skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting to dovetail that against the recent top article here that we are reaching the end of the antibiotics era. I hope we have a replacement for fossil fuel when the time comes, but I worry about too much "rational optimism". Tragedy of the Commons is a real thing, and Pangloss was sarcasm, not a role model.
No they aren't. A plan to buy out the exchange settle the pending fraud lawsuits and divide the remaining Bitcoin among the creditors as well as give them a % stake in the new business was announced a couple days ago. No Mt.Gox Bitcoin is getting liquidated by the bankruptcy court.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/29/us-bitcoin-mtgox-s...
I find it fascinating that once people that understand the details they feel that nothing is wrong with this, and the people that stand back and look at the big picture see a rigged market.

It is Heisenberg morality. Once you look at it, there is nothing wrong with it. They are just updating prices to reflect demand, but at the same time they are extracting money from the market just because their data center is physically closer to the exchange.
I don't get the title.

The title tells me I don't want XTS.

Then the post explains that I don't want FDE, for sundry reasons. Then it tells me, sure, go ahead and use FDE, but be aware of the limitations.

At that point it looks like I want XTS, after all.

Then it shows how XTS works and where cryptographers are seeing problems.

And then... well, there is no "then". The recommendations don't deal with FDE at all.

I think the post would be much stronger, if it either had some alternative mode to present or (I'd be more interested in that) it showed other ways to achieve what people usually try to achieve with FDE. And usability is a big one there. Bitlocker is huge. FileVault is huge. People can actually use it.

An aside:
Has anyone ever seriously used XTS mode for anything but FDE? I've only encountered it in Truecrypt and the part of Boneh's Crypto I where he's talking about FDE. But that doesn't mean much, I admit.
I see what you mean. Thanks for catching this! I agree, this needs to be fixed ASAP.
For developing economies with unstable currencies, does Bitcoin add anything to their current currency situation? Many countries, for example, use black market US Dollars for transactions. It's not clear yet if these countries with limited technical infrastructure will see a win of Bitcoin vs. USD cash, at least in the short/medium term.

Sure, BTC might win out of Argentinan Pesos, but it's certainly harder for the average merchant in Buenos Aires to accept and transact using BTC vs. paper USD. The barrier to entry to accepting foreign USD for transactions is 0; for BTC the entry is more difficult (currently).
Integrate manageable content in any website or app
"... automating account bans past a certain earning threshold ... seems easy to implement, with a massive earning"

More earnings than not banning them and letting them continue to make money for Google?
You're right - sometimes it will truncate the full subject. I'm looking into fixing this.
Rabbit poisoning is caused by having very lean meat make up too large of a portion of your diet. It has no connection to vegetarianism. In fact it's necessary to eat almost exclusively meat.
It's like their annual conference for developers. Like Apple's WWDC. Or Microsoft's... (not sure what it's called).

I love the name F8. It's a great play on words.
My 12-hour experience with Facebook Ads
So why not have it in the lease, or regulations if you must, that property damage or certain noise violations will result in eviction?
Great ! Many thanks for the tips.
The paper is quite old, Num is no longer a subclass of Eq:

ghci> :i Num
class Num a where
(+) :: a -> a -> a

thus ‘memsq’ would look as follows:

memsq :: (Eq a, Num a) => [a] -> a -> Bool
memsq xs x = square x `elem` xs
The post ends with the takeaways I'm hoping for:

1. Try not to rely on FDE at all.

2. For God's sake don't use XTS for anything other than FDE.

There's an encrypted filesystem guy that suggested they were moving to XTS. That's what prompted the post.

Usability is great. I think you should turn FDE on. But turning on FDE buys you a lot less than you think it does. There's a pretty good chance that FDE isn't going to do anything for you if your computer is seized by the FBI, because the key will probably resident when they do that.

You don't want XTS, in general, because you don't want to turn a simpler problem (safely encrypting your secrets) into a hard problem (simulating hardware encryption).
Can anyone make the case that Bitcoin has the three primary characteristics of money [1]: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value?

Ignoring the blockchain, this is why Bitcoin will fail. Bitcoin as a currency is inherently inflationary because as demand increases (which is the state of a healthy currency), the supply is relatively stationary. Therefore, a drop in Bitcoin value is indicative of a disproportionate drop in demand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Functions
I'm confused. You're actually saying the exact same thing as him and assuming something in the process. You're saying that he is not considering other people when he is actually saying the opposite: that people should think of ALL users.

I'm guessing 'What is the point of this?' got you but reading that closely is more this: not everyone is sold on the idea of FB in general as the answer to anything so an alternative product doesn't do him any favors. Like trying to sell someone who doesn't want to drink a smaller bottle of alcohol.

