skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless the subjects were wrestlers or models, why should the choice of fruit v. cake involve self control at all?

For a fair number of people in the US, choosing fruit over cake is largely a matter of willpower. (I hope you're not arguing that a significant fraction of the population needs to exercise willpower in order to choose cake over fruit!)

You could argue that that percentage isn't significant enough for the experiment's sample size, certainly. But otherwise, all things being equal, there should be roughly the same number of people who need to exercise willpower to choose fruit over cake in either group.
Sony and Panasonic to develop 300GB+ optical discs by end of 2015
At these prices it seems like you could take Postgres, wrap it in a support contract, and call it EnterpriSQL and still charge less than MS.
Telco Astroturfing Tries To Bring Down Reviews Of Susan Crawford's Book
1) how about carbon fiber as material?
2) what about internal friction during acceleration?
How big was the application (like how many developers were involved in the migration, data size, etc)?

How long did the migration take? Was the business okay with a feature freeze during that time, or did you take advantage of the switch to rewrite it too?

Did you have multiple connected systems, like ETL processes that also hit the database for other reporting systems?

Always curious about these kinds of issues because they seem to be what's holding businesses back.
Fred Fish Memorial Archive
yes but this is purely mechanical
It's the cost of doing business. They're putting insecure software into hundreds of thousands of cars, and every owner of that car has no control over the software that's running on them.

Imagine if we applied the same logic to phones and other devices -- I wouldn't be surprised if you personally would be offended at the idea that you have little recourse over your phone being hacked remotely and you can't do a damn thing about it because the mobile handset manufacturer locked it down. Thankfully phones are subsidized, ubiquitous, and cheap, so you can take your phone anywhere and get it fixed/replaced.

This is the future folks: locked down devices that you have no control over.

Caveat: we're all plugging our phones into these insecure systems too. Wrap your brain around that for a second to see where I'm going with this.
I was thinking about this the other day. Just as with joint-stock ownership, legally limiting financial liability redistributes risk (by transferring it to creditors), but doesn't reduce it in net.

Creditors tend to be established firms and bankrupt companies tend to be new, small enterprises, so it seems that limited liability promotes socially beneficial risk-taking by offloading bad outcomes on those who are best able to absorb them. ... "From each according to his ability, ..."
The phone thing I can understand, but why would a bank ever send a courier to pick up a card (and why would someone believe that they would)? I've never heard of such a thing.

Even if it's got a chip, what could possibly be stored on the chip's memory that would help? If there's a problem with a card being compromised or cloned, they issue a new one.
Your new solution of "fuck the company" actually harms the enduser even more. Some of them get the updated lock... then the company goes out of business, and now none of them can get official parts for their vehicles. It seems a solution for an ideal world, not the actual world.
A talk on the book in question (as well as audio) can be found here:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2012/12/craw...
and if you prefer YouTube, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R4xhwy-1oI
It's a pretty good overview of the American broadband infrastructure problem.
The more obvious conclusion, to me, is that people prefer energy-rich foods after expending more mental energy. Our brain is a major energy sink, as it consumes about 20% of our body's energy.

I'm pretty sure that after I've been thinking hard, I prefer to eat energy rich foods. Of course, as with anything related to the brain, since we understand it so poorly it's hard to say if either hypothesis is really true.
http://www.enterprisedb.com/
I wonder which edition StackExchange use?
Someone beat you to it: http://www.enterprisedb.com/
I had to read The Victorian Internet for a class and it reminded me a lot of IRC. Definitely recommend.
Large (tech) company employee here. For the project I work on, most of our production stack is made out of FOSS software that's wrapped up in support contracts.
Good points. However, I don't think that "the ancients were fully aware" is an appeal to authority. I think the idea is ancient people tended to use things that were successful; therefore if the ancients used something, we should boost our confidence in it (relative to the baseline).
I'm fairly certain they use Enterprise because they make use of AlwaysOn Availablility Groups.
You're correct. See the original scrypt paper by Percival [1], halfway down page 13, for a description of the categories. The table itself is at the top of page 14.

[1] https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf
Being a crystallographer, this appears analogous to transforming Reciprocal space -> Real space in X-ray diffraction crystallography.

Only, in this case the negative space (from a shadow) is the raw data instead of diffraction spots. So no Bragg's law or Ewald's spheres involved here, but fascinating nonetheless!
Like I said, I am not arguing that Google did right. I'm just saying, if you're handing out a single key to people with arbitrary configurations you should probably assume it's compromised. Your friends could just as well have had some other malware.
> I wonder which edition StackExchange use?

