skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had an argument about these type of services when Instacart showed up, not a well-thought out one, but here goes.

My first thought with these services is always "that's cool!". I'll save time, won't have to bother with some boring task etc, no more inconvenience! Same reaction with Instacart. Then I questioned that reaction. The store where I buy all my food is roughly a 100m away from my apartment, and it takes me roughly 10 minutes to get there, buy food and get back. Yet I still find it inconvenient. And after I get rid of that inconvenience, there will be something else that will start to bother me, a smaller inconvenience than the last one, but still bothersome. So where does it stop? I always think of those kids you see around, whose life has been completely removed of all unpleasantness by their overprotective parents, and who are spoiled/irritating beyond belief. Will we all turn into that?

Expanding on that, we probably won't all turn into that in the near future, because the inconvenience that we'll have removed will be taken care of by another human being, who in turn will take on all the unpleasantness. So there will be a class of people who do all of the "boring" work so the top class can "do what they want". It's already long established in things like house-cleaning, gardening etc. And the argument I get into is, why do "we" get to do what we want, and "they" get to do the work we (and in most cases they) find a waste of time. The counter-argument I get is it's a job, people get paid, and people can make any work enjoyable for themselves, even if it's picking up groceries/laundry for others. And I argue that if they can make any work enjoyable for themselves, why the hell don't we make picking up groceries/laundry enjoyable for ourselves? Or is making a boring task enjoyable again reserved for that other class of people, who don't have the means to avoid it?

This is quite a tangent, and I still think it's a cool idea, we're all working on projects which serve to remove pain-points for people, and abstracted away, you could argue my points for any business in the world.

Still, I'd like a start-up that instead of shifting my inconvenience to other people, removes my feeling of inconvenience itself. Once someone teaches me that, I'll be set for life. Maybe we can revive Marcus Aurelius and give him a few million dollars.
Time to read a few classics of Bastard Operator from Hell.

http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/index.php
> Usually, the keys are entirely symmetrical. You just name one public and the other private.

Nice try, General Alexander. :P

In DSA, the public key is (p,q,g,y) and the private key is (p,q,g,x). The public "y" is computed directly from the private key using the formula: y = g^x mod p. Thus, anyone who has the private key can compute the public key.

In RSA, the public key is (n,e) and the private key is (n,d). They're not interchangeable because of two speedups that we use:

1. Small public exponents. Most of the time, e is either 65537, 5, or 3. This speeds up encryption and signature verification, but also means you can trivially guess the public key.

2. CRT exponentiation. The private key is actually (n,d,p), where p is one of the prime factors of n. This speeds up decryption and signature verification, but recall that the security of RSA is based upon the difficulty of factoring n.
Don't you think Angry Birds was rather "inspired" by Crush the Castle[1]?

They did well milking the idea for every penny, and I think they were a key driver of the casual gaming genre (along with Zynga and their Facebook gaming) but I think they were pretty lucky with a few key celebrity endorsements.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_the_Castle
I think the point here is that feds don't want to have to ask access to companies, or even getting noticed.

Operating directly on the database means either :

* requesting a dump that get quickly deprecated

* having a direct access to database, which can be traced

Using common interface, you can use it without rising any flags, except if companies specifically implement warning feature for known NSA/feds/whatever ips.

The best of that is that many people use the same password for several websites. So, having one, you may access data on an other website without the company knowing it.

As it becomes more and more clear big companies are fighting agencies here, decyphering passwords and using them abroad makes perfect sense.
Quite simply we have moved from discussing my hourly rate and onto "you will deliver valuable feature X, that I estimate will improve sales by Y - but you are charging too much for it"

Now that is a much easier argument to have - plus if I have many other features I can swap some around, split X into xx and xy and so on. Talking about features for the client is always good
Apparently it's a common practise at Amazon - start with the customer and work backwards
Could you explain a bit more how it works because, if a see the big picture, I fail to see how it could be useful outside Twitter's stack. I mean it seems to heavily rely on Finagle, right ? Please correct and explain if I'm wrong.
>We noticed that you're using Internet Explorer. Polymath currently does not support this browser because compatibility issues prevent us from delivering an ideal experience. We're working on fixing these issues.

People do realise that some company networks give you no control over which browser you can use right? I can't understand what feature they would need which is missing from IE10. Why not use feature detection? We've moved on from browser detection...
There isn't, but if they are going that route then why do they want the passwords?
Doing what SugarCRM is doing would be better than what they're doing right now. Many companies would find both AGPL and SaaS against their policies but would be OK with paying for non-copyleft software that they can install on their own server.
> Lets not forget that it was a democratically elected government in Europe that started WWII. And killed millions for nothing more than being born who they were. Systematically, and with the full acquiescence of the favored population.

