skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough. I've read that using CUDA (or another GPU-based language) you can get at least a 10x the GFLOPS of a 4-CPU Xeon [1], though, and RSA cracking should easily parallelize, if I'm understanding the process correctly. And the high-end NVidia cards in the G2 instances have 1,536 CUDA cores each. No, I'm not kidding. The one benchmarked in the link above is about 1/3 the GFLOPS of the one in the G2 instances.

And it looks like a reserved G2 instance is 0.65/hour (though can be lower on the spot market and in the reserved instance marketplace). So if there's a 120x speed improvement over the "single core 2.2GHz AMD Opteron" (and that's assuming each core is as fast as the Xeon core above), for only 11x the cost...well, it gets a lot cheaper.

In fact, it ends up, if I haven't done my math wrong, at about $94,900 of full instance time (less if you get spot or reserved instances). [2] To win the $200k prize. Hmm....

[1] http://archive.benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_con...

[2] "the equivalent of almost 2000 years of computing on a single core 2.2GHz AMD Opteron": That's 17,520,000 hours. If the G2 instance gets you 120x performance improvement, that's 146,000 hours. At 0.65/hour, that's $94,900.
To a non programmer or an absolute beginner? Sure, but then I would ask; why in the hell are you writing your code in a style catered to people who don't know what they are doing? That line simply shows that the writer doesn't understand Boolean expressions.
It seems that one of them committed a violent act here. They're not all doing that.
SnapChat Adds Filters, A Replay Function & Time, Temperature & Speed Overlays
Is there a good, ideally free password manager that works on Android, iPhone, and the web? Any recommendations?
Many governments already have access to microsoft source code. Big corporate clients too.
The Speech Synthesizer was the coolest thing about the TI99/4A. Well, that and Tunnels of Doom.
For the one who downvoted me without comment:

You pick a random web dev forum, and I post there suggesting my business plan of low maintainence (for me), super cheap websites to get a start with freelancing or even disrupt it. People will say I shouldn't undercut market rates. And then I will say what the poster said, "I am a nice guy, and I try to help others on stack overflow, but if I want a nice career, I have to underbid. Sorry to everyone else."

You hold the stopwatch and see how long it takes for me to get flamed to hell and back. [the fact that pricing low doesn't really lead to a "nice career" is besides the point btw, you get the idea anyway]
I'd take loners.org from you.
What are you saying? That because Snowden didn't have an extension to his own bloodline that it was easy for himself to come forward and blow the whistle?
I this case, returning objInDb would be semantically different. So, if you always want to return a Boolean, you did the right thing.
Actually, in contradistinction to buzz-wordiness, most of the terms he used such as tensegrity have quite precise definitions- conceptually, as well in mechanical terms. If you want to get a true introduction to the depth and breadth of his thinking, I highly recommend his magnum opus 'Synergetics' [1]. Otherwise, at least take a glance at the meta-structure/heuristics behind his geometrical and design work [2].

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Synergetics-Explorations-Geometry-Buck...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergetics_(Fuller)
It should, but AT&T's still in business and their collaboration with the state to spy on customers has been known for a long time.
Look. I've worked in enterprise software.

You sound like you did it all wrong.

That you think that 'Version control was non existent' is bizarre is just, well, naive.

Why did your clients need version control? Was your code not extensible?

You do the install. You sell a support contract. You make it extensible in a repeatable, not modifying the core code, kind of way. You have tools to find out if the client has modified parts of the code they shouldn't have.

A bug pops up, you fix it locally. You then log in to their instance. You deploy the fix.

That's how it works.

That's where you went wrong.
You're pretty much correct. True regular expressions don't have the expressive power to decide whether arbitrary-length strings are or aren't palindromes.

That said, 'regular expressions', as used in most programming languages, have extensions that extend the expressive power. One such extension is the matched group & backreference, used in other commentor's answers.

From a theoretic stance, these aren't really 'regular expressions', but that's what we call them in practice.
"As part of the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54), signed on January 8, 2008 by President Bush, the NSA became the lead agency to monitor and protect all of the federal government's computer networks from cyber-terrorism." [Emphasis added]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA#Mission
window.localStorage doesn't exist in (for example) IE 7, and it may or may not exist in IE8 depending on the domain. So you can't rely on the interface being the same.
No more startpage24?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/startpage24-incl-v...

How sad!
I disagree that the space between "but" and the ellipsis is a mistake, and the first citation I found (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/ellipsis.htm) supports me.

However, lest anyone think I think I'm perfect, I'll point out that I omitted the period after "etc".
I use KeePass and I haven't integrated it into any of the web browsers I use. When I want to log into a site, I don't load it via my web browser's address bar; instead, I Alt-Tab to KeePass, Ctrl-F to find the site/account, Ctrl-C to copy my password, and Ctrl-U to open the site. This takes only a few seconds longer than using a browser extension like LastPass (which I've used to share credentials with family members).