Enterprise for the memory and the ability to do online reindexing. They were in the BizSpark program, so they basically got free licensing.
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Harnessing Physics in Grand Spaces for Music
Ask HN: As a developer, how do I work with freelance designers?
I am working on a small start up, and I am nearing the point where I need to hire a freelance designer to add some finishing touches to the web application. This is my first production application, so I am quite nervous about just about everything.

How do I work with a freelancer though - when so much of my code contains sensitive information or information a designer doesn't need to see. On the other hand, I happen to be using Django to power the backend, and I don't believe there is a way to have him work locally without setting up a development server.

What do you guys do? Should I just make sure the contract clearly lays out he cannot use/share backend code in any ways? Do I need to change all my backend API keys and sensitive information after working with him? Or should I cross my fingers and hope my payment API account doesn't get hacked 6 months from now...
I don't get it. How did the first experiment imply anything about willpower?

Seems to me that a viable explanation for the first experiment is that heavy cognitive processing trips some circuitry in the brain that says "We got a lot of work to do. Get me some glucose."
Didn't read. Used the word Seriously in the first paragraph.

Grow up noobs. Holy fuck!
Precisely. I've had the legitimate fraud-prevention department of my bank contact me but be unable/unwilling to authenticate themselves. I told them that until they were willing to authenticate, they would never receive any identifying information from me.

At some point I said that I would accept the account number as authentication and they were unwilling to provide that. I don't know why they--a legitimate fraud-prevention department--expected to be able to cold-call a customer and receive identifying information. They should be actively working to prevent customers from turning over this information to "just anyone who rings them at home."

I ended the call and contacted my bank via their online banking system and via that system they vouched for the original call and provided a number to call back. I lodged my complaint that their own fraud department was calling customers without any ability to self-authenticate. Not sure what happened from there; I've not had to deal with that process again since.
Before AGs came out, they used a custom log shipping script for DR, and mirroring for the critical DBs. I don't think they would have gone Enterprise just for the AGs, but since they were on EE anyway, AGs were an easy decision.
They can open the specifications of the ECUs[1] and get involved with all car dealerships, maintenance franchises, insurance companies and whoever else. The goal being to educate them all on how to maintain, repair, and replace the ECUs that are at the heart of every automobile being deployed.

Leaving the responsibility to fix these security flaws in the hands of the automobile manufacturers is dangerous and foolish, they simply don't have the means nor the interest to fix these security flaws.

This is one of the most obvious cases where FLOSS shines -- everybody and anybody can fix their broken software because they know what's running on their machines and the machines are open and accessible to those that need it most: end-users.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_control_unit
I like the idea, but it seems like it would make deployment a pain. How do I spin up a new server without rebalancing and/or restarting the world? Not to mention that now when I do need to restart the world, I can't do so without also clearing my cache.
What about that idea involving harvesting energy from people shagging?
> Used the word Seriously in the first paragraph.

Actually, that was the second paragraph.
Hey, that's a great idea! Now excuse me while I come up with it independently.
And they are on Software Assurance, right?
But seriously, how about a site that manages agreements between people/companies etc.. we could do away with a lot of lawyers... :-)
Generating fresh keys aside, one thing I do with our AWS setup is whitelist the IPs that can connect to our SSH bastion host. This completely eliminates scripted port scans of the SSH server and makes the auth logs much more manageable.

If our IP address changes (eg. ISP assigns a new one for the cable modem) then we just update the whitelist (and remove the old address). It's very infrequent. I could probably count the number of times I've done it on one hand.

It might not be the most scalable setup but at our small size with everybody working from home it works great.

The only slight hitch is updating it when traveling but even that isn't much of a problem. It takes a minute or two from the AWS console and its good to go.

I recently took a look at digital ocean ($5 servers gives me ideas...) but didn't see a firewall option similar to the security group setup in AWS. If it does exist then I highly recommend it.
Funniest thing is that Microsoft sponsors the article!
So happy to see Kathy blogging again! She's always been my favorite tech-UX blogger.

For anyone interested in her prior blog, Creating Passionate Users, I coped with her absence from the blogosphere by curating an e-book with all of my favorite posts.

You can grab a copy here:
http://www.kevinmconroy.com/pdf/creating_passionate_users.pd...
How about we had PKI to GPS signals..? That way we could trust they are correct..
> Which Open Source DB does everything that MS Enterprise SQL does and why aren’t you using that instead?

I used to think the replacement wouldn't have to do everyone MSSQL does - after all, nobody uses all of the features. But getting a core subset often isn't enough either - for example, Windows Azure SQL Database supports a core subset of features and datatypes, but I still constantly hear people say it's not enough to migrate their apps.
I wouldn't be too hard on yourself. I would have probably fallen for it after the phone call. The answer isn't that you're stupid - the answer is, when other human beings exert a ton of effort to deceive you, sometimes you're going to be deceived. Especially if it's out of the blue and you're not on guard. Human beings are pretty cunning and deceitful bastards.
Yeah right now Im giving the pitch to the parents on why I should borrow there car to drive down from Ottawa to do this.
The blog post is glossing over the details of the peer-reviewed scientific literature a bit. I'm not sure, but I believe the result has been replicated without food.

