skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those ideas would both lose valuable aspects of the buses.

Uber/Lyft/cars would have a much bigger impact on traffic on 101, which is already terrible congested during rush hour. The buses help to minimize the impact of commuters.

Public commuter options eliminate some of the convenience for two reasons. First, Google has a single destination for everyone which reduces commute times. As you increase the number of destinations, you increase the possible routes exponentially, making it much less feasible to have direct routes everywhere. Second, you can't do confidential work when on public transportation. So you would be much more limited in what you can accomplish during the commute.
The article was trivial. I upvoted because I learned about Karnaugh maps in the discussion.
The NIH, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a number of other major funders of science both in the U.S. and U.K. already require papers funded with their money to be open access after 12 months.

The problem is that whether or not a paper is Open Access, "Data is available on request from the author" may be an undocumented bit of spaghetti code, may be stored on a Zip disk around here somewhere I'm sure, or may just be lost.

Regulating "You must make your data accessible, and maintain it well" is much harder to implement, and much harder to check. Some grants now have sections describing what will happen to the data etc., but right now there really is very little reason beyond their own personal desire for researchers to maintain good quality software and data repositories.
The annual meeting of the hacker scene: Chaos Communication Congress
Well, yes, an unlocked/unlockable bootloader is not the same as a rooted phone, that's correct. But the former often leads to the latter: for example, the process of rooting a Nexus phone involves flashing a new recovery system, which takes advantage of the unlocked bootloader.

If you don't have an unlocked bootloader, you have to resort to exploits and other flaws in the system. Releasing a phone with an unlockable bootloader is opening a door to rooting and many "unauthorized" modifications.

That's what I mean they're the same in practical terms.
Who cares - the OP, perhaps?

I have no way of knowing whether cases like that aren't the ones he's referring to.

Noone (including yourself) has come up with any examples yet.
Point 2 is well-taken. This is only my opinion and observation. Not factual in the sense that it draws on empiral measurements for its validity.
This seems like a glass half empty / half full situation. "Why The Web Won't Be Nirvana" got a lot wrong, true, but it also got a lot right. His prediction of books not being sold on the web was incorrect, but his explanation of why (cold, less fun at the beach) still applies. Yes, the Eternal September happened, but it wasn't as bad as some feared. I haven't read Silicon Snake Oil but I did read the original The Road Ahead. Silicon Snake Oil can't be much worse than that, can it?

So... Many years ago my Tek 7904 oscilloscope fried itself. Again. I realized I just don't have the time to keep it limping along. I bought a soulless DSO then posted a Craigslist ad for my whole setup (12+ plugins including 7CT1N, probes, cart, ...) at an absurdly cheap price. This machine that I had been trusting for a decade, it had to go. Quick, because this was depressing.

One person responded to the first ad. Cliff complimented the squigglescope and chatted about how great these old tools can be and how he uses them in high school classes because the new stuff just doesn't teach as well. He said he couldn't do anything about mine but offered some suggestions and that he'd keep an eye out for a suitable home.

That made my day.

The scope sold second try. Hope it's fixed and keeping someone's bench warm somewhere. No doubt Cliff is still resisting technology and doing his part to make the world a more welcoming place.
Cyanogen Inc.'s business model is to license an improved version of Android to phone manufactures who want something better than what their competitors have; large manufactures do a bunch of customizations themselves (MotoBlur, TouchWiz, HTC Sense), but smaller manufactures are often left with "what you get from Android". However, to get the Play Store, as well as other first-part Google apps, a device has to pass Google's strict compliance tests. This is thereby Cyanogen's first customer, and a demonstration that their model is not fundamentally flawed (Google didn't deny the phone during certification testing did to some weird changes CyanogenMod has accumulated over the years, and a manufacturer wanted their product enough to get all the way through that process). If you were trying to value the company, I'd say a lot of the risks of their business model just got removed: they should be worth a ton more today than they were yesterday.
Why Apple's Suburban Spaceship Could Lose the War for Tech Talent
Turn a Rails controller into a Single Page Application
Events can be observed. Causation is not an event, its a relationship between events which cannot be observed, only inferred

Hmm, I may be improperly using the word "cause" here because of the connotation of the word causality. I see what you are saying, I probably am using "cause" & "produces" interchangeably.

Can I set up an an example for you to translate into how we arrive at knowledge?

