skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I think "unauthorized access" is like porn. You know it when you see it.

Isn't that one of those quotes from the Supreme Court like "three generations of imbeciles are enough" that everybody now uses to show how the Court is fallible?

It's just abdicating the role of Congress to make the law and the courts to say what the law is so that instead everyone can just do whatever they want on a case by case basis.

>As for chilling effects for security researchers, I don't think they're an inadvertent result of vague statutory language. I think Congress clearly intended to make that sort of tinkering around illegal.

I don't think the Congress that passed the CFAA contemplated that the sort of tinkering around we're talking about could even be possible. They pretty clearly passed it having in mind the idea that some foreign government or corporation might try to infiltrate the mainframes of US banks or the military, or maybe to have the ability to prosecute in case GE or Boeing is using one of those beasts to store their proprietary trade secrets and the Communists try to break in. I can't expect that overeager college professors were high on the list of expected defendants.

>I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to create such a rule, but there is a certain internal logic to it. Laws create social norms.

The issue in this case is that the law violates social norms (or more accurately, social norms violate the law), because the law so rarely gets enforced that people disregard it, so it becomes a tool for prosecutors to abuse in service of convicting political enemies and anyone else they don't like when nothing else will stick.

Anyone who operates an internet-facing server can tell you that break in attempts happen continuously. That's what the social norms are. I expect if you went to the FBI with a list of all the IP addresses that have tried to guess ssh passwords against your servers in the last week and asked them to prosecute they would tell you to shove off as they have more important things to do -- and those are the people who are unambiguously doing something wrong.

That's the trouble with the social norms argument. The social norms on the internet are that if you forget to lock your doors then within a few hours an army of foreign criminal syndicates will parachute out of stealth planes to eat all the food in your refrigerator and start storing marijuana and pirated movies in your garage and then teenagers will wander in off the street to write graffiti on the walls. I can sympathize with the inclination to just prosecute them all, but when they mostly aren't subject to your jurisdiction and there is an obvious available alternative of remembering to lock your doors, having a law which imposes severe penalties on less serious offenses but only against the minority of offenders present in your jurisdiction seems like nothing more than a trap for the unwary that makes little to no progress against the problem it purports to solve.
The Haskell Road to Logic is a pretty good.

I took a class on discrete mathematics only with formulas.
I didn't understand any of it.

Then I read this book and all of it made sense.

"What I cannot program, I cannot understand.."
(with my apologies to Feynman)
I view "ship early" (and iterate!) as a superior verification strategy than formal methods for most typical software. Most errors occur much earlier in the pipeline than the authoring of the first line of code.
Based on this structured data, another service is nifty: http://bin.hyperrest.com

which coupled with a browser search plugin http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=bin.hyper... can brings specifications to the tip of your... "bin+tab" :)

Opensourced at https://github.com/hyperrest/bin
In my experience, you have the difficulty backward. It's just fear of the unknown that keeps too many technical people from attempting it.

If your product has a demonstrable return on investment, then it is far easier to sell to businesses. Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI, and consumers mostly don't.

Remember that to make a fair comparison, you need to do it per dollar, not per sale. Even if it's 10x easier to sell to one consumer than one business, if a business customer pays 100x more money, then it is still vastly easier to sell to businesses.
Another possibility is that the encoding program did something slightly non-standard which is no longer recognized by modern decoders?
Does the name coders bother anyone else? Whenever I hear coders I think of people who do medical coding and billing.
The logical outcome of this kind of predatory practice should be that the "investor" (the purchaser of the liens) gets $5000 out of the $197,000 sale, and the debtor gets $192,000. And even that seem predatory, never mind getting all the equity and forcing the person out of their place of residence.
A web app a week sounds like a pretty brisk pace to me -- but then again my knowledge of web development is rather outdated. What technologies would you use to build a web app in 7 days in 2013?
It's not as if Canonical's approach was exactly uncontroversial either. My reaction to the Mir announcement was not exactly that I was overwhelmed by warm fuzzies, to put it that way, because I think they should collaborate on Wayland rather than doing their own thing for something as central as the display server.
I think the biggest giveaway from this article isn't how do you tell a false memory from the real one (because you can't), but the fact that you can have false memories at all. You can be 100% sure that something happened and at the same time be 100% wrong. This happened to me at least once and raises your humility - you never can be 100% right about something. Memory is malleable and it can play tricks on you.
This is just mindblowing and I wonder why it wasn't on the front page.
Then, we are screwed.
This seems relevant:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4553/copy-a-file-...

dd does not show a progress bar, unfortunately but it does report its progress.
At least inflation has to be added, and that's without calculating any risk. Otherwise I'll borrow from you $100K and return it 30 years later
Books every investor should read
I watched is a couple of months ago and I think it is one of the best Gene Hackman movies.
Well there are two issues here.

