skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always recommend this book to people that feel they're about to be canned, or who were canned but can't figure out why. It seems you know the cause when you wrote:

"I stirred the pot on the distinction between corporate and startup marketing to be sure."

Here's the book:
http://www.amazon.com/How-To-Survive-In-Organization/dp/1933...

It's one of those books everybody reads but nobody says they are reading.
I think it's a little odd that screens on personal devices are going in the direction of super-high viewing angles and brightness, as if letting everyone else besides you see what you're doing is a good thing... even the unbranded low-end Android I have has a screen with nearly 180 degrees of viewing angle.

However, this with a randomised button layout solve the problem quite well:

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/SDP_NaturalView/...
You mean a big startup creating new projects in many different directions, automated cars, wifi balloons, space elevator, open source os for mobile devices, and smart spectacles?
>It's a bit much to pile this on the admins. In my experience, those jobs don't pay enough to attract/keep the level of talent they need nor are they given the autonomy to effect change on their own.

I agree with you here. What I wrote there was careless -- I meant to lay most of the blame squarely at the feet of the overzealous and incompetent district IT directors and their staff. I wrote "admins" when I was thinking of the people in charge. The mostly incompetent admins certainly don't help but they aren't at the root of the problem. You're correct that it's hard to attract competent help at the salaries public school districts pay.

And based on my friends' experiences, I agree with your list of structural problems. The 'super parents' doesn't apply as much since they're working in poor districts where many families are fragmented and uninvolved. But otherwise, I'd say you're spot on.

I do strongly disagree with your view on locking down computers to such an extent, particularly your view on handing out admin rights. When a teacher is teaching a computer science class that requires installing new libraries and executable every other week, they should be given admin rights or else the computer pre-installed with all needed programs (that never happens in my friends' schools). They can't even follow a nationally standardized curriculum due to their IT depts' obstructionism, not only because they can't get the right software installed, but also because their kids can't access the various Google-related projects (i.e, Google docs) since all Google logins are blacklisted.

It's absolutely ridiculous and it infuriates me. These are motivated teachers who want to teach students who desperately need to learn, and they're being actively blocked by their own district policies. It's maddening for me to hear about these things.

Ideally, they'd be given root accounts on Linux machines as in MarcScott's enlightened district, but I think my friends would be happy to just get Python installed on their kids' computers.
Middle class individual income have been stagnant since 1970.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&t=9m3s
How many fewer people are doing meth because of this raid?
Introducing eleVR
Not trying to be a jerk, but why don't you just intentionally shave the rest of your head?
It's possible you could actually lift a usable fingerprint off the surface of a phone that you find. We leave them everywhere.
If it isn't voluntary, the money will eventually find its way there. It's a fungible commodity, and as Congress has often demonstrated, earmarking it for specific uses is notoriously subjective.
Cool, wish you success.
This reeks of bull shit

The proof states that the C code of the kernel is a refinement of an high-level "abstract" specification of the kernel. This means that the C code only exhibits behaviours that are also exhibited by the high-level specification. The high-level specification (by construction) doesn't have certain bad behaviours that you often see in C programs: NULL pointer dereferences, buffer overruns, signed integer overflow, etc. Thus this class of bugs is proven to be absent. A good primer is available at: http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/proof.pml

The original proof didn't make any claims about the high-level behaviour of the kernel, such as security. So for instance, the original kernel might have had a bug where you set up a system so that two processes shouldn't be able to communicate with each other, but after some unexpected sequence of API calls they form a communications channel between them.

NICTA in the following years after the initial proof carried out two security proofs: an integrity proof and an information flow proof. These proofs state that the capabilities possessed by a process determine (i) what other processes a particular process can modify; and (ii) what other processes the process can communicate with. Like the original proof, these security proofs (especially the second) have assumptions. In particular, they can only talk about parts of the system that are modelled. Timing channels, hidden CPU state, etc. not modelled by the proof may still allow information flow between processes, for instance.

