skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fortunately, the attackers didn't, or weren't able to, use their access to slip backdoor code into the OpenSSL software, which websites around the world use to provide HTTPS encryption for the pages they serve. That assurance is possible because the code is maintained and distributed through Git, a source-code management system that allows developers and users to maintain independent copies all over the Internet. Since the cryptographic hashes found on OpenSSL matched those elsewhere, there is a high degree of confidence the code hasn't been altered.

A few days ago I posed the question of whether Git's crypto is an example of dangerous amateur cryptography, since Linus isn't (AFAIK) a crypto expert: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961683

The general answer I got was that Git isn't really crypto, because it isn't using the hash to guarantee integrity, but simply as a checksum to detect corruption.

I didn't find this argument very convincing at the time, and I would now offer the above quotation as evidence that people do in fact treat Git's hashes as a security mechanism that can withstand an adversarial attack.
Suicide is completely a personal choice. MIT had no reason to try and defend an outsider who hijacked part of their network, and trying to make them seem like they caused him to hang himself smacks of tunnel vision.

It's a natural response to a suicide; we try and search for something to blame. But unless you argue that MIT should have known Aaron was mentally unstable, saying MIT "caused" him to kill himself is illogical. People who commit suicide may desire to because of what they feel about their lives, but the final decision is one's own.

It's sad that it takes a death to bring attention to the IP issues that Aaron's trial had raised.
"the problem of maintaining a public ledger of user names to public keys"

What is the point of that ledger? Public keys identify users on their own.
Show HN: Rmux, a Redis multiplexer written in Go
What Is the Mystery Flavor of Dum Dums?
> I'm not sure that it says anywhere in the documentation that it guarantees anything more than that, but I agree that a significant proportion of developers would intuitively expect that the entire content of the tree to be signed rather than just the SHA1.

Further evidence that they do assume that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7003900
Scott Young, a blogger, did this (http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/), but not to make himself more attractive to potential employers. He covered the equivalent of a CS degree at MIT in one year, where "covered" means passing. Highly recommend reading about it and watching a few progress videos to get his method down.
A desire to kill oneself is a diagnosis of mental instability.
And not one of those ideas is Bitcoin related. It's 2014 for god's sake.
Defense budget is $500 billion+
D-wave's system is fundamentally not amenable to cryptography. As they describe it it's a quantum annealing system; good for finding optimal parameters to some loss function, but not for instance Shor's algorithm.
I'm very glad I grew up in The Netherlands for this precise reason. Every summer, I took a full eight weeks off with family and went to India to spend time with the rest of the extended family. This remained the case through college (although eight did become six).

I did half of my PhD research at UC Berkeley and it was quite insane for me to note how rare it is that grad students take vacation. I love vacation and I love coming back fully charged to work thereafter. Can't quite fathom how you can adhere to a "no vacation" way of life.
What a Bitcoin is really worth in India and China
I think it's much more complicated than that. I wouldn't say it "caused" him to commit suicide, so much as greatly contributed.

If the punishment vastly outweighs the crime, to the extent that one's mental health is impacted, can he be completely to blame for that?
What they want is information of such person BEFORE they were accused with the crime. Therefor they need all the information of everyone!
Is day to day life experience capable of causing change in the neural anatomy ? We know the answer is yes because people who go through intense trauma end up with brains that function differently in measurable ways, and that is well studied. Meditation is a similar thing except that where trauma causes brain damage meditation causes brain healing. Meditation is about learning to control and direct your faculty of attention in order to upgrade your brain's "wetware".

You're learning to choose a new primary neural pathway that tends to route around the fight/flight parts of the brain and route into lesser understood parts of the brain. The end effect is a calmer, happier, less worried you, but it takes.. well... practice :)
True, but sometimes questions also don't show a whole lot of effort on the part of the asker, and so the answerer is not inclined to put in much of their own. If I'm going to ask a question and want a thorough answer, I try to at least provide a little background on what I already know.
I'd be really interested to see a list like this of bitcoin ideas?

I keep thinking how revolutionary it is yet I can't seem to think of any ideas beyond payments :-(
Pig is another option. It allows using SQL like commands on the grunt shell, making using Hadoop a lot easier.
That was your takeaway and most useful comment, huh?
Noam Chomsky on Singularity 1 on 1: The Singularity is Science Fiction
I hadn't read the article yet, the giant waste of space annoyed me enough that the content didn't matter. Besides, this is HN. Web design is fair game for discussion just as much as the actual content is.
I believe it is because Spark stores data in objects called RDD (Resilient Distributed Dataset) and these are lazily evaluated. I could be wrong though.

http://spark.incubator.apache.org/docs/latest/quick-start.ht...
MIT did not on its own "cause" Aaron to commit suicide, but MIT certainly did play a role in the events that led up to the suicide. Perhaps MIT had no reason to defend Aaron, but what reason did they have to help the prosecution -- why did MIT turn over information without being subpoenaed for it? MIT deserves its share of the blame.
Spark's major benefit comes from storing the intermediate results in-memory instead of storing it in HDFS as Hadoop does. Let's say a certain query needs to run 3 mapreduce jobs A, B, C one after another. In Hadoop, there will be 3 hdfs reads and writes. With spark, there will be only 1 hdfs read (before launching A) and 1 write (after C is completed). In spark, the output of A gets stored in RAM which is read by B and so on until the final write.

