skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great idea, but it seems to be severely over engineered.
Simply vibrating the left or right side of the handlebar should be enough.

The two things I really don't like about this are

1) creating friction at the steerer. As a cyclist, we're steering around obstacles and want to have instant reaction. Adjusting the expected force necessary to turn the wheel can be dangerous, or just inconvenient. Even if it is just a small amount, we'll need to oversteer that small amount.

2) mechanically move a heavy piece of steel to the end of the handlebar. Similar to my issue with friction, we're introducing an inconsistent feel, but here you're also moving a weight. What happens when the mechanism breaks and the weight falls to the outside of the handlebar. That 'natural' feel isn't so natural anymore.

For a first generation at least, I'd like to see them do something simple, then if they feel it needs these extra bells and whistles, then add them in.
Coursera should ONLY allow access to IPs from .GOV -- Clearly these are the most desperately in need of an education.
Deep Learning for Image Understanding in Bing
This guy is so self destructive.
They are technically called distributions, not dividends, for the reasons you mentioned.
Actually, edX did something like this a while ago too.

edX is, however, working on opening its doors to anyone who wants to learn:

> Tena Herlihy, edX’s general counsel, said the company has since last May worked with the U.S. State Department and the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and has so far applied for and received company-specific licenses for its MOOCs to enroll students in Cuba and Iran (a third license, for Sudan, is still in the works).

source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/28/state-dept-blo...
>Yeah, how's that working out?

It isn't, of course. But that's not the topic on hand.
See the comments above about mobile networks and persistent sockets.
That's what really excited me about this challenge. I heard about how DPR got caught from a StackOverflow login, and I wanted to see how difficult it would be to maintain anonymity.

It turns out that it's really fucking difficult. Also, it kind of sucks that I couldn't talk to any of my coworkers about being on the front page of Hacker News!
IE8 in IE7-compatibility mode does not always render the same as IE7 - I know because it broke a site I worked on. So it's not that simple.
If you were in the US they wouldn't listen to you either, so don't feel too bad.
Someone should create a Coursera clone that's not hosted in the US.
That is what I do.

Less than 10 tweets in 3 years and all I do is read other tweets
I actually think it was 4.
Whoops, I should apologize to that guy. Didn't notice the link in the source.
Interesting that coursera mentions that they only have a IP address block. It seems like they just want people to workaround that and access the courses.
Probably not, although you could write the rules in a way that avoids this I think -- e.g. the knowledge of the person who looks at the patent is imparted to the engineers because they're all part of the same organization.
It sounds like you are basically suggesting the most generic of web startups.
Why doesn't the US pursue the blue-jeans approach do diplomacy any more? You know, give them blue-jeans, fast-food and rock'n roll, so they will become like us instead of hate us.

I know this works, since it has been applied in my home country (Germany) to astonishing results.

This incident als further highlights that we (speaking of Europeans now) need non-US based online services. Remember the last big Paypal scandal, when all online-retailers that sold Cuban rum had their accounts frozen?

Yeah, won't be the last.
I suppose they could, but they'd fall into the copyright netherworld in most every case.

Some faculty have chosen to release MOOCs under creative commons and other similarly permissive licenses, but those are few and far between.
Yes, absolutely.

The guy has given a clear and convincing story of what happened. I'm sure that it would be pretty easy for someone on Twitter's security team (assuming that they have one) to verify that the username was taken when he said it was.

I don't know what I find more shocking -- that PayPal would actually give the last four digits of a credit-card number to a complete stranger, that GoDaddy would let someone guess a two-digit number, or that a credit-card number is all you need to identify yourself. (In Israel, it's common for companies to ask for the last four digits of your credit card number in addition to other details, but never on its own.)

Actually, I'm willing to believe just about anything about GoDaddy. But PayPal is known for being surprisingly harsh and paranoid about security, shutting down accounts and holding money when they suspect problems. It's sad and rather surprising to me that they're willing to give out such information so easily, unless you specifically ask them not to. Shouldn't it be the other way around, that they refuse to provide such details unless you allow them to?

