skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow! If I understand this correctly, he asked customer service to write this response?
The thing is that distros tend to use loadable modules, and if you want to avoid that you need to compile your own kernel (as you seem to be doing), and at least I am a lot happier getting security updates from my distro than being on the hook for recompiling them myself in a timely fashion.

You can get most of the security benefits of avoiding loadable modules by setting the sysctl kernel.modprobe (i.e., /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe) to "/bin/false" instead of "/sbin/modprobe", late in the boot process. So everything needed to initialize your hardware is loaded, but anything that an unprivileged user attempts to autoload (like a buggy kernel module for a socket family you've never heard of) fails.

I have a config like this on all the security-sensitive servers I run, which tend to have a few thousand unprivileged users. It's actually a shell script that logs the attempt and then returns false, instead of silently returning false, but "/bin/false" is good enough.

But do note that this is a bit orthogonal to the issue mentioned in the article: the proposed attack involves the victim machine having the kernel and modules intact on disk, but device firmware compromised so that it changes the kernel after it's been loaded into memory.
I've had similar experience. I have a Galaxy Nexus and had a terrible time getting the NFC stuff to work. My friends and I stood around looking like idiots for a good 10-15 minutes trying to get basic stuff like sending contacts or files to each other. Getting a good connection was nearly impossible. Maybe it's gotten better, but boy was it terrible when I tried it.
In the aftermath of Katrina, people from Walmart and other organizations tried to bring water to stranded people in New Orleans, and FEMA turned them away. What was the motivation there? Maintaining orderly road traffic?
If you want NFC, the easiest way to get it is to look in your wallet for a Master Card. Call the phone number on the Master Card, ask for a PayPass. I stick the paypass to the inside of my wallet. It works 100% of the time, with no unlocking or launching an app. I don't open my wallet, just put it close to the machine, and it works without issue.
Yes and also having a kickass startup idea doesn't hurt. This guy is building http://www.simplelegal.com/
1. Depending on how many games you want to watch, there are VPNs out there with free plans. I used to watch Hulu using one.

2. You can configure the gateway (router, whatever) to route the TV through the VPN. That said, I'd rather pay the $2.
Interesting. I have an iPhone so I'm never able to use the NFC feature. However, I find that opening the app and typing in the meter number is quite fast, since I can walk away while doing it. Also, the ability to extend my parking remotely is pretty awesome.
Neat. Here's some inspiration. (Note, Don Hopkins has been at this for a while.)

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/CAM6/
Follow up: What are some open-source alternatives or similar software?
Actually yes, I think that is exactly how it went down. And I think they were very thoughtful about it too. Remember that this data collection has been ongoing according to the article, it wasn't a proposal that was denied it was an ongoing activity which got shut down. Information available to the people on the ground included both results and the experience of running these mapping flights. So lets watch it play out and see where it goes.

My sadness is that I doubt the person on site, even if they think it is a good idea, has the authority to evaluate what the mapping drones were doing and re-authorize their use. And the process to change the SOP is going to take longer than this crisis, and a lot of useful data that first responders had been using won't be available.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Though it didn't need the expletive, I totally agree with the sentiment. This 'Philosophy' is offensive to all of your would-be early adopters. Like I work on building web stuff all day and kind of enjoy it. The people contributing to all of the open source projects on github probably kind of enjoy it. Have a little respect.

If you're going to write a mission statement, don't start it with "X sucks". That's not a mission and it's certainly not a philosophy.
regarding point #2, if you don't have an alumni connection in your network, yet you know that this is part of the formula for writing a successful application, then it's on you to figure out how to make those connections. that mentality of being "relentlessly resourceful" is straight from a pg essay [1].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
That would be true for the hosters which can be (hardware-) controlled by the NSA, meaning US/UK/Australian/Canadian/New Zealand hosters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
Mostly waiting to be researched instead of captured. We're only just starting to figure out how to compile software such that the binary can be audited and proved to match the source. How do you fab hardware so that the IC can be proved to match the blueprint?
> Sunday Ticket is free for DirecTV users

No, it is $60 per month or $300 / season.

