skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that security questions are 100% a joke, in that they're completely useless and potentially represent an attack vector.

Unfortunately some services have the annoying habit of randomly providing multiple choice for these (ex. TradeKing). So my qgwpagprgqrgwasr2q really sticks out as an odd answer for my first car, making it even more guessable than the real answer.

There really needs to be a way to completely opt out of these systems for competent consumers. I'd never need a password reset, so they shouldn't allow it.
You're talking about this as if employee contracts are usually a negotiation. In many cases, you either sign "The Contract" / "The Agreement" or you don't get hired.

If a company asserts that all employees must sign such a contract, I feel that it's pretty obvious that said company is just trying to make their contract as broad as possible to "cover all of the bases." They want to (attempt to) close all possible loopholes by essentially claiming "all your base are belong to us." How many software developers could even sign a contract that assigned over all IP rights to all IP that they ever created?
It's not Capitalism, it's Technocracy.
"It's 100% covered by the federal government for 3 years, and then 90% until 2022."

Exactly this. So, who pays for the 10% after three years? The 100% after 2022? That's right, the State. Sure, maybe they didn't like Obamacare. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a real concern for a very real budget, which the legislature is constitutionally required to keep balanced.
Or, if requested, just never allow password resets. Period.
> However for Glacier, it would mean throwing away the disk whenever someone deletes their data.

Probably not a huge concern, given the use case. Glacier is pretty fire-and-forget.

> It would also means constant replacement of disks.

They're already doing that with servers, why would disks be a problem?
Petition to allow Coursera access in foreign countries
Lessons in Acceleration
The creator acknowledged this possibility [1] (fwiw it appears they do use accelerometer data to discount obvious false hits), but mentioned that they hope to include a proximity detection circuit in the multiplayer adapter so that scoring will be more honest.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/levelup/sabertron-foam-...
So, the real problem is that people smart enogh to make meaningful contributions to the modern economy are also by definition going to be too smart to be appeased by silly gestures like this. I doubt even the reinstatement of Binney would be enough to convince the people who need to be convinced. Spooks will eventually have to settle for allowing a secure domestic infrastructure and relying on traditional HUMINT. Legitimate foreign threats such as Iran will be able to construct their own secure infrastructures, and no one smart enough to actually produce economic value in an advanced industrial economy is going to do much undedr what essentially amounts to tyranny. An economy of disempowered 'app' progammers may be easy to subjugate but it is also about as strategically useful as an army of slaves with down's syndrome.
Nest Team Will Become Google’s Core Hardware Group
Yea simple is better than... everything
There's a big "Raw" link in your screenshot, you know.
I gather this is the result of the increasing price of crude oil, making small oil fields that weren't previously considered viable now viable. The output of these wells is enough to essentially stop oil prices from going through the roof for the time being.
Yeah, this is very common. It's simple economics: the barrier to entry for the majority of "starting at 100K" jobs was just geography, due to a short supply of workers and a huge demand. Eventually enough workers flood in, the wages drop, and the only people who can get a high starting salary are the highly skilled tradesmen (drill operators, welders, etc)

Tie onto that the fact that rents are relatively high due to a housing shortage, and you get a bunch of people living paycheck to paycheck just like they were before.
Support our Brother Carl Carozza
Help us spread Carl Carozza's story and push the Laborers Welfare Fund of Chicago to do what is right and humane. Reinstate his health benefits in order for Carl to receive the therapy he needs to lead a normal life!!!
I did get the BTC. Thank you so much for you generosity. I have downloaded the Bitcoin-Qt and is downloading the block chain now.

I'm going to check out electrum and multibit next. Thanks!
The article's take on why this is newsworthy is completely incorrect. It's newsworthy because they're letting 4 year old's into MENSA, not because the girl is somehow has the intelligence anywhere close to the adult members (which is what the article implies.)
I actually thought of that site after I posted.

In hindsight I was unnecessarily...cavalier...but I would be willing to work something out.
I'm pretty certain Patch will fail in the long run. I checked "local" news from Florida, then from New York. They both had the same "What Obama Could Learn From Pete Seeger" article. People see through this syndicated crap that they try to pawn off as local news.
Here's a paper on why it's easy to detect whether you're in a VM: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jfrankli/hotos07/vmm_detection_hotos0...
I was running out the door when I made the post, and wound up screenshotting the wrong tab by mistake. The correct tab had a big error message like "We're sorry, we didn't generate this code blob fast enough for you" with no raw link. Sorry about that.

On the very slim chance that a Github staffer is reading this, here's the link that was down for ~30 minutes: https://github.com/kaniini/slabbed-or-not/blob/master/slabbe... ... It was down at around 8pm PST.
Jena here too. 14G of data total. Total Triples: 124,294,115 (SELECT (COUNT(*) AS ?no) { ?s ?p ?o })

I believe that's actually pretty big for a triplestore. Seems to work ok, but loading is pretty slow.