Sorry, I don't think you can claim you have a mathematical proof of the correctness of your kernel when you assume this much.

You need to assume something. Every operating system kernel makes these assumptions: seL4 is just explicit about them. Some of the assumptions are bigger than others (management of caches is a pain to get right and hard to test, for instance). Some assumptions remain just due to a lack of time, such as proving the initialisation code of the kernel.

Additionally, as time has gone on the assumptions have been reduced. For instance, the work of Thomas Sewell and Magnus Myreen mean that the compiler no longer needs to be trusted: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mom22/pldi13.pdf

And where is this proof? I can't seem to find it anywhere on their web site.

The proof will be part of the open-source release. It consists of around 200,000 lines of Isabelle/HOL proof script, which is machine-checked. Anyone will be able to inspect/modify/check the proofs after the release.
Buy Garden Plants Online Nursery
Garden plants is an online nursery located in middle Tennessee. Being a 56 year old state certified nursery that offers affordable prices on quality trees, ferns, perennials, mosses and shrubs online and home delivered. Garden Plants Nursery also offer homeowner's the same low prices as they do wholesale nurseries.
Google Ventures + KPCB: The Thoughtful Things Fund.
How do you define "workaholic" ? Please take a look at Foxconn workers.
>I came into Pivotal Labs a few months ago excited and passionate, and I am now leaving Pivotal bewildered and dumbfounded. (...) The Pivotal Labs I knew, I respected, I admired is no longer. This would not have happened there. It was not how they conducted business.

Sorry, but you came into the company "a few months ago" as you say.

It's not like you were in IBM in the nineties, and now IBM is all different etc. Or like you were in Google in 2000 and now you're dissapointed with how they turned.

What was this mythical "Pivotal Labs" you "knew, respected and admired", and when did you have time to get to know it before it changed? In "a few months"?

Mind you, I'm not saying Pivotal is good, or your story is not accurate. Just that the narrative of "the company I knew and admired is no more", when you just had a very short time to get acquainted with the company. Perhaps the company was that bad all along.
In case he does take it down, here's an archived copy: https://archive.today/7u3t4
Tech research banks on Skype-like app for next spinoff
I love orgmode mysef.
I was going to ask to make an export to orgmode format
Thousands of WordPress Sites Hacked with SEO Spam Hidden inside wp-includes
A package for learning Go conventions
All the sites I've seen which use such trackers implement them via JavaScript, so that the original links are unmolested.
I think the interesting and more important questions that stem from this are around the consequences of not having free will.

I don't think that question is more interesting or important because I don't think it makes a tangible inquiry. A universe with free will looks exactly the same as one without. What do we care about when we ask "are we truly responsible for our actions?" What is the distinction between true responsibility and deterministic responsibility? Whether you freely decided to reply to my comment or were determined to do so based on an unbroken chain of physical events since the beginning of the universe, the logic behind your locomotion remains the same, a decision was calculated based on data stored in your physical/non-corporeal brain; if you had a choice, you would have done the same thing, if you didn't have a choice, you would have done the same thing.

If we have no free will, then a human killer is as much to 'blame' for killing as the crocodile is.

To me, the idea that moral culpability might hinge on the true nature of free will seems flawed since morality is a construct defined within the scope of physical consequences that arise from human behavior.

We ascribe moral culpability to the human killer not because of their choice to kill, but because of our own perception that the killer understands what it means to take another life. You might say "more precisely, because of their choice to kill within the context of that understanding", but human morality is not equipped to consider the absolute nature of our choices. Be it a truly free decision or a determined one, the human killer's programming matches our description of morally wrong i.e. "understands what it means to take an innocent life, but does so anyway".
It is weird to not see a single comment calling for the long due death of passwords as authentication.

They have so many drawbacks, they are annoying each and every employee that works with a computer on earth, we have weekly massive password leakage posts on HN (only tip of the iceberg), and apart from fingerprints there is no contender?