On the other hand, I believe there is also a body of more recent research indicating that the "cognitive fuel tank" model is too simplistic to give an accurate description of how it works.
My free instant image upload site for those click and share moments
I know that there are several image upload sites but they all seem to have some public facing outlet but I wanted to create a site for an upload and share without all the hassle of account creation, or worrying about anyone seeing the images. Something you can upload, get a link and send to someone without having to worry about others seeing your image. Anyway, let me know what you guys think. And of course, the site is secured.

https://freeih.com
Regarding entropy sources for guest virtual machines, the host can expose a random number generator device to the VM. This is an option in KVM: http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#elementsRng

Modern Intel x86 processors now have a hardware RNG built in, so even if the host boots without any devices, you have a source of entropy.

(Incidentally, KVM defaults to /dev/random which might create a DoS vulnerability if a guest exhausts entropy.)
I assume that the linked blog intended to link to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993(v=sql.120)....

SQL Server has been getting much more expensive because their current userbase is captive (meaning the cost, complexity and risk of migrating to another database system is enormous because of a heavy integration with SQL Server specific features). I don't imagine a large number of new systems are being built around SQL Server, apart from those at shops that are already captive.

It is an excellent database, but I do get a chuckle that by far the greatest benefit being pushed for SQL Server 2014 is in memory tables (which is something that SQL had -- at least for temporary tables -- back in the 6.5/7.0 era, but then had removed). While it is hardly identical, an approach we did on one team is to have SQL Server take 64GB (note that it is per instance, and most server deploys see many instances on a single server, so that isn't quite as prohibitive as it might sound) and then have an enormous RAMDISK on which tempdb would be created. Made use of the RAM, and saved enormous amounts of IO (tempdb is the weak link of almost all SQL Server platforms, as everything hits it, especially if you make use of snapshot isolation / row versioning).
Yes, when you exit BizSpark, you can just start paying maintenance on the servers you were using during the program.
Absolutely - baking the same private key into images is much, much worse (and in my opinion a pretty embarrassing thing for a cloud provider to do by accident).
Those guys are awesome. Much better than Heroku IMO.
That sort of thing is a reaction, by developers, to Apple's unwillingness to add demos (and consumer's unwillingness to shell out when there's no demo). Calling it a "pen" is probably not the best way of marketing it, but basically you're buying the full version. The free install is a trial.

If Apple added demoing all of that would vanish pretty quickly, I suspect.
You'll note that I proposed other solutions first. To repeat myself: it is highly unlikely that there is not some possible workaround that temporarily disables the system, even if it's something as brute as snipping a wire.

Even in the absolute worst case that the vulnerability is somehow built into the very fabric of the car, you can still secure it by removing all valuables from the interior and then clamping a wheel with a boot. Remove the boot once you figure out a fix. Inconvenient to the owner to be sure, but not impossible to deal with.

Harm to the end user is not my priority. Harm to society is, and it's clear to me that the long-term chilling effects on academic research far outweigh any temporary harm from VM issuing a recall or even going bankrupt.

The alternative is to say that entity B should suffer from a restriction on their free speech simply because entity A, due to their own negligence, finds it excessively costly.

There are so many different ways this could be handled other than "threaten to throw the researcher in jail if he doesn't shut up". But they are all more inconvenient and costly to VW. One can understand why, then, VW would go for the "threaten" option, if we think of VW as a sort of non-moral profit-optimizing organism. But I certainly can't understand why anyone would defend it, let alone say that we would do the same thing.
A Hackers Chromecast Review as a Consumer
I'd say that the cost of efficient PV array systems is a real issue which currently exists.

Unfortunately the article doesn't say much about the costs of these new cells.

In my area (Latitude 20 deg. N.) solar begins paying for itself after only a couple, or more, years depending on the type of system.

Obviously, one wouldn't choose to power heavy inductive load appliances with solar power, but for small items such as electronics and lighting, even refrigeration, solar makes more sense than paying $0.47 per KWh.

Then there are reliability issues inherent to municipal power grids...

When my neighbors experience a power outage my home is not affected, and to me this alone is worth the price I paid for my stand-alone solar power system.
basically shining a very bright light

GPS satellites broadcast 500 watts from a 13dbi antenna.

But they're far away. Really really far away, to the tune of 21,000km. (The Earth is about 12,000km wide.)

