skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Giving the user an option to upvote or downvote an artist feels like a statement of subjectivity, but pre-banning an artist feels like a statement of objectivity.

Of course, the user who used the term "circlejerk" is probably onto the true reasoning of the company: they did it because Nickelback hatred is one of those funny things that citizens of the Internet use to feel united with other citizens of the Internet.
2013: The year in heists and capers
This belongs in http://reddit.com/r/cringe
Why should new systems avoid RSA?
In the United States, any student with money can find a college which will accept them.
No, the alternative is to have some guilt when taking advantage of people that work for minimum wage, and not feel like Mother Teresa about doing it.
Building Phenomenological Bridges
I know UML is not very popular, but as you can see, I thought it was interesting.
Sometimes the license is more important than the product.
You are not doing full-text search with bloom filters (unless you add all partial words to the filter), only word-search, which is imho the biggest disadvantage (e.g. typos in the index or on the client's side).
The idea has of an EC-based PRNG apparently has merit, however the Dual_DC_DRBG implemntation doesn't. Supposedly there are similar designs out there which have nice security proofs which the NSA one lacked, most likely due to the backdoor.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment.

Cloudflare does not host the website itself. If Cloudflare were to stop providing their services, the website might be inundated with traffic, or more susceptible to DDoS attacks, etc., but even if they terminated their relationship, this would not prevent rescator.la from doing their damage. The Pirate Bay is an excellent example of how little power one actually wields simply by controlling the DNS level.

Second, I'm a little concerned by the idea of a third party independently deciding that their client is guilty of a crime and unilaterally terminating that relationship. What if Krebs's analysis happened to be incorrect? What if someone had compromised rescator.la's servers and happened to be carrying out a false flag operation[0]?

I use Cloudflare for a site I operate, and I would feel more than a bit uneasy if they terminated their relationship with a client in this manner. Maybe OP and Krebs are correct and rescator.la are completely guilty. But what's to stop them from making that decision (incorrectly) in the future?

It's one thing to cooperate with law enforcement in an investigation[1], but it's quite another to appoint yourself the judge and make that ruling yourself.

[0] Unlikely, but the point is that it's hard to be certain of what you think you know.

[1] Which, as evidenced by the NSA debate, is not always so cut-and-dry either.
Crimson (Font)
I have a unicorn job. I sleep with the boss. It helps that we've been married for over 23 years.
HN isn't really a company in the sense that they don't have the same goals as a monetized website has - specifically, there isn't really a "drive" for users, or traffic. In fact there are many things HN does to actively discourage "general" users from joining/remaining part of the community.

I offer no value judgement, I just wanted to be clear what is happening when a blog links to its HN submission directly like in this case, and even moreso to your latest point - HN doesn't give a hoot if you send traffic its way or not.

It's very non-intuitive, I understand your confusion.
There was a lawsuit, I got to testify, nothing came of it, my capabilities system was not going to be allowed to ship, Java had become a 'big deal' inside of Sun. I briefly tried to launch it as a secure offshoot of the language in Sun Labs, that didn't get a lot of traction and so I went on my way.
GNU License ≠ GNU Project. Yes, (almost) all GNU software (as in projects of the GNU Project) are released under the GPL. So is a lot of other software.

GNU Foo is, branding-wise, just like Microsoft Word, Google Drive, or Apple Macintosh.
This is a good choice. One of the challenges had me stuck for months because I hadn't realised that you really need fine-grained control over bitshifting that e.g. Ruby doesn't appear to give you. Taking twenty minutes to re-write my solution to that challenge in C sorted it out straight away.
OK, Interesting, I haven't had the same experience, having won a few Visa chargeback attempts from customers that received merchandise as ordered. My experience is primarily B2B though, where there are credit card authorization and tax exempt forms involved. So, it's not like the customer can claim they can't recall ordering something, etc.
That would be more mind-blowing, I agree, but that's an enormously high bar that no one is achieving.

Sudbury Valley is a private school, but it is much less expensive ($8k vs $25k+) than many other private schools and does not attract only elite students. In fact many students turn to Sudbury Valley after struggling with public schools or even being expelled from public schools.

Unlike most private schools Sudbury Valley will accept all students as long as they want to be there and agree with the educational philosophy (e.g. adults will not force your student to do anything)...
Wouldn't verification of this story just require talking to the North Korean expatriates in China, though? They have no particular reason to censor their speech.
Let this be a reminder to all hackers and geniuses out there: protect yourself from your society. You exist purely at the mercy of your physical realm. It does not matter how essential your discoveries, how profitable, how useful to mankind, how breathtaking. If you are perceived as being a risk (through something simple like your sexuality) you will be ground to dust. The decision will be made (perhaps justifiably) but it will be executed by the worst sort of petty human being: bureaucrats, under achievers, jealous men and beasts in human form who have been handed down power by the state. They will unleash a torrent of hellfire in your life.

