skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The American dream of meritocracy and working your way up has been a lie from day one. In a pyramidal social structure, even if rising is possible, it's probabilistically unlikely. You should predict that your "merit" is in the normal range and you will remain in the largest class, subsistence workers. To convince people that "anyone can make it" implies "everyone can make it" has been a triumph of political bullshit, and the sooner it unravels the better.
Lekkere en gezonde recepten met witloof
The obvious take away is that good looking people are actually average looking (as opposed to median looking). The first comment on that blog is from the creator of the images and he explains some of the issues with the collection.
Am I only one who finds this stuff disturbing and sexist? Author starts with some 'facts' and than just goes on and on with some speculations.
Monads and Gonads by Douglas Crockford
[actual real code story example]

I wrote two approaches to the same problem.

The first approach uses simple python data structures and greedy evaluation. It runs under CPython in 0.15 seconds. Running under pypy takes 1.2 seconds. pypy is 8x slower.

The second approach (using the same data) builds a big graph and visits nodes v^3 times. Running under CPython takes 4.5 seconds. Running under pypy takes 1.6 seconds. pypy is almost 3x faster.

So... that's why. "It depends." But—it's great we have two implementations of one language where one jits repetitive operations and the other evaluates straight-through code faster.
YouTube is still the king of Internet music. I can find full length new releases of relatively unknown music on YouTube that I can't find anywhere else. The downsides of YouTube are quality control, and that as a playlist application it kind of sucks (compared to GrooveShark).
> it's not a legal definition, but it is a marketplace definition:

> if I give you permission that I did not realise or understand, it's not really permission.

Yes, that's true, but it's also true in a legal sense. At least in the U.S., if you enter into a contract that includes conditions that no reasonable person would agree to, those are called "unconscionable" conditions, they have no force, and therefore the contract has no force.

http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-is-an-unc...

Quote: "What is an Unconscionable Contract? An unconscionable contract is one that is so one-sided that it is unfair to one party and therefore unenforceable under law. It is a type of contract that leaves one party with no real, meaningful choice, usually due to major differences in bargaining power between the parties."
Funny that China is the only country where they specify the ethnic group, even though many other countries in that list have sizable ethnic minorities.
In some ways that's your job :) If I was managing you and the situations that you describe came up I'd probably be saying things like "That's why we have antocv - he's normally right, and what do we know anyway". Possibly I'd get "We should boot him and hire a monkey", and if that is the rational thing to do I'd be thinking, "you know what, I need to let antocv know that he is wasting his talents here"

Also I would start looking for a new gig myself...

But it's a different context and situation to the one above. If I came to you as a software engineer and said; "Antocv, our new customer is insisting that we add an extra step in our QA to get our contract signed off" I would expect you to either say "Sure, no problem" or "My friend, it sounds easy, but the thing is that doing it will sink us. Because..." if you said "No" and left it at that I'd conclude this is a guy who I can't work with.

The thing is the reasonableness of the behaviour - if I come to you with a request that you can fulfil reasonably and you are paid to do it, you should do it, or find a way to let me know that I do not really want you to do it in the first place. The "because" is the critical thing; random acts of rebellion are not helpful.

But be clear; nor are dickheads from HR/Accts/Sales appearing and announcing that they know how to do the jobs of skilled professionals by remote control. That's every bit as unacceptable as uncooperative techies, and if you are in an environment where that washes it's definitely for the short term only. It just means that money is being wasted and no one knows what to do.

Either leave now, or put up with it until they go bust; there is no third way.
TL;DR of the critique: These images are a blend of many "real" images, and these real images may have been sampled in a way that doesn't represent the country's real distribution of women.
First official release of Go based Exercism Client
Another cool BitCoin video which is not very technical, but has impressive visuals:

http://vimeo.com/63502573
Yeah; I recently had a friend "accept [my] invitation" to join LinkedIn.