I really hope that Twitter and PayPal apologize profusely to this author, and undo the damage they've done as best as possible.
Link to the source: http://blog.chromium.org/2014/01/run-chrome-apps-on-mobile-u...

(TNW needs to lift their game on making sources more obvious)

EDIT: My source was http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/28/5355064/chrome-apps-are-co...
Soviet Buran spacecraft used Prolog
A startup in Europe should create a free proxy to use Coursera for these guys living in those unfortunate countries. Berlin, London, Munich, etc. anything?
Indeed. Now excuse me while I go bathe in my ill gotten Irish funds with my fellow Icelanders.
> Why doesn't the US pursue the blue-jeans approach do diplomacy any more?

Because good diplomacy won't help the military-industrial complex increase its revenue.
Yep, that's my SSH public key. And here's my PGP public key: https://gist.github.com/untraceableblog/8683769
But much less than against C++.
So that startup can have their Paypal account frozen? No thank you. Probably the best way is to create a Coursera competitor.
That's like a carpenter saying he's afraid to pick up a hammer. How can you be an employee and at the same time be afraid of doing your job?
GoDaddy requires 6 digits, but the agent let the attacker guess 2 of them (repeatedly, until he got it right). That's truly awful.
DPDK is Intel's turf and PF RING only supports igb/ixgbe/e1000 drivers.
For out of the box usage, looking at Netmap or Linux PACKET_MMAP (though not entirely zero-copy) should be possible.
This gives you a good idea of how difficult it is to comply with regulations in the US. And, conversely, how (in)effective regulations which don't respect the underlying technological capabilities can be.

A few things to think about:
-What if students try to access once from a blacklisted IP? Is their account now blacklisted?
-Does Coursera need to comb its logs for past accesses from those countries?
-What if a student mentioned their home country on the message board?
-What if the person claims to be an American working in Sudan?
Communism would be suggesting that the government should force him to give it up.

There's nothing wrong with advocating the concept of sharing when a person obviously has more resources than he could actually use.
The attacked got the last 4 from Paypal and Godaddy asked him to guess two more digits.
That's what I'm trying to understand from tptacek's post. Some hypotheses that come to mind:

1.) Putting money into the corporate bank and then taking it out as a nominal salary keeps you really honest with yourself. You can't say "There's money in my bank account, there's not much need for urgency", instead you see the corporate bank account dribbling dry just as if it were someone else you were paying.

2.) It reduces personal risk in case the startup goes bankrupt.

3.) It makes accounting & record-keeping easier for when the startup actually does start making money, since you already have systems setup.

4.) Minimum wage laws require it. I talked to a (Massachusetts-based) lawyer once that suggested this may be an issue. But then, if it is, how does that square with all the tech company CEOs that take $1 salaries?

5.) It lets you take advantage of certain personal financial products that are only available if you have earned income in a year, eg. Roth IRAs.
It wasn't the first 2 digits that were guessed, it was the 2 digits prior to the final 4.
That's tough. Not because the software isn't out there (see open edX), but because of the content. The big attraction is that this is content from premier universities. If you open Coursentenza, how could students (or employers/colleges) down the road assess the quality of the education you offer?
The US regime never ceases to amaze me.

Projection of power at all levels in the lives of ordinary people, from privacy to education.

I'm completely dumbfounded that they consider themselves protectors of freedom, how such cognitive dissonance runs rampant within the US is beyond me.
Terms of service normally don't override law. So, if there is something unlawful about their behavior, it doesn't matter what they wrote in their TOS. At least in many countries, not sure about US.
Any thoughts why the attacker would tell the guy how he did it if this is the obvious solution?
"All students from Syria"
Both in loyalist and insurgent areas?

