skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a really, really simple way to get kids to love trig. Get them to write a video game.

Seriously, as a video game programmer, you use trig _every day_. If you want to find the distance between two points when you have the angle (eg. I'm firing a projectile at a certain angle), use cosine for the length of the x axis and use sine for the y axis. You get the hypotenuse from using pythagoras' theorem. If you want to find the angle between two points, use arc tangents.

Once kids have mastered all of that, you can teach them law of cosines and get into linear algebra; simple rotational matrices which can let you do collision detection and a whole bunch of other really, really cool stuff.

So yeah, Bob the builder might be boring as shit as a word problem, but Bob the builder might be a pretty cool video game. Without trig, as a game, Bob the builder is probably going to be boring as shit too.
Do you know if CCP Games is registered as a money transmitter? Eve ISK has value and is as equivalent to money as bitcoins so they should fall under that umbrella right?
The addendum to the post appears to be a totally unrelated NHS security breach, which actually strengthens the point made by the poster-above-but-one. Further down the page still, in the comments section, I saw this:

To quote from the report where PA admitted this is what they had done:

" ...upload it to the cloud using tools such as Google Storage and use BigQuery to extract data from it. As PA has an existing relationship with Google, we pursued this route (with appropriate approval). This showed that it is possible to get even sensitive data in the cloud and apply proper safeguards."

So they are claiming that they (a) had permission to do this and (b) steps were taken to secure it. It may also be that PA via partnership with Google have access to a more secure version of BigData.

Don't get me wrong, I've sold proprietary data to big-name management consultants before and know they don't always respect licensing restrictions, but at the moment the suggestion that PA have actually done anything wrong here is pure conjecture
Saving our public libraries in a paperless world
Good to hear, any math books you'd recommend to someone who's not there yet, or remember from that class?
Perhaps my sister is pregnant and she uses our family computer with a shared account?
Popular sites are routinely attacked now too, with much larger attacks than any in the early 2000s.
You do realise you're watching Apple's response to the Open Automotive Alliance, I hope?

http://www.openautoalliance.net/
I posted this in another thread, but it's valid here as well: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09279.pdf

Basically, in a study of federal workers, a 7% unexplained gap exists between male and female worker's wages when controlling for occupational, experiential and educational differences, among other things.

Especially relevant data is on pages 84-86.

(edited for clarity)
A Blueprint for Building a Quantum Computer
"Women are penalized more than men for negotiating," Babcock tells Alex Cohen. "People are less likely to like them; if they negotiate in a job interview, they are less likely to hire them. There are real social sanctions that occur when women initiate negotiations."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252923...
California Court Rules In Favor Of Using Cellphone Maps While Driving
> The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt.

I agree. The fact I have a penis attached to me means that I don't get to participate equally with all conversation partners. So while I'm all for equality, I keep quiet about things I both disagree and agree with, because my opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit a priori.
Firefox is not vulnerable to this.
Yay someone agrees TPM's can be a good thing!

Right?
It happens relatively rarely that a large multinational food company poisons half its customers (or so I like to think), hence I would assume that laws and proper auditing can stop such problems.

In summary I have spent at least five to ten minutes (and likely more) on spam brought to me by Dropbox without any compensation. How about a fixed payout of, say, 100€ per leaked detail (username, password, email etc.), payable immediately to each customer? At least companies with bad security would be out-of-business soon.
Vidpresso (YC W14) Offers Low-Cost Tools for Adding Tweets and Ads to Broadcasts
First Class Goto
The FAQ talks about subscription, but there's no link or any mention of how to subscribe anywhere in the site. Looks like the site itself (other than the videos) is not updated.
We've been dealing with DDOS attacks affecting mainstream citizens and businesses of 1st world countries for about a decade now. Why isn't there law enforcement dedicated to catching people who do this? We're at a point where CEOs of companies can engage in such behavior and the companies can stay in business.

If there is someone reading this who works with a US congressman or senator, this may be a chance to introduce legislation that can make a positive impact, make it easier to establish Internet-facing companies, and instead of eliciting dismay from the community of technical people, gain their gratitude instead.
The election was criticised quite harshly. But that is not Russia's problem, anyway... [Or do you think elections in Europe is Russia's problem to "correct"?]

Consider the scary thing here:

To AGAIN start invading and taking pieces (Transnistria, Georgia, etc) of countries in Europe is not just small meaningless realpolitik, as you imply.

Especially since the motivation is "Protecting Germ... Russian speaking populations"... :-(

What will happen now is that the West will continue to say "Peace in our time" while starting to also rearm.

Are you seeing the obvious parallels here? You need to wait for Putin to get a moustache first? :-(
The Snowden privacy panic has spread to medical research. This is a problem
The myth of the fall is that we imagine we were at a higher place than we are now according to this, but I would say it's not that black and white. In between proprietary products, the foss culture soared, and during years of proprietary product releases, it was relegated to the hacker and academic realms (as opposed to consumer).