Except I have never sent any LinkedIn invitations ever, nor connected LinkedIn to my GMail account.

Not only is LinkedIn forging e-mails and deep-mining connections, they're moronic enough to treat those forged e-mails as organic.

Incompetence vs. malice… why choose?
For comparison, /r/sloths has 44k, /r/mildlyinfuriating has 80k, /r/creepypms has 87k and /r/animalsbeingjerks has 100k.
You "get" permission by tricking users. I am very web-savvy and almost fell for your tricks, so I hope you have to pay at least a $billion as a message.

(That and clicking on ads on Google and other SE, they make it extremely hard to distinguish between ads and content. If we had an FTC that stuff would end after threats of lawsuits and billion dollar fines.)
Kind of a "well duh" post. All of the image scan finger print readers are easy to game.

Even the ones that use capacitance can be beaten with a rubber glove and a copy of the finger print, printed on the latex. (the best is actually an Vinyl condom that doesn't come pre-lubed, the ink sticks better and the vinyl is less of an insulator)
That's not a 'critique', rather it is uninformed prejudice.

The concept that averaging faces produces attractiveness has been well studied: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness

The jezebel author asserts that this must be the result of selection bias while ignoring the research, thus revealing their own prejudice.
There's a good rebuttal to the critique in the comments of that story:

--- 8< ---

There is no ethnic cleansing. Some site on the net stole these from me, by not sourcing them to me. I created all of these and more (ones for men) right here: [pmsol3.wordpress.com]

My account on FaceResearch.org is Rasfarengi. I have e-mailed the editor about this already. The "South Africa" composite on here is labeled wrong, because who ever took it from my site did not label it correctly. It is actually the Argentina composite. The South African composite I did only uses Khoi-San and South Bantu populations found in South Africa, not whites or colourds.

I am African American, so there is no racism here. I didn't make specific composites of many African nationalities because it is just too difficult. My process requires front facing photos with limited smiles. I have to look through nearly 2,000 photos online to find good pictures of Italians. Let alone a Fin. In Africa it is just too hard outside of Nigerians and South Africa, because there are less pictures on the net, because those people don't have good internet access or access to digital cameras the way East Asians and Europeans do.

It is even hard to find pictures of Latin Americans of specific nationalities outside the larger nations.

I did one of "West Africans" specifically to see if I can tell how much Euro and Native American admixture changed the African American population, whose ancestors mostly originated from the areas between Senegal and Angola (with a very very small % from Mozambique) I tried to use the same % that came to America from specific regions, like the Blight of Biafa, during the slave trade. I think you can see a difference. I did do a separate South African and Ethiopian one. Doing specific tribes is too difficult.
You appear to be encrypting "Onions" with CBC with a static IV, using the hash of a string as the key, and with no integrity. You can't use a static IV. You can't encrypt without providing for authenticity. How do you know you don't have a padding oracle? The code you have right now will, from what I can tell, behave differently if an attacker modifies the ciphertext.

Where did the crypto design for this system come from?

Why are you hand-rolling your own crypto? Why didn't you use something like Nacl instead, which was already carefully designed to make crypto safe for developers that haven't studied the topic?
http://pastebin.com/ktukPBHE

I reformatted it so it would justify right like the original but for some reason Pastebin likes to reflow things.

It turns out the single-character tokens 'u' and 'w' were not being used so repurposing them for the #defines leads to a saving of 46 characters at the cost of an extra line. There are a few other recurring tokens but you hit a point of diminishing return.

One should not, however, lose sight of what an awesomely clever hack the whole thing is. Reminds me of some of the text-flow layouts in old illuminated manuscripts, or the more modern variations here (like the one with the light-bulb): http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/11/award-winning-new...
Well - Denmark. Places like Norway/Sweden/Switz/DK are gonna be comparable to the SF peninsula/Marin/Westchester, in terms of opportunities/culture/mentality.
The "How to fake fingerprints" link [1], is one of the scariest things I have seen, given how simple it is, and how much we reply on fingerprints for linking people to crimes.

