proof that you did confirm the identity. There's no way to distinguish between "obtained unique ID via the key and thereby proved identity" and "obtained unique ID via any other method and thereby did not prove identity".
This is not a moonshot technological problem, but like climate change, this is more of a problem which everyone can solve with changing habits.

It's not people who create waste but the manufacturers who in the best position to make waste reduction happen would rather offload the problem to consumers who can't do much about it. It's manufacturers who make non-standard containers, disposable plastic, unnecessary packaging, planned obsolescence etc...

There are incineration power plants that already are in service but they produce more pollution than coal plants.

This is not a technological but a social problem and if you want to have at it with a moonshot goal you would need to look at starting an activist organization and not a technology company.

You might want to read a few recent article related to China banning US imports of garbage to get an idea about the scope of the problem.
ALICE is a garbage decision.

SCOTUS should focus on enablement rather than subject matter.
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2164.html
My opinion as someone who's had extremely restrictive diets in order to lose weight: People overthink this. As you've said, our bodies are pretty good at making due with what they get. Aim for a baseline: protein plus some vegetables, some of which are dark green; and then just occasionally indulging in some cravings will probably cover the rest.
Very cool. They didn't mention this in the video, but I immediately see one groundbreaking new phenomenon that they uncovered: at the exact moment the end of the whip goes supersonic, it is being accelerated by something other than the tension of the rope. It looks as though it's accelerated by the shockwaves, of which there appear to be two -- one on each side of the whip end, with a vacuum in between. It's as clear as day in the video. The rope in front of it clearly goes lax, and the whip end even changes direction to align with the shock wave propagation.
Ask HN: Author of “How I sold my stock options” – thinking of writing another
Hey HN, So looks like I got an idea formed from personal experience for an essay on start-ups, investment, and whatnot. Kind of in the theme of "Lost and Founder" by Rand Fishkin (you know, the guy from SEOmoz), but with a different angle. Not my typical topic. The only issue is I am already working on a more formal piece about Big Data for O'Reilly, so don't have much time. With all that said, who would be interested in reading this essay on start-ups if I were to write it?
This always bothered me too. Both when computers were expensive to me and now cheap. I get paid a good amount of money during the day to use a computer to compute things, display/interface with me, to communicate to humans and other computers. Then my computer is idle/sleep when I am not there. This feels inherently wrong to me. How is that I cannot come up with something useful for my computer to do when I am not there to make real contributions when I resume work? (disclaimer, engineer who programs but not a computer scientist)
Some KBA questions don't show up on your credit report, that being said, they can still be guessed with some certainty if you know the person.

Some examples either me or my husband have gotten:

-What month was [person] born? [person] was my mom and one option was "I don't know [person]." Luckily they didn't ask the date, because I don't know that, but I do know the month.

-Which of the following people are/were you associated with?, my ex-roommate as one of the answers. Makes sense to connect us if we had the same address at the same time.

-Which of the following people are/were you associated with?, my ex as one of the answers. This one baffled me because we never lived together and never had a bank account or loan together.

Which town did/does [person] live in? Where [person] was my husband's brother. Of course, useless if everyone still lives in their hometown.

I've also been asked about the previous cars I've owned, which are from DMV and insurance databases, not credit reports.

The entire concept of KBA is flawed and pretty shitty all around.
There’s the common impression - misconception? - that driving for rideshare companies is a losing game, and that drivers end up making very little money after fuel, repairs, and depreciation. For a while, it seemed like every day there was another article breaking this down and “exposing” Uber and Lyft.

Having never driven for them, I can’t verify whether this is true, but just a quick back-of-the-envelope guess seems like drivers in the Bay Area could average $40 - $50 an hour. That doesn’t seem like minimum wage level to me.
“I don't know how people will react to seeing a heat map in real time of where all the phones are. I can imagine some people would be like, ‘That's the coolest thing!’ And I can imagine some people would be like, ‘That's the creepiest thing!’”

I don’t think I know anyone that would find that the coolest thing ever. maybe the companies that buy the data, sure.
True, shady people do exist everywhere but I expected more of Austin due to it being in a part of the country where someone's word is supposed to, or at least used to, mean something. Maybe I'm old-fashioned that way.