I'm sorry, but you are displaying a remarkable level of naiveté and outright stupidity about how history happened.

Hitler was not democratically elected. Hitler had only been a legal German citizen, permitted to run for office, for less than one month. Hitler ran for President with the intention of using the office to destroy the constitution and establish a dictatorship (under which it is extremely dubious to justifiably assess 'full acquiescence' of the population). He assumed the presidency after losing the election because Hindenburg died two years after defeating Hitler, and Hindenburg ran for re-election expressly to prevent Hitler from becoming president. After Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler as Chancellor, the 1933 elections were an inarguably undemocratic election, in which new "elections" were held after Hitler urged dissolution of the Reichstag. The Nazis relied on widespread violence and intimidation, culminating in the Reichstag fire and subsequent laws that eviscerated civil liberties and imprisoned political opponents. The Nazis even "monitored" the elections to ensure they achieved a majority.

Slavery, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, sexism, paternalism, COINTELPRO, etc.--all these have strong places in American history of being the norm, not the aberration, and being accepted as a matter of course.
I'll never forget a SysAdmin Day again I promise. Why? Because today is my birthday :D
Dude, it doesn't take an hour to do the laundry, that's like arguing that you could pay someone to wash you at your desk instead of taking a shower.

For a single guy (which means probably everything is cotton and colorfast) it's maybe 10 minutes because nobody expects you to actually iron anything. For women (who actually think about their clothes and whose clothes are more complicated in terms of mixed fabrics, special handling) it's still only 25 minutes or so. That's the whole point of having a washing machine, it's a time-saving appliance. If you do go to the laundromat you may not be able to drink a beer, but on the other hand you can kick back and read.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with using a laundry service, which is why most laundromats offer wash and fold. But then again if it's 5pm on a Wednesday you have loads of time to just buy a new t-shirt on the way home from work.
I think docker or similar is a great step forward... One question in my mind though: what about the databases?

Say you have a web app and a reporting app that use the same database (and probably a communications framework - zmq server rabbitmq etc in the middle there as well). How does docker deal with the following:

* The data? I can see postgres, redis or whatever being packaged up into containers, but what about the data that they use? Will there be attachable storage? Will you share some exposed resource on the host? Will the data be another container on top of the database app container?

* Routing. How do you tell your reporting/web app containers "this is where your message bus and database live?"

* Coordination. I'm used to using something like supervisord to control my processes - what's the equivalent in docker land? Replace the scripts in supervisord with the equivalent dockerized apps? A docker file for the host specifying what to run? How do you know if your app that you've run inside docker has crashed?

* Or do you just package the whole lot above up into one container?

edit actually that was more than one :-)
Polymath might not be the only ones hotlinking... the alternative would be to track everyone who is hotlinking, get their email, and then notify them. Many will likely ignore this email.
> don't want to have to ask access to companies

I mean, isn't the article about the gov't asking the companies for user passwords? How is asking for direct db access any different than this?
Scalado is actually a company that first partnered with BlackBerry (they should still have licensed the software).

And this piece of software was really intriguing in its presentation long time ago (RIM announcing the new Blackberry OS)
It's not clear if you're suggesting a PR agency aimed at startups or some more automated system ?
SQL-transactions for python (sort of)
Ah, but the important question is: was the beam pink?
Today I found out about a similar-ish project called TestLab, "A toolkit for building virtual computer labs" https://github.com/zpatten/testlab
I set it up just to have a play with after the PRISM story broke, and I've been really impressed. Now, if only OX office [1] finally gets released, I'll have all my cloud stuff running on my own server.

[1]https://www.ox.io/

EDIT: It's OX Text I'm most after (https://www.ox.io/ox_text)
Have you seen people trying to get in for a top NY restaurant - they will participate in any fetishism :-)
Those places usually sell you a cup of cheap supermarket instant coffee...
I was wondering how the government started making a profit on its costs:

“using the JLENS instead of traditional, fixed-wing surveillance aircraft, could bring the cost of operation down by as much as 700 percent.”

Alas, this appears to be the Russians making a muck of things. From the Raytheon fact sheet:

"Depending on the kind of aircraft used, a fixed-wing surveillance aircraft is 500–700 percent more expensive to operate than a JLENS" [1].

[1] http://www.raytheon.com/newsroom/rtnwcm/groups/public/docume...
>he still was re-elected. Which drives me to the conclusion that his voters are gullible enough to still believe in "we're going to change Washington"

There were actually many who were disappointed by 2012, and I am not aware of anyone (even Obama) who still discussed or believed that the 2012 campaign was about "changing Washington", as was the 2008 campaign. Even his campaign slogan had changed to reflect this. That election was more a repudiation of Romney than some zealous continuing belief in change.

I mean, really, do you think the sort of person who would desire the type of change that Obama promised in 2008, would then vote for Romney?