Let's say we both stumble upon a giant multi-level sandcastle on the beach. For the sake of this thought experiment, assume we never saw the creation of this sandcastle, nor can we observe any other sandcastles like it being caused into existence (i.e. it was there long before we existed, and we'll never observe one being created again)

Me, in my irrational Christian ways would use faith to say "well, I've never come across one of these before, but I would posit an intelligent designer caused the existence of that sandcastle". You, with your rational and logical models of scientific inference, would take all sorts of measurements and gather the available present evidence and extrapolate that data deep into the past. Given the benefit of time, you would argue the complex movements of the ocean against the rocks and beach likely formed the sandcastle in a slow process over millions of years.

After all, the only present observable evidence we have is the ocean, the waves, the rocks, the sand (and all those intertwined processes), so it's clearly the only way we can arrive at a cause, right?
He deleted, i.e. retracted it. In full. To harp on about it instead of talking about the story kinda sucks. We're talking about mass surveillance and everything being recorded, and look at what we are doing. Repeat after me: every day is a new day.
Cliff Stoll is a fantastic guy: warm, creative, super genius smart, and a truly giving human being.

Makes fantastic Klein bottles too.
How attached cats are to their owners? (Psych study)
> Well even after the ninja edits, your comment still reeks of overclass condescension, using meaningless feel-words ("very good at their jobs", "measured, professional understanding"), essentially saying , "trust them, pleb, they know better than you".

You don't think it might be an allusion to the American Supreme Court's habit of legislating how they personally feel rather than with any serious basis in fact or precedence? Chill.
> And finally, the most exciting news: we've signed a first contract with iSEC partners to evaluate large portions of the Windows software and bootloader code. This review will begin in January.

That's huge. I assume you're not referring to having access to the Windows source code, though.

Here's a crazy idea. After the whole NSA stuff, many governments are going to require Microsoft to give them access to the source code, if they want them to continue using it, or buy the new versions of Windows. Any chance you could contact such a government, to allow you to do the audit on their behalf, or to work together with them on it?

That would be a win-win for everyone. They get a team of experts to review the Windows code base, and you get to know everything about Windows. They probably won't be very eager to get Americans to do this for them, though, so make sure you flaunt all of your credentials.
If it helps, I'd pay good money to have a front row seat if they had a section right next to the section where all the folks who can't wrap their brains around not talking for 3 hours are forced to all sit and drive each other insane.
You're completely missing the point. Unless your position is that if people want a safe, decent job they shouldn't chose to be transexual. But if that's your position, I have a much bigger problem with that.
> Unpack the extension, too? This process probably reduced the external extension installations by 100x, while they can still pretend that you can still technically install external extensions.

Er, no, they say you can't, except for development (and the method that you can use, whether or not you are actualyl doing development, has always been the preferred method for development.) They aren't pretending that they making things available to Windows users, they are saying straight-up that, outside of development, Windows users cannot use non-Web Store Chrome Apps.

Heck, even before they disabled the old, less onerous manual method, Chrome pretended that you couldn't -- if you tried to install extensions directly from the web without setting a command-line flag, Chrome would just tell you that you couldn't install extensions except from the Web Store (you could then drag the downloaded extension to the extensions page and it would install, but Chrome did everything to hide it from you.)

> First off, I think their original excuse was BS, because I very much doubt more than a marginal number of users were affected by malicious extensions this way.

I'm glad you think that. Is there any reason you'd care to share why anyone else should believe it?

> And second, there has to be a balance between what's safe by default, and what level of freedom/flexibility you have.

Any position you choose on the continuum is a balance between those things.

> If that "freedom" is hidden away in 10 layers of submenus, then might as well kill it for good, because it's not going to help anyone.

I think the flexibility retained for developers helps exactly the people it is designed to help.
49ers...
You'll Never Guess Where This FBI Agent Left a Secret Interrogation Manual
no, my frame of reference is all the talks, workshops, and presentations i've attended, papers i've read, and real code i've seen and worked with.

setting a single scalar argument requires no extra dereferencing in the kernel. if you're setting an array of values, then you'd need to dereference (via array indexing), but you'd need to do that in CUDA too. besides, even if you did have to dereference it, writing it into a private variable would save future dereferences, and even a basic optimising compiler would do this by default.

and you talk about persistent global state as if you'd want that. global variables (in any language) are generally considered bad practise.

OpenCL 2.0 has dynamic parallelism, too.

