skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes it takes hundreds of exposures to concrete examples to grasp the abstract principle.

I'm sure we've all had a-ha! moments of the form "it's just like Professor Whatsisname / Coach Thingo / Mrs So-and-so said, I just didn't get it".
Agreed (and sorry for the edit confusion). My qualm is that people aren't intricately aware that it's happening. Because technology makes it so efficient it can happen wholesale, at little (compared to physical 1 on 1) expense.

I also agree that tracking could be beneficial. But, if there were an inflatable robot that popped up over everyone's shoulder when they were being tracked for this convenience, there would be a different opinion, IMO. Right now - likely because it's so new - the general populous has no clue what they are trading for such convenience. That - to me - is the problem.
He mentioned something about General Hummel and The Rock and how he was doing the right thing...
Many of the reasons which the author mentions as why they chose Gentoo are precisely the reasons why I choose FreeBSD.

I really like the ports system, and from what I've heard, Portage is based on the FreeBSD ports system.
How come you guys compare with it CoffeScript? Compiling to JS makes sense because that’s how the code should be distributed. That’s what browsers understand. But why should a new language come to compile to PHP? Why not build a first-class language?

CoffeeScript took off because that was the best way to write client-side code with a cleaner language/syntax. But for server-side, if someone wants a better language/syntax, there are a lot of options to choose from and you don’t have to continue with PHP if you don’t like it.
It's cute that even though pg is an Internet veteran, he still doesn't understand how HTML (and the web in general) works and he hardcodes br tags in his text at 80 columns.
Right. But I can very easily find reports of reliable ways to crash IE via CSS: https://www.google.com/search?q=crash+ie+css

I don't have a problem with your blog post. It documents how to reproduce the issue referenced in a particular CVE. But I'm curious what value people are deriving from reading it.
I used Gentoo a while ago, and I did enjoy the experience, but found the culture and system to be a bit mired in old stubborn tradition.

An interesting fork-ish project is Exherbo, which is basically Gentoo but much lighter (in architecture, not performance really), cleaner (in my opinion) and modern.

It's not for everyone, but if Gentoo tickled your fancy but you found it a bit old-feeling, give Exherbo a shot!

http://www.exherbo.org/

Full disclosure: I have absolutely no connection with Exherbo or its maintainers.
If we installed cameras inside everyones TV that allowed the government to view inside everyones home I can guarantee we'd catch a lot more terrorists.
Not all are exploitable.
Most Americans with college degrees have heard of it, even if we never go near law school. Same for the GMAT and MCAT.
Slightly off topic, but I wish there was a change to how scientific papers were written (and this comment doesn't pertain to this article - it's just a general comment). For some, inexplicable reason, it sometimes feels like authors are challenging one another to write the most convoluted, unclear account of what is actually a fairly intuitive idea.

Clearly, this is not always the case, and obviously complexity doesn't lend itself to nice 10 word summaries (hat-tip to Jed Bartlet), but equally the choice of language used and the pace of arguments can make a huge difference. There is no need to use "big" words, when simple ones will do just fine. There is no need to use technical language in place of standard vocabulary where it adds nothing to further your ideas. Don't "hit the ground running" but introduce a new idea with an analogy, or a toy example.

Write papers so humans can understand them - often the science being portrayed is complicated enough, there's no need to further complicate your ideas to the point where you leave English speaking audiences trying to decipher the message, let alone what foreign readers must think.

The best papers are the papers you can read abstract-to-conclusion without stopping and asking yourself, "What does that mean?". This is all too rare an occurrence for me. /rant
Right. But your post shows that you can reliably get the browser to crash. It doesn't demonstrate that the crash is exploitable, unless I'm missing something.
Brain activity decides what goes viral online
A Gov Supreme
I.e. confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance?
The big advantage is going through the process of putting the system together which gives you knowledge that you can apply to other distributions. It makes weird errors feel a lot less intimidating and you build more confidence in resolving things yourself when google doesn't help. In other words you start to understand what parts you need to make a functioning OS.

Gentoo installs can be very snappy on old hardware, I ran it for a while on an old AMD Athlon and it booted faster and felt way more responsive than much newer machines running Vista etc.

Of course it's not as quick to install and get to a desktop than say Ubuntu, but it isn't really trying to be. Having said that it's really not all that hard, if you've used Linux before and can follow an instruction manual you will be up and going in an hour or two depending on how fast your computer can compile the code.

It's also rolling release, so you don't have to worry about doing big distribution upgrades. You can keep a gentoo install rolling away for years quite happily.
You would be correct if compensation of any individual in our society would be independent of their title/position in the hierarchy. Unfortunately its not.

Either way competition is inevitable- If its not from the inside, it will be far worse- from the outside. And in most cases companies have to acqui-hire people or purchase out an entire product line because they just can't get innovation out of their own people.

