skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised I have to spell this out to someone who writes software for a living, but about 50,000 people total go to Burning Man every year, a subset of which are software engineers. There are something like 500,000 software developers in the country. If fully half of Burning Man's attendees were practicing software developers that would still only be 5% of all developers (of course, nowhere near half of Burning Man attendees are practicing software developers).

Meanwhile, 40% of Americans regularly attend church (FWIW: I am not one of them, though I am sort of idly Catholic). If developers were 1/4th as likely to regularly attend church as other Americans (a stretch, though it might not seem that way if all the developers you know are San Francisco twentysomethings, but I'll stipulate that it's possible) than, meeting a random software developer on the street, you are talking to someone who is twice as likely to attend church as burning man.
A Fish For Our Time (the coelacanth)
I come from a rather unstable and violent corner of the world, and I've met plenty of psychopaths growing up. I have a hypothesis that early childhood traumas and violent environment can trigger the development of psychopathic tendencies, but I'm not entirely sure how much role does genetics play in this process.

Some of the commenters on this topic seem to ascribe superhuman rationality and brainpower to psychopaths. I don't think that's a correct way to look at it. They can be very smart, but they suffer from the same set of biases and blind spots and Dunning-Kruger type of phenomena as other people. I think the defining characteristic is the complete lack of empathy and the willingness and ability to manipulate people (practicing the skill from early childhood, hence very good at it).

I was just looking up one of the smartest and most pronounced psychopaths I've met in recent years. Apparently he got his MBA and started an offshore private equity fund, seems to be doing well for himself. The guy had monumental talent for manipulating people. I wonder how far will he go before people catch on to his true nature...
I don't think the solution was "obvious" until you mentioned it. What you suggest might not be perfect (I'm not qualified to judge that) but it's certainly a very good idea.
A large number of people who know what they are talking about have stated to you in the clearest terms possible that when it comes to cryptography and security systems, it is appropriate to place the burden of proof on the creators. It isn't an opinion, its a fact agreed on by every competent security practitioner on the planet. If you are going to continue to ignore this, no one is going to take anything you say about cryptography seriously.

Its not about dogma, its about safety. The fact that you fail to understand that is a testament to your inability to contribute to a meaningful conversation about security.
What's your reasoning for why FB is an awful product? I'm curious.
Latest NSA Leaks Point Finger At UK Facility
Even interns had this access.
A decent overview why Bitcoin is important
You really think this makes the situation sound better for the protesters? "They were parked illegally"? So get the city to write them a fucking parking ticket. I'm sure Oakland could use the revenue.
Bitcoin's only interesting for laughing at the true believers and shaking one's damn head at all the scams.
Singaporean government bureaucracy effectively closes news site
The counterpoint to this, in the enterprise world, is to promise the customer the moon, then turn around and tell the developers to make it happen before the sale process completes.
Hacker News right here, everybody.
That's exactly the problem we have at https://commando.io/

No one wants to give us SSH keys to their server. So we have a great product but it's very hard to sell.
Four months ago, Bret Victor published his "Future of Programming" Talk. The most inspiring part to me was his 'prediction' of discarding brittle api`s for systems that negotiate a communication protocol dynamically. (Toy example: modem filter negotiation) http://vimeo.com/71278954 Relevant explanation @ 13:30-16:30.
Google Translate uses English as an intermediate language
Just because there's no autofill doesn't mean you don't have a password manager.
How do you know?

Even if you're right, Airbus does.
>Don't be a fool.

Classy.

>You would let your children go hungry and live a worse life

No. Read what I wrote. The words are right there.

If the choice is "have children and commit evil to feed them" and "don't have children and don't commit evil", I choose the former. As should, I think, any right-thinking person.

The question is probabilistic. What are the chances that the former happens? What are the chances that the latter happens?

Choose accordingly.

The question is also systemic. There exists the possibility that forces larger than the individual have decided to normalize the nuclear family (and also romanticize the vision of having said family) in order to serve evil ends. What is the probability that that is the case? As time goes on, it looks far more probable than we once thought. People like you think families are in themselves beautiful. Any means justify the ends of preserving them. Seems like an excellent tool for keeping a population right where you want them.

Look up the history of the nuclear family. Notice it didn't exist pre-industrialization. Why's that?

You're taking humans -> have children for granted. I'm arguing against that dogma. Because as paradoxical as it may sound, it is trite dogma at this point in wealthy societies. We don't need these additional people, we don't need this extravagant life. It's not a matter of survival anymore. So what is it all accomplishing? What's the end?

>Having a family can be a beautiful thing.

For my morality, concerns of beauty don't trump concerns of humanity. If my having children perpetuates a cycle of exploitation, murder, pain, suffering, etc. etc. etc, then I don't have children. Regardless of how "beautiful" my experience of those children may be. It really is that simple.

