skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand everything but "Apple Is waiting until Democrats will let them..." Really?
Hmm have you done this with private disclosure? If not, please do that next time. It is unethical to disclose security-related issue of some PaaS publicly without first going through the responsible party first. Even if a security issue you want to report is actually something only the owner can see... I don't know what this do because I don't really use DO, but just judging the way it is reported, it looks like you haven't...
Interesting: this sounds like a recurrence of the same issue which was described a number of months back:

https://www.digitalocean.com/blog_posts/resolved-lvm-data-is...

At the time, the blog post claimed that the issue was resolved and that data was now being wiped by default. I wonder why that would have changed.
have you gone to DO directly with this first?
But is that the point? Maybe the solution is not to try to prevent someone else from manipulating your computer. Maybe the better approach is to give the user full control of her computer, including the BIOS.

For reasons that fall far short of evading intelligence agencies, the user should be able to flash her own BIOS whenever she wants.

Better and more choices in open source BIOS solutions might help in this regard.

In my opinion, it is precisely the notion that the user need never control her BIOS that was used to try to maintain IBM's monopoly on the PC, and later to maintain Microsoft's monopoly on the PC OS. Whatever the motivation might be, I would welcome a renewed focus on making the BIOS open and something that a user can choose, just as she chooses her own bootloader and OS.
It would be interesting to see a survey of the various cloud VM services; if any of them will return non-zero (data) blocks for uninitialized storage.

Sounds like a major risk if SSH, SSL, passwords etc can leak this easily.
Even Joe Average should be acknowledged that clean reinstallation after getting new hardware is a good practice.

Ed: BTW, does somebody know how to audit your laptop in its current state?
You could say the same thing about copyright infringement. The governments, with all their guns, still lost that battle, despite very real and high profile lawsuits and crackdowns. When something is extremely easy and completely ubiquitous, it becomes very difficult for government to scale its enforcement. You could say the same thing of something offline, like marijuana in the US (although with that one I would argue that there is no sincere desire on the federal level to eliminate marijuana or even reduce marijuana access and use).
I actually don't believe in a rigid system office like. In fact you are self employed because you don't want to be part of a process machine called the office. You figure out what is right for you. If you feel you are reading a lot of web, then go back do some work. If you feel you have cracked a problem after lot of hours of work, go and chill out doing some thing else. If you feel you are doing a hybrid of browsing the web which is not work related and coding then turn off the internet.
I do a mix of all of these. I feel it is ok to be a bit fluidic but only with the end goal what you are working on in the mind. I mean mostly to creative work - something that you are creating on your own from home rather than a customer paid work which I feel the first comment is good enough to follow.
If you are creative, be relaxed and keep thinking on the space you work on, keep diverting your attention from any disturbance and keep going at it...that's the formula
Formula One racing legend in a coma after ski accident
Dumb SEO != growth hacking

What the author does get right, however, is that the need for growth puts a lot of pressure on a founding team and sometimes that pressure can push teams to take more risks than they should.
Some social scientists are skeptical of the validity of stereotype threat. John List, in a paper coauthored with Steven Levitt at the University of Chicago, was unable to reproduce it[1]. Some scholars suspect publication bias[2]. Also see another failure to reproduce by the Educational Testing Service[3].

[1] http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-none...

[2] http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/01/stereotype-threat-scienti...

[3] http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/11/high-stakes-stereotype-th...
Modern processors commonly have 8MB of L2 and 16MB or even more of L3 cache. Shaving 10kb off a binary is meaningless.
Talk about a link bait title. Its a bit hard to call it a leak,Its a configuration option that is well presented in the web UI. It is optional as it adds ~ 10 minutes of billing to the small 512mb VMs and as such it is optional if you do it.

If your using an overlay or API on top of a cloud or service, its the overlay's responsibility to ensure a consistency with your expectations. The API is consistent with the UI.

While other cloud providers accept the time that this takes as non-billable, DO don't. By getting higher utilization is how they are able to offer their prices and still have some modicum of service.
Even if one bought the ridiculous notion that private disclosure of vulnerabilities is a good thing, why would you think it would be necessary to privately "disclose" to anyone what Digital Ocean already publicly documents in their API?
Uh, yes.

The OP was correct in saying that men are better (he didn't say anything about naturally) at the competitions cited.

And...many men don't want to do chess, coding, or Go competitions, but feel they have to do it, because it is often way of getting any recognition from society, which usually reserves it for actors and football players. Women often get a free pass on account of their looks -- people are naturally nice to even an average-looking woman. An average looking man gets squat. This social pressure = society's problem. Think about that the next time you see an ad that portrays the average dad as an incompetent schlub. For instance, this one -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iymBRSUfz9U

The average man will be treated much worse at a supermarket, a coffee shop, or on the bus, even if he is very very very polite. And if he is less than handsome or wealthy? He's "not really my type", or "ugh, what a creep".

