skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be willing to go out on a limb and estimate that maybe some private interests in Hollywood, with certain four letter acronyms, despise open source media player projects like VLC, since they might represent a channel that can potentially enable bypasses that can circumvent precious, precious DRM.

The perception being: if you can see the source of a media player program, the encryption might be implicitly compromised. This is a silly idea though, because it neglects certain realities about the very nature of electronic encryption, and media consumption. Maybe having source code lowers the bar in some respects, but the reality is that determined people will simply bootleg media anyway, by other means.

Not an accusation though, just that my tinfoil hat is tingling. Who else might be so motivated to attack an awesome software project like VLC?
Maybe Videolan isn't the target and the DDoS is against someone else in the form of using Videolan's bandwidth against someone else?

That's my general assumption of any attack in which the response to a request is in the many MB range and the request is in the bytes range.

That someone with limited bandwidth and many connections is attempting to acquire a large amount of bandwidth to attack someone else.
Apache Binary Backdoors on Cpanel-based servers
Thanks, it's not as complete as Shark. But it is nonetheless very interesting.
I wonder what would have happened to the Internet if it had been called a bubble as persistently as bitcoin is...

It's almost as if "real" economists have an emotional need to say "I'm not stupid! I can recognize an obvious bubble!"
Yeah that's true, too.
No — balloons only increase your altitude. They can't give you orbital velocity.
Could you have the ML part done as a standalone process and not actually linked into your other project code? That is, process some data "out of band" so to speak, and write it out to a file, which is then used by "your stuff"? Or communicate with the ML part over a socket? Either approach would let you use this code without requiring the other parts of your project to be licensed under the GPL.

Just a thought...
Talking scriptie-talkie, interactive JavaScript samples right in your blog
I agree with your points. The saving in the case of released source code is that, if the original analysis is flawed in such a way that there's no need to repeat it because it's wrong, then a large amount of expense and effort can be saved. Of course, if the original analysis holds up given the data and code, independent replication is a necessary thing.
I bet somewhere in the Pentagon they have wasted the money to developed a radiation hardened smartphone chip for them to fantasize surviving nuclear fallout.

If so, then NASA could use it for space?

This is an interesting read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening#Radiation-h...

Maybe they can just shield conventional chips with depleted boron.
why should they need to change? If you acknowledge that the changes required are superficial, why are they required?

If they're superficial, why can't Uber just play ball? I can't disconnect my electricity meter and install a more accurate one of my choosing, even if that leads to me paying more in utilities. Some things are standard just because it makes it easier for people to tell that nobody's breaking the rules.
> Not sure if this is off topic, but shouldn't it be simple to make a high altitude balloon out of a material that doesn't explode so easily when it gets to the lower pressures in low earth orbit?

The very early comms sat experiments in the 50s were just aluminised passive balloons that reflected radio signals bounced off them while in orbit. [1]. However they were there because they were put there by a rocket. I'm not sure if your question is implying that you could float your way up to LEO altitude. I suspect you couldn't with anything that could be engineered.

> Or even some kind of contraption that slowly releases gas from the balloon as it detects lower pressure in the atmosphere to help it maintain altitude and prevent the balloon from rupturing?

This is done already in two ways. One passively does what you describe - a zero pressure balloon - by having a hole in the bottom so helium leaks out as it rises. Eventually enough leaks out that the net lift is zero and it just floats.

The other is a super-pressure balloon [2] which does what you described in your first paragraph - it's strong enough to not explode until the pressure (and so density) of the helium inside increases relative to the outside atmosphere until the lift becomes zero. But we're still a long way from an altitude that could sustain orbit. These operate at relatively low altitudes like 45km/150kft. The drag and heating there would be enormous at orbital velocities!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpressure_balloon
There is a section lower down on TFA that documents using a Permission-based test or a custom test. Over all, looks like I'll probably swap my hacked-together-from-jquery-plugin-and-ajax-api solution with this. Much cleaner for my code.
Disclaimer: VideoLAN president and lead VLC developer here.