But the sad fact is its not current employees are at fault here. Unless you are super foolish, why should you ever work hard when some guy who isn't doing 1/10th work you do or is 1/100th as competent take all the credit, money and power stealing your work? The net result is no one contributes, the company struggles and buys their life saving kits every now and them from the outside.

And no competent person will accept a incompetent person over them, especially when getting a job or doing a start up/side project is so easy these days. How many times have we seen companies that claim to hire all super candidates with all those algo/ds questions routinely acquire start ups at big prices, yet they can't get something half decent out of their super star regular hires.

If you look down below, you will see it all gets down to incompetent middle management.

>>Too many senior managers shirk the responsibility of growing a cadre of good managers by connecting it all to numbers that encourage destructive behavior.

No, they do it because they know competent folks will grow and become a threat do their positions.
I was able to prove that it was potentially exploitable to MSRC, which is how I got them to fix it. There are a lot of non-exploitable crashes such as null pointer dereferences that MSRC will not consider as security bugs.
It doesn't make sense for Nordstrom to hire a consultant for each underperforming store -- they can save money and make better decisions by using data collection technology. Anyone could go to a retailer on a slow afternoon, see open registers with no one in line, and determine that they could save money by having fewer cashiers. But having the data allows the company make those decisions with much more confidence.
Also, they missed out on fixing possibly the second* silliest part of PHP: horrible inner functions.

* Edit: I just remembered PHP's "barewords".
> dismissing anyone who interprets the 4th amendment differently as "morally bankrupt.

If you get to the top rank of any government agency, you have a moral responsibility to understand and respect constitutional law.

The 4th amendment was not instantiated so it could be interpreted at will by whomever is currently in power. Doing so is the exact opposite of acting morally in the context of ruling over a democratic society.

That is the very definition of a republic:

A republic is a form of government in which affairs of state are a
"public matter", not the private concern of the rulers.
What is the relevance now, almost four years later?
Apple Working on The Flexible Screen
But what if the government, specifically under the argument of national security, wanted a chip manufacturer to use a specific algorithm? They may want to do this not to create a general weakness or backdoor. That is to say not a backdoor that just anyone could use, but a specific backdoor that only the NSA (not even the chip manufacturer) knew.

Such a back door could be accomplished with tools like Dual_EC_DRBG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG).
One can easily find motivation in commitment. If you commit to learning something, (as an example; by investing money in it) then you would be more likely to be motivated as you would not want your money to go to waste.

Think of your time as money, as personal self-development. Also, lower your goals when you start out. If you fail to achieve a certain goal at a certain time that you expected to, you'll be frustrated, and it is this kind of frustration that is a demotivator. By avoiding frustrations, you're optimizing your ability to remain motivated.

As an idea of lowering your goals, try this: Instead of trying to achieve, simply try to be productive. You can still have Netflix on in the background while you work. Once you've reached a consistent productivity level, then try to learn more, but don't just read - work while you learn. Then begin trying to achieve.
It's in the article?

> By the end of 1995, distributors across the U.S. had sold about 1,000 Quadro Trackers to customers including police departments in Georgia and Illinois and school districts in Kansas and Florida. When Ronald Kelly, the agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s office in Beaumont, Tex., learned that a local narcotics task force had bought one, he attended a demonstration in which a Tracker was used to find a brick of cocaine. He wasn’t impressed. “I paid reasonable attention in eighth grade science,” Kelly says now. “I pronounced this bulls—.”

In 2001 the new device was almost sold in Denver, except someone conducted a double blind test which the device obviously failed.
> the fact you're blaming it on the religion

However misguided, the parent's comment amounts to 'Muslims are more gullible.' While that may not be true, it doesn't excuse a conman from defrauding someone just because they were more gullible than someone else, and I don't believe that the parent is trying to claim this either.
The last time I felt it worthwhile tailoring my own kernel was to breath life into an older P3 laptop. In this case, it improved battery life by 30% over windows (my primary concern with it, as it was for class use in college). In this case, it was almost a decade ago.
If you're somewhat familiar with Linux the time investment isn't really that bad. I've wasted more time over the years due to weird Windows quirks than I have configuring Gentoo.
So what do you think of Cindy Gallop's Make Love, Not Porn project?
I really think you should read that book I mentioned. It's by Robert D Austin, published by Dorset House.
Realize, please, that many as passionate as you, and with many of the same opinions, have gone into education to try to improve it. Not just now, but for decades.
https://www.leadgeni.us
PHP is still the only option on many, many shared hosting services. Less common over time, but imagine the amount of legacy code that requires PHP libraries or frameworks. If newcomers wanted to ease their development with a more concise language, that holds the same opportunities and difficulties anyone chosing CoffeeScript, Scala, etc. in development has made.
Americans also bought these devices and those people were not Muslim and had no particular opinion about dogs.
I don't want to identify myself but I was one of the first developers for Gentoo back when it was called Enoch. There was always drama, credit stealing, back-stabbing et all. Arguably the largest contribution I made to the distribution (once again not mentioning specifics to identify myself)... the history of the event was rewritten and I was left out of it entirely.

