skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the bitcoin pseudo-anonymity is a plus, but i feel the real value in this new round of ransomware is that the unlocking actually works. Its possible for the ransomware app to verify payment and unlock itself, with no contact or control from the ransomware author, greatly reducing the author's risk. Actually, its easier for the victim too - rather than wiring funds to some bank account in far off lands, a quick anonymous digital payment instead. Im speculating but its possible for the app to query blockchain.info for a deposit for a given address, or (less likely) for the app to download the blockchain itself, and then unlock after a certain balance. If there is high confidence that the data will actually get unlocked, that swings the balance of fight the app or pay the app towards the pay the app side. The author sits back and waits for those wallets to fill up.
Five Great Gems To Use During Rails Development
The story was no doubt based on earlier real-life examples of "Ransomware" like this one: http://www.infoworld.com/t/malware/ransomware-returns-if-you...
I don't understand systems like this -- much like most of what's been in stores since 2011. It's got a nice, high resolution screen, and the absolute slowest integrated graphics they can match with it. An HD 4400 can barely keep up with its own panel and a small external monitor let alone run a 5-year-old game on it.

For just a little more money they could've put at least an HD 5100 part in it. While the TDP would be higher, the higher-TDP Haswell parts still idle at very low wattages, so when you're not using the extra power they get similar battery life, but it's there when you want it.

The performance difference between the 4400 and 5100 is huge. It's on par with an older discrete Radeon/GeForce chip.
Point 1. Yes, low margin/cash-generative businesses exist, like grocery stores and well, pretty much all of hardline (and much softline) retail. AMZN has not yet generated much profit or much distributable cash flow, relative to their revenue scale (and normalizing their expense base, for things like leases and capitalized software).

My point regarding Walmart was that, even with many of the historical expenses (like trucks) that they no longer bear, they were still more profitable throughout their history than Amazon has ever been. Why?

Point 2. I don't think we disagree, as I'm referring to the long term, not the short term. In most circumstances, a business can't be both unprofitable and cash-flow positive indefinitely, unless there is something very strange happening with the accounting (like unusual tax losses a la GE Capital).

Profits and free cash flow can and do diverge for short periods in the company's lifecycle, but they ultimately must converge in terms of sign/direction.
> This is an interesting problem: should you err on the side of creating new species every time you find a bone fragment or should you assume it is more of the same?

That is an extant fight in taxonomy, and one which has been going on for more than a century and a half: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters

> splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera … and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. … Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat.
From the Reddit article linked above [1]:

"Backup solutions like Carbonite are no good against this as they will commit the encrypted files to the cloud."

You need "cold" backups to get around this without paying.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1mizfx/proper_care...
I didn't hate Studio 60 as much as others but, yeah, it should have been better.

>As great a show as 30 Rock became, it wasn't all that great from the get go. A lot of the magic happened in production, with the hiring of a fantastic writing staff and the time to let the whole thing gel and find audience fit.

I'm generally not very receptive to arguments along the lines of "OK, this show isn't great now but you owe it to the universe to give it six months" but I also don't really disagree. I confess to also liking 30 Rock but never quite putting it in the must see bucket. (In all fairness, I've really sort of gotten away from sitcoms period.) Certainly, I imagine we'd all like to see good shows get the opportunity to work out kinks rather than putting all the burden on one pilot.

I'm curious. Are there good examples of a really "knock them dead" pilot that didn't translate into a halfway decent show. Smith might be one possible candidate although I liked the show as a whole more than people in general apparently did.

[EDIT] Related question. For a relatively big budget show, how expensive is making a pilot relative to non-pilot development costs?
until it encrypts the workspace and that gets synced. Although, I suppose you might have a previous revision as I know dropbox supports versioning for some (all?) kinds of files.
OS X defaults to only running applications that have been signed with a valid developer ID. It’s not difficult to get such an ID, but Apple can also blacklist them, which would prevent the malware from running once Apple notices it. So I think the Mac has a good defense against this kind of attack.
The ‘sharing economy’ undermines workers’ rights
Who are the creators? Are the FBI going to take them to federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison?
Where did this article mention climate change?

If you agree with every fact in the article, why would you look for a hidden agenda?

