skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is currently pretty much impossible to short large quantities of bitcoins. Besides, such an attack would probably crash the whole system which could render the potential shorts useless. Too much uncertainty for anything that big.

I really can't see the way for anybody to benefit from a 51 attack. However, a potential attack will probably be a black swan, which will make it "impossible" to foresee for 99% of us, so the fact that there isn't any clear way to benefit from it, doesn't actually mean that there isn't a way.
Agreed. Really, middle/high school level algebra ought to be called "simplifying equations" or "solving for a variable" because real math majors know that a college level algebra course is worlds apart and middle/high school teachers should be shot for letting their students think that they are competent at anything more complicated than balancing a checkbook. Similarly, pre-calc ought to be "concepts that we think you ought to be familiar with before you take calculus because you need to have a fundamental understanding of these concepts before you can do anything useful in math because, trust us on this, it will be nice to have these tricks in your toolbox of knowledge," but I suppose that is just too long so they kept it at pre-calculus.
> who would be the contenders?

Here's a good start - and I'll bet that Heroku's free tier is a better option than most $5/month PHP webhosts:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/language-support
Bjarne Stroustrup has a great quote which is something like (from memory, so I don't guarantee complete accuracy) "I used to want a computer which was as easy to use as a telephone. I got my wish; I now no longer know how to use my telephone".

The problem is that software (and social networking software in particular) is designed to take advantage of general unfamiliarity / cluelessness and manipulate people into doing something they didn't actually intend to do. The case is legally interesting for two reasons:

1. As DanBC pointed out above, when you have a restraining order against you, you are expected to take reasonable precaution not to violate it inadvertently. However, accidentally running into your ex in the grocery store is not in itself a violation -- so long as you do not then proceed to intentionally violate the order. Could an inadvertent social networking invitation constitute a violation due to lack of reasonable precaution, or it it more like the grocery store scenario?

2. The argument from ignorance. Computer systems are frequently regarded by laypeople as being not just unknown but unknowable. Can it be successfully argued that this crazy computer stuff is just too complicated and that a reasonable person could not take adequate precaution against the whims of an unknowable computer system.

This is the adult, 21st-century version of "the dog ate my homework" -- "Google violated my restraining order". Should it go to court? Absolutely. But it's still of great interest to the HN crowd because -- depending on the technical understanding of the judge and the type of argument chosen by the counsel -- it could end up impacting the design of web services and the sort of legal arguments we see decades into the future.

Usual disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, anything I say about legal matters is probably wrong, if restraining order lasts for more than four hours consult a physician, etc.
Oh I agree with you. If I thought someone might actually try to kill me (not just hurt me), a restraining order is the last thing I would get. I'd go into hiding instead. But I understand that to be the theory.
In-depth Analysis of New Magento2 Developments
Elon Musk starts to make a LOT of money! :-)
Showing my age. My first thought upon reading this was "holy crap, Easel[1] is still around?!"

[1] http://www.thefreelibrary.com/VMARK+SOFTWARE,+INC.+AND+EASEL... - I can't find a better link. Easel was a '4gl' in the early-mid 90s (and maybe late 80s), one of the earlier event-driven UI programming languages. It was kludgy and annoying to code for, but ahead of its time in a lot of ways.
I wish the Stack Exchange folks would open source their chat app and/or provide as a service alongside Trello (perhaps with the same payment model). We use HipChat here, it's ok, but SE chat is pretty awesome.
> The fact a programmer will fuck up an app boils to the fact twitter will use HTTP, which is text, on top of SSL. This can't be blazing fast for such a low powered device, especially if it's a library API thing you use to make an app on top of it. I think google and the web in general are mostly to blame because they're responsible of spreading text based protocols.

I think this paints only part of the truth. About an year ago (I don't know if this still applies today), I grudgingly agreed to see if Phonegap could be of any help to us in a project. The difference in interface alone was noticeable: slider widgets were sloppy and noticeably froze, on a mid-range phone. The same native widget was fine.

Clearly, then, the phone isn't memory- or CPU-starved to the point where it can't paint a slider widget. It logically follows that one implementation of that widget is inefficient (sweet talk for "it's worse than it could be", if not "it's bad").

HTTP over SSL probably does make for slow data transfer on such a device, but it should play little role in a sloppy UI. I've seen fluid, well-built UIs that ran on slower devices, over slower data links (think hundreds of bytes per second or even less). They adequately conveyed the information that the device is waiting for data, or that data is being fed at a slow pace, but they weren't botching.
Nope, I'm stuck on Hacker News.
> But you are completely disregarding the study, which shows that children around the age of 8 have a massive dropoff in what they can remember from a scant 2 years ago.