I got the heck out of there. That being said, the founder Daniel Robbins is a nice guy and taught me a lot.
Portland, Oregon: The Age of a City
This is the rub isn't it. If you are a public utility and you have a dozen brand new transformers sitting in a warehouse you've never used, it can be presented as a 'big scandal.'

That said, while the typical production of things like transformers is long (since the manufacturer is optimizing for the maximum of the materials and warehouse space) emergency manufacturing is "fast" (as in start today and in a month we've got the raw materials, and 14 days later the first transformer comes off the line and they keep coming as long as we feed them materials).

Will it impact everyone horribly? Sure. Will it be expensive and disruptive? That too. But we have proven that given the incentive to do so, both the US and Chinese manufacturing sectors can do extraordinary things.

So given that, nobody is willing to spend the money to look "prepared" if the "event" isn't going to happen while they can still take credit for it.
There's value in seeing what URLs are and why they didn't get picked up by a dupe filter.
"I've always hated this argument.

Banning efficiency, of all things, seems counterproductive."

Counter-argument: For many thing the efficiency of enforceability is built into the penalty structure. "The public" accepts - more or less - the current penalties for speeding/parking/general traffic offences. This is in spite of the fact that most of us "speed" when we consider it safe/appropriate, that most of us will stop in a no parking zone briefly if we think we aren't going to inconvenience anybody, that we'll use our better judgement at stop signs or merge lanes or double lines and obstructed roads.

If someone proposed a "better 'cause it's _more efficient_" means of enforcing road rules, where every single infraction was immediately deducted from your bank account - we (the people) would rightly push back and demand a reconsideration of what an "infraction" is, and how much the penalty for an infraction cost. And, indeed, whether implementing such a "super efficient" system is what anybody wants.

Super efficient surveillance is similar. It's now possible in ways that it never was when we wrote the laws regulating it. If you take out a camera and shoot a few shots in a park, you might get a few odd glances, but you're unlikely to get asked to stop unless you're being creepy. If you stand outside schools and take photographs of every child arriving and leaving you'd rightly expect to get asked to explain who you are, what you're doing, and where those photos are going to end up. Even if you're a cop or FBI/NSA operative, I'd expect you to get asked about what case you're working on, who's supervising it, and what probable cause you have to justify invading the privacy of every schoolchild at this school.

These days, it's clear that shopping mall and store security cameras, and wifi base stations sniffing phone wifi IDs, are capable of collecting - and with very little doubt actually collecting right now - much more detailed and accurate data about individuals (including the "think of the children" example earlier - these systems don't discriminate about all the kids hanging out in shopping malls).

Who's being held responsible for that data? Who's tapping the guy with the harddrives full of images and cellphone ID's on the shoulder and saying "Hang on, who are you? On who's authority are you collecting all these images and IDs? Where are they going to end up? Who's signed up to accept legal/financial responsibility if this data is misused or stolen?" Why isn't he being treated with the same suspicion as the guy outside the school with the camera?
"Imagine a world where most want to... x"

What a majority want or do not want is entirely orthogonal to whether it's moral or not.
Who defines the "problem space"? Dropbox, or computer users?
I would never claim to have 100% confidence in my ability to speak for users, but I think you underestimate the readiness users might have for other solutions to online storage (that might define the "problem space" differently).

I'm very positive about this upcoming paper and I'm enthusiastic about open source alternatives to Dropbox. Not sure what you mean about negativity. Why so defensive? Is Dropbox like Microsoft or something? Are we prohibited by some clause in an EULA from criticizing the company or comparing its software with competitors?
I use lavabit _and_ PGP.
> So are most webpages

View hacker news on multiple browsers and operating systems. It won't look the same. My gmail looks different too. Fonts are different which means the numbers of words per line are different.

> I believe this can be done gracefully in a manner where the authors just supply a source file and the software chain will generate the requisite output formats (much like pdflatex or Pandoc do the job today). Scientists should NOT have to muck around with HTML/CSS/JS/etc else the solution would be DOA.

Agreed but this is much much easier said than done.
I would not be surprised to hear that conmen believe that someone who takes the more fantastical parts of scripture literally is an easy mark.
Anagramatron: serendipitous anagram tweets
The results of this thread are disheartening.
That said, the majority of technical people in my professional and social circles do not use any form of email encryption.