Let's not forget that the BSD (Net1) debacle didn't even start till about 89 and Linux didn't show up till, what, 91? There is a huge time gap between the origins of the open source culture and the practical availability for tinkerers.

Also, please, please don't forget the influence of Minix in this (also not till 87). sidenote: If you weren't aware, Minix 3 is now BSD licensed, and I find it as a ray of hope for the future (10k lines of kernel code vs what, 10mil in linux now? Let's admit it, linux is getting out of control of the open source review principle... but I digress.)

The real gem of this article is the end:

"We didn’t get here because we failed in our duty to protect a prelapsarian software commons, but because we succeeded in creating one."

What that really means is that although open source got us to where we are today, we are still in a very precarious position. "Prelapsarian" is right. We are in a time where the potential for a lapse back to proprietary is far too strong at the moment, and honestly while I understand the arguments between BSD and GPL, I think history has shown that BSD is far too easily abused (Apple/Windows netstacks, etc), and RMS will in the future history books either be considered a visionary ahead of his time or wiped from the pages of history due to the totalitarianism in effect.

Software is a social issue, there is no way around that fact, and we ignore it at our peril.

(one more sidenote: I think one of the main threats of proprietary these days is, that as open source/foss takes over, it becomes the backend blob that everyone ignores and forgets about. See: GSM stack, etc. We need to keep FOSS close to the hardware)
>If they have permission of government officials then what? //

They wouldn't - without wilful negligence - accept such "permission" from anyone other than a senior official who had in depth knowledge of the necessary requirements of privacy laws. A person in that permission is unlikely to be acting lawfully and is likely to be aware of that - there's no way they should retain a post with responsibility over anything greater than a stapler after that.
How a 40% decrease in X can be a 6% increase in non-X
Amazon Chooses HAL Media Type for AppStream API
The Bizarre Tale of a Man Murdered Over a Jetpack
> The physical state of the occupant is an issue if there are situations where the occupant might need to regain control of the vehicle.

All I can say is that the goal of self-driving cars is to take the occupant out of the picture entirely. I think a lot of public safety officials will welcome this change. Eventually, there will be two classes of vehicle occupants -- those who are qualified to touch the controls, and those who aren't.

For an earlier social model, look at elevators. At one time, to have an elevator in your building, you had to hire an elevator operator. Then there were elevators that the building's occupants could operate if they were careful and knew what to avoid. Now elevators are safely operated by anyone.

Same idea.
Outbrain NYC is looking for front and back end engineers to help us design, scale, simplify and integrate our infrastructure. Competitive pay and benefits (with equity of course).

Descriptions for both positions below, but please reach out to cmaillard@outbrain.com if you're interested!

Backend
As our newest backend engineer, you’ll help us scale, extend, and evolve our infrastructure. We use awesome libraries/tools that span the entire development spectrum– nginx, varnish, gevent, scipy, storm, kafka, fabric, and a number of our own proprietary technologies, too.
Full posting: http://outbrain.mytribehr.com/careers/view/8

Frontend
A small team within Outbrain R&D is looking for an organized, experienced front end developer to help us continue building and simplifying the experience across our platform. You will be responsible for transforming wireframes and mocked ideas into working products using the latest front end technologies. We're looking for creative developers who love to solve problems and want to help us build the future of content on the web for devices large and small.
Full posting: http://outbrain.mytribehr.com/careers/view/53

About Outbrain:
Outbrain was founded with the goal of developing the world’s best platform for the continual discovery of high-quality content. You’ve probably seen us before and didn’t know it was Outbrain. In fact, we bet you’ve clicked on one of our links. ‘Cause they’re pretty good.
>Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation

Fix what? What are they "fixing"? They seem to be fixing the problem of people being able to do better than default. Exiting times we live in...
No one is forgetting history. I think those of us pointing out that Bitcoin enables perhaps less regulation is because it provides new technologies for self-regulating and self-organizing. n of m wallets, self-executing contracts, autonomous organizations, etc. are all paradigms that we've never seen before and solve some of the efficiency/regulatory problems of the past.

One could imagine a world where the government doesn't regulate, it only provides guidelines that all people can use as a framework or template for the self-contracting they do with potential risk.
Xkcd "Now" widget for Android
> The downside (to me, not to you) is that the attack has limited impact.

I agree, although I think the break of channel bindings is going to turn up some interesting cases that are harder to fix than client-cert auth in browsers.
That's the part I don't understand – I'd be scared witless at the thought of not having tests for anything moving money out of my accounts. When you have millions in those accounts, even a really expensive developer is cheap insurance…
I actually wrote that comment back in the day. I was rather snarky and unhelpful it seems.

