skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cryptography is alive and well, but not because we can redefine the goals to disregard the most powerful adversaries. It's alive and well because there are ciphers that remain essentially unbreakable and are likely to remain so in the forseeable future.

The title is somewhere between misleading and dishonest. It's like saying that door locks are "dead" because burglars can go in the windows - in reality there's nothing wrong with the door locks, and the correct response is not to abandon the door locks but instead to secure the windows too (no pun intended).

The fact that there are side attacks is not a flaw of cryptography, rather it is a part of the environment in which it is practiced, and besides the attackers' workarounds are in principle subject to being defeated or avoided.
Guilty as charged. :-) CTO, head janitor, the company lived in my 1 bedroom apartment's living room for 3 years and up to the first 9 employees.
5 Questions for Entrepreneurs to Ask Before Accepting Investment
"Fiat money" is as I've seen it used a political message, used most often to assumptively introduce the idea that government-backed currency is suspect. But fiat currencies are simply currencies that aren't backed by collateral. To the extent that you believe it's a currency and not a tradable instrument that happens to have interesting barter and liquidity characteristics (right now), Bitcoin is a fiat currency as well.
The merchant needs a payment system that they trust, and the customer needs a payment system that they trust. But the payment systems don't really need to know or trust each other. He's saying that Bitcoin turns payment from a many-to-many problem, into a one-to-many problem.
Second that. Our app [1] is a web builder that lets you edit multiple pages at the same time and use Less to create your design - both through GUI and code editor.

Node-webkit works great. Our build process is simple: minimizing js files and copying files into a release folder. Grunt node-webkit takes care of creating binaries for Mac and Win. Making changes in development is easy. You basically just refresh the page in node-webkit and new version is loaded.

We use the same code base in the desktop app and online [2]. The only difference is that desktop app has additional code for working with local files and native windows.

At first I was doing it with Chrome packaged apps. But the security model there is more complex and working with local files and supporting the ability to open & edit pages from the internet required jumping through many loopholes and passing messages around between frames with different security privileges.

With node-webkit everything simply just worked from the start.

[1] http://pinegrow.com
[2] http://pinegrow.com/edit.html?page=index.html
> The criticism that merchants will not accept Bitcoin
> because of its volatility is also incorrect. Bitcoin can be
> used entirely as a payment system; merchants do not need to
> hold any Bitcoin currency or be exposed to Bitcoin
> volatility at any time. Any consumer or merchant can trade
> in and out of Bitcoin and other currencies
> any time they want.

I'm having trouble understanding this point of view because it implies that someone, somewhere is always willing to buy in to BTC, no matter the circumstances. So, two questions:

1. Is BTC somehow immune to currency crises like many government-backed currencies have experienced?
2. If BTC is not immune to crises, have any parties emerged that will act to "defend" BTC in a crisis?
Devil's Advocate:

What if they swap Scheier's USB key (or drive) with one that will exploit the USB stack on his offline computer (disabling 'auto-mount' won't help you here)?

Yes, it's a physical access attack, but physical access to his person might be easier to achieve (while remaining unnoticed) than access to the offline computer.
It's Not Too Late to Make San Francisco Affordable Again. Here's How
I think that's my biggest problem with shell-scripts-as-an-init-system. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but sooner or later, the only way to correct for broken or missing functionality is (to borrow your term) to add more glue. And if you want more correct behavior, you either have to wait for the distro maintainers to fix it or fix it yourself only to merge your changes back in on the next OS update.

That's another thing I like about systemd. With the separation of "stock" unit files in /usr/lib and user-supplied ones in /etc/systemd, you can override the ones distributed by your OS vendor without worrying about updates breaking your changes. That's already saved me once or twice during Arch's transition from sysvinit to systemd, in fact.

One thing that comes to mind is an issue I had some time back with running a proprietary service in a manner that would allow the init system to control it when it forked itself a number of times and spun up separate processes. start-stop-daemon was confused by this behavior and it required some tricks to collect the approriate PID just to be able to stop the service (I may be wrong, but I think it was the TeamSpeak 3 daemon which behaves weirdly). systemd's use of cgroups ignores this rubbish entirely, because it's effectively impossible for systemd to lose track of what processes belong to which service. Want to kill the service? No problem.

Some in this thread seem convinced that systemd is a solution looking for a problem, but I suspect some of them lack experience with systemd. Or stubbornly cling to their ideals of what an init system should do. I like the unification of a supervisor-type service and the init system. It makes my job easier. And that's not even half of what systemd is capable of!
no mclovin ?
Cool - signed up for AWS S3 last night and woke up to this news :)
The myth in this article is that a per capita average of income tells you anything about the condition of the poor. Many countries can raise that number significantly by simply asking Mr. Gates to visit for a day.
This is a fascinating letter that helps combat some of the "doom and gloom" that's so prevalent in... well, everything.