BTW, for anyone who does not know about Chaos Computer Club (CCC) [2], they run a massive conference in EU. You can look at some of their talks @ http://media.ccc.de/

[1] http://dasalte.ccc.de/biometrie/fingerabdruck_kopieren?langu...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club
Hey – this is what I've been working on over the last few months, which is really very similar:

http://keepupdated.co

Had the idea few years ago and eventually moved it into action. Funny that we're doing it at the same time!
I look forward to people doing weird interesting things with this!

my first thought was: do they have a reverse add-on as well? And then: I would love to see the output of various types of music :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_Financial_Crisis
I'm not; I'm a useless academic. :) Many of the students in my program start small game companies, though (I teach in a game masters program), so I follow that scene a bit.

A few examples that have come out of the program here: http://conquistadorthegame.com/ http://machineers.tumblr.com/ http://www.knapnokgames.com/ http://gutefabrik.com/ http://duckandcovergames.com/ http://www.seriousgames.net/

Most of the small tech companies I know are pretty low-key, though. Besides the game company route, another common one is a small team of 1-3 people making a living doing iPhone app development, that kind of thing. Some congregate around hackerspaces like: https://labitat.dk/

Not as much of the typical 'startup' route per se, although there have been a few (Unity3d and Bitbucket come to mind). There's also Copenhagen Suborbitals, which isn't for-profit, but is probably the most widely recognized organization to come out of the Copenhagen hacker/maker scene.
iOS security is trivial to break if you have physical access to the device. TouchID (and passcodes) should be considered little more than a convenience, not a serious security measure.
If you want to explain why surveillance is creepy, show your mother or boss this video and ask how they'd feel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz8PdALdQDI

To give some background, it's a man who simply walks up to people and starts taking video. It's amazing how many people get annoyed with it.

I think this runs close to performance art, and is the best demonstration possible, because it's so easy to empathise with those under scrutiny.
Better formatted version here:

http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
The software uses a default face, if you go to http://faceresearch.org/demos/average

You can see that even picking to very lopsided in the same way face, like Right eye higher than left, and mouth off center, results in a face that looks good when averaged.

The method they are using is clearly flawed.
The dark side of javascript (Chrome only)
Nice project. Considering a stream of tweets how can you find the beginning and the end of a sentence/message?
"Biometrics is fundamentally a technology designed for oppression and control, not for securing everyday device access."

Yes
These findings would have been more surprising if the fingerprints were taken from the phone itself!
Shameless plug for where my friends work, but there are consulting companies like http://bestbrains.dk/

Definitely a small tech company but larger than what was mentioned.
Expected. Still much, much better security than no code at all. I will use it (with full knowledge of its downsides and tradeoffs) and it would behoove the CCC to not portray security as a binary state. (Just as much as it would behoove Apple to be truthful in their marketing.)

Don't use it if thieves would consider going through all the effort of faking out the scanner. That's what I take from this no doubt valuable and important work from the CCC.

(I assume that iPhone tracking and activation lock cannot be disabled with the fingerprint, so stolen phones will still be easily remotely wiped and bricked, with fingerprint or without. Thieves will have to be crafty and quick if the want to pull this off.)
The following gives you a listing of UK CS PhD Projects:

http://www.findaphd.com/search/phd.aspx?DID=8&Location=UK&TI...

I suspect there are more projects than this. The way it works is you like a particular lab, you contact their PI, agree on a topic, and work on it for 3-4 years. In Cambridge (where I work), the university enrols all research students in a "Research Skills" course/workshop, but that is it.

If they believe you are not up to snuff, you might be asked to complete an MPhil/MRes course first which does have a taught component. Apparently, if you fail this part, and in some circles, you will be seen as a PhD failure. Apparently.
>On the numbers you crunched, which western countries "with strict gun control" did have a higher murder rate than the U.S.?

