skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> posted a positive comment about Windows 8 [...] was then accused of astroturfing

> great news! Congratulations to MS.

You’re not helping your case ;)

Anyways, I've been a member of many tech fora over the years. So far, I find HN to have the best balance between defenders of Microsoft, Apple, Android, *nix, and BSD. If you know of a better forum, I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks, that is a super interesting talk! He posits one mechanism for how the octopus might be able to colour-match while being colour-blind, which is the presence of distributed light sensing pigments in the skin - a molecule for this, "opsin", can be found in the skin of cuttlefish and squid (and maybe octopi too, he didn't say).

He says that although the pigment they have found for light-sensing is the same one they have found in the eye, and thus only indicates that the skin may be able to "see" a single colour (i.e. is also colour-blind), the research suggests that other pigments may exist, or that some other mechanism like refraction of nearby chromatophores (pigmented and/or light-reflecting cells) may allow those pigments to detect more than just a single colour.

When I was first trying to imagine how a colour-blind octopus could colour-match itself to its surroundings, one thought I had was how a deaf person can sense sound via felt vibrations. Based on the frequency of the vibration, pitch can be inferred. In a way, that is sort of similar to what he suggests is happening with the light-sensing pigments in the skin - the information the organism requires is fed to it via its skin rather than the organs typically used for this task, the eyes.
Very, very impressive. I'm excited about the possibilities! FWIW using machine learning approach to try and individualize treatments and treat people one at a time (linking 'what works' for the individual rather than trying to find the single cure for all) seems very similar to what we tried to do for autism spectrum treatments with http://autism360.org (thought that some on here may find this interesting).
yep - i think this is where the real dollars in advertising is to be made; namely, branding campaigns.
Should Microsoft Buy Blackberry?
Bonus with Lenovo is it's pre-backdoored by the Chinese government, so you don't have to worry about NSA collecting your info passively :P
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/29/lenovo_accused_backd...
I guess everyone would like to have a chat with the one who came up with the monkey idea.
Parent: I would wager that they're opening it in order to generate a thumb or preview, or maybe for search indexing

Article: Uploaded Documents to Dropbox Personal Account with Private Folders

So drop box indexes and creates thumbnails for private documents? This is because the NSA gives a bounty for friendly UIs, perhaps?
Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa Nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa nsa
Oh, that's "never how it works?" You must be full of concrete examples that I will patiently await you posting here.
I've never understood why these employees (who are clearly quite intelligent) don't just pursue another career where they have more leverage. After all, I don't think they have any particular love for banking. Being on HN, the obvious suggestion would be software development (not a bad choice, considering the current state of the market), but there are a lot of other options out there as well.

If you fail in software, then you're just an out-of-work programmer. If you fail in banking, you take a two-year timeout at Harvard Business School and raise a search fund before you're 30.

The upside of software is arguably better (fatter rightward tail, more interesting work, more impact, less tied to NYC and London) but the insurance is not there.
> reducing the possibility

I was going to disagree because some U.S. remakes of British shows have not been as good or have been terrible, but in-general tried and true products in a market in one country have a better chance of succeeding in another country in similar form. This generalization pretty much carries over into most products and services.

Something else that would be interesting would be to show the # record/CD/mp3 sales of cover songs of successful original vs. originals by the same band doing the cover.
Merlin Mann made his own 'compose email' app using automator: http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/45763194525/compose-gmail-m... .

Basically you launch it, it jumps straight to the blank compose window (nothing else), and closes when you hit send. That's it.

I try use it for the times when I don't want to see my email, but need to email something.
Americans in general dislike saying people have 'died,' which sounds too final. 'Passed on/away' is a sop to people who believe in the afterlife.
Not sure how I feel about the considerable bonuses for supporters. Maybe less cards/gold and more aesthetic things? Gold bonus and 50% more cards per challenge reward is quite high.
Protein-interaction videos often make molecular reactions seem "deterministic" when in reality everything is quite stochastic; the molecules are "bouncing" around like crazy and each step may go back and forwards several times before completing. That said, I love the videos--its really amazing to think about all these little proteins bending and folding around all the time!
Sorry, but after trying Windows 8 for three weeks, I had to go back to Windows 7. The experience was just too frustrating. I'll try again when Windows 8.1 comes out.
After an actual desire to learn (which several others here have mentioned), the biggest obstacle to learning is bad teachers. I don't want my teacher to be a vast self-curated backwater of internet tutorials and apps. I don't even want options to customize my learning. I want an opinionated, sassy domain expert who inspires me, pushes me, and clearly delights in the subject.