And if a (wo)man tells me "I just did it to feed my kids" after committing some reprehensible act, I sympathize, because (s)he made a terrible decision in having children to start with. But I still condemn him/her.
LaunchKey: Anonymous Multi-Factor Authentication Platform
The article said in a narrow sense that the charges on their own had a healthy foundation. It is very clear that the decision to prosecute a tax violation in a tax code designed to force businesses to skirt the law to remain competitive was politically motivated.

The business environment is why there have been massive amounts of capital outflows in recent years. Everyone understands the game being played here, you get to play by Putin's rule are you get your toys taken away at the minimum or get sent to a siberian penal colony.
HTML email is an abomination, but...

If a form doesn't have a submit action, what's the point of the form?

If you have HTML and CSS, why not have forms?
How does this get so many upvotes? Besides being rather straightforward logic, it's taught in surely every comp sci 101 course.
"It's not like everything breaks just because the user has a Sony phone."

Actually, recent experience developing for Android tells me it does. Can't tell you how many times I've had the app behave dramatically differently or crash on different devices. Even using a Nexus One as your baseline doesn't help. And if you work with the camera… welcome to hell. The Support Library is not a cure all.
Read the indictment. Nacchio was convicted along with several other executives of running a pump and dump scam.

Despite being specifically prohibited from trading based on insider information, Nacchio first became aware that their earnings guidance was "a huge stretch", that to meet them would involve growing revenue from a line of business that had been failing to grow revenue and that had actually been underperforming that year, that they had (apparently) lost important contracts, and that it had become essentially impossible for them to hit their numbers. Then, after learning all that, but before any of it was disclosed to investors, Nacchio dumped over $100MM worth of his stock.

Nacchio controlled the earnings targets for Qwest. He set them dishonestly high and allowed them to be released to the public over the objections of many of his own executives. The stock performed as a result. Then, when it became obvious that the public would soon learn that those projections were impossible to meet, he sold his stock for $100MM.

Nacchio went down within a year of Enron and just a few years after Worldcom. It was the end of an era in which the big accounting firms had conspired with large corporations to swindle the public out of billions of dollars. Nacchio was a crook, not a Fourth Amendment hero.

Are the executives at JPMC crooks? I don't know. If they are, which is not outside the realm of possibility, they should go down too. But what JPMC people do has nothing at all to do with the fact that Qwest's executives defrauded the public to the tune of over $100MM.
That's what a Facebook employee told me last month.

For similar stories: Katherine Losse, Facebook employee #51, wrote a biography [1] that includes details about early days when the master password was "Chuck Norris". And this 2010 interview [2] with an "anonymous Facebook employee" (for what that's worth :) also describes how engineers can access user data.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230489870...

[2] http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-interne...
I think that most people realized this upon reading your other comment.

You are either entirely unfamiliar with cryptography or you misunderstand a great deal of what you think you do know.
Don't stick around until the text fades out; there's nothing more.
Asymmetric warfare with multiple adversaries doesn't work that way. For example, Stuxnet did not make U.S power plants safe from malicious attackers. I recommend reading Ralph Langner's op-ed in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/04/do-cyberatta...
Wealth, on a scale of being in the single digits percentage-wise, often has a lot to do with skill. Some skills, such as empire building, get you there faster than others. See Bill Gates as an example. First he built a tech empire, then a charitable empire. The man is very good at enacting world wide change.

Secondly, 5% producing 99% sounds very reasonable. If you ever have the misfortune of having to work with code written by contracted companies, you would realize a LOT of code is slapped together with no care at all. The average person contributing to open source or participating on hacker news cares. The average person coding is looking for a paycheck, and doesn't give a single damn.
>No conspiracy theory requried

Conspiracy doesn't mean aliens and Disney being frozen.

It just means people/organisations doing something together in secret.

What the NSA and partners have done is very much a conspiracy -- by definition.

As the great writer Gore Vidal once put it, "Americans have been trained by media to go into Pavlovian giggles at the mention of 'conspiracy' because for an American to believe in a conspiracy he must also believe in flying saucers or, craziest of all, that more than one person was involved in the JFK murder."
Not if you're a 800-pound gorilla against 30kg monkeys...

Then offense is just offence.
As hire As, Bs hire Cs. A quip, but Ive certainly seen it in practice. My personal interpretation is that the best performers seek to be challenge themselves. Others, who may not strive or lack confidence etc, end up hiring those who are at or below their level.
What an intelligent argument, why didn't you post it under your real account?
Whereas repeated pro-NSA apologies are? How many people would approve of them and how would they respond to them, if the person making them wasn't also all powerful in a forum?
It changes a person, but in a wrong direction, i think.
I think Dr. Evil was at the bargaining table
I'm happy to hate on Bank of America, but they've caught multiple fraudulent charges for me too. Good for them!
> I actually prefer your second form: return as soon as
> you know you are done in the function/method -- if
> nothing more can be done, then don't pretend to do
> any more.

