skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, come on. Consider what it takes to create a Yahoo! user account. Almost nothing.

Yes, I was born on January 1, 1901
Yes, the CAPTCHA is HU3FR43O

When you're engaging in elaborate sock puppetry, ostensibly for evil deeds, you're going to create and dump accounts like water.

Let's say there's some evil super villain plotting to derail a train, and he needs to communicate with his henchmen. If he knows that the law will stop attempting to trace his secret e-mails to his henchmen, after reaching some magic number of say... 100,000 user accounts, then his evil plan needs to incorporate operations to create maybe 500,000 sock puppet accounts, to give his communiques a 1 in 5 chance of being intercepted.

Now, let's say you have special evil dedicated servers, capable of queuing and automating requests in real time, and funneling off the CAPTCHAs to warehouse filled with data entry sweatshop slaves, so that your henchmen have all of their dummy accounts prepped for use, once the plan is set to unfold. Because a lot of human intervention and human interaction can be removed from the creation of a yahoo! account, and thus automated, if our evil super villain were able to engineer a custom yahoo! account creation apparatus, it would be a mistake to assume that 40,000 accounts represents 40,000 people, much less 40,000 terr'ists, or even 40,000 'muricans.

So it's not like one can make any assumptions based on these kinds of numbers, when it comes to anything on the internet. But regardless, the reverse aspect to this unreality of "user accounts" on the internet is the worry. There's no way to know when government officials are being honest, and not taking advantage of their powers, to abuse them for personal gain, either to spy on a cheating spouse, or to accept bribes and do it for someone else.

If user accounts, as a rule are nebulous and pseudonymous, and there's no real limit on creating them, and thus only a fuzzy integrity to them, then how can there be a predefined limit on eavesdropping?

The only real limit on sock puppet accounts is a theoretical one, tied to the bandwidth consumed by the circuits crossing all international boundries. In theory, if it takes "X" amount of time for human intervention to create a user account, and we can estimate "T" amount of terr'ists worldwide, then, given "N" amount of time lapsed since TERR'ISM A.D., there might potentially be:

((N/X)*T) = terr'ist user accounts in the world

...then that's pretty much what 'murican law enforcement will entitle themselves to commandeer to fight "evil".

But even more absurd is the idea that a dragnet of all internet traffic will reveal any kind of terrorist communications at all. I would have imagined that human couriers and satellite phones were still the primary drugs of choice when it came to super villainy.
That (removing I-frames) is exactly what they were doing - the technique's called datamoshing.
There's nothing magical about having a genetically diverse crop.

Except that there is. It means you can survive when environmental factors (predators, pathogens, change in food supply, change in population, etc.) change your assumptions. This often happens more quickly than you can respond, eg. the black death. If you think we're beyond that sort of thing, you're just plain wrong.[1]

We can still have bread and pizza with the desirable milling and taste traits because we inserted the single gene, rather than having to spend years and years backcrossing

Well, firstly you wouldn't have the disease problem on such a scale if you had less centralized farming / genetic monoculture. Second, desires aren't global. Third, your backcrossing line is dubious. Biology is good at survival, we don't need to tend to it ourselves. If we reach a state where we do, then gee golly: we've clearly buggered up hundreds of millions of years of success in a right jiffy!

no plant biologist would argue that breeding is the only technology that matters in feeding people. Everything from agricultural market efficiencies to post-harvest storage needs to be improved, and bettering technology is the best way.

I agree with your premise but not your conclusion. Growing suitable crops closer to where they are consumed, in greater variety, and removing external dependencies such as artificial fertilizer, unnatural water consumption for unsuitable crops, technology and energy for industrial farming, packaging and transport will also go a long way.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the reality is that actually helping people to get fed well and cheaply is a great way to make them consume less, reject large established business interests, and stop going to work. Therefore supporting policy is far from a priority in government.

[1] http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/pages/background-goals.htm
> Finally, having a 10-ping average of 7ms vs 6ms is very much within the margin of error one would expect to see.

It's not like he did a google.com ping on each and called it a day... From the post:

> I used Multiping set to do 10 pings a second and chart it. My target was the CMTS IP. I did weeks of charting and then did mods and did more charting. The differences were quite interesting.

Weeks of charting should more than correct for other factors.
Maybe, but I don't feel that way.

I do enjoy the power of the CLI for automation and pipelining of commands and build scripts.

However I am a visual guy and also enjoy the power of IDEs when coding.

So I rather use the GUI and make use of the CLI when required, than the other way around.

This was exactly how one would use Amiga OS. Spend most of the time in Workbench and use Amiga DOS when required to do so.