To elaborate on the integrity bit, ... over-promising to the point of creating an expectation that would not be met or acknowledged at any point in the future. Some people might refer to that behavior as being 'flaky'. And I should note that most people in Austin are not like that, but that I encountered a lot more flakiness there than in other cities.
I think that is mitigated by allowing the key to be rotated freely. The shortcomings over the token based approach are outweighed by being more practical to implement. If the issuing of a new key was an annual process, or even tied to something like drivers license/state id renewal, it would still be worlds better than what we have today.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
Agreed, and now that I think about it a bit more the ticker symbol is largely meaningless. Institutional investors trade by CUSIP, not Ticker, and a unique CUSIP is assigned to each security (and each share class of a company's stock is a unique security) regardless of whether they share an issuer.
Citrix Investigating Unauthorized Access to Internal Network
OP is likely taking exception to the use of the word "eavesdropping", since it means listening to, specifically, conversations.
IDK why YC lets stuff like this through when they always say they're struggling to fund nonprofits, things benefiting underrepresented groups etc. Its like, ya, because you're funding stupid shit like this
Kolaches have to be one of Texas' best kept secrets. I discovered them after I moved to NYC (from DC) because a friend from Texas is opening a kolache bakery in Brooklyn, and man... what a treat. I highly recommend everyone travel to Texas and try a kolache from a roadside stand.
It's worth noting that Levison may not have been handing over written keys as an act of protest/petulance/whatever, but as a delaying tactic. He'd been looking for legal aid (and failing, because under a gag order he couldn't request non-attorney help finding it), and was in court without representation. Levinson was ordered to produce keys on August 1, and did so on paper August 2. It took until the 5th to get together a contempt charge and an order to surrender digital keys by the 6th.

Honestly, the alternative doesn't make much sense. If he just provided paper keys as a final insult, expecting them to be used, why shutter the entire service when someone called him on it? Why then wait two days past the start of the fines to pull the plug?

I'm not surprised that Levinson caught a contempt charge for printing the keys, although it's pretty ugly if he's right in his claim that he was denied a hearing to contest the charge, then denied appeal for his failure to contest it. But doing so seems less like a move to irritate people than a way to drag out the process without naked defiance.
I'm 53, which makes me about twice median at my company. A lot of this rings true, but I'll add one more twist on the "hard to keep skills up to date" aspect. Keeping up with all the technological churn across the industry is damn near a full time job.

When you come out of college, you might be pretty close to the state of the art because you've been doing nothing other than getting to that exact point. Then it suddenly gets harder, because most of your time is spent working on whatever technology you already have instead of ramping up on new ones (plus eventually family and such).

Sure, you can try to weave as much learning as you can into your job, but it's almost never enough. Most people will end up getting further and further behind, or more and more specialized. The harmful effect of the first becomes apparent quickly; the second can actually be quite lucrative for a while until suddenly it isn't. Either way, at some point your knowledge becomes pretty severely devalued until you go back to spending near-full-time to catch up.

It's hard to blame employers for favoring newer knowledge over older, but the effect on older workers is still pretty profound.
> for the short time in your life while you are more than just profit to the machine

Except that for most, they are adding profit to a different machine: the $1.5T in student loan debt, averaging almost $40k each. $40k to become "a more well-rounded person"
Which is exactly my point. The post I am replying to said:

> workers might be much happier in countries where they can work without the possibility of being fired at any moment

The reason why this is an issue is nothing to do with actually being fired, it is due to the difficulty of getting rehired...which is a bigger issue if labour markets don't function (and in most European nations, as the higher unemployment has risen, the more desperately the privileged few have clung onto their protections worsening the issue).

This is why Denmark went the other way: the logic for inflexible labour markets is only consistent when labour markets are not flexible. Remove that and target spending where it is actually needed i.e. on meeting the needs of the market.

The idea of stronger safety nets is also not particularly true (the idea of strong/weak never made sense to me). Social security is not universal as in the UK or US, it is based on contributions. And the reasons unions work, again in contrast particularly with the UK, is that they collaborate with employers (Denmark's union participation rate is anomalous but even compared with somewhere like Germany).
This might be one of the biggest issues in America today. We have a seemingly large number of folks, or perhaps a small number of highly vocal ones on social media, that believe the system is so rigged against them and that they have no chance of improving their lot in life.

At the same time as this pessimism has permeated America, a global, friction-free marketplace for services and products has emerged that anyone can tap into: the internet and mobile phones.

This network is not only available to all, it also hosts the keys to the kingdom, with every single skill and clever strategy for building these products and services unlocked, for free, for everyone, on YouTube, Coursera, etc.

