skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ex-worker denied unemployment compensation in 'government mind control' case
You don't need to run OpenSMTPD in order to get Xorg to work, of course. Also, OpenBSD is just the operating system. You can run whatever MTA you want.

Just a reminder, this thread is about Xorg running without privileges on OpenBSD -- an amazing feat!
I don't think games are stupid. I just like them to be a bit in depth. Why would I spend time looking at a more interesting version of the game, how to cheat it, and how to add twists otherwise?

Also, if you want to take a game theory approach, you're wrong about the warden. If the warden is just playing a sadistic mind game, and wants to fuck with the players before feeding them to the alligators, the correct "solution" to the game for the players (should they catch on to the warden), is to never declare, thus extending the game infinitely, or barring that maximally, before the warden bores of the game and offs them.
Holy shit. That article was an intense read. Well worth it, in the end, though.
>There is no evidence that testosterone levels will affect someone to the extent that they have a natural tendency to logic or programming.

Possibly so, but there's plenty of evidence that testosterone levels affect someone's willingness to work long, tedious hours in isolation in exchange for a higher salary, and give up their personal time for career advancement.
"True. But if you think about it for a moment, you'll realize it actually meets the criteria for extortion. You're handing over your money under threat of violence, even if the violence is X steps removed from where you are now."

If I take your laptop, is it extortion when you demand its return? At some point you may resort to violence (or have someone else do it on your behalf), so, that's extortion right? I would say no, because we have collectively agreed that property rights should usually be enforced - the mere fact that I possess your laptop doesn't mean it is rightfully mine. Likewise, we have collectively agreed (through the process of government, with all its flaws) to pay certain amounts in tax in certain situations. Asking for something that in someone's possession but that they don't actually have right to is not what extortion is.
We still don't know what Intel's microcode actually does...
> The big companies like Twitter, Google are big enough so they can stand by themselves and do not need the SF/SV influence

That only works if your employees know they are going (and want) to be with you for a long time. In tech things change fast, and both companies and people want to be in a place where they have a good amount of options. This naturally creates local maxima around a few geographical locations. The only way out is widespread remote work.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ortttosqmnxbfw/s2014form.html

I'd love to hear any feedback!
It is more than a simple ping, it actually issues a full request according to the given URL scheme.

Sitemeer is not supposed to collect vast uptime information from the entire Internet but only to provide realtime snapshots. This mostly comes in handy when you cannot reach a site but are not sure whether the site is really unavailable or there is merely a routing problem.
The problem is that the default install doesn't do much. It's almost like saying that MS-DOS is secure because networking is not working by default.
This couldn't disgust me more.

> At USV, we don’t invest in health care, but we are certainly, and increasingly, interested in the way networked humans can impact health care. We don’t invest in clean tech either. But we are certainly, and increasingly, interested in the way networked humans can impact the environment.

USV might not be aware, but our society really needs better health care and clean tech. This is more important than the need to prove that human networking leads to productivity gains. Human progress has nearly halted. Compare the progress of the 20th century with the progress of the 21st century. It would be great if investors started paying attention to this, and invested accordingly.
DoS of the high-work-factor algorithms actually is a thing. The bad part is the attacker doesn't have to wait for a response, so he can actually initiate a bunch easily.

The gold standard if you are worried about DoS and need security vs. stolen db right now is to encapsulate everything inside an HSM and have a symmetric algorithm. Unfortunately HSMs today are shit -- $30k, slow, a hassle, etc. I'm testing some cheap stuff to do this cheaply and sanely (USB connected, etc.).

If you can scale out your frontends, use bcrypt/scrypt/pbkdf2 with a reasonable work factor.
2) Council tax has all sorts of central govt limits on it, including the banding system. They can't fix the problem of empty property on their own.

3) A houseboat is not a building, and is therefore exempt from all the laws about building minimum standards that were instituted the previous times London had a slum problem. I'm not sure if there even are any standards about living on a boat, only standards about in relation to the river and other water users.

Housing in the UK is weird and broken. This is about 50% due to Right To Buy and the slow abolition of the council house.
4.95 million people signed up for Telegram
By "acknowledge" you probably mean apply an SPRT (serial probability ratio test). The Neymann-Pearson lemma is also relevant.
Because Cogent and Comcast have a peering agreement in which they agree to exchange traffic that is more or less symmetric (since that means that both partners will be spending approximately equivalent amounts on infrastructure development and maintenance). It has been customary for consumer-bound traffic to not count against the balance, since it was a relatively minor portion of the overall traffic exchanged. With the advent of high-resolution consumer-oriented video services like Netflix, that has changed - consumer traffic has become a significant portion of overall traffic exchanged, which causes a flow disparity between the two peering partners and places a disproportionate burden on one.