Or even the old Mac OS, where a terminal was a third party application. There was no command line, only GUI.
We've seen this same behavior @TutorUniverse, student-tutor pairs aren't as flaky as you would think. Since we have thousands of tutors to choose from the students sometimes switch between tutors to find a lower rate, different schedule, etc. but rarely do we see them going offline. Aaron, hats off to your team for doing a wonderful job building TutorSpree. Do you have an outplacement plan for your tutors? We're recruiting :)
Well, for a personal project I've written a parser for email (https://github.com/spc476/LPeg-Parsers/blob/master/email.lua) but I've also used LPeg for work to parse the logging output of some of our components (as part of the regression test) since they have a set structure (a mixture of "var=333" (example), "var=1/5/22" (minimum, average, maximum) and "time=33/55/88ms" (now with time units!).

Yes, it's nothing that a regex couldn't do, but I find the LPeg code easier to read and modify than a regex, and I don't have to do two passes over the data (one to break the input into multiple strings, then convert the appropriate strings into numerical values).
YAML playbooks can be under whatever licence you choose.

They aren't /linked/ in to or in any way part of ansible.

They are completely input to ansible. Saying that playbooks would be 'infected' or something is absurd. It would be like saying if I use GNU tar to compress a file, that file is now GPL.

And, after all that, even if your playbooks were GPL, there is no reason at all that you'd have to release them. It's perfectly fine to have internal non-released mods to GPL software.
"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
i don't get why the law is so coarse - why a lien worth less than the value of the house can be used to forclose the house?!

I understand if the value of the lien/debt is equal or greater than the value of the house. Otherwise, it's just like the article claims - highway robbery.
As I said, the intentions are good, but in practice these licenses are used as an actual incentive for companies to purchase the commercial alternative for redistribution.
Wow, I'd never read A Sister's Eulogy for Steve Jobs before.

"His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it."
-Mona Simpson
I find this a curious objection. Would you still have hesitated when, as was the case until very recently, there was only the OSS version?
It's pretty obvious why they release these numbers right now. More or less for the same reason why Google says now that they speed up encryption between data centers:

Cheap and ridiculous PR, designed to move your attention away from the real question (their collaboration with the NSA) to questions that have become almost insignificant (comparatively speaking).
Seriously? What arbitrary metric of cultural value is this guy using other than nostalgia? He makes a truly fascinating comparison, but like many of you have said, his statistics are dubious. Technology's influence on evolution / selection in modern society pushes us towards efficiency, connectivity, knowledge, and truth. Its influence on art/music is profound, too, but we can't qualify art anyway
It's an interesting marketing scheme. Doesn't cost a lot. Per day they sell max 3000 kg of onions (will go on for 7 days). This will perhaps bring them a lot more publicity than advertisement space they can buy for that dollar. Practically every blog, deal site, newspaper will end up covering them. Enormous traffic too.
Funny, this brain imaging study from 2010 that she mentions, states in the abstract:

... Overall, true and false memories showed similar brain activation, but could be distinguished by this reactivation. This was true only in the early regions of the sensory cortex. ...

ref: https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/StarkOkadoLoftus_FalseMemor...
It's not fair for me to second guess this move without knowing details, but this is a bit odd to me. Here's what I'm trying to figure out... If it was actually a business, but just a slow growing one they wanted to get out of, why didn't they hire someone else to run it? What am I missing here?

Anywho, they sound like smart guys. I'm sure they'll move on to something bigger.
"sold out in 9mins"
I thought Exchange was part of Microsoft Platform Products and Services Division, whereas office is part of Microsoft Business Division.
Pure CSS - Beach Ball of Death
Rendezvous with Ramen, Clarke's lesser known SF work that explores alien civilizations and the mythos of the flying spaghetti monster.
Is it hard to grow onions in the average India climate?
"Encrypt all data" is a vague term. For example, would that include encrypting it while a CPU is processing it? What about when the CPU is writing it to RAM? What if the RAM is on some other computer in the rack? What if it's in some computer on the other side of the world?

I'm not sure what Google's public statements on this have been, but if you want to research it, be sure to distinguish statements regarding user data at rest from those regarding user data in transit.
Being an entrepreneur vs. traditional "good" jobs
The sum of 'node.js' and 'nodejs' is greater then 'angularjs' and 'angular.js'
Very sound advice. Thank you.
Free as in sexist? Free culture and the gender gap
This is hardly surprising. During my childhood in India, coupons were very rare. This meant that when a coupon did show up, it was usually a great offer and an enourmous flood of people would rush to cash in. It was common for newspapers to sell out just for a specific coupon.

