skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Police did the same dance with BlackBerry, they claimed to the media it was impossible for them to spy on calls and texts but we all know now that was a ruse to encourage criminals to use them. UK riots they had no problems handing over decrypted messages to the police. The Datalocking company, who ran their own BB Enterprise servers and peddled "unbreakable encryption" were remotely accessed by the FBI and keys pulled, with the help of Blackberry themselves of course. Any customs agent in the western world can plug a locked BB into a little device they have that unlocks the screen immediately. Finspy/mobile malware let's the police monitor communications in real time too (and iOS).

Samsung Android phones the proprietary modem can r,w /sdcard and /data unless you either install Replicant or use some kind of permission controls like SEAndroid to lock out modem.img access to everything. Apple likely has a similar proprietary baseband with full remote control over the whole application OS they can offer the FBI to quietly activate targeted spying.
Can't Stop His Vibe: Spanish Sam's Club Employee Turnt All the Way Up
Thank you for posting it. I first reading this story as a teenager. I remember it having an impact on me in a way few stories do. I have re-read it many times since then and it can still take my breath away every time.
Do you know who has shared your link on Twitter?
The notion of using a computer to be productive in class is desirable, but walk into your average college classroom and you'll see ~50% of the computer users on Facebook. In one of my classes the kid in front of me would straight up watch Netflix or The Daily Show. And bear in mind this was a top private school.

I used a computer through most of my classes in college to "take notes." Personally I took a computer to every class, and was taking notes <10% of the time. Most of the time I was reading stuff that I did care about (and do use today, as opposed to most of what was being taught to me in class), but the notion of using a computer in the class to be more productive in the class was just a cop-out I used to pursue what I was interested in.
Always protect your OpenVPN instances with tls-auth, especially if your instance accepts connections from any IP. It prevents the SSL negotiation from even occurring if it doesn't match. It would have protected you from heart bleed, and it protects against shell shock.

There is no downside to using it. However, keep in mind that the key file is shared across all clients, so you probably want to change it periodically depending upon how much you trust your clients not to become hostile. You could run multiple server instances on different ports/IPs to subdivide your client base, or when rolling out a new key.
This site has compiled an interesting collection of observations: http://crimeflare.com
I can appreciate your frustration, but when you look at the history of things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or read a book like "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" the distrust becomes more understandable. As per the RFS biotec comments (http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/), and given the expressed intent of certain groups to develop the ability to annihilate entire ethnic groups, the fears are not unfounded. Consider how many still fervantly endorse Darwinism. Consider this quote from his popular book (the title of which is often truncated):

"On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
How come? The operations of an automobile can and often are learned by even the most stupid ones of all people. Further, all automobiles from the past several decades mostly work the same way: the controls are quite simple and to some extent even intuitive.
What the hell are you even talking about?

"Not it's not quite the same"? What is not the same? Converting between metric units and English units? It's exactly the same if you're doing it right. Contrary to common belief, most engineering and science that is done using the English system doesn't use "eight pounds four ounces per foot per inch" or some other such silly unit. Consistent units are used based on the application. Are there instances where a conversion must be used? Certainly. Are these conversions any more complex than those used in the metric system? No.

Disagree? Then tell me how many liters of water are needed to fill a cubic meter of space without looking it up or writing it down. You can't? Then stop crying about having to divide by 12 to get to feet.

Only an idiot does unit conversions in their head.
> A fire is a self-perpetuating chemical reaction in which the high temperature encourages fuel to combine with oxygen in the air, further raising the temperature in the process.

Kinda OT but this sentence finally cleared up for me how burning works.
If it would be that simple, everybody would be running Microsoft Windows.

Oh, wait...

(It's sarcasm. I think Win8 is actually really nice in some aspects even if inferior to everything else overall.)
Not all languages need to have all the features of Haskell or Rust. Just as not All languages need to be dynamically typed. Just because a language is missing your favorite feature(s), doesn't mean it's a bad language. And maybe you have tried writing programs in go and didn't like it. That's fine. But there's no need to insult everyone who uses language. Every language has its niche, even perpetual punching bags like vb and php.
The operators of automobiles do however "make large numbers of errors" of varying levels of severity. The linked paper isn't looking just at ability to learn to use the tool in the first place, but also at which kinds of errors crop up during normal use. By the standard being looked at, "user collided with other vehicle while changing lanes" would be an error, and if such errors are common, it would suggest a problem with the design.
It is not expected to find Alexander by anyone. It is expected to find an important general or someone close to Alexander though.