If this were not consumer-bound data, then Cogent would likely already be paying for the disparity. As it is, it's a good guess that Cogent has refused to compensate Comcast for the additional load on their network build-out and maintenance costs, instead relying on the good-faith consumer data exception to exempt them from paying for it. Comcast's response to this was to steal Netflix's business from Cogent, thereby alleviating the uncompensated load that Cogent was placing on their network and improving Netflix's deliverability.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you're a service provider, you're paying someone for delivery of your bytes. Netflix just cut out the middleman here. It's not like Netflix didn't already have to pay for the bytes they delivered - they just changed who they're paying.
It's not tied to any one place. It is tied to a few places, and Silicon Valley more strongly than most: in no small part because you can hire programmers there, because programmers live there, because they can get hired there (all circular-referency-like).

But it's also tied to places like New York, and London, and Seattle, and Boston, and Austin, heck, Shanghai and Hong Kong and Bangalore -- any place where there's enough of a critical mass of reasonably well-educated raw population that "programmers live there" because everyone lives there. Not tied as strongly, mind you -- the network effect and the venture capital in the bay area are hard to beat. But tied enough that it works.
Related... someone should write a good article about estimating customer acquisition costs (CAC, or ROI if you prefer) based on conversion rates of ads.

It drives me batty when people tell me their "average" conversion rate is 1% after running a $25 ad campaign with so few clicks. It seems like too many folks are just oblivious to sample size, confidence interval, and power calculations -- something that could be solved with a quick Wikipedia search [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination
This is actually a heavily criticized animation within the computational biophysics community. Our intuition for physical determinism breaks down at the nanoscale. One major fault of this video is that, at low Reynolds number, there's essentially no inertia. So the representation of kinesin taking deterministic, 100% processive steps is an absurd idealization. The motion is dominated by thermal fluctuations (which, by the way, are occurring on a nanosecond timescale).

At the same, even as a biophysicist, I think these animations are superb learning tools. Those beautifully rendered animations actually describe the mechanism in far greater detail than, say, textbook diagrams. One should just be aware that fluctuations dominate at these scales.
The specification indeed is about proxying http resources, not https ones. So it's not initially as alarming as some other proposals discussing trusting proxies to intercept SSL connections. For more details, you can refer to https://insouciant.org/tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-....

This specific proposal is interesting because it specifically is related to opportunistic encryption proposals, in particular, the one that allows sending http:// URIs over an unauthenticated TLS connection: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-httpbis-alt-svc-.... The problem here for proxies is, if you mix http and https (authenticated) traffic on the same TLS connection, the proxy cannot tell if it can safely MITM the connection. The proxy vendor would like to know if it can do so, probably for network management / caching / content modification reasons. Of course, the point of the opportunistic encryption proposal is to increase security (although its actual effective impact is controversial: https://insouciant.org/tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-...). But if you believe in opportunistic encryption's security purposes, then it doesn't seem to really make sense to make the MITM'able traffic identifiable so proxies on the network path can successfully MITM them without detection.
I'm not sure no 1 is a good explanation. For 300 you can share a nice house with 2-3 other people in the south west regions. How does being born in London, or (especially this) having a spouse with you explain choosing to live in terrible condition instead of pleasant house in a different city?
All machines are SSD based, though we neglected to make that obvious. We will correct it.
Actually the advantage of bitcoin escrow is that the third party only has to get involved if the first two parties have a dispute. Otherwise they can release the funds all by themselves.
Just to explain, it was protest and demonstration against economic inequality that took place in London, precisly St Paul.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_London
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the quoted sentence -- this which-hunting is a ridiculous exercise in 'gotcha grammar' completely divorced from the facts about how the language is spoken.

See, for instance, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5479 .
Right to Buy is ending in Scotland shortly to protect social housing.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment/Housing/...
> London is not monolithic; it has several local councils all with differing rules [...] I don't know why it isn't done better

Politically, London will never have a unified council because it would wield too much power over the presiding government. This is effectively what led to the downfall of the GLC (Greater London Council) - in the early 1980s the socialist GLC antagonized the Tory government to the point where Thatcher ended up forcing it to be abolished.

London produces so much of the GDP it would be very easy for a centralized London council to hold the national government 'to ransom' (this happens to some degree now with the London Assembly, but since the Assembly has little power over issues such as housing it's not as pronounced as it could be).