Examples:
http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html (thanks tokenadult)
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.asp...
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html

If you had a learning website built around teachers rather than subjects, I would definitely check that out.
But the jury is still out on whether that ability is a net positive for our survival in evolutionary terms. And if it isn't, well, natural selection is quite merciless.
Thanks for the correction on that.
I've been using 16,384 for my SSH key sizes for the past year and am considering using 32,768 a soon as my two year rotation period is up - would there be any problems with my key sizes?
if you look at this ama as well as past ama's the hotmail / outlook team have done, you'll see you don't need to plant someone to ask "hey M$, why u no ship IMAP??!?!". it was the #1 question / request the team had from this audience.
The simple way to see this is that evolution is essentially just the simplest possible hill climbing algorithm (at each step, change one random gene on some fraction of organisms in a random way, keep the best set of genes for the next step).

It can do amazing things, but only because it's had millions/billions of years and an entire planet to run on.
If you find anything could you please let me know?
Despite Faster Care, Heart Attack Mortality Rates Remain Steady
>perhaps we need a geolocation aware social network a la Square but just for notifying you of other nearby PGP users...

To what end though? What do you share in common with them other than the fact that you're both probably interested in cryptography? Just because you can easily communicate back and forth with encrypted messages doesn't mean you'll actually have much to talk about.
> they don't have BIOS checks verifying that the OS is supported and refusing to boot if it isn't

In fact the machines they're selling now almost certainly do have precisely this. It's called 'secure boot', and caused a lot of controversy. The major Linux distributions work because they've managed to get themselves signed with the appropriate key so the BIOS accepts them, but if you want to put a more niche distribution on there, you probably have to disable that check in the BIOS.
Indeed! An intelligent "USB Device" is what was used to originally jailbreak the PS3. [0] A USB device (commonly using an AVR USB microcontroller) sends differing USB descriptors at different times - a sort of double-fetch vulnerability. The exploit leads to complete hypervisor access. Do NOT trust your USB device!

[0]: http://ps3wiki.lan.st/index.php?title=PSJailbreak_Exploit_Re...
This is one of the things I love about HN. People we talk about here actually read the articles and comments.

Feature request: like they do on Reddit with iAMAs, give posters the opportunity to verify with staff that they are who they say they are.
Anyone who wants to go to that amount of trouble will find brute-forcing 10,000 possible pin codes to be just as easy.
Ironically, this post makes you sound rather pretentious
As someone who ran a restaurant I can say that being well-known, in a prime location, and easy to google does not completely remove the need in ads, much like it doesn't remove the need to have a signboard.

For a known brand ads serve as a means to say "we are here, we are alive, we do well". That's why Coca-Cola or McDonald's keep running ads, despite the fact that everyone in the world is aware of them. This is not unlike wearing an expensive necktie on public, or having a gold watch 100 years ago; it's the same sort of signaling a peacock uses his tail for.

If you stop putting your ads before public's eyes, sales start to slump. Maybe this is not so for a brand with a small cult following, but such brands are few.

So advertising is not going to go away, as much as luxury items market is not going to go away. It may shrink a bit when times are hard, it may migrate to different media (from paper to TV to computer screen), but not disappear.
Can We Really Trust Webhosting Companies?
That's a lot of brands to boycott, including, sadly Guiness.
Well mine is 4097 bits. Checkmate, Sir.
Sorry. I'd edit it to include one but HN won't let me.
I'm on OSX, and macports gpg does 4096 fine (gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.13). Also works fine on Ubuntu (gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.11)

What no one seems to support is ECC, but until I get more confirmation, I'm inclined to follow Schneier and stick to 4096 RSA in preference to ECC, at least where possible.

I really don't want my key to be on my general-purpose machine. I have fully airgapped machines for code signing and such, but for regular communications, I want a key which can be used from my laptops (mac, ubuntu) and ideally from iOS/Android (via bluetooth), without being exposed to compromise on the host. You can force me to sign or decrypt arbitrary stuff while my key is paired, but can't steal my key.

Ideally v2 would have some kind of log of all transactions on the secure token, so I can at least see if I'm being trolled for signatures/decrypts by malware on the host, and in v3, some kind of secure UI on the device.

I figure I could make a device like this, in a fully open/auditable design, for <$250/unit. Ideally something which looks like the Blackberry CAC reader, but uses bt 4.0 le to talk to a paired host, rather than power-hungry bluetooth.
Skydrone FPV with Oculus Rift VR - demo video
or maybe you left an openbox installation on another computer and you don't remember, and whoever has that computer likes to snoop on your .doc files, specially the ones named "passwords"
I think it depends on the direction of the acceleration. The John Stapp experiment was horizontal acceleration, right? Right above that:

"... if g-forces are not quickly reduced, death can occur. Resistance to "negative" or "downward" g, which drives blood to the head, is much lower. This limit is typically in the −2 to −3 g (about −20 m/s² to −30 m/s²) range."
Canadian banks aren't too bad from what I hear. In the radio episode referenced by the OP, it's mentioned that the worst offenders are Wall St. Banks, and the worst departments are M&A...
Here's a direct link to the NSA slide explaining the MITM attack (originally published by Fantastico in Brazil):

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130910/10470024468/flying...
Arthur C. Clark's "The Songs of Distant Earth" has some leap-frogging colonists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth
I forgot how tedious signup forms are. OpenID or facebook/twitter login?
I also found it going very well or very, very badly.