I don't want to sign in with Facebook full stop. I really agree that you shouldn't force people to use a third party service to sign in.

If you're contemplating login, please consider people like us! Do Facebook login as your MVP but please do consider us!
30 incorrectly used words that can make you look bad
Apparently it can do;

In this survey, 998 children and adolescents between 7 months and 17 years of age who attended a hospital diagnostic center in the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, for routine evaluation were tested for Toxoplasma gondii antibody. The 5.2% prevalence rate of antibody for children living in the outlying rural areas was significantly higher than the 1.1% rate among the urban children (P = .0006). Seroprevalence increased with age for both rural and urban children. Cat ownership was associated with antibodies to Toxoplasma among rural children but not urban children. Rural children who lived in a house with more than one cat were two times more likely to be infected than children who had one cat and three times more likely to be infected than children with no cats. The geometric mean titer was also significantly higher among the rural children with more than one cat, 1:152, than rural children with one or no cats, 1:63 (P = .02). In light of these findings for children and adolescents, the association of Toxoplasma infection with cat ownership needs to be thoroughly evaluated among pregnant women in rural areas.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1594371
Web Fundamentals: A handbook for best practices
Not trusting is the default. It is up to Coinbase to prove that they can be trusted.
In order to facilitate transactions BTC has to have value greater than $0 You can't transfer value via Bitcoin if the value of a Bitcoin is zero.
No, having root on the VM doesn't necessarily let you own the host (I don't think I implied that), but it's been known to happen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine_escape. If we're dealing with attacks as sophisticated as others mentioned in the thread, I wouldn't put that outside of the realm of possibility.

edit: at the very least I'd recreate the VM from scratch.
tl;dr

BitCoin is taking a breather on its upward speculative bubble phase, and is being used primarily as a transactional currency at the time, while downward pressures remain the same as they were before the bubble days started.
Agreed, however, there are a few pieces of information that I find useful for Facebook to share. Namely my profile picture and sometimes my friends list. Though gravitar somewhat solves the profile picture problem.
For many of us, Bitcoin represents far more than an opportunity to gain or lose money. For us, the freedom from financial and fiscal paternalism is worth the risk.
I'm not getting it. How is this?

doSomething().then(function(result) {
var results = [result];
results.push(88);
return results;
}).then(function(results) {
results.push(99);
return results;
}).then(function(results) {
console.log(results.join(', ');
});

More attractive/readable and superior to this?

function doSomething(pushEight);

function pushEight(res){
res.push(88);
pushNine(res);
}

function pushNine(res){
res.push(99);
showResults(res);
}

function showResults(res){
console.log(res.join(', '));
}

In addition to the anonymous functions I can't reuse elsewhere?
Serious question, just asking..
I could certainly include it, but doing so is not usually required for MLA, APA or Chicago citations, and it would in many cases, make the citation really long.
On the one hand I don't trust Chinese numbers a lot, but they seem to be at least in the ball park to the actual numbers, and even that is a major achievement considering the size of the Chinese economy, its lack of technology in many parts and a bureaucracy which isn't exactly renowned for its "accuracy".

In general, if this "PPP" calculation shows China overtaking the US, this is probably happening in "PPP" terms. Doesn't mean they have more economic weight in the world, though.
Best summary I've seen:

"If the bad guy can MITM your browser going to www.bank.com, they can break your browser going to the online revocation list."

(Implicit: the browser will fail open to connect to the website anyway in case it can't connect to the revocation list.)
In my mind, this is the same argument as whether or not we should ask people to follow a standard model or customize it themselves.

Do we use SAT scores or personal interviews? Do we recruit from Harvard or allow anyone to apply because there are diamonds everywhere?

LinkedIn has simply made itself the defacto standard for most people in terms of an online resume. (So has, btw Github for developers, and maybe even StackOverflow.)

We can debate all we want about whether or not it's "right." But at the end of the day, different people will have different philosophies and lie on different ends of the standardized vs. customized spectrum. There are trade-offs toe each. So let's minimize the negativity a bit please =)
Yes. We hear this each time. All that i can respond to this is: log chart, log chart, log chart [1]! By looking at a simple log chart one can notice a repetitive cycle. One may even notice that now is actually the best time to buy. Following the pattern, the next boom is only 2-6 weeks away. Who knows what could cause the next boom? Russia pump, Ukraine banking shutdown, E.C.B. Quantitative Easing, USD weakening ? ...

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap?timespan=2year&sho...
Glacier redux
Is LinkedIn perfect? No, probably not.

Is it the best tool we have for public resumes? Yes.

