skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The image is not very random because it only uses a few possible patterns per 2x2 pixel block. If anything, that should give an attacker more information about the plaintext, not less.
To the core!
As an American who married a Russian and lived in Russia for a while, I find this article to be quite accurate.

When visiting for the first time, I asked my (then-acquaintance) why women never smile at me. She said "if they smile at you, that means they are easy." Basically, they are saying they like me and I should introduce myself. Or, like the article mentioned, maybe I look funny.

You are right in that it is cultural, but the reasons you state aren't the only ones. They are in general pretty unhappy people, as the saying goes "God suffered, so should I." However, the younger generation is stepping beyond the suffering attitude, and yet they still don't smile, so that isn't the only reason.

Your example of the skinheads is just another example of the bystander effect -- definitely not unique to Russia. Also, Russians are pretty crazily racist, so that causes the story to be moot as well.
Server Configuration Can Protect against Fast-Growing CHARGEN Attacks
Not to mention how obfuscated it is. Why not just minify it and call it one line of javascript?
Bitcoin $700
as a Russian-american - I found this article to be absolutely correct.
Νέο site alarmslarisa.gr -
It's a little south of the marker on the map in the article, but it is still on Google Maps.
Wow, could this mean the end of overpaid, media-hyped sportspersons being on American TV all the time, and American people actually getting off their asses and going out and reducing the obesity rate? Yay! I hope they cut "free" game broadcasts and force people to pay $1000/month to watch them.

Also, The NFL and the NHL are registered as "tax free organizations", which means that those of us paying taxes have to pay more because these corporations are too greedy to give up a fair share of their (enormous) profits. This makes the hypocrisy of them crying about "free" broadcasts extremely irritating.
If I'm reading you correctly that's not parallel construction, that's planting evidence.

Now, I haven't followed the US law or police news closely, since my interest is at most academic, but my picture of parallel construction is that you first use unreliable/inadmissible sources to construct a picture of the situation, then using that general knowledge to locate actual admissible evidence.

So the cop might use inadmissible sources to know there's an person of interest somewhere. But he still needs admissible evidence to demonstrate probable cause if he wants to enter and use results of this second search to be useful. Otherwise he's exactly in the situation of the 'naive' cop from your example, where he can only say 'anonymous tip', doesn't have a record for that, and his 'real' investigation gets dismissed.

What you seem to be describing is taking inadmissible evidence and then somehow inserting it into results of a legal search - i.e. planting evidence. That's not a new idea, I guess, but is it really so common, and how is that caused by parallel construction?
To me, what's surprising is the contrary: that people call communism "socialism". While here in France, our Socialist Party (in power right now) has always been far from communism.

It feels strange to me to call social welfare anything other than socialism. Maybe it's just a case of French socialisme and English socialism being false friends.
Bitcoin's price at the first of November was $197. That's around a 250% increase over the course of two and a half weeks.

General question: if you expect the price of Bitcoin to continue this rate of growth, does the rational consumer have any reason to spend? I don't follow BTC too closely, but it feels as though there's an innate conflict between its role as a speculative investment and its role as a currency.
> If this has not been posted before, its good to see that all the worries about the tor protocol can be laid to rest.

A year ago I would have said that DEA using "parallel construction" to hide the origin of intelligence was just a paranoid conspiracy. Today I'm not sure I'm being paranoid enough.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...
Bitcoin is designed to be deflationary in nature. Many people here will see BTC's dramatic rise in price as a feature, not a bug. I personally am more concerned about the difficulties of BTC -> USD conversion... with exchanges going down and others getting hacked.

Speculators obviously love BTC's volatility. But surely, this is not a sign of a healthy "currency".
I run http://sysadmincasts.com and I am about to do an "Into to AWS" and an "Into to OpenStack" series. These will address the very issue you describe, because I 100% agree with you, there is next to zero screencasts about what you can actually do with OpenStack (there are many, "here's how to install OpenStack" posts, but, what about once you have it installed?!), I also feel the same about AWS, in that, there seems to be a need for specific howtos which are easily consumable.

Email me (see my profile), and I'll send you a note when I have a couple episodes about OpenStack/AWS.

ps. if anyone has some specific topics they would like me to cover, please let me know!
Are Russians klingons?
Olark is hiring front-end-leaning full stack engineers
I've been living in CR for a few months now, and I can say I've met a ton of genuinely happy people.