If a girl chooses to dress as a man for a year, it is a fact that she will come out of that experience seeing how harder it is for men. (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/01/highereducation...)

And please, I don't ever want to hear about how you (or your spouse) can't do well at chess or programming because you are busy putting out the trash and doing the dishes in your house. I face the same problems regarding housework, and I am still expected by traditional society, even in the US, to be the breadwinner for my family (which is one of the many reasons I will probably never marry).
Anyone who's tempted to use "the cloud" for anything sensitive should first be forced to write out, at least 5000 times, in longhand:

"The cloud. Somebody else's computer".

I think cloud computing is great for the right applications, as long as people understand the risks.

But there will always be problems like this. Always. This is part of the hidden cost of "simple cloud hosting".
Let's go to the source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script
"Note that there is a small number of standard script forms that are relayed from node to node; non-standard scripts are accepted if they are in a block, but nodes will not relay them."

It seems there's enough flexibility left to do some interesting things. I see discussions in the forum of things like M-of-N, nLockTime, and anyonecanpay.
Well, with current practice you don't even get OS recovery CDs anymore. You probably get a "Recovery Partition" with preconfigured OS image. And OEM windows license might not allow you to install from elsewhere and re-use your license.
What about complicated cloud hosting? Rackspace is still "Somebody else's computer".
[edit]: okay I misunderstood the issue here.

Some day I would forget to close my home door with a bang. No home invasion yet because nobody notice that the door wasn't fully closed. Now I am telling people I will forget to close my door, and I will get an invasion.

Some people's repo have password committed. It only takes someone to google that to find out. If someone posts that on HN, yeah, it's on the web anyway, it only takes one person to make my password known instantly.
TL;DR: In the DigitalOcean web panel you can check the "scrub data" checkbox when destroying a VM. When using the API this option is not ticked. This can lead to other customers being able to retrieve your data.

The author thinks that this is a security issue because this option should be enabled by default. However, (I assume) it's not in Digital Oceans interest to do full disk scrub because it reduces the lifespan of their SSD.

If a user forgets to log out of Facebook on a public computer, is it Facebook's responsibility? Similarly, if a user does not correctly delete data on a budget host, is it the hosts fault?
Scientists Are Building Computers That Can Learn And Adapt
LanderDB - A Small NoSQL Embedded Database Engine in Python
That an argument can be made doesn't imply it's a good one, or that anybody should pay it any heed.

Most of the ills in the health industry stem from the fact that providers--insurers and direct providers alike--have a profit motive rather than a "provide healthcare" motive, because their market is entirely captive and literally without any (real) choice.
It's almost public knowledge as there's an option in the GUI called "scrub data", the absence of a tick there implies that it's not going to be erased before the VMs partition is reassigned. I had a chat to the support months back about "erase data" not being in the API at the time, and the solution I came to was just to ditch their API and go back to scraping their forms for the option.

That said, this would probably go down better for the company and the community if you tried a private disclosure rather than posting about it on Github.

https://www.digitalocean.com/security
fit2rule:"Nowhere in the history of war has it ever been true that 'to kill a little now means not killing more later' - if it were, the killing would have stopped."

Not so. You jihadis have found that, for example in Algeria, by killing off the (relatively small) leadership of centrist and non-radical muslims you can eliminate opposition to radical jihad. Once these people are eliminated, opposition to jihad plummets (people are afraid to speak up) and Taliban-like elements can take over.

So indeed _you_ and _yours_ have learned that "killing a little now means not killing more later".
We all take nationalism for granted these days, but it really was a growing new thing in the late 19th, early 20th c. Germany and Italy didn't even exist as nations back then.
I'm the one who reported it. I was able to recover someone else's web logs from 29 December 2013 on a VM an hour old.
Ask HN: How to increase reading speed
What are the best way to increase reading speeds. I am reading at about 300 words per minute rate which I find unsatisfactory.
Successful alternative cryptocurrencies ... backed by governments or businesses

It seems like this could have been done 15 years ago with Chaumian digital cash (which requires no mining and is more anonymous than Bitcoin) or even earlier with plain public-key crypto if you don't care about anonymity. Why hasn't it?
I think it's less in Digital Ocean's interest to silently give customer data to a subsequent user of that block device?
I'm not sure if this would really help you, but after working with a rather complicated design that had to cover all screen sizes, an effective strategy for working with media queries may be applicable to more people than just me.
Yea, I believe the most common number was $70k/$75k per year depending on the report. After that, it's mostly diminishing returns.
If the "securely scrub" parameter has ANY kind of performance impact which I suspect it does then isn't it a good thing that DO gave their users the choice ? There are plenty of use cases where I would trade privacy/security for performance.

