skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I strongly suspect a similar market will shortly exist for aged out SSD. Once a SSD dies, simply modify its bios to report its brand new and error free, and sell it at full price on CL / ebay / etc

>I can't say I've ever heard a report of this kind of behavior in old fashioned rotating rust hard drives. Then again the major manufacturers all have some story or another about shipping broken garbage fresh from the factory, they don't need additional crooks to rip off the endusers.

I know that practice is thriving in the spinning rust market. Usually the drives are relabeled as some brand you've never heard of, but sometimes not. I've been burned when I was younger and cheaper.

(note, I've never seen a drive sold as a larger drive, as is common with SD cards... but that's 'cause filling the drive is a very standard minimum test for a hard drive. Generally speaking, these are drives with a bunch of bad sectors that are 're-mapped')

To prevent this sort of thing, standard procedure, when dealing with used drives, is to ask for the serial number. With that info, you can go to the western digital or seagate website and check the warranty status. If it's got a warranty, they probably haven't screwed with the firmware to make a bad drive look good (because why would you, when you can return it to the manufacturer and get an actual good drive.)

If the drive isn't under warranty, don't buy it unless your time is free. If your time is free, don't buy it even then, unless you trust the seller a lot and are willing to spend a lot of effort on burn-in during the period where the seller will accept returns.

Warranty service for both Seagate and western digital is very good. It doesn't matter how you got your hands on the drive; if it's within warranty, you can ship it back and they send you a working refurb (often of a newer model, if you ship back an old drive.) Same is true for initial manufacturing defects. /never/ return a drive to a retailer (unless you are getting a refund, not an exchange) - when you exchange a drive at a retailer, they just give you the drive that the last guy exchanged. Send it to the manufacturer; they actually know how to test the things.
It reduces the perceived latency, thus making aim easier. If you want to make a habit of being rude to strangers in public, you should be very, very careful to have your facts exactly right before you do it.
If I was the NSA I'd force/put some piece of network hardware that mirrored all VPN traffic exiting PIA's endpoints. I would assume that the US, UK and DE endpoints might be monitored without PIA's knowledge (unless they own the data centre and/or upstream provider?).

Then it is fairly simple to start pattern matching the unencrypted traffic exiting your endpoints by matching HTTP headers for each client. Then all they would need is for a VPN user to acces a website that leaks the user's identity and you can back match their previous traffic.

For example, you search for information on "how to make a bomb" via the VPN. Your browser sends the the HTTP headers, Accept-Language set to Accept-Language: ar-YE,en-US,fr-FR,de-DE;q=0.5 and a user agent of Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; rv:21.0.0) Gecko/20121011 Firefox/21.0.0. Those HTTP headers aren't unique, but they vastly narrow the search scope.

Now as that user you visit your Facebook page, and those same matching HTTP headers are passed. Boom, you've just leaked your true identity.
Is there any point in using 'strong' passwords?
> I agree that there should be an easy way to get home from each page. That's why it's become standard to have the logo link to the homepage. The question is whether enough people are aware of that convention to dispense with the additional Home link in the navigation.

How about having the logo tag have a title field that says "Go to home page" as well as changing the cursor to a hand? This will prompt users who hover over the icon without taking up room in the layout.
I'm convinced that a lot of people just don't like music that much, but if they were to go to a concert then classical offers the benefit of appearing more prestigious/sophisticated.
Could you elaborate or link to the relevant paper? Feynman did so many things that looking for the particular thing you have in mind probably is like looking for a needle in a needlestack.
HN London almost always gets front paged. Maybe the account that submits the SFHN meetup is blacklisted for some reason? Probably a question for the admins.
Not sure why you get banned. I always post HNLondon meetup announcements while it is morning in UK and SF is asleep. At that time there is less competition for the front page and it's possible to get there with just a few upvotes. Once SF starts to wake up we inevitably get swept away.
> The two cops are at the door, holding our computers.

That's service. When the German police took away my computer and I turned out not to be guilty I had to get it back from the police station in the next large town. The computer was pretty much destroyed. I don't know what they do in 'computer forensics' but I assume it has something to do with slamming a hammer into the main board and playing soccer with the hard drives ...
> The “Hierofalcon” series also provides enhanced security with support for ARM TrustZone technology and a dedicated cryptographic security co-processor

I'm always going to see stuff like that in a very suspicious way from now on, considering NSA has succeeded in putting backdoors in "encryption hardware".

> The “Adelaar” GPU family will deliver rich 3D graphics, multi-display support and support for DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.2

Sure, support the very latest DirectX, but only 2 versions behind OpenGL with your future new GPU. Way to go, AMD!
See comment to previous.