I don't know if I can fully credit the sun, but there's something going on here.
I'm reminded of a course I took which was co-taught by the CTO at the Department of Homeland Security. He once said that "The criminals will always be better at using cryptography than the people who use them in positive ways."
My illustration is based on the images in Chrome's retina mac image source files.
I don't pretend to know anything about how bitcoin works but it seems to be very volatile. The stock market is bad enough, but this fluctuates wildly just on speculation and seemingly nothing more.
Thanks for the link! Coin mining is really the only application that has ever made me regret not owning an AMD GPU.
In a similar vein, HR is not your friend. Never trust what they say. Especially when they have you sign things.
I think it comes back to something we talk about quite a bit here: the advantage of the youthful entrepreneur. It's not that inexperienced 20-somethings and college dropouts are in any way superior to their older, credentialed, experienced peers.

It's just that, when you're taking moonshots, you should expect to miss most of the time. When you're tired of failing, you can go back to school, or start in a new career field. The gaps in your resume are there, but they're forgivable. You were hungry and foolish then, but you're ready to eat and learn now.

As others have noted, those gaps hurt a lot more when they appear later on. It's not fair, but it's just the way it is, unfortunately. Even if you were on your way to 20 years of employment at your stable dream job, layoffs can happen. Shit can happen. Count on it.
There are a bunch of methods I've used over my software career. The one I found most effective was:

1)Create a review package with the code and a brief discussion of what it does. (if its an update then we'd provide code diffs).

2) Have reviewers (at least 3) submit a list of bugs to the person holding the review.

3)The reviewer could accept the comment or flag it to discuss.

4) Then everyone got together (meeting) and discussed the ones that where flagged to discuss. Generally this made the reviews themselves not last too long (going through every line of code thats fine is boring) and some interesting discussion could be had and a conclusion reached.

5)The moderator would write a ticket in the bug tracker for the items and then when the updates are made the moderator would verify the changes were made a close out the ticket.
So, has Google actually refused to remove the image? Or just not moved fast enough?
7 Tech Trends Supporting Small Business Globalization In 2014
I'll play devil's advocate to your devil's advocate, then. You are a callous human being who encourages countless needless deaths to justify your personal experiences, especially deaths of teenagers.

Touché, I agree the hyperbole was unnecessary and over the top (probably got generated by some emotional trigger that I didn't do a good job of moderating). Just to clarify though, I _don't_ "encourage countless needless deaths".

If an app or a book convinces you to not commit suicide, the likelihood is high that what you're experiencing is strong emotional pain that is quite likely to subside.

I agree with this and the rest of your comment. :)
If the NFL is taken off network television, major broadcasters will lose many local affiliates and a large portion of their audience. Ad sales will collapse across all network programming. It'd effectively put the studios out of business. That's not Aereo's fault, it's the NFL's decision to take their ball and go home.
11 technologies that didn’t survive into the sci-fi future
One area of speculation is whether or not the rise of CryptoLocker virus has inflated BTC prices.

With victims that number "in the tens of millions", many people are being FORCED to use BTC, whether they want to speculate or not.

http://www.coindesk.com/tens-millions-uk-may-targeted-crypto...
Hi, i'm Russian sociologist of culture.

The conclusion about different culture code and semantic is right.

But there is more some interesting things. Russians have really poor toothcare, and this is joined with non-smiling bidirectionally. There is nothing abnormal for Russian to have couple of missing teeth. I've seen a really rich people (for example owner of Rolls Royce fleet) with just a couple of yellow teeth left... man, you should never smile with this.

Also there is a lot of mimic signals except mouth area muscles tension, especially orbicularis oculi tension, that subconsciously telling that we are smiling. I've noticed that this secondary features is also less often for Russians relative to west and east Europeans. This is also true for voice tone and other subconscious traces of smile. So the low-level mental trigger for smile not firing at all.

So i can assert that this is not about smiling, its about more deep communicational norms like, literally, answering "sorely" on "how are u?", that means "i'm complaining so i'm sincere to you and trusting you", the essence of social stroking is different. Yip, assumptions that the Russians is same in everything but the culture codes is wrong, we are pretty depressed nation.

Anyway, i see that norm is changing nowadays along with life quality increasing, European culture codes expansion, and toothcare, heh.
Do you actually know if the new Apple building is open plan? I believe they currently have offices.

Pixar, the previous Jobs-designed office building, gives employees a lot of control over their personal spaces. Designers actually get their own mini house. (Kind of like an Ikea showroom.) They have lounge-like common spaces you can work/meet in too.
Have you tried using today's Firefox's menu on Windows 8? It's much better relocated out of the way of Windows 8's hot corners.
We could take an anecdote from Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research"(+) - speculation on why some scientists do great work and go on to win Nobel prizes, and others don't, even if they are also clever and hard working. It includes this paragraph:

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

It might be similar with open plan offices - less pleasant and more difficult to concentrate in today and tomorrow, but resulting in better, more competitive, more coherent software in twelve months.