The attack started on our new mirroring system (powered by mirrorbrain) 2.5 days ago, during the night (after 2am, so we were sleeping).

We were woken up (OP and I) in the morning by many mirrors complaining of high bandwidth use. The actual number of requests was not that high (400 req/s), but the botnet was downloading the whole vlc.exe, aka 22MB. So, we were at around 70Gbps during the night, in average.

Afterwards, North America got up, and things got worse. We had up to 1660 req/s, so around 292 Gbps...

This is very weird for a DDoS, to be honest.

Our front machine that splits the down mirrors was taking most of the load, and we were able to find the patterns to drop the botnet connexions, in order to not kill too much our mirrors. I won't discuss too much of the patterns, as you can imagine, but as usual, I'll be happy to discuss it IRL or by mail.

Tweaking the front server was also important to reduce the number of open connexions, to not kill our server.

2.5 days after, the attack is still going on, with an average of 500req/s.

The video was done using logstalgia, using scripts of OP, on my machine (<troll>he was running eclipse, he couldn't do both at the same time :)</troll>).
Annoyingly, there's no volume control on the embedded video.
It seems like you are being intentionally obtuse: more surveillance can make almost any law enforceable. Requiring disclosure and regulatory review of exotic financial contracts doesn't violate individuals' privacy except in some very artificial and theoretical terms, and the downside risk is global in reach and magnitude.

Building the kind of surveillance that ensures individuals will observe all terms of service they unknowingly agreed to and can bring felony charges and large statutory damages against them reliably and efficiently does violate all kinds of individual privacy. It also institutionalizes a privileged place for publishers in the legal system, and brings Big Brother into our homes. None or that can be said for financial regulation.

We don't owe banks or publishers or buggy-whip vendors the ability to continue to do business in any particular way. We do owe people their privacy. There is a fundamental difference here you no doubt see, but ignore.
So the rich "need" transportation to safety more than poor people. Got it.
They didn't argue that they complied with regulations, they applied for an exemption, see the difference? If they want to charge a non-fixed price I think they should have to show the price for comparison and during the trip. With an exemption they wouldn't have to do that at all.

I might not know their marketing, but you don't know the market in Stockholm so maybe you should be a little less cocky about it.

Sometimes regulation gets in the way of innovation, but this time it seems like regulation only gets in the way because they can't be bothered to innovate. Getting their app certified as a meter would be a nice precedent for more innovation.
The utility of 'price' (whether it involves "gouging" or not) is to signal the entire marketplace regarding the current state of supply vs. demand. The market is dynamic and responds to the signal.

If you attempt to legislate the rules regarding price you are making it illegal to respond to the signal. This just leads to oversupply and legally enforced profit (the price is too high) or shortages and legislative enforced queues and delays (the price is too low).
Technology is not important for your startup. Choose whatever you know. Then go from there and fix it when you scale because you've found a market.

About time to market: From my experience (and Reinertsen [1]) time to market is not lost during programming but during the decision phase. Optimize your decision speed (reduce meetings, don't postpone decisions, have a clear decider, know what to decide and what not, ...), not your technology stack if you want to beat others to market.

I did have an offer for some years: Anyone beating a Java (the COBOL of the internet world) stack 5x to market, I pay him $1000. No one did take it yet.

One of my slide deck on the topic:

http://www.slideshare.net/Stephan.Schmidt/what-everyone-shou...

[1] "Developing Products in Half the Time: New Rules, New Tools" Preston G. Smith, Donald G. Reinertsen
Make new friends? Meet new people? Learn new things?
Rather presumptuous to assume that just because 'your friends' won't be there, those who will aren't going to be 'as good' for an arbitrary definition of good.
Newton also said, "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results." This seems to be part of the attitude OP is taking, that if others want his best, most unique results, they should arrive at them independently. But then when someone did that with Newton (Leibniz), the resulting fallout "redounded to the discredit of all concerned." (Here is a nice summary of the beef: http://www.ams.org/notices/200905/rtx090500602p.pdf)
"not every Egalitarian is automatically a feminist as you claim."