Your comment makes you seem a bit paranoid.
I love this quotes on splitters v lumpers:

> splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera … and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. … Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat.
Shouldn't you be able to do this with a link in the footer of their emails? If I recall correctly, it's US law that companies (and websites in general) have to put unsubscribe links in their emails.
Science Now, the news service affiliated with the journal Science, has a write-up on this report,

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2013/10/sleep-ulti...

and that links to the abstract

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373

of the published study itself.
For torrent searching alone, torrentz.eu or bitsnoop. For a community, kickasstorrents.
Video/Slides: Case Study – IPv6 and Home Automation
I'm assuming that Carbonite doesn't have a Dropbox-like version retention system? Or does this virus get around that?
Surprisingly enough, it is not. Looks like even Microsoft is now making apps for iOS and Android before making them for Windows Phone...
I can't imagine you'd come across many folks with the experience you described looking for a sales role at 4 person startup. If a salesperson was employee #4 at a startup, and that startup was successful, I would imagine he or she would pursue a Senior Sales / VP of Sales role at a more established startup vs. a lateral move.
> There are, however, active threats against Fort Knox -- we know people want to rob it

Fort Knox seems like a bad example of necessary security. How far would you get with a convoy of trucks, each carrying some tons of gold? Does that gold need more security than a nuclear weapon?

Fort Knox seems more like an example of security theater, designed to impress people with the idea that a pile of gold matters a whit compared to large modern nation's budget.
> For me, many of the variables in the study - how well I slept, my mood, my willingness to work - vary considerably day to day anyway.

Certainly. That's why it took closer to 6 months rather than 6 days. The more variation, the more data you need.

> Ultimately, the study found no difference. Given that we know that LSD is very active at the right doses, the only thing that you can really take away from this is that the dose wasn't high enough.

No. What you can take away from this is 'while no one doubts that at 100μg and higher one gets dramatic psychedelic effects, the suggestions that at tiny doses like 10μg there are non-psychedelic genericly positive effects, may not be true'. Don't confuse your hypotheses here.
They do, when a user marks an email as spam gmail pings the sender back and notifies them.

I imagine this is most useful for the bulk email sending services.
TBH I've always thought that variations in skulls unearthed and labelled as different genus seemed not to be that varied next to the variation in modern people. About a year ago I tried to unearth a visual comparison that would show the variation of "modern" skulls so it could be compared - anyone know of such a work?

It's the same mistake made with the dinosaurs (see eg http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaur...) assuming that one can tell how an animal grew by analogy and that heterogeneity necessarily shows speciation.

Is this really the first time that differently formed skulls have been found together in an archaeological dig. That's surprising isn't it?

Equally well, just because 5 skulls were found together why does one then have to declare them all to be H.Erectus, presumably there are other methods of categorisation relied on to establish that point?
As an experimental physicist, I want to point out that negative results do get published -- for example, much of the experimental work on gravity amounts to the showing of no measurable difference from theoretical expectation, to a high degree of accuracy [1] -- but writing the papers for them is much harder than writing up positive results. The reason is simple: you have to convincingly show that your failure to show a result is not just due to your mistakes.

Here is an analogy to a trivial situation. Which is more convincing?

Positive result: By following the steps in the documentation, I installed MS Word on my computer. Therefore, MS Word can be installed on my computer.

Negative result: I followed the steps in the documentation, but MS Word still doesn't work on my computer. Therefore, MS Word cannot be installed on my computer.

If you're like me, you barely pause after reading the positive result, but the negative one brings to mind piles of questions: did you have the right version for your OS? Do you have enough disk space? Does your computer work properly in other respects? A really tricky problem could take ages to figure out. At some point it's probably going to seem wiser just to abandon the problem, and get a different computer or a different program.

So, as a scientist, when you're faced with a negative result, you know you have a battle ahead of you. If you don't think anyone will care very much about your result, moving on to the next project may seem to be the right choice. It's a tough situation, and I sympathize with anyone facing it. And is it the right choice for science as a whole? Sometimes it isn't, but sometimes it is.

[1] For one such example, check out the Eotvos experiment and its many descendants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eötvös_experiment
What features does VS2012 have for .NET (IDE features, not platform features) that don't have direct analogues in IDEA?

For C++, I find VS rather lacking compared to Xcode (though that's a combination of the compiler being dumb and IntelliSense being poor).
Did anybody notice the zsync download links, next to the Torrent links?

Anybody have experience with zsync downloads? Is it supposed to update a previous 13.10 Beta ISO, or any previous ISO, e.g. the 13.04 release?

http://zsync.moria.org.uk/

Also, I wonder why they don't use magnet links instead of torrent files.
I'd argue that Babylon 5 retained many of its flaws throughout its run even if, for me, the good aspects outweighed the bad. That said, the first part of its run was pretty weak as was TNG's. I doubt I'd have made it through as a non-genre casual viewer.
Your post seems like troll-bait but I'll bite...

As a broad general statement, that's wrong. Let's say that your website is a combination of content (mostly static text and graphics) and web "apps" (forms, dashboards, interactive tools, etc). In most cases, your content can be device-neutral or (even better) mobile-first design. No separate mobile version needed.