> Sunday Ticket is $40/season with the purchase of $60 Madden 25 (meaning, $100/total for the whole season of Sunday Ticket), and does not require a cable/satellite package of any kind

That's a little misleading. A) It sold out before the season began. B) The cost is $100, because for people like me who don't own an XBOX or PS3 and bought the game for the coupon, I now have a game I'm never going to play. I shouldn't have any issues selling it, but it will be at a used game price.

Also, you are supposed to only be allowed the streaming option only if you can't get DirecTV service, which most people in the US can. IMO, skirting that rule (as I've done) is no better/worse than using a European IP. You are either being dishonest to the NFL, or to DirecTV.

> HDTV Bunny Ears or Aereo will provide local in-market games for free (or the cost of Aereo)

As they have for 40+ years. This discussion isn't about in-market games, it's for out-of-market. Also, depending on who you talk to (certainly the networks and the NFL), Aereo is considered cheating.

> Many games are broadcast online for free on NFL.com or through the website of the network showing the game, like Fox or CBS

No, many aren't. Some are. But the key is I want to watch my team every week, and my team (as most) only play a few primetime games per season, which tend to be streamed.

To conclude, I'm a avid sports fan who lives out of market, and I pay for the MLB package, the MLS package, various college sports subscriptions, and have paid the $300 for DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket in the past. I'm happy to pay for my sports, and I'd love to pay the NFL a reasonable price for an NFL package, but since they don't offer one, I have to resort to cheating DirecTV.
Ask HN: Do you share your Google calendars with your friends?
A little bit of background. I am the cofounder of a dating website for working professionals called Truffle and one of the things that we want to do is to import our user's work calendar and their work location and organize dates for them in one of their free time slots at a nearby cafes. We want to make dating align with our day to day life. Currently this is a manual process where the invitor picks a place/time and sends an invitation to the invitee who can accept/change/deny the invitation.

Fast forward to now, Seattle Startup Weekend is coming up this weekend and we want to pitch this location based scheduling app where given user's calendar info and their location, the app will recommend you time slots/locations to meet. We are going to use the app's backend for scheduling Truffle dates anyhow but I also wanted to see if there is market outside our above use case.

Will you use it for planning a dinner with your friends, so you import your calendar, work location/home location and the app will recommend you the time slots as well as the restaurants in the neighborhoods that is convenient of all your friends. We can also integrate this with Open table so that you can reserve a table right, even further we can hook up Uber, Zipcar to automatically reserve a car for you on the day of dining. So basically no need to email bunch of friends back and forth about the place/time, this app will give you enough data to make a decision.

For all the above things, the biggest question is there a need of a such a personal assistant and on top of that, are people willing to share their calendars and location info?

For every feedback, I'll give you guys a cute insight about dating scene in Seattle :)
I was planning to apply for a phd, and not so sure. Thanks for such a nice post. Really helpful.
An amazing display of engineering. While watching the stream is a bit dry, you can see progress by watching the dark part of the ship, the formally submerged section, get larger.

I go on the assumption that the ship is too large to salvage in place? Considering the expense so far, nearly 800 million dollars and expected to be considerably more, it is impressive to watch
An American won Miss America and many Americans didn't liked that
So... are we going to hear the other side of this? I mean, sometimes the 'customer is not always right' and I think it's fair to assume he is mostly sorry only because he got caught. But I want to know what the issue was that prompted such a forceful reply.
My understanding is that one of the reasons that relays are still used for many these systems is that the latency for going into a safe state is very low, and that they are easier to verify than so called solid-state interlocking systems.

A relay-based system like this might look simplistic and archaic to a casual observer but it's quite complex and there's no room for error. Formal proof (static analysis) is often used to verify both the formal specification that dictates what constitutes a safe system state, and the actual system's compliance with this specification.