Guys, startup creators, hackers, engineers: wake up! Find something, anything!

In 30 years, when passwords will be past, our future selves will be amazed to read stories about passwords: how could we bear this skyscraping level of stupidity and annoyance.
kinda reminds me of http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-google-should-...
For some users, of course, that 1% is all that matters (see Chromebook complaints). I don't find that a very compelling reason to seek out patent encumbered OSes but to each their own.
And what about the life long hospital bills?
Actually I would think GPUs are one of the biggest counterexamples where driver support has been noticeably improving recently (mostly thanks to Valve and Steam). Even the open source drivers work well enough to let you get work done (although the performance might not be where you want it to be).

Compare that to driver support for things like the fingerprint reader in a Lenovo Thinkpad. I wouldn't want to bet on getting that working at all, unless Lenovo had preinstalled Linux for you. And unlike GPUs, this is likely to be all or nothing, so if you don't get the drivers you can't use that hardware feature at all.
I don't see a PCI-Express one. Alternatively, which one do you find convenient? I think the external board should have some kind of case so that I won't have to worry about short-circuiting it.
Didn't I just devote a whole paragpraph for an exact case where that has happened?
"military-grade AES encryption"

Can we please, as an industry, agree to stop using bogus terminology like this?

"Even the NSA won't be able to read your dirty secrets"

And can we stop using ~"Our encryption beats the NSA" as a selling point, given that:

1. It doesn't take into consideration the various side-channel attacks the NSA would actually use

2. It's unlikely to be true even discounting side-channel attacks

3. It's a scare tactic at best, akin selling boats that are rated "kraken-proof".
If you're the author of a new programming language, it's easier for you to develop a plugin for an existing package manager than to develop a new package manager.
Could you share how this was accomplished?
Perhaps some people like to be frank and open, even if it means they won't get to work with the same assholes (or generally people against them being open) in the future.

E.g not everybody feels they should behave like a slave or an asskisser when they feel they got the wrong end of the stick.
In numbers, I'm pretty sure Android dominated (can't remember the exact numbers but Google should reveal them for you).

In revenue (app-sales etc) iOS dominates.
I'm not sure you appreciate quite how small 128 bytes is; for comparison, your entire comment is 305 bytes. This one's just 128.
I previously submitted equaldex.com and it got no traction (at least none that I could tell -- no upvotes, no comments). I submitted it in part because of the beautiful GIS work. I have a certificate in GIS and the maps for different subtopics are really beautiful pieces of work -- they are interesting, informative and have visual appeal. So while you are there, check out that piece as well, if you missed it before.
This just makes me hate beyondpricing. After all, as a consumer, I love paying more when demand is high.

A good company (as opposed to an amoral capitalist company) would focus on increasing supply during times of high demand. Not restricting supply to those of significant means.
I guess I'm only considering commodity, consumer routers. I'm sure you're right at higher levels.
What a typical HN response. Do everything in JavaScript.
he was being creative on how we titled his article you know.. He knew he was fired.
>For my part I use Pivotal Tracker daily and have got a lot of value out of it. I'm not completely sold on the new design (although the multiple project view is great) but I've really seen nothing to indicate that Pivotal has gone bad or sold their soul somehow.