> Indeed, they went out of their way to show that at age 6 they had a high recollection of things 2 years prior.

You have misread something. The study does not make reference to any 6-year-olds, or 8-year-olds, being tested for recall of events 2 years prior. The events tested always occurred at age three; they are comparing 5-year-olds' recall of events two years prior to 6-year-olds' recall of events three years prior to 7-year-olds' recall of events four years prior to 8-year-olds' recall of events five years prior to 9-year-olds' recall of events six years prior.

Furthermore, I specifically didn't say it's a matter of the age of the memory. If I had meant that, I would have said something like "memories fade with time". What I did say was "memories fade with disuse". If you exercise a memory (whether a true one or a false one), it will become stronger. If you don't, you will lose it.
I am from the US, and that's just a normal gun nut asshole opinion.
>>>Seems a little greedy.

Which actually benefits us as the consumer. Would you prefer a less greedy corporation that goes where the most expensive labor is which then increases the cost of production which then increases the cost of the products you buy from said company?

Greed is what keeps prices low, and competition high.
Did i do anything to trigger that company to send the mail?

Did I take that action after the order or not?

Because doing something when I'm married and forgetting to undo that after a restraining order is different to deliberately doing something after an order has been taken out.

If a spammer is spoofing my details I can demonstrate to the court that I had nothing to do with the sending of that spam. There's a reasonable point to be made about the burden of proof, i guess.

People who are spoofed did not send the contact.

Just checking but you do see the difference between:

Bob does nothing to contact Chris. But Sam Spammer sends an email to Chris using Bob's forged email details.

And

Bob joins a website. The website asks for access to Bob's email contacts, and offers to send emails to everyone on that list, and Bob says "go ahead".

When a judge tells you that you're going to jail if you break an order you either get ready to go to jail and break the order or you make efforts to not break the order. It is very normal to deal with i justice after the event by appealing at a pater date.
There was a wonderful Greenpeace poster from back in the 80s which had these words:

"When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can't eat money."

It wasn't about workers' rights, but something along those lines seems to fit.
> To be fair, your memory could be only slightly altered over time [...] It's also possible that your parents' memory is off.

Absolutely. In fact, I find it extremely interesting, in a philosophical sense, the implication that perhaps nothing we remember can be considered reliable.

But in this case 3 years old is quite young for an early memory and it is clear from other evidence that I have particularly poor memory for events (late age for most childhood memories, poor memories of events and conversations even today). So the most likely explanation is that my own memory is fabricated. Interestingly, that doesn't change the fact that I can still remember it!

> my wife has abundant and clear memories of much of her life [...] she's a writer

It is certainly a thing which varies strongly in different people. I am reminded of an author (I think it was Beaverly Cleary) being interviewed and mentioning that she had strong memories of her early childhood -- and that this was the source of much of her excellent writing.

> she wrote a piece about navigating the unreliability of memory

I read it. Wow... she's a great writer! Please pass on that I said so. I thought the pacing of that piece and the way it draws the reader in at the beginning were really wonderful. It is so difficult to write about racial issues in a way that is open to and accessible to readers from all races, but this piece managed that.
What people don't understand about Switzerland is that it's USA's ally.
Even being officially neutral, during the cold war it had its own Gladio program financed by the CIA.

And intelligence agencies in the rest of the world, don't need a warrant to spy inside their own country. It's assumed it is to be done and as long they are not caught, nobody will ask any questions.

So Swiss spies may well have cooperation agreements with NSA as every NATO countries.
You have to look at countries that are hostile or at least unfriendly toward your country.

If I was an American worried about NSA's 'legal' mass collection of meta data I would rent space on Russian, Chinese or Iranian servers (I have no clue if North Korea provides cloud services* :-)

Of course they can still hack the foreign servers but their job is made harder than to just ask 'nicely' the data to an American company.

My 2 cents.

* perhaps a start-up idea : Juche As A Service or Kim Il Cloud
Are there any jurisdictions where it is a barrier to, say, purchasing a knife? I doubt it. Again, if I thought my life was in danger, a restraining order would not be sought.
The sentiment from me is that any registration pop-up converts good feelings (good feelings that might have turned into love organically) into repulsive hate faster than I can close the tab or window.

The way to win me over is purely with content. I read HN for years without getting an account. Guess what, I came back day after day because of the content. Eventually I wanted to participate more actively, so I intentionally and with absolutely no prompting, registered.
I am not sure what you are trying to argue for.

Is your argument that giving someone else exclusive control of things you own is a feature? I guess a thief could argue that stealing stuff from people house is a feature too.