>there was absolutely nothing to indicate that Obama is not a regular politician that would promise to change everything and change nothing

Seriously? Everything about the man suggested he was different. From his work as a community organizer, to his own experience and background, to his writings, to the fact that he would be the first African-American president, virtually everything about the man was different from a "regular politician".

Not to mention the striking contrast with W.

If ever there was a time in recent political history for Americans to cast off their well-justified cynicism regarding politicians it was with Barack Obama in 2008.
You describe the mamram thing, but aman conscripts people who are better at 17 than good compsci grads from the technion at 22. They do 4 years, not like atuda. aman also gets people from talpiot and the best mamram has to offer.
People will probably start doing that here now
Activision in $8.2 Billion Deal to Buy Back Stake From Vivendi
I think you just end up moving the work around. Not sure the current concentration of security at a few points (distros) has scaled. Most web application developers do not use a distro stack anyway for much. Most of the security issues in a distro apply to stuff you don't use, although it may be installed. Traditional Unix was a much more minimal thing.
I think it's illustrative to look at how long (as a percentage of the universe's age, 13.7 Ga) each of those steps has taken in our case:

1. 70%
2. 1–3%
3. 1–3%
4. 15%
5. and 6. 10%
7. 4%
8. 0.03%
Because people aren't generally motivated purely by money? Surely it's not hard to imagine why a band, once they're making enough money, might also want to consider factors like letting in the people who love them the most, regardless of whether they happen to be loaded?

Surely it wouldn't surprise you, for example, if someone accepted a lower salary for a job that they enjoyed more than a better paying job?
That's what we meant. IIRC you can't even use a self-signed certificate directly for authentication: you have to create your own self-signed root CA, then use it to sign you authentication certificate.

The point is, if what you do interest the US government, it can compel Verisign and the likes to betray your trust, so you shouldn't trust them. And what emerges progressively is that the threshold beyond which you're deemed "interesting" by US administrations is way lower than long believed.

If you're a company doing international business, you want to secure your strategic communications with your own root CA, not with that of a company who can't say no to the government.
Or it could just be many civilizations in the milky way are exactly at the same place as we are now.

The ones advanced enough to colonize space(whose stars formed way before) are likely very far away from us.
> The "private" key file includes both keys.

It wouldn't need to, though. Given the private key (n,d), the public key is probably (n,65537).
Everyone these days is so polite.

OK, that was a bit of an exaggeration. But back in my day the web had a whole site high-bandwidth site specifically for educating careless webmasters about the dangers of hotlinking: g o a t s e . c x.

It was used to great effect on things like auction sites where the original page html was not allowed to be changed after listing.
Oli Dolly Reviews Folk Country Album I've No Home
Not entirely sure why the person who wrote this is so put out. They wanted a job and they didn't get that job. Things change. It can be frustrating, but get over it. You didn't get the job you wanted.

I also think it's pretty arrogant to assume that any hiring manager is going to want to or be able to give you the information as to why the offer was rescinded. If anything, I'd probably train my hiring managers to not tell people why they weren't hired. Saying "You weren't hired because of xxxx" seems like a way of getting into an argument or giving people enough information to start legal proceedings.

Given the tone of the article, and the fact that you went so public with your non-hiring, I'm going to assume Reuters dodged a bullet with this one. Did you tell Reuters you were going to publish their private emails to you? Did you give them any opportunity to reply?

Yeah - After reading what you wrote there, I wouldn't hire you either.
I think that's just code for "we don't want to spend the time and effort to properly test and debug our application on IE at this time, and we really don't want to get barraged with IE support requests either".
Cutting edge telecoms sat launches
Before this turns into racist rage thread, please remember Chinese people posting these kind of stuff on the Internet only for the lulz. it's not like that every Chinese in every Pizza Hut are doing this.
I see.

That's totally unrelated to their service though. Lots of companies have an exclusivity policy.

Nothing to do with whatever development happens in their servers done by their customers.
Linterna Mágica, play & watch web videos online without flash plugin/player
The Atom range are intended to be low power draw CPUs for use in things like netbooks and server environments where I/O and bandwidth are going to be the bottleneck not CPU.

As such their suitability depends greatly on your particular application.

They aren't so good for high concurrency for instance, but if you are using a mainly event driven server where concurrency isn't a massive issue you'll not notice that limitation.

At this price, the most cost effective option is going to be to rant one for a month or few and give it a try. In fact at that price if the machine works for you it is an absolute bargain, you could pay more for a much smaller VPS where you are competing with others for I/O bandwidth. I have a machine at OVH currently for a few bits and bobs - for my use pattern I might be better off cancelling it and getting a few of these instead for the same price.
Is it really likely to turn into a racist rage thread?
If agent-forwarding wasn't implemented, more people would just copy their private keys to several machines.