The DAG used by spark represents how one job/partition of data depends on another job/partition and what methods (e.g. filter) need to be applied on the parent data to get the child data. This is useful when a node goes down and that portion of data has to be recomputed. Note that users can choose to persist some intermediate results to hdfs to avoid recomputation in case of failure.
I think that depends on the type of company -- a number of old-school companies would be scared off by open-source contributors. For example, back when I was at Motorola (way before the split, and before Google bought out the cell phone section), part of the employment contract was that anything creative you think of at work or at home) belongs to the company, so technically you couldn't work on any side projects without them owning it. Not that it was legally enforceable or that they ever tried to enforce it...

Also, even today there are a number of companies (esp. in the midwest) that won't let any open source software inside, unless it comes from a paid vendor (like Red Hat).
I agree and it is something of a strawman that I put up, but my other points stand.
tl;dr urgency and prudence don't go together.
Whoa, let's tone down the negativity HN. The hate is already piling up, but I think there are some really good ideas here. Sure, many (probably most) of the ideas are already done, but he does give some thoughts on the angles of execution and niches. This would be a great place to start for someone looking to brainstorm or for someone looking for their first startup experience.

At least don't deride the author for sharing some interesting ideas. If you've thought about each and every one of these, good for you, but I had some interesting thoughts while reading.
What defines a functional programming language?
Maybe not. The bass at a dubstep show hits your chest really hard, I can imagine it floating a golf ball. You can do some simple DSP to cancel out most of the amplitude too
I've been thinking about the "Sell my car" idea for a bit. I think it's ripe for new thinking. If you're interested and in the SF Bay Area, ping me at ahconsidered@hushmail.com
Perry: Deterministic Builds Part One: Cyberwar and Global Compromise
7 Traits of Wantrepreneurs: How to convince yourself that you can't make it
Well, they certainly did not help to prevent the ridiculous prosecution being made
> Surely the main way people access the internet is through 3G either directly on the phones or on mobile broadband.

I don't know if that's true or not but I'd be willing to bet that most of the cellular towers there (providing 3G/mobile broadband) are themselves using microwave backhauls, quite possibly the same one(s) carrying the "Internet connection".
I agree. The article is titled "How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World" whereas the scientific consensus for the past half century has been the opposite, and very little evidence has come to light over the past half century to change this. The beginning of the article is given to the ideas of a heterodox associate professor at UCSD. Further down in the article John McWhorter affirms the orthodox view (his speciality is slightly tangential to the question).

There is a mountain of evidence supporting the orthodox view, and the Boroditsky's, the Daniel Everett's etc. have not come up with much conflicting evidence or compelling alternative hypotheses. Is there any prominent scientist in this or a related field who subscribes to these Sapir-Whorf type theories? The hey day of this idea was before World War II, and the alternative theories may get play on NPR and the like, but not within the scientific community. Until, as I said, compelling evidence to the contrary is seen.
It's not reasonable to "punish" an organization that went too far? If you don't do that then they don't have much incentive to stay within the lines.
You really are overthinking it. Context and intent will always have a place in the law.

Did you typo a wget to random URL and it returned my credit card number / ssn and home address, realized this was something you shouldn't be accessing and stop? I'm sure you would have a good case that your intent was merely an accident or innocent and you won't get in trouble.

Did you wget a million URL's over the course of the day and store these credit card numbers / ssn's for some use later? Probably might have a harder time justifying that. Again it is all about context and intent, these are going to be a factor in the court. It is never going to be a simple black or white sequence of events that can be followed to determine if you were doing something harmless or not, no matter how much the crowd here doesn't want that to be the case.
Oh, poor MIT, all they did was actively help the guy who wanted Aaron thrown in prison for three and half decades* while pretending to be neutral. Any of us might have done the same, right? Totally innocent! Like "a rape victim," to use Heymann's own words.

If you punch a stranger in the face, you probably don't expect him to fall, crack his head on the corner of a table, and die; but you don't get to claim you're blameless if that happens, either.

* This is the bit where someone says that Heymann didn't really want to lock Aaron up 'til 2045, he just said that to scare him. Where I come from, "but I was lying" isn't considered much of a defense either.
Although spark is nice, I'm also looking forward to mpi/orted integration with hadoop...