For instance: "In most cases, before beginning to listen, the browser will ask permission to monitor your microphone."

Came out as: "In Las Cruces, f listen, permission to monitor your microphone."
"A developer might not know how to optimize a slow-running Postgre query, but he knows how to cache data and denormalize in a manner that makes the query he wants to run fast"

And you can cache and denormalize with postgres just as easily, and it will probably perform better and not corrupt your data.

What mongo makes easy is things like replication and failover. It can go horribly wrong on that front, but until you see that, it is much easier to get up and running with replication and failover.
After having seen several of your comments: You assume a lot.
If you get to a point where ageism actually becomes an issue for you, I would suggest embedded systems engineering. With your C++ background it should be no problem for you, and in my experience firmware engineers tend to be older and don't have age bias like the rest of the industry. I enjoy firmware because you get to work fairly closely with actual physical things and apply your knowledge to an extremely wide array of real-world applications.
I do freelance work currently, it's OK, I earn a decent amount but I don't really enjoy it.

I'd prefer to work with a startup or small company on something exciting. Learn some new skills and possibly be part of something big.
Grocery stores are absolutely chock full of terribly unhealthy products misnamed "food".

Presumably, their competitors either adapted or died. Even if the winds of change are blowing in bad way for society, trying to stand against them may be bad for business.

Perhaps take the tactic of the yuppie organic good section?

Wait a few years, then start a conference dedicated to real work and actually getting things done.
I don't think this is a tech industry specific thing. In a previous career in sales, all the conferences and events ended each night with a boozefest. The most common way to celebrate a sale was... to go out drinking.

Friends that are doctors or lawyers talk about conferences, which as I'm led to believe, are some possibly interesting talks during the day, and then a party/drink-up at night!

(I didn't drink during the sales phase of my life, and generally found there were other people drinking soda or able to handle their liquor and hold a real conversation at most events.)
Our economy doesn't reward workers based on merit, but on dynamics like supply/demand, risk, scarcity, etc...
Well I have done quite a bit of embedded work in the past and I agree, I was often the youngest software engineer on the team. I quite enjoy the work too, but the thought of going through the whole interview process again is tiring! Needs a lot of prep to get back into the correct mindset, especially seeing as I've been doing a lot of web stuff recently.
Do you happen to know if he charged from the get-go?
This is ridiculous - it just builds in a price floor for Apple gear, thus reinforcing Apple's price positioning - while simultaneously excluding people from the used market if they can't match MS's offer.
I might sound like a dick here, but I'm just trying to be matter-of-fact about it.

If you have depression, anxiety, or panic disorder, you probably shouldn't consider an analyst program to be a viable career option, just as being a pro basketball player isn't viable for 99+ percent of people. Sorry, but it's just not going to work; those typically manageable conditions become crippling disabilities in the crucible of a 100-hour work week. You should probably find another way; if you're smart, you can do something more interesting than analyst dreck, get an MBA, and move in as an associate-- or, perhaps even better, stick with technology and move in as a quant and have a ~10-hour day.

This person had epilepsy, which is potentially fatal. He never should have taken on an analyst gig.

I'm not saying this isn't horrible and wrong-- obviously, it is-- but I wish in general that young people were more aware of the reality of health risks. It's one thing to go into a job like that knowing what the risks are, but a lot of people have no clue.
It seems difficult to fight this directly -- prosecuting anti-vaccinators would be viewed by supporters as persecution, and might actually make them more reluctant to vaccinate.

Publicizing deaths due to lack of vaccination can work, but that lags -- by the time enough of the population is unvaccinated for the disease to spread and kill babies, it's too late.

I'm in favor of quarantining Napa/Marin and certain LA suburbs, since that seems to be ground zero, at least in California, for this insanity.

Andrew Wakefield should have been forced to personally meet every parent of a measles-infected baby as part of his punishment for fraud.
Not at this point. Feel free to sign up for the beta on our site and take it for a spin, I'll make sure to get you your credentials quickly.
PS: by the way, big fan of historio.us...
> Get out.