Anyway disingenuous title to say the least.
>The French did intervene in the US Revolutionary War. That's probably why there is a United States today.

That's not the civil war I asked about though -- the revolutionary war was already between 2 different nations (well, one under construction).

And there was other differences: France did it to weaken Britain (the part which was their rival to their colonial and trade empire). Not to "bring justice/democracy/what have you".

And if France could do much power-wise, it would have taken whatever much it could from the new nation.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/digitalocean/

https://www.digitalocean.com/blog_posts/resolved-lvm-data-is...

This sort of terrible behavior was by design and known. They got written about and claimed to have fixed it, but didn't.
SQL :)

More seriously, R is more of a functional language than one would think, but it's certainly not a great general purpose language.
You are extremely confused. Digital Ocean does this deliberately and already publicly documents it. It is intentional.

This is not a bug report to Digital Ocean or any other PaaS. It is a request for a third-party library to support an option Digital Ocean's API provides.
HN disallows duplicate URLs from being submitted (if you try it simply considers your submission a vote for the original), but in this case your variant lacks the trailing forward slash. Which is weird given that the NY Times site automatically redirects URLs that lack that trailing slash, appending it on.
The term "disc scrub" makes little to no sense in terms of SSDs, which makes this issue even more complicated. People who work in the disc recovery field have been dealing with this since SSDs became popular.

An SSD is limited by its number of writes. To compensate for this, the SSD has very complicated on board logic that abstracts the actual SSD away from what it tells the OS system. This allows it to do certain tricks to save writes. However, when you are "scrubbing" an SSD, internally the SSD might be writing somewhere else entirely. Scrubbing is not considered an effective way of wiping SSDs, from what I believe.
Stallman was right. Again. http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Trust nothing. Everything is a lie.
How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system
I've been a DO customer for about a year and some, this is news to me. So no, I wouldn't say it's public knowledge.

That said, I haven't really destroyed many of my VMs.
The linked article on Der Spiegel has a section on what they call "persistence:"

The specialists at ANT, which presumably stands for Advanced or Access Network Technology, could be described as master carpenters for the NSA's department for Tailored Access Operations (TAO)... The ANT developers have a clear preference for planting their malicious code in so-called BIOS, software located on a computer's motherboard that is the first thing to load when a computer is turned on... This has a number of valuable advantages: an infected PC or server appears to be functioning normally, so the infection remains invisible to virus protection and other security programs. And even if the hard drive of an infected computer has been completely erased and a new operating system is installed, the ANT malware can continue to function and ensures that new spyware can once again be loaded onto what is presumed to be a clean computer. The ANT developers call this "Persistence" and believe this approach has provided them with the possibility of permanent access.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-ns...
If it was a lifespan issue they could just encrypt the partitions (minimal overhead with AES) and then destroy the key with the droplet.

Due to the way that SSDs wear level, even if every block returns 0, you don't know if that's the same block or if the real data is squirrelled away on out-of-life blocks. From what I understand the SSD has a lot more capacity than advertised and moves the blocks forward as sections of the chip wear out. Assuming you could reprogram the controller (or use a different one), you could go back and read the old blocks and recover data in the clear.
I agree very much with this. I'm not sure many people would disagree either...
From the article:

>The latest report, this time via Der Spiegel and based on internal NSA documents, reveals that the NSA, in conjunction with the CIA and FBI, has begun intercepting laptops purchased online in order to install (quite literal) spyware and even hardware ... Agents divert shipments to secret warehouses ... install the software and/or hardware ...

So if they're installing hardware/firmware that is something a clean reinstallation won't fix. Probably should have titled the submission software/hardware.
I don't have a real answer yet, searching desperately though. Have to admit that I prefer what is going on now to the aristocratic and theocratic systems we had before in much of the world. The worst tyrants are the ideologues, and it seems that now the crooks have taken over instead. Anyway, nothing is going to change unless popular anger becomes a force to be reckoned with. The NSA is or will be a major obstacle to civilians organizing on a large scale and for that reason alone it must be opposed. People talk about getting better voter participation but really I think we need people in the streets, not the booths.
Maybe it would've been better for this news to have been broken a month or two ago, for maximum financial impact.

In all seriousness, one has to wonder how shipments get diverted, and how easily this process can be taken advantage of. Surely the companies handling these "special" shipments are made aware of details on a need-to-know basis (eg: super-secret gov. employee is going to be taking the shipment for an hour, don't ask why and don't tell anyone), but are they able to verify that their handlers are who they say they are?

