skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Phantom Ships Expose Weakness in AIS Vessel-Tracking System
Social isolation and difficulty in meeting people are going to be problems for some people on HN.

> For the life of me I fail to comprehend [...]

You just failed to spot the market opportunity, the problem that people have that needs to be solved.
I have some photos I had uploaded on Picasa a few years ago. I recently noticed that these photos have each become posts on my G+ account. Apparently they converted what was an album into a bunch of G+ posts. Now I have zero confidence in anything google claims.
> In the Internet tech community, it's ultimate manifestation is how we pretend we do not earn our livelihoods from advertising, something most of us deep down know to be evil [2].

Thank you for calling out this one. I've been harshly criticized in the past for pointing out Google, which is beloved amongst geeks, is ultimately an advertising machine, and the reason they push many positive/geeky initiatives is because they have total consciousness of that ("Don't be Evil") and don't want to lose their talent pool.
Improving quality is not the solution. The issue is lack of a proper failsafe system - in this case, a STOP button that physically removes power from the ignition system.

No amount of quality can guarantee the computer cannot fail.
I used to write embedded firmware for factory machinery, and I can tell you that there are a few obvious nuisance bugs in my car's firmware. The kind of things that probably wouldn't be present if they had even owned or driven the car.
> In case you didn't know, as a customer of uber, the driver gives you a star rating just like you give the driver.

Wow. As someone who has never used Uber, this surprises me. It's repeating an obvious mistake that it took Ebay ages to correct.

> if they are working, then quality numbers staying flat actually mean they are quite down.

Exactly.
>Electric hand brake is very common in modern cars.

Yuck!

>Luckily most the features you listed are usually implemented in separate ECUs.

What concerns me would be how the systems handle unexpected inputs.

In the article it notes that the only way to end one unexpected acceleration event was to stop using the brakes. I'm not sure if the vehicle in question has separate controllers, but if it doesn't that's a real concern that unexpected input from one tickles a bug in another.
A bone fracture that breaks the skin, known as an open or compound fracture, is a true emergency. You should go to the emergency room immediately. If you delay significantly you will almost certainly get an infection and risk the loss of limb or life.

I know this is a straw man for your argument but try and make it somewhat realistic. And no need to appeal to emotion by making it about a child.
> In the TV shows and movies, they never seem to spend more than a few days at a time going anywhere at warp speed.

There are a few canon reasons for this:

1) Ignoring special episodes (and all of Star Trek Voyager) where they use a contrivance to hurl the ship tens of thousands of light-years, the working range of a starship on Star Trek is relatively small:

* The distance to the Romulan Neutral Zone, on the outer fringes of Federation Space, is only 28 light years away from Earth.

* Deep Space 9 (so named because it's on the outer frontiers of known space) is 70 light years away from Earth.

* Oo'nos, the Klingon homeworld, is ~100 light years away from Earth.

2) Ship speed exponentially increases as warp factor increases, and by the time the USS Enterprise-D is in service, warp 9 is fast, but not "I need to get there immediately because every plot shown on TV is an emergency" fast. The maximum sustainable speed for the Enteprise-D is warp 9.6, which is 1,909 times the speed of light. This would allow Picard to reach even Qo'nos from Earth in under 3 weeks.

3) With the exception of the JJ Abrams franchise (where they seem to keep going back to Earth after every mission), the ships featured in Star Trek are generally exploratory: between each episode, they'd roam their mission areas performing routine work. The episode plots would generally revolve around them dealing with an issue that happened to be close to wherever they happened to be at the time.

Of course, being a set of TV series and movies, liberties with distances were routinely taken. For example, in the first episode of Enterprise, they say Qo'nos is 4 days away from Earth at warp 4.5, which would place it less than half the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri, the closest star system.
>The camera delivers a fixed resolution.

I think you misunderstood the question. Cropping and scaling are both software choices for reducing resolution, so the question is why crop specifically?
Use Opened Apps With No Password Authentication In Mavericks 10.9
A Bug Allows To Use Opened Apps With No Password Authentication In Mavericks 10.9
Oh, you're right of course. But my machine still has to complain to the other end that it's not getting frames rapidly enough, so there is still some coöperation going on.
That link is to a page from the MySQL 5.1 reference manual.

As of about 4 years ago Oracle's been the owners of MySQL, so that's the reason why you're seeing it hosted at docs.oracle.com.
Man sues DHS, NSA for the right to parody them on mugs, T-shirts
I never listen to music while doing anything that required mental focus and/or which involves learning. I did listen to music when doing less demanding things like making a (simple) website.
Thanks for feedback!

Tip: Just click on the favicon or the URL (green link) to go directly.