However, it is likely your "apps" will suck when squeezed down to mobile size. The layout will be terrible and the interactions may be so broken as to be unusable. They'll work about as well as a king-sized bed and full-sized bathtub in a pleasure boat.

Better advice would be: Use bootstrap or some mobile-ready layout for your site's content and review your web apps on a case-by-case basis. Then, you very well might want to pay the fine young gentlemen or ladies who know mobile user-experience to rebuild some of those.
Maybe they have groups making the apps separately and they're just releasing them as they're finished.
Serious attempts to colonize space might be a tremendous complication here. There might arise a scenario where economics favoring the exportation of outdated fabrication equipment combined with the relative ease of constructing huge industrial facilities that are entirely in vacuum would result in a proliferation of low-power devices in the off-Earth economy.
> free rider problems, collective action problems, problems involving positive and negative externalities, problems involving information asymmetries, etc.

The usual statist objections to pure market action are total myths, not to mention weak and tangential objections. I'd love to argue the market with a hardline Marxist because at least they take a true thrust at market action rather than just nibbling.

>free rider, externalities

How is it a problem to anyone that a persons actions benefit
others without deriving some monetary value for the benefit? No one is coerced, no rights violated. This is the only standard for judging these matters. No person should be forced to pay for a benefit for a transaction they did not agree to. Collective defense, for example, does not suffer because some people don't pay to play --- forcing equal patronage only serves to undermine the entire relationship between buyer and seller. More: http://mises.org/daily/2769

>collective action

Kickstarter.

>Information assymetries

Information is a value that is open on the market, as all values are. Not sure if the product your buying is safe? Buy insurance for it. Or, take the time to do your research and make comparisons. That time spent has a value. Decide which you are willing to give up: that time, or the cost of the insurance. Value is a dynamic and multifaceted concept. http://mises.org/daily/1135
Same, I use clippers, but go #3 - #8. Here, I photoshopped a quick image.

http://i.imgur.com/tXbKNtF.jpg (red and green wrap around the head, blue is just the top section)

Red, I use #3. Green, I use #5. Blue, I do #8 at the front, #7 towards the back. Then, after that, I use the inbetween numbers. So I use a #4, and smooth out the transition from red to green. Then I use a #6, and smooth out from green to blue.

To finish, thinning sheers. They're basically magic. I have thick hair, so I just clip all over the place at different lengths, and it blends everything together nicely.

The neckline is difficult to get straight. I'm finally able to do it with a few mirrors, but it's a lot easier if you have someone else that can take 10 seconds for you.

I just use some clippers by Wahl, and they've always worked fine. Cleanup takes the most time. Watch a few YouTube videos to get a better idea, and pick a forgiving time to cut your hair as a first attempt. If all goes wrong, you can just buzz it, or wear a hat for a week.
Is there a non minified version of the javascript emulator file that is publicly available?
Toll roads run into the problem of positive externality. Specifically, transportation creates large positive externalities. A road creates economic benefits not just for people who use them to get from point A to point B, but direct economic benefits for stores, developers, and employers along the route. Tolls capture only the part of the benefit felt by people traveling on the roads. As a result, if you fund roads using only toll revenues, you'll end up building less roads than your economy needs.
OHHHHHHH bootable. I'd never actually tried that as I've always installed in a VM. Now that makes sense as to why the Mac version wouldn't work when I tried it in a VM.
To the extent it's about the GIL or lack thereof, I am confident that the amount of performance increase you would get by switching would be directly correlated with how much of your typical response generation time is spent waiting on I/O.

The _less_ time you spend waiting on I/O (you are cpu-bound), the _more_ performance increase you get from switching to an interpreter without a GIL.

Most of my web apps spend a very large percentage of their time waiting on I/O (chiefly an rdbms), but if you have a heavily optimized app that is more cpu-bound, you would see larger gains from a GIL-less interpreter.

This hypothesis just makes sense, and I also believe there's evidence for it in the benchmarking I did at: https://github.com/jrochkind/fake_work_app
>The axiom that God doesn't exist is exactly on the same level as the one that he does. Both of them require the same type of assumption.

I'm with you on this. On some level, something caused the universe to exist. The explanations are: a Creator did it; or causality has no meaning outside of existence, so a first cause isn't necessary.

Either of those axioms requires an assumption, and once you make such an assumption, everything else is filtered through that lens.
There is a way - this is just a license limitation imposed by Microsoft to make their pricey server OSes an easier sell. However, you can fairly easily modify Win7 to allow for multiple logins [1].