I think it comes down to a combination of how few people use it and how much more work is required. The only people I know who use it are exactly the ones you'd expect: those who do things like go to DEFCON every year.

That's not to say that my other friends aren't sometimes cautious with some of their data, they just go to the length of doing face-to-face sharing of physical media and not having intensely private/personal conversations over the phone. Basically they (we?) all just assume that there's no way to protect it once it's on the wire, so "why bother?".

I can't stress enough how important holding/going-to a CryptoParty (or similar) is.
Where Is Wisdom Found (and How Can We Kill It)?
Really? For some reason I guess I didn't see it on the list.

The only people I email back and forth with that have a GPG key are privacy aware people. Even in light of recent events; it's still very hard to convince people that they should be using encryption to protect their communications!

Email encryption, I think, has the social stigma of being associated with a paranoid state of mind when it really should be associated with the human right to privacy and protection people feel when they lock the door at night or set their house alarm system.
Let's also not forget Gentoo is the basis of the amazing SystemRescueCD http://www.sysresccd.org
'Hacker' has been a market since personal computing became a thing. How do you think people got parts back in the day? By being marketed to through magazines and user groups.
If you have evidence they're lying, I'd be delighted to hear it. Otherwise I'll believe them over a random HN comment, thanksverymuch.
The value might go up by more than $600K right now, but assuming it gets to $100M, who knows if the value will have gone up by $6M due to the YC branding.
To opt out, before entering a store, turn off your phone and put on a ski mask.

"Are you here to rob us?"

"No, I'm just opting out of your facial-tracking systems. Which way to kitchen appliances?"
Stewardess electrocuted while on iPhone 5
I think that's a good way to put it. Yes.
Time Machine to a local drive for immediate restores. Backblaze for disaster recovery.

Time Machine could easily be replaced by cron and tar or some other local backup option. Other backup providers are easily found.

This is not to say anything about git-annex's usefulness or the value of supporting the developer. It just surprises me when engineers are still struggling with backups. I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's not really the git-annex market, either.
Engadget: The rise (and rise?) of Bitcoin
cronjob dumping encrypted tar to S3
Just use encfs for basic encryption, and something more powerful for reliable solid encryption (pgp/gnupg for example).
I do something similar (on osx): make; say "done compiling"
Icahn in last-ditch bid to keep Dell gamble going
That's also the reason why in almost all places in the US, ambulance rates are regulated. If you have a concern with the price of your ambulance ride, contact your county or state - or the ambulance company.

We (as paramedics and EMTs) are also required to document the medical necessity of transport, without which Medicare, and insurance providers will likely not cover the bill, and (at least in my company, and others) is a good way for you to waiver your bill.

As a general aside, though, treatment of unconscious persons is done on the presumption that they would want the most expedient and appropriate emergent treatment.
Why people wants to believe it works ? Well, it has nothing to do with religion. Reason is same as using robots for manufacturing : It's cheap, fast and could be 7/24 on duty.

Why these devices haven't tested properly ? Easy, corruption (, which is not condoned by any religion)
Why New Experiences Are Important &How They Affect Your Perception of Time
Oh, I definitely wasn't singing their praises even if ALSA was a step up from OSS, PulseAudio was just a new low for me in sound systems. My biggest frustration with it was the tendency it's always had on my systems to simply stop producing sound with no obvious cause and when it was working block anything that didn't use it from producing sound. Sometimes a random process had either accidentally muted everything or triggered a bug that did so, other times audio would get sent off to some completely useless sink, occasionally there were no noticeable causes and you just had to kill and restart the daemon (if you were lucky). On top of that a lot of choices were made that tended to bind it to one console, so switching to another would cut out all sound.

I guess my core complaint is that ALSA could be a pain to get working properly on a new system, but once it was working it didn't usually spontaneously break on me. PulseAudio was only slightly more likely to work out of the box, but was much more likely to break without my making any changes. I guess it's partially a sysadmin mindset, but I usually come down on the side of preferring up-front pain to long term unreliability. Perhaps I didn't use as wide a set of audio programs as you did, I didn't tend to run as many of them at once, or my hardware just had better drivers. For streaming sound (I didn't care about video) I usually stuck to network servers that could shove audio down a Shoutcast or http stream and listening with something like Amarok or MPD, I'm sure PA was nicer if you were trying to relay what your HTPC was playing back.

[ETA: I use linux consoles very heavily when I'm coding on a linux machine, I know this isn't exactly the most common behavior among more recent unix users.]
I'm getting a bit fed up with US media. Calling a natural occurring phenomenon an attack is just fear mongering. Is it time to bring out the tinfoil hats ?

That being said it's an interesting topic which certainly needs more research. Some of us would certainly be without jobs if the power network went bust :)