I kept coming back to one thought while reading this: why are people so mistaken about Africa in particular? The article covers misconceptions all over the place, but it keeps coming back to Africa, and it seems that the disparity between what people think and what's actually the case is far larger there than anywhere else.

It would be easy to blame this on casual racism and move on. And I'm sure that's a factor. But there must be more.

I wonder if there might just be a cliff effect in people's perceptions. The perception of China, for example, changed rapidly from "shithole" to "where all our stuff is made". India quickly switched from "shithole" to "where our IT gets outsourced". (And reminder, I'm talking about perceptions here, specifically in the US, or possibly the western world as a whole.) I wasn't around for it, but I have the impression that more or less the same thing happened for e.g. Taiwan and Japan.

If that's the case, then Africa is still in the "shithole" perception category simply because we don't see much of them. Not much of our stuff comes with a "Made in Kenya" label on it, and our experience with IT-related outsourcing to Africa is mostly limited to Nigerian scammers. Once that changes, the perception will rapidly go from "those guys have no food" to "those guys are taking all of our jobs".

A counterpoint would be South America, which is not overall perceived as "shithole" but nor is it a place we interact with a whole lot.

Perhaps it's just mental inertia. The places that are changing most rapidly will be the most incorrectly perceived.
Its not cryptography which is dead, but the notion of a keeping a key secret forever. Key compromise will happen with some regularity, but there are three things you can do about it:

1. make key compromise harder, for instance require that an attacker compromise both your hardware and software to get your key,

2. limit the damage a key compromise can cause, for instance expire keys more often, randomly reissue keys,

3. and increase the speed with which you can recover from a key compromise. For example, the web PKI is completely compromised if a single CA key is compromised, but chrome can detect valid but forged google certs using key pinning and thereby alert the world. You can only use the stolen CA key to attack Google users once.

The security community is advancing on all three fronts.
Valve: Consumer-priced virtual reality headsets feasible for 2015
Seems to be missing demand or utility (for derived demand) functions. But it does have some overlap with computational/agent-based models. I'd give it a B- as a midterm project, maybe a B for using a language better than Matlab.

(I'm an economist).
I guess this general pattern of police misconduct is only now becoming mainstream, thanks to the Internet. There are probably still a lot of people either ignorant of the pattern or in denial of it. Remember, it took a while for the masses to learn and accept that cops in LA had a pattern for severe mistreatment of African Americans.
Get Paid Today, Tomorrow, Everyday...
Do you mind explaining why?

Providing contraception (especially condoms) can prevent STDs in addition to preventing unwanted child birth.
Comparing Payment Terms Of Mobile Ad Networks
Read This Before Zapping Your Brain
Maple Syrup Revolution
The help link is dead.
$1 Billion Prize for Perfect NCAA Bracket
Game Aion Chanter PVP Guide
True, but viral it up: Minutes old mystery solved instantly, but what happened next made me fall off my chair.
As if only Ukraine does that. How about OWS protesters?
This article (which I found via Kottke: http://kottke.org/14/01/say-hello-to-big-maple) describes a new method of producing maple syrup which could increase production by an order of magnitude given the same amount of land.
Sustainability means keeping the population at a consistent level. Otherwise, exponential growth means that the planet is eventually covered in humans to a depth of 50ft, and nobody wants that.

There are only two ways to accomplish this: having fewer children, or killing more people. The latter is what has historically dominated, but we've become so much better at keeping people alive in the last couple of centuries or so that it's no longer working. That aside, many people find that solution to be tasteless.

That leaves having fewer children. Contraception is the only way to accomplish this. Yes, technically it is possible to accomplish this by avoiding sex. But socially, this doesn't work, because people simply don't do that. Contraception, however, does work.

It's the only available solution to a serious problem, and that's why it's on the list.
Water found in stardust suggests life is universal
Rust-ci has new features
Do you know any full-blown products that started as an internal tool?
Except, you're not getting around the problem here either - I need to find a real money payment system that the bitcoin exchange and I both trust and and the merchant needs to find a real money payment system that they and their bitcoin exchange both trust. You're doubling the problem no matter how you look at it, because the problem of you sending money to the bitcoin exchange is the exact same problem as you sending money to the merchant.
If you're buying something to run for 5 years x 365 days x 24 hours, then how big a percentage of bucks is worth saving?
Yes! To my knowledge, this is the first large-scale drive reliability study that names manufacturers.