In short: I still can't see that you answered my simple counter argument. The shorter I write, noting you pretend you don't see it, the more text you write.
It doesn't need to a privacy invasion. If the user could permit an app to use their location data and revoke it at any time, similar to how we permit access to facebook/twitter timelines, they would personally weigh up the risk/benefit and decide accordingly. Admittedly location is probably more private than facebook/twitter information but that just means it needs to managed well. There are many potential benefits of allowing access.
... obvious solution with hindsight.

Still, I wonder if the bug is with Sublime or the font (since other fonts don't seem to have this problem).
it's seriously out of warranty after 13 months? that... seems kinda crazy to me. Even consumer-grade spinning rust has a good 3 year warranty. 5 years for enterprise.

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-7PD512B...

Yup, looks like the samsung pro stuff also has a three year warranty.
Interesting. Seeing more of these startups focus on small niches instead of "we'll find someone to do anything".
Best horror story ever.
Impressive attention to detail. I love how there is a slight difference between the way the second hand ticks, between models. Did you start each one with a photo as scaffolding and draw the SVG on top? Did you use Illustrator or Gimp? Beautiful execution.
I think this actually went pretty well.

- Internet crime is reported

- Police IT team tracks it to specific IP and address

- Contacts owner, she says (incorrectly) the WIFI is secured with only the two people at the address having access

- Regular police is sent to collect all computers at the address

- When the police IT team realizes the computers weren't connected to the scam, they are returned within two weeks.

The only thing that really went a bit bad is the reported attitude of the regular police officers sent to the address.

Of course it would have been better to have sent someone better at both IT and english. If either of those had been different they might never have taken the computers, but the two weeks to clear things up are pretty good as government organizations goes.
Thanks!

I may come back to you personally for some more information at some point .

The biggest challenge in the UK for any kind of alternative construction is still the price of the land. Have you discovered any ways to overcome this challenge?
Did they replace / fix / laugh maniacally / shrug ?
Yes, but the tone throughout the story feels otherwise, don't you think? It was more like an impression of how the text felt than this actual final line acknowledging it.
Maybe the case just recently closed, and he can legally talk about it.

Turns out the wifi had no password.

:)
Open WiFi in this day and age is kind of stupid. I have to think that with BabelFish, or what ever they had in 2008 I could secure a router regardless of the language.
You know how it feels if people dissociate from you in high school becasuse you seem nerdy? It's such a joke that feminists now try to turn that on the head and claim those nerds prevented them from programming for sexist reasons.

No, those nerds did not become the bullies they hated in high school. You are still the bullies you were in high school, you just found new excuses (then: they seem nerdy, now: they are sexist).

See, most male programmers stuck with it despite the bullying. They did not need special encouragement. Excuse me if I feel little enthusiasm for developers who need to be bribed into the profession.
Just a thought but aren't Hackers way better at the whole pushing the boundaries of knowledge thing? I mean Is there any community more collaborative and co-operative and down right generous as ours? Tons of amazing people around the globe make tons of amazing stuff and a lot of them just open source it. By doing so they open the floor for debate, for improvement, for guidance to others to learn from it and to advance upon it.

Not to mention sites like stack-overflow where the entire community helps each other with tons of problems no matter how trivial or how complicated.

The whole world really could learn alot from us
It is also a bit surprising that the police force is using regular police to do technology heavy investigations. Would it really have killed the budget to send along a adviser who know the difference between a computer screen and a hard drive.

Say he had been guilty. He could "given" the police the nice clean computer, while the real evidence sits on a NAS/cloud somewhere, or been encrypted, or have done anything that would confuse people who don't have a clue where digital evidence actually resides. It becomes a designed system to catch innocents, while guilty people can run circles around the system.
"the files are IN the computer?"
Closest thing I can find is an app called Moves: https://apps.moves-app.com/

Logs location in the background as a pedometer, and other apps can access this data (with permission!) to do other things.
... hello wilful misinterpreter? You don't fix a gas leak by buying a new sofa. I'm just saying that the thing being posed as an issue isn't the actual issue.
A good reminder to have offsite backups
I'm not an expert in wifi security, but aren't most securing methods pretty hackable? In 2008, what are the odds that his landlady had a WEP router that could be hacked in 30 seconds?
Yes why cant research be done in start-ups? Well... maybe its the money. Research doesn't exactly bring in money. So wouldn't that be a failed start-up?

But i do like the idea of telling these senior supervisors to f-off and taking away the talent to do some real work for which they get credit
In related news, Oracle still doesn't support HTML5. Back to you, pron.
The cop I asked about what happened to the computer said something along the lines that they got it in that desolate state and they had protocols (records) to prove it.

Later I asked my lawyer what to do about this. He told me it was pretty pointless to try and I should see it a 'cost of doing business for living in this great democracy'.
if a single dll loaded by dropbox hasn't been compiled with /DYNAMICBASE to instruct the OS to allow ASLR, Dropbox will have some reliable memory addresses available to an attacker, often defeating the purpose of using it on anything.