The first form actually does that. As soon as one if condition fails, the code falls through down to the bottom and returns. This is most impressive in the initialization/identification phase (see sdio_open() [1]) because that has like a dozen commands it has to get through successfully. By collapsing this way it allows for common cleanup, and if the cleanup requirements change you only have to change it in one place.

The effect of the first form (in C) is to collapse all of the if's "else" clauses into a single one at the bottom.

As for finding the other end of an off screen if clause, I agree with you, that it is a crutch to use the 'find matching' command in the editor with the open brace. The interesting about this problem is that it is driven by the SDIO spec, which was driven by a strict requirement of backwards compatibility, which results in very carefully crafted command / response / flow options.

This discussion has been helpful for me as at some point I am going to have to describe this to people new to, or possibly unfamiliar with, programming which should be interesting.

[1] https://github.com/ChuckM/stm32f4-sdio-driver/blob/master/sd...
Clearly you haven't been to many comp sci 101 courses.
Have you seen the size of the UCSF shuttle buses? They are tiny compared to the tourist coach sized google buses. Also they don't just take UCSF staff and students, they also take patients.

Googlers can take the Caltrain to Mountainview and hop on the free shuttle buses which drop them off at their campus. Why don't they do that?

Or since Google has an office in San Francisco here's a better idea - let people who live in San Francisco work from that office, and people who live outside work at Mountainview.
I would quibble with even that, as those "Google Apps packages" are often themselves from sketchy sources... but even so, being some unofficial process done by a user is not really relevant from the perspective of a shipping device purchased through a carrier...
Oops: "gives [compared to] all other countries an unfair advantage".
Probably internal messages where they discussed or sold each other hacked RDP or something to use on top of a Tor exit for trading coins or whatever. Maybe conspired to hire a shady person to go after competition, who knows
The author references the work of Barbara Frederickson, a psychologist who had a very popular theory on "Positivity Ratios", a theory that was in part justified by misuse of differential equations from fluid dynamics, and was thoroughly debunked in "The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking: The Critical Positivity Ratio" [1].

There have been several good summaries of this paper and the work that led up to it over the past few months (my favorite being this [2] one).

I'd take this author's view with a grain of salt (or something stronger).

[1] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/complex_dynamics_final_clea...

[2] http://narrative.ly/pieces-of-mind/nick-brown-smelled-bull/
This sounds fantastic, and my first reaction was "don't I need a password on LaunchKey in order to unpair my device?" So I checked it out, and they only use your username and e-mail.

Unfortunately, I can't download the app for WP7, so can't check for myself how it works, but my next step is to wonder if I can take somebodies phone, which has their e-mail, unpair their devices and change the notification e-mail address?

Either way, I'm really excited about the potential of this.
Oh, and absolutely LOVE your logo.
>I fail to see the benefit of building a jvm to run in a javascript engine.

That's because you picked a very specific example to suit your argument.

How about seing the benefit of building games to run in the browser with near native speed? Or something like Mathematica? Or an image editor, etc etc...
The killer feature to me would be the ability to load up one time card numbers on a device like coin (or something similar). Virtual card numbers work great online, but don't seem to fill a similar purpose offline.
a) "useless" should be "economically useless" -- I myself majored in Political Science and it taught me a lot of valuable things, but it would be hard to earn a living on them.

b) Nothing's inherently wrong with Burners or their culture. Those traits listed are singled out because they (to me) uniquely identify a group which floats by on privilege while simultaneously claiming to be deep in the struggle of poverty. Almost by definition, anyone who can skip work for a week in summer and spend $300 on a BM ticket (plus associated costs) is not impoverished. To the extent that they are poor, I submit to you that they elect it, and thus to claim that they are victims of the same forces which keep the working poor down is ludicrous.

I am actually fairly liberal on these issues. What I resent here is the employment of race and class language to dress up what this really is: one group of overprivileged slackers angry that they now are on the receiving end of a gentrification wave, when they rode in on exactly such a wave!

The complete denial of their own privileged status, the pretension that they are in solidarity with the actual poor and disadvantaged (who are largely peaceful and hard-working) -- that's what gets to me. Nothing specific against Burners or the humanities.
What if the powers that be decide to "classify" the results/reports? I would guess that would be a big legal hurdle. But if things get to that point, a copy the report would probably show up on wikileaks... I guess?
If the commute is annoying, move closer to work. Don't come up with a solution which is illegal.

But oh, I forget, this fits right in with Google's approach to doing business, from whether it's scanning books or slurping up wifi data: break laws first, deal with consequences later.
"we have a great product but it's very hard to sell" - how can that be true. If it's a great product it would sell.