There's a Swedish company called Prover specialized in this. I used to work there and moved to SF when we set up our US subsidiary.
"Ad-free time! is located in beautiful Victoria, British-Columbia, Canada."
Easy for you to not to be cynical on a Monday morning. You work at Google. I work at a dead end, boring job :(
for what exactly? What are you doing at work that needs privacy?
Yeah - I was surprised to see FEMA and federal funding getting involved so quickly. As I recall, Longmont officials in particular and Boulder Country in general are extremely efficient when it comes to major blizzards, etc. and I expected that to transfer over well to flood relief. I've been hearing nothing but good things about efforts were being managed.
Clearly it was sarcastic. Someone just, intentionally or otherwise, forwarded it to the customer too.
The flip-side to all of this indignation is that the company that is working to extend our police state to local government is using a human tragedy as a marketing effort.

These guys are putting spy craft in to the sky and looking to hand the keys to the same corrupt local paramilitaries that thrive on civil forfeiture. They're hoping to scoop up all the Federal anti-terrorism dollars that they can.

If they weren't looking for attention, Spectrum wouldn't be writing about them.
4 years of hard work and novel thinking, followed by acquisition.

I don't know the Bump team, but I respect the effort and the outcome.
This feels like TMZ. Other than critiquing and learning from the things he says in response to it, I see very little value in this. I also don't like fun; so there's that! :)
Mysql in Amazon RDS with Provisioned IOPS... a benchmark
There's really no way for open hardware to be better. Unless you have your own fab, the only way to ensure that back doors haven't been added at the hardware level is to decap and manually validate every chip. That's pretty clearly not viable.
At least for e-mail, I think the idea is to ensure that a cloud provider doesn't have a long backlog of his e-mails. Of course, if the NSA take an interest in him, they'll still find a way to monitor his current e-mails, but this makes it harder for them to pull all his past e-mails. I doubt WebFaction is secretly storing all the e-mail he has deleted, because that costs money, and they can't show advertising next to it.
It's weird to see this on the Toronto Sun. (hometown gossipy newspaper)
Look at the mysql schema of a Drupal system. Either you support arbitrary fields at the database level, or you write a ton of extra code (which will have bugs) and piles of support tables on top of your relational database. It's a waste of time and effort and adds unnecessary complexity.
How do you know privateinternetaccess isn't logging everything you do?
Top 3D Printing News Last Week: 3D Systems M&A, Design, Leopoly
I've been to a number of hackathons, and AngelHack is by far the best run. The team does a great job, the locations+judges+sponsors are good, and they're usually cheap/free developers and designers. Can't wait to see what AppHACK is like.
Good effort, but you should go for sanitizing the user input before you go ahead and use it.

For example, if you enter "'/> Hellooooo!" into your textarea, you can see the result shows the text "Helloooo!'/>" being shown next to the QR code for "'/>".

This is hugely important when writing web applications - you can read a bit more from this stack overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2794137/sanitizing-user-i...

You may also want to read up about XSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

EDIT: I realise this was just a small, simple, learning project, but it's important to learn and be mindful of these considerations.
what Linda replied I'm stunned that a mom can get paid $5082 in 1 month on the internet. go to website http://goo.gl/HRSfiS
I'd never heard of postmates until now, so I think the strategy is working for them very well.
Haha, it wasn't a joke. He said it under the assumption that in no way it would be forwarded to the customer. Oooops. Employees are always saying stuff like that, sort of a behind the scenes tough guy/gal thing, while smiling to the customer. It's just a human way to deal with customer frustration I guess.
Great! Very interesting stuff (as it's all new to me).
Back at university we had a grad student teacher that used to go to a lot of these and win them. He said at the last one he went to they kinda "cheated" by having one of their team of three who also had masters in mathematics. He said that this guy would break down the math stuffs and simplify them so that when they did code it their code was faster then everybody else.

