skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't get how referencing a singular event often is actually an issue.

Because it's irrational and doesn't represent the real probability of an event happening again. The argument is therefore that we are shaping policy (with ramifications on economics, privacy and politics) based on poor statistical analysis. I'd recommend reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow if you're interested in understanding how irrational our minds are. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...
Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6965157

Target hackers stole encrypted bank PINs, according to source
[video] (chicagotribune.com)

========

Other submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6962139

Target hackers stole encrypted bank PINs
(reuters.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6962814

Target hackers stole encrypted bank PINs
(reuters.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963289

Target hackers stole encrypted bank PINs - source
(reuters.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963515

Target hackers stole encrypted bank PINs
(yahoo.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971525

Target Confirms Encrypted PIN Data Was Stolen in Breach
(securityweek.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971864

Target confirms encrypted PINs were stolen in recent data breach
(nbcnews.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971917

Target confirms encrypted debit PIN data was stolen during hack
(theverge.com)
As if yuppies didn't make yoga horrible enough already...what else can we appropriate from Eastern religion and patent for profit?
The US reaction was not smart, but in fairness 9/11 was a big deal because it forced a recalibration of the tail risk from a terrorist attack - a whole bunch of scenarios (dirty bomb, chem or bio attack) that require complex planning and resources are much easier to believe post-911.
FreeBSD Journal announced
I see more and more of this as time goes on. Ubuntu is not the only GNU/Linux distribution! Hell, this program looks like it may run on any *nix that has Python and Qt.
Not at all, just look at the difference in the current sensors on the market. There's a wide range of performances due to engineering restrictions. Only the pixel size and aperture size are really relevant to diffraction so it occupies a different class of problems.
Indeed, the blurring of this distinction became the means by which Larry Wall earned his college degree!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Education

He talks about it in more depth in this interview: http://youtu.be/aNAtbYSxzuA
If someone let's you borrow their desk, you place it in your home. Does that person have the right to enter your home and use that desk whenever that person sees fit?

Oh, I forgot that I left my [really important item] in
that desk I let you borrow, and your backdoor was unlocked.
Just thought I'd come in and grab it.

What if the person sends their best friend over to retrieve said important item?

Could this person ask a police officer to retrieve it (say the person is handicapped)?

So we're borrowing these "cloud desks". Does that mean the stuff I've placed in the desk is also up for grabs?

Under your analogy, not only can they retrieve the item from the desk, but they also get to know all sorts of things about how I personally used the desk.

I'm sorry, but I don't like it when you leave the
drawers of my cloud desk open like that. So, I
took a picture of it so I can keep track of its use.

Now, would you agree to a borrow of a desk if you are expected to not only maintain its quality of state, but also it is that you are expected to record your every interaction with it?

They're recording it for you — fair enough, but is the loaner permitted to share those photos with other people? When does it end?

So the loaner isn't a government. But extrapolating from this: The Fourth Amendment gives us a clear answer to this question. Sure, it's not private, but that is beside the point. How I use the desk, technically, is not private, but something stops the loaner from telling the entire neighborhood about how I used the desk. That something is unwritten, often described in terms of "the rules of decorum" or simply: it's not worth it.

Thank Goodness Our Founding Fathers Decided to Write Something Down that Explicitly Answers this Question — When does it end? — in an Explicit Context that Can Be Governed.

Heck, by this Decision, our government can share our metadata with FOREIGN ENEMIES at their whimsy based on international agreements that statistically legislate over terror. This Decision just makes us a metastatistic, ultimately collatoral damage of a digital war.

They're exacerbating this institutionalized equivocation exactly so that they can cultivate our consumerist behavior and behavior as content producers for their own financial gain. They're exploiting exactly the fact that the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the digital age. They're doing this on purpose:

ooops sry i didn't know what an internat wuz im just too old i guess

They're not doing their due diligence to correctly interpret, adapt, and apply these laws. And the Judicial Branch is folding to monied interest indirectly.
Did you read the same article I did? There was plenty of blame to heap on the kids, though it's rational (ctrl-F for mini-max).

The problem is that the article just isn't particularly useful. It's an editorial, so fine, whatever. But it's long on anecdata and short on anything concrete. I'm hesitant to blame students for a system they didn't invent, don't run, and have approximately zero responsibility for. You just aren't thinking on this level at age 18.

Also, if people chose to occupy themselves only with what's "useful" (e.g. not art history), it would impoverish our culture. But I agree that kids need to be realistic about the relationship between their choice and their later prospects-- I agree it is a trade-off.
Insomniac has an utterly kickass set of publications as well:

http://www.insomniacgames.com/category/research-development/
That's right, but one of the corporations mentioned in the article is a UK grocery chain. The UK must be the most surveillance happy country in the world and we know that GCHQ cooperates closely with the NSA.