I remember a company introducing a new orange flavored drink coming out with an offer where they'd give the drink for "free" in exchange for x number of oranges.

Oranges across the city sold out.
Rails for Designers - Rails front-end design and development guide
Bronstein/Semendjajew’s Handbook of Mathematics[0] is something close to what you envision. It’s helpful if you just need to look up a given formulae and understand the larger picture, but it will be incomprehensible if you don’t know at least some maths. Note that the HHGTG, while giving you some information about planets, will be useless unless you know something about hitchhiking, too: Like the Bronstein, it gives you bits and pieces to remember parts of the larger picture, but it doesn’t give the larger picture to you.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Mathematics-I-N-Bronshtein/dp... (apparently without an English Wikipedia article)
When the NYT article said NSA has succeeded in putting backdoors into "commercial encryption hardware", what were they talking about? Weren't they referring to chip companies like Intel?

If Intel wants our trust again, they should open source this stuff, and make it very transparent so we can verify if it's clean or not. At this point this should worry them a lot more than "giving their competitive advantage to AMD" or whatever. Same goes for the other chip makers, too, of course. So maybe they can all do it at once, to level the playing field.
That's on my birthday! How appropriate.
Short answer: No.

Longer answer: see below.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/are-high-vegetab...

"According to Government data, India’s onion output in 2012-13 at 16.65 million tonnes, wasn’t much below the record 17.51 million of the previous year. Also, the fact that prices at Lasalgaon, Maharashtra’s and Asia’s largest onion market, averaged Rs 8 to 8.50 a kg till mid-May shows the crop wasn’t bad. What, then, explains the same Lasalgaon prices now touching Rs 45/kg?

"The last time when wholesale prices rose so much — consumers paid Rs 100 then — was in early January 2011. But that was a year when crop in South India was hit, especially by floods in Andhra Pradesh. The country’s entire requirement had to, then, be met from stored Maharashtra onions, allowing the traders at Lasalgaon to make a killing. But this time round, no such production disruption has happened; the kharif crop from the South is yet to be harvested.

"It only points to the power of traders, who would have bought at Rs 8 in early-May and stored to create artificial scarcity after July — when crop arrivals stop and the festival season takes off with Ramzan/Id-ul-Fitr!
Still disturbing that an audience as young as your daughter were participating, watching or present at Disrupt, and TechCrunch didn't even bother to properly and thoroughly screen speakers ahead of time.

Edit - In case anyone is confused, I'm referring to:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/08/an-apology-from-techcrunch/
It looks quite interesting, I wonder what went wrong.
No, but it's not just men versus women. I know plenty of women that would think it's funny. It seems like the thing here is that it was unprofessional, and some people don't like that. It's a valid opinion, but it's not along gender lines.
Unless you have paid for his training, why does this bother you?
No. But, the ruling party is looting India and is determined to make India bankrupt.
Is it really a big deal that Groupon India's site crashed? Was there not an article a few months ago on HN about how badly coded this website was? I thought it was just a localized version of Groupon but there was something appalling about it as I remember.
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> IPSec didn't exactly take off

Oh, jezus. Did you read it on the Internets?

IPsec (s is in lowercase) is the standard to securing L2 connectivity and it has been ubiquitously used for site-to-site and client-to-site connectivity for ages. In addition to several mature FOSS implementations, every network equipment vendor ships one. There is also a ton of client software - Windows supported it since Windows 2000, the SSH company (you know, the ssh creators) has been selling an IPsec Toolkit since as early as 1999, Cisco has a VPN client that is de-facto software in Cisco-based shops for remote workers, etc.
Except for the fact that they worked the TPB case under Swedish Law. You could (possibly) argue that they sponsored US-style legislation in Sweden, but to claim that TPB went down for violating US Law is misleading.

It serves to erase the various subtle differences that exist in laws throughout the world. For instance, the UK has no such thing as Fair Use - we have a weaker concept of Fair Dealing. Under F.D. such things as making a copy of a CD onto a Computer as an MP3 is illegal (though there are plans to legalise that).

I've met several people who believed that such a thing was "Fair Use", precisely because of the "All Copyright Law is US Law" mentality.
In addition to all the other arguments here, I have a problem with your assertion that Paypal is run by smart geeks. a) I think its a common knowledge that it is actually run by business pointy heads b) their API and dev environment are so horrendously bad and hostile to developers its not even funny. And its been like this for years. If it was really run by geeks, getting the API and dev process in order would be high on priorities list.
Get out the US. Other places have less crap in the way and have better performing services (ie their lack of regulation in the IT area is actually capable of producing better results). Are the regulations just protecting incumbents? Or am I overly cynical?
19yr old Inventor Finds Way to Clean Up the World’s Oceans
Isn't this comparing apples to oranges? It's like saying Apache surpasses PHP in Google Trends interest - they're very different, incomparable technologies.
Debian Virtualization: LXC Desktop Virtualization
>The first things that the company stops paying for are ... health insurance, taxes and unemployment insurance (you may not care, but this is important to you after you get laid off).