No need to go into it any more than that, your post was so negative and didn't propose any alternatives. Sounds like someone is bitter they didn't get more friends requests accepted...
Well it works for some people. For instance, a friend just told me earlier today that he got the job I forwarded to him from one recruiter that contacted me through linkedin.

Also, you don't see the connections between people you didn't know met each other. I find it useful despite all the issues that they have.

Disclaimer: I don't live in USA and I suspect the experience is quite different over there.
But if the currency is deflationary with a coin limit, over the long term the only way more people can enter the market / make use the currency is for, as an example, $1 USD to be represented by smaller and smaller subdivisions of BTC. This necessarily increases the value of 1 BTC.

Why is there ever any incentive to do anything with BTC besides hoarding?
@malchow I work at BSA and would love to chat with you guys. Good way to connect?
Bitcoin was meant to be a trustless system. You are handing over your private keys to a third party, and hence all the direct control over your funds. How do you know they are solvent? How transparent are their security measures? There are many, many examples of this going horribly wrong with people who could supposedly be trusted by the community, and there are more popping up on a regular basis.

You are asking the wrong question -- why should you trust Coinbase or anyone else?
"It still makes sense to mine if you’re living in a dorm and don’t pay for electricity" it will be nitpicking on a whole post, but I don't find it ethical to make such gains. The fact that you don't legally need to pay does not entitle you to use resources of someone else this way (in this case the educational institution). I guess he meant "it theoretically makes sense if you don't pay for electricity"
The dials break easily, but they aren't a commoditized part so they're difficult to replace. Number pads are more reliable.
Petka Antonov (the author) wrote this:

https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Optimization-k...

Other than that, I think he also said similar rules of C++ and Java optimization apply (avoid allocations a.k.a. creations of new objects, avoid avoidable work in special cases, take advantage of cache locality etc)
You may also be interested in Mesos. They have a number of tutorials; here's one for Ruby on Rails: http://mesosphere.io/learn/run-ruby-on-rails-on-mesos/

Mesos has preliminary docker support, and it's reportedly improving in 0.19; see https://github.com/mesosphere/mesos-docker
If you could link me to an example of a typical legal citation you would use, I can look into it.
> Extinction-level event is a scientific term which refers to the rate of extinctions and the associated loss of biodiversity, it doesn't necessarily mean that we all die.

By the scientific definition, I will agree that climate change can be an extinction event. However, I still stand by my assertion that it will not end civilization.

> And if you think there's a meaningful distinction between "civilization ends" and "breakdown of civilization"... wow, okay.

"Civilization ends" is total and permanent. "Breakdown of civilization" is partial and temporary. That is why I referenced a dark age. We have been through civilization breakdowns before, albeit not since we became globally connected.
It's Official: Apple and Facebook Are Phone Companies Now
IEEE Spectrum special report: The self-driving car
Well yes, all of those criteria are bad business, if taken as absolutes. They can all be factors, for sure. But as absolute requirements, they just weed out good candidates.

> I have come to the conclusion that most companies don't give a shit about candidates as long as they are getting enough. Hell, even some companies that bitch and moan about "talent shortages" seem to have their own Pareto principle bullshit getting in their way.

It sounds like a lot of the companies you've encountered have embraced irrational business practices. That can definitely happen. I'm not convinced it's the norm, though. And I'm sure that it shouldn't be.
I've always thought loser pays 2* the lower of the two sets of fees would be a good system.
Okay, so I seem to have gotten the gist of it.

Still, I want XTS. :-)
Models working well? Frankly laughable. Global temperature rising for almost 25 years at half the central rate predicted by the IPCC in 1990 and no global warming at all for half the RSS satellite record.

Since you mention consensus (is that how to do science? Maybe we should introduce elections for new theories) - but still let's proceed; only 64 (or 0.5%) of 11,944 scientific abstracts published since 1991 state that most of the global warming since 1950 is manmade.
I work on Dart, and find it much nicer to use than either Java, JavaScript or Python, my main languages before taking up Dart. I think it's a great general purpose language and even though it's starting focused on web apps, it'll be great for servers and command line script.

It's faster, more sane, structured and readable than JavaScript with classes, mixins, sane this and type coercion behavior and statically analyzable semantics.

It's much less verbose than Java, with libraries, top-level functions, getters and setters, implicit interfaces, cascades and more.