So I would love to hear an explanation from the people who put that clause in the contract. Maybe it's some kind of protest, but if it is meant seriously, it would be the most ridiculous thing I have heard in a long time.

Unless terrorism is actually just a cover for the NSA's true purpose of doing industrial espionage on behalf of US corporations. But if the meaning of the word "conspiracy theory" hadn't changed so dramatically recently, I could swear this is one ;-)
This tracks pretty much exactly with my college experience, ugh. The worst part was that I always used to think of myself as a very independent person who didn't need anyone else to get things done. When I finally came to realize the important of social motivations, I had to face the fact that I was just in denial for years, making myself miserable for no reason to live up to some ridiculous individualistic ideal.
I'm sorry I quite get your analogy, you're saying the problem is that he went to the hospital?

I am not trying to justify the reaction to 9/11, but using it as a reference point seems fine, just like the berlin wall being torn down is not in itself the event that ended the cold war, but is a turning point for things.

But your point about it being self-referentially important seems pretty valid.
It's almost never as bad when you design it yourself. Then the logic and reasons are apparent. Coming into such a system from the outside can be tough though. An explanation of the rationale and pre and post conditions is very helpful, even if all it does is keep a future programmer from trying to circumvent the system and causing the problems it was implemented to avoid.
This seems kinda interesting. I don't know if it would solve all the problems of global state but it would definitely make serialization of the program state simple. It wouldn't even be that difficult to implement in a language that has a LISP-like syntax.

A first stab at the "tree-shaped resource space" referred to in the article would be the abstract syntax tree of the program itself. Each node would have a unique URI, which can be a physical directory path on a filesystem or can be stored in a database structure. Every local variable would be defined by a path in a flat namespace. The "parent" directory of the local variable would be the function it is defined in. Security rules can be created that simulate many of the features of variable scoping rules. The most basic rule, that variables are only visible within the scope of their parent function simply means that the only variables that can be referenced within a function are those within the same directory. Again, none of this seems too difficult to implement especially if your language uses a LISP syntax.

I'm tempted to implement a toy version of this, if for no other reason, because I've been wondering about good ways to serialize the program state of a DSL that I've been working on. Performance seems to be the big problem with using a database or filesystem. A global map of URI's (that is easy to serialize) with some sensible access/permission strategy doesn't seem too bad and could be transparent to the developer.
I am curious about what % of Americans consider this a real issue vs those who just don't care.

Of course HN is a tech community, understands the repercussions and it's very sensitive on the matter.

I am asking because we're possibly facing a huge (maybe the biggest) gap between voters and government here.
If I tell you I murdered someone, should the government have to get a warrant to get that information from you? What if they asked you if I visited your bookstore last week? What if you kept a journal indicating each time I visited your store, or bought a book? What if they asked Amazon for a list of when I visited their site, or bought a book? (Keep in mind Amazon has the right to refuse to give that information without a court order...the question is whether I can protest that subpoena, or only Amazon can).

At some point, there needs to be a line drawn. The 4th amendment has been interpreted to protect "reasonable expectations of privacy" in order to draw that line. If I tell you I murdered someone, or if you tell the police when I visited your store, that's over that side of the line. I have no reasonable expectation of privacy. I freely gave up this information to a third party.

The copyright law has an entirely different history, text, and history of interpretation.

I agree that the third party doctrine is no longer workable in the digital age (people probably have just as much of an expectation of privacy in their DropBox as their C: drive), but I don't think the other viewpoint is entirely unreasonable, especially during the pre-digital age.
Haha, good troll. Pretending that Anti-GMO != Anti-science.
That strikes me as more of the same overreaction. 9/11 didn't really demonstrate complex planning and resources. It took a bit of cash, not a lot, and 20 people. The scale was big, but it wasn't exactly complex. The main difficulties of the other attacks you mention are obtaining the materials and getting them into the US, and ability at neither was demonstrated by 9/11.

The mention of a dirty bomb rather reinforces my point, I think. A dirty bomb isn't much more destructive than a regular bomb. Yet, we consider it to be a vastly greater threat. Why? Because we'd vastly overreact to it. Why? Because we consider it to be a huge threat. And so on in circles.
This is a very famous post, and Van Jacobsen is the archetypical networking systems programming bad-ass. Important context here though: this is just the per-segment receive processing piece of TCP; it's describing a very simple fast path that segments can take, but not all the TCP logic!
I developed my distaste for pointless acronyms after working at a large company that had little regard for sensible terminology and would tack acronyms onto everything. Plenty of acronyms not only conflicted with established acronyms in the field, but also with others within the same company.

