skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Storing critical data to external storage (which is clearly explained as unsecure in http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage....) is a huge security hole. This kind of basic oversight makes me wonder about base competence of WhatsApp developers - anyone with basic understanding of the OS would get that anyone can read external storage.
Can Graphene Oxide Filters Unlock Our Most Abundant Water Source?
Does this happen on Windows Phone devices as well? While WP allows reading and writing to the SD card, it provides isolated storage for apps(which is a source of much pain). While I am not sure about how android handles storage for apps, there should be a middle ground where users can explicitly permit apps to read protected storage data of other apps. WP disallows storage data sharing between apps leading to limited functionality.(this is not related to the article, just a wp rant)
Thanks much! Fixed.
Pre-7.1, was the tweeter similarly asking how the Touch ID section of the Settings app is able to do anything at all?

Presumably what has special considerations is read/write access to some data store, with the sell being that Random App X has no means to get at it.
Yup, the way to do it is via a small variant of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectiminimax_tree. Backgammon has "min", "max" and "expectation" nodes. The "correct" solver in this case only has "max" nodes (for the human moves) and "expectation" nodes (for the computer 'moves').
The Igon Value Problem
$6 Million Letter to Son Describing DNA
Show HN : A site for creating launch pages for books
HTML / CSS / JS, in human terms
It's hard to put faith in what someone during an interview is saying. It's a sales pitch on both sides of the table. This guy already had the inside scoop on what "a day in the job" was like and he was already sold.
I found you can get to 256 by just being twiddle-fingers, sometimes even 512 ..
I'm afraid I don't know exactly what comment to leave this under but it feels very relevant to this discussion. This user's answer to the question goes through quite a bit of history of Direct3D and OpenGL.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-...
Sorry you're right, I don't know why I thought that was Dave.
It's far more valuable to you for 2-way communications vs. Judge Judy.

There are a lot of really quite vocal, really quite elderly people who love, support and value CBS and the like. The pitch of enhanced communication, in whatever form, is much less appealing than Wheel of Fortune.
Em, no - that can only be done in internal store "data" directories which are usually formatted with UNIX filesystems and are by default secure (and cannot be accessed by other apps at all).

WhatsApp is storing to external (on most devices FAT) storage (which was SD card on older devices, it's usually a separate directory/partition on newer ones) which does not have any ACL-like system due to FAT backwards compatibility.
This is a real issue indeed. First of all, in XBMCtorrent, I'm using libtorrent-rasterbar, which is _very_ optimized for the swarm.

Second, seeding in enforced during playback, to "give back".

Third, there is a time randomization in which hot spots (pieces who are big demand) are also the ones who are the most shared (since everybody is seeding these).
Heh. If you look in the code you'll see a big commented out chunk where I tried randomly sampling computer moves to get sort of an 'expected value' for the opposition's move. Empirically, it performed worse. I think this is for the same reason that all minimax algos assume optimal play by the opponent: if you assume optimal and they play less than so, it can only work in your favor. However I think there's some truth in the fact that sometimes an unpredicted random computer move can mess things up. Unfortunately exhaustively enumerating all possible computer moves was way too slow (for single-threaded javascript in the browser).
Compressive Sensing on a whiteboard
"The searches, officials said, were conducted in an effort to determine how committee staff members had gained access to a draft version of an internal agency review of its controversial interrogation program."

"Feinstein confirmed that committee investigators had received and reviewed documents detailing the interrogation policy but said she didn’t know whether they were provided intentionally or unintentionally by CIA officials or by agency whistleblowers."

These political games are extremely complex and I don't know if we'll ever know what actually went on here. I suppose it's possible that the CIA leaked these unauthorized documents to Feinstein to give them a pretext for searching her computers.
Why You Should Consider Working for a Consultancy
A new category of laws needs to be enumerated: "Laws that only apply to Congress".

This is the reverse of the "Laws that do not apply to Congress" [0]

[0]
Whistleblower Protections; Subpoenas for Health and Safety Probes; Keeping Workplace Records; Prosecution for Retaliating Against Employees; Posting Notices of Workers’ Rights; Anti-Discrimination and Anti-Retaliation Training

http://www.propublica.org/article/do-as-we-say-congress-says...
I agree completely. This is particularly prescient for me because I finally made the leap from PHP to Ruby with a job I started 2/5/2014 (hold your applause :P). There's a lot to learn, but I actually find myself more happy and productive. Also, I'm a bit of a junky for learning new tools and the like so that's part of the fun.
$ gem install json

$ scout_realtime

You're welcome.
I doubt this will happen. CBS owns rights to show the AFC division of the NFL. It is not in the NFL's interest to reduce it's audience. The NFL is a HUGE money maker for CBS and other networks that cary games.
I wholly agree. Which is what I find so confusing about Agile "methodologies" and their ardent supporters. I'm not knocking the methodology (well I probably am) rather that they have little, if anything, to do with agile in the original sense.
I suspect this is a problem with any project once the original developers move on and there's a break in institutional knowledge about the architecture and design reasoning behind a project. I also suspect it's more of a problem the more powerful the ability of the language to introspect and self-modify. Lastly, I suspect this is also paired with gains in efficiency in the design and implementation phase.