We are trying to create a "hub" experience where you can build on top of just a simple link (add text, video, list, gallery etc) and others can contribute comments, related links, votes, etc.
Ionic, promising front-end framework
That would value YC at around $400m, but isn't the mean dilution insufficient, since YC would be diluted the most for the highest valued startups?

A very interesting question: once it's all said and done (let's say in 30 years), do you think YC will have a greater valuation than any single YC startup?
Well, if you're going to compare two scenarios using a numerical example, I think the assumption that the total pool of opportunity would decrease is a rather strong one!

>In the argument from justice, you think it's a moral mandate to take money away from people because other people have less money?

Well, not because other people have less money.

My politics are roughly "people should do whatever they want, but they should have to pay the price of the externalities of their actions", sprinkled with "reducing overall human misery is virtuous".

More like, because in order for the massively wealthy to exist there's a strong argument that there has to be a massive underclass to go along with it. In this light, being rich creates the externality of forcing people to be poor, and as a result it's perfectly moral to redistribute some of that wealth.

Another argument goes, we have a more vibrant and stable society if we ensure that a) everyone is healthy and gets a good education and b) no one person or group in particular can amass so much power as to be capable of destabilizing society as a whole.

There are a few other argument, but at the time of writing I think those two are the strongest. We can talk about right wrongs from the historical record, we can talk about the duty to minimize misery, we can talk about private property is a state-regulated right and thus it's legitimate to argue over it, we can talk about theological underpinnings, etc etc.

You may disagree, of course.
detected unauthorized access to an internal support application using a password that was shared with a compromised personal account

Someone's updating their resume tonight.
So looks like we got hit with a perfect storm of Github going down for the archive download, and the icons not loading on Firefox. Working on fixing the second one, but the repo with all the icons is here: https://github.com/driftyco/ionicons
Finished. Enjoy.
Especially bad for people that were using MongoHQ to manage their DB backups to S3:

As a precaution, we took additional steps on behalf of our customers to invalidate the Amazon Web Services credentials we were storing for you (for the purposes of backups to S3). While this prevents the abuse of your AWS credentials by any malicious party, it may have resulted in additional unintended consequences for your AWS environment if you were utilizing the same AWS credentials for other purposes.

If you had S3 backups configured with MongoHQ, when possible, we have disabled the IAM access keys via AWS. In any case, please go to the AWS Management Console and regenerate any keys given to MongoHQ .
Adding a Gaussian blur to images can significantly increase their compressability (for many codecs), perhaps that is what's happening here?
This happened to me twice with Uber black and that was enough to abandon the service. Weird that I've not observed this behavior among Lyft drivers (who I'd expect to be part timing it).
The article is asking people to make their lives worse. The suggestions are predicated on the assumption that the alternatives listed are less desirable.
I wonder if this effect could be made less noticeable by layering & blending the cropped image on the last full-size frame. The centre of the feed would continue to move, but the edges of the image would remain stationary.
All the more peculiar, then, that they list RavenDB.
We Need More Women in Tech: The Data Prove It
it eventually loads in Firefox 17 but it is yellow for a fraction of a second (probably javascript that is slow to load?)
Yes, but I was more thinking where was the mention -- while it's not particularly good for ACID properties I like rethinkdb, as a nosql DB
When are we going to lazer a communique to one of the planeted systems?
Many iOS Apps Vulnerable to HTTP Request Hijacking
Facebook is doing what no developer has done before by throwing people and money at it. Maybe they should go a little slower. I don't see anyone breathing down their necks in this type of software.

But the broad concept used by Facebook is the future of mobile software, especially on Android. Instead of making apps bigger, make a suite of cooperating apps and services.
Angel Investors; Benefactors for Tech by AppScale CEO Woody Rollins
And this is why you use 2FA and put this behind a corporate VPN in RFC 1918 space. Why they are just planning for that now is amusing.

"Our support tool includes an 'impersonate' feature that enables MongoHQ employees to access our primary web UI as if they were a logged in customer"
I am disappointed by this article. It made such a big deal about PG hating to work with Windows, and reduced the innovation of web applications to a way to not work in Windows.

Really?

Clearly the whole point was to get away from developing desktop applications, and realizing the single-source, rapid development nature of web apps.

Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doing it on Linux. Its bullshit. Overfocusing on this aspect of the story feels like platform fanboyism, misses the real point, and just overall kind of cheapens PG's stellar image.
It seems a little dangerous to include logos for various companies. I could see the likes of Reddit and Y Combinator turning a blind eye, but would we expect the same from Google, Microsoft, and Apple? I am no legal expert, but wouldn't those icons present a long term problem if this project were to truly become successful?
I'm not a MongoHQ customer (and as I don't use either AWS or MongoDB... it's unlikely I ever will be), but this is one heck of a disclosure.