The first is that laws that allow this to happen are scandalous. Worst case, particularly for the elderly, is that a lien is placed on the home such that it must be paid when the home is transferred in any way. So what if DC has to wait 10 years for $137 mistakenly not paid? Seriously.

Unless the debt exceeds some nontrivial amount, the county should be restricted from taking any action whatsoever. All this to recover $137? Seriously?

If it does come to foreclosure, it is utterly ridiculous that the "investor" (I prefer "predator") gets to keep the entire sale amount. Fees (that should be capped) may be retained with the rest being returned to the owner. Otherwise this is (or should be) the unlawful seizure of assets.

Secondly, if you are such an "investor" how exactly do you live with yourself as a human being doing this? Seriously. I couldn't sleep at night.

As for the county or state officials that make this possible, how do they live themselves doing this to their constituents?
What happens to little startups after everyone forgets?
Oh boy, are you right. I have an Economist subscription which I got after foolishly assuming that the quality of Charlemagne and Bagehot are representative of the whole product.

What enrages me most is that the "leader" opinion pieces (at the very front of every issue) are so catastrophically bad. I recently wondered if there might be a positive correlation between how bad a political decision has played out and whether or not it had been demanded by "leader".

As soon as it runs out, I'll get a Guardian subscription instead.
From what I read:

1) Owner of the house owes a minor amount of taxes. In most of the anecdotes, the homeowners have either no mortgage at all, or otherwise have mostly equity (tiny % of the total value of the home owed).
2) Since the city technically has a lien on the home (or gets one?), they are able to then sell the lien to an "investor", who pays whatever the tax bill is.
3) The investor demands payment, and begins charging huge fees.
4) After 6 months or whatever, the investor forecloses on the house, which is essentially taking ownership (basically a "repossession")
5) The investor sells the house for market value, or whatever price they want.
6) Since the investor is NOT a mortgage company or otherwise holding a mortgage lien, but is holding a lien originated by municipal entity, there is no rule in place that says they need to pay the original homeowner the profit. Therefore, they keep all of the money, minus the tax bill they paid at the start.

In the end, the article implies that this company is buying liens for as low as $50, and then selling the houses out from under the homeowners for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At least, that's what I understood.
If you are going to get a dog, for security primarily, you need a PPD, (personal protection dog). They cost around $35,000 for a proper one. And you will have a friend for life when it is not in "guard mode".

The downside: have to speak to it in German/Dutch.
That's similar to how Xerox copiers were switching numbers -- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_me...

Though that was due to overly aggressive compression instead of corruption.
Good points and agree. But I think when you get into "at best he'd owe $848" then you don't provide proper disincentive to prevent the behavior of ignoring tax bills and other notices.

As an aside as someone who has gone through significant pain trying to collect money from people that owe varying amounts (over the years) it's a process that given a bigger stick (not "ordinary" penalties) would go a long way.

Noting also that this played out over many years. He didn't just miss a payment of $134 and boom someone profits $5000 or $197,000.
Property taxes are very progressive and we should absolutely have more of them (fair ones, not like the one in this article where you lose your home if you fail to pay some trivial sum).

The reasons are best described in the article below, but in summary, we all pay to defend and enhance your property (by supporting the police, roads, local services, etc). It's fairer for property owners to take a larger share of this burden since they alone get the benefits from it, like the ability to sit in the garden and enjoy the view or the increased value of the property when the government builds a road to it. Land taxes also raise revenue without deterring productive work (unlike, say, income tax).

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...

To answer your direct question, since property owners are overrepresented (they vote more often and are far more likely to be politicians), yes of course they've tried to get rid of progressive property taxes. eg. This in Nevada:

http://www.interstice.com/~drewes/allodial.html
The validity of that statement depends on your historical perspective.

To the modern eye, we see radically different type systems and conclude they are as different as night and day.

But there was a time when the world was divided into people who thought anything higher-level than C or FORTRAN was stupid and impractical, and those who aspired to build more abstract languages. LISP was one of the rallying cries of the latter group. Haskell clearly falls into that group too.
Outliers with Grubb's test in Ruby. Supports hashes/arrays as inputs.
Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean it's not illegal.

After all, do you think you'd get away with stripping DRM from your own e-books for personal use? Probably.
What works for you doesn't necessarily work for everybody. For example I am completely unable to work from home, so even though most of my career I worked remotely, I prefer to rent an office, even when I have the freedom to stay home.

But not all people have such preferences. I know people that are quite happy and productive while working from home. And personally I come to work in slippers and tee-shirt during the summer, with no effect on my seriousness with which I treat work.
> Just another example of government acting as stenographer for the financial industry.