And surprisingly to me when I started, I like it better than Python. It's more consistent and feels more lightweight, and it's a lot faster than CPython.
A+ doesn't require that you use the browser's asynchronous scheduling mechanism, it only requires that the promise callback is always executed after the current function. There is a really neat hack to achieve this without completely relying on the browser's scheduler by implementing your own callback queue.

asap(callback);

which will push to an array of callbacks that you need to execute and then call a loop if one isn't currently active:

function asap(cb) {
callbacks.push(cb);
setTimeout(flushQueue, 5);
}

Flushqueue will run all the callbacks from the queue in a loop, then empty it

function flushqueue() {
if (flushing) return;
flushing = true;
for (var k = 0; k < callbacks.length; ++k) {
callbacks[k]();
}
flushing = false;
}

Now if some of the callbacks schedules a new function to execute using asap

promise.then(function first(x) { return alreadyResolvedPromise.then(function second(y) { return y.some.property; }); });

then when "promise" resolves, first()'s execution will push a new function to the queue, changing queue.length, causing that loop above to cause one more iteration - but only after first is complete.

(If you don't nest the callbacks, then the push will happen before flushqueue even starts executing)

The code above is overly simplified but I think its enough to demonstrate the idea. (Huge thanks Stefan Penner for explaining it to me :D)
I'm more interested in what it means for Gluster. I've had RH pushing Gluster at me very hard as performance-competitive with Ceph. Now they have Gluster and Ceph, it'll be interesting to see if Gluster falls by the wayside, or if they reposition Gluster more as easily-configured resilient storage.
Another worrying development: Pfizer buying Astra-Zeneca.

It's not to streamline drug development, the deal is a tax dodge in its entirety. Some lovely commentary down the hallway, in the Pipeline: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/28/pfizer_and_a...

Scientists worry about the cuts to NIH funding, but the cuts to pharmaceutical research are ten times more worrying - who is going to develop the compounds to replace the current set of antibiotics when they have become useless? Wall Street is entirely unequipped to deal with this question; there are things that cannot be bought with money or at market, and scientific progress is one of them.
Monitoring and alerting systems
I can't find a really great monitoring and alerting service for backend systems that is "simple to implement" and "just works". Googling/Quora isn't really being very helpful either. I am curious to know how people are monitoring Java/Rails/python and other 'popular' backend systems.
OpenSSH 5.1-6.X – memory disclosure
Instead of developing more antibiotics, can we reengineer these disease bacterias with a kill switch built in? Then release them into the wild to compete with non-engineered species and eventually displace them?
If I was hoping to persuade someone other than a potential crypto designer, I probably wouldn't have tried to explain the XEX tweak. :)
Not at all. 'Real money' currencies are inflationary, for lots of reasons, including the fact that we keep printing more money. If I stash my $millions under my mattress for a decade, do you reckon they'll be worth less or more after that time?

Bitcoin however has deflationary pressures, because there's a fixed upper limit on the coins (21 million) and they become harder and slower to mine. With a price of (say) $1000/BTC, that means there can only be 21 billion dollars worth of bitcoins out there. But if you expect bitcoin usage to explode and account for trillions of dollars of wealth, then the bitcoin price has to increase.
It's the fatalism about fixing this is most discouraging in Langley's writings.

Why shouldn't someone who cares very much about security be able to tell their browser to get the full 30MB it would require today, or the 300MB Langley projects it will take in 5 years? That's not that much data!

(Google's hand-curated tiny CRLSet lifeboat is currently only ~308KB of blacklisted certificate data.)

Why can't the organizations with multi-hundred-million-dollar budgets for web projects design the privacy-preserving/space-saving/probabilistic systems that would make this work with much smaller overhead?

Once the original site, the CA, and a major browser vendor all know, via public info, that a certificate is compromised, why should any browser user have to wait days/weeks/months/indefinitely, while showing the false "lock icon", before warning users?
Indeed: https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/0/author%3Asillysa...

(I want to preface this by saying that I'm talking about people storing their savings in Bitcoin. If you don't care about what happens to your money, then it doesn't matter whether you trust Coinbase.)

The most convincing argument, I think, is that you're putting your faith in an entity that's not FDIC insured to hold onto your entire future and keep it safe. Your savings is your future. If you lose it, you lose your future. You'll have to exchange months or years of your life to get it back, as I now have to. There are many reasons that businesses fail, and it's important to never forget that Coinbase is a startup, and the fate of startups always hang in the balance.

There's no reason not to trust an entity that's ensured by the government (banks) with your savings. They won't vanish.

The only reason right now to trust Coinbase with a lot of money is if you're hoping the price will rise, as far as I can tell, because there's no other realistic application of Bitcoin right now unless you want to send some money to a friend, in which case you can just buy it as-needed. So it's essentially long-term gambling. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. I knew when I did it that there was a chance things could turn out horribly awry (though I don't think I fully appreciated how "down" the downside could be for me). But if you're going to do it, at least be smart about it: The coolest thing about Bitcoin is that you don't have to trust anybody but yourself to keep your coins safe. There are secure cold storage wallet solutions. Find one, use it. I've heard good things about Armory, for example.