Other companies (looking at you Linode...) could stand to learn a thing or two from how MongoHQ is handling this. Extremely transparent, and explaining in very clear terms the steps they'll be taking to mitigate the breach and prevent future incidents.

All that being said... Ouch.
If I slice open my finger badly, I might get myself to the hospital of my choice. But if I fear I am dying in a rather immediate way, or worse, if the people who find my unconscious body think that I am dying, then there is no way in hell I would be acting with any sort of price sensitivity. The hospital doors I could get to the fastest is the ones I would be going to.
At least they used bcrypt to hash user passwords.
The name of this company is unfortunate. It doesn't appear that this service has any affiliation with MongoDB, Inc.
The NYT Pays A Woman To Lecture You About Being A Commuter Prole
What do you do instead of 'bundle exec' to execute ruby command line utilities using the desired dependency tree?
and secure the communications and not be centralized.
Poverty Produces Smaller Brains
Ah, didn't know that. Figures!
That could be a huge edge for Lyft, "rides from locals."
Anything is better than waiting an hour for a taxi to show up, and then having to call a friend because the company just forgot about you.
I'm guessing this is a parody?
Worth mentioning (if it's not obvious) that this is written by the FoundationDb guys, on their site, and so will clearly show a bias toward their product (surprise!, it does!).

There is still some interesting information here, but there are some notable missing players here (MSSQL) who I presume are missing because not including them paints Foundation in a better light.
I doubt he'll be fired just for that, but yeah, that is a big mistake on his part.

In general though, in any security breach the most common way to pivot is via password re-use. You'll see this happen with many privileged employees at almost every company.
I don't think this is necessarily a good idea. For one thing, automatically cutting off the edges of a frame is undesirable, exactly for the reason mentioned (in a conference call, it cuts the people on the edges off).

Secondly, zooming is not as effective as real compression. What I mean by this is: assume you have a high resolution image. One way to save bandwidth is to use a well-designed compression algorithm optimized for the human visual system. The second way is to just shrink the image, and then "stretch" it back to the original size, which -- in a sense -- is what Skype is doing here. Which is going to be more effective?
The throttle control on an early 90s, or early 2000 FORD is also a lever and rod [or braided steel cable] attached to a couple springs...

Unless you had cruise control [remember when that was an _option_?]... then there's a servo or equivalent motor in-line with the cable and springs.

---

Even with a digital system: there's no benefit. It's the same mechanical piece, it has to be, that's how combustion engines work: you open a throttle plate, the vacuum sucks in more air, the computer compensates w/ more fuel, compress that, spark it, you have more power.

You will always have a throttle plate and some sort of lever; and since you want it to fail closed you best have a return spring somewhere.

All you gain by adding a digital control system is [perhaps] clever software control and [certainly] additional complexity.

Is it worth it? Perhaps... there are some _very_ cool systems developed as a result of drive-by-wire. Lane following assist, parking assist, assisted hill starts, manual transmissions with automated clutches, collision avoidance, etc.[0]

I would definitely argue for more _transparency_ in this technology, but I don't know that I could argue that the technology itself is a bad thing.

[0]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ridS396W2BY "Volvo Trucks - Emergency braking at its best!"
This reminds me of a great study about the relationship between cultural and legal norms in looking at corruption. Because of the UN, nearly every country has a diplomat in New York, and because of diplomatic immunity, none of them are responsible for their parking tickets. So you effectively had to rely on their own cultural norms about how to behave with your car, rather than legal enforcement. They found that there was a strong correlation between the number of parking tickets issued to diplomats from a country and independent measures of corruption in that country, showing that the norms really were an important part, and carried over even into a different environment.

You can find the whole paper here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12312
We don't know whether they're healthy, because we can't compare the samples.
I've seen this on my Mac with its inbuilt webcam. It annoys me intensely because when it switches it usually results in unwatchable video for a period of time before it stabilises, then it suddenly realises it has enough bandwidth and switches back, and that is followed by another period of disruption. Good idea in principle but needs refinement.

Since someone reading this might know, does anyone have any recommendations for webcams for OS X? The Logitech C920 seems to be the most modern HD webcam out there, but the Internet is conflicted on whether Mac's in-built UVC drivers will properly take advantage of it in FaceTime or not or if it will just be seen as an SD camera. So if anyone has any personal experiences with good HD webcams on OS X I'd be very interested to hear...

Edit: Actually, a "weekend project" I never got around to was to use OpenCV to detect faces and automatically encode just those regions with a higher bitrate, and sacrifice the rest. So that the areas we actually care about are encoded better and we can get an objectively better image for the same average bitrate. I'm sure someone must have done this already, though I couldn't find anything when I looked.
I guess you'd feel the sameway about mongolab
I think this behavior comes from the webcam, and not Skype. I have actually seen this exact behavior with the Microsoft LifeCam, which often auto-changes the width of the video stream. The larger width will show "people on the sides," and the more narrow width does not.