"Performance: Launches ~1000x faster, runs ~10x faster"

"Launch scaling: Hadoop (~N), MR+ (~logN)"

"Wireup: Hadoop (~N2), MR+ (~logN)"

http://slurm.schedmd.com/slurm_ug_2012/MapRedSLURM.pdf
Given that this is hacker news, I'm surprised that no one bothered to write a simulation to sanity-check their answer. Here's a quick and dirty one: http://jsfiddle.net/qc9qk/2/

The mistake that most people seem to be making is using P(biased) and P(fair) instead of P(biased|10 heads) and P(fair|10 heads).

Spoiler: The answer is ~0.75.
The Brave New World For Startups, Filmmakers, Musicians, and Other Artists
if someone broke into my Network Closet, I would not need a subpoena.
I feel a lot like that, And I know many hard working people who feel like that.

I don't think there is any thing wrong with that kind of an attitude.

And I can also assure that's some thing not restricted to our profession alone. A lot of people have to be in the game to feel comfortable. There are tons of people who are supposedly in retirement but still put in crazy hours to keep themselves sane.

Beyond the craving to be seen by your own self as productive. Showing up for work has other benefits, like socializing, meeting people, knowing things, current affairs and continuous learning. None of that is possible sitting at home.

Another thing that I see among people who while away time at home is their attitude towards their family. If there is some one around more productive ego clashes are inevitable. And human mind always seems to converge towards doubts, uncertainty, fear and in general negative emotions when left alone.
I'm genuinely curious, is that a widely accepted position on suicide and mental stability? I can think of a number of situations where suicide might be preferable to continued existence.
Yea it's really better than I thought possible considering the volume. Most of these I can't come up with something that will make it impossible, by the time I'm done reading, as I usually can do with most people's billion dollar ideas. A lot of these are what you might describe as small businesses done on the internet, which is not a bad thing, not every idea has to be a quick growth money burning exercise.
Guess What? Programming is Even More Fun Than Proving
Not necessarily. I've worked on projects where a high six figure yearly price tag was "trivial money". It still took approvals from several steps up the line, but they were the rubber-stamp variety once something was seen as necessary for the project. Many of those decisions were based on "here's a handful of options, there's others we can follow up on if none of these are satisfactory" conversations. Anyone that required contacting them for a ballpark estimate ended up in the second group, and as often as not were not even considered.
Most voter ID proposal I've read also make voting without ID annoying and time consuming, but doable. This is taken as a clear evidence the goal is voter suppression. Thus I am asking, why the same thing with flying is not considered movement rights suppression?

I don't see how without ID checks cost and detection probability of voter fraud is high. You just get a list of guys who are dead or in jail or otherwise aren't going to show up (shouldn't be that hard to do), and pay somebody some small sum to show up at the polling place and vote as the name on the list. Where's the high cost in that?
I find it interesting to note, that I spend roughly 3 hours a day goofing off. And in the past 5 years, I've never taken a vacation day, because every day I love what I do and take my 3 hours to do what ever I desire. Taking vacations (for me) would be painful, I can't stand being kept from my work. Then again, my girlfriend needs a vacation once or twice a year to feel better and I don't feel she is weak by any means. I just don't seem to need what she needs.
Is there a source for left/right acceleration being more comfortable than down? My subjective/uneducated guess would actually be that acceleration is most comfortable in the order of: forwards, up, backwards, left/right, down.
What would be a less strict university in USA, more libertarian, less police state if you would?
detecting corruption is pretty much the same thing as detecting changes though right? Git uses SHA-1 hashes (I think). If someone managed to change the code in a way that still properly compiles AND doesn't change the checksum hash, well... pretty unlikely.
Indeed. Assuming the rest of the code is implemented without any vulnerabilities (and that's one hell of an assumption about any code), SHA1, which Git uses as its hashing algorithm, has been completely broken as early as 2005[1].

That said, I'm not sure how you'd go about crafting source code in such a way as to collide with a known hash without it being amazingly obvious. You could change history to make it appear as if your crocked code was always there or had been for a long time, but then you don't have to figure just one hash, then you have to figure every single hash down to the parent. Depending on the number of commits, that's a hell of a lot of work, even with an algorithm to break SHA1.

And even then if you change the hashes, since Git is distributed, the developers will quickly figure out that what's in one repo doesn't match all the others when patches start breaking..

[1] - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/cryptanalysis...
Not gonna lie, I feel a bit dumb for that. Factoring primes is as useful as a one-input mux, as a college roomie would say.
That's not my argument. My argument was that saying "there's no evidence of X so nobody could genuinely support measures to combat X" is nonsense - there are plenty of examples of existing laws and regulations purported to combat things that either do not exist or not dangerous or way less dangerous that the laws against them. Still, people support them despite the evidence. So the argument "anybody that supports voter ID must be after voter suppression" makes no sense - there are plenty of people that support voter ID because they think voter fraud is a problem or can be a problem, not because they want to suppress voters.
A SF-based hedge fund has started hiring "Bitcoin execution traders"
user: mentalhealth
created: 17 minutes ago

You're really not a very good troll.
Three Reasons Your Startup Will Suffer Without DevOps
Coinye West
Description provided on the site below.

