skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Multiple factors help a lot even if most of the factors a not very secure, because now the attacker has to compromise both of them for the same target in order to succeed. So if a bank uses SMS and a password you need to develop a way to capture passwords and then also capture SMS messages. The number of accounts you compromise is the intersection of these two sets, instead of the union which would occur from two separate exploits. So it increases the costs of attackers significantly.

Of course a properly cryptographically secure token is better (and you should demand such for important stuff like access to your bank account), but SMS as a second factor is far from useless.

EDIT: SMS also has the property that compromise is transient: not only do you have to compromise two seperate systems, but you need to compromise one of them at the time which you wish to login.
"A study led by Michael Worobey at the University of Arizona in Tucson provides the most conclusive answers yet to two of the world's foremost biomedical mysteries of the past century: the origin of the 1918 pandemic flu virus and its unusual severity, which resulted in a death toll of approximately 50 million people."
>> but it just doesn't seem the world ending thing to me like she treated it.

It's comments like this that make sexual assault seem acceptable.

Comparing this story to "clothed hugs from friends" sounds like we did not read the same post.

I feel she was well within her right to feel like the world is ending - and unwanted sexual assault is never o.k from anyone - let alone people in a position of power (such as running a startup accelerator).
That's one of my all time favorite episodes because no matter how ridiculous "MeowMeowBeanz" is portrayed to be, it's totally possible. People will try to validate creating these apps, but at the end of the day they're profiting from bullying ("cyber" bullying is redundant these days) and young people's inability to ignore what's being said about them. It's pathetic.
"Little inklings of secret undercurrents" strikes me as pretty silly (though delightfully written!) since I've done nothing for the last month but plaster the site with transparency and feedback. I have a list of dozens of things we can do to make HN better, and haven't been able to get to any of them since becoming public as moderator—I've been doing nothing but answering questions, explaining things, and worrying about answering questions and explaining things.

If, after massive effort, some people still accuse us of every insidious practice in the book, I'm doubtful that the lesson to draw is "try harder". It might be, if (a) there were a hope of convincing everybody, (b) it weren't very costly, and (c) it didn't prevent us from doing other important things. But (b) and (c) are definitely not true, and it's looking sadly like (a) isn't either.
Underpowered implies that given enough data you can make stronger claims. The argument the above poster made can be made with any amount of investigating up to and including 24x7 surveillance. In other words if you are going to make an argument about data being underpowered you need to describe what additional data would be necessary to provide enough power. If you don't you just sound like the pseudoscience people who hold on to unfalsifiable claims.
I thought it was a clever logo, given the subject matter (i.e. compilers producing object code, even MS compiler has (had?) *.obj as an extension for output)
But are heart disease and cancer "somewhat more treatable" inherently, or because more resources have been devoted to finding and testing treatments that work for them?
GroupOn is trying to solve a two-sided problem.

1. Businesses need more customers

2. Customers want cheaper stuff

I'm just not sure that linking the two solves either problem. You've got cheapskates taking up deals and never coming back.
No, snow scatters the emitted light and scarcely any is returned at all. A wall covered in ice looks like an air gap.

(I know this because my very expensive 800kg autonomous vehicle almost drove into a lake under my software control due to this effect...)
git push --force

Though I'd assume they did more in depth investigations than just looking at the commit history, what with being a company that literally makes a living out of git.
Whitewhidow, can you please email your issue to matt@freelancer.com and I will personally look into it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urs68vf7ZFY I've been doing my last-mile logistics by drone for a while, is that OK?
I do appreciate the analysis and the message of the post that the total sales can mask problems, however neither of the examples are failures. Herbalife may expand to other products instead of additional companies. Amway, probably the most successful implementer of Herbalife's multi level marketing scheme, is over 50 years old and worth $11+ billion. Even the fictitious waffle shop can adjust by selling other products.
In short, creating a large distribution chain and reaching to many customers is tremendously valuable. The company can leverage that base and move to a sustainable model. If you're as successful as Groupon, you'll have plenty of runway to try different things.

Even the ficticious waffel
Paying for piecework (or sales commission) does work in that kind of environment, though.
But we're not living long enough that we're all getting schizophrenia. We're living long enough that we're all getting cancer and heart disease. Even in the realm of mental illness, if the problem is "we're living long enough to develop new problems", wouldn't we want to focus on age-related problems?
If his condition was the statistical norm, how can you attribute it to his unusual diet?
YC-Incubated LendUp Raises $50 Million To Disrupt Payday Lending
Same as supermarkets - once you own more of the wallet you'll get the margins. They're just shifting it from the supermarket to them.. quietly.
Using MCMC for optimization is really strange. MCMC is for generating random samples from a probability distribution, not for optimization. Some variant of hill climbing would be more appropriate here.
Does it matter if it works?
I thought the most important characteristic of a successful business was that it was profitable.