I'm contemplating switching to YAGO2[1] or Freebase, but I think I'd be better served doing entity extraction myself (DBPedia & YAGO tend to be out of date).

[1] http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/yago-naga/yago/
Never said it was.

I spend a lot of time reading code. I read other peoples code every day. To a very large extent, that code is going to use various layout tricks that are based on a monospaced font. Someone might line comments up like this:

// 1. Blah blah, blah
// blah and more blah.
// 2. Second piece of blah.

Arguments to a function might be lined up:

void func(int arg1,
int arg2...

Someone might describe some detail of a network protocol with a diagram (as often seen in RFCs). A large comment block might be adjusted to fill out to a certain column width. I'm probably forgetting a ton of other layout tricks that people use. Almost all of them rely on a monospace font.

Looking at code that wasn't specifically written for proportional fonts is death by a thousand cuts. The readability suffers greatly.
Not knowledgeable either, but one difference is durability. LTO is rated 15-30 years while the video notes the blu-ray discs FB uses are "certified for 50 years of operation" and some go up to 1,000(!).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_Open#Tape_durabilit...
Ah, memories.

I did this in a production database (thought it was a QA environment) and brought trading on the mortgage desk of an investment bank to a grinding halt on September 14th, 2008.

The DBAs saved my 23 year old ass that day. I make it a point to send them beer on 9/14 every year.
Pixelmator and Sketch are a fantastic combination to replace almost everything I'd ever do with Adobe CS.

Sketch is also so much easier to get nice results out of than Illustrator.

I love Pixelmator, but its biggest shortcoming is the complete lack of palette management, especially if you pick up and move between different monitor setups frequently. They need to snap to each other and the sides. They just end up everywhere, including on top of each other. I can never find the ones I need because they're always piling up and changing sizes and locations.
I talked to them at the Open Compute Summit and got the chance to look at it up close. They quoted me 100GB/disc and 10,000 discs in the cabinet for 1PB. They could have been rounding those numbers for simplicity, but that gets you in the neighborhood.
Head of French nat'l space agency warns of American/Spacex dominance
OTOH, it's a good reminder of the privacy implications of digital images. By default all the photos you take are associated with each other and generally fairly easily connected to you.
So we can finally get all the AAA titles for free and covered in ads!
I have to say, I really dig 'em both (there's another in the article headline). A very unique effect.
Judging by the recent articles, you should at least be able to call them and get access to your (or probably someone else's) account.
Well, the article makes it sound like they're basing the research on the assumption that the 208Pb comes from Asia simply because it spikes in the spring. I would hope they have reason to believe in the specificity of that marker for Asian pollution, rather than actually engaging in such wild speculation, but if they do, the article skips over it.

Also, the non-sequitur about iPhones and iPads at the end is completely random and seemingly pointless.

Also needs "[2010]".
Wiped.
BackBlaze turns hardware storage testing on its head
Thank you (and also to fennecfoxen)! My background in physics isn't sufficient to be sure of my interpretation of the details here.

I usually ignore implications of immediate world-changing revolution in popular science reporting (they're invariably nonsense in those fields where I'm qualified to come to a definite conclusion), but Nature (and certain other publications) are more circumspect, at least often enough to check first.

Of course, I'm still happy that the results are interesting!
First Porsche revealed to be an electric car from 1898
Out of curiosity how would you reimplement this file in bash? https://github.com/kaniini/slabbed-or-not/blob/master/xen-de...

In particular, the fact that it's using inline asm directly (for cpuid, ud2, some others). Maybe with 'as' but that's not exactly pure bash (and I suspect not embedding it in C would need a non-trivial main function anyway).

Reading an arbitrary memory address (for the cpuid scans) might be a bit tricky too, though it could be doable with /proc/$PID/mem.
I agree, I probably should have qualified with "in public", there will be some areas of relative privacy. There will still be a security community; people who are skilled and need true privacy will be able to find it, bit I think they will be a small minority. Already many people are sharing from inside the sphere - data, media, text, etc.
what about if you sold a camera or some other form of legitimate transfer, loan, for example. I don't want FB starting to track my product serial numbers thank you.
We recovered an actual stolen camera this way. But it really only worked because the buyer used Flickr, and otherwise this kind of metadata is pretty hidden.
wow, so here we are at the bottom of the page, below the grayed-out guy, but heh, ramnode looks cool - $2 per month!!! That's perfect for goof-off domains, silly projects, sandboxes and whatnot. Thanks!
Maybe in a couple years: http://rt.com/news/5d-nanostructured-glass-optical-memory-94...
In Australia you can go in to emergency for anything, but you'll be waiting until there's nothing more urgent in front of you. If you are triaged as having a trivial condition and you insist on a doctor instead of the triage nurses advice you're in for a looooong wait.