I believe that the LifeCam looks for movement in the peripheral area. If there is no movement there, the LifeCam will truncate the sides of the image. I have sometimes been able to force the sides to appear by waving my arms off to the side.

When I first noticed this happening, I was surprised that many "people on the side" don't move or talk at all, thus triggering a truncation. But I started looking for this, and most "people on the side" barely move at all.

In my experience, Skype video quality tends to degrade by simply freezing the screen. I have also noticed this behavior when Skype was off entirely, when recording a video of myself. So I'm pretty sure it's the webcam itself auto-controlling the width, and not Skype.
I wonder if the reason you were having trouble with Liquid is that you were using it incorrectly. It's definitely meant to be secure over simple. Was the issue you were having a bug or did you find a way to fix the encoding?
Wow, its people like this (both comments from docker/dotCloud) that make you really love a service.
In fact, I would have put my next side project on dotCloud if the prices weren't steep - but I get that they're for businesses and not for side projects.

I guess DO is good for that stuff (at the very least! - I'm sure they're good in general as well, I've actually been reading/discussing them a lot - mostly for hobby projects though).

EDIT: Forgot about dokku/flynn as a PaaS (plugin?).
Also learned about other services in the thread which I'll be looking at.
> Yes, but a completely separated system. The odds of both software systems failing simultaneously is getting in the hash collisions domain...

It isn't, really, in a lot of newer cars. You have a brake override system [1] that can reduce the power output of the engine by various means.

[1]: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regu...
I think there is another element in this and that is a form of self-deception. Obviously the US establishment tries to put a good propaganda face of some of its seamier actions. It can, and I think does, reach the point where there becomes too great a cognitive dissonance, and people begin to fool themselves and their own intellectual community with their own lies.

For example - is the US for or against Islamic extremism? Is it for or against a more secular society in the Middle East and Muslim countries? Most people here, or college-educated NPR or Fox News listeners I know think it is against it, and that the US wants to promote a more secular, moderate form of Islam around the world, as do allies like Israel. The problem is that all evidence over the preceding decades is against this. The US and England threw out the secular, democratic Mossadegh in Iran in the 1950s, and then the CIA helped the Shah's Savak jail or kill off anyone in the country supporting a return to a secular democracy. Almost unbelievable nowadays, Israel supported, including financially, the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah against what it saw as the more existential threats of the PFLP and the PLO.

What has the US been doing in the past few years? Supporting the most theocratic countries such as Saudi Arabia, where as it has been in the news lately, there are crackdowns on women who want to drive cars. The remains of the secular, pan-Arabist, Nasserite parties have been what the US has attacked in recent years - Iraq and Libya. Obama recently made the call for more intervention in the secular, Nasserite government of Syria and , surprisingly, some mainstream opinion noted he would in some fashion be supporting Al-Qaeda - which is true. Which is yet another case - the US supported the overthrow of the secular, socialist Afghanistan in order to put into power the mujahideen forces which later became Al Qaeda.

All of the historical evidence, from World War II until recent months shows the US opposes secular governments in these countries and supports Islamic fundamentalists and radicals. Yet for some reason, not only does US propaganda say the opposite, not only do Fox News watching blue collar Americans believe this, even NPR or Fox News listening college educated Americans believe this. College-educated Arabs know what the truth is, but somehow the reality hasn't penetrated the US.

Usually propaganda is just shading the truth, but for the Arab world, the news just openly lies. I watch talking head shows where they still say that Ahmadinejad said "Israel should be wiped off the map". I've heard this repeated for years over and over and over. It's just not true, a look at his remarks in Persian said he absolutely, certainly never said the word map, and even the rest of the translation is somewhat shaded. It's too good a lie to be bothered going into that, so this lie, which is now widely known to be a lie, is still endlessly repeated on in the US news media.
Yes, really.

It's a support system - do you want them to paste in their private key to login?
Ubiquitous mobile messaging might be what happened.
In other words, you do believe might makes right, or at least there's no point in doing right if you can't do it for very long.

I am not so cynical. But neither am I naive. I believe (as possibly you may also) right is right, and it is not defined by winning (but you feel right is pointless unless without wining). Right is not defined as the ultimate outcome of geopolitical darwinism. But I also believe in self-fullfining prophesies. The world ultimately reflects us. We get the world we deserve.

Imagine if the United States unwaveringly played by the same rules internationally as it must domestically, per our Constitution. Rather than gaining power by leveraging the corruption and self-interest of foreign politicians, we'd gain influence by winning hearts and minds, and push the world by example rather than at the end of a bayonet. Idealistic? Perhaps. But it is a fallacy that idealism contradicts realism.