Did you actually just say a sentence with the phrase "government acting" in it as an example of something Ayn Rand would be in favor of? HAHAHAHA....

(I'm not in the Ayn Rand camp, but I think you're missing the basic concept of what she was about.)
#WTF? Tide, Bounce and Downy TV Spot, 'Startup'
Happen to catch this on Project Runway.
Mathematical theorems are formally proven.

It's formal compared to colloquial english, but completely vague compared to computer programs.

There are automatic theorem provers, but it isn't Godel's undecidability theorem that limits them. It's the difficulty of formally writing down our proofs in machine readable format that limits them for practical purposes.
"After the bill isn't paid the lien is sold to investors who increase the owed amount by an order of magnitude "

What is the time period that that happens though? Isn't that an important factor in all of this? Plays out over years? How many chances (and over what time period) could the homeowner have been able to rectify for a more reasonable amount of money?

Not disagreeing with your main point or that the punishment not fitting the crime (or opportunists) etc.
You're right -- I stand corrected. A bit more research shows that some iPods have had weak bass output and other issues but -- again -- no more so than rivals, and most iPods have pretty much flawless output (again, modulo the quality of the encoding and the output device).

More to the point -- making a blanket claim about iPods having always been inferior reveals the writer to be an anti-Apple troll.
This, and the choice of board is perfect if you're trying to get military and VA contracts.
The true reason is probably much simpler than any of those considering war has a profound impact wherever it strikes. WW1&2 were triggered by a long chain of events and itself sparked another chain of ongoing events, affecting great many lives dead or not (including myself). If it all possible, you may have to mate with an ancestor to get your own life back.
How the N.S.A. Cracked the Web
I've been thinking about the next 50 years a lot. Climate change, the state of our oceans, the lack of corporate & human morality to reverse or even slow down the rape and pillaging of our planet.

I don't see any indication that we're not on a path to surefire destruction. Climate change is happening. The sea level is rising. And as this article (and many more) points out- it's a snowball effect. Faster and faster. When will it stop? When will governments actually take notice and do something about it?

I don't think that the earth in 50 years will be able to support nearly as many people as it has now. We're going to see massive migration, famine, and starvation. We'll have to learn to live on our new planet, one that isn't quite as nutritious as this one, has a worse climate, and even less habitable surface area.

I actually have my fingers crossed for something drastic to happen before that. We need a silver bullet. This could be something good like a new energy technology- or it could be something bad like a disease that wipes out 50% of the earth's population. In any case, staying the course is not something I want to do. We're headed right for disaster.
I never thought about it that way, thank you!

It makes me wonder what audio format could be fun to corrupt this way. FLAC, maybe?
Maybe. I'm letting it bake a bit. Generally speaking, radically new stuff from Apple is roundly rejected initially by the digerati. I agree some stuff seems weird but I think a lot of designers don't "get" what they're going for.
I hate explanations like "you can't change history". It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You don't kill Hitler because you didn't kill Hitler.
I'd bet anything the choice of board is due to Theranos looking to get military and/or other government contracts very, very soon.
Shouldn't cp have "-h" (human readable) flag that does exactly that?
My advice is, chill, have fun, you don't need to be an entrepreneur.

I really don't understand why being an entrepreneur is so "sexy" (only to other dudes, being sexist for a moment here) these days, it's lame.

P.S. I know, wrong forum to say that.
NSA can reportedly access secure BlackBerry email, 'tap' other smartphones
But you don't need an open plan to know if people are making progress, right? Or the ability to know what's displaying on their monitor?
So true. Kingston apple store is the same. Not seen anyone actually buy anything in it for ages. It's just full of shop tourists.
Issue is abuse of that system not the fact that it was by a private company operating for profit. Many prisons are run by for profit enterprises as well as hospitals. The way the program is run is the important thing not the type of enterprise handling the program.

Example: Small town with "speed trap" (not a for profit business) gives out excess tickets to raise money.
I grew up in a poor rural county with a smattering of libraries. The local branch was a small single room building with maybe 1500-2000 books, but I practically lived there. On occasion I'd visit the central library and just walk among the aisles looking at all of the amazing books. I'd easily spend 7 or 8 hours there, skipping meals.

After the Internet, I (like many people) kind of stopped going, I was spending less time reading for pleasure and more time studying and web surfing. Libraries really struggled during this time finding a purpose. But there's been a definite resurgence in the last few years and I, and it seems many others, really enjoy spending time in libraries. Quite often, when I'm on a work-from-home day, I'll just spend the day working out of the local library. It's quiet, I can focus, the WiFi is decent for what I need to do.

I definitely take them for granted -- considering them as essential for civilization as indoor plumbing. One of the things that has surprised me as I've traveled around the world is how rare public free libraries are and in a sense how at risk this puts the local public library. "If <country> doesn't need public libraries why should <insert US state>?" is something I've heard from time to time.