The code for the sshd does not seem to be there anymore, but from memory: it did not check if the number sent by Bob was 0, 1, or any any other groups that would make it easy solve the discrete logarithm problem. I don't think it bothered to check the primes either. [1] I think there was also something wrong with the signature checking (padding not checked maybe?).

Altogether it seemed like you could easily MITM connections made to the server, but I don't think I ever tried. It was a perfect example--to me at least--of why you should not spend a trivial amount of time reading about crypto on Wikipedia and then writing crypto code.
Show HN: Awesometalk – Free video calling without the hassle
As much I understand, even HTTPS and its infrastructure has plenty of holes.

How was this, that some people broke into a signature authority and stole master-keys -- so a huge number of keys where compromised. I don't know, if that thing was repaired yet. Also there exist many authorities that give keys to people without the simplest identity check. Such keys are a security risk of its own.

I also don't know, how good (or bad) the key withdrawal mechanism is working currently. I remember darkly (I am not current in these things) that there existed some problems with existing browsers, infrastructure and so on ...

And even, when those things would work fine ... as much I know, there exist holes in the implementation, depending which algo combination is used.

So there are so many attack vectors, that even in the best case (https works fine and you have a domain that belongs to the correct author ... and you have checksums ... and you check, if your browser tells you, that the certificate is perfect (who in the internet age cares, when the browser says that the certificate has some problem??) ...) there seems to be no security in the internet age ....

(And I am not even speaking or thinking about governments spying on us all)
I've become acutely aware of this over the past couple days. I'm setting up a new a laptop, using VMs for all work. Getting VMware is easy - it's signed. But from there? Things start sucking. I need to fix my "ThinkPad" fan and trackpad (new ThinkPads don't actually have a middle button despite the dots appearing like they are one) - gotta download unsigned blobs.

Since I want as little software installed on the host as possible, I'm going to have to start a VM on something like Azure (easiest) with Visual Studio, and build my own copies of these tools if possible. The culture of building stuff on Windows is fairly weak, so I imagine I'll run into all sorts of issues.

It's pretty embarrassing that Windows doesn't ship with a lightweight way of creating "VMs" to increase security. Something like Sandboxie would be a welcome piece of OS functionality.

The JS crypto comment is off-base. The discussion about JS crypto is that it's pointless because it's only as strong as TLS - it doesn't provide anything else, and it's very easy to get it wrong and get more damaged (due to ease of XSS and whatnot). Sandboxed execution is a fantastic thing, and even MS tried that with .NET and it's million code-access-security policies. And now everyone does that with Android/Windows Store style permissions (although not as fine grained).
Some people do; mjg59 is working on boot attestation as an anti-boot-sector-virus mechanism. The underlying absolutely critical question is who controls the TPM hardware.
And again:

Ray ID: 1057b84ee49b08a5
You are totally correct imho, but miss the point.

Read about the resource curse on Wikipedia. It is too lucrative for the junta in an oil country to steal the elections, get external enemies -- and send the oil money to Schweiz.

Putin needed to get isolated from the West, so he can condemn all criticism as Western conspiracies. :-(
To be clear, it was one of CloudFlare's clients, it wasn't a DDOS on them directly:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/technical-details-behind-a-400gbp...

"On Monday we mitigated a large DDoS that targeted one of our customers. The attack peaked just shy of 400Gbps."

And yes, it did affect other parts of their network, but they were able to successfully mitigate it.

"We saw attack traffic hitting every one of CloudFlare's data centers. While we were generally able to mitigate the attack, it was large enough that it caused network congestion in parts of Europe"
Definitely look into expanding your online visibility. SEO, social media, get on Pinterest! Pinterest will be crucial for your business. Your products are beautiful, and I think there's major potential here.
Enlightenment Introduces Eolian, EFL C Generator
Because doctor-patient trust is vital. If people are afraid to tell their health care providers anything important, then both individual health care outcomes and public health will suffer.

That you don't care if people know your medical history is great, but you shouldn't project that to other people.

Examples of things where people have entirely legitimate concerns about how others might react: sexually transmitted diseases, addictions, chronic diseases, contagious diseases, terminal conditions, mental health issues, pregnancy, failed pregnancy, abortion, and anything predictive of future health issues. And examples of people that they might not want finding things out: parents, children, pastors, church members, neighbors, insurance companies, current employers, tabloid journalists, future employers.
In the Huffington Post article, you wrote: "Years of working with NGOs and government aid programs were convincing me that handouts are a dead end, temporarily soothing the acuteness of the injustice but taking donor and recipient down a path of dependence that ultimately makes the international wealth divide even wider."

