skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Anyone want to go through SICP with me? I'm in Seattle
Hi everyone,

I'm a mid-20s software engineer living in Seattle and I'm working on improving my computer science fundamentals beyond what I got in/from school.

After talking to some friends and co-workers and doing research on the internet I decided to go through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I've been making decent progress but would like to set up a group for any other like minded people to go through the book with me.

I'm pretty flexible - thinking the pace should be a chapter a month? (if that's too fast or slow for you I'll switch it up) I just want to go over the information with other people and have resources in case I can't figure out an exercise or part of the book.

My email should be in my profile, or post here. I'll be checking back frequently.

Also if anyone who has worked through SICP has any advice any wants to share I'm happy to listen or if you want to go through the book again for a refresher (or because you enjoyed it a lot) join up!

Thanks!
Welcome to the Bush-Obama White House: They're Spying on Us
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Maybe because they're doing a much more effective job than we realize.

Maybe. Unfortunately there's no real way to say. I mean, if I offer you a "tiger proof rock" and say that it protects against tiger attacks, will you accept as evidence, the fact that I've never been attacked by a tiger?

Also I don't think you accounted for Pearl Harbor.

No, I didn't. I don't think most people put that under "terrorist attack", as it was an overt action by an organized nation-state as part of an active military strategy. The Japanese weren't just trying to "sow terror", it was a tactical objective to weaken the US Navy so they wouldn't be able to impede Japanese objectives in the Pacific during WWII.

I do not think the vast majority of the world hates the US. I'd be curious to see facts about this.

I don't think the argument is that the majority of the world hates us (although it might be fair to say that a majority aren't terribly fond of us), but rather that - of the groups which are actively engaging in terrorist attacks directed out way - those groups are motivated by our foreign policy. I admit this view is not without controversy.
How to ask questions as an interviewee
It was weird timing because I was working on a multi-threaded application that was murdering my server (expected) when I made the comment.
Teamocil is usually the thing I show non-tmux users, that then makes them want to use tmux. Awesome utility, Remi, great job! (with apologies to Tim and Eric)
Introducing the World's First Private Cloud Appliance.
http://www.starkitsystems.com/
It's all city down there...that's why.
My friend also runs the ListServe Archive. It's quite interesting to dig through some of the older submissions and see the variety of the content.

http://thelistservearchive.com/
This is always about what you could have said. Every question in an interview is a chance to prove yourself a worthy hire, and complaining, while technically accurate, at most pushes you no further towards your goal. If your answer is to complain about your previous employer, you have simply wasted that question.
Beautiful movie and soundtrack. There's two guys that rode a lot of the landmarks of the movie/book on mountain bikes: http://forums.mtbr.com/passion/mountain-bike-version-into-wi...
Two smart approaches to keyword expansion
Yea, it's been there for at least 8 months, when I started using it.
Completely OT, but I accidentally downvoted you due to an errant attempt to click on your link -- sorry about that.
Can we please stop with the politics/outrage posts? If I wanted to see articles recycled from /r/politics, I would read reddit.
There's one thing missing from your analysis: the life expectancies calculated this way include all deaths; someone who is 58 has managed to avoid some pretty dangerous parts of life, for example:

1. They did not die during their first year of birth. About 6 babies in 1000 die during the first year of birth in the US.
2. They did not die as a youth from depression or driving their car into a tree.

That being said, this histogram (logarithmic scale) suggests that one's odds of living to 100 are still somewhat low: http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/number.jpg
Awesome. I have about 86546774 docs to convert now.
It appears as though the author is unaware that this feature has been here the entire time. This 'leaderboard' has always been accessible to anyone and everyone. In the past it was an out of app mechanism, I would have to go to the site and go to made up example url: snapchat/user/Mitchella to find the information but it would still show my 'score' and my 'most snapchatted to list.
I'm not sure if my case is very strange, but it took me a good 5 months to find a job after having designed a website and having a masters in math with many comp sci classes. I think it's not that easy for everyone to find a job.
Probably, because he said that he doesn't want to go into his family details. He wants to keep his identity secret. Also the fact that he didn't tell his company about his illness would be a justification.
> Maybe now you morons who continue to vote in the pieces of shit into our government who are bent on taking more and more power for themselves will wake up and figure it out?

In my opinion, from everything I've seen, the only thing they are bent on is protecting people like you from the increased threats of crimes, radicalization, and terrorism.