Obviously nobody in their right mind would hand over their ssh keys to you.

Also the name probably puts some people off. I also don't see any need for what the product does.

"Never type the same commands into multiple terminal windows again!" - I can easily do that already with ssh (or clusterSSH) - I don't want a UI for server commands, I want to script this stuff. When you analyze a little deeper, I think you'll see why the product isn't selling. I hope you are able to make a go of it, but my gut instinct tells me that dashboards and apps like yours are too hard to make into anything substantial.
Sure. What is the problem for residents? In my experience, cities are basically vehicle chaos from 6AM until 11PM. Taxis unload in the bike lane. Black cars block the street waiting for their flaky passenger. UPS trucks, parked six-abreast, unload Amazon Prime packages. Traffic blocks the intersection as the light turns red, and much honking ensues. Crazy homeless guy pushes his cart of possessions the wrong way down the bike lane.

Certainly, having big buses pulling in and out of traffic doesn't help speed up the flow of traffic at that precise instant in time. But the situation was already pretty bad, and if you're taking hundreds of individual cars off the road, that's a step in the right direction.

(Public transit won't work because the jobs are all in the Middle Of Fucking Nowhere. Try walking to the Google campus some time. It's in the middle of a swamp, separated from the mainland by a jam-packed freeway.)

So I'm not sure what the solution is. Move Google to San Francisco? Sure. But then the protesters are going to complain about how they watched 5 N trains go by without stopping because they're full. San Francisco was never designed to be "the big city" (that's San Jose, right?), it organically grew. People liked it a lot, they moved there, and now there are too many people that want to live there, and not enough space for them. That's a problem, but it sounds like a problem that can only be solved by not wanting to live there.
Whenever I read about this, I wonder at what point it's worth changing your name. Your name is kind of a weird thing, even though it seems like such an ingrained part of you, you can legally change it to something that would freakonomically make you better off.
I for one really appreciate your effort and dedication. I know it's a trivial or even frivolous pursuit but having wondered the same thing, I'm glad to have the "issue" resolved. Now time for a Real Genius / Wargames double feature.
That's not how classification works.
Size is not diversity, nor does it prevent shared interests.
It's also not how research works. For something to be restrained from publication, the government needs to know it exists. But with new research results, they can't know what to restrain until it's too late.

They could try passing a law outlawing security research, but: good luck with that.
Does the authors comment "are so many doctor Dans simply because Dan is a common name", not opposed to the methodology used "men with unusual names, the study found, were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names."

In the first study, they weren't looking at the number of "Doctor Dans", they were looking at a subset of people and placing them all along a graph and watching for trends in performance not based on a name, but based on the popularity of the name. These strike me as different things, but I'm no expert in these (or any) type of study.
"People have been commuting by car from San Francisco to Mountain View and Santa Clara since the dotcom bubble."

I'm sure that some people were doing that. You can find people who will tolerate anything. The point is, the buses shift the market by making that kind of commute appealing on a large scale.

"by paying employees who own and maintain property in Oakland, Google is in fact providing part of the tax base for Oakland. Every other city in the country understands this and their mayors and city councils practically puke on their shoes trying to get big employers to move in."

Red herring. Again, the increased property taxes those tech employees are paying (assuming they're not just renting from owners who are all protected from tax increases by Prop 8, but I digress...) isn't offsetting the real cost-of-living increases experienced by the people living in Oakland.

Said another way: your theoretical, twice-removed tax-base gains aren't making the housing cheaper, or the poor people richer in Oakland.
That is disasterous. That logic is why Chaimberlain allowed Hitler to get more and more and more power. ("Surely they'll agree to peace if we just let them have Poland.")

It is also why my generation (I'm 27) will eventually have to fight a nuclear war that pits Iran against Israel and possibly the US.

That war will potentially kill millions. And whose fault will it be? Obama's and Bush's. They will (if history is just and we don't change course) go down in history as potentially making mistakes that killed millions, just as Stalin and Hitler did.

Or we could insist now (or, ideally, a few years ago) that Iran not develop nuclear weapons capability, if necessary fighting a minor tactical war to stop them.

(There is NO reason to have Vietnam IV, where Afghanistan and Iraq are Vietnam II and III. Except of course socialism for defense contractors and altruism as we throw away trillions "re-building" the latter two countries.)
Dart is for sure coming to Android?
A while back I noticed this....
https://api.dartlang.org/docs/channels/stable/latest/dart_io/Platform.html#isAndroid

And then today on Google+ I saw this...
https://code.google.com/p/dart/wiki/Android

With Chrome being the default stock browser on Android...I get a strong feeling we'll soon be seeing Android API's ported over to Dart.