[1] http://www.serverwatch.com/server-tutorials/how-to-enable-co...
I was under the impression that Crashplan's backups included limited versioning?
It didn't mention climate change. I know from past experience that this line of argument -- indeed, any that casts doubt on scientific research -- is a favorite of the "climate skeptic" world. Moreover, I know that the Economist has a center-right political bias.

Maybe they're advocating for something specific here (it's honestly unclear), but given that the Economist almost never writes anything of substance about science, and given their political bias, it isn't at all paranoid to wonder if this article has a subtext. It's called "being an intelligent consumer of media".
> No one is willing to take the risk of publishing, even anonymously.

I find it hard to believe that such an experiment could not be written up in a way that made it impossible to guess who the participants were. In fact, I would be happy to do just that and add it to my page for you; you can find my PGP key in http://www.gwern.net/Links#contact (I am routinely contacted by people through PGP, especially post-Snowden, so your email would not stick out).
Too late. The Boston Marathon bombings should have made large crowds at airport security checks a critical priority to get rid of. But noooo.
That's awesome, I quit! :)
> I think an important piece of information that is missing from the experiment is the name of the vendor who he purchased the tabs from.

VitaCat. For all the details you could want, see http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road#lsd-case-study
It looks like the patent trolls have finally found their true calling.
I primary use linux, but even I feel threatened by this. This is Sony's rootkit all over again.

edit: never mind, I thought this was novel. Never heard of ransomware before.
Can anyone with better knowledge of such things explain why this has to occur during sleep? Is there just too much going on during the day to dedicate physical and mental resources to this type of cleaning?
RDP opens a remote session, it's not the same as sharing. It actual creates a new user session and redirects the video output.

I use TeamViewer personal edition to be able to access my computers from either at home or away. It's free and really convenient. Yesterday I was in San Diego and my mother-in-law couldn't figure out how to get a movie going for the kids. I used TeamViewer on my Android phone, logged into the HTPC, and got the movie playing in XBMC.
While you're technically right - we are responsible for our security, and we should lock down our networks just like we lock our front doors - this is basically blaming the victim.
I had none. Before starting the microdosing, I tripped with the second tab I had bought. It was an enjoyable and very interesting experience.
He's not wrong: WiX is a horrorshow. It's unintuitive, difficult to read and parse, and is saddled with much of the cruft of years of Windows; when you compare it (or NSIS, or InstallShield) to building an .app (or even a .pkg) under OS X, it fares very poorly.
You're right, but what you're looking for is someone who joined a start up early and grew the sales team successfully and now wants to go back go an early stage start up. Some people like building and working with early stage companies
I recently built my own desk too. I live in an old victorian with a curved window. The only way to fit a desk there was to create my own.

I went with a walnut top, and then got some legs from Ikea so I could adjust the height to where I'd like. I think next time, I'd make my own legs for even great stability.

Besides doing the finish, the process is super easy. Just lots of sanding. I posted some photos to Instagram, which then synced to Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisstreeter/sets/721576366662... One note is that these photos are pre-27" monitor, so the desk looks a bit more complete now.
As a former Decide engineer, I'm happy you made the decision to expand so rapidly. :-)

The point about hiring for agreement is interesting - I'd never considered how much constant questioning could slow growth. My initial reaction was to worry about stagnation of ideas, but I think you could still get a lot of diversity of thought even when being likeminded on a few points. Is it possible to scale this hiring practice indefinitely?
> The usual statist objections to pure market action are total myths

The usual libertarian objections to modern economics are usually wishful thinking.
Most importantly, the criticism of a _design_ is independent of the results of the experiment.

Secondly, he may have wanted a null result.
Central to the plot in the book Reamde but these guys don't offer a 'pay in WoW gold' choice.

Given the cost of computers these days, at least in business a separate 'browsing' machine and 'business' machine seems to be the best solution. I wonder if you could provide wireless for employees to bring their own laptops which had no 'office' connectivity (but internet connectivity) and machines that were hard wired and MAC filtered to the 'business' network.
Very easy to miss, as I only posted it publicly this morning.
> Educating users to stop running random programs in zip files attached to emails, is apparently impossible.

Imagine something just like the malware we're discussing, but instead of a 72 hour timer, it's a 4 hour timer - and at the end, it pops up a "gotcha! just kidding. but if this were real malware, you would have either lost hundreds of dollars, or all your documents. Don't open attachments like me."
Truth is discovered. The process of arriving at the discovery of truth is where the perceptions and subjectivity play a role.

For example, water has certain properties based on the conditions surrounding it. These properties exist whether you know about them or not. If you can, through observation and/or measurement, discover these properties, you have discovered truth. If you never discover these properties, it does not affect the existence of the properties.
Just thank you.