Products don't necessarily indicate how the companies that made them are run. You could be happily using the same product for years, where the company becomes some hell-hole internally.
One of the best book I found in similar situation is High Output Management and Only Paranoid Will Survive by Andy Grove.
; Wolf128 by Baudsurfer/rsi 2014 aka olivier.poudade.free.fr
; A 128 bytes interactive intro tested on XPSP3 and DOSBox
; Presented at Outline demoparty in Eersel/The Netherlands
; 256 bytes versions :
; http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=24755
; http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3396
; P.S : click left mouse button to start moving in maze
; Greets to UkkO Ggn Fra Den and assembly language lovers
org 100h
mov al,13h
int 10h
les dx,[bx]
A:mov cl,0ffh
B:mov bl,cl
not bl
lea ax,[di-10h]
mov bp,140h
cdq
div bp
call G
call G
test byte [1dh],7
jz C
add dh,[1fh]
sub bl,[1eh]
jmp short E
C:mov dl,[fs:46ch]
sub bl,[si]
test dl,40h
jnz D
add dh,dl
D:add bl,dl
E:shld bp,bx,10
sub dh,[bp]
mov al,dh
and dh,bl
or dh,ah
and dh,20h
loopz B
xor al,bl
xor al,ah
db 0d4h,10h
add al,10h
stosb
or di,di
jnz A
mov ax,3
int 33h
test bl,al
mov [1dh],bl
jz F
mov [1eh],dl
mov [1fh],cl
F:in ax,60h
dec ax
jnz B
G:xchg ax,dx
sub ax,64h
imul ax,bx
add ax,[si]
ret
$5 Australian Cloud SSD VPS Server Hosting
Here's a problem I have with the definition of "wealth".

My wife in I, who recently finished professional schools, earn (combined) in the top 5%. But because of our student debt, when I do a "wealth" calculator, I'm apparently literally at the bottom of the wealth chart - 0%. Leads me to question:

1. Is College attendance increasing, or decreasing over time?

2. Is price of College attendance increasing, or decreasing over time?

I suspect both increasing. Would that explain some (or most, or all?) of this phenomenon? Average or lower income individuals will mostly go from positive to negative to put themselves through school, while rich or upper class will not. Would be interested how much of the phenomena that would explain.
Ask HN: SaaS/VPS server security
Good day all,

I have a question for all the fellow HNers out there who run their own servers on VPSs, or provide early stage SaaS products, or anyone who has actual metal connected to the internet:

What process do you follow to secure your servers (regardless of OS), and how much effort do you invest in this (think 80/20, not 'how little can I get away with')?

Some more comments:
- It would appear that everyone and their dog nowadays has at least one VPS being hosted somewhere. Based on DigitalOcean's online security docs, it also appears that the default images available are not 'secure' - why not?

- There are lots of articles on basic security (closing ports, firewalls, logging utilities, security updates, basic pen testing, etc), but what is considered an absolute minimum level of effort to secure your server, and at what point is your effort overkill? Note that this may differ if you're running a VPS to play with, vs hosting a service used by other people.

- How do you ensure your efforts are working, assuming you might not have $$$ available to pay a professional firm to monitor it for you (e.g. Kali linux, but again - which tools, how much time,etc). If you have $$$ available, what is an effective level effort someone should be putting into it.

- What are the most prevalent attacks being done against servers. About 10 minutes after your IP goes live, you can see it being pinged and portscanned, but to what extent are exploits actually being used, and how concerned should you be (i.e., how carefully should you monitor log files, etc).

- Disregarding high profile hacks (ebay, Target, etc), how many people have actually had servers compromised, and what level of damage was done (defacement, exfiltrated data, complete destruction).

- If you do comment, information on OS and version used would be interesting - are there distributions that are inherently more secure or easy to secure than others.

Kind regards,
Why exactly would we need the "archived copy"?

Is a personal rant from someone, that might be harmful to him, that important to the internet, that we need to preserve it and keep harming the guy if he decides to take it down?

This is how internet bullying sometimes leads to suicides.
I had a similar initial reaction. Discussion on drones often conflate issues relating to the use of drones per se, and the policy of the US to target humans for killing as part of a murky overlay between anti-terrorism and a defacto war, which is likely illegal to begin with.

The act of using a drone versus a plane to drop the missile is surely not in of itself controversial. The main issue as to the use of drones is that the lower cost of flying these machines means the US can a) afford more sorties which further terrorises the civilians (as it is not a war, it is by definition terrorism) and b) the lowered risk to US life and 'shot down plane' stories means the US media is less likely to give a shit and report on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938911
There's a significant fault in your reasoning, that 'philosophy' is only performed by people who are socially recognised as being 'philosophers'. It's like saying that the only people who cook food are chefs - professionals recognised as food cookers. People who are professionally recognised as 'philosphers' are a miniscule fraction of the people who use and engage in philosophy, just like chefs are a miniscule fraction of the people who cook.