The tomb date is greatly varied now, between 100-400BC but before Christmas where excavation will be done to the lower outer part of the tomb it will be possible for a ceramic analysis to be done that will pinpoint the date within 2 years.
Pointing out that people from the internet shouldn't be able to set shell variables isn't 'hate' - it's basic security and knowledge that alternative, more secure transport systems exist.

Saying that Apache (and other apps) passing data from random people on the internet to a known insecure environment like a shell, that was known to be insecure in the 90s, is 'not Apache's problem' doesn't actually absolve Apache of responsibility for its own programming.
Cities heatmaps based on tourists vs. locals pictures
I thought this would be something that everyone wanted to know. how many tweet have your link been in? I wanted to know this and i thought it has to be away to find out. So i found a way how to to do this on twitter . I was so surprise to how many people there actually were tweeting my link that i never know. The tool even tells you how many times those links have been clicked in twitter.
> The spec specifies environment variables.

If that's true, then the spec has been obviously, fundamentally broken for it's entire existence.
Predictable Password Topology
Umm, and why exactly does the Delaware State University tolerate this sort of behaviour? It's unconscionable that they don't fire this ass-hat immediately, for causing thousands of unnecessary deaths through idiocy.
>Often better libraries and tools can only be built on a better language.

Precisely. For example, a lot of Cocoa these days relies on dictionaries and/or stringly-typed identifiers: KVC, KVO, Bindings, Archiving, CoreImage attributes, CoreData's interface to the database etc, etc. Autolayout also uses a separate string-based language.

There are a lot of problems with this approach, not the least of which are performance, code bloat and lack of any kind of compile-time checking.

Polymorphic Identifiers[1] in Objective-Smalltalk[2] are an attempt at addressing these issues (and others). The paper shows why you actually need a small amount of language support to successfully build libraries that address these issues.

I wish I could complain about how Swift's approach to these issues is so much inferior to mine (grin), but there just isn't anything at all. If anything, support for solving these sorts of problems is thinner than in Objective-C. Yikes!

Another issue is the large-scale structure of applications...their architecture: target/action, delegates, bindings (again), notifications, view-controller segues etc. are all architectural connectors, and a large part of what makes Cocoa so powerful. However, these types of connections (-> configurations) can only be described in ad-hoc ways in code, or in a different ad-hoc way in IB. Various inspectors of a GUI builder are not really the proper place to describe the overall architecture of your program.

There have been many systems/languages for describing such high-level architectures, for example ArchJava or ACME. In Swift? Crickets.

When direct language support for a feature is not present, dynamic messaging has been a great way of making library features available as if they were built-in language features. Swift makes this harder or downright impossible.

> Swift wasn't designed to make better libraries and tools possible

Yep. In fact, it's arguably a step back even compared to Objective-C. Which is sad.

> but rather to work well with the ones we already have.

Except that it doesn't really work all that well with existing ones either. Objective-C interop seems to clearly be marked "legacy", with the default apparently non-interoperability.

[1] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media...

[2] http://objective.st/
'nightfall' is also very good, both the short and novel version.
It may have influenced Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky portrayel of the civilization of the intelligent spider creatures who hibernate through the "Deepest Darkness" of their variable sun's long "off" periods where their civilization falls apart.
While students have certainly always been able to tune out, I would argue there is a difference in degree when facebook is available.
All I get is this error:

> Sorry, this page does not exist on the Wolfram|Alpha site.

I guess you wanted to submit the graphic of:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sin%28y%29%3Dtan%28x%2F...
Attacks against Boletos: Stealing money from offline users
There's a really cool technology out there that I am working with in the Docker ecosystem to help solve this.

My dream is to be able to solely package an application and its dependencies in a docker container so it can be used like a static binary.

I'm working with a partner to premiere something like this at DockerCon EU.
I built a similar mechanism using SQS and DynamoDB instead of RabbitMQ and PostgreSQL, respectively. The nice part is it requires no servers for job management. (Just workers obviously.)

https://github.com/gfodor/skyrunner

(It's still a bit half baked, but could be useful as a starting point.)
Yeah, what do those stupid professors know about education? How dare they attempt to engineer an environment in which students can engage with new ideas and information, even if it's a little dry or difficult to understand at first. You should totally be allowed to waste their time and energy and occupy a seat in their class that could've gone to someone who might've valued the experience a bit more.
Also have to address "when these could be reduced by changes to the program." Though I have heard automobile controls are not optimized- but what became standard first.
All Unix shells don't really separate data from instructions. Your PS1, for example, can contain commands in backticks and subshells, it's expected to be able to do so.