If that's true, it's a matter of trade-offs, not a clear negative, and it becomes a matter of recognizing those downsides and dealing with them accordingly (whether that be avoiding certain features except where specifically called for, better documentation, or preventing that loss of institutional knowledge).
XBMCtorrent has other providers (such as Kickass). http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736
But on the other hand, doing that just pushes complexity around.

This. In my experience moving to small teams, service-oriented architecture, and semi-open allocation, the underlying problems of coordination were not solved. We had all sorts of issues coordinating API work and being blocked because one team's API was not performing up to par, but they were not fixing it because they had competing priorities. What ultimately helped get us moving again was getting a new engineering lead who had very good overall product judgement and could bang heads to get people on the same track.

If your app is intrinsically decoupled, then obviously small teams and SOA is a good idea. But if your app is inherently interconnected and requires coordination among complex pieces, then you are really choosing your poison either way.

Ultimately, I think the only proven solution for building high quality, complex software systems is to have Steve Jobs or another extremely talented and charismatic BDFL.
Ansible can be used as a distributed command runner but it's also a configuration management tool like Puppet (and much more).

Its "playbooks" are by default meant to be idempotent -- you can run them over and over ensuring that a system is in a consistent state.
I'll add one more: PostGIS.
Migrating from PHP to Node.js
$ brew install -g html-xml-utils

seems to work on OS X 10.9.2
Her CSPAN video: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4486712/sen-feinstein-accuses-...
I use to be concerned about that when I was at your age, but now, after having to face major tragedies in my life I learned that the poet was right when he said that "All is worthwhile if the soul is not small." (Fernando Pessoa). I never get tired of learning, even if what is shown as new smells like dejá-vu. Learning is something that rewards you not only when you achieve the goal, but in the process of achieving it. I tried the management path and I was good at it, but I really enjoy programming better, so I get programming gigs as much as possible. One thing in my favor is that I don't have any aspirations of being rich, stability and alike. This open my choices of jobs.
Even – 2048 for Android with a twist
Hey HN, I'm the developer of Even. Oddly enough, Even launched last week before 2048. It's similar in that it uses even numbers but different in other ways (dynamics, bombs, etc.)

I spent a ton of time tuning the gameplay (in fact, it was internally beta tested by other Googlers for 2 weeks before launch). The concept is similar to Threes and 1024 but the gameplay is quite different.

It's free so try it out. Warning: it gets really addictive, especially with the public leaderboard!

Ask me anything.
My sister-in-law was an Aeronautical Engineer (specializing in jet propulsion systems), and a close family friend is a former NTSB investigator. Both said almost exactly the same thing: until they find the plane, everything is an uninformed guess.

Actually...our NTSB friend said something about "clowns engaged in a furious mental circle jerk", but he's been on the pointy end of pointless speculation about tragic events and gets touchy.
The investors I've met clump into those two aggregates. I am not imposing any constraints - just saying that the people I've met seem to line up into those categories.
I liked most of the generalizations in the blog post,I think that if he isn't 100% right, then at least he is really on to something.

The place I balked, is where he said that design patterns are almost dead. I find design pattersn to be invaluable, and so does at Apple Computer and with them millions of developers, so the death of design patterns is a bit premature.
In the vagrant-libvirt provider (https://github.com/pradels/vagrant-libvirt) we already do this. When you import a box, we load the full QCOW2 disk image into a storage pool. When you create a VM based on that box, we create a new image that is linked to the original image and only stores changes from it. This makes creating new VMs noticeably faster and more space-efficient in libvirt compared to virtualbox. It would be great if other providers used this technique.
Yes, one must be careful not to define a new standard, but rather to observe a strict subset of both for which that "equation" holds.
So, all else being equal (the pitch, the idea, etc.) the study found that people looking to invest realize that attractiveness can play a role in the success of the venture.

Since the success of the venture depends upon a lot of sales and marketing of an idea both internally and externally... why is this a surprise?

Investors are worried about the success of the venture and their ROI. They understand that attractiveness can impact it.
No not really. None of those are books he wrote himself. He runs a book publishing company. It's primary purpose is to publish books people want to buy. Though I'll agree that many of those authors capitalize on the exact things he is railing against in his post.
There's been a lot of work in trying to use the unused television spectrum for data broadcasting. Trials have happened before (with controversial results[1]) but they're still going[2]:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spaces_(radio)#Preliminar...