Mexico, most of Central America, most of South America, most of the Caribbean, some of Oceania.

What is interesting is that Washington State, Montana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine all have very similar homicide rates to their Canadian neighbors.
Nice , The mythbusters did this in their fingerprinter scanner episode ,
although they didn't have the iPhone5s but I am sure the same principle/technique would work.
What happens is that when you click on a "This person wants to connect with you..." link in an email LinkedIn's website connects you automatically. BUT they throw up a page that looks a HELL OF A LOT like a "you're not logged in yet page" that has a password form on it which SEEMINGLY prompts you to login to their site.

What it's actually doing is prompting you to give them your email password so that they can login and scrape contacts. I know this because I've nearly fallen for it myself in the last couple of months. Thankfully I have some internet savvy. The folks who are suing probably saw "please enter a password" and entered one and just happened to use the same password for LinkedIn as their email; LinkedIn thus "hacked" their emails.

I think LinkedIn should have to face some heat for this for deceiving people, though I don't believe what they're doing is technically hacking.
Wasn't Gruber getting awfully excited about how amazing and revolutionary Apple's finger print sensor was?

Will he be claim chowdering?
A good history of the start of FoxPro: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/ftale.htm

I still end up using VFP occasionally to port our older clients to our newer software.

Python/SQLite is almost as productive, you can do some sweet stuff with a few lines of code. Not as REPL, though. Throw in some pandas, IPython and some SQLAlchemy and your are rocking.
PC-file FTW. I created a stock tracking app for our electronics R&D department with it. It was one of the original shareware apps. Must have been about 1985.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-File
> A lot of comparisons are being drawn, for example, between the 1920s and today. While the income distribution curves look startlingly similar, the concentration of wealth is very different. Most of today's 1%+ are "working rich," i.e., they receive the bulk of their income from salaries and bonuses -- not from ownership or direction of capital.

This is something that I don't know if so many people completely understand. For instance, my wife and I combined put us well in the top 1%[1] of the US based on our salaries, but there is no way we are "rich". And b/c we are trying to be smart with our money, we don't live like most would expect from our combined salaries. The issue, as I see it, is that our salaries are obviously not guaranteed.

Now, I fully recognize I'm in a privilege situation regardless, but we're not living a jetset lifestyle by any means. Sure, we are technically in the top 1%, but it isn't the lifestyle most people would envision when they think "top 1%". Though don't get me wrong, as I said, I DO recognize we are privileged and am not complaining, just saying we aren't living like those robber barons of old.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States
This is why it's in Beta. Thanks for pointing that out to me - I'm gonna' roll that in right now (although everyone will lose their data as it stands, this is good).

I'm imagining this is a good crypto library for its Ruby implementation: https://github.com/cryptosphere/rbnacl
What did he claim?
An interesting comment on the YouTube video: Not cleaning your iPhone is likely to leave fingerprint evidence/marks directly on the device's housing that could be faked.
Godaddy. Promo code cjcRMN199. Comes out to $2.17 after ICANN fees.
> upward mobility has been regressing in the US for a while now

Do you have a source for this?

> If you are born in the bottom fifth, your odds of making it out of there are roughly fifty/fifty.

Are you sure? In a longitudinal study of US income earners during a 20 year period [1], a majority of people who started in the poorest quintile cracked the richest quintile at some point. The degree of opportunity this points to is really quite astonishing if you think about it.

This study is a little dated now (1990s). I can't imagine it's changed dramatically, but I'd love to see a new longitudinal study that went up to the present.

[1] Google Books, "Basic Economics" by Sowell: http://bit.ly/grnsDF
I'd be interested on peoples' opinions, is this more or less secure than a 4-digit passcode?

From a real security perspective, users should have alphanumeric password, as far as I know, businesses often enforce this.