The study you mentioned by that certain large company was tantalizing, because it also found large differences between manufacturers, but did not name them. The relative insensitivity to temperature (<= 40C or so IIRC) they found was helpful, however.
Just add this script as a bookmarklet (drag it to your bookmark bar) and click it whenever you get a paywall message:

javascript:%20window.location%20=%20window.location.protocol%20+%20'//'%20+%20window.location.hostname%20+%20window.location.pathname%20+%20'?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes';

PS: Support journalism if you have the money to do so!
Fascinating. This addresses one of my key concerns, that aid often is a bag of cash to high officials, who then go buy 6-10 Lamborghinis and a new apartment rather than actually helping people out.
From Monolithic Ruby App to Distributed Scala Micro-Services
So basically screen capture? I was more expected something along the lines of a visual debugger that steps through code whilst zooming into functions and variables jumping around when they get copied or assigned or something.
I have seen people using (or pushing) mind maps occasionally. I never got it though. How is it better or different than a tabbed outline? Is it the distance between nodes that matters? Is it because outlines are too vertical?
1. no, but stability will increase with mass adoption. It's not tied down to one specific geographic market as nation-state currencies. Once it's based on global trade then it requires global instability, which is a higher threshold. USD has a similar global stability because of that vs other currencies.

2. no, how would this would decentrally? You could pay into an insurance policy maybe, that pays out in alternative currencies?
So do you think God lets you pray in index form? I mean, if he's the grand super dude, can't we just recite the index?
I understand you. But, is it possible that say, between two features, say SSE 4 and AVX, the less powerfull one happens to be the most efficient for a given algorithm on platform A, and the least efficient on platform B? If yes, how would a the compiler know which path to choose without knowing which platform it is targeting?
I've been to Mexico City fairly recently, and I guarantee that in the right places -- possibly the same place the 1986 picture was taken -- you could take something very much like that 1986 picture today (which is perhaps even more tragic today, since its not just after the major earthquake). And I've seen Mexico City pictures just like that 2011 one, barring changes in fashion, from the 1980s. And even the 1960s.

On a bigger problem with Myth 1, not only are the pictures distortion, so is the main set of economic claims supporting the myth thesis they are meant to illustrate. Gates makes claims about "per person income", but the statistic he uses and treats as if it meant that is actually GDP per capita. Because much of the value of goods produced in developing countries is captured by foreign capital holders owning the firms doing the production, and because all that value extracted from the country's economy still shows up as part of the GDP of the country it is extracted from, GDP per capita, particularly in the developed world, is often very different than income per person.
Cocos2D V3 RC1 Released
Should be noted that paths in brunch aren't set in stone. app/ gets some special treatment is all. For instance our current project has app.js, vendor.js, test.js, test-vendor.js, admin.js, admin-vendor.js
Why don't you put a demo query page so I can try addresses in my country without signing up?

edit: signed up. does not work outside us. Why not bother documenting that?
> A certain large company in Mountain View suggested years ago that they had collected a great deal of metrics on consumer grade hard disks performing in a data center capacity, but refused to publish the data.

They did in 2007:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

(first result of a search for "google hard drive report")
Right on. Jeff Raskin's equation is pure gold -

Intuitive = Familiar
http://phabricator.org/ - at Facebook

http://www.google.com/analytics/ at Urchin
A transparent screen that can turn any window into a display for moving images.
It appears that the only non-murderous way to reduce population growth to a replacement level is to make people wealthier. It's the only thing that's done the job so far, anyway.

So given a poor country and two choices, here's what happens: if it stays poor, the population continues to increase and consumption likewise continues to increase. If it becomes wealthy, the population stabilize and consumption, after increasing to feed that increased wealth, also stabilizes.

There's an easy solution to the problem of resource depletion. You simply take the Benderist approach of killing all humans. Problem solved! The trick is doing it in a way that isn't horrible, and while that's completely unsolved, it doesn't look like keeping people poor helps at all.
I bought 3 Green 2.5TB drives for a Synology NAS that's lightly used -- and all 3 have had SMART failures in the ~18 months that I've owned them. WD just sent me a refurb'ed Green 3TB drive, let's see if it holds out better.

I wish I had had access to this data before buying the Greens...
I've been a loyal oScope users for ages; I once used it as my front panel in a Halloween robot costume, and it blew people's minds that they could talk to me and have it show up on my 'belly screen'. A very useful tool indeed.

One thing that I've always wanted it to do is to be able to horizontally move/scale the frequency domain plot. Most of the time I'm using it, I only really care about the low frequency (vocal range) component.
Not at all. Channel sizes in 802.11ad's 60GHz spectrum space are 2.16GHz wide, and can fit four of those channels in most countries. 802.11ac is still 80MHz channels in 2.4GHz space and now 160MHz channels in 5GHz space, and can fit two and three or four of those "big" channels". 802.11ad is definitely a major user of beamforming, relying heavily on reflectance, as it doesn't penetrate solid stuff very well.