Seeing as how your friend worked for the EPA, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that this phenomenon often seems to surface within organizations whose name is typically given in the form of an acronym...
It varies week-to-week, but I try to hit 30 minutes a day, minimum. I wrote more about these things at http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/
Judge Rules That NSA Collection Of Phone Data Is Lawful
Isn't one of Nokia/Microsoft's phones, currently on market, at 42 megapixels?
> quiet room

You answered your own question. Colleges and your office have libraries or quiet rooms to flee to.
FYI I sent an email to the btc sec list with some recommendations on this issue and a link to this discussion. I hope they will act.
> We've already established the NSA is not acting within the constraints of law.

What we've established is that the NSA is acting enough within the constraints of the law that different courts disagree as to the legality of its actions.
For the first time throughout his series of blog posts, I respectfully disagree.

Thinking big seems to be the favourite pastime and recommendation based on hindsight bias of people who have already made it. It's not the reason why projects are successful and it's very likely not something that will get you taken seriously by a VC investor or startup angel (too much delusion of grandeur does not befit people who don't even have a working prototype).

It's much more important to try to solve real problems (that hopefully affect many people). If your solution a) works and b) turns out to scale to something huge, then you've made it. If it doesn't scale, you might still end up with a successful und useful, albeit smaller company. Would that be such a bad outcome?
If the skills came with a guarantee that you would get to that million dollar mark in a certain amount of time then it becomes more interesting. Also, one can be average in their ability to do something, so it'd have to be about fluency in said skill(s).

Stil, I'm not sure which at this moment.
Amazing blog. I had also tried Zotonic and was impressed by the performance.

This should work great in Indian market.
Sapir-Whorf is a claim about the effect a language has on the cognition of those who speak it. i.e., the claim is about the cognition and not the language. The C++ statement was just a silly reason (IMO) for why C++ is a better tool than other languages for expressing to a computer what a person is thinking.
I'm saying that the immune system overreacted, resulting in an allergic reaction that put the person in the hospital.

Bee stings aren't all that harmful in normal people. But some people's immune systems decide to treat bee stings as if they were extremely dangerous, life-threatening events, and in those people, the reaction itself becomes an extremely dangerous, life-threatening event. If (and this is a huge if, of course) you could simply convince the immune system not to react so strongly to a bee sting, the threat would be gone. But instead, in this analogy, you have the people running the immune system arguing for a stronger reaction to bee stings, citing the terrible consequences of the last one as the reason for it.
I shy away from keyboards that have an indicator light built into the CAPS LOCK key, so no, I don't have the problem of the indicator bugging me.
I'd suggest the title: Cap Trap drives to the root problem. The fact that the convertible note cap has become the pseudo-pricing of the round, creates considerable contention between angel investors and founder, which compromises the major benefit of convertible notes to raise money quickly. Obviously ego and/or misunderstanding can acerbate this issue, but ultimately, it's the focus on the cap number that introduces many of the complications of a priced round.
They are also wording their defense very carefully:

"[people claim] YogaGlo will now try to shut down any business or individual teacher that films a yoga class, which again is not true. There are many ways to film a class as evidenced by the many videos that currently exist that do not violate our patent."

Note how the overall tone here is "it's incorrect to suggest we're going to shut down all yoga class filming," (incidentally, a suggestion nobody is making) and the subtext is "so long as you film in a way that doesn't violate our patents."

edit: This post of theirs really seems to just dig them in deeper. They look like clueless assholes.
The telephone company has little to no incentive to search through your telephone records and look for correlations. Further, the telephone company has no capability to correlate your Internet data to your phone records, to your physical mail, and come up with conclusions about you. The NSA does.
Photon shot noise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise#Optics) is as fundamental as diffraction - it's a property of light, not a property of the sensor.

If your sensor counts a mean of 100 photons per pixel, then you'll see shot noise with standard deviation of 10 photons in each of those, for a signal-to-noise ratio of 10. If you quadruple your pixel size and now measure 400 photons per pixel, then your SNR goes up to 20.

This is why bigger sensors (more captured photons for same light level and exposure time) are fundamentally better at image capture.
Watson, a new Sublime Text UI Theme
They covered this; it's sort of a rational choice, in the sense that since college is required for everyone, kids just want their certification. You or I might not like this attitude (I don't) but it's not altogether surprising, is it? Perhaps with the ascendance of such as standardized testing, you just want to get the "right" answers with the least effort.

I was like this in high school (solid B student b/c lazy), but for whatever reason, I grew out of it in college and have since reacquainted myself with the joy of learning. I can understand why the whole thing might seem like a joke, especially if everyone around you feels the same way.