Perhaps they're using an old or unusual linker?
People who read these tracts need to understand that the goal is not to literally prove that God exists (all superficial appearances to the contrary), only to show that the argument can be made and is logically consistent. The same argument can be made with equal justification about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, or an honest politician.

All other issues aside, the Holocaust proves that either (a) God doesn't exist, or (b) he's Spinoza's God, the one who can't be bothered about humans and their problems.
I wouldn't support this because: the campaign project members are anonymous (and thus cannot be held accountable), the project is flexibly funded (meaning they get the money either way), and the key IS NOT A UNIVERSAL HANDCUFF KEY.

There was a presentation on "The Ultimate Handcuff Key" at CarolinaCon 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjfGwRE_DF8&t=29m30s where they demo and give data and measurements for all the handcuffs and keys they could find.
They show a calculated 'universal key', and how to make it. Notably it has a notch down the center of the blade.

Looking at the TIHK, they are very obviously NOT using this design.

You can, however, watch the talk and learn how to make one of these keys yourself with a specific handcuff key, a file, and a dremel tool.

Slides: http://deviating.net/lockpicking/slides/cuff_stuff.ppt
Glad to see unicode love hotel works too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/🏩
Nice. What do you do for connectivity/internet? Water?
Wow, you Godwinned that right out of the gate.
Not only that, they let him dick around on his computer in front of them. A quick "rm -rf" would have made evidence retrieval a fair bit harder, wouldn't it?
Really nice job, Matt. I especially like the color choices. Very fun.
> discussed illegal gender discrimination in tech

Can't we just call it "bullying"? Illegal bullying.

I experienced an awful lot of similar things when at school, in 50-50 gender split English classes and others. Sure, the wording was different, not mentioning my gender, but the effect was the same. I remember a particular group of girls picking on me consistently because I was so quiet and shy. Physical as well as verbal harassment. The bullies will choose anything that is different about a person: be the lone female, and they obviously choose gender.

I really see the problem in all "discrimination" type cases, whether gender, race, sexuality, being: unpleasant people. Cure these people of gender discrimination, and they'll just be bullying the quiet kid instead. Or the poor kid with the cheap clothes.

We need to be teaching kids to simply be nice and to accept everyone else for who they are. But like that's gonna work.
The official documentation is really quite excellent.
Maybe they wanted to break your encryption and took "bullrun" too literally.
No, I just say that the fact that someone clicked accept button on some website is not a proof that I accepted anything. If things worked like that you would not be required to go to the bank to sign a contract and take a loan, one mouse click on bank website would be enough.

I could as well write whatever ToS on my homepage with "accept" and "not accept" link with whatever terms, and then wait for Google bot to "accept" my terms. Do you think Google would be bound by their "acceptance" in the same way.

It's not like I was using my digital signature or whatever, it's just that someone clicked somewhere.

The burden of proof here is on the "vendor" or software provider. They need to prove that I accepted their terms, not the other way round. That's why many free services require credit card, copy of the ID and physical signature as a proof of identity. The fact that Google decided that this might be too expensive for them to enforce, and that is cheaper to just not do it is their choice.
I was thinking something along the same lines, I think it's illegal to comment on ongoing investigations. The case might have been dormantly open until recently, when it was closed because of a lack of new information.
Pardon me, but shouldn't it be compulsory that if the police know they're dealing with a foreign national they speak to him with an interlocutor of his preference? I mean - why should the onus be on the accused to blurt out his rights and then do the entire merry-go-round. I'm sure it won't be that difficult to arrange for 1 English (global business language) interlocutor in Copenhagen. The onus should be on the police to allow an opportunity for explanation.
Ah, the downfall of HN personified.
Great work, kudos!
Could you please show an example on the site that's not CSS (or at least it's a different one)?

In that image there are a lot of important glyphs that cannot be seen, for example:
()[]/*|!

I haven't tried out the font, so I can't give much feedback on it, but it seems nice so far (although the '1' looks a little bit weird. I get why, but it still feels off to me)
Daft Punk's Get Lucky in 16-bit
Denmark isn't a big country so they might not have had any specialized police available for such a thing in this particular location. Maybe the officers in question just overstepped on their authority, thinking "How hard can it be?"
Which are the Basic Technologies & Resources for Augmenting #Joomla Development?
I was questioned by police a year ago. I hadn't done anything and was at the police station voluntarily but after an hour I exercised my right to leave - the 2 officers knew absolutely nothing about the crimes they were meant to be investigating and everything I said was either not understood or they believed that what I was saying wasn't "how it worked".