That's the disconnect I'm concerned about... so many people in America are giving up on the American dream, while other countries are copying it (i.e. China).
They arent asking you questions they dont know. They will ask you questions about the color of your car or streets you lived on, and they know the answers.
The latest in a long long line of TEMPEST research. I think I would prefer to see academic security research steered in the direction of solving problems affecting millions, but an interesting discovery nonetheless.
There has been a lot of discussion about this issue in the last years. Dual-class setups (at least for new IPOs) are penalized now by some index providers.

https://citywireusa.com/professional-buyer/news/crown-duals-...
Foursquare was the best data provider for casual geolocation analysis + visualization and POI data (here's a scraper I had written for it: https://github.com/minimaxir/foursquare-venue-scraper), until a April 2018 change neutered both the amount of returned metadata for Personal API clients and the rate limits for those clients. (endpoint documentation: https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/api/endpoints)

It's disappointing, and this article is a reminder I need to add a depreciation notice to that repo.
The spherical correction was weakened by half a dioptre, leaving the cylindrical correction unchanged. So for my bad eye, the computer prescription's SPH is -4.75 instead of -5.25. This roughly agrees with the calculator at http://www.computerglassesrx.com/

The PD for near vision is only slightly smaller than for distance vision: 60mm instead of 63mm for me, less than 5% reduction. I doubt it is all that important since I've been using distance vision glasses to read with for decades, but it is a fact that you have to go a little bit cross-eyed to properly focus on something close to you. I think it might help a bit for looking at very small objects just a few inches away, but ditching the glasses entirely works even better for me when I need to read eg. markings on a 4mm IC.
From the Warren post:

Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be designated as "platform utilities." … These companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform.

Thus Safeway would be exempt from the regulation because (a) they do not offer an online marketplace and (b) they do not connect third parties (but instead act as an intermediary).

Similarly, it appears that only Amazon Marketplace, not the retail arm of Amazon, would be affected by this regulation.
imo you also need dry land, for the tool-making flavor of intelligent life
Yep... here is it...

https://act.eff.org/action/save-alice-tell-the-patent-office...
How about going after all these companies...and to make it simple - start alphabetically.
I guess it's similar to Japan's occupation of China as well, they didn't have much regard for the Han. Pretty bad.
My “boring” “explanation”: the number of alien intelligences is unknowable and irrelevant because interstellar travel and communication are both near as damnit impossible.
Too bad the humans fucked it up by breaking the deal:

>Old Tom forced a small whale to the surface, where Davidson harpooned it.[1] Because he wanted to get off the water before a storm arrived, Logan attempted to bring the carcass ashore without Old Tom eating the tongue and lips.[9] Old Tom apparently grabbed the tow rope in his mouth and lost some teeth in the struggle,[7] with Brooks recounting that Logan said "Oh God, what have I done?" when he realised that Old Tom had lost teeth.[1]

>When Old Tom's corpse washed ashore in 1930, the mouth had abscesses from missing teeth and he may have died of starvation.[7][9][1]
I know people who did that via custom driver, it depends on sound card capabilities.
A client side key sounds great, let me investigate this route and see how to do this. I imagine it's a similar pattern to end to end encryption.
Yes:

Interestingly, the audio chipsets in modern motherboards and sound cards include an option to change the function of an audio port at the software level, a type of audio port programming sometimes referred to as ’jack retasking’. This option is available on most audio chipsets (e.g., Realtek’s audio chipsets) integrated into PC motherboards today. Jack retasking, although documented in the technical specifications, is not well-known [34]. For an in-depth technical discussion on malicious retasking of an audio jack, from the hardware to the operating system level, we refer the interested reader to the following previous work [29].

References:

Mordechai Guri and Yosef Solwicz and Andrey Daidakulov and Yuval Elovici. 'MOSQUITO: Covert Ultrasonic Transmissions between Two Air-Gapped Computers using Speaker-to-Speaker Communication'. arXiv preprint 1803.03422v1 [cs.CR], 9th March 2018.

Mordechai Guri and Yosef Solewicz and Andrey Daidakulov and Yuval Elovici. 'Speake(a)r: Turn speakers to microphones for fun and profit'. 11th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 17). USENIX Association, 2017.
Spoiler alert: the judge will not be amused.
On Facebook this morning, I was shown an ad from a page called "Uber Assault", which was about a (potential) lawsuit over riders being assaulted, and there were a bunch of people chiming in that they didn't feel safe being Lyft/Uber drivers so they quit. It seems that perhaps drivers are more at risk than riders because even though the approval process for becoming a rideshare driver is very weak, it's much weaker for becoming a rider. Either way, people who had a bad experience were likely to avoid using it. I don't think Uber/Lyft is going to replace car ownership anytime soon, maybe for the six foot tall man like me but not for everybody.