I know how that sounds, you can't figure out if I'm joking or if I'm a brain-washed moron.

But think of it this way, Obama did a 180 when he got into office because a) power-lust made him do it, or b) he gained access to a much more detailed and clearer picture than you have?
Your counter argument to verizon call list is: what if a black guy is calling the KKK?

Not that I'm pro verizon, just that is a very poor example.
Voting within a system where you know, almost without a doubt, that only a Democrat or a Republican can win is really difficult. As an independent or libertarian you sometimes have to be pragmatic and vote for someone who might be aligned with some of what you think is important and hope to do some good. The alternative is to either waste your vote on someone who will not get elected or refrain from voting at all.

This isn't a simple problem. There are very few choices that actually make a difference.

I used my presidential voting record merely to point out that I truly don't follow party lines. Voting at all levels is important, not just for president.
VPN privacy policies decoded: Hide My Ass
Utah also has cheap land and really cheap electricity.
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$5? If I can't solve it with Google, it is worthy more than $5! :) I am thinking about rates between $30 and $150 per hour.

I think must be a protocol to understand the size of the problem. If it is something that will need more than, say, 10 hours, so it becomes a traditional freelance job.

But this risk you say happens on every freelance or outsource job of any size. A freelancer that expects to built a site in 2 weeks, can take 2 months if he didn't do his due dilligence right. A software factory that quote to do a system in 3 months, may take 1 year if the communication on the quote phase was problematic. This happens everywhere, it doesn't justify a "not worthy model" for me.
Go finish the article. You missed the point because you stopped half way through.
Full text of the email sent to cutomers:

Dear Client

At the end of last week, Hetzner technicians discovered a "backdoor" in one
of our internal monitoring systems (Nagios).

An investigation was launched immediately and showed that the administration
interface for dedicated root servers (Robot) had also been affected. Current
findings would suggest that fragments of our client database had been copied
externally.

As a result, we currently have to consider the client data stored in our Robot
as compromised.

To our knowledge, the malicious program that we have discovered is as yet
unknown and has never appeared before.

The malicious code used in the "backdoor" exclusively infects the RAM. First
analysis suggests that the malicious code directly infiltrates running Apache
and sshd processes. Here, the infection neither modifies the binaries of the
service which has been compromised, nor does it restart the service which has
been affected.

The standard techniques used for analysis such as the examination of checksum
or tools such as "rkhunter" are therefore not able to track down the malicious
code.

We have commissioned an external security company with a detailed analysis of
the incident to support our in-house administrators. At this stage, analysis
of the incident has not yet been completed.

The access passwords for your Robot client account are stored in our database
as Hash (SHA256) with salt. As a precaution, we recommend that you change your
client passwords in the Robot.

With credit cards, only the last three digits of the card number, the card type
and the expiry date are saved in our systems. All other card data is saved
solely by our payment service provider and referenced via a pseudo card number.
Therefore, as far as we are aware, credit card data has not been compromised.

Hetzner technicians are permanently working on localising and preventing possible
security vulnerabilities as well as ensuring that our systems and infrastructure
are kept as safe as possible. Data security is a very high priority for us. To
expedite clarification further, we have reported this incident to the data
security authority concerned.

Furthermore, we are in contact with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in
regard to this incident.

Naturally, we shall inform you of new developments immediately.

We very much regret this incident and thank you for your understanding and
trust in us.

A special FAQs page has been set up at
http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Security_Issue/en to assist you with further
enquiries.

Kind regards

Martin Hetzner
All seems very pointless when you can 1) Take a screenshot, or 2) take a photo of it.

Once you give someone the ability to see or hear something, there is no guaranteed way to take it back.

I say this because: "You revoke access to anyone in the future that even if they have the image, without the privilege, the file is useless"
> Based on this, it would be counterproductive to vote third party, and the responsible thing would be to vote for Romney.

This only stands if you want it to be counterproductive. A third-party candidate vote is never counterproductive. Even if it did increase the probability of an Obama win, or even if it did have no effect on the election outcome, why would it be a wasted vote? What you're effectively doing is raising publicity for the cause. Just because you'll have to suffer 4 more years of struggle doesn't mean it's all for nought.
I'm sure it's possible to sit in isolation and create a livable startup. In my experience, though, the best things professionally, such as bizdev deals, finding people to work with or making large sales, come from personal connections. That is, people that you've actually met.