802.11ad also has engineering work being poured into protocol adaption layers, so interconnects such as DisplayPort or PCIe can run atop it and presumably the 802.11 MAC that's supposed to be core to 802.11ad.
> for 99.9999999% of us, that outcome will never happen

It may actually happen for quite a bit of people. I think your percentage is about people where it makes a difference in their life whether or not the Three Letter Agencies decrypt their traffic or not.
He was showing off/joking. If every undergrad who has said something like that is an asshole, then pretty much everyone is.
It guess the counterpoint to this is that tools are fun to build and it can be easy to fall into the trap of spending too much time building tools instead of other priorities. I've seen a lot of developers over the years use tool building as a way to procrastinate on more important tasks (myself included), or build things that just become obsolete and useless within weeks
PaaS is a blessing, not a curse
>> "Overall I think they have two things up on everyone else: design and playlists. On Spotify and Rdio finding good playlists is difficult. Spotify has been getting better at this but it isn't great yet. Beats seems to have spent a lot of time crafting A LOT of really great playlists and they seem to be where I'm spending most of my time. The human curation thing seems to have worked."

Totally agree. Beats has taken the best of both of Rdio and Spotify, and along with the human curation, built a pretty solid product.

The web interface leaves a lot to be desired at this point, but looking forward to seeing what they come up with here.
Well, yeah, this pretty much describes vim. No cues are told how to save, exit, search, or insert.

But, it's functional, and once you learn the functions, it's quicker than using a mouse and many other tools.
His third point, "Saving lives leads to overpopulation," is a weird straw man. I've never heard of anyone ever suggesting letting suffering children die as some way to keep the population low. He brings up Malthus as another straw man.

I'm not sure the point he's trying to make. To stop people from stopping people from saving people's lives? I think he's trying to suggest that the planet has too many people on it but that shouldn't stop us from saving people's lives. I know a lot of people who consider the planet overpopulated and I've never heard of anyone suggesting letting babies die would help, let alone consider it remotely human.

He seems to conclude educating women and making birth control available helps most. Why not just make that point? I feel like he's trying to imply those who disagree with him or agree with Malthus are tantamount to baby-killers.

On another (lighter) note, since dromedaries are camels too, calling the "camel world" a "bactrian world" would be more clear. The fun mnemonic for camel names is that the Dromedary has one hump and the Bactrian has two, like the first letters of their names, 'D' and 'B', turned sideways.

EDIT: Moreover, these statements are at odds, or at least need more explanation to connect them.

"It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too."

and

"Human beings are not machines. We don’t reproduce mindlessly. We make decisions based on the circumstances we face."

The first point suggests people have extra babies in anticipation of some of them dying before adulthood. The second implies they would target a certain number to reach adulthood, which would not itself lead to overpopulation. What would lead to overpopulation on a broad scale would be individuals benefiting from more children than the planet would, which is more like a tragedy of the commons.

If people decide based on circumstances, then they wouldn't have too many children for whatever their values decide, independent of child mortality. They'd have the right number. If they are having the right number for themselves, then food and medicine wouldn't affect their target number of children.

Bringing up food and medicine is a red herring. There may be a myth (which they don't establish), but it's irrelevant to the point made in that section: increase education and birth control. It confuses unrelated issues and paints people concerned with population as ignorant and cruel.

It's not clear to me where their logic suggests I should contribute resources. Should I favor food causes over education causes, the other way around, a mix, or neither?
is this the "head parking" thing? The Reds are supposedly the same drive, but don't have the head parking algorithm, with tweak able TLER to make them more RAID friendly, and their rates are pretty acceptable.
> We try to avoid buying enterprise drives at all costs.

Why is that? From what I can read on your website, it seems you would be the correct use-case for enterprise drives, no?x
Russian socialite sparks outrage with 'racist chair' photograph
I think the link is broken, but I'm assuming this is the correct one: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/
To be fair, this wasn't searchable in 1996. :)

They rediscovered the card a couple days ago and the string of characters only results in the content itself. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFU...

The solution was someone recognizing the pattern, not arbitrary Googling, which I find far more interesting.
Cherry picking one example does not make you more accurate than Google Maps. TIGER has some giant holes in it, and is based on block faces not building footprints like Google Maps. In most cases Google Maps will be much more accurate and comprehensive.
No, for example if we were discussing a model of weather, that would not directly be a contribution to economics.
Neo4j 2.0: The Ascendency of Graph Databases