At least when you use agent forwarding, your key is only exposed while you're actually connected to the machine.
And if you wonder about the opposite - how human contact would affect the behavior of intelligent life elsewhere - I highly recommend The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.
If you're unfortunate enough to be in americuh, I suspect people will never do that with salad. Hot-wings, french-fries and anything else deep-fried... /r/fatpeoplestories is going to be flooded!
China likely to issue 4G licenses by year end
The humble border-radius
U.S. Dollar Taking The World For A Spin
But the bounty in this case was 50.
Hear me out: with a sensible court order and oversight, requesting a single user's password makes a lot of sense. Let's say you've taken a suspect in to custody, but want to capture their co-conspirators [1]. One way to do that might be to impersonate them online so as to keep their plot moving forward.

In what ways is it in a different category to their phone company handing over their call logs and getting someone to impersonate their voice (or send a text message) to an associate?

A single password, in an active situation, with oversight [2], is a totally different proposition from something like Prism or handing over SSL private keys.

[1] Not sure about US law on entrapment, but "bring the kit, we're doing it tonight, rendezvous is XYZ" and then seeing who turns up with what doesn't sound like entrapment to me.

[2] I have no idea what oversight might or might not be applied. "No comment" from the government is admittedly not an encouraging sign.
Well, to be fair Romney was confused by his own lies even before being elected. When the choice was between Romney, who clearly wiggled to satisfy every group and failed to take a stand for at least something, and Obama, who at least could articulate his position, many voted for known lesser evil.

Radicalization of the right wing basically made republicans unelectable, and on top of that pushed mainstream democrats severely right when they try to grab centrist republican votes. System is not working as intended, politicians are fine, people loose. On other hand in two-party state over time both parties degrade beyond point of distinction fighting for 1% of centrist votes anyway.
Samsung overtakes Apple as 'most profitable phone firm'
Cert pinning doesn't solve that problem. Cert pinning solves the problem of a compromised CA signing false certificates. If an attacker has the private key of the endpoint, cert pinning will do nothing.
Petition Of The Candle Makers
If it makes you feel better: pretend you and your wife are immigrants to the United States, speak little English, are raising three children, and work long hours at a laundromat. The Internet, which you're pretty sure one of your kids has on that phone with the white earbuds, calls and tells you that it can offer you $3,000 of business. A month. For the forseeable future. No catch: they just want to pay you money to do that thing that you customarily take money to do.

So, hypothetical you, how frivolous would you rate this company, when it has just told you that you can probably now afford to send your eldest daughter to any school that will take her?
OVH is the leading hosting company in Europe and the fourth in the world (according to netcraft). They created the sub-brand kimsufi (which this article is about) a few years ago to go into the low cost market, and are now going even deeper into it, but it is still a sub-brand, look at ovh.com and you see actual premium servers (although still low priced when compared to american hosting companies)
I've got the impression that spectroscopic methods that would be able to detect the major composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets at 10–100 light years away, are almost around a corner now. Maybe in 10 years?

Then if we find a planet with an atmosphere that is far from the thermodynamical equilibrium, like our 21% oxygen is because of photosynthesis, then that might be a planet with planetary scale life.
Although I agree the tall towers are probably more for the lulz than a serious attempt to maximize ROI at the buffet, the article title does make the explicit claim that the practice has "Destroyed Salad Bars at Pizza Hut".
I wonder if that's a genius bit of marketing for "embarassing" products? Lots of things that people could be embarassed about buying/caring about (men shaving/waxing, dildos, etc), these products can easily be bought as a joke, as a gag. It's socially OK to get a "joke dildo" (just look at all the hen party stuff). You can sell a real dildo as "joke" (wink wink). Make the whole purchase flow as if it's a joke and gag, and you short circuit people's social embarassment and shame.
Can someone explain me what is this link doing on top of Hacker News?
Never played Crush the Castle. And now that I looked it up, well, there goes the originality of their IP. Unreal.
Interesting, Google has added more stuff to the speed test. My site has gone DOWN by 4 points since I last tested it due to failing some new tests.

Really great service by Google in general. I've managed to improve page loading times by 25%, cut number of connections in half (I merged all images into one unified file and then use CSS to display the relevant sub-sections), and reduce the total size of my page by over 10%.
That was exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that.
This already exists - http://www.oberweis.com/web/default.asp

My parents (suburban middle class family) still use the service to this day.

How do they justify it? The milk is better quality then anything that's mass produced in the grocery store (and my parents still go to the grocery store regularly) and doesn't contain all of the growth hormones. I would argue it is very niche though.
It's a hack. And a really clever one. Kinda pointless but fun.
Bill Gates reviews Harvesting the Biosphere