Meaning? (I can think of several possibilities.)
There's another term from the mentioned "Selfish Gene" (which is a book by the same title): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

It's a view on how ideas spread and use hosts (e.g., human brains) as carriers. They mutate, they're selected, they compete for "brain space". One funny perspective is that we're the slaves to genes and memes, both using us to survive. We're just carrying out their orders. :)

(In the end it's just a way to look at information diffusion with focus on the way how ideas replicate and the condition of their success or failure over time, abstracting away from social/cultural context and other hard to grasp things.)
A common misperception but not true, because traits are heritable and the environment selects for fitness.

Mutation and genetic drift play a role in evolution, but are not the sole source of changes.
That post makes no sense. The great that Netflix is available on every platform known to man is exactly why they are one of the dominant players in online video streaming. What possible benefit is there to Netflix for all the expense and hassle required to release a Netflix-branded device, when all they have to do is port an app, and let someone else take all the risk?
My understanding was that the right against self-incrimination was largely meant as a patch, to prevent suspects being tortured into confessing by devaluing their confessions. If that's the point, I don't see any reason for a court not to compel a harmless, painless fingerprint swipe.
I don't understand. What does bad RAM have to do with re-installing OS X?

Also, even if the RAM somehow corrupted the OS, weren't you able to boot into the recovery partition? Or even install it on a USB drive beforehand? https://www.apple.com/osx/recovery/
thanks. didn't see that post.
I'm interested to use it in combination with a robot (NAO). Could you provide a tutorial for it. Not sure if ROS on NAO will be necessary or not.
Today it's "just another option", a few years down the line it's mandatory.

Bullshit.
Selling off could hurt the project. Here it helped.
do you have one? are those actually comfortable?
> slippery slope

...towards a better world.
"Files sync immediately and fast".

So which is it? Immediately or fast? How would the transfer rates to a remote sync compare with a NAS replication stream? How would the LAN file synchronisation compare to local NAS?
Who took his stage name from the subject of this thread.
Obama's address is actually a great piece of propaganda that serves the United States' strategic interests. Judging by the comments here and on the NYT, it seems to be working.
Most definitely they should, the Windows phone 8 is a perfect replacement for a Blackberry. I used to be a BB user but switched to WP8 about 1 year ago and never looked back. For a business user, the WP8 is a perfect fit and the BB user base is a great fit in my view.
Technologies introduced with the potential to control and restrict people (or users) have always expanded their scope and reach.

Yes, that's why you can't get on the internet except through AOL any more.

Walled garden software was few and far between all through 1980-2010.

What nonsense.
Ask HN: How do you get a core job in a mature field?
I want to get a core job in a mature field (semiconductors).

The problem is the requirements for getting a core jobs is 20+ years experience designing chips with a large network of people who work in the industry. I have a better chance of getting a job designing the core interface of the next Facebook then designing the core functionality of a chip today.

It seems the only jobs left for an inexperienced person like me are housekeeping jobs implementing the plans those senior people create.

What options (if any) are there for getting a core job in a mature field when your still young and foolish?
I want people to sign my public key. I don't care who they are but the more people do the more people can trust that it really is my key. Imagine if your phone told you that you are at the same coffee shop as someone who is also a registered PGP user and has not yet signed your key. That would be pretty easy, right?
Didn't google introduce at least some of those "little pain points" due to their requirement for alternate js engine (for v8), and their own process sandbox?

I heard that after the fork, both sides were able to clean up and remove a ton of code (thus benefiting pretty much everyone).
Google doesn't use Nuance.
Trade in your iPad, get a $200 gift card
Not when the data erases after a low number of misses.
The article specifically states that ODAP bears no no risk of toxicity unless someone is suffering from malnutrition, stress, or acute hunger.
It's entirely about filtering for people who will submit to abuse.

Sort-of, but not entirely. You have the typical corporate exponential bottleneck (~25+% per year attrition) and extremely competitive people, but the work isn't intellectually difficult, so people need to compete on something, and it comes down to conformity and availability. It turns out that some people can take that to an extent that would kill many of us. We're good at our stuff; they're good at theirs.

I don't think the intention is to subject analysts to "abuse" at any level beyond the abuse that comes from clients. Sure, there's a bit of hazing and testing that goes on, but it's there for a reason: when shit really does hit the fan, even the MDs (who usually have a 9-to-5 existence if they want it) are working 24/7. You can't be a front-office banker if you can't deal with those kinds of hours-- even into your 40s.
NASA Quotes 'Star Trek' As Voyager 1 Enters the Interstellar Frontier
The US concerns are exactly the same only in opposition.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/08... .. 31 kids could've died because 1 religious zealot refused vaccinations.

For fuck's sake, get your vaccinations, and while I'm ranting stop drinking un-Pasteurized milk from dirt hippy stores illegally too. There is no elaborate conspiracy to keep nature down, it's to protect you from Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria
It shows that the espionage isn't just for terrorists.