The upshot of this is you end up with a pretty crazy system whereby someone at one end of the street could pay twice as much council tax as someone at the other end (in the case of, say, Wandsworth - which has one of the lowest council tax rates in the UK, and Merton - which is more around the average). I would agree having a centralized London council would be far better than the current system, but there's no way it will ever happen.
I've lived in Texas, Washington, and in Silicon Valley California. There is way more bigotry here than any of the other places I've lived.
Why Facebook Will Never Stop Spending
Vim is not a healthy project. Example: They support transparent encryption for documents, but refuse to address or document the shortcomings of their implementation. It's of course a fully custom implementation of a half-homerolled protocol.

Main flaws: Apart from implementation issues, non-authenticated encryption susceptible to bitflipping.
That means we should be legalizing cocaine as well, not that we shouldn't be legalizing pot. And reducing the profits (and thus power) of drug cartels a small amount is still substantially better than not reducing them at all (doubly so if it's something we want to do for other reasons as well).

Edited to add:

Also, while I have no idea as to the veracity, Wikipedia says that over half the cartels' revenue comes from marijuana, and links http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1269781... in support.

Given the high fixed costs (salaries, bribes, infrastructure) of maintaining a criminal network, I expect that cutting revenues almost in half would be a tremendous blow to their profits.
Yes. My colleagues in London were advised to dress down during the protests to avoid drawing attention to themselves, I think this was fairly common at the time.
Only time will tell. It's all still in progress. Of all the major browser vendors (Firefox, Chromium, IE) present at the Zurich HTTP/2 interim meeting, only Patrick McManus (Firefox) has expressed interest. Notably, he's a co-editor of that Alternate-Services internet-draft.
> A p-value cutoff of 5% says that you have a 5% probability that you're wrong in rejecting the Null Hypothesis.

I don't think this is right. A p-value cutoff of 0.05 doesn't, by itself, indicate anything about the underlying probability of incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis. It tells you, in a test that meets your cutoff, if the null hypothesis is true, the chance of seeing a results as strong or stronger than the results observed in the test is 5% or less. But that can't tell you the chance you're wrong in rejecting the null hypothesis.

A 1% chance of seeing results as strong as your results if the null hypothesis is true does not mean that there's a 99% chance of the null hypothesis being false.

Regardless, even putting this disagreement to one side, I still don't see how the original author's point makes sense. He or she seems to be using the cutoff as an indication of the underlying false-positive probability for prospective tests, regardless of the results of those tests meet the cutoff or not.
Agglomeration economies.
You're totally ignoring the difference between cable systems now and cable systems back then. Building modern HFC networks capable of supporting broadband requires tremendously more investment than cable TV systems of yore.
Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa
I don't fundamentally disagree with the existence of Right to Buy, but it really required a comprehensive house-building program to back it up. Now we're fucked.
The one exception to anything other than an immediate single-click unsubscribe IMO is a confirmation button, prominently displaying the e-mail address that is being unsubscribed, just to deal with the case where someone unsubscribes from a forwarded e-mail.
is this fiction? if not, then why isn't the causes list of Black Monday including this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)
WhatsApp revenue is $1/user/year for all users who have used the service > 12 months. So, revenue is somewhere south of $450 million, but certainly a 9 figure number. That's real revenue.

What would be interesting is to know the gross and net margins, plus growth rates. With these numbers you could back your way into a valuation using various traditional valuation models.

That said, my opinion is this deal is a mix of traditional business plus Zuckerberg's vision. The first and only time I got to hear Zuckerberg in person was at Startup School in 2013.

Zuckerberg made some very interesting comments at Startup School. Basically, it was something along the lines of FB already has almost everyone who can afford a smartphone (i.e. developed markets) as a user. The next big idea is to help connect the next 6 billion people to the Internet...and then he went on to say this is an exciting idea but may not be good business. Make of that comment what you will.
My $20 is totally worth the "risk". Here's some dude from Brazil, that has at least some demonstrable skill, willing to take a month and have a go at improving a tool I use every day. For the price of four coffees.

As for Bram, he can, and most likely will continue his good work on vim. I am kind of disappointed that he is not more supported of this effort though.
So This Is What Getting Pwned Is Like
Why, oh why? I can’t think of one good reason the effort put into this shouldn’t have gone instead into raising IPv6 adoption.
An even bigger problem, in my opinion, is the idea (usually only implicit) that any advice can apply to the entire panoply of software development. As though writing Flappy Bird and writing control software for the Falcon 9 weren't as different as banging together some shelving using plywood from home depot and machining custom components from exotic alloys using a lathe. An important part of maturing as a developer is learning to understand that different situations call for different techniques and being able to know what things are truly important with a given project and which aren't.
The entire survival of Yahoo under a specific business model was staked to this. At the time -- this was my first job out of college -- I didn't care at all about those aspects, but the technical learnings for me (primordial NoSQL data stores, software-based high availability, hugely distributed architecture spanning many continents, what later came to be known as "devops" practice, etc...) were immense.
My assertion is true even for people who understand probability, and thus won't get much thrill about multiplying ~0 by 10.
Paranoid Programming
What would Netflix be losing? A lot of customers? And handing all of them over to Comcast's on-demand service. It'd be a massive win for Comcast.