If growth is so important and defines success then eventually is will plateau due to limited resources and no longer be successful which is obviously not true.

To place both of those ideas into one, the most important characteristic of a successful business is a positive return on investment. Profits and growth can account for a positive return on investment.
> it's expensive enough to serve even an affluent area that the market can't really support much more than 2 companies

I would state this with a key qualifier: it's expensive to serve even an affluent area the way our society currently works. The way our society currently works is that local municipalities are strongly discouraged from doing local development sanely--where "sanely" means that when a new subdivision goes in, say, all the easements for running wired high-speed Internet go in as well.

The best way of doing this would be for the local developer to simply run the cables, and have them owned in common by the municipality, homeowner's association, or whatever entity owns the common areas in the development. That entity then leases access to the cables to all Internet providers on an equal basis.

The next-best way would be for the local developer to put in all the cable trenches, space for connection hubs, etc. in while the development is being constructed, right along with the water lines, gas lines, storm sewers, and other utilities, and with all the permits, easements, etc. already in place. Then an Internet provider just has to do a cable pull, which is only a small fraction of the cost of installing high-speed Internet in our actual society.

When municipalities actually try to do either of the above, however, they find themselves embroiled in lawsuits and negative publicity from the large Internet providers, who can't stand the idea that nobody really wants to buy their overpriced services, and if a way of routing around them became common, their business would be kaput.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I noticed that as well. I do believe Herbalife is a pyramid scheme, but the data doesn't support that it's popping. If it were, revenue by country would stay relatively flat, or the relationship would be sublinear.
Ask HN: What's your writing process?
I'm interested in what your writing process is like for blog posts, articles, essays, etc.
Whitewhidow. I looked into your situation and it has been resolved at our end now.
Well there are "Flash Lidar" sensors, that are effectively instantaneous depth cameras firing a lidar beam for every pixel - but a) they're hugely expensive, and b) they don't seem to have taken off (possibly because academia can't afford them to do the interesting research that'll help them take off)
Ruby + Sinatra. This doesn't prevent you from having to create the html and css for the webpages themselves, but sinatra is a dead simple server framework for serving up webpages.
While I don't strongly disagree with any of the points made regarding the security of the SMS network, I do feel that the article is inordinately preoccupied with banking, and dismisses SMS authentication out of hand because it isn't good enough for your bank. In the case of a bank, I agree that a security token certainly is the right tool for the job. But what about other login services?

It doesn't really matter to me, as a developer, whether SMS is impregnable. It matters whether it is harder to break than user-originated passwords. Users are notoriously bad at picking good passwords, and are easily socially engineered.

We can implement password policies to attempt to mitigate this, but what we end up doing is frustrating our users, who will struggle to remember the 8 character minimum, alphanumeric, at least one capital letter, at least one piece of punctuation password we have forced them to choose.

What ends up happening is that users either forget their "strong" passwords, and have to reset them via email or SMS every time. Or they write their passwords down or store them all on a spreadsheet. Or they reuse then same strong password across multiple services (and even correct horse battery staple doesn't avoid that one).

SMS authentication may not be perfect, but single-use passwords, with nothing for the user to remember, is an improvement on weak user-originated passwords. For my money, at least!
I agree -- there's no problem with someone claiming a specific individual acted in a way that was unprofessional, and it's certainly a believable claim worth investigating. Turns out that was the case here.

Where things jumped the shark is where men watching women voluntarily hoola hooping at a company event triggered an industry-wide freak out about sexism through the magic of blogs and twitter. (With Valleywag et al laughing all the way to the bank.)
Can't you just uninstall the app and not worry about what anonymous trolls are writing in it?
Whitewhidow, I have looked into your account and the limitation has now been cleared.
We've had folks fresh out of CS degrees but didn't feel that they had software development skills, team skills, interview skills, negotiation skills, etc. Also we've had quite a few that studied CS, didn't use it for a long time or got stuck in a particular stack and used the intensive 8 week course as a way to quickly pick up and put the new skills to work. Make sense?
I nominate this author as the Fred Brooks of the 21st century. (Brooks wrote "Mythical Man Month"). These depictions of organizational sickness are spot on. I look forward to hearing more. The Carcinogenic Prototype is what Brooks might have called "the tar pit".
The disclaimer about non-Intel processors is necessary, but sad. The dirty tricks they pulled with their compiler creating slow code on AMD processors are really underhanded.
Awesome. Thanks for doing this.

I started a little example project too. So far, I have some sliders that let you play with the decay animation.

https://github.com/callmeed/pop-playground

If anyone wants to help, drop me an email.
It's a battle of analogies.