Using the definition I gave (which is quite literally the dictionary definition), they are. I acknowledge that many people (in the US) seem to use the word "feminist" to mean "filthy godless pinko commie liberal baby-killing anti-American" (where "liberal" has already been redefined) or some other such politically charged interpretation. That's a fantastic trick pulled by the anti-women (amongst other things) crowd who do wonders with redefining language on a daily basis.
> but shouldn't it be simple to make a high altitude balloon out of a material that doesn't explode so easily when it gets to the lower pressures in low earth orbit?

No, because balloons don't orbit, they follow the wind patterns at a lower altitude than the lowest satellite orbits. And they're relatively short-lived at altitude -- from seconds to days.

> Or even some kind of contraption that slowly releases gas from the balloon as it detects lower pressure in the atmosphere to help it maintain altitude and prevent the balloon from rupturing?

No, not "releases gas" -- that would lose the gas irreversibly. Instead, consider a scheme that used solar power to drive a pump to put some of the gas under pressure as needed, and releases it later as needed to maintain altitude. Sort of how a submarine maintains its buoyancy by filling tanks with either water or gas, depending on the need, and that does this by putting the gas under pressure to change buoyancy (and avoid losing the gas).

But balloons don't have very long lifetimes at the moment. This might change in the future.
Part of what they offer is the appearance at your destination of having been delivered by a private driver.

Uber X and Uber Taxi are just Priuses and regular taxis.
Show HN: Simple Markdown Blogging Platform
>When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant.

The "radioactive for a long time" thing is really hopelessly misunderstood. The unique thing about producing something which is dangerous for a long time is not that it stays dangerous, it's that it ever stops being dangerous.

You mine "coal" and you unearth ore that contains elements like arsenic, cadmium, lead, antimony, selenium and thallium. The same goes for most mining operations. You want your rare earth metals for your wind turbines and hybrid batteries, same deal. Geological deposits are rarely elementally pure. That is some awful stuff, and it never decays. It sticks around until the end of time. So if you're worried about the future, worry more about "until the end of time" than "for thousands of years."

But let's keep talking about nuclear. Where does 10,000 years come from? What you're referring to is the half life of Plutonium-239 at ~24,000 years. Pu-239 is weapons grade. The problem with it is very much not that we don't know what to do with it. The problem is we do know what to do with it. But you can't stop Iran from getting the bomb by not building new reactors in Virginia. Moreover, if you have no desire to blow up a city you can mix Pu-239 with Pu-240 which makes it useless for bombs but great for reactor fuel, and using it as reactor fuel destroys it in a lot fewer than 24,000 years. The other byproducts with multi-thousand year half lives are the same thing -- reactor fuel. Isotopes of Uranium and Thorium. They're actinides which are either fissile or can reasonably be converted to fissile isotopes.

If you like irrationally scary numbers, Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 BILLION years. The thing is, Th-232 isn't produced by reactors, it's the most common isotope found in the ground. It's fuel, not waste. And it's not even very radioactive -- the longer the half life of an isotope, the more stable it is and the less radioactive it is.

The most problematic components of "nuclear waste" are isotopes of Strontium and Cesium that have half lives of a few decades and are things you very much do not want to get into the soil or the water. But that is no different than any of the variety of poisonous and toxic chemicals we deal with on an industrial scale every day. And they have significant commercial value as radiation sources e.g. in nuclear medicine. You do have to be careful in handling and storing them, but how is that different than any other sensitive industrial use chemicals other than OMG NUKULAR?
Balloons/UAVs are more reliable when it comes to communications. Getting a suitable satellite into orbit that allows for reliable communication is way too expensive.