(+) http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
So make it a genuine smile, by working something into the conversation/pitch/whatever that is authentic and amusing to you.

Not to mention, I'm guessing you're in the huge minority here. Like people who boycott products with annoying ads. Annoying ads which are proven to work.
implying he knows every wife.
Bitcoin-powered assassination market targets Obama, Bernanke, and others
Musings: India’s New Drug Subculture
This is 4 paragraphs saying exactly the same thing I said upthread, just more emphatically.

Meanwhile, we're no closer to understanding how "parallel construction" could have been helpful in this case, which is the question the thread purports to answer.
He says he had $500K in savings at age 48. That seems a bit low considering his earnings and all the kids. Why he would think he was flush enough to risk two years off at that age I don't know.
I think its one of those interdisciplinary things you can approach from multiple angles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesics
Everytime I see a new bitcoin article discussing its' new price, I'm reminded why I should have never sold at $75. Sigh.
A comment like this reeks of ignorance and adds nothing to the dialogue.

If you wanted to vouch for the reduction of sports on broadcast television with reasons related to health that are backed up with facts or citations, rather than speculative opining, you could have, and should have, done so.
Yes. Taking 2 years off didn't help either. This sounds like the plight of people who take extended maternity or paternity leaves, only to find themselves unwanted in the workforce. Age discrimination is tough!
>The bottom line: workers in enclosed offices were by far the happiest, reporting the least amount of frustration on all 15 of the factors surveyed. Workers in cubicles with high partitions were the most miserable, reporting the lowest rates of satisfaction in 13 out of those 15 factors.

Really? you don't think that he people with personal offices are not in better, higher paying, less menial jobs to begin with? I think that would be obvious and clearly a better reason that they are happier. If there are some distractions and lack of total privacy, but you love what you are doing, do you really think that you are going to be miserable?

Please stop with the correlation posts where there is more obvious potential conclusions. So annoying.
I remember that one. It doesn't literally mean "don't give engineers rooms." It means there should be regular public (to the team) milestones that force engineers to show their work.

The room thing just comes from the visual of a rockstar coder coming into work and locking himself in his office and saying don't worry, everything's fine, trust me I'll have it done in time. Beware of that.
Are Bitcoins the Criminal's Best Friend?
We're testing a deep linking service that works both before and after the app is installed and integrates with URX/DeepLink.me and others. If you'd like to join the beta just email slaven at gmail.
Already down to $520.
The 7 Million Dollar (this minute, anyway) Pizza
Blimp's Open Design: Day Three
The "sports" word was mentioned, so yes, we can expect a deluge of holier than thou prejudiced nerds explaining in very ethnocentric terms why sports is bad.

It'd be comical if it wasn't depressing.
Do the maths: the science behind the numbers that govern our lives
I think that once you've used the two side by side, you'll change your tune. Australis is actually a much larger departure from looking like Chrome in the tab strip. Seriously, use it for a couple of weeks, then open the two side by side in the middle of a browsing session and it'll be clear to you that the visual experience is not at all alike in practice.
Can you do that if you're homeless? (I don't know for sure - my local library doesn't say either way except for the statement "living in or owning property in [my area]").
You're having trouble because you are incorrect about how parallel construction works. Parallel construction is not the Orwellian term for simply "coming up with a bullshit story about where you got your evidence when it in fact came from NSA". Instead, it is the Orwellian term for "coming up with the complicated story of what precise piece of unrelated probable cause enabled you to effect a search that was motivated by evidence that came from NSA". Notice that the latter definition includes some notion of some kind of probable cause. The NSA is not PC in a "parallel construction" scenario.
I wouldn't mind buying some to speculate since I can only lose the amount I buy which won't be much. But it's not very easy to do it.

What's everyone using?
It is very interesting to watch the rise and expansion of Python. I'm interested in the thoughts others have to why this is. Is it that it's to learn? Easy to read? Easy to extend? Whatever the cause, I'm glad that I'm learning it for Math too. Similar to the OP's observations, many of the holes when I got started have been filled.
Pretty amazing that something like this is basically a statistical certainty with the amount of imagery we generate of the world.
- What price range are you looking at for renting?
Another great source for this kind of data and analysis of the site has been TheoryOfReddit[1]. Along with traffic data, there are people doing network analysis of all kinds between the groups on there, and even comment analysis.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit
@300bps: What job is that? 40 hours per week at an investment bank?
Traveling the world with kids
This reminds me a bit of a CAPTCHA experiment that I put together where the idea is that a human would need to position the cursor in a specific place to be able to read the underlying message. I think its a really cool idea [1].