In addition to this being potentially more secure, another benefit is that I can specify that KeePass open certain sites in a non-default web browser. I prefer not to log into some sites/accounts using my primary web browser, and KeePass helps me to avoid this. If I were to use a solution like LastPass for all my password management, I would need to pause and recall which browser I use to log into a site/account. But with KeePass, I just mindlessly Alt-Tab, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-U.
If "non-US entities" includes businesses outside the US as well, I'd agree. Revelations recently [1] that the spying went beyond countries/heads of state. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that companies were being targeted for US based companies' benefit.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/20/gchq-targeted...
Johnny Depp stars in singularity, AI flick.
Wouldn't Yahoo be exactly the type of site that you would opt-in to autofill for?
RSA is now owned by EMC
> any US-based/originated IT security system

Perhaps, but the poster to which I replied said any US company, period. Could be he meant what you meant, but that's not what he said.
I'm kinda amazed that the support staff would risk their freedom for only 50-75k a year.
I thought they're about to canonize him at the end of the article :)

I really feel for the guy. He took the stand, went to jail - but he's far from a "prisoner of conscience".

Many high profile criminals use dislike of Mr Putin in the west as a safe getaway from Russia. They commonly claim that Putin is after them and they're the opposition.

One case in point is Andrey Borodin - former president of a major bank in Russia. He made multiple billion dollar loans to himself through affiliated fly-by-night firms in the offshore. When he was caught, he fled to the UK and suddenly turned opposition overnight. Eventually granted an asylum and lives happily in Oxfordshire in his newly acquired 140 million pounds mansion.

This happened in 2011. In the 90s, when Khodorkovsky operated, things were a lot less clean. He got nabbed. Many others found a way to avoid imprisonment. A lot of them now are "respectable" businessmen ranked high up in the Forbes list.
5 Architecture Tips from It's a Wonderful Life
Err, I think you should think through your argument logically a bit more...

You're using a "Think of the poor!" argument, just like they use "Think of the children!".

It's a complete strawman.

Put it this way - if they can program a Chrome extension - that means they probably have access to a reasonably modern computer.
And working internet access.
And they they're probably fairly educated.
And they had all these things for some time, since this isn't the sort of thing you can learn and hack up in 5 minutes, unless your name happens to be Jeff Dean.

So yes, I'd say that the above group probably does have access to $5.

We're not talking about illiterate villagers in Africa or rural China here with no running water and one OLPC for the village.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do something to help those people (Red Cross does awesome work here, btw, good people to donate to) - however, I somehow doubt that programming Chrome Extensions is at the top of those people's list of priorities.
Shares & Cliff Vesting: I liked this one: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/everything-you-need-to-kno...
I'm curious - what were Mission, Soma, and Lower Haight like in 2002?
‘Zero Dark Thirty’ leak investigators now target of leak probe
6) Don't forget the massive influx of boot leg celebrity memorabilia (mouse pads, pens, ipad covers with photographs of celebrities printed on them) that started about a month ago. They've clogged up the search results.

7) "Ebay Patents 10 Step Check Out" comes to mind. They're complicating a process that should really be a lot more simple.

8) Ebay has "dumb search results". If a seller has a "buy it now" listing for pens that have sold well at 100+ units, and another seller who has sold none, eBay is so stupid that it will put the best selling products in the middle or end of the search results. Where as Amazon puts the best sellers at the top.
First of all: One very viable option in science is to say that we don't know. If we don't know, we simply don't know, there is no point in making stuff up. That does not mean that people might not form hypotheses as a first step to eliminating that lack of knowledge, but as long as we don't have some serious evidence, it's just a hypothesis, not a claim of knowledge, and we continue to simply not know, even if we might be speculating wildly as to what the explanation might be, and in some cases it might be that we never will know, and that is perfectly fine.

In this context you should also note that simply positing an intelligent designer does not actually gain you anything. Explanations can be recognized by their ability to predict future observations. Positing an intelligent designer does not allow you to make any predictions whatsoever. There is nothing necessarily fundamentally wrong with positing an intelligent designer - it's just not an explanation - so, if you want to have an explanation, you are still on square one. You essentially just have given the thing you lack knowledge about a name, namely "intelligent designer", but you haven't gained any knowledge about it.

As for your sand castle example: Well, I don't really have a clue how a geologist or an archeologist would go about that, but presumably one could try and determine the structure of the castle, such as the form of the grains, and how they stick together, and find other instances of similar structure to try and figure out what kinds of processes might be able to form such a structure? But as always: When in doubt, we simply don't know.