GPL denies people to circumvent property rights of the devices owner - ie, the person who bought it. If you object to stopping such activities, I hope you don't object when people circumvent other laws.
I hadn't heard of the second possible attack that you mention until now. Could you please point me to an article or somewhere that develops the idea. I'm intrigued about what people predict that the miners of such pool would do in that scenario.
Except it's not. China has reached the stage in economic development that people are moving to higher skilled and higher paying jobs. Infrastructure in Vietnam has improved to the extent that is ready for large manufacturing plants.

While companies are saving by moving manufacturing plants, many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living. I say it's a win win.
With a physical lock, you'd have to pick the lock each time you wanted access, and avoid being seen. The bar for repetitive attacks on the web is much lower, because you only need to write the "lock picking" script once, and then you can use it indefinitely, disseminate it, etc.

A poorly protected website is more akin a house with no lock on it at all, and reporting that "this house has no lock" is not a criminal act.
Wages go up.
Fair enough for that literal description, meaning that the parent poster was sloppy. But at some point between an unfriendly breakup and literal threats of murder, the restraining order is the right response. I think that's the key point.
12 Of The Best Ideas From CES 2014
Fintech Hackathons Coming to SF, NYC | Cash Prizes
Correct, that's what the popular opinion is too. Sans Serif fonts are easier to read on computer monitors because they are less visually complex.
What I love about freelancing is how unpredictable it is. Clients can (and will) call you whenever they want. You’ll be forced to realize that you underestimated a project and you are personally eating the cost. One day you’ll have 1 project to work on, the next day you’ll have 5. Sometimes a client “forgets” to pay on time. When you need to crush it and work 8am to 10pm for days on end to keep your clients happy, you do what you gotta do.

While there are plenty of good reasons to freelance, I hardly see the above as something to love. The post reads like a bit of a sales pitch (and perhaps that is the intent) that makes freelancing seem wholly superior to conventional full-time employment.
Julian Król’s Take on AppCode
If they did, the third party would have a right to be told about it proactively and a right to contest it. I am betting there is no jurisdiction that does this.
To my knowledge, I don't think Valve has ever had any intentions of developing serious developer tools for software (not games). Apple and Microsoft both have suites of tools for developers to use and Linux is one big developer tool kit.

The purpose, as stated by Valve, is for gaming not development. I think that this article is reaching a bit far.
One study referenced had 20 participants. Another had 25. These are really small studies! Their small size means there is a high chance that the effect doesn't actually hold.

It's fine to say "some small studies suggest this is true", and then use it practice because doing a better study is beyond your means or simply not important. It's fine to do small studies, because it's a cheaper way to look for interesting effects that might then be investigated in more detail. But let's not pretend "science" has decided this issue beyond reasonable doubt.

"Science", some amorphous entity quite disconnected from real science, has become a religion of sorts for some non-scientifically minded people. Put "science" is a post title and you'll fool many into thinking you speak from authority. I feel the author is well intentioned here, but has gone far beyond what the science suggests.
Essentially, it creates a barebone project with a list of pre-defined folders/files. For me, this is not very useful as I actually prefer to create my own.

Unless this command is vastly more opinionated (and less bare-bones) than Django's startapp/startproject, and with only what you've written to go on, I get the impression that what you're doing here is killing part of the benefit a framework gives you: The ability for others with framework experience to (relatively) quickly pick up your projects and work on them.

I've worked on several projects that did similar things in addition to many that more strictly followed their framework's conventions, and choice of framework aside, when you're using something lightweight already but ignoring its conventions, you might as well be rolling your own.

If that's not something that's important to you when choosing a framework, for whatever reason, then I can see this being OK (if not useful). But I don't think it's a good habit to get into if you are likely to pass off your work to others or need to bring in outside help in the future.
Yeah, no kidding. Animated garbage popping up as soon as I start scrolling, and a "Subscribe" popup before I can possibly have had a chance to evaluate whether or not I might like to be annoyed with emails about whatever it is the post is on about? Plonk!
How disappointing, the article is called "Frameworkless JavaScript", but the author uses jQuery for the application. Yeah, I get it, jQuery a library...

File size seems like the biggest concern, but really, how important is that on a dynamic page that needs to load exactly once? And using a CDN it might already be cached anyway.

That being said, I also like clean, minimal JS code.
You can’t solve a logic puzzle that way, but you can explain the pragmatics of why the “logical” answer is contrary to our expectations based on interaction with real people.
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How does that not fit your definition? Most governments consider piracy websites objectionable, and try to censor them.

