skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Antivirus is always a "closing the barn door after the horse has left"... it's completely reactionary/inadequate as it almost always relies on other people reporting a problem, so it's always behind and a Tragedy of the Commons in that very little of actual malware is ever reported. HIDS isn't much better. NIDS is slightly more useful as it's independent of the endpoint, but can also be evaded to a degree. Both HIDS/NIDS aren't great on their own because they're really the last lines of defense to tell you you're pwned.

In previous life, I inherited a bunch of Win2k database servers that were running on unfiltered public IPs (yuck!).. and several of them had undetectable, stealth rootkit malware that wasn't economically-feasible to remove (Microsoft and Winternals were in the loop).. and because they "couldn't be reimagined," network rules were used to disconnect it from bot operations. Yuck. Don't put unsecured or fragile anything on public IPs because odds are they will be pwnes with variants of malware no AV has ever seen, and it will be a persistent threat (APT) that won't be evident until later.

The best defenses include, but aren't limited to:

- Never run untrusted code.

- Never allow untrusted write and execute.

- Don't do email / browser operations with admin credentials. Do it in a VM maybe or a separate machine as a normal, unprivileged user is best.

- Least privilege, all the things.

- Verify cryptographic signatures enforcing chain-/web-of-trust of source/binaries/packages.

- Holistic defense-in-depth.

- Minimalism/minimal attack surfaces.

- Don't run fragile, unconfigured OSes on unfiltered public IP's. (Please.)
You can still figure out it's hidden.
>> The agents are never told anything about the rules of the game, yet learn
about fundamental game concepts and effectively develop an intuition for CTF.

Here we go again- throwing around big words, "intuition", and marring an
otherwise interesting piece of work.

From a cursory glance at the relevant figure, "A look into how our agents
represent the game world" - it looks like what is being learned is very much a
goood old behaviour tree. For instance, the figure suggests that agents
learned to react to situations like "Agent flag at base & opponent flag at
base & not respawning & agent in home base". So basically, the condition part
of an IF-THEN-ELSE rule.

Why is this called an "intuition" rather than a "rule"? From my reading, the
only reason is that it was learned by a deep neural net by reinforcement
learning without explicit supervision, i.e. without anyone telling the agent
"learn this rule".

That's a very narrow, procrustean, definition of intuition. Is it really what
most people would mean by "intuition"? Is it even close? Who knows- nobody can
tell what most people would mean by "intuition". There's a dictionary
definition, but chances are most people would not know it by heart. So it's
very hard to even say "that's not what intuition means"- one would just be
begging the question.

So why use such a vague term in an article like this, that is already pretty
impressive stuff? What do such meaningless claims add to the result? I don't
get it.
It’s not an effective way to compete in the US, where most subscribers live outside city limits and coverage is king. (That’s why Verizon is #1 even though it’s the most expensive.) To put things into perspective, the Munich metro area is about the same population as DC’s, but twelve times as dense. Wiring up the urban areas hits almost all your potential subscribers in Munich. (Last time I went, the area between the airport and the city was countryside and had no LTE. The fastest growing part of the DC Metro area is an exurb close to the airport, an hour outside the city.) T-Mo has struggled with LTE coverage outside the cities. At the same time it’s expensive to build cell towers all through the suburbs and exurbs. So the winning play is not necessarily doubling down on the cities and pushing down cost. Americans are willing to pay for coverage (and on the flip side, will punish you in the market for not pursuing coverage).
I recommend the server-side `update` hook (much like `pre-receive`, but a little easier to use and more flexible).

Here's an example with Prettier:

https://coolaj86.com/articles/server-side-git-hooks-for-code...
If you work in the Ruby ecosystem at all, there is a gem called invisible_captcha that does just this. It beat back most of the bot signups we were getting, though some still slip through occasionally.

https://github.com/markets/invisible_captcha
>Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has.

Docker provides an (IMHO pretty buggy) isolation layer that lies between "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate folders" and "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate virtual machines".