Would you trust a shipping company based in China? Why would you trust an American one any more than a Chinese one?
I think both sides are assholes, and should collectively shut up and let calm, reasonable people handle these problems like adults.
How Writer Pro Could Be More Awesome (imho)
When I saw the photo of the replacement fan, I was convinced the story would turn out to be about how, using the broken fan as a template, the guy was able to get a replacement fan printed from a local 3d printer.

Alas, (spoiler alert) that was not the case, but hopefully that will be a great use of 3d printers in the future.

I hope we can say goodbye to planned obsolescence.
Net Neutrality is how the internet has operated since its beginning. It's not "giving" the government or anyone else anything new, just preserving a very successful status quo. It's the telco's and the anti-NN crowd that want to change that, not the other way around, despite their dissembling. If you want the internet to remain a level playing field for everyone, as it has been since day 1, from bootstrapped startups to giants like Google and Microsoft, support Net Neutrality.
Ok, so the data isn't necessarily destroyed immediately after a scrub. But how does that play out at the level of VM users? Is there a normal usage scenario where the portion of the SSD containing my deleted data is made readable to someone else's VM, or will it be inaccessible to normal VM users until it's overwritten?
Let's be clear about what this is: they are charging their customers after their customers have deactivated a service (destroyed a VM) to not create the situation wherein they give that data to another customer later.

What sort of mental gymnastics are required to make that a reasonable choice?
Why?

If customers don't care enough about the data why should DO?

DO is a budget provider. Their main hook was cheap SSDs, and is still cheap costs. They billable time it takes to wipe a VM adds to the cost. If you want the data zeroed... then pay for it, otherwise it must not be important enough.
Another word for empowerment is "autonomy" or "slack". If the regular job is easy, let the employee do other things during the slack time, whether it's helping the company or not. If it helps - that's great, and the person should be paid.

Overqualified people are cool if you don't have to manage them - the lack of oversight saves everyone time and money.

Likewise, being overqualified is cool. The work is easy and steady. Probably even more importantly, people who are overqualified for some jobs take the jobs because they're "fun" jobs. My job is basically "fun" except for some of the coworkers (most are very awesome, but you never get 100%). I undertake odd side projects. The pay isn't great, but the benefits are decent, and the hours are pretty good.

I'm looking to make a lateral move that's probably to a differently "fun" job, but one with less autonomy and slack time, and more pay.
Google Search broken query
My bad - I didn't read Der Spiegel article.
[edit]: okay I misunderstood the issue here.
There is a simple solution to this: don't trust providers to do what they say they'll do with your data. You should scrub any drive that's ever contained sensitive info before you throw it away, and terminating a VM instance is precisely equivalent to handing the VM's harddrive to your provider.

It's pretty easy nowadays to scrub a drive. Writing zeroes would suffice.

Personally, I'd worry more about what data is being leaked when your VM is paged to disk on your provider's servers. Parts of each of your VMs will probably reside in the pagefile at some point, so therefore writing zeroes won't save you if the provider has bad disposal practices (like not scrubbing before disposal). So it seems impossible not to have to trust a cloud computing provider whatsoever; some basic trust seems to be a requirement.

But that minimum level of trust should be the extent to which you trust them. Not scrubbing your drive before handing it over is placing faith where faith doesn't belong.
If the hardware is spending its cycles on your workload, then it definitely makes it a reasonable choice. Its not like they can sell those cycles to someone else until your job is done.

Besides we are not talking about a high margin business here. $5 vms when most providers are charging 4x times that. Its not unreasonable to expect that your going to have to pay for extras. Similar to a budget airline, you get what you pay for. You want a service that includes that cost in your other fees... then use AWS, rackspace or one of the 1000s of others.
http://i.imgur.com/Aliyewf.png

I suppose when I made that comment I was expecting everybody to be like me; eager to flip switches to see what they do.
The concept of a single instruction to load or store multiple registers is much much older than the 68000 architecture. It goes back to 1964 when IBM announced the S/360 architecture. The instructions were called LM (load multiple) and STM (store multiple). It's probably an older concept than that but I'm not familiar with 1950's computer architecture.

Here is LM and STM used in an IBM assembler calling convention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Basic_assembly_language_and...
This and the Rap Genius stories go on to show why algorithmic search (aka Google search) is not going to last another ten years. It probably already does, but more and more Google algorithms will include lots of ifs and buts.

There is definitely some room for fresh approaches to content discovery, knowledge indexing, and finding answers. New startup(s) or Google rediscovering itself?