Do you feel that way about a universal basic income? Does your statement only refer to single-recipient donations, that tend to cause dependence? I can't claim any personal experience, but from what I've read in e.g. [1] and [2], an unconditional basic income has positive effects on the community. The lesson I've taken from such pilot studies is that direct, conditionless donations are a very effective way to help the poor. I'm curious if I've learned the wrong lesson, and the benefits only appear if it's happening for a large population (or perhaps even that's not effective, and the studies are flawed or misleading).

[1] http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html
[2] http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100
Announcement details and partners list => http://airpa.ir/api-partners

A survey on Api usage we're doing today => http://airpa.ir/2014-q1-api-survey
plan ahead and work with DDoS mitigation services before you're attacked

Where can I find more information about this? I've been thinking about exactly this issue with regards to running an MMO. Pretty much none of my functionality can be cached, so I don't think CloudFlare can help me. The best solution I've come up with is to run my MMO as a few servers on NFO, which hosts game servers and has a good reputation for "not just nullrouting you."
Japan: Robot to take top university exam
Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference
What actually is so technically challenging about this app? Any machine learning? AI? Any complex algorithm?

If no, just save some money, hire some cheap developer in India when you have some saved up, or even better learn coding and work on it when you've learned enough. This ain't no Wolfram Alpha. It's probably 2 from 1-10 in terms of technical complexity.
I gotta say I don't buy this. I was the token conservative on a lot of issues in grad school and I never got flack for saying my opinion on gender or race or economic issues as an Asian male from a privileged background. Not being an asshole about it works wonders.
>Some of us consider privacy a fundamental value that must be defended

The severity of a punishment can be tuned separately from the form of punishment. Imprisonment is not appropriate merely by dint of your emotional reaction to the crime itself.

>Which is more of a danger to me...

Sufficient to warrant throwing them in a cage, being brutalized by actually violent criminals, imposing a direct cost burden on society, and also indirectly by depriving society of that individual's productivity?

Probably neither.
I don't believe the original example was contrived. It sounded like a real series of steps that this guy went through. But you're right, it's even worse if you don't have any idea what you're doing.
Pretty much none of my functionality can be cached, so I don't think CloudFlare can help me.

We have plenty of clients like that. They are using us for a variety of reasons, DDoS protection is one.
At TokBox, we get many requests for help integrating our API to add live video chat into existing products. I think that AirPair's expert integration will be a great resource to offload some of that work to our community who are already familiar with our platform.
Hi Paul,

First of all, I would like to commend your worthy contribution to the good work the people at Zidisha are doing.

There is something I want to draw to your attention to(searched and did not find your email)

I am wondering how to balance the stereotyping to the "African Entrepreneur" while at the same time not forgetting the millions of small scale business owners in Africa.

When I first saw the headline, I was excited that finally, a top tech investor would be investing in African startups. Only to look and see yet another (VERY COMMENDABLE)but "charity like" donation.

In general, you do not see VCs from the west investing in African startups. That door is almost always closed. When they do it has to be under the category of impact investment and/or a "social enterprise"

Why do you think this is so?

Two years before the WhatApp acquisition, a Ghanaian startup SAYA https://www.saya.im/ came for disrupt but they could not get any funding. Even with hundred thousands waiting signups. Almost like they were not worthy to tackle high tech.

I am very certain that if these guys had built an SMS app to remind farmers of prices in the market (or something along that line) they would have got funding.

Thankfully, things are changing a bit as Dropifi http://www.dropifi.com/ (from Ghana) got funding from 500 Startups.

PS: I want to make it clear that what you are doing is very worthy and commendable and this is not meant to be a criticism of you or this action in ANY way.

PPS: I will be in SF from Wed-Sunday this week and would be very happy to chat with people who want to learn about the tech scene in Nigeria (yes and that includes 'Nigerian scams' et al :)).

Oh. I also do not mind surfing on your couch if available too :). You will be paid in Nigerian beer (I brought some).

my email is in my profile.
Well, in my case knowing that I went to college with Simon, Richard et al, and could most likely arrange a face to face meeting / key exchange at the next Debian barbecue (hi Steve!) ... Of course, there are still plenty of things to be paranoid about (if I were the faceless security agency I know whose parties I'd have been going to 20 years ago)
I think Google has direct line to NSA, so yes the Google.
This seems to be popular (a lot of people had it at the MS shop I interned last year) [0] and, to be daft, here's two more recommendations via SO/reddit: [1] [2].

0: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590597893/

1: http://www.manning.com/marguerie/

2: http://manning.com/skeet/
> Perhaps I'm just too old to hack.

No such thing.
I think that was Tunisia?
I remember a similar issue when the italian government decided that it doctors should report treatment of illegal aliens. This just meant that a lot of illegal immigrants didn't want to get cured and it posed a severe risk for public health regarding contagious diseases.