This beast does not discriminate: weather a gathering of Sikhs in a park, tribes of Africans or a sole genius with an arguably significant contribution to the war effort - to the beast they are all one once the order has been given.

Always ensure you have some form of protection and a way out.

The British establishment should be ashamed of themselves. They have tolerated homosexuality for centuries among the upper classes up to and including the royals. To grind down a man on the level of Turing with for such an absurd reason is an act of criminal stupidity. All the more so after his efforts during the war.

The computer science community all the world over should reject this "pardon" and ask the queen to stuff it up her posterior.
I get up at 9-ish, hopefully. I use intermittent fasting so I don't eat breakfast. I go to work still exhausted. I have a paper notebook I use to take notes. Space constraints at work means my team's whiteboard wall for standup is now inaccessible. I work as late as I can, eating lunch and maybe dinner, until 8 or 9. I go home and stay up online reading until 2 or 3 in the morning, with a few games of something in-between. I pass out exhausted.

Heaven forbid I ever go to bed not ready to fall asleep instantly, lest I be forced to consider all that I have not done in life, all that I have failed to be. All the missed opportunities that I let pass me by, all the mistakes I have made.
I agree. The students at Sudbury Valley and the families are not representative. That said, there is no application process outside of making sure you want to be there and your family is on board. They are not filtering out lower-performing students at all.

But it is certainly possible that this model would fail miserably when applied more generally. I don't think that can be the null hypothesis, though...
Brian Krebs actually brought this up in his talk at DefCon (on my phone so I don't have a link). Then, the CloudFlare CEO got up to argue his case.

While I can't summarize everything he said, he basically brought up that CloudFlare chooses to take a hands off approach to managing their customers. This makes sense, IMO- if they choose to censor one customer without appropriate legal backing, where does it stop? Saying CloudFlare supports this is different than saying CloudFlare simply protects the rights of its customers to publish content freely.

In fact, Cloudflare also pays the price for this stance. Many of the fraudsters who either target cloudflare in some way, or aim to undermine it's infrastructure (eg DDoS services) actually use cloudflare, and CloudFlare doesn't shut them down.
That's your preference, and I respect it. But writing a long rant attempting to prove that your personal preference is true for everyone is silly. I personally have taught myself the vast majority of what I know. So you are wrong.

EDIT: maybe I'm misjudging your tone. If so, my bad.
Which doesn't matter much, because I can also do the exact same comparison to the same group in today's suburbia America.

And no, it's not "movies and television". There are numerous books studying the decline of the middle class since the seventies.

Heck, there's even an accepted term "Great Prosperity" (as opposed to the "Great Depression" that describes the era after World War II for the USA and the West in general.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econo...

Here are some factoids:

Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 declined by 27 percent after you account for inflation.

Back in the year 2000, more than 64 percent of all working age Americans had a job. Today, only 58.7 percent of all working age Americans have a job.

The home ownership rate in the United States is the lowest that it has been in 18 years.

In 1989, the debt to income ratio of the average American family was about 58 percent. Today it is up to 154 percent.

Consumer debt in the United States has risen by a whopping 1700% since 1971, and 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month.

Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
A Korean Joffrey Baratheon!
Time Goes By: Turning 30
> Since you're saying "drone" I'm assuming you want them to be autonomous in some way, and not just traditional RC.

Would giving the drone a 4G radio with a data channel open to an EC2 instance be considered "autonomous", or "remote-controlled?" It always seemed like the best option to me, since the server issuing guidance could read from whatever internet sources you like (like grabbing a route from Google Maps, or somesuch.)
The NYT is so foolish in their coverage. Everything is about money? Really?

These internecine clashes are about everything but money. These are life or death personal conflicts. It's about political power and the goods which come with that - sure money is one, but it's ancillary.
The Bitcoin developers really don't want people storing data in the Bitcoin blockchain.
I have 6 kids. One, my 10 yo daughter is mostly at home due to long term illness. School attendance, 10%, ish. In education tests, she is in the top 10%. My conclusion? Kids learn. Its what they do.

No, Im not sure what the point of school is, except as a babysitting service for working parents. IMHO, its just an imposition of authority and structure on kids, so that adults can more easily do as told in.... authority and structure. Or some such snarky anti-society as we have it now thing. You know...