I actually don't have the need for the level of isolation below VM and above folder very often. IMHO this level only really makes sense when containing and deploying somewhat badly written applications that have weirdly specific, non-standard system level dependencies (e.g. oracle) that you don't want polluting other applications' dependencies.

I've compiled and installed postgres in separate folders lots of times (super easy) and I've lost count of the number of times people have said "why don't you just dockerize that?" as if that was simpler and/or necessary in some way. That's the effect of "docker hype" talking.
Facebook Loses [Irish] Supreme Court Appeal in Max Schrems Data Case
Cloudera earnt $145m last quarter and grew by 37% over the previous quarter. Other Hadoop startups like Databricks are doing well and Docker has gone from a 2 digit revenue to a 3 digit revenue company from 2017-2018. How has billions been wasted when we have successful companies doing well against the toughest competitors ever i.e. Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
All this money should have been spent on developing new, improving existing or switching to better (operating) systems which solve the resource and communication security problems, instead of creating another inner-platform effect.

I hope WebAssembly goes in this direction, instead of trying to adapt to current programming language paradigms.
Varlink: A Protocol for IPC
Not quite correct. It automatically picks the browser window size based on the monitor its being displayed on, in some multiple of 200x100. There is no randomization on every run.

https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/15705/why-does-tor-b...
M'lord gwern
Of course having 3000 species of spiders to choose they needed to play with the cool funnel-web spider. One of the most deadly spiders for humans. Wise choice.

Atracotoxins. Stuff extremely toxic for a particular kind of animal: primates, causing pulmonary and cerebral edema in humans.

Fortunately for mosquitoes, atracotoxins are relatively weak as insect killer. Big spiders rely in their fangs to subdue the prey. My congratulations for the people that so carefully designed this experiment.
> I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.

The limit is not “natural”. The limit is at least partially because we are excessively vigilant about terrorism, and put measures, effective and ineffective, in place to anticipate and prevent terrorism. The far reaching and extensive nature of those measures is a result of the same risk calculus that I describe here, and is a manifestation of the same phenomenon that the research linked here found.
I agree to an extent. But, I disagree that learning ORMs are a waste of time. For example, I'm on Phoenix, using Ecto. I find
`Repo.all` much more convenient that "SELECT * FROM .." etc.

I don't know if it's better or worse - the original blog post asking governments to regulate data formats/code!
Patent: Method of concealing partial baldness (1977)
It really doesn't matter. display:none or position:absolute;left:-1000px makes little difference. Honey pots only catch a small number of bots.
America is rife with de facto monopolies and duopolies. That is our version of capitalism which champions competition but its all talk with little walk. That the government would pick on Qualcomm is a mystery to me. Its lobbyists must not have paid off the right people.
Maybe that developer knew something unique about that use case i.e. data needs were expected to grow or they had plans to use it for Data Science (very common in telcos). And you just weren't aware of it.

It's always easy to pass judgement at technology choices but in my experience they are often made with the best intentions based on requirements that not everyone is aware of.
I didn't say anything about that. I'm only refuting the claim that Windows email clients will run an executable just by clicking on them.
And MapR is so much more efficient than vanilla Hadoop, AWS definitely makes more money off the less polished yet mainstream version.
I also found this very interesting.

I'd like to see a similar graph with different media outlets from around the world.
"by that measure we've solved pretty much everything"

Yes.

And you need to appreciate this before you start breaking things. Life can go from good to bad, not to better.
+1

The Date/Datetime picker looks very good. Would love to be able to only pull that to my JS bundle.
- Something has to be done.

- This is something.