My wife grew up in a country without free public libraries. They had specialized "study libraries" you pay a monthly fee to go to, or "book loan" libraries where you check out a stack of comic books in a series and return them when you're done, but again you pay for this service. I don't think she has quite the appreciation I do for the public library system, but on occasion I can get her to go to one for isolated work and she's checked out and read a handful of books.

Interestingly, in her home country the government, in search of global cachet, has started building vast public city libraries, a bit like the New York public Library. But they haven't yet turned this into a full-fledged library system like here in the US. It's still a significant travel expense from many places to get to one of the few free public libraries there.

But imagine the social and economic implications if kids did their after school studies at the local free library branch then at an expensive and often poorly run (and sometimes illegal) "study libraries" that almost every Korean kid goes to.
>is making people like Schumpeter feel under threat

Schumpeter won't care, he's been dead 60+ years now. The Economist has a habit of naming their departments after famous people in the field to make a political statement. Schumpeter was kind of the anti-Marx and anti-Keynes of his era. Read into that what you may about the editorial board of the Economist. Somehow I don't think Fox is in any danger of having their "fair and balanced" motto stolen by the Economist LOL

He had his good points and his bad points as an economist. They're probably not all over his biorhythm / astrology based business cycles, although given how crude understanding was at the time, he did push the field forward at least a little. On the other hand he was kind of the first wise old men of technological innovation and the entrepreneurs so on HN of all places I would expect people to at least pretend to have heard of him. I would expect this crowd would not give a pass on someone who had no idea who Turing or Babbage was, so its kinda a bad scene that I seem to be the only person on HN who knows who Schumpeter was.

As for the specific claim about management being replaced, he was of the opinion that in groups people cannot self govern themselves successfully, and they pretty much need a loosely controlled republic at most, not referendums and democracy. So not knowing much about his views on management, but knowing his views on govt, he'd probably find that tool-mediated management is not going to work any better than mass media-mediated government. But who knows, someone who knows more econ than me, might dredge up an essay by the man on this very specific topic.
The article states that the investor can foreclose on the house 6 months after purchasing the debt. Skip to "Outsiders come to buy liens" in the article for a full summary of why it's such a problem.
Hm, that makes some sense, the book might be old, that's why.
Are you disturbed?
Neat implementation details and 'disruption' aren't what make a startup unique / important. For example:

'InstaToiletPaper is doing really unique things like drone delivery of toilet paper and a huge selection! If these guys succeed, they'd be out disrupting the $20B toilet paper market, or at least forcing the to innovate.
For anyone curious as I was why the /dev/tcp/... redirection works, the Bash manual contains the following:

Bash handles several filenames specially when they are used in
redirections, as described in the following table:

/dev/fd/fd
If fd is a valid integer, file descriptor fd is
duplicated.
/dev/stdin
File descriptor 0 is duplicated.
/dev/stdout
File descriptor 1 is duplicated.
/dev/stderr
File descriptor 2 is duplicated.
/dev/tcp/host/port
If host is a valid hostname or Internet address,
and port is an integer port number or service
name, bash attempts to open a TCP connection to
the corresponding socket.
/dev/udp/host/port
If host is a valid hostname or Internet address,
and port is an integer port number or service
name, bash attempts to open a UDP connection to
the corresponding socket.
I have a dillema. You are, beyond any shadow of doubt, spamming the hell out of the service on HN.

On the other hand, the service does look pretty cool.
Absolutely - I noticed that too. Exceptionally well done from a web publishing standpoint.
He was a great man, one who got his hands dirty.
I've always liked Law 9 'Win through your actions, never through argument'. It's good to remember most arguments won are Pyrrhic victories.

hah yeah thanks. I'd been lurking for years before I realized this was a community to stay with (and build reputation with) on the internets. I always think of how much I'd read it in college (graduated 09), and kick myself for not grabbing my name then. I think it was a year or two of following before I knew what y-combinator was :).
If You Were Replacing Steve Ballmer, What Would You Do?
I recommend Paul Lockhart's Measurement.
Wayland is not under such licences. It uses the MIT license.
It's just a huffman code. When you encounter an undecodable sequence of bits you can skip bits until you find the next symbol (i.e. the stream is decodable starting from current position + X bits), then just guess which symbol it was that you skipped. The symbols are a run length encoding of quantized zigzaged DCT coefficients of (usually) 4:2:0 YCbCr. Wikipedia has details and the spec is readable.
The Sunday Beat is here
Even if the cat at the beginning of a pipe isn't strictly necessary, it still helps readability to have everything flowing from left to right.
"Give me your tired, your poor and we will make them homeless"