Microsoft says a warrant to obtain email is like a warrant to search a house, and a US court does not have the authority to order a search of a house in another country.

The judge, on the other hand, says a warrant to obtain email is like a subpoena for documents. A US court can order a US party to produce documents and they must comply regardless of where they happen to store the documents.
Or they invest in a mechanical turk "supervisory remote driver" system.
> I consider the fact that we still teach Shakespeare in high school to be proof positive that neither teacher nor student actually understand it... if the violence and sex jokes were understood in modern terms, schools would not teach it. (I'm not saying they would censor it per se, it might still be in the library, but it wouldn't be taught front & center.)

AFAICT, neither students nor teachers are generally particularly against having racy stuff in schools -- the people that are a vocal (though often small) group of parents and interested outsiders, and they tend to be selective in their objections in a way which reinforces the idea of "bad" = "new". I have no problem believing that students and teachers could understand Shakespeare quite well without the group that is usually the source of objections either (a) understanding it, or (b) finding that it fits the particular world-view they are trying to sell to object to it.
Also it's in part because mental illnesses still come with a huge stigmatization in this country (USA). If you're diagnosed with schizophrenia, you're not normal, and something is wrong with you. Even though mentally ill people are more likely to be taken advantage of than commit a crime because of their illness, society does not trust you if you're schizophrenic. In fact many people make fun of the mentally ill or totally ignore them. If you live in the bay area you don't have to look far for proof, just look out your window. When I visited I was surprised to see so little thought given to the countless, clearly mentally ill homeless people in almost every part of San Francisco. I can feel some of you scrambling to justify how it's somehow their fault, how it's okay to not care that they are mentally ill and homeless, that they somehow chose that life. I do it, too, because it's part of our cultural programming.

Someone fairly close to me is affected by the illness, and I've discovered it's not something you can just talk about. If someone close to you has heart disease, you'll get sympathy. If someone close to you has schizophrenia, it's almost shameful to talk about. It just doesn't get the same amount of sympathy.
How Many People Are Wrongly Convicted? Researchers Do the Math
Start with a note memo. Boil down to 140 chars, tweet it and see if I get engagement. Outline. Research for related writing. Write too much against outline. Edit to 500 words. Add links. Promote on Twitter, Facebook.
Yik Yak serves a good purpose. It brings up those things that can't be said without anonymity. It allows you to push people's buttons in a way that you can't when your name is attached. Maybe you are the person that nobody likes but nobody wants to tell you. Yik Yak can help you out. Maybe all of your peers think you are a slut, but nobody says it to your face. Yik Yak brings it out into the open.

Yik Yak is dangerous and disruptive because we don't know how to deal with such forward criticism. Even more, nothing on Yik Yak is necessarily true (though you wouldn't say it if you didn't think it seemed at least partially correct).

Yik Yak enables forward, hard hitting, juicy criticism (gossip, lies, and simply outrageous nonsense, etc). And while the immediate result is pain, criticism is important on an individual level just as it's important that we can criticize our government.

The damage that Yik Yak causes is the result of us not being able to handle criticism. At the highest level, I welcome the flow of knowledge and hope that it leads us to a better place overall.

But that doesn't mean I'm ignoring the immediate problems. People have likely committed suicide as a result of all the openness. But that's not a problem with the technology, that's a problem with how we approach ruthless criticism. We might be stuck with the technology, but we aren't stuck with the devastation. It's a different type of bullying and criticism that we need to learn how to deal with, and that we need to prepare our children for.
A self-driving car doesn't need a steering column.

The steering column is one of the biggest problems to engineer around for impact safety.
I do 9:30 to 6:00 75% of the time and 9:30 to 5:00 25% of the time, with either a 30 min lunch break or 1 hour lunch + gym break. I never work the weekends. I don't make the most money on HN, but you can't beat that work-life balance, and I won't burn out for a long time.
Continuous Flow model reminds me of divide and conquer sorting algorithms.

Most elaborate roundabout( with traffic lights ):

http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z202/keber1/razno/tomaevo...
Women at GitHub reported feeling supported, mentored, and protected at work, and felt they are treated equitably and are provided opportunities.

This is an interesting revelation. (Actually it's not a revelation. It clears a doubt on our minds after Julie's incident.) Also, I have always wondered why none of GitHub's female workers have supported her or spoken to Github's allegedly rotten, sexist working environment so far.
90% of drivers think they are above average.
It has been over an hour and based on the reaction threads I've read I still think the vast majority of people are "insane".

I am glad that you are satisfied with this response and it brought you back to GitHub. You are one of the open-minded ones. I probably could stand to be a bit more open-minded myself.
I don't see what problem this solves because I am not aware of any problematic behaviors associated with reading comments downvoted to greyness nor positive behaviors associated with being prevented from doing so. And I can't really imagine any...though that may be a function of a poor imagination on my part.