- Therefore it has to be done.
Yes. Learning ES5 means you'll miss out on some useful language features, you won't be able to use some of the more modern libraries in NPM, you'll find it much harder to carry on progressing once you finish the course, and employers are a bit less likely to hire you. It'd be like learning Python 1 or Java 8 now. You could make stuff, sure, but there are better ways now.
As Verchot says, REDD-mechanism was designed to offset deforestation and it is not designed to work as a carbon credit system. Both are important but maybe they should be kept separate. Money can be collected from consumers who want to compensate their use of products or services which use fossil raw materials. Follow-up should be rigorous and if money is wasted, it should be paid back.
The difference is standardization. Postgres can be installed in subdirectories nicely, as you say -- if you know how. Same is true for JBoss, CI build agent, whatever. Now if you have dozens of these apps then e.g. onboarding people in a remote team suddenly becomes non-trivial (a nightmare, to be precise). With Docker, they can get a complex system running in an hour.

The two primary use cases for Docker is, as far as I can see, is simplifying deployment on varying environments. Variations can happen because of many reasons. Sometimes you have clusters of various sizes in production. Sometimes the environment is a developer laptop. And so on.
I really do hope we don't end up with an internet connection counting as a platform.
I'll correct you: Hadoop solves a hard problem that lots of big enterprises have. A distributed file system is a big deal, and everything that on top also is.

Now making (big)money with its ecosystem is another question.
AI learns teamwork in a deadly game of capture the flag
I can almost see the appeal, when you think of decorating it.

Consider a table with five columns:

* uid

* pwd

* cmd

* exit-code

* datetime

Now you can `SELECT pwd,cmd WHERE exit-code != 0` to see all failed-commands.
What about setup and maintenance of the infrastructure that hosts either VMs or containers?

Given a mediocre number of physical machines (say, 40), which is easier, install, setup and maintain a VMWare cluster or a Kubernetes cluster?

If someone has any insight, preferably backed by actual experience, it'll be most appreciated.
Well the question is if Blizzard ports Hearthstone to Linux as a “hey, we have a beta for you guys”, and bring some buzz. The annoying part is the battle.net launcher.
> planted trees, which pull CO2 out of the air

When an old building is torn down and the wood is burnt all the CO2 goes back into the environment.

Unless we start burying old wood into sealed underground chambers (like depleted oil wells) all the CO2 stays around.
> TrueCaller is Facebook's face recognition for phone numbers

This is very good analogy - in fact I think that it's even more dangerous because when it comes to Facebook people are slightly more aware about privacy-related issues.
I'm pretty sure that TrueCaller extensively profiles users, links all possible connections, gathers data - Facebook might not know that one visited certain doctor or that one has some medical conditions, TrueCaller? Who knows. It is possible to gather a lot of data and build detailed profile just by linking who calls who.

Additionally according to HN comments [0] one doesn't just simply "opt out", truly terrifying

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058218
> if you use Dropbox, make sure you have a second backup

"make sure you have a backup" Dropbox is not a backup service. It's a collaboration / sharing space. It's a multi-desktop sync tool. But it's not a backup tool - in the same way a RAID with daily snapshots isn't a backup.
That’s cool, what sort of query latency do you get? (For a variety of queries).
Solutions to hard problems of big enterprises should be the most juicy way to make money no?
Intel's 10nm was a failure. Cannonlake was a mostly broken chip. It's taken them a year and a half from shipping Cannonlake to starting to ship Ice Lake. The 10nm process Ice Lake is fabbed with is not the same process Cannonlake was fabbed with; Intel has disclosed a few of the changes that were made in order to produce a viable chip, but we won't know the full extent of the changes until TechInsights gets their hands on an Ice Lake chip.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the label’s metadata is always present and accurate. Labels have been screwing artists for over a century.
I'm a big user of Firefox since I switched from Chrome 1 year ago for these reasons, but I wonder why don't they base their underlying engine on Chromium then build all their safety, privacy and other niceness on top of that?

I know Mozilla has been working hard on the engine (rewrite with Rust?) and new versions like Firefox Focus on mobile is blazing fast, but keeping a separate renderer (and developer tools!), with its own issues and discrepancies, seems like a lot of sweat and pain when the Chromium project seems decently sound OSS. I know being able to put in practice your own interpretation of standards is a great exercise in freedom and web diversity, which seems to reinforce their mission, but still... the end result is probably millions in economic impact worldwide to keep website codebases aligned with browser standards, even if the differences are apparently minimal and 99% of the time it just works.