A similar approach could use (a much lower-res) version of this encoding for fun!

[1] http://embed.plnkr.co/LGHrxf/preview
Apple’s app store discovery 20X better than Google Play, report says
not to add fuel to the fire: but if bitcoin is really un-hackable (can't guess individual keys held offline by private owners), untraceable, and all that goodness ...

... and there are only 21 million of them in the world ...

... then the value of each bitcoin could be $100,000 or more, assuming it can attract 1/4 of the interest that gold currently enjoys worldwide.

of course, as the value creeps up, it's use as a currency will diminish, and it becomes more of a store of value. eg, without bitcoin dimes and quarters, you'd have a hard time buying smaller items. but it is lighter than a pound of gold for sure.

the possibilities are interesting.
I don't think it's the affordability that's the problem - or rather, I know plenty of people at Google / Facebook / Apple / any other company in the valley who make the choice to commute not because of any cost saving, but because they don't want to live somewhere with very little going on socially and pretty much constant need for a car.
So, oddly enough, the thing that bothered me the most about this article was the way his wife left him. I read stories like this a lot online, where two married people are prospering and living happy lives, and then despite the vow they made for "better or worse", one just gives up on the other person when times get hard.

Is it really that easy?

I'm currently 23, and if/when I ever get married, regardless of who brings in the income (both of us, just me, or just her), I would support whoever I married even if they lost their job or had some other hardship. You hear about people getting cancer or some other sickness and their spouse leaving them because they don't want to deal with it. It boggles my mind that these things occur.

If you weren't going to truly commit to the person, why would you get married? Just live together instead. Or get married without saying the vows if you just want the government benefits. I don't understand.

It's not just limited to spouses. It sounds like some of his children could have supported him as well. If something happened to my father, I would do everything I could to take care of him, regardless of what it cost me.

I'm curious of other HNers take on this. Has anyone been in a situation like this?
Okay, ya I just found it as well. It's actually more South-East of the marker, and you have to look for the police car to locate it.

I don't think this is an unreasonable request to remove this map tile, it's a pretty clear image of a dead with cops standing nearby.
It's possible that because YC is now a recognized brand, it has access to lower-risk companies - i.e. those that have pretty much everything figured out. As such, that will increase their success because a. self-fulfilling prophesy of more leverage in the future by being associated with YC, b. they are already low risk to start with. IMO, they are the next Sequoia, not so much Google/Microsoft/IMB.

Contradictory, however, is these lower risk, already figured out, companies are not really in need of an incubator as much as some younger companies. Anyways, I'm really interested in seeing the next batch of YC companies and where they are going with that.
> It means there should be regular public (to the team) milestones that force engineers to show their work.

While that is part of the underlying point, "beware of a guy in a room" is very much "don't stick a guy in a room by himself and let him do his thing" (he emphasizes it more in the video I linked to). The larger, more figurative point about having regular, public milestones is rule 4, "don't go dark", of which he claims rule 6 is a special case.
coinbase.com is quite easy, just AHC like you do anywhere
It's not so strange. Conspiracy to ____ is often shown before the individuals participating in the conspiracy. In this case there was evidence galore of illegal drug trade, so it became a matter of finding the individuals responsible.
Priceonomics should hire this guy. I wouldn't doubt he would dedicate himself to writing stories such at these.
Blimp: Project Management for Humans
Deeplinking via the use of custom url schemes has been possible in iOS and Android for a long time, but has been a relatively underused feature. Now that advertisers and ad-tech companies have helped popularize it, hopefully other app developers begin to realize the value of having every app out there deep-link enabled.
Cheat Day: Eat Dirty, Workout Dirtier
Failing to predict the future is one of those human foibles that we all suffer from every now and then.
The primary markets can get it OTA, but the secondary markets are out of luck, which makes zero sense since the games can be blacked out in secondary markets. Eg. Rochester and Syracuse are secondary markets of the Bills. If the Ralph doesn't sell out, Rochester and Syracuse get blacked out along with Buffalo, but only Buffalo can get NFLN/ESPN games OTA. Rochester and Syracuse fans without cable cannot see the game.

In the parent's case, if they lived in Providence or Worcester or Portland, which are definitely Patriots markets, it wouldn't be on OTA :s
China: Bitcoins welcome here.
Why forgotten password forms shouldn't tell you when the email doesn't exist
The 30 day delay in effect at the time I bought at $125 to test my first use of the system is the only reason I have three Bitcoin instead of 20. By the time I was approved for quicker purchase the booster rocket had kicked in and I simply couldn't believe the price increase to $200 could last. Ah, well. Story of my life.
What price should you have sold at?