.. are you being serious? maybe monopoly means something different to me? exactly, how many brands of GPU have official support for CUDA? yes, CUDA came before OpenCL, and nvidia are (still) a part of "the committee" - khronos. but it was apple that created OpenCL, handing it to khronos after they came up with 1.0.

that said, it was neither apple or nvidia, that came up with the idea of compute on the GPU. BrookGPU is the real project that kick started GPGPU.

i hate to nit-pick, but the Titan is kepler, not fermi. architecture output of nvcc? i don't even know what you mean. for the codes in which i've written both OpenCL and CUDA, the performance difference is almost measurement noise.

my complaint of using CUDA in rust is as follows - rust is an open language, being created by an "open source" company. it makes absolutely no sense to me, that a company with free software principles should make their language dependent on a specific vendor. i don't think that's an outlandish complaint. imagine if rust only compiled for intel CPUs. or only worked in windows.
yup, zvi-kohavi is a good text...
You're wrong on points 5 and 6. Dual_EC_DRBG is not "unsafe" per se; it's just that the constants chosen could be precalculated so as to allow easier prediction of the resulting random numbers. This doesn't mean that the numbers the constant was calculated from are easily calculable by an attacker.
What about things extensions Tampermonkey, are those at risk by this?
For security, verified chrome store is better than someone's self-host. And many users might just download random add-ons and think they are legit when they are not. I am not saying all chrome store apps are safe, but when shit goes wrong it is Google's responsibility to take it down from spreading and mitigate the issue.

For openness, no, of course not.
I imagine that, like most highly educated people, the people making these decisions do not think that the impact of Google employees on rent is their concern.

This is because in a free market, housing is like any other good. Some people happen to be particularly affected when competition drives up the price of a given good. But it is not for individuals to try to mitigate this effect. The most efficient and fair outcome is for the government to redistribute money, and for the poor to spend their money however they feel is best.

This is not libertarianism, it is basic economic theory that is shared by moderates on the left and right.

So Google has no moral obligation, or indeed any good reason, to discourage their workers from living in SF.
I read his books when I was young and impressionable, and impress upon me they did. Wrong or not, I think his alternative perspectives about technology are more than healthy. For all the good, there's definitely a lot of snake oil out there, and there's definitely a lot of good in enjoying life's simple things: friendships, food, gardening, music.

Negroponte is a freak of nature (a compliment). I read an older book of his recently, and he was incredibly accurate about so many predictions. Interesting to go back and read predictions (both the wrong ones and the right ones) and try to understand the frame of mind that those with insight possess. Steve Jobs (by way of Wayne Gretzky) called it "skating to where the puck is going to be". Paul Allen called it "reading the chips" (like "reading the tea-leaves", you could say).

Anyway, it's really worth reading Stoll's books. They're entertaining, well-written, and are a nice counter-balance to the hype we ingest on a daily basis.
I did not know about React. It looks to be like the solution I need for one of my personal projects. In your experience, how does a React code base evolve as it grows? I've bumped into other libraries and frameworks that look simple at first, but then evolve into a big mess.

I ventured into the careers area of the site. The computer vision engineering position caught my attention. Do you mind talking about what the position entails? The description is rather vague.
>>People like Snowden are rare.

In all honesty, Snowden is a 30 year old single dude, and as far as I know, he doesn't have kids. Do you think he would have done what he did if he had a family to look after?

In my opinion a person's first responsibility is to their family. So yeah, if you're married (like these executives probably are) and you're facing the choice between option A and option B, you should absolutely pick option A.
Show HN: I crafted the simplest way to Gift Bitcoin this Christmas
Show HN: I crafted the simplest way to Gift Bitcoin this Christmas

The link is: www.spreadthecoin.com

For the past two weeks, I have been building a Bitcoin Christmas(/Happy Holidays) Card company --> and it has just launched (today) at www.spreadthecoin.com . The "Certificate" makes it easy for Bitcoiners to give their friends and family their first Bitcoin (with suggestions on how to spend/use it)! It is meant to play-well with home-printers and can suffice as a last-minute gift idea. I think that Christmas morning/Hanukkah is an excellent opportunity to gift coins to others! :) This is more of a Bitcoin advocacy idea and (purposefully) does not implement a Wallet-type service.

We do not take a percentage of anything, it's simply run on donations. Tis' the season, right?

Speaking of which --> Beginning January 3rd, 2014 - the company will be soft-redirected/hosted to/at ".org" and will become a "Transparent Company" (which is essentially a heavily-amended version of a Domestic LLC). The premise of this idea is that --with Bitcoin-- it's possible for companies to be immediately and completely transparent. I believe there is quite a bit of potential innovation around financial tools (for easy-audits and checks-against-the-budget). I've pulled some smart people together on that aspect of the business. It certainly has an aspirational quality to it. The incoming donations will be redirected to other organizations at that point like EFF.org, FightFortheFuture.org, etc -- you can read all about it on www.spreadthecoin.com .
afaik it's the Oppo N1[1] running Cyanogen. I got to play with one at the Big Android BBQ and it was pretty sweet.