Shells are insecure. You could replace them with something compatible but insecure, but they wouldn't be a POSIX shell anymore. Hence the well known SetUID blocking on shell scripts, hence not letting random people on the internet set shell variables.
The mismatch you have with Altman is that you're assuming you'll keep the lion's share of the founder equity (as distinct from employee and investor equity). That being the case: with investors, you can plausibly hope to end up with somewhere between 20-50% of the company.

Say that as a single-founder company, in the unlikely event that you manage to raise not only a seed rounds but an institutional A round, you end up holding 40% of the company by the time it sells.

Now look at what happens if you have two equal co-founders: 13%, squarely in Altman country.

Being irritated about this is pointless. At each dilutive step --- dividing the pie between cofounders, allocating options to employees, buying a pile of money from seed investors, buying a bigger pile of money from VCs --- you were given a judgement call: "will the amount of equity I end up, converted to dollars, be higher or lower if I give up equity now?" If the answer is "no", you say "no".

Often the answer is "yes". For instance: "will I make more money in the long run if I cut my stake in half by bringing on an equal cofounder?" If you're being careful, and you don't have a cofounder already, probably yes. Looking at your percentage is not helpful. Think of it this way: prior to having a cofounder, all your energy and skill is generating ${X} amount of value. If you select a cofounder carefully, you can end up generating more than ${2X}: not only is there a whole other founder working on the problem, but their skills complement yours. Also you can get the stomach flu for a week and not leave the company rudderless.

The percentage you're left with is a barometer, but it's a little like the spot cost of a share of stock: you need more context to actually evaluate it. Having 90% of it can be a bad sign: it means you're keeping a lot of your value in the bank, rather than deploying it to accelerate your business.

You say you're building a company positioned for "hyper growth". I'd suggest you double-check that assumption. Implied in the strategy of "hyper-growth" is "fast go-to-market". That costs money. Money costs equity. My sense is that a lot of people who believe they're in a shoot- the- moon startup are just fine with 10%; 10% of ${BIG NUMBER} is ${BIG NUMBER}. If you're thinking about what 10% of ${MODEST NUMBER} is, you're not thinking about "hyper growth". Which is fine! I think "hyper growth" is a bad strategy for most founders.

You can keep 100% of the company if you go it alone, don't take on investors, and pay nosebleed market salaries for all your employees. Good luck. Just remember what 100% of zero is.

Here's a link to one of the rare infographics that is actually helpful:

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/dilution...

Here's Joel Spolsky on how equity divides in a well-run startup:

https://gist.github.com/isaacsanders/1653078
One measured thing you can use to guess better at stocks lies here:

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W_...
"82 percent of farms in Washington did not collect subsidy payments - according to USDA. Ten percent collected 67 percent of all subsidies."
Quoting that without the historical follow-up (namely, the experience of eugenics in the first half of the 20th Century, culminating in the extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany, which is widely regarded as one of the most shameful chapters in human history) is dishonest to say the least. Many great thinkers made errors in their thinking. You can take the good without taking the bad - and you certainly know that.
I wish the official OpenVPN howto [0] highlighted this sort of things a bit more.

As it is, it provides a clear and easy to follow path to a minimally viable setup, but only mentions many additional security parameters (tls-auth, running as unpriviledged user, chroot, increasing key size) under "Hardening OpenVPN Security", very far down the page, where people probably miss it. And this, even though some of these elements vastly increase the security with little to no downside.

[0] https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howt...
> So your argument boils down to: Apache should have seen the special treatment of data in this context, and used another context instead.

Yes, the behaviour of all Unix shells and their poor separation of data from instructions is well known in the 90s.

> There's no spec to say that data received from the "other" channel will not be interpreted or used unexpectedly.

That is true. However something specifically designed as a communications channel, such as a socket or FIFO, is generally better suited than something designed as a shell.
A long but interesting read. The parallels with the mystery novels didn't make sense to me at first but then I understood that the evolution of such novels to greater complexity was being compared to the growing complexity of our understanding of alzheimer's disease.

I prefer to draw a comparison to CS. The Tau vs Amyloid camps are essentially defining two spaces where potential solutions may exist. It seems like the research is doing brute-force depth-first searches across potential solution spaces. Viewed in this manner, and given the lack of results, I wonder if a more comprehensive (breadth-first) approach might be more appropriate. Accounting for all sides of the puzzle rather than focusing on only one.