I love the outdoors and I love to code as well. This sounds super fun and I'm kind of jealous of that lifestyle, but I'm not sure if it's a sound business decision.
Reddit's /r/conspiracy hasa pretty good post on the matter as well:

http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_n...
Culture isn’t kumbaya stuff
You suggest good SEO. Ok.
Counterexample, use the power of a Botnet to do something unorthodox, dive into the grayzone, get media attention. Hustle

Under the right circumstances, I'm not opposed to doing the unorthodox (I might skip the botnet though), and I agree that hustle is important and getting media attention is good. I just wanted to share some of the obvious stuff that jumped to mind immediately.

You saying that reminds me of another resource of interest: Ryan Holiday's book Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.[1] There's some interesting stuff in there about manipulating the media. You could almost think of it as "black hat PR".

[1]: http://trustmeimlying.com/
Is free IT worth what you pay for it?
read the 2nd last sentence
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>The trek will cover about 5 miles of straight-line distance and will likely take about a year.

This is interesting to me. Does the rover just move really slow because it is collecting data the whole way? or because the terrain is hard to navigate?
Four of these stories are from 2011, and one is from 2012 ... but also seems somewhat innocuous: As long as there isn't other damage, I'm not sure how having sex in an AirBnB apartment is that big a deal, unless there are potential liability issues.

Given this, I'd think that AirBnB has fixed the issues it had in 2011, and is killing it.
It was a much more homogenous mob than what we have in the US today, but it was still a mob.

As for citizen referendums, look no further than California to see the outcome of this "direct democracy". It still suffers from the Golden Rule, he who has the gold makes the rules.
> sort

I think that a bubble sort can be effective in that it's easy to write and does the job.

I'm not addressing the rest of your post, just the one part that has nothing to do with what you were really saying.
I disagree with your numbers on the message/reply/date funnel (mine is much better and I would expect most people's are). I do like the idea of Wednesday Night though and hope you guys can execute well on it.
I think most people have quite effective asshole detectors. If you get noticed because you used a botnet to spam your site, that will do serious damage to your credibility amongst almost anyone you might want to work with. If your aim is respect amongst black hat hackers, then perhaps it would be effective, but in the context of startups I can't see how that would be desireable. People don't go into business with someone they can't trust, and nothing screams untrustworthy like promoting yourself with a botnet.
Not directly, but it is a means to help establish overall credibility and reputation, which do come into play.
What's the story here? What can Scotland do in 2014?
Nice typo right?
Inevitably complete electronic surveillance of communications will be used for insider trading, implicating enemies/competitors in crimes, and suppression of journalists and politically unfavorable activists.

Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational security implications of bribable government employees having access to their trade secrets and strategies.

The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims.

No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.
I'd like one too. Sorry for all this spam.
New Immune System Discovered
Relying on a terrible hashing mechanism just because you hope nobody will realize you're using it is a very bad idea. There's no technical reason to use MD5 over at least looping over a good SHA variant, and if your code has access to bcrypt/scrypt, it's hard to come up with a reason to choose anything (except maybe pbkdf2) over them, either.

Further, a string that long might be effectively impossible to crack /by brute force/, but MD5 has been found to have flaws that allow the attacker to find alternate inputs that will produce the same hash in a very short amount of time (minutes to hours, according to Wikipedia[0]). That means if the attacker has your hash, they don't need to figure out your nonce or salt to come up with something they can use to trick your system into authenticating them as an arbitrary user. These attacks don't reveal the user's original password, but they do still allow someone to impersonate an arbitrary user on your site, for e.g., purchasing services, accessing financial details from your billing system, or performing social engineering attacks.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5#Security
Great post! I hadn't realized the size of the decoupling on Android. I wonder if this won't ultimately result in the Microsoft Word problem where engineers kept giving people more and more options but ultimately the amount of choice decreased how fluent people were on the platform- will major decoupling have the same effect because there are so many choices of which apps to download/use?
hmmm... what does Hetzner do?
further reading: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/16/1305923110.abst...
Great! Thanks revorad, that's it!
Actually not for the problem I used as example, as their focus is more about front-end and some tools integration, and not much worried about developers having problems with more complex code.