[1] http://en.oppo.com/products/n1/
Yes, I already understand all of that. No, you didn't answer my question.
This is eyeball grabbing article to bank on the recent events, which are nowhere near the norm. Let's not promote this here.
I see it's not mentioning the open source KeePass.
Functional programming using F#
It seems to me type classes have a superset of the features of CL multimethods. Why not compare them?
> I usually take a pretty skeptical attitude on this blog when it comes to Internet security. For the most part we do things wrong, and I used to think most people didn't care. The fact is that I was wrong. If the response to our audit call is any evidence, you do care. You care a lot.

I used to feel the exact same way the author did initially. It wasn't until this year, between teaching a class on security (whose demand I still can't even remotely fathom) and becoming more outspoken about my concerns around the way we handle security, that I really started to realize that people do care deeply about security. That said, most people don't know enough to positively impact security, but that's a problem of education; it's something I'm hoping to put a serious dent in over the next year.
How about compare to an oil town in Alaska? There are plenty of women around rural India (as far as I can tell!).
There are a rare few people that truly do not experience fear, but they have a damaged amygdala, which is rare and totally unrelated to psychopathy.
you're worried about an eventuality, right? Are you more concerned the extinction will be at the hand of humans themselves, or nature? This species hasn't been around very much, but the Sun is eventually going to die. Some spectacular even between now and then could also do it.... so, there are far better things to think about: it's the equivalent of worrying about your own death: that's bound to happen too.
One of many, really.

My own personal favorite language -- Lua -- is also really easy to write readable code.

It also happens to run 3-100x faster than the equivalent Python, and has real coroutines. And easier C bindings.

There are other goals in programming language design than "make it pretty."
> Top 15% in SF,LA,NYC areas would put you around 180-225K combined, making his statements true. 75k in a rural small town x2 with a wife would be more than enough to buy a house, have kids and have 1k in spare change every month.

The parent was specific about a top 15% income on the national scale. However, for interest's sake, if you want to talk about local incomes, $75K puts you in the top 3% in the rural area I come from. I should hope you'd be able to buy a house and still have some money left over being such a high earner, relatively speaking.

In my experience, incomes do not migrate well though. If you're making $75K in a rural area, you're probably not going to make $500K, or whatever top 3% is in the cities you mention, just by moving. More realistically, you might move up to $100K or so to account for some rise in cost of living, but not much more. Generally speaking, of course. There are always outliers.
Thanks for commenting. Coming to the decision to release this was more than arduous. I know their is a massive market out there for this type of software, and I know how valuable it is, or can be. In the end, I'm just a guy who loves to write code, and if other people can make use of my software than I'm a happy guy!
What happens when everyone is an entrepreneur?
Putin: World Conservatism's New Leader
It's spelled "silicon", and "klein bottles".
The word is encode, not emulate. Native support isn't any more concise, in fact it is more verbose when partial application is involved.

So why complicate the language with native support for a feature whose encoding on top of one argument functions is concise, elegant, and works well?
Sorry to repeat myself, but San Francisco or New York is no better.
It's just a custom node app I made, nothin' fancy.
Oh yeah, these are definitely a great bunch of tips :)
"That would still allow the NSA to subvert, compromise, or weaken proprietary Chinese or Russian military encryption standards"

But would it? How would you distinguish? Why wouldn't they just use whatever is known to be off-limits?
> After the whole NSA stuff, many governments are going to require Microsoft to give them access to the source code, if they want them to continue using it, or buy the new versions of Windows.

That's interesting to hear. Got any more information on that?
It wasn't... You know, I hate being the guy that hate those who hate being that guy, but couldn't resist.
It's better to have root access disabled by default on phones sold to the general public since they are more likely to just click the "Allow root access" button because they don't understand the security implications of allowing root access.
so that's the thing that scares me

a nsa official just did an obvious trial-balloon of pardoning snowden in exchange for return of all the docs [1]

but now that snowden is in russia, you have to assume that many nation-states have seen all these docs. so really, the nsa is worried that you and I will see them

fucking amazing

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/nsa-edward-snow...
Isn't it better to overlay this whole security level over existing infrastructure (Skype or something) and take advantage of that?

Seems like this new protocol wouldn't work too well with offline messages, storing previous conversations etc.

Also would be easy to trace back to IP's and find origins of the messages. They should've designed a system so that messages would be hidden in echo/ping commands. That way if someone is monitoring all the messages between nodes they wouldnt be able to distinguish actual traffic.