Undoubtedly more funding will be required in any case.
To follow up on this, a lot of the overhead from reverse-mode AD can be avoided by flattening out the expression graphs and compiling specialized functions (at runtime). A number of the JuliaDiff packages support this approach. This is not a new idea, but Julia's hooks to LLVM make this surprisingly easy to do.
Except that bash is not installed by default... if bash is not installed how does BSD suddenly become vulnerable?
I've read both of these but hadn't made that connection. A Deepness in the Sky is one of my all-time favorite scifi novels.
I'm old enough to have been at college before laptops, back then it was perfectly possible to take written notes without really thinking about the lecture.

The discipline has stayed with me though, I don't power up any of my toys if I'm at a conference.
> ... never a problem on windows

Hello? Dll-hell? Outdated dlls bundeled with an app? This essentially the problem distros solve; fixed target against which to compile..
Shell executes the contents of variables by design, and users use it everyday - ever had a PS1 with backticks or a subshell? If you don't wish for it to do so (which is reasonable), fine, but you will break compatibility and throw away that entire ecosystem of tools (which may also be reasonable).
It does have arrays, but they aren't first class to the same extent as MongoDB.

* A Postgres Array can end up being stored elsewhere, whereas in MongoDB an array will be contained within the document

* I am also not clear on what exactly can be stuck inside an array (In MongoDB it can be an object that contains more arrays) while maintaining first-class access and updates.

I would love to find more detailed information on these points, but with jsonb they may be moot now.

I will look into the increment issue in PostgreSQL more carefully. I just know that it wasn't feasible in MySQL when I was using it.
Startup.com Is a Dot-Com Era Case Study
I read this and didn't understand anything. Can anyone ELI 5 ?
>It is each student's choice to pay attention or not, it doesn't look like you would want to force them.

I agree, but those people who like to play on their phones, and who I fully support their right to fail my courses, are often unable to stop themselves from disturbing others, ruining on-topic discussion, etc.
If you look at early RFCs, you will see that if they mention security considerations at all, it's often just to mention that they haven't been addressed at all.

Specifically, the literal string "Security issues are not discussed in this memo.' is found 568 times in the 3000 first RFCs. (6 times in the RFCs from 3000 to 5887).

When searchers were inventing the internet, they just put aside security considerations. In a way, security was enforced at the boundary, by universities controlling their teachers and students who could use it.

When the internet becomes a public network, where anybody can send packets on it, of course security considerations become a priority, but the protocols weren't designed for security. Like IPv6, we'd need to design a new set of protocols for this public internet, taking into account security considerations as a priority.

But given the speed with which IPv6 is adopted, you can guess with what readiness a new set of secure protocols will be adopted (you'd also have to be able to trust them, that no NSA or other backdoor is hardwired in those new protocols).

In short, this is not a simple situation and there is no simple solution.
It took longer than that for the lesson to sink in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization

And it hasn't completely stopped.
For reading up on p-norms related to the article, I found the wikipedia page on Lp spaces[1] to be fairly accessible as a learning tool.

Not sure if it's my learning style, but most math-related wikipedia pages read as a reference and seem to assume prior knowledge (especially with notation).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp_space
Yeah, it's absolutely nuts to hear that the copenhagen interpretation is still taught in universities, because it's such a desperate attempt to avoid admitting this truth of how fundamental QM is to reality.
Ello needs push notifications
I always find myself irked by this kind of message - aside from looking like a cheap shot to drive labour costs down in the long term, I wonder if we are truly unable to find a middle ground between "follow your dreams (and die in a fire)" and "go do X right now because X is growing and pays nicely". What about "do what you'd like to do without losing sight of the reality"?
Two reason why I have ended up using RDBMS for messaging: 1)Transactions can easily cover both DB and messaging operations (distributed transactions are not easy/possible on all platforms) 2) The database is anyways there, no need to add another critical component to the stack.
Why does this survey ask for information on ethnicity?
I have very little difficulty believing that Google offers $280k salary packages routinely and that $8 million has been offered in GSUs to at least one engineer, but that being a routine enough offer to flummox a recruiter strikes me as unlikely.

Anybody at AmaGooFaceSoft want to provide a little color commentary here?

[Edit to add: I've been told, by multiple people I trust on the matter, that my sense of this was largely correct. $2 million a year is within the realm of feasibility for top contributors -- a handful in a year out