And THIS was considered bending the rules back then (10+ years ago), having a team member that was a little too smart. By what I'm reading now it appears that hackathons are no longer coding competitions, but instead full on hacking, and not the fun kind at that...
No, the part where the system resolver calls different DNS servers based on the domain is certainly part of Mac OSX.
Linux and Gaming: Gabe Newell talk at LinuxCon 9/16/2013
The problem with suicide bombers is that they are already "addicted" (in some sense), to a toxic, and extreme, strain of their religion. It's possible that they could be weaned from their fanaticism and ideology via a substitute like sex.

On the other hand, many of them already have access to plenty of sex - for example, UBL had four wives, and the 9/11 terrorists are known to have patronized prostitutes and strip clubs in the days prior to their suicide hijackings. So it may not be a perfect substitution for someone who is that dedicated to the cause.
Without seeing both sides, all I can really say is that whoever forwarded this to the customer is the one who unambiguously messed up here. The CEO of a company is allowed to get frustrated, in general, and he clearly didn't intend this to reach the customer. Whether his frustration was justified is really another question which can't be answered without more information.
Creating an Unbeatable Scraper (in a Client-Side Application)
Thanks! And yeah, I'm pretty lucky we created that option. And it's only because I wasn't the only person annoyed with what was starting to feel like working in a high school cafeteria.

Had I been the only one, I'm sure I would have gotten some variation on "Just wear some headphones," or "I don't hear anything," or "That's weird," etc., which is basically what I've been told my whole life. :)
Sorry, but what unmentioned corruption are you talking about?

This is high up in the article:

> Adding the last straw — Kilpatrick’s gamble: He’s best known around the globe for a sex and perjury scandal that sent him to jail and massive corruption that threatens to send him to prison next month for more than 20 years. The corruption cases further eroded Detroit’s image and distracted the city from its fiscal storm. But perhaps the greatest damage Kilpatrick did to the city’s long-term stability was with Wall Street’s help when he borrowed $1.44 billion in a flashy high-finance deal to restructure pension fund debt. That deal, which could cost $2.8 billion over the next 22 years, now represents nearly one-fifth of the city’s debt.

And then there's a whole section headlined: "Kilpatrick’s award-winning deal turns into a financial disaster"

Kilpatrick is quite famous for his sex and corruption. But are you arguing that those had more of an effect on Detroit's long term viability than a pension deal that blew up the city's obligation to swap holders from $770 million to $1.95 billion in four years? You could argue that only a corrupt bastard would make such a deal, but that deal was talked about at the time...and, the Freep notes, even its own editorial board approved of it. It was a politically expedient and irresponsible gambit, but let's face it, the corrupt don't have a monopoly on irresponsibility.
Anger spreads faster than joy on social networks
Having been a part of similar conversations to this at Twitter, I can say with complete confidence that you are wrong. The "...in a way that makes us proud" part of that company value is taken very, very seriously.
Even though I hadn't thought about this company for a long time, just yesterday evening I was wondering "whatever happened to Bump?" and checked their site.

Since the start they've had interesting technology (though of the kind that looks easier to implement than it really is) but, in my opinion at least, never found a killer app for it. I remember when they had that webpage where you would hit the space bar with your phone and that would be enough to create the connection. That was really cool, but it felt like a "cool trick" rather than something I ended up using.

edit: I didn't want to come off as negative and I'm sorry if it reads this way. Their solutions are very innovative and inventive, and really feel magical. I just wish it had caught on more… Hopefully Google is planning on using the technology in many places. It would make sense of course for it to be part of the core of Android, but the syncing between mobile and desktop could be very useful as well.
Geary is a mail client for Linux with a similar interface to conversation view. It's still fairly young, so not entirely polished, but it is usable.