Is being a fully independent browser Mozilla's main raison d'être?
Thanks. The target audience here is beginners to programming or JS. I think learning ES5 isn’t a stumbling block, and it’s probably good as a basis to go on and learn ES6 features later. It’s more like learning the core features rather than an out of date version. I use typescript at work and I still use functions instead of lambdas, closures instead of classes where it makes sense for clarity.
There is an ongoing thread that may help you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058697
Yes. Very very very few people have data as big as "the internet" and the need for speed (which was the reason Google developed a look of their distributed tooling) that you get with these frameworks.

And it really only makes sense to have permanent infrastructure for distributed computing if you're constantly using it. Like if you're constantly rebuilding an index of the internet. Which most people aren't.

For occasional reindexing jobs, I've personally had success with Kubernetes. Our customer facing services were deployed with it, so it was trivial to bump up the number of nodes, and then schedule a bunch of workers containers, then roll everything down when the job is complete. No need to learn the ins-and-outs of Hadoop.
Awesome! Love a good Ruby solution. Please keep these coming :)
Encrypted app Tella protects activists
I remember watching one of those emergency room shows years back. Three guys go in for swelling in the brain, due to the rat worm.
Their conditions got worse, until they administered immunosuppressants, as the doctors assumed that their immune system was reacting to the dead worms.
Apparently when they die in a hosts brain, they release antigens. Toxic I think.
>In DC, you’ve got these cavernous underground stations, a testament to brutalist architecture. In Chicago, you’ve got a wooden platform on some steel girders.

Meanwhile, in Moscow... https://hypebeast.com/2015/10/moscow-metro-stations https://www.rbth.com/arts/2017/06/19/dont-miss-these-5-stati...
This comment brings to mind a discussion I was having in my current company.

We produce our own game launcher (think: uplay or origin) and I asked if there were plans to produce a Linux version of the launcher. They replied “no because productions (games) [weren’t] asking for it.”

Inversely, when I ask productions if they will support Linux they say that there’s no point because the launcher doesn't support it and the launcher is mandatory.
I love how the "cloud" is a tech fad in your eyes as well as technologies like Kubernetes which are core to Google and virtualisation which is core to every VPS/cloud provider in existence.

Be a pretty awful world if everyone took your advice.
The isolation is done by many other tools, and with less bugs and vulnerabilities.

> applications that have weirdly specific, non-standard system level dependencies

Spot on. 99% of software the world needs can be written against libraries provided by OSes. And then packaged properly.
That is a very cool question. Now I am interested to see if anything like that has been done.
> That's not just sad, it is really strange

Doesn't seem strange at all for a company pushing a technology for mass adoption to choose one of the most common languages which possibly has the most eyes in the world on its performance metrics, keep in mind VR has to hit framerates up to 90fps.
Irish Supreme Court Dismisses Facebook’s Complaint on NSA Surveillance [pdf]
Ask HN: No Way to Export Chrome Passwords to FF in macOS/Linux. Any Suggestions?
I came across this post on SO and apparently there really is no easy way to export passwords from Chrome to FF in macOS and Linux:

https://superuser.com/questions/1355790/import-chrome-passwords-to-firefox

Mozilla should really work on this fast; it's a huge deal-breaker for people who want to move from Chrome to FF.
PassThePopcorn has a similar CAPTCHA-like implementation to the Pexels one you mentioned in your article. It has a repository of movie posters (which I think are user submitted to the movies themselves), one of which is chosen and the user is asked what movie the poster is for. I've always thought of that as an "enjoyable" CAPTCHA.
One thing that's missing is GPU acceleration, like MAPD

Being able to group by a column and do a count(*) in 100ms is mind blowing. I would pay for a MAPD-style backend for postgresql.
Doesn't matter what he "might have known or intended to do", he didn't build a solution which met the specifications the business needed.
How data is helping in the fight to eliminate malaria
>I don't think Qualcomm strangled RIM with their 3.4% (peak!) licensing fee on the selling price of the phone. If RIMs profit margin was 3.5% they had bigger problems.