Another problem is waiting for a car. I got robbed once while waiting for an Uber. One solution might be to wait for the Uber driver to arrive and then go outside. I tried this once the other day, not for safety but so I could hang out with friends. The Uber left less than a minute after I got messaged, and I got charged the $5 fee, so that isn't practical. It feels safer to be walking to a bus or rail stop, or to be waiting at a stop, than it does to be standing on a corner waiting for a car.

The idea that Uber/Lyft is going to replace private car ownership for everyone because it's replaced it for some is ludicrous. Public transit has done more to replace it for me (car-free by choice for 5 years) than Uber/Lyft. I usually only use Uber/Lyft when I'm in a hurry, and the cost Uber/Lyft rides just about cancels out the time savings.

Self driving cars might one day replace it, but I don't think that Lyft or Uber is going to be at the forefront of it. If they are it will make me more frustrated with how the tech industry operates, because it will show that the value of investment and brand far outweighs expertise. Uber/Lyft contain a tiny fraction of the deep learning, automotive, and transportation expertise that will be needed to pull off such a thing.

Finally the term "major cities" brings up the "no true scotsman" fallacy a lot. "Rent is high in major cities." Oh yeah? Dallas isn't a major city? If I don't live in a high rise downtown I'm not really living in Dallas? Eventually every major city will be eliminated in an argument and it will turn out that for the sake of the argument, there aren't any major cities in the world.
Cashless would be nice if it weren't for the fact that it comes with a 2+% tax to the CC makers. And they decide if you are permitted to do business. Make porn? CC companies often decide you don't get to do business. Can the CC companies decide a person may no longer do any trade by denying them all access to the cashless society's goods?

The cashless society represents a fundamental danger to liberty.
The difference comes down to market share. It's fine to sell store brands if you have 10% of the market because there's plenty of competition. Vendors who refuse to deal with you can do just fine by working with your competitors.

Amazon is approaching 50% market share. They are close to becoming the place for online commerce. So when they compete with vendors by offering similar products, the vendors are effectively put out of business.

Just like with MS and IE. The issue wasn't so much that MS offered IE with Windows so much as the fact that 95% of computers came with Windows, so bundling IE was putting other software providers out of business.
Or perhaps it's a response to the (admittedly not unfounded) pervasive cynicism where everything is seen as the "commodification of x or an attempt to disrupt the deathly loneliness of y".

You know, maybe humans just trying to figure out what being human was supposed to be before suits and patagonia vests got in the way. /shrug
The law was not changed. The interpretation of the law was changed, as you describe, initially by Republicans but Clinton and Obama maintained the Republican interpretation.
Different classes always trade with different tickers. When they trade, of course: Google has also a non-traded B class. (By the way, I don’t think the first statement is correct.)
Depends on what you do. When 3d modeling, I'll spend the day working on a project, then have it render overnight.
The problem with the drake equation is that we're not really working with means of normal distributions as estimates, we're working with wildly different, skewed distributions for each factor, due to uncertainties spanning orders of magnitude for some factors. Instead of multiplying point estimates you need to convolve the distributions, which yields quite different results.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf
Yes, we've lost it. However, it can be fixed. I created app so everyone can be a taxi driver. It's PoC, but actually works. There are tons of problems, no critical mass, security. But anyway, I was once able to find a ride back home from San Francisco.

This app is for everyone at https://libretaxi.org (non-profit, open source)

Disclaimer: I'm founder
Always happy to see go links being used at other companies! You can actually take this a step further at Eligrey. By setting up a DNS Entry that redirects go.eligrey.com to the domain go you would then allow your links to become conversational and even quicker to access. For example you could say "Checkout go slash zerodrop" without physically sending an email or message.
Financial Cyberthreats in 2018
Lyft only operates in the US and a few cities in Canada.
For me the saddest thing is that even if Lyft stock tanks after the IPO the founders Zimmer and Green will have very little impact to their personal finances. The founders along with the investors will be able to move most of their stock through the markets making them billionaires. It's mostly the Lyft employees stuck in the post IPO lock up period who will be hurt by the dip in stock value. Another reason why the rich keep getting richer.
Most people like leaving crap in their car and having it ready at a moments notice. I definitely think people will want self driving cars - but as a feature in the car they buy.

The exception will be those in the city where it’s a pain to find parking.