I do wish we could start again with a blank sheet of paper.
I'm presently stuck on #6 in problem set 1...
Yea, I know. It's tough to strike the right tone in the blog post and in the end the format was structured to be readable and get attention as I really do just want people to think about these ideas more, even if in the end they don't agree with them.
Target or banks or law enforcement can ask CloudFlare to take action (or perhaps explicitly not take action), depending on what's appropriate. Third party vigilantes and 'social pressure' that can't be calibrated to the wishes of real victims and responsible authorities should not.

The cards are out there; having a sketchy resale site routing its traffic, and paying, CloudFlare may be better for maximum long-term justice than forcing such a site to their next-best options. And given how often law enforcement itself has run 'carding' forums, for the purpose of eventually rolling them up, who knows what's really going on?

The same Krebs post also mentions a major bank bought card info from the site, to learn what was out there. Shame that bank into stopping that practice, too? Or trust that the bank knows what's in its long-term interest, since it faces more risk and has more professional staff aimed at this problem?
So, how does that matter in this discussion? And the 1500s people didn't knew many who died from car accidents or obesity either.
Maybe start eating breakfast?
Oh wow, those comments were interesting to read. Why the hostility towards North-korean spies? That spy program must have an exceptionally low success rate given that once you're outside North Korea, you will find out what the state of your country actually is compared to the rest of the world, and then what motication would you have to do your job?

The only thing I can think of that would keep them in check is that their family is being held hostage, but that would also make all of them extremely motivated to become double agents?
> And don't make your cryptography project sound like snake oil. Saying military grade encryption or N-bits of security makes you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.

Interesting to contrast this with patio11's statement from just a few days ago (https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/sco_remin...):

> People are better at remembering images than they are remembering claims or facts. "256-bit SSL encryption" is a true fact about your software product, but for most customers it goes in one ear and out the other. "Bank-grade encryption" is an image -- people can envision the vault -- and is vastly more likely to be recalled favorably when someone is worried about security.
Well, it would be, except the pipeline seems to be clogged. I'm waiting weeks and months to get a response. Which is frustrating because the early problems are already really interesting, and I want more!
I might agree somewhat if you couldn't turn it off, but as it is, to me it just comes off as a fun, cheeky little jab.

Maybe they should have it off by default if so many people really can't take a little joke...
I'd be much more interested in a blockchain designed to secure other sources of data than one that attempts to store data itself (NMC or DTC). Hashes and signatures of important files, personal and corporate public keys, etc.
Sometimes they don't know what they hired you for. As in have no idea how the task should be done and how much time it can possibly take. That can be unethical.

If you have spiky workload and work on fun projects or just learn, I believe that to be fine.
> They have no particular reason to censor their speech.

They're possible asylum seekers in a nominally allied state, who've (supposedly) fled a totalitarian regime that's shown no compunction about assassinating critics abroad. I can see why they'd not either make their location known, nor wish to talk to foreign media.

And that's assuming the story is true.
That would be OK with me if I used his app, I like Nickelback.
For one, because most people can not even point Canada on the map, much less know anything about the living conditions in the medieval age.

In fact, most things people associate with the middle ages are either BS or happened at other times. Witch-huns and the Inquisition for example, are phenomena of the Renaissance, not of the middle ages. Even the Plague happened on the tail end of the middle ages entering into the Renaissance.

Heck, even fewer know that the ratio of holidays (what we'd call bank holidays today) to work was extremely higher in the middle ages compared to today.

Most homeless/coupon-living/trailer individuals would be much better off in the middle ages compared to today.
TiddlyWiki: personal wiki designed for the next 25 years (running on Node.js)
This is not a criticism, but are you sure "making money" was all they thought about, or was it that they constantly saw opportunities for making money around them? The two are not the same. The latter is an extremely valuable skill worth cultivating, because even if you don't take advantage of it, having it can be useful someday.
That's what the author did by banning Nickelback.
If you finish these and want more, it's worth skimming back through time on http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/

Bemused frustration is such an entertaining writing style. Alas, my attempts tend to end up as incoherent raging. Maybe switching to bourbon would help.
Why? Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with how VC works, but I'm not entirely sure how being able to convince VCs of profitability would be a good enough filter for people to determine whether or not a VC backed company would do bad things to improve their profitability.
I'd be interested to know roughly what sort of employment/positions you've taken up over the years for the purpose of an extension of the timeline you've started here, if you're willing to share.
this is a great open source alternative to EverNote.

p.s. TiddlyWiki 5; has undergone a complete re-design/development; so please give it a try.

and if you want to contribute: http://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/
Well, what's funny about it is that Rap Genius has done the one thing that Matt Cutts says you should do, which is make a lyrics site which is head and shoulders better than the competition.