By the time the signal makes it to the surface of the planet, the inverse square law has punched it down to -130 dBi, which is well below the thermal noise floor of room temp electronics. GPS receivers pull a useful signal out of a storm of random noise using deep information theory magic, which is vulnerable to several clever low power attacks.

Even a dumb jammer doesn't need much power, though.

one could program a missile to follow the light...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-88_HARM

"The AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) is a tactical, air-to-surface missile designed to home in on electronic transmissions coming from surface-to-air radar systems."
> I assume that the linked blog intended to link to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993(v=sql.120).....

Great catch - fixed, thanks.

> greatest benefit being pushed for SQL Server 2014 is in memory tables (which is something that SQL had back in the 6.5/7.0 era, but then had removed)

Sorta kinda - back then, we had DBCC PINTABLE, and it would cache the data, but it would still require that the transaction logs and data pages be written to disk. Now with Hekaton, you can specify that a table never hits disk, ever. (Don't get me wrong, I don't think people are going to adopt that particular feature due to other limitations around datatypes and supported syntax.)
Interesting. Do you know if any cloud providers do this? (DigitalOcean uses KVM so it would be a possibility.)

Exposing hardware RNGs to guest VMs would be great; entropy in guests is pretty lousy in general, not just at first boot (though obviously at first boot it's at its very worst).
> I don't see many UPS drivers going for jogs during the day...

What a horrible example. They actually get up and walk around probably dozens of times per day. That is completely different from long-haul trucking, where you may only get 2 stretch breaks in a 10 hour period.
Ubuntu Edge is also getting on the corporate sponsor train, but unfortunately I think they set the bar a bit too high.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge

$80K enterprise bundle. It's a bit pricey (even though you get 100 devices), and I'm sure if they offered an $8K option for 10 devices then they'd get a lot more interest than none at all.

The $8K price point is almost in splurge territory, and the benefit of having access to workshops and online support would certainly put it over the top.
Professor spoofs $80M superyacht’s GPS receiver on the high seas
Who pays for fraud cases? Do the credit card companies end up paying for all the merchandise when they reinstate the victims cards and forgive his debts?
We were skeptical of Azure before NSA revelations, but now; "Hell No!".

Besides that, Microsoft has pretty well pissed off all but the most entrenched developers.
Tired that, my palm will touch the lower edge of the screen activating menu buttons. The only befit to the pinch and zoom method is the ability to rotate the map.
Flynn lives! (A Tron reference).
You don't "opt in" to having someone tell you to kill yourself, that is not how civilization is supposed to work.
I believe you're confusing SSH host keys with the keys used for user authentication. The private SSH host key has to reside on the server, so it's either being generated on the server or you're sending Luke a private key.

But I agree this sounds like a good way to handle user authentication.
as much as I appreciate the plug, that key I ask you for? that's to get you into the admin interface on my side. I don't mess with the ssh keys within your image. (host keys are auto-generated on first boot, just like a real server, which has the 'generating keys in a low-entropy environment' problem described above. The image doesn't come with anything in the authorized_keys file; though actually, I could pretty easily adjust the creation script to put the key you sent me in the authorized_keys file of root... but I don't really know the 'right' way to do that; everyone has preferences, so I leave it up to the user.)

We've actually talked a lot about trying to write a xen driver to share a hardware entropy device, but it hasn't gone anywhere. (I mean, xen has 'vtpm' - a virtualized Trusted Platform Module. And nobody uses that, so why not a vrandom?)
There are some good answers and advice in the comments here. One thing that appears to have been missed is - there is an underlying issue that you may or may not have identified yet which will have a major impact on your psyche. Being rejected by a parent is one of the most soul-crushing things that can happen to a person. Our sense of self worth and our relationships with others is largely defined by our relationship with our parents ... the one people who are supposed to love us unconditionally.

I have seen its impact on friends and family, and it remains as a major influencer all throughout life if not addressed. I recommend speaking to a specialist about this.
For those people wondering why so many comments here are saying 'Glad to see Kathy blogging again', it's because she stopped blogging in 2007 after getting severely harassed online. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#Harassment

As someone who followed her previous blog 'Creating Passionate Users', I'm really glad she's back writing publicly - not so much for this particular post (which wasn't anything novel), but more that it means her scars have healed enough. Hope to see more posts from her soon!
Mixpanel Now Analyzes More Than 15 Billion Actions A Month
How trolls steal from us all.

Internet trolling is a social technology problem so you'd think there would be an opportunity for a technologically social solution.

The main problem is how do you collate multiple identities in multiple forums and mediums ( twitter, facebook, snapchat, ad nauseam... ) and manage the scorefiles you need for social filtering.