Obviously a 4-digit code is easy to brute-force on a computer, but it requires far more technical knowledge to do so - booting custom firmware, using some script to brute force, etc, and if the attacker doesn't have the skills, they are limited to 10 tries, maybe more after waiting a few minutes or an hour.

It seems to me that, excluding users leaving smudges on their screen and seeing the passcode that way, a fingerprint is even easier to break than a 4-digit passcode.
How well do you see color?
Another clown(writer) with an agenda.
I got a 3, with 0 being perfect. I'm a bit disappointed in myself I couldn't manage a perfect score. That said it is incredibly dull and frustrating at the end.
Yeah, I'd like to hear your "course correction" I can guess.
Frontline had an excellent piece on the (lack of) reliability behind most of crime forensics. Fingerprints in particular are mentioned as being very unreliable and unscientific. The only scientifically rigorous piece of "CSI" is DNA matching.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/real-csi/
For this to be secure (one-time-pad) you can't reuse the corpus. That's a big enough pain that I doubt people will actually do it. Which means you can start decoding their tweets once you collect enough.
Interesting to see backup mentioned. I've used it in the past, but kind of forgot about it. It's super useful. The documentation tells you to not put it into Gemfile, but it seems like you really should. Do you?
I have accidentally seen basically all of my friends' passcodes as they type it in at bars etc. I could get into their phones easily. TouchID is more secure than that simply because someone needs to take a 2400dpi image of the person's finger to do it.

Locks (when physical access to a device is available) are to keep honest people honest. Most security experts that I know agree that if an intruder has physical access to a device, it can be considered compromised because it is just a matter of time.
Way prettier than my experience.
Lately, their message usually seems to be that some new product they've decided to pick on (say, an iOS device, or a new version of Windows, or what-have-you) is evil and will enslave your children, or something. I know their message is supposed to be about free software, but it tends to get lost under the ranting and smear campaigns.
If we've learned anything over the past few months, it is that security is an illusion when it comes to Google, Apple and Facebook.

The fingerprint scanner is not intended to protect your personal data from being accessed by nefarious cyber-spooks or crackers. The $5 dollar wrench technique is fairly effective in bypassing such security anyway.

The fingerprint scanner is there so that when your phone is nicked by a mugger, they can't reset to factory defaults and sell it on eBay. If some knife wielding thug that robs me of my phone has the intellectual capability of lifting my fingerprints off the case and then using them to bypass the security, he still has to know my AppleID password before he can remove the 'Find my Phone' feature.

Give Apple a break. This is just another layer of security. It's _not_ the panacea to all our security woes, and they have never claimed it was.
I wonder what mp3 compression would do to your objects :)
I read "A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius", a book partly about the death of his parents, after my mom died as a recommendation--it was fairly insufferable to say the least. I couldn't empathize with it at all. I'm very interested in social commentary on tech and social, especially given my trade, but I doubt it will be anything but hype. The Amazon comments are pretty funny.
They're probably more worried about bad press than the payout for the case. The class action lawyers only care about their own fees. They'll probably get a settlement that involves giving some money to some privacy charity rewarding the lawyers and not actually doing anything to directly benefit the members of the class action.
Of course they have broken it, I had no doubt it would be broken like any other fingerprint security system.

The issue here is that it's ok, it doesn't really matter. It is all about the amount of security you need. Does a normal user need unbreakable security? No. The security provided with this method is more than ok, it is kinda secure and it's faster (imho) than writing your passcode. After all your "enemies" here are nosy friends or similar...

If you need "unbreakable" security then you shouldn't use iphone or android, or you should use an specific secure storage application (cyphered content, hard to guess pass or whatever). If you need "unbreakable" security you better consider hiring a security consultant.

So, the question here is, are the security systems in mobile devices more than fine for most normal users? I guess so...
The problem is that Apple made a big deal in the announcement about how it was so much more secure than previous implementations, how it used sub-dermal imaging and stuff like that. It appeared from what they were saying, that this would be considerably harder to fake.