Edit: usable, but seemingly with no support for encryption/signing, among various other things. Maybe it needs a bit more time to be ready.
It does not at all assume or require that your dataset will fit in RAM. To an extent, it will cache some indexes in RAM of query peers, but there is no expectation that the whole dataset is in RAM.
Yeah, human recipients and snoopers would both be able to filter out the poison. But it would make automated collection difficult.

Another idea could be a reverse captcha. All messages by default could be coded as images. (Hey in fact I think this is a brilliant idea if I say so myself!) Combine that with poisoning, and we can be safe from automated collection for atleast a decade. Combine that with encryption and other security measures and that would be awesome.

In fact I am on a idea spree. What if messages were encoded with a captcha? Enter the captcha to decode the message. This encoding is purely to eliminate automated collectors and indexers.

Spam is easier to tackle since a spammer can be tainted for ever. But a poisoned feed still needs to be processed every single time
Detroit isn't circling the drain because of Kilpatrick, as corrupt as he was; the problem is fundamentally the cumulative effect of decades of reasonable if ultimately irresponsible decision making. I liked the freep article a lot; I was surprised by how little approbation Young came in for, all taken with all.

There's a fairly serious principle-agent problem in elected government; I'm not sure how you get around things like e.g. Detroit's pension fund throwing the 13th check around, or US Representatives trying to force the US Treasury into default, given that the incentives for more long-term thinking just aren't there.
So, this leaves everyone who was building something on top of Bump in a very odd position. Do we continue building on Bump, or do we work to implement something else on our own.

Please note, I'm not saying they are wrong for being acquired by Google. Just saying that as of right now, building on the Bump platform just got a lot more unsure.
Last I heard Udacity is powered by App Engine. There was an interview about it with the CEO at the end of the Web Development course, and he seemed pretty pleased with it.
His "apology": http://blog.postmates.com/post/61340672198/a-message-to-our-...

Last night I sent a private e-mail to our Customer Service team in response to a customer complaint regarding her past orders and restaurant profile. My e-mail, which outlined how to resolve the customer issue, contained a bad joke which was very poor in taste. Subsequently, the bad joke was sent to the customer. What I said was a major lapse in judgement on my part. I deeply regret this.
I immediately reached out to the customer and offered my full and sincere apology. I would like to extend that same apology to all of our customers and Customer Service team. There is no excuse for this.

At Postmates we love and value our world-class Customer Service. We take great pride in our Customer Service team. However, with my comment I have not lived up to our own standards and also damaged my team’s reputation.

I cannot find the words to describe how much I value our customers and how deeply I care about them being happy. There is no excuse for this type of conduct.

I take full responsibility for my actions. I am sincerely sorry.
Bastian Lehmann
Just a thought after reading the news today, has the CC team tested against this exploit?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6391122
Yes Go is similar to COM in that it focuses on interfaces and leaves out implementation inheritance which causes so much trouble. COM was way ahead of its time on that.

"Component Oriented Programming = Polymorphism + (Really) Late Binding + (Real, Enforced) Encapsulation + Interface Inheritance + Binary Reuse"

Apart from "Binary Reuse", the definition above is what object oriented programming is really all about (I think).
As embarrassing as it is, he didn't actually tell customer to fuck off.

Apparently some poor sod in support didn't trim internal exchange when using last mail in the chain to reply to that lady.
Looks more like a pitchfork mob, to me; the guy can't even apologize for a misstep. I bet none of these people have ever said anything bad about another, in a private place! It shouldn't really matter if they are customers or not.
Kids don't get outdoors enough these days.
I approve of the bb gun. When I was 10 the one thing I really looked forward to was archery class.
Marksmanship is all about developing skill with practice. You can have plenty of fun with a bb/pellet gun/bow&arrow that doesn't involve killing/wounding critters. Just make sure the kid acquires a healthy respect for any weapon and understands it is a responsibility. That may be difficult given the way people wave guns around on TV and in the movies, but responsibility is the most important aspect.