skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a way to harden pickle to protect it against the most basic exploits: http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/pickle.html#restricting-...

It is not a complete solution, as an attacker could still DoS your service by making pickle allocate a huge amount of memory, but at least that's better than allowing arbitrary code execution.
Google is massively profitable. They don't need to make "hard" decisions and they can afford to invest in extremely generous terms for employers.

If and when Google's revenues fall, expect to see benefits like this slowly dry up.
> When this happens, I have to dispute the claim. In one case [1], the rightsholder confirmed ownership--even though the video is me programming and the only audio is my voice--and now I have no recourse.

You do have a recourse, a DMCA take down notice requires that the requester swear under penalty of perjury that their statements are true. While suing them would be effective and probably unreasonably expensive, a quicker and cheaper solution is to send a letter to the legal department of said company explaining the situation. Do not threaten to sue them in the letter, as that is illegal, instead clearly explain what they did wrong (issued an invalid take down notice) and how to fix it. Lawyers don't like getting sued and they will work to fix this issue on the off chance you decide to sue them.

If this was very important to you really could sue them, probably for way less money than you think, as this video does make money but also, the take down notice has damaged your brand and wasted your time all things that are valuable and you can demand compensation for.
Apple Offered to License its Patents to Samsung for $30 Per Smartphone
Software patents are the biggest problem in my world. Definitely need reform there.
This is not how to crawl webpages. He started with the Alexa list. Those are not necessarily domain names of servers serving webpages. I would guess that some of the request to cease crawling came from some of these listings. Working from the Alexa list he would have been crawling some of the darkest underbelly of the web: ad servers and bulk email services.

His question: "Who gets to crawl the web?" is an interesting one though.

Do not assume that Googlebot is a smart crawler. Or smarter than all others. The author of Linkers and Loaders posted recently on CircleID about how dumb Googlebot can be.

There is no such thing as a smart crawler. All crawlers are stupid. Googlebot resorts to brute force more often than not.

Theoretically no one should have to crawl the web. The information should be organised when it is entered into the index.

Do you have to "crawl" the Yellow Pages? Are listings arranged by an "algorithm"? PageRank? 80/20 rules?

Nothing wrong with those metrics; except of course that they can be gamed trivially, as experiments with Google Scholar have shown. But building a business around this type of ranking? C'mon.

If the telephone directories abandoned alpha and subject organisation for "popularity" as a means of organisation it would be total chaos. Which is why "organising the world's information" is an amusing mission statement when your entire business is built around enabling continued chaos and promoting competition for ranking.

Even worse are companies like Yelp. It's blackmail.

If the information was organised, e.g., alphabetically and regionally, it would be a lot easier to find stuff. Instead, search engines need to spy on users to figure out what they should be letting users choose for themselves. Where "user interfaces" are concerned, it is a fine line between "intuitive" and "manipulative".

The people who run search engines and directory sites are not objective. They can be bought. They want to be bought.

This brings quality down. As it always has for traditional media as well. But it's much worse with search engines.
I couldn't agree more. I shudder to think of a near future in which discussions include this "libral" or "conservative". I don't think it is nonsense because I think "it's a bad dichotomy for politics." I think it is bad because it is a poorly formed idea that reminds me of a high schooler learning some new thing and trying to apply it all over the place and see it everywhere like a psychoanalyst.

But the worst part about this is it is a pretty useless discussion despite the claims that this is some revolutionary culmination of a series of wildly over blog posts.
>A big one, though, is about appreciation for foreigners. China does in fact have laws about foreigners

Non-Chinese are officially second class citizens(to use a western expression) if thats is what you mean by laws about foreigners . The Chinese do go about this in the nicest way possible of course but anyone who is not Chinese has little to no rights (in the way a Chinese person does).

I've recently returned from living in China (a tier 2 inland city) where I have been living with my wife (this is her hometown) for 3 years.

I found after running afoul of the administration in the college where I worked how fragile my stay in China really was. I had to leave the country (where my wife, her family, and my son were) within 10 days after losing my job.

Everything is fine in China as a foreigner, until it's not, and then it's awefull.
The article and the paper it discusses talk about that.
Why I think app.net will succeed
Though I understand that you aren't denying the placebo effect, I'm confused about why you feel that a large amount of the placebo effect is due to bias. After all, most drug trials are double-blinded and placebo controlled, so surely in these trials the placebo effect is legitimate (assuming no scientific fraud).
Just tell, how does going through transport security in China work for you?
Explicit is better than implicit. If you want to call base64.b64encode on a piece of data, do that.
I hope so. The trick would be, after there is a cache of the Internet on Mars, to only have to send the changes, not the whole Internet again.