(The awful truth is that's good enough)
already discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658
If object-oriented programmers (here represented by Scala-ites) are excessively fond of modelling the crap out of stuff, to the detriment of the code they're trying to write, there is also a problem with the opposite, "lightweight data modelling" approach: a weird fascination with representations of data, instead of the structure of it.

Here's an example from Land of Lisp:

(defun limit-tree-depth (tree depth)
(list (car tree)
(cadr tree)
(if (zerop depth)
(lazy-nil)
(lazy-mapcar (lambda (move)
(list (car move)
(limit-tree-depth (cadr move) (1- depth))))
(caddr tree)))))

and here's the version that I re-wrote, using your friend and mine, defstruct:

(defun limit-tree-depth (tree depth)
(labels ((limit-depth-move (move)
(let* ((next-tree (limit-tree-depth (get-tree move) (1- depth))))
(if (passing-move-p move)
(make-passing-move :tree next-tree)
(make-attacking-move :src (attacking-move-src move)
:dst (attacking-move-dst move)
:tree next-tree)))))
(make-tree-node :player (tree-node-player tree)
:board (tree-node-board tree)
:moves (if (zerop depth)
(lazy-nil)
(lazy-mapcar #'limit-depth-move
(tree-node-moves tree))))))

I submit that the second may be preferable, even if it is a bit more verbose.
>All of the replies to my comment are coming from someone with higher than average technical expertise.

This is Hacker News. We don't discuss from the point of view of someone who doesn't know these things.
My overall message is that the original poster's line

> Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning.

Is making a huge statement about everyone and every possible topic to learn!

He is making an absolute statement about human psychology of all things. Thankfully absolutes statements are easy to disprove, only a single counter example is needed!

> I personally have taught myself the vast majority of what I know.

Well I'd say that I also taught myself the vast majority of what I know! :) But to be fair that is because I spend multiple hours per day reading! That said, I'd also argue that self directed reading is not the most efficient way of learning. On more than one occasion I have spent days reading up on topics and then only been enlightened after having a 10 minute conversation with a friend!

Likewise, all the mathematics and the vast majority of the science I know comes from instructors at school. I am good at math[1] (heck I love math!), and I was likely in the top 20% of students to pick up on stuff in class, but by no means could I have taught myself! Thankfully I went to a community college where classes were small and resembled a back and forth discussion between students and the professor, so it wasn't a strict "lessons from up top" type of learning either.

Which kind of is my overall point, some topics require a different learning style! Rote memorization is actually really good for learning some types of material.

Likewise, for all those math classes, group discussions after class where we all brought our understandings together to form one cohesive whole, was when everything really clicked. The lecture for an hour got us started and gave us the foundation, two hours of study group dedicated to solving actual problems with what we had just learned is what brought full comprehension.

There is no one catch all solution for the entire population. If we were going to be truly civilized about it, we'd design tests to discover how people best learn, and put them into classes accordingly. Heck make it tests per topic even, how I learned writing is different than how I learned math!

[1] Well used to be good at it, back when I still used it in school. :)
When someone says "readability" I have come to realize they mean: "I can read now".
GLOC9 caroling
I'm curious to hear people's thoughts about git. Git is "crypto" to some extent, Linus does not appear to have tons of crypto expertise, and it uses SHA1 as a MAC AFAICT (which according to tptacek's earlier comment is invalid). And yet I've never heard about attacks on its crypto.

This was interesting for me to think about because it seems like a counterpoint to the article, in that it is a very successful project that came about in a very "quick and dirty" way as opposed to starting with formal protocol design.

--

I see that Linus disclaims the idea that SHA1 is about security: "Git uses SHA-1 in a way which has nothing at all to do with security.... It's just the best hash you can get.... It's about the ability to trust your data. I guarantee you, if you put your data in Git, you can trust the fact that five years later, after it was converted from a hard disk to a DVD to whatever new technology and you copied it, five years later you can verify that the data that you get back out is the exact same data you put in."

But it seems like avoiding attacks like this must also be a goal: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0311.0/0621.h...
>And we got over all that stuff, and emerged stronger.

What, out of the recession? That's fairy tale level denial. The thing is still going strong, and it's not even close to over yet. Neither is the US economy coming out stonger at this point.

>The Russian Roulette analogy is not applicable because we're not discussing random processes.

Actually it's perfectly applicable.

For one, the processes we're discussing are essentially stochastic -- there are so many random factors playing into the economy at any given time.

Second, as with the russian roulette, the long term result after a specific consistent course of action is extremely deterministic (you blow your brains in one case, or you fuck up the economy in the other).