There was talk of doing a Pirate Bay dirigible at one point.
You just described the difference between a project and a business. All businesses are projects, but not all projects are businesses. There is nothing wrong with creating projects for the sake of creating projects. But if you are trying to create a business, market and marketing come first and you should consider them way before writing your first line of code.
You can clone a "magnetic card" from a chip card - it's magnetic stripe will be identical, but you won't have the private key of the chip.

And afterwards, if the bank knows that it is supposed to be a chip-capable card; and the location (country) is supposed to be chip-capable, then all mag-stripe transactions are rejected even if the "all required information" is correct.
Which Chinese Restaurant Do The Chinese Go To?
> I'm glad to see that stating the truth is a valid defense.

Truth has always been an absolute defence; the Act doesn't change anything in that regard.

(Several of the 'new' defences are just codifications or tweaks of existing defences. I think the only completely new defence is the 'peer-reviewed statement in scientific or academic journals' one).
Indeed. I think Youtube's "Hey, you should use your real name!" nag to be a very unsettling sign of things to come. My friends @ the Googleplex also note that there was a large schism internally wrt the whole "real name" push, but that's all heresay anyway.

I found the article I mentioned: http://www.fastcompany.com/3004448/plus-one-proof-google-plu...

The author thinks G+ will be huge by the end of 2013, which is much too short a timeline... but otherwise I think his analysis is spot-on. Some highlights:

"Sure, there’s a social networking aspect to it, but Google Plus is really Google’s version of Google. It’s the groundwork for a level of search quality difficult to fathom based on what we know today. It’s also the Borg-like hive-queen that connects all the other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Images, Offers, Books, and more. And Google is starting to roll these products all up into a big ball of awesome user experience by way of Google Plus, and that snowball is starting to pick up speed and mass."

("awesome user experience" is obviously highly subjective and debatable)

"What makes Google Plus different is that it is the new backbone of a company that does search better than anyone already--something Facebook could never compete with. You use Google to search, right? Well, imagine if Google knew every piece of data about you that Facebook knew. Imagine how better equipped they would be to serve you what you are looking for. Google Plus is a way of entrenching Google’s dominance in that area, not a way of stealing Facebook users. If you are in first place, that’s the time to accelerate your lead."

and the conclusion:

"I know. You are still in the “no freaking way am I joining another social network” mode. But one day soon you will wake up and find out about that one little thing and it goes something like this:

Your buddy, “Hey have you heard about this one little thing?”

You: “Oh. My. God. That’s Awesome. That’s so Awesome. How do I get that?”

Your buddy: “Oh, you need to have a Google Plus Profile or it doesn’t work.”"
The problem with the English (as opposed to British - Scotland is different) libel system was that it went out of its way to penalise free speech.

So you couldn't recover all your costs in a case, and libel barristers are some of the highest earning. Losing a case meant you could be liable for part of the other side's fees, so you are easily looking at £100k+ when fighting a case.

So it became really easy for bullying threats of a lawsuit to shut down awkward speech. Not just in England, anything "published" in England - and there the courts consistently ruled incredibly broadly. So you had all sorts of dodgy foreigners using the English libel system to crush criticism abroad.
Time in programming languages
Is it really though?

Registered developers can already submit code level problems[1], there are official developer forums and bugs can be filed with Radar.

Meanwhile at WWDC, it's a developer scrum to get a 15 minute slot with an engineer and walk him/her through code they've never seen before.