Also, I smell the Boeing from the junkyard argument for creationism. In case I am right there, you urgently should educate yourself about what natural selection is and in particular how natural selection is not random, and how evolution without natural selection would not work.
Athletic Software Engineering: Initial Results
New Drexel Study Reveals Funders Behind the Climate Change Denial Effort
you'll probably get downvoted, but it made me laugh.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/apples-mac-mini...
This just completely ruins LastPass as an enterprise product, which seems to be a major revenue stream for them. (Unless LP enterprise allows admins the option to globally disable these insecure "features".)
Which is why I don't work for Google.
I use Keepass for this. The android port (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ke...) works perfectly fine for me, and it looks like there are a few ports for iOS as well. Keepass itself has, of course, long established itself as a solid password manager. And the cost is $0.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that Mikhail Khodorkovsky's trial was not politically motivated. (http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-european-court-khodorkov...).

This means Khodorkovsky was jailed for his economic crimes, not because of his anti-Putin stance.

Why Western media keeps referring to him as a 'political prisoner' and 'freed dissident' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25472250)?
The takeaway: Although imperfect, a properly used password manager can still have a large positive impact on an individual’s
security.
If you don't want to download the PDF: https://view-api.box.com/view/1cdbcb3a1a944ab1becab0506d11fb...
so as a digression, which language do you think has a runtime that controls memory access better than OS? I wonder can a language like Rust and Golang meet that criteria?
>> These ideas are all basically the first thing anyone comes up with when dreaming up a new IDE.

Indeed.

Use of icons was one of the topics in an April fools' joke from Bjarne Stroustrup [1, 2].

[1] http://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

[2] https://www.cct.lsu.edu/~hkaiser/spring_2012/exercises/week6...
Plastic is the new paper.
Blah blah blah, inflammatory headline, blah blah blah, it doesn't do this one thing I think it should, blah blah blah.
I should have put a smiley on that, then. While feeling trolled, I highly suspect this is just a rather amusing case of poor communication.

At no point was I trying to describe or discuss monads. That is something a response to me thought I was trying to do. When referring to "simulating" a system, I was referring to where the video refers to the process of reading "dead code" in a text editor. There is a large rant on monads in the video where the argument appears to be that the problem is strictly with the name. The reason given that it takes something understood, and hides it behind non-obvious names. I extrapolated this to be that it makes the program and the idea "hard to simulate" for the coder reading the code.
> No NSA employee should be chair of an encryption-related working group.

This makes me think: What is the basis of trusting any organization or person not to have their own agenda, possibly contrary to the group’s ostensible agenda?

The basis is this: We have a tacit assumption that all participants have realized that better standards (and strong crypto, more secure systems) will lead to the betterment of all. This is the default assumption.

However, now that the U.S. government, and the NSA and its collaborators in particular, have been shown to explicitly not have this goal – in fact, their goal has been to strive for less secure systems and more difficult standards ­– what should be done? The logical thing to do is to exclude any person or organization revealed to have an agenda explicitly contrary to the group.

The same argument could be made (and has been made many times in the past) for Microsoft to be excluded from any and all standardization committees like ISO, IEEE, IETF, etc. for the same reason – their repeated practice of Embrace, Extend & Extinguish among other things shows them to have an agenda contrary to the group, and their participation would therefore be a detriment, not an asset.
Can somebody identify just exactly what the "security implications of allowing root access" are? Are we referring to unrestricted escalation with sudo by an unprivileged user/app?

CyanogenMod has never allowed sudo without confirming it with a UI, or only allowed it for a few days back when it launched.
You're not wrong about the concerns and uncertainty, but isn't SRP explicitly licensed for free use in Internet standards?
The Chinese government has the Windows source code for a decade. Microsoft's press release: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2003/feb03/02-28gs...
Because he did not receive a fair trial. It's quite obvious that he was jailed for reasons that have little to do with serving justice
So, I suck. I couldn't let go of any of my precious precious hoarded domains, so I bought a new one for the occasion.
News Corp Makes Social-Media Push: Acquires Storyful for $25 Million
Read the article - each attack it mentions only applies to browser-integrated ones.

If instead you mean "browser-integrated" as in the default "remember my password", well, those are not what this paper discusses and are generally better, though they are still not as desirable as a standalone less-privileged manager.

The idea that the password manager should be separate is practically common sense. Browsers provide more surface are for attack. Browsers are made to share content and work with network data. Ideally, your password manager should never touch the network ever. It has no need to.
Excellent points :) I always heard that the reason for undefined behaviour in C was to allow for certain operations to be implemented in a way that was faster for a given platform. Guess I was wrong.

I do disagree regarding comparing the JVM to Quemu though. A PPC binary can't be said to be portable when you're emulating the CPU that it was meant to run on. I do understand the point you're making though, we just happen to disagree.
You follow this logic consistently and pretty soon you're blaming NSA for bad weather.
Why less able?
You seem to care about this a lot more, and I'm honestly ignorant about these issues. But I'd just add that nearly every casual computer user is running some unwanted extension, toolbar, DNS hijacker, or worse. For whatever reason, it seems like this shit software ends up on a lot of computers through extensions

Wouldn't Google's decision this help to eliminate that problem?
I find tptacek's remarks to be enjoyable, generally speaking. In regards to crypto, I value his opinion highly, especially compared to my own novice opinion.