[2] http://www.whitespacealliance.org/
Malaysia tracked missing jet to Strait of Malacca
Volkswagen: 'The Car Must Not Become A Data Monster"
Not all channels are meant to be closers
It's science. A lot of science is measuring and documenting the completely obvious - because there's a lot of interesting and not-obvious stuff hidden in the obvious.
They already have been paid. Or you think mr. sound technician guy or lovely ms. Magda the hairdresser will receive money until his last day just because they have worked on a movie. The only one who will have that right is a company, who had nothing to do with filmaking process, they just invested, and for sure, after the premiere they've got, or not, a lot of money. Even the main actors release "rights".
Has anyone reading this article checked out cdist?

I like it very much, you can guess why...
Are Your Best People Ready To Leave
A thing that this article is hinting at that I think might be more fundamental to making good automation principles: idempotency.

Most of unix's standard set of tools (both the /bin programs and the standard C libraries) are written to make changes to state - but automation tools need to assure that you reach a certain state. Take "rm" as a trivial example - when I say `rm foo.txt`, I want the file to be gone. What if the file is already gone? Then it throws an error! You have to either wrap it in a test, which means you introduce a race condition, or use "-f" which disables other, more important, safeguards. An idempotent version of rm - `i_rm foo.txt` or `no_file_called! foo.txt` would would include that race-condition-avoiding logic internally, so you don't have to reinvent it, and bail only if anything funny happened (permission errors, filesystem errors). I does not invoke a solver to try to get around edge cases (e.g., it won't decide to remount the filesystem writeable so that it change an immutable fs...)

Puppet attempts to create idempotent actions to use as primitives, but unfortunately they're written in a weird dialect of ruby and tend to rely on a bunch of Puppet internals in poor separation-of-concern ways (disclaimer: I used to be a Puppet developer) and I think that Chef has analogous problems.

Ansible seems to be on the right track. It's still using Python scripts to wrap the non-idempotent unix primitives - but at least it's clean, reusable code.

Are package managers idempotent the way they're currently written? Yes, basically. But they have a solver, which means that when you say "install this" it might say "of course, to do that, I have to uninstall a bunch of stuff" which is dangerous. So Kožar's proposal is somewhere in the right direction - since it seems like you wouldn't have to ever (?) uninstall things, but it's making some big changes to the unix filesystem to accomplish it, and then it's not clear to me how you know which versions of what libs to link to and stuff like that. There's probably smaller steps we could take today, when automating systems. Is there a "don't do anything I didn't explicitly tell you to!" flag for apt-get ?
Pick a really boring, antiquated industry. Think about how you can add glamour to said industry. Think about how you can redefine workflow, transactions, purchasing, sales, marketing, etc. Change the way business processes run. If the industry dictates everything, try and build something that gives the consumer greater power/choices.
It handles sound, input and a bunch of other stuff which DirectX also handles besides window management and rendering.
If it's trash then wouldn't it make sense to just not watch it at all? Why is it that we somehow 'deserve' to watch a film at whatever price we think is reasonable, when the whole thing is optional anyway?
Congrats Vlad, Bryant & Sergie. Killer product, great raise.
The balance comes down to how the spectrum is serving the public interest.

In the eyes of the FCC, free-to-air broadcast television serves a greater public benefit at the moment than does private subscription datacasting on that spectrum.
>Ignoring that statement, which is a nice way to excuse your obvious criminal act(s)

What's your suggestion, then? Should I refuse to consume them or force myself to go to cinema even though I don't want to? (nor have the time to do so.) I'm all ears.

>the key is that we need centralized services to offer everything easily. If every content creator starts to have their own distribution method, get ready to complain about the "expensive" $10-15 fees you pay for 15 different services!

Of course. It shouldn't get to the point where buying individual movies would be more cheaper to pay for streaming services. Studio executives should leave their egos aside and start acting reasonably. Who wouldn't pay, say, 15-20$ a month and you're allowed to watch 5 movies each month (and extra 3-5$ for each individual movie after that). That's a good and a fair deal for both parties.
JD.com Said to Plan IPO by July With Over $20 Billion Valuation
The Upstanding Desk
You can always pay some sort of % as tribute, but you've created something that we all find a horrendous waste of time :-) so a way of remunerating you to some degree is not in the least bit unethical.

It's good to get paid for your work, even if it was fun.
not to mention, proximity to Mayo which has been doing some pretty cool stuff w/r/t imnovation
This will be nice. In a similar vein, I'd also like to see an option to install base boxes and plugins system-wide in addition to per-user.
I've been doing that, too, but my impression is that it's a human cognitive convenience, rather than something algorithmically stronger.
Brilliant game! I got pretty close, but even the AI managged to fail just a few moves before the completion. :( http://i.imgur.com/F2ldDAS.png
That's a common expression used by lots of people who understand that the process is more complicated than that.