--

DROPPING JANUARY 11, 2014. 11 PM EST. No screwed up fake "fair" launches, shyster devs, muted channels, and fked up wallets. We will be releasing password protected, encrypted archives containing the binaries and source for the wallet and daemon BEFORE LAUNCH, with the passwords to be released at the specified time. We will work with multiple pools to orchestrate a PROPER and FAIR release.

Internet Relay chat is in irc.freenode.net #coinyewest

Technical Details:

Algorithm: Scrypt
Max Coins: 66,666,666,666
Block time: 90 Seconds
Difficulty Re-Target Time: 12 hours
Block Rewards: 666,666 COYE
Every 100k blocks, the payout halves
A common paradigm in the 1990s version of universal grammar (I have not kept up) is the principles and parameters framework. In this framework, the universal grammar consists of a collection of principles (such as "syntactic movement is always sensitive to hierarchical structure") that can be configured via a collection of parameters (traditionally, these were thought of as binary or ternary switches). A summary of this framework is available at http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/CELS.pdf .

The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.

From the perspective of an adherent of the principles and parameters variety of universal grammar, the examples of cross-linguistic variation you mention are not all that radical. A much stronger challenge to universal grammar is the existence of the Pirahã language, which (it has been argued) cannot express recursion, which would otherwise be a linguistic universal.
You could use a key derivation function (scrypt or pbkdf2) to expand it out and make it quite difficult to even rainbow table it. You could also compound the effort by only storing a hash of the pairs (one hash or derived key of two phone numbers) with no associated metadata directly linked to it, only as an access gate. Collisions may occur but at least the positive results from a total search space would be significantly reduced.

I Am Not A Cryptographer, so I admit there is likely faulty reasoning in there somewhere, though.
Achieve Anything: A framework for programming habits and behaviors
Stuff like this is why I run BigBoardList.
I've used SSH on my iPhone on occasion (and on the iPad somewhat more regularly). It's not that utterly crazy, as long as you have a good SSH app and can run something like tmux or screen on the server side.
I learned quite a long time ago that realistic discussion of mental health as it actually affects real people generally results in a lot of negative votes here on HN. But please, continue to dismiss my argument by attacking me and not the statement I made. More par for the course hereabouts.
Nice post! Anyone deserves a vacation in order to relax from
everyday stresses of life.. For me, I don't care if people label me as "weak" as long as I enjoy every minute of my vacation.. (",)
> So the code matters. There will never be powerful IDE like features as long it's this single threaded thing that only ever does anything as a response to user input.

Run VIM in a sub-process, and communicate with it through a fake terminal. Basically, quarantine the madness.
Wiki for remote software engineering jobs
I think it may be widely accepted, but I also think it's nonsense. As you allude to, someone with a terminal and painful disease could have an entirely rational desire to commit suicide based on a sensible projection of the future as containing a persistent unacceptable level of suffering.

I think we should only invoke "mental instability" when someone's projection of their future level of suffering is clearly mistaken.
This feels like a hack or Domain Specific Language on top of email. It's interesting to think what the RFC for email would have been if how Enterprise uses actually uses it was baked in from the start
Going from Hive/Pig to Spark enables substantial improvement in developers' productivity (for non-reporting/BI workloads). You can properly unit test your program, use a debugger, and have all your code in the same place in the same language (rather than in the case of Pig, write UDFs in Java and then use a pseudo-scripting language for workflow specification).

All of these are just productivity gains; not to mention the performance gains you get when you go from MapReduce to Spark.
What's more libertarian than calling the police when someone misuses and infringes on your property?
I am curious, what was wrong with the criminal charges against Swartz? Can someone clarify how the prosecutor handled things wrong?
OK, then you would receive your share of the blame if that person killed themselves after being hounded by the prosecutors you aided.
MIT leadership had a duty to act reasonably, and they didn't. MIT's position should have been that, at most, this amounted to trespassing and matter for the Cambridge PD. Aaron Swartz was no threat to MIT's network. They might not have prevented subsequent events, but they failed, horribly, by not speaking up for a reasonable outcome.

MIT's IS&T office had a knee jerk security-oriented reaction, and was over impressed with interacting with Steven Heymann, who is a fixture at the sort of conferences where Swartz's "crime" is inflated out of proportion.

It's not OK that Heymann, Ortiz, and MIT's personnel who overcooked this case contributed to the death of Aaron Swartz. And it's not OK they got away with it so far.