What you describe about string theory is philosophy. It's just not your personal definition of philosophy, which is based on a faulty stereotype. The funny thing is that it's only because you assign philosophy a stigma that you want to distance yourself from it.
Source: I have worked at NICTA, with the seL4 team, on the seL4 project, I've seen the seL4 source code and am (was?) a primary author of the user manual.

What they mean by this is that they have specified certain properties at a high level in a logical reasoning language they call HOL. These properties are things like the kernel will never reference a null pointer, or, the kernel will always run the next runable thread, or no application can access the memory of another application, or, a capability invocation will always terminate.

They then wrote a runable version of the kernel in Haskell (a purely functional language) and they have a mechanically checked mathematical proof that the Haskell code implements these features/properties. They then wrote a (nearly entirely) C implementation of the kernel and, under a relatively small set of preconditions, proved that the the C code exactly (no more, no less) implements the Haskell code, which implements these correctness and security properties.

A nasty side effect of this effort is that the C code is very strange, since it is more or less translated Haskell code, and the kernel code must necessarily be VERY small, about 10,000 lines of code, which is practically nothing for an operating system kerenl (it is a micro-kernel in the truest sense of the word). Another side effect is that the API bears almost no resemblance with "previous" versions such as OKL4.
Innocent children haunted, crying all the time... what a blood-thirsty, mad government to conduct such evil.
A question I have after reading this: does it work Android to Android with no iOS device around?
Everyone has one vote.

The problem with dollars is that some people have more. Many, many more.

So while I agree in principle that we should close the gap between citizens and decision-making, I'm not confident the right way to do it is with currency.
Just a little bit more on this: NICTA was originally set up as a research group by the Australian Government with the explicit mandate of commercialising its research.

The OKL4 and seL4 microkernels developed by NICTA were commercialised through the company Open Kernel Labs, which was subsequently acquired by General Dynamics (who thus acquired the IP of both projects).

At NICTA, we are very happy to see seL4 finally being open sourced: we really do want to see our work be used as widely as possible, and open sourcing it is going to be the best way of this happening. (So, in response to the grandparent thread, that is why we are making a big fanfare: we are excited, even if nobody else is.)
Your comment would've be much more civil, and possibly even more persuasive, if you had left off the first sentence.
This is a crazy stat... Seriously.
Actually, per standard capitalist theory, if beyondpricing gets higher prices for Airbnb hosts during conferences, this should spur increased supply during that time, which in turn brings prices down.
Wow, thanks so much! I appreciate it! When the site first launched in February, someone submitted it HN and it didn't receive any traction as well. :( Maybe someday!
I feel like "roll this die and we'll pay you x * what you roll" isn't really a test of ethics, since people know that that is the whole point of the exercise. I think a real test of ethics would be something where the participant doesn't even know that they are being tested, for example, telling a participant that they are being hired for the day to collect parking payments whilst unbeknownst to them they are secretly being recorded to see what percent of the take they are holding back.

Something like that. Because honestly if someone told me that they were testing my ethics I don't really know if I'd tell the truth, since it is the whole nature of the exercise, but I'd never steal from a parking lot owner.
Forget about the rescue party, there isn't even ever bulletproof intelligence to justify the first drone strike, due to the way targets are acquired. This is well documented, and a serious source of controversy.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-ns...

Doubling down on the carnage by killing medics/family/bystanders who hurry to the rescue of the victims whenever the CIA makes a mistake is just sick, sick, sick.
Beware, since the source is a translation of Haskell into C, this is not an entry level source tree and is not straightforward to read/understand despite it's small (LOC) size.