That entirely depends on what Qualcomm was charging RIM's competitors.
> Hadoop solved a hard problem that nobody had.

This baseless assertion is patently wrong on so many levels. Building computing clusters on COTS hardware is a very mundane problem. Running processing jobs on data shards is a very mundane problem. Scaling COTS clusters transparently is a very mundane problem.
But what about things like pinch zoom, elastic scrolling and such? I know there are some extensions but all that ones I have tried (the top 5 that come up in search) are all janky.

While not a deal breaker it would be nice to have a more native macOS feeling version of Firefox but I guess Mozilla have other things to work on.
I don’t agree.
Yes, of course everyone should consider if they really even need their DSL. But sometimes as the author rightly notes, sometimes the alternative to a DSL is a lower or significantly more complex existing interface style (such as SQL).
>The difference is standardization. Postgres can be installed in subdirectories nicely, as you say -- if you know how.

Or if you have, y'know, a really simple script.

...the kind which also runs inside most semi-complex Docker containers anyway.
ANPR Using RoR and React Native
That list of accolades makes me think B-list is generous... even if I do have a crush on her.
It is very, very, very common for companies to have enough data to need a distributed approach to ETL and especially common if they are doing any machine learning which is most of them.

In telcos you have network telemetry data. In supermarkets and retail you have purchase data and often credit card gateway data. In banking and finance you obviously have transaction data.

And with Kubernetes you still need a compute framework. Like I don't know the standard in the industry the Hadoop Spark framework.
>> Hadoop solved a hard problem that nobody had.

I'm genuinely curious, if you want to search over big data, which should be a pretty common procedure these days, what alternatives are there to a distributed file system? A dfs seems very complex to me. And it is not clear too me what alternative system designs a dfs will outperform. Is a dfs the only solution to big data?

Relational DBs do break down at a certain scale. What system do you turn to next? Nosql? Will that scale infinitely? Will any system scale infinitely?
This. If a log house or similar construction burns, the walls are often left standing afterwards. Solid logs are really slow burners.
You can pool n if it's on your hot path, can't you?

Escape analysis was just rewritten, and the objective is to handle this case more gracefully.
>All this money should have been spent on developing new, improving existing or switching to better (operating) systems which solve the resource and communication security problems

But this isn’t the problem Docker is trying to solve. It’s just a problem that Docker needed to solve in order for their product to be useful, this is completely transparent to Docker users. Docker abstracts away a whole bunch of work you’d otherwise have to do to implement repeatable builds, it makes those builds widely distributable, and (depending on how you choose to use containers) can also simplify some capacity planning problems.
> installed pre-configured Docker ARM images for 8-9 different media applications ... It just worked.

Often the applications are packaged by random people on the Internet and do not receive security updates.

There's plenty of evidence showing how bad the problem is and there's no way around it.

You need the security team of a distribution to backport security fixes into a stable distribution and a large user community test them.

Only with this you can run apt-get upgrade without breaking things.
Samsung, Huawei and Intel all make working 4G modems. They work fine outside the US, which suggests that there is some US-specific problem at work.
This has nothing to do with Tor. Cloudflare frequently blacklists entire countries/counties worth of people (and rarely reverts those blacklists). There is a good chance, that you have missed a lot Indian/Vietnamese/Russian/Chinese visitors, because Cloudflare concluded, that forwarding their traffic to your site isn't financially viable for them.

> Unfortunately there isn't a "block Tor traffic from assholes" option

What exactly is "Tor traffic from assholes"? Bulk DDoS attacks? E-mail spam? SSH login attempts? Please share your valuable experience with everyone here, so that all of us could stay safe by learning from your example.
Demonetized videos still get YouTube Premium revenue.
Julian Assange shows psychological torture symptoms, says UN expert