Pedants might make good scientists but they're unlikely to be good instructors.
U.S.-Russian space trio lands safely despite bad weather
My startup is majority-owned by a broadcaster in a major market :) I'm very familiar with audience demographics.

Sometimes, decisions can't be democratically decided (moving spectrum from broadcasters to 2-way comms), as opinions ("I want my stories") shouldn't hold the same weight as facts (spectrum is far too valuable to waste on broadcast).
Hey HN, I'm the developer of Even. Oddly enough, Even launched last week before 2048. It's similar in that it uses even numbers but different in other ways (dynamics, bombs, etc.)

I spent a ton of time tuning the gameplay (in fact, it was internally beta tested by other Googlers for 2 weeks before launch). The concept is similar to Threes and 1024 but the gameplay is quite different.

It's free so try it out. Warning: it gets really addictive, especially with the public leaderboard!

Ask me anything.
"`sudo apt-get install nginx` just works. Perhaps they're doing it 'wrong', but there are thousands of people who are making sure it just works."

True, but that is only half of the problem. Once you have nginx installed you have to configure it, which requires another layer of automation. Package installation is the trivial part of the stuff done by Ansible, Puppet, etc.

You could package up pre-configured .deb's, but you lose the "thousands of people" aspect and are back to "compile it from scratch". It's significantly less entertaining, particularly if you're trying to do it repeatably.

I think the real point of Nix is that you use the same mechanisms for both package management and local configuration.
This is the single best piece of advice I've ever seen on HN, apart from this bit about love: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617915

Your time is your most valuable commodity and you will have less as you get older. Don't waste it on unqualified leads, ever.
> In the eyes of the FCC, free-to-air broadcast television serves a greater public benefit at the moment than does private subscription datacasting on that spectrum.

You're right, but it still makes me sad.
Again the people who say Philosophy is dead to science I say UGH learn from history. Philosophy and Ethics are still the heart of progress.

How many Scientific papers that were "peer reviewed" have we now learned that the science behind the scientific papers have seriously been lacking.

The cost is in the suffering and deaths of patients who didn't get help needed that research would have found if they didn't have to chase all these rabbit trails.

Biased and mad

PS Theology/Philosophy Degree holder and my son is named after my favorite Philosopher.

PSS My other son died of cancer (Bone Cancer) where there has been zero progress in mortality rate over the last 30 years.
Out of curiosity, how would you define my example stringify function in Haskell with "no cost" safety around the argument type?
Hi, I started this project last year, as someone pointed out, we have free access to Facebook ("thanks" to the Internet.org campaign and TIGO, one of the biggest telcos here in Paraguay). It would be nice to port the client to Android (it seems that isn't possible to use tuntap directly) and implement some obfuscation and encryption stuff later. I'm open to any collaborations, I need to clean up some things and write a README and TODO list.
Using a Java Hypervisor to reduce your memory footprint
Great post. It was fascinating to see how your copyrighting evolved. A/B testing is big these days and if done properly can make a significant difference in conversion rates.
But there are lots of crowdfunding successes for videogames, even though they present the same problem that you don't know in advance how good it will be. So I don't think the situation is hopeless.

Another idea which I think has promise is payment by social conventions. Tipping culture in the US is like this: you are not legally required to pay waitstaff, but everyone does because they would be considered assholes if they didn't. People joke that it's ridiculous that rock bands and web cartoonists make most of their money selling t-shirts, but actually if we are aiming for social pressure t-shirts are the ideal currency---everyone you interact with in your daily life can see that you bought one. So if we got a convention going that "if you regularly read a webcomic you oughta buy the t-shirt", then it would be easy to ostracize the people who violate it.
I think the trend is that generally people are happy with the new language when they learn it because they want to. It gives you a chance to assess the warts of the previous language by seeing a new way to do things (and eventually an appreciation of what they did right but is problematic in the new language).

When moving to a language you aren't really enthused about, it can feel like all downsides. For me that was having to dive deep into some PHP projects. Although that may have been more to do with the nature of going from Perl to PHP, which really, really felt like regressing to me (PHP sort of feels like a very old, constrained version of Perl). I think the only feature I preferred in PHP was classes, and that point is more than moot now, it's reversed.
My Pomidoro Windows 8 app is getting famous
What are the hundreds of things that apt-get (or actually, dpkg, which is the software that actually installs debs) does that can fail? Dpkg isn't that complicated.
Moreover she is part of the group which provides a significant part of the oversight which allegedly makes such programmes "safe".

Both are bad but they're in a different league.
Experiments Backs Up Turing's Theory About Cells
It would be cool to pay a small fee in order to watch one of these movies once. Like a digital movie ticket