Maybe we should ask questions about why kids' expectations are what they are. I'll bet you they're a lagging indicator of some characteristic(s) of our educational system. As I said upthread, as adults we're beholden to them for making sure they turn out OK. To put it charitably, it's misguided to blame kids for the results of adult decisions.
I'm not a huge fan of the double wrap of anonymous functions. The inner one seems entirely superfluous unless you're adding multiple plugins in one file and, I think, makes the code a little harder to read since you have to look at the invocation of the function to get all the information you need about it.

It seems a lot clearer to simply declare `var pluginName = "borderize";` at the top of the function than to pass it in. Granted, that does add 6 characters to the total length of the file.
College football: Abbrederis transforms from walk-on to superstar
Thank you for educating me with that extremely relevant quote!
There's a book you should read called "The 80/20 Principle". It might help you understand better how this sort of thing naturally happens, and why it is to be expected and nothing wrong about it.
what would it take to open a Westerns-only online "Netflix", with titles I would want to offer

An unquantifiable amount of venture capital for infrastructure and licenses.
Maybe you should try to be less myopic on these things when paying attention though. Historically both the judicial and the legislative system have slowly pushed back on unchecked executive privilege. Before FISA, the executive could basically spy on any foreigner for any reason without any reason given to the other branches. Congress pushed back, putting into place the Senate Intelligence committee.

The problem isn't that all branches are in on it, it's that they aren't. There isn't communication between the three branches, so when the gory details get revealed ,be it Hoover's FBI antics, Nixon's abuses, or now, the NSA's eagerness, other branches fight back.

If you look at laws regarding privacy historically, there's a general tendency for more, not less. One step back doesn't invalidate a whole system.
ccc streaming team is great and the traffic should be fine, but better be save and provide a fallback.
Ramona Pierson: From near-death to Silicon Valley CEO
I agree with you re: humanities. I should also say that I think it's a shame if what's "useful" is the only thing that we, as a society, decide to focus on. What about literature, art, and culture? Should we just content ourselves with Hollywood blockbusters and reality TV?
It would help to define what "changing the world" means to the author (and whether it's a good thing; not every change is desirable; 9/11 changed the world for the worse).

It could be argued that only two tech companies actually changed the world since 1980: Microsoft and Google. Amazon, maybe.

But for example, I don't think Apple, Sun, Oracle, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter... "changed the world". They are very big, wildly successful companies, they make products and software that people enjoy (me included), but they didn't turn the world into a different place than it was before.
Least extreme U.S. weather years ever?
"If the value is good, sure"
Good point. I'm glad you brought that up
A few questions:
1. How can you tell if the revenue stats are valid?
2. How do you determine "good value"?
If you liked this post you might like the "Appendix E: Extended Example: A Tiny TCP/IP Done as a Parser" by Ian Piumarta. The paper is available at: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf
At least Gabriel is upfront about it: investing contributed a big part to the changing of his world view. Here is how a cynic may see it:

(1) Risk of time (and other things, including money) => go safe.

(2) Risk of money (only) => go big.

I am genuinely not sure[1], but it does occur to me that this could be the underlying difference in approach between an investor and a founder (more specifically: a founder still looking for his safety net.)

---

[1] To tell you the truth, I find myself leaning towards "going big" of late. But until I found something tangible, it's just an exercise in vanity.
Interesting thing to notice. Probably just a coincidence but if it was set in purpose it would be really genius evil.
Obama’s NSA Phone Spying Reforms Might Make Things Worse
I'd rather be lucky than good. One million dollars please.
> While it makes sense to pick the skill...

Why does it make any sense to pick the skill? My goal in life is not to make money, it is to do things which mostly unfortunately require money. A million dollars would be a life-changing amount of money, and I could get started on the real things I want to do with my life in the mean time.
Even if your servers are patched, firewalled etc and you encrypt all traffic travelling between data centres, if the data is decrypted on your internal network for processing or use you're vulnerable to "host is subpoenaed by the NSA", "black box installed on network by NSA" and "insiders work with NSA out of patriotism" which non-US suppliers may protect you from. Even if you self-host and have no employees, it's difficult to stop a legal subpoena from the NSA for your SSL private key except by making sure you and it never enter the US courts' jurisdiction.

Of course, you're still vulnerable to hacking, physical intrusion, and blackmail or bribery of insiders by the NSA. And whatever the local equivalent of the NSA is. And secretive international agreements.
What interesting things are you doing during those gaps?
Internet Archive releases classic 70s & 80s Atari games
Analytics Made Skeezy
You're also assuming field of view (FOV) stays the same - which it won't. Think about if every picture you took was a panorama - I don't think 18000px x 2135px (to keep the same number of pixels) is unreasonable resolution for a 180° panorama.

Now imagine that lenses for single-shot panoramas are standard on all cameras and cellphones.