There's no net neutrality issue in this discussion at all. Comcast is simply declining to upgrade its peering with Cogent. How is that net neutrality? If Netflix comes to me tomorrow and decides to buy all their transit through me, is Comcast somehow required to give me lots of free peering?

Netflix might be the majority(?) of Cogent's traffic, and Comcast might decide that it's not worth upgrading the connections for them. But as long as Comcast isn't discriminating traffic on their end (via some traffic shaping mechanism, I'd guess), then it's simply a matter of "Comcast thinks Cogent has enough connectivity, and sees no reason for them to upgrade the connections while getting nothing in return".

Their customers may disagree, but it up to them to not buy the service. (Perhaps the real problem here is lack of competition in the ISP market?)
The default OpenBSD install ships with plenty of software. It comes with pretty much everything but graphical web browsers that the devs use. It includes web and email servers, opensshd and openntpd, openldap, gnome, etc. It's a system fully functional for many purposes.
I don't really see any hatred there.

Software he has been significantly involved with has caused problems for a lot of people in the past. The recent strife and disagreement surrounding systemd surely hasn't helped the situation.

If somebody has had bad experiences with multiple software systems developed by a particular developer/project/organization, it's totally understandable why they'd want to avoid that developer's/project's/organization's software in the future. Nor is it unreasonable to want to protect oneself in such a manner. Furthermore, this can be the case without holding any sort of hateful emotions toward the developer/project/organization in question.

Do you have a better name for such a flag that may not involve his name directly? It does seem like a very descriptive name for what it does, even if some people may incorrectly interpret it as being "hateful" or something like that.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtLJO5JKE5YDKG4WcaNts3...
Comcast’s deal with Netflix makes network neutrality obsolete
I just so happen to be moving from Australia to Kenya for half a year in a few weeks, I am really keen to drop by their offices in Nairobi and check this out in person.
You can not see the concrete user benefits of a modernised, cleaned up code base ? Maybe you need to look harder.
You can get a 3-room house with garden and parking for less than £300 per week. I know because that's what I have; 10 minutes by motorbike to Old Street, or 40 minutes by public transport.

The wildcard is your qualification of "nice area". There's a very wide scale, and what would qualify as "nice" somewhere else will be a lot more expensive here. I've never felt physically in danger, though I have had motorcycles stolen.
Why would Netflix want to do that?
For a small arm of a large federated public University?

The vast majority of income to the University was from public funding, tuition, and sales on campus. He was never involved in working with state legislation to try to get us more funding -- that happened at a higher level in the University system. The large independent contributions happen regardless, and had mostly happened before his time (you know, buying a new building for the University and having it named after you).

The President was so far divorced from students that almost nobody could actually recognize him. He wasn't the reason anyone attended the school. Every alum I know has never heard of him outside of public speaking engagements. Every faculty member and staff member on campus I talked to (and I worked there for 3 years, it was a small University) had almost 0 interaction with him.

How is he fundraising, and who is he selling what to?

I saw absolutely 0 justification that he was earning the salary of 1 sanitary worker, let alone 5x the highest amount they paid any skilled worker on campus.
Facebook's navbar has a dead link
Rant about doing...
I read everyone's blog posts on here all of the time... I decided to take the plunge and just started writing some myself.
What about it in particular made you feel that way?
Too bad it's an all or nothing situation, it's not like they could just reduce the number of employees in the area.

If only there were some way for employees to do digital work without being in a centralized geographical location...
While we're talking Yamaha, i should mention my digital piano by them is pretty noisy while playing on headphones, i.e. the keybed thumps pretty audibly to everybody else within 30 yards. I think Korg and Roland keybeds are a little softer, but caveat piano players, not as great a 3AM instrument as you would think.
From idea to core prototype in hours, not weeks
This is what makes the concept of junk DNA [1] non-surprising [2].

Often complexity would come at a cost though, and evolution would automatically end up optimizing for it. Such costs may include energy costs, vulnerability to faults/diseases, etc. With such elaborate mechanisms for DNA wrapping, replication, etc., I wonder how much cost junk DNA brings to the system (vs. benefits in terms of fault-tolerance and evolution).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA#Junk_DNA

[2] I am not making any assertion here about the percentage of junk DNA in the human genome, and am unqualified to do so.
OpenBSD has lots of fine documentation. Read the man pages they aren't generally useless like the gnu ones.

http://www.opensmtpd.org/manual.html