Straight snapshots would probably be the only viable option though. And maybe make the policy, once a decade do a complete update. And every year, do "any webpage accessed by colonists in the past year will be updated. And the top 5-15% of webpages by popularity on Earth."

And during the year, the top 5% of webpages, and any webpage with specifically Mars relevant content would be updated "wirelessly."

The numbers would change constantly, depending on bandwidth and costs and whatnot. But the question "how to build the best asynchronous shadow Internet given such and such constraints" is fascinating.
There is another logical conclusion: accept that since information is now easily shared that those who made their living by controlling the act of copying will be out of business soon.

The trouble is that the people who make their living that way aren't just working for the big guys any more. There are little guys out there, whose work can be ripped off just as easily and who suffer public prejudice that was earned by the abusive policies of the big guys over the years, yet who have none of the advantages of the big guys to make up for it. When you put these people out of business, the works you value don't get made any more, because they get other jobs so they can have food to eat and put a roof over their family's heads.

Like when the guild system collapsed and you could decide to try to earn a living as a blacksmith or carpenter without having to pay and get permission from the local guild.

The difference in this case is that you're not just bringing down the guild, you're bringing down the blacksmith and the carpenter as well.

I actually find it much more likely that artists will find a way to be paid and will adapt to a free exchange of bits than that we will find some good way to protect speech and freedom while still policing copyright.

Perhaps you're right, and I'll be the first to support abolishing copyright if it turns out that there are better ways to incentivise artists without the same social cost. But the fact is that nothing is stopping people from using alternative business models today if they provide a better incentive than copyright, and almost no-one does.

There have been a few experiments with things like choose-your-own pricing, but they have had highly variable success rates. Almost all of the really successful projects were made by artists whose reputation was already built the old-fashioned way.

There are a few experiments with things like Kickstarter today, and I wish them luck too. However, for now they consider a $1,000,000 project a huge success, and it remains to be seen how many of these projects actually produce the kind of results that the "investors" expect and how sustainable the model might become.

Meanwhile, to put that in perspective, the budget for Batman: The Dark Knight Rises is reported to have been $250,000,000, and Star Wars: The Old Republic allegedly comes in around $200,000,000. No small, independent studio can build projects on that scale anyway, and while a MMORPG like SW:TOR has a certain natural barrier to being ripped off, the same can't be said for other genres of big budget game.

I see the sense in your version, and it's not crazy. I just don't think we can pull it off. What we can do, since it's been done many times before, is let artists adapt to new technology and find a new business model.

The trouble is, if we don't pull it off, those new business models are going to be things like always-online DRM schemes and locked-down hardware and walled garden app stores. Exactly none of these things ultimately results in better experiences for the public. They just happen to have defensible bottom lines for the businesses.
Blogspam. OP is http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-...
very cool resource. Thanks. Any other lists like this, for instance for hardware or desktop apps?

Or whatever else.
If I as a provider can have software that determines eligibility for $0.05 as opposed to having a clerical worker spend 20 minutes with phone calls or faxes, yeah that's probably not only reasonable, but an insane bargain.
And we wonder why gnome has gone to shit
> "I'm very well read on the subject"

It certainly doesn't seem this way. You started this whole argument by stating a ridiculous falsehood: that the majority of America "sits on their asses" while the few "do all the work". Furthermore, you state that every resource has been granted to them "yet they do nothing".

Jtsummers then explained quite clearly that characterizing the middle class "doing nothing" and "sitting on their asses" is grossly false.

You started this thing with an incredibly disingenuous framing and appeal to emotion, going so far as to state an obvious falsehood.

Then you, incredulously, claim that you weren't trying to argue things from an emotional perspective. Right, because the claim that most people "sit on their asses" while the few, the honorable (like yourself, presumably) "do all the work" and that these people "do nothing"... that's not an attempt at emotional argument at all!

After Jtsummer continues on his journey of reasoning, you now make one more concession and try to gloss it over by insisting that you never meant to claim these people were "worthless". Your emotional framing failed, so now you're ducking behind the excuse that you never meant any value judgment with your claims - because "sitting on their ass" is totally not a value judgment at all!

If there's one thing I cannot abide in arguments/debates its disingenuousness. If you try to frame an argument purely emotionally and get caught in it, own it.
Where's Peter Thiel when you really need him?
US college education is increasingly demanded even for middle class jobs. new generations will have a tougher time landing decent gigs as even the manufacturing jobs become more and more complex.

while software engineering is something that can be learned by reading a book and hacking away at home until one can get through a jr programmer interview, or maybe even pick up programming on your own to a higher degree, not everyone can learn this way, and not lots of jobs will require formal training.

i don't like when this is painted in black and white colors .. i.e. "college education is a waste of time and money" or.. "college education is a must" .. but i do think it will be in higher demand as more jobs become high tech, and we can't all be Steve Corona smart :)
Chrome uses way more memory (and cycles) than Firefox or IE
I applaud the initiative, but I think the JSON needs to be friendlier.