But that will be a good resource to me! I'll check if they can quote a more complex problem there.
I addressed the part that I most cared about. In privacy discussions like these, it's often the case that people lament the fact that the public cares more about things like abortion than the NSA collecting call metadata. My point is that the legal status of abortion (or gay rights, etc) is not the kind of minor issue that some people like to dismiss as merely "wedge issues."

On the list of things that aren't in the Constitution, abortion rights are far more important than "privacy."
Explanation of this metaphor for people like me who had never heard it before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose

edit: fixed link, whoops
"wait, did people not think this was happening?"

There is a very interesting book called The Puzzle Palace, about the early history of the NSA and its forerunners. The telegraph system had ATT cooperating with the government to let them have a copy of everything. This is before telephones. I always assumed this never stopped.
We Build At Night interview with Andrew Heaton
SIGGRAPH 2013: Technical Papers Preview
And you think that's still going to be the case in five years?
> You seem to have a rosy view of everybody as smart and equally capable if they just jolly-well gave it a go. This is just not the case.

No, I just think most people could be quite a bit more smart than they are. That does not imply equal potential.
Nicely executed but not really new, as any real estate agent on a bus stop bench will tell you.

I'd prefer to see "Art that doubles as a bench or a shelter or a ramp." We have quite enough advertising.
The content and addresses of the letters you send cease to be 'your information' the moment they enter the mail system.

Does this mean we expect, Constitutionally, for them to be penetrated by government overseers?

If the Constitutional protection were about one's diary, something one expects never to transmit to another, that would be another matter, but the clause is implicitly understood to apply to information transmission and storage between people.
Have all Hetzner customers received this mail? I currently have a couple of servers with them and have received nothing yet.
PyPy Status Blog: STM on the drawing board
Apple's Watch is Not What You Thought
It was a quick confirmation in case there was any doubt.
We have launched this as an experimental viewer for research articles. We convert NLM xml to a custom JSON format, and save these JSON vserions of the articles on an s3 bucket. The web app then displays the article. You can read about the tool http://www.elifesciences.org/lens/.
When Puppet and Chef Aren’t Quite Enough
The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial murder is legal.

Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki.

Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game.

Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.
There are many of us Mormons who are deeply against this facility being built anywhere, let alone here in our own backyard.
https://pinboard.in/popular/

I'm being serious.

If you're looking for a raw source of interesting material—you can often find some really interesting stuff.
AFAIK yes - it might take a while though, i've gotten mine quite a while after the first ones seemed to have gotten them..
Even the foremost thinker in security, Dan Geer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Geer), once said: "...The most serious attackers will probably get in no matter what you do. At this point, the design principal, if you’re a security person working inside a firm, is not no failures, but no silent failures."

In the same respect, you can't really stop people from taking screenshots or take a photo of... a photo. What we do is we put a watermark of the recipient in the image. This way, if that image get released anywhere, you knew who was the culprit and you can take further actions.

No box is ever impenetrable, then the next best thing is to know when, what, why, whom of the penetration. I hope that helps. It is a difficult problem to solve, however, we have to do something!

Thank you for your thoughts.

-V.
Definitely not in the top 5, not sure why he said that...
Treehouse launches a job board
Why Fossil Fuel Utilities Should Solve Solar's Intermittency Problem
They're a German Server/Webspace ISP - see www.hetzner.de/en
The Guardian posted the FISA court order up on DocumentCloud. Check it out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...
That's good to know for when we launch Tokyo, thank you.
IIRC there were indications that they restarted the system twice in those 45 minutes, to no avail. Presumably it took that long to get someone with the authority to make a decision to switch it off entirely to decide to do so.
> The Baloney Detection Kit is a cache of offensive weapons, and for many discussions it's better to leave it behind and go in unarmed. Not every discussion is an argument, and arguments aren't always about winning. This can be a difficult concept to grasp, especially for strutting alpha male types like myself. But if we want to live in a more just and inclusive world, it's a concept that's got to sink in.

I think of the Baloney Detection Kit as a shield, rather than a sword, and it has worked nicely for me. I always approach an argument by allowing someone to persuade me. I use the BDK as a way of knowing how someone is trying to trick me.

If my goal is to persuade rather than be persuaded, I am better off targeting the Logos-Ethos-Pathos (any combination of the three, preferably all three) than I am trying to use Logos alone.

And if my goal is to attack, I should feel ashamed.