You're spot on about doctor visits not being fun. We also have free GP access and people will see a doctor if they have a reason but most people would rather stay home and rest than go out to the Doctor's just because they have a sniffle.
It's not just that the cost of crude is up, advances in horizontal drilling and fracking have made these wells economical despite lower crude prices.

Fracking has been tried on and off for decades but it was only recently that wildcatters struck upon the right formula and techniques to unlock the Bakken.

Horizontal drilling is key in this region because the Bakken is like an oreo cookie: a thin layer of crude sandwiched between two huge layers of rock. Fracking breaks up the small inner layer while horizontal drilling lets a single well drill down into that layer and then within that layer, unlocking far more crude than with regular vertical drilling.
Medical loss ratio is a stupid metric. A simple way to increase it: reduce fraud protection. For example, suppose you reduce fraud protection by $1, resulting in an increase in undetected fraud by $2.

Medical loss ratio = (med cost + $2) / (admin cost - $1) will go up.
Scary! If ObamaCare is an example of what gets developed on government contracts, then this might not end well.
You misunderstand. It is perfectly fine to question the use of a particular language for a particular task. It need not be meant as an attack on the language itself.

That said, this project seems to use C to make CPUID calls with inline assembly, and thus circumvent the `/proc/` interface. If this is true, it might be useful to describe your process in your README.
Typically, investors don't like it, and it tends not to be paid out in cash. However, I believe setting your books up that way gives you a better negotiating position when it comes to how low your salary will be, and possibly in relation to equity issues. It's a matter of having that sacrifice (no salary for X months) on paper so it can be respected as a real contribution with a concrete value, rather than just a giveaway that is somehow expected of a founder.
Pull out your smartphone and record them through it while talking
Most of this is natural gas and not crude oil. The reason these fields are now viable is because of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Before fracking, no one thought you'd ever get any oil out of that area. Now all of a sudden its all available again. Its like finding a new gusher just because you can drill deeper than you could before.

Also natural gas is WAY cheaper now that it was 5 years ago. Its so cheap that a lot of oil companies are voluntarily not pumping out of some good wells because they want to decrease supply.
PayPal and GoDaddy respond to Twitter hacking controversy
Naoki Hiroshima recently published a distressing account of how he lost his desirable @N Twitter username to a hacker. But part of his story accuses PayPal of giving the last four numbers of Hiroshima’s credit card to the perpetrator. “I called PayPal and used some very simple engineering tactics to obtain the last four of your card,” the hacker reportedly revealed in an email — after Hiroshima had agreed to give up his Twitter account. “I was acting as an employee,” he said. This first step was key in the sequence of events, but now PayPal is denying that it released any information on Hiroshima. After first denying the account via Twitter, the company has now issued an official statement.
Most of Google's services are blocked.
Put space in front of any command to avoid history.
Can PayPal prove the rep didn't hand over CC info as the previous OP was told by the hacker. Given how awful PayPal has been over the years, I rather believe they messed up than this cover up story
"capitalism + redistribution of resources by the state", if you prefer. But I fear the American-English battle for the word "socialism" is lost.

While food banks are important, as nearly as I can tell most people aren't relying on private charity alone. (I wasn't able to find a number online, but the numbers I did find were that a boatload of people are relying on SNAP, and a huge fraction of the people on SNAP are also relying on food banks, and that number is roughly comparable to the number of people who visit food banks each year, so the number of people who visit food banks without relying on SNAP must be quite small.)
That is not an emulation.

ParAccel, like a large percentage of parallel analytical databases, are forked off the excellent PostgreSQL code base because those internals were designed to be easy to extend and modify. Netezza, Vertica, EMC/Greenplum, Teradata/Aster, et al are all PostgreSQL derivatives as well with varying degrees of divergence. I've designed and built custom parallel derivatives of PostgreSQL for companies too, it is surprisingly straightforward.

There are only a handful of original, high-quality database kernels out there because it is enormously difficult to design one from scratch. Most good databases copy an existing design, or even more conveniently, fork the mature, easily modifiable, BSD-licensed, Stonebraker-designed PostgreSQL kernel. Every basic kernel design has distinctive characteristics that tend to stick with everything derived from them, which leaves an identifiable "fingerprint" on a new database if you know what to look for. You inherit both the strengths and weaknesses of the underlying kernel design.

(Source: I've designed analytical databases engines for a long time.)
This is getting silly.

"(I notice that you have left out this point completely)"

No, I didn't. I addressed it in the other half of my post, which you obviously saw since you responded to it. If every sentence must address all parts of the argument, we're all guilty of flagrant violations up and down this thread (and every other) and will need to be writing some awfully convoluted sentences.