* Use REST.

* Use HTTP Basic auth instead of cluttering the URL query string with the API key.

* Use ISO 8601 for dates, no exceptions.

* Use lower_case or lowerCamelCased keys.

* Don't use spaces or other non-alphanumeric/underscore characters in keys, otherwise you can't easily index child objects with dot notation in many languages.

* Instead of liberally using dictionaries, use arrays with a type field. For example (I couldn't finish the example because the example JSON on your site is indented too poorly to comprehend):

active_coverage: [
{
title: "Item #1",
description: "Choice Fund HRA Open Access Plus",
free_text: "Member is in network based on NPI ID provided in request",
...
}
]

* Why are percentages expressed as a string? Instead of ".1" which will need to be parsed again by the consuming app, use a raw number, or to avoid floating points, multiply by 100 to ensure whole numbers.

* Same goes for balance, make it a number (use cents to avoid floating points), and provide units like "USD".

The JSON example at https://eligibleapi.com/overview/how-it-works is incomplete and invalid. I'd be interested in seeing the entire JSON envelope to see how to actually get at the data and what other metadata is exposed.

This looks like a straight up EDI translation into JSON, and thus not natural at all. I'd try to abstract it out a bit more into what people might use it for, and build a truly consumable REST API.
You should have watched the press conferences where this was explained. The current software is optimized for the flight and landing. Now that they are on the surface, much of this functionality is not needed so they are switching to a driving and experimenting optimized version.

NASA has updated software exactly like this on a number of previous missions so no one expects any trouble.
Well, what do you consider "upper-level" math? The original article definitely means graduate level classes, not just advanced undergrad.

FWIW, I'm a physicist and used not rows or spirals but the "columns" approach mentioned by one commenter. :) And I probably couldn't tell you what type of math I prefer.
Not all do - but this is why I ask - I would like to see an API that lets me search for procedures I want, and ultimately have a market that makes the providers of that service compete for MY business.

As it stands, the insurance market is inverted that it makes the insured compete for coverage.
A friend of mine used to work at JPL on transmissions from one of the older explorers. Maybe Voyager?

Anyway, he compared the energy used to transmit from the probe to that of a flower petal falling from a height of six feet.
Apparently I'm screwed; I cut it off the cob in sheets.

So I guess that means I don't care about efficiency, but need things super neat and orderly. I have always liked Prolog though...
10k square miles of rock floating in Pacific
Except that you'd get rather unintuitive results: recursion seems to tie nicely to algebra, while iteration seems to tie nicely to analysis (algebra: see group actions, modules, lattice decompositions, analysis: many proofs require chaining inequalities together). But recursion is generally associated with functional languages/LISP/etc., while iteration is much more associated with traditional OO languages (and objects are pretty algebraic, the author gets that right).

I'd say it's probably more dynamic typing versus static typing. Dynamic typing matches up very well with the sort of fuzzy proofs that occur in analysis ("well this is less than that, and that is less than the other, so this is less than the other by a little bit" seems close to "quacks like a duck"), and static typing seems very much like an algebraic idea.

But, as someone working on a math masters, I can say that I prefer analysis and really like dynamically typed languages, so this might just be my pet theory of matching the world to myself.
Automated Data Migration: SugarCRM to Salesfofce
I guess it is part tone or intent, I'll reply often "I'm good, how are you today (or doing, etc.) and get, "I'm ok (or I'm good, or "you know") and many times, "thanks for asking" in a sincere tone.

A sarcastic tone would throw off the cashier, or, if (my personal example) I am stressed or thinking of something else, of course my intent will be interpreted as "not caring," as, I probably don't.

It doesn't take that Much willpower just to be nice to people, and many times, you will catch the "auto response must say hi how are you" verbists off guard in a good way.
Seconded. They are one step above supermarket tabloids when it comes to journalism. What's next? Posts here about the Bat Boy?

If there is something to this story, then it will be available at a reputable site. That's what should be submitted here.
"Fixed", or more popularly "Fixed That For You" (FTFY). Is a common internet-ism, found on message boards, reddit, blogs, etc. definitely not exclusive to Marco, though now that you mention it I do recall seeing him use it.
When I get the "how are you" question I often answer "Oh, about an 8. How about you?" Always gets a smile.

Wish I could say I invented that but I stole it.
Here's the source code for water: "H₂O"

The build requirements and procedures are openly documented on the Internet. GL;HF!
I didn't say "most" people sit on their asses ... I said that millions are.