The PirateBrowser was created by pirates, but isn't necessarily for them.
A Cherry G80-LSCDE. It's one of the cheaper mechanical keyboards with MX blue switches. The case is cheap plastic and it doesn't look and feel too sturdy, but the typing experience is good.
Thinking like a programmer can help you raise your game
Having a native English speaker proofread the copy would’ve helped as well. It’s amazing how many mistakes they managed to make in such a short text.
When I first read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll, I was wondering if anyone would think to criminalize connecting something to the network that had no protection. So instead of throwing teenagers in jail, they would make an example of systems administrators. Perhaps that would have quickened the advance of internet security awareness.

At one time, there was a law in Minnesota that it was a misdemeanor to leave your car unlocked in a public place, so the idea is not totally without precedent.
Why don't you start by not generating hate? An unimaginable, controversial suggestion, no doubt, but perhaps there's some slight value in it all the same.
I agree that apps and aspects of modern life make it too easy for someone to appear to have broken an order even if they had no intent of doing so.

Perhaps some kind of pre-court mediation where the parties can apologies and explain and demonstrate willingness to abide by the order?

I kind of hope that headlines like "Facebook request sent me to prison" makes app authors think carefully about grabbing email address lists and sending to all of them.

Perhaps there could be a honeypot project where people include trap addresses on their contact lists?
Too bad all the fancy math can't account for people who don't share or upvote the content because their reading was rudely interrupted.
If they assured me that the extra price goes to ensure a better standard of living and better working conditions for their third-world workers, then yes.
With all the concern over double spending, I'm wondering doesn't double spending happen frequently?

It seems like all you'd have to do is make two transactions within a short time period like < 1 second. Doesn't this happen from time to time?
Reads like a self-help book...
The mathematics that programming -- program verification -- requires is unlike traditional mathematics. All programmers do this; all programmers will go through a process to reason why his programs are correct. This process might be formal or informal, conscious or subconscious, through or incomplete. The most relevant branch of mathematics would be formal logics.
> Which actually benefits us as the consumer. Would you prefer a less greedy corporation that goes where the most expensive labor is which then increases the cost of production which then increases the cost of the products you buy from said company?

Yes? I would definitely prefer an America where there is less disposable crap, but more secure and stable domestic jobs for people, and I think most Americans would agree.
Hah! Exact same thing, I used... Borland Basic, IIRC, to build the executable that I called from autorun.

I collected many passwords - I never used them or intended to, I just wanted to see if I could do it.

I made the classic mistake though - I told someone about it. A few days later word got around. I was suspended for a week and was banned from computers for the rest of my time there.

Edit: Now that I think about it (I haven't in years): What kind of response is that? Someone shows some creative thinking and does so in a way that is obviously[1] quite naive/without ill intent. While I understand that you want to discourage the specific behavior, perhaps steering the culprit to use talents with more foresight would have been a better answer.

[1] Looking back, I was something of an asshat in the personal skills department so it's entirely possible that they simply didn't believe my lack of nefarious intent.
Archos is working on a $50 smartwatch
Not using a JS Framework? Congratulations, you've just built your own ad hoc JS Framework.

Suddenly, anyone who joins moot will have to invest tons of effort in your custom framework instead of being able to hit the ground running.
Suggesting that frameworks are too complicated because they "add tens of redundant methods, adding complexity for the end user" is ridiculous. The number of methods in something doesn't always add to the complexity - in a lot of cases a framework vastly reduces the difficulty of using something by abstracting away the hard stuff so the user doesn't need to worry about it. That's pretty much the point of a framework. Further though, using an established framework improves things through the "many eyes" principle - if tens of thousands of people have used a piece of code, chances are it's going to be pretty damn bulletproof and it'll have a swathe of documentation backing it up (as official docs, blog posts, StackOverflow questions, etc). No startup can even dream of competing with that.

Specifically in the case of moot.it, perhaps as a thing that's dropped into a website to provide a discussion forum having tight code is a bonus, but if you're writing something for other people to extend then using a well known framework as a starting point is a very, very obvious choice.
2014 Baseball Hall of Fame Predictions
Cultural note: is this the kind of thing that uk legal aid no longer covers?
Worked for Lincoln, too.
This is ridiculous click bait and flame bait.

Freelancing fits certain people's (like the author's apparently) personality perfectly.

Others, like myself, have had enough years of dealing with customers directly and prefer internal positions where I mainly just deal with the CEO and my own team.
Snow Leopard was just beautiful! It's been downhill from a developer standpoint since.
That's why nobody should be accepting transactions with no confirmations.
There are a lot of people who do just that, when possible, me included. I always prefer products made in the U.S., but when it comes to tech your choices are reduced greatly. I'm okay with paying a little more if it's more ethical.
This has been discussed before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6653024

A massive discussion between Backbone.js developer and the developer of Riot.js kicked off. It's an interesting read that's for sure.

You can find the library here https://github.com/moot/riotjs