From my experience, engineers do their best but they have always looked somewhat tired, hungry and distracted. All things given, I'm not sure it's the best environment to solve non-trivial problems, although it is nice to put a face to a name.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/submit/
Top 13 Keyword Research Mistakes
I think one needs only to look at this paintings to decide for oneself.
I'm running the latest Chrome Beta channel on my mac, and the installation button is disabled for me. Anyone care to host a crx?
The CubeSat program is awesome for universities. There are also lots of launch opportunities from the Chinese, Indians, and Russians. Just yesterday there were a couple university sponsored CubeSats that where launched on a Chinese rocket.

http://amsat-uk.org/2013/04/26/ham-radio-cubesats-successful...
Yeah, I think you're supposed to put a city input there and not the whole text. I guess I should of made it more clear
OK, sure: we have the same problem today that we had back then, which is the tendency of governments to descend into tyranny. The 4th amendment is a protection against that and so it remains relevant.

Copyright was began with an effort to simplify tyranny, and later evolved into a way to promote the interests of the publishing industry. Neither of those are relevant to today's world; we do not want the Star Chamber and the publishing industry is no longer necessary to spread information and entertainment. Why, then, should we keep copyright around?
Seems like everyone is looking to call something a "bubble" after 2008. In this case, this type of increase and crash seems to correlate with other bubbles like the 1987 crash or the Japanese crash in 1989.
Requiem for Our Wonderfully Inefficient World
I've updated my bookshelf to include Simon Singh's "Trick or Treatment" which sparked his involvement in libel reform when he was sued by the Chiropractor's association.

Given the impact on his life for the past few years he deserves recompense. Plus his earlier works were excellent.
In ubuntu, when using the packaged clisp and asdf (installable via apt-get), i'm unable to install quicklisp without some hacking around (it complains about the asdf version).

But I agree with you, quicklisp is awesome.
This was a collaborative research effort with our friends at ESET, here is their breakdown of what they saw: http://www.welivesecurity.com/2013/04/26/linuxcdorked-new-ap...
They are "sort of" connecting to the bank - the idea is that the card issues an authorisation token w. the amount and other info, signs it with the private key, and then the merchant sends it to the bank which may approve or deny the transaction.
I'm in. I wonder if we should just have a HN meetup around WWDC time.
JQuery Annotated Source
Sam Harris does not appear to be a rational individual who discovered atheism through logic and evidence. The man just appears to be bat-sh*t crazy.

The author casually tries to put this man in the same leagues as other atheist such as Richard Dawkins. But in my view Dawkin's is a sane individual trying to cope with an insane world. I cannot say the same about Mr. Harris after reading this article.
See

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/03/credit-card-skimmin...

It's not easily avoidable.
Does this shut down "libel tourism"?

9(c). A court does not have jurisdiction to hear and determine an action to which this section applies unless the court is satisfied that, of all the places in which the statement complained of has been published, England and Wales is clearly the most appropriate place in which to bring an action in respect of the statement.
I agree with you on what ownership means. And who wouldn't want to be a post-funding owner where they can draw a nice salary and where the only thing they risk is their time and other people's money? Few want to take on pre-funding ownership where the starting salary is $0.
Perhaps more than traffic, conversion should be the measure. Good content converts, while link baits could get traffic. Seems like common sense, but would love to see some stats or experiences if anyone has.
The standard skimmer "online kit" options include also replacement keypads - a thin (1mm) overlay over the real keys that record your physical keypresses.
The original source does have one: http://nextberlin.eu/2013/04/bruce-sterling-fantasy-prototyp...
In-dash devices can be very distracting to drivers
One non-obvious way to expand the number of GPIO Pins on the Raspberry Pi is to buy a BeagleBone Black...
Fisker Automotive Pulls Website – Founder to Testify Before U.S Congress
Actually, they should try.

They are not obligated, but it is in their best interests to build a reputation of not breaking things.

I do think that Linux lacks a reputation of not breaking existing programs as much as it lacked a reputation of ease of use before Ubuntu.

Now, ease of use, and not breaking things? I bet that kind of reputation is worth millions of dollars.

Even Linus agrees about it, when it comes to the kernel breaking userland programs. The kernel developers have no control over userland programs. Nonetheless, the kernel developers try very hard not to break userland programs.