Where did I ever say anything about the "middle class" doing nothing or sitting on their asses? The middle class is not the problem -- they are not the takers of America.

"Sitting on their ass" is a value judgement. Sure. And there are millons of Americans who are doing nothing but taking. Period. They aren't trying. They aren't taking the opportunity that sits before them. They are existing because government pays for everything for them. How is that even deniable?

Instead of saying "the few of us" it would have been better if I had said "the rest of us".

If you want to get hung up on that, go for it.

I think that the Elizabeth Warren / Obama speeches about "giving your fair share" are getting a little old. The point is that all Americans have fairly equal access to the same roads, bridges, and other things the government provides -- yet there are millions that are squandering their own opportunities. That's not my fault and I don't feel like I owe them something for it.
RT is, as usual, full of shit. TrapWire is no secret, but a public product, available to any company who wants to pay for it (see www.trapwire.com).

"more accurate than modern facial recognition technology"

"recorded digitally on the spot"

"encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence"

"the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented"

It sounds a bit ominous, but what does any of that even mean? The security video cameras have encrypted feeds into a central server, which does facial recognition? Sounds nice, but I'd be surprised if it works well enough to be useful (esp. if someone is wearing sunglasses), but not nearly as alarmed as the tone of the RT article encourages. Sounds more like fantasy technology and wasted tax money than anything else.
Weird. I got heavy into algebra, algebraic topology, and graph theory early on and never cared a whit for analysis. I eat like a typewriter.

In my home state of Georgia the two major public universities are very lopsided in their math departments. University of Georgia is very strong in algebra and Georgia Tech is very strong in analysis. I went to both but fit in much better in the former department.

I have a bunch of job interviews coming up - I'm going to ask my interviewers how they eat their corn as a wedge into discussing problem solving strategies on their teams.
Exactly. You weren't born with the instict to say "fine, how are you you" or "please" and "thank you." You were taught to do that by your parents.

Habits like this are a muscle that can be developed. Relatedly, the concept of ego depletion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
A political philosopher "he ain't." I still get the hype of Steve Yegge, I guess he's a writer only software blog audience world could love. It was soooo loqacious; he doesn't disappoint. :)

Nevertheless, I don't know which was worse, the claim about what political conservatism/liberal is or the software one. I guess the software doesn't matter because he's just making it up anyway, but still. Before anyone thinks too highly of this piece, I recommend people study some actual philosophy and humanities.

At it's very core this is just an elaborate (not in a good way) dressing up of the static vs dynamic typing discussion; hardly a revolutionary insight. I also don't see how this is "risk" based debate. But in any event, this is just hard to take.
He sure hates when people are

critical: http://www.marco.org/2012/07/26/mac-app-store-future

of: http://www.marco.org/2011/03/03/a-rare-disagreement

Apple: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-hona...

sources: google "marco arment critical apple"
Gmail Team Testing New Login Page With Multliple Sign-In Management
"...but you don't see them suing people like geohot as sony does."

Yes, yes you do. The ridiculous lawsuit that Apple is currently waging against Samsung is a prominent example. Frivolous waste of time. "Let's patent a rectangle. Wait, a black rectangle with rounded edges!" Good thing no one told any TV manufacturers about the no-rectangle patent! Silly.

Don't get me wrong, though. I work on Macs every day; love 'em. But I think the platform wars should be over by now; being able to use *any device or OS or application should be the focus, shouldn't it? (For my part, I'm enjoying the flexibility to create, code, whatever on open and expansive Android devices in addition to my Mac these days. And I'm grateful that OSX is now based on a BSD variant.)
Have you really never had to install a firmware or BIOS update? It's the the same thing.
>It boils down to cost vs benefit, actual studies, and mathematical axioms, not aesthetics or feelings.

Its not quite that simple. Well performed studies that are actually relevant to a particular project are _difficult_ to come by. By well performed, I mean free of biases and misattributions and relevant to your particular use case. For example, most of the links in the answers here (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/10032/dynamic...), a question specifically requesting studies them don't have any significant empirical data. Further, if you dig deeper its also clear that studies often contradict each other. Further, lets say you try to do a cost-benefit analysis. How? Try to estimate how many hours a particular technique will save you and you run into the same problem people have been trying to deal with for years. Estimating the time it takes to do a project is _hard_. Add to that how rapidly things are changing in this space and how dependent the structure of code is on the application of that code, and its clear that we really don't have objective metrics for this kind of thing.

>Engineering tools affect both how you ship, what you can ship, and when you can ship it. The choice isn't arbitrary, and choosing involves careful reasoned thought, informed by real experience

This is far more revealing of how these decisions are actually made. Your experience and thought process may very well be arbitrary when contrasted with real data. It might as well be aesthetics and fuzzy feeling.