"What of it we can access, and what use we can make of it [...] at this point in time is limited by our past light cone and our current knowledge and technology, obviously. But what of it we can access, and what use we can make of it, indefinitely into the future is not; it is only limited by the entire universe and our future knowledge and technology."

Per my understanding of relativity and the present state of physics (significantly received from others but I think that I followed it at the time) this is simply not the case (in particular, if time is finite then "everything our light cone will encompass before the end of time" is finite - and I think an expansionary universe makes things worse). I think we're going to need to bust out some math or expert testimony instead of simply making assertions at each other if we're going to get anywhere.

"For any specific task undertaken at a specific point in time, in a specific, fixed state of knowledge and technology, yes, there is such a bound in principle; but you made a much stronger claim than that."

There is a set of possible futures from any present. You hold that, for any task in any situation, with sufficient knowledge, the resources it can take can approach arbitrarily close to zero?

'Also, whether or not that in principle limit has practical significance even over "short" time scales such as a human lifetime depends on how fast our technology and knowledge changes, not just on what they are at a given instant.'

I don't think the bounds given by physics have any impact yet. I'm not convinced they ever will - my point was there is a theoretical bound, and there may be more practical bounds that matter at any time-scale.

Let's try to get this back closer to useful.

My original point, which I think too much was read into, was simply that there are situations in which some having more can lead to others having less, and that paying attention to whether we're in such a situation is worthwhile. I stated right there in that first comment that I didn't think we presently were, in most respects.

That was followed by a levelling of a charge of "zero-sum thinking" in an explicitly hypothesized zero-sum situation, which (again) I said I thought unlikely to be relevant. I found this amusing.
My understanding was they were extracting natural gas and burning off methane. Methane is much more difficult to transport (because the molecules are so small it leaks out of everything as a gas and its very difficult to get it cold enough to be a liquid). Eventually they'll have methane transport capabilities but for the moment it just gets burned off.
These "bootcamps" delude students into believing they can be placed in a good job if they pay up. I've worked with graduates of these programs, and found them to be eager and optimistic, but woefully ill-prepared for professional software development.

I'd love to see more programmers, but this cash-grab bootcamp practice makes our entire industry look bad.
Related work anecdote: I was working on IPv6 support for a C code base running on a Linux appliance. Time came for me to have a go at the traffic shaper application. Was given repository access. Had assumed the whole application was doing to be littered with IPv4 specific netlink/ioctl-stuff. Turned out most of it was string manipulation and calling tc using system(). Like less than 10 lines of bash turned in to a way bigger heap of potential failure points. Nothing against C as a language, it's just that to some people, everything is a nail.
Nice. I once needed to do reciprocal blast for the complete genomes of about 300 bacterial species. That's on the order of half a billion queries, but the work was embarrassingly parallel, and each discrete job only took about 90 seconds. I wrote a little shell script to kick them off on the cluster, and went home.

I woke up the next morning to several inbox screens' worth of messages from angry people I didn't know, demanding explanations for what I did to their jobs and their cluster. I don't think I have ever biked to the lab faster.

After multiple rounds of palm-drenching emails with the cluster sysadmins and the computational mathematics group PI (and my own boss agonizingly cc'ed), we determined the cause. The cluster sysadmins, lacking imagination for the destructive naivete of their users, had not foreseen that anyone would want to submit more than 10^4 jobs at once. That broke the scheduler, preventing other people from running jobs and me from canceling them. Meanwhile the blast jobs blew past the disk quota, leading to a Hellerian impasse where I somehow lacked the space to delete files so I could create space. I still don't fully understand it.

I believe it took a full day to get the cluster back online.
Would a Bayesian admit that there is one fixed parameter value?
I just came here to say pretty much exactly what you've already said (both paragraphs, in fact). So I'll just chime in (as a physics professor and string theorist) to endorse your take on the article.

This is a cool result, and it's neat to see a realization of the Dirac monopole in a thoroughly quantum field. But it's not a detection of a Dirac monopole for the usual electromagnetic field (which would be an amazingly big deal, and which I think most people don't ever expect to see).
>945 million mobile users

I am very skeptical of this number
I don't suppose you mean software engineers? :-)
How ironic that CA made such swift and strangling economic regulations that all the factories moved to china or shut down.

Now we have no control of the egregious pollution that China produces and the world (including CA) is far worse off because of it.

Why can't politicians and activists just have a little foresight for a change? This kind of thing always seems to happen. Unintended consequences will always happen, but when people warned of this years ago and the powers that be did not listen... SMH
That's an important point, and your general sketch is certainly correct, though I think you are overstating and overgeneralizing the research a little bit. (That said, I grant that it's certainly possible your understanding is more correct than mine.)