That said, I seldom trust anything I cannot verify. In matter s of crypto, that often means that I accept some things as magically working, and accept that the magic could wear off at any minute. Same thing with CPUs. I know generally how they work, and understand bitwise logic, but for the most part, they're just magic boxes that I've got enough experience with to have an expectation of.

In matters of the government, the fault I find with tptacek's arguments (and I hadn't even realized that it was a thing until this thread, but now I'm caught up) is that I think it is naive to trust the government. The federal government is something that our founding fathers encouraged us to be suspicious of. They specifically prescribed that, in order for our democracy to thrive, that we should be ever vigilant in regards to those we entrust with power.

Assuming good faith on the part of the NSA is naive, whether or not they're acting scandalously. Assuming good faith on the part of any politician is naive.

That isn't to suggest that we should never trust anything the government does, but if there's ever the potential for abuse, we should expect that potential to be abused at some point. If there's a loophole that could be exploited in any way, we should expect that it will be.

This diatribe isn't really directed at this comment, per se, but at your "have to trust __something__" comment, which I completely agree with as a generality. As humans, we routinely put trust into a great deal of people and things all the time, but I disagree that a government, even a pristine, flawless, immaculate government, is deserving of that trust, and it is our duty as citizens to thoroughly distrust it.
I'd say the original comment by lawnchair_larry comes off as a bit gauche... as if the XKCD "someone is wrong on the internet!" guy came here to post. I never saw the deleted comment, but it seems that after the initial frustration wore off, Thomas thought the better of it.

I've had my disagreements with some of Thomas' positions, including several over crypto/politics stories like this, but if you run out like that to play "gotcha!" it just doesn't feel right.
god bless the humanities
Uh, I think pretty much all of it is overreach. The FISA 215 metadata stuff was particularly bad.

The only stuff that doesn't upset me is genuine foreign intelligence. The NSA can listen in on the Israelis as much as they want, as far as I'm concerned; the Israelis sure as shit listen to us.
Is Vancouver the Bitcoin capital of Canada?
I can't vouch for whether or not that is what he was saying, but if so, it's pretty likely to be true. People with families, right or wrong, tend to place the security of their family's future above their own political beliefs.

Snowden's actions were brave, regardless of his family status, and I don't wish to downplay that even one iota, but yes, if he had a wife and three kids, it likely would have made his actions even more of a longshot.
"Why would people do this? What did us Big Data geeks do to deserve this? Don't they know we're building a better world?"

You guys have no idea, do you? You're just literally oblivious. Anyone as smart as you who remains oblivious is doing it by choice, so there's no point in trying to educate.

The best approach is a direct one. If you won't do the right thing because of your conscience, do the right thing because you're tired of being hassled, because you're tired of worrying what people will do if they find out who you serve.

You can protect Google, but Google can't protect you.
White House: NSA and Cyber Command to stay under one boss

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/white-house-nsa-a...
As an aside, this isn't as 'hi-tech' but with a paper plate, styrofoam bowl, sheet of paper and a magnet you can make a speaker, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awef78YtWmc#t=8s

It's just a neat thing to do during a break, or if you need a science project.
>> Find your typical customer's main objection.
Nuke it.

Interesting post with a lot of good advice based on the philosophy described above.

I also think that this sales philosophy should have a qualifier around it.

It is important for any salesperson to seriously consider the (potential) customer's objection objectively. Nuking the objection shouldn't be the primary goal and it shouldn't come at the expense of the customer's interests.

In some cases, it is quite likely that the customer's objection isn't something that must be nuked. In fact, I'd even go further and say that (in some cases) a good salesperson should think of potential reasons why a product may be inappropriate (e.g. little value, too risky, too expensive etc.) for a certain customer. IOW in some circumstances, walking away from a sale (based on a customer's objection) might be the right thing to do.
One would hope that two side effects of this plot would be

1) Increasing wages in SV to attract and retain talent.

2) Medium-to-large-scale exodus of impressionable folks, reducing pressure on apartment rentals and bringing the rental market back to within screaming distance of sane prices.
Reaction-wheel cube that balances and walks on its edges and corners
What the fuck? Maybe this is too much of an immediate response for me, but why the fuck would you contact the police? Do the police seem like they take care of people like him well? Shit I feel bad for him, the one guy he thought he could trust just snitched on him, even if he was crazy. Must have been hell to undergo that. Maybe you should have posted to a forum about how to help him first, as opposed to helping? Now the police thinks he is harassing random people and has a legal trail just in case they want to discriminate against him.