On the other hand, I often see uncivil comments rendered in the dark tone of legitimacy and I associate those with eliciting similar comments. I don't have to imagine their effect, I've seen it.

BTW, when I see a stream of short repetitive replies to a greyed out comment, my bad response radar goes off and downvotes sometimes follow. Just arguing, pointing out the obvious, or worse doesn't add anything to HN.
Schizophrenia is a serious illness, and often misunderstood as "split personality." It is a constellation of delusions, hallucinations, and scrambled thoughts that is often (though not always) pretty devastating to work, school, relationships, etc. For some reason, because we have no blood test or genetic test for it, the diagnosis is still met with skepticism from many in the public

I'm glad you posted this.

These diseases (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD) are challenging and can be horrible but I feel like the stigma makes them a lot worse. It's like many natural disasters in which the human malfeasance after the event causes more harm than the thing itself.

The way people treat people who are afflicted by these diseases is, in many cases, an aggravating factor. Instead of helping them, plenty of people (especially in the corporate world, and in society at large after 1980 or so) kick them when they're down. It's pretty disheartening.
> That's a strong statement to make based on little information.

That's a fair point. It'd depend a great deal on how github has their repos set up, and I can't remember seeing anyone talk about that.
An agreement that a spouse shouldn't work in the office. Gosh, this is even worse then the original complaint. In California you can't have such agreements, this is marital status discrimination. I don't know what kind of job Teresa was doing, but even thought she wasn't on a payroll, being a volunteer or an informal adviser is perfectly acceptable. If anything might be wrong here, this would be mixing up corporations or such. But employees are in the company to do their job, not to control borders, and "this person is not supposed to be here" sounds territorial and toxic. You're busy, not open for certain interactions, tell about it. I suspect it wasn't Julie who got harassed, especially combined with spreading gossip. And I find it incredibly sexist consistently referring to a professional woman as a "wife". Compare to: "I insist that this engineer/marketer/director shouldn't be on the floor".
This makes the weird assumption that a non-native species will never occupy any position within the local ecology. Consider a (slightly unintuitive) case of an intrusion into a well-established ecology: maize into human society. Europeans came to America with a level of reliance on maize of exactly zero, since they weren't aware it existed. They brought their own grains. And we grow wheat here today. But... if we decided to completely eliminate maize, would there be any consequences for American society? Or for a case with more historical flavor, consider the introduction of the potato to Ireland. There were problems when the potato population failed.

More generally, if species I ("intrusive") arrives and replaces species A ("autochthonous"), why is removing species I more dangerous than removing species A would have been?
Show HN: cashay.me – translating time at work to cost of items
Just a toy I put together while learning AngularJS.
In the US, that situation is called a "right hook", and it's indeed very dangerous for cyclists. Once you know about it, though, it's pretty easy to ride defensively and avoid it: just refuse to pass on the right of a car that might turn right. Get behind them instead and wait for them to turn (or go straight). In California, at least, a cyclist is legally entitled to take the lane at any intersection where a right turn is allowed.

(In practice, I admit that I don't do this 100% of the time. I never pass to the right of a car with a right turn signal on, but if a car is waiting at a red light without a turn signal, I'll sometimes pass on their right, always stopping well in front of the front of the car, so that I'm confident the driver sees me.)
SMS security tokens have significant weaknesses; yes. The reason for multi-factor authentication is to compensate for the weaknesses of any single factor. This works reasonably well as long as the factors aren't so weak as to be trivially surmounted.

If there existed a single authentication factor that was at once practical and perfectly secure, then there would be no need for multi-factor auth.
Texas may well have killed an innocent man
What (else) can men do? Grow the f*** up
I don't understand how so many people are claiming that #1 had nothing to do with sexism. The whole thing was about a founders wife harassing an employee because of suspected infidelity.

This is NOT something that would happen to man and had EVERYTHING to do with the fact that she's a woman.
"Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel"

Right, because Intel should spend their finite resources buying every imaginable Intel-compatible CPU from other vendors just to test and qualify them for the Intel compiler.
Don't see why it is cheap to take a deal. I'm not a coupon addict, but my wife is one. Since she discovered Groupon she refuses to buy anything not on sale. I think its pretty smart, I'd do the same but it takes too much time and dedication to shop that way.
Is Parallella alive? I put in an order more than 18 months ago and still nothing.

Related question: is Erlang running on Parallella yet?

I remain very interested - 64 or even 16 cores on a small form factor would be incredible.
In 2 or 3 years when you move a few notches up on the developer continuum look back on this comment and reflect.