My health insurance actually stopped a few months ago. I discovered it while I was in the dentist.

> Paychecks are delayed, and a short time later, paychecks are issued on-time, but bounce when you try to deposit them.

This is exactly what happened.

> You might be asked to pay for things on your credit card that are actually company expenses

I first felt very weird when my boss was unable to provide a company credit card for me to test our own credit card processor. He asked me to use mine.

What you said in the last few paragraphs is definitely a wake up call for me. I am very surprised this is actually what's happening to me at the moment.

Thanks a lot for your insight!
So is this the guy that's advised the Republicans in congress to ruin our country's credit rating as a bargaining maneuver with the stupid 'Debt Ceiling Debate'?

"Alex Patton is a media & communications expert, Republican political consultant"
I am starting by working on a pilot project[1] to put control of education standards back in the hands of educators. It's inspired by ideas that are quite familiar to the hacker crowd, but quite new to education: continuous improvement, forking, and open source.

The main problems this project addresses, and how it addresses them:

First problem: Most education standards are written by an external standards body, over which educators have little or no influence. Solution: Make it easy for educators to develop, maintain, and share sets of standards that they create and modify.

Second problem: It is difficult for a successful school to share its overall system with another school. Solution: Make it easy for one school to fork another school's system.

Third problem: Most schools have one set of graduation requirements, regardless of the fact that students have widely varying interests, aptitudes, and experiences. Solution: Allow the creation of different "pathways" through the curriculum that students can follow to earn a diploma.

Fourth problem: Many ed-tech offerings these days are built more with a profit motive in mind than with the desire to foster widespread adoption of what is best for students. Solution: Commit to a fully free and open set of tools for educators and learners.

It's a pilot project just for my school this year, but it is public and the source is available for anyone interested. It is also set up to be scaleable as soon as the pilot phase is over.

[1] http://opencompetencies.org

https://github.com/openlearningtools/opencompetencies/
i think they would have sold it off. Their idea seems amazing and would have worked even in Kenya where I live and thats saying something. But it seems they had passion which may serve them elsewhere.
This cheats a little by shaking the image, though. Without that you're hitting a fixed point much earlier, with less dramatic results.
This is _not_ end-to-end crypto, that would require users storing the keys to their own emails on their own systems. This is basically TLS on a giant scale but does not prevent email from being intercepted while "at rest" on a gmail server.
While this comment is likely to attract down-votes but on a serious note just this one line adds so more depth to the problem. What a huge challenge of numbers and scale when it comes to economics of the Indian household!

The problem of overstocking to artificially create scarcity and then bend the prices over (of onions or rice or tomatoes) to profit quickly is such an age-old problem that has stuck around in India since the independence. It works like the crude oil industry and works like a charm. Every time. There have never been any convictions or efforts reported on "fixing it".

No one even remotely seems close or interested (I could be wrong here) in thinking up a solution or to get involved in solving it. Thus, the LOL.
Sounds good to me. That's what you get when you become a sleazy company willing to do anything for money (in the short term) without thinking of the consequences.

Plus, it's also quite ironic considering US started this whole trend of banning companies because of fear of bugs in their hardware. Reap what you sow.
I'm always amazed about how puritan is United States.
Something I found interesting is that when searching for "angular", "angular.js" and "angularjs", spain comes out as the country where the search happens the most and Barcelona, the city where I live, is the second most popular city for Angular people.

Where are you all?
Thanks for your input! The paid vacation is definitely a good plan.
> You're argument that entrusting certain officials with making good publicly known decisions "works really well right up until it fails really badly" based off of a weird GW parable has me scratching my head.

You're the one who advocated that judges be allowed to ignore the law and judge entirely based on their own good judgement. I pointed out that there are few people who even have good enough judgement to abdicate at the right time.

> And regarding small claims courts - the amount of damage a judge can do is directly related to how much a person is worth, just like fines for civil infractions. It can be nearly nothing or it can be life altering.

That's why we have laws and we make judges follow those laws. It ill-serves society to force extremely good judges to follow poorly-thought-out laws, but the losses on that end are more than made up for by forcing the idiot and asshole judges to adhere to laws written by people who aren't explicitly out to screw you over.