Their ignorance would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that some people have been arrested and convicted of crimes for which they were innocent of because of it.
Yeah, I'd be more in the "what the hell, let's buy one of these boxes because it's interesting tech" camp than the "falsify student loans" interest category.
> I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates.

Why oh why did they not bring it up with the school?
WPA is the default for most routers and can be considered "secure" for the purposes of a home network.
It depends on what exactly are the problems you are facing with the team. It could either be that this startup isn't a good fit for you, or it could be that you aren't suited for working in startups.
Ask HN: Accelerator programs that currently accept applications?
Y Combinator is accepting applications for its Winter 2014 funding cycle. What are some other accelerators that are currently (or soon) accepting applications for their next cycle?
> Maybe one day science and philosophy will meld to the point where this might be possible in a peer reviewed in the Nature journal kind-of possible way ...

No, that's not possible, because of two essential properties of science that distinguish it from philosophy -- empirical evidence, and falsifability. The first (empirical evidence) means science is steered by evidence drawn from everyday reality in practical experiments or observations. The second (falsifiability) means it must be possible to test scientific ideas against reality, and those ideas that fail the test must be discarded.

These properties of science mean that science and philosophy will never merge.

> God cannot be addressed by the current scientific method.

And the "current scientific method" is how science is defined. The only way to get around that definition is to abandon science.
And now I should apologize, because I realized I was thinking only of the student body when we did have some male teachers. So although I would be shocked to learn of any incidents, it is not as impossible as I said.
I played trumpet for years as a kid. I was terrible at it, and eventually gave it up.

But I did get something interesting out of it - I know how hard it is to play a trumpet well, and when someone does play it well, I enjoy listening to it very much.

When I point out fine trumpet playing to others who have no experience with the trumpet, they just shrug their shoulders.

But I still derive obvious pleasure from hearing it, clearly more so than others. I think it is real pleasure, not just snobbery.
Guide to cryptographic hashes for content-based addressing (2007)
Good reading about hashes with spot-on examples of widely used open-source software.
Videos of talks from previous events are online at http://vimeo.com/hnlondon
I Didn’t Love My Wife When We Got Married
Actually, with Java EE7, they do.

http://jaxenter.com/java-ee-7-officially-launches-bringing-h...
http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/7/tutorial/doc/jsf-facelets009...
Other companies are not the point here though. Microsoft is and they have been consistent in their use for the past two decades or more so why the sudden change?
ray casting or ray marching?

I ask as I've done a bit of fractal rendering using distance-estimators before.
Ask HN: Cross-platform game framework for Android, iOS?
I'm looking to write a 2D puzzle game. Probably nothing more complicated than a puzzle game like http://weplaydots.com/ . Any recommendations on frameworks/platforms? MonoGame? LibGDX?

If it matters, I've written Android apps before, but more of the social networking kind of app rather than a game.

Thanks.
I was expecting another minecraft clone but it looks awesome.
Forget maps, this would be the ultimate Dwarf Fortress visualization engine!
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358970 for my previous comment about why I chose VB (I'm a teacher and was a developer)

The questions/problems that the exam board sets (considering the number of hours the students get to solve them in) are really suited to VB, or another Visual based language. What I'm trying to say is that the language chosen also has to fit the requirements of the exam board, as the students, school and myself are all judged by our results (GCSE grade etc).

Edited: changed wording for clarity
PSA: Don't count on this to be secure. Not just because Koding can obviously monitor everything you do, but because the implementation appears to rely on some more or less flimsy kernel container isolation (user namespaces etc). This means hackers can break out of one instance of this and enter others. So please, don't use this as a bouncing point to SSH to other servers or for anything else that might be even a little sensitive.

Also, it's apparently unpatched since May:

$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 3.9.0-0-generic (root@salt-master.in.koding.com) (gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) ) #4userns5 SMP Mon May 13 06:15:34 PDT 2013
AFAIK there are no such codes in Kansas, at least according to Lessman:

http://www.surfaceandsurfacephotography.com/photoblog/surfac...

So you're basically free to build your own house (for better or worse).
> Remember that some of the greatest scientists and mathematicians lived when all of it was just philosophy.

Not really. Galileo and Newton turned philosophy into science by doing experiments, and scientists never looked back. Science differs from philosophy by being steered -- defined -- by empirical evidence, and by falsifiability, the idea that any idea must be testable against reality and must be discarded if the test fails.

That's certainly not philosophy.

> It's not saying "can we prove it" it's saying "let's think about creative ways to prove it if we can get a little lax about the scientific method."

There's no middle ground such as you're suggesting here. There's no overlap between science and philosophy. They are distinct ways of processing ideas. One of them must be compared to reality at every turn.
Yes, but those ideas aren't comparable -- proof or disproof of one doesn't influence the other. They're orthogonal ideas.