That's a Solomon solution, I have to admit.
After bug, Google notifies users that all is a-OK with Gmail
Wow. I never knew about that one.
Engineering is constant re-invention of already solved problems...
Cultural conquests were always the most satisfying to me in Civilization.
What's really chilling about this is:

>Federal regulations prohibit U.S. businesses from offering services to countries subject to economic sanctions -- a list that includes Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan

On this message board, I can imagine that "U.S. businesses" includes a substantial number of us. You're all blocking those IPs, right?

The State Dept. set a dangerous precedent when it didn't immediately respond to edX and Coursera with an "Of course a web application filled with educational content doesn't constitute doing business with the enemy."

It leaves those of us without a legal team in a real pinch.
> The kids in these countries are already suffering under oppression/war/famine/ you name it..

Just a nitpick. Maybe in the other three countries this is true, but Cuba is pretty well off in those respects. Especially education wise.
I would bet my arse that if Bill Gates woke up tomorrow in a world where he had no money and no options, he would go about getting a job wherever he could until he could get back to doing what he wanted to be doing.
Furthermore, # has been used for comments before //, so he's even "wronger" than he probably thought :)
Right, independence isn't binary. There are definitely degrees of dependence. But it's more objective than "obviousness" at least. Obviousness is also non-binary, and because the jury must assess obviousness from a "person holding ordinary skill in the arts", there are additional questions as to what constitutes "ordinary skill" and what constitutes the requisite "art".
Only if you or a customer of yours are going to bomb them, otherwise you're better off being friends and selling them bombs.
You could `sha1` the messages, similar to how `git` deals with blobs, trees, etc?
The EU has a ban on trade with Syria since 2012[1].

http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/count...
I thought everyone knew not to use GoDaddy after the SOPA incident. Hopefully this will convince more people to move their domains to a domain registrar that cares about its customers.
Software startups are more likely to raise VC funding if they can demonstrate they have a defensible product or service.

One of the ways of making a product defensible is to patent its underlying technology.

If a software startup doesn't hold a patent, there is a chance a larger player could just copy the startup's product or service and drive the startup out of business.
This is just Cordova with Chrome App APIs. It doesn't run on top of Chrome or anything like that. So the only difference is you can now have API compatibility between your real Chrome App, and your "fake" Cordova-powered "Chrome App"
One does not simply compare a 320k people country with a 50+ millions one.
I don't think Iceland is popular for screwing the UK and saving themselves, I think they're popular for punishing their bankers, which is something your analogy doesn't seem to make any mention of...
Yes.

But the biggest point is that Iceland has taken a very different path from Ireland, Spain or Greece with very different outcomes.

(of course, the situations were not exactly similar at the beginning but comparable enough to draw those comparisions)
A much simpler solution would be adjusting the expiration of IT-patents. The patents in this case are from 1996 and expiring in 2016. If the term for IT patents was reduced to 10 years, we would have many fewer problems.
How Much Does Design Matter for Wearable Tech?
It would be nice if there were a safe harbor for open source/educational/non-dual-use materials even to individuals in a sanction-restricted regime.

I doubt the Government of Cuba (the true target of the sanctions) would get material benefit from free courses for their populace. Certainly only the most indirect and limited military benefit.

Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, the treasury and state restrictions aren't so specific. IANAL though, particularly not an export-compliance lawyer.
Except that Cuba is not an uneducated country... the other way around actually, with universal and completely free access to university.

By the way, unlike Coursera, they even offer free college education to other third-world countries. Something to think about.
Hey nadirkazan. With 3D printing, could it be possible and affordable to make really tiny rocket engines for other uses, like radio controlled flying things? I'm thinking something like a moon lander, but smaller (really small, quadrocopter size). I would buy that :)
Maybe I'm missing something, but who uses ICQ still? And why not focus on 3-digit numbers? There's a million 6-digit ICQ numbers; not that unique.
The majority of Iran already likes us. The 5% of religious extremists control the govt. and oppress the people. They are the only ones who dont like us.
Cuba is not well off in (lack of) oppression.

Not at war right now, and not suffering famine, but also right now there isn't war or famine in Iran.
Iran is in a good situation also, and I think Syria was ok before the war. The problem was the oppression mostly.
I've met several students from upthere. They complained about the lack of freedom but they did not about lack of education, war or famine. They were even pretty well educated.
The US regime never ceases to amaze me.

Power projection at all levels of an ordinary human's life, from privacy to education.

I'm dumbfounded they are self proclaimed defenders of freedom. How can such cognitive dissonance run rampant within the US.
Actually - he posted something snarky about how this is no big deal considering the poverty, rape, sanitation etc issues that India has - and got majorly downvoted for that - and then seems to have edited it to something else.. While a message like "I love X" wouldnt contribute to the discussion - it's usually likely to just be ignored - but not so severely downvoted. Lastly - for the sake of the argument - "love" is anyways not black and white - so someone saying they love something doesn't mean they are making a blanket statement!
The Mozilla location stuff has been around for a while now, and I've contributed a fair amount of data via their MozStumbler Android application for the past two or three months. I realize it's an experiment, but there are a few problems I see with the data collection side of the project:

• All data is uploaded anonymously, so I can't download or save the raw data I've collected. This means I can't look at it except aggregated together with other users' data and fuzzed on a map Mozilla provides, I can't play with it, I can't upload it to other similar projects, etc.

• In fact, nobody can download a dump of the data because of privacy concerns for data contributors and access point operators. At best, you can consume a derivative of the data by using the location API.

• In an attempt to protect the privacy of data contributors, Mozilla "fuzzes" acquired data before displaying it on their map. Unfortunately, they've fuzzed the data to the point that I can't tell which streets I've already been on and which I haven't. (Half of the fun of this was seeing things on streets I'd never been on before.)

It's mildly tempting to fork MozStumbler and have it also upload the data I collect to a server I control, just so I have a copy of my data. (In particular, it might be fun to throw together some code for algorithmically locating cell sites and access points, just to see how well I can make it work.)
Still seems to be getting a lot of use and I'd certainly choose it myself over vanilla javascript.

But now that decent alternatives with support for static types like Typescript and Dart exist, I'd choose either one over Coffee just for maintenance reasons and improved tooling support.
Great points. I would definitely do something like this if my life were on the line, or I needed to leak something about my government, for example.

But the convenience of Tails persistence is really tempting. I can just unlock it with a really long master password, and have access to my SSH keys, passwords (Keepass), Electrum bitcoin wallet, packages, source code, etc.

But yes indeed, a live CD, a simple blog hosted on Wordpress or Tumblr, random MAC address, and Tor on coffee shop Wifi over a long-range antenna would provide almost guaranteed security.

P.S. It's no fun without stats. 25,000 page views is a success, I think! And $25 USD in bitcoin donations. Now I just need to work on anonymously converting or spending them.
I guess Coursera could publicly denounce this particular type of government policy and set up UK puppet company just to deliver courses to those countries.
Those who flag a post, I would request you to specify a reason, even if it's a one word reason. Helps others.
No. Coursera should relocate into a country that values freedom, at least in respect to their mission and business.
Interesting. What is the reason for grouping method calls together? Is this to reduce the number of requests sent to the server? If not, is there no way of providing a higher level operation instead of bundled discrete operations?

In any case, I think you could have something a lot closer to REST, even if you carry on with grouping calls together.

Something like:

[
[ "GET", "/messages", { "search": "foo" }],
[ "GET", "/mailboxes", { "etag": "bar" }]
]

Obviously, you're not limited to HTTP verbs if you do it like this, but it's a familiar metaphor.
I´m a peacefull and calm person, which despites violent but the more I read about US patent law the more I want to set a torch to the trolls and kill them with fire.

I know that this is not very constructive. I know that violence is not a solution. But seeing what these [insert insult here] do to our industry I just can not help myself.
But the problem with alternatives is the fact that they're alternatives. Not what other people are using. If it's a social app, it's important.
Who cares what number the call was coming from. Security 101 for these phone techs should say something like "don't give out any information over the phone, even if the CEO calls and threatens to fire you if you don't." Or better yet, have much stricter protocols that deny the phone tech access to the information, so even if the caller threatens the tech personally, the information is safe.
Coursera could suggest (and eventually subsidize) non-US VPN services for those students.
I feel so bad for Naoki that he was compromised in this scary manner. While the hacker did con his way on the phone for personal information, at the minimum, it's...hmmm....not nice...but "informative/narcissistic," of the hacker to describe his method to the victim.

Makes me happy that companies are moving towards text authentication since emails are easy (or at least well practiced) to compromise.

Note: Time to change my Time To Lives on my MX records and up my security.
> Ferdinand Porsche debuted the vehicle, dubbed the Egger-Lohner C.2 Phaeton, on the streets of Vienna in 1989. It was one of the first vehicles of its kind on the Austrian streets– or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

Like I always say, you gotta watch out for those off-by-a-hundred errors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

What does it have to do with the matter at hand?
SOPA was from one person (in-house counsel) and was not and is not the sentiment of c-level management or any employees I've ever talked to.
Actually, not quite. Spain hasn't nationalized the debt directly but instead, since the beginning of the crisis, is continuously pumping money into banks that should have gone under. It is ruinous to Spain's public finances, but we don't hear so much about it, since the relative size of that particular debacle is smaller than the Irish "public finances suicide by banking".
Fewer problems, but still a pain. If you independently come up with something one year in IT after the original patent holder, that's still nine years of suck.
If I have something that needs that level of accuracy, and the implied up time to go with it, I don't use Windows. Neither should you.
I think you're missing part of the story... That part where Ameri's sons/daughters (well only the most privileged ones) went to the Casino on everyone else's dime by obfuscating credit derivatives (Default Swaps) and crashed the entire system.

Seems sort of relevant to an analogy about international finance around this time since the economies are so interconnected.
No, won't work. Parent company is on the hook for subsidiaries.
So what? If Twitter returned control of a handle if someone could prove that they had recently controlled the handle, that would quickly make the handles market dry up.
When a customer calls into the GoDaddy call center, they are supposed to provide a 4 digit pin in order to gain access to their account.

I don't work in that department, but I'll forward the page to the CEO and make sure it gets read and addressed.
Spotify: how a busy songwriter you've never heard of makes it work for him
Such attitudes only increase the hate from the affected countries towards US.
Visionary, yes. There are some pretty serious question marks over his character however. http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-652371.html#spRe...
The problem is stealing @N is, someone will have to use it one day. How can they hope not to be traced?
Ideally you'd do both at the same time (or one after the other).

With good diplomacy, neither you, nor them, nor their enemies would buy more bombs.
Didn't Bernstein v. US pretty much eliminate export restrictions on speech?
Yeah why is that attacker so nice and kind? No joking, it's bad for their business.
Why on earth are people still using GoDaddy?
You could probably work around this by e.g. introducing enough layers of separation between engineers and the person who read the patent/formulated the problem. It would be an interesting form of... knowledge laundering? ;).
Whoever controls the public discourse gains in the long run. What do you think Iran would look like today if local information policies hadn't been counterbalanced by the internet for the last ten years?

I distinctly remember The Daily Show sending somebody to Teheran to ask people in the street if they new the show and they found quite a bunch who said yes!

So IMO you are right, but only as long as Iran is well-integrated in the internet. Guess which 5% of Iran realized this recently.
Ask HN: is the site going slow for just me?
The site has been loading very slow for me the past few days. Is this happening to anyone else?
"All students from Syria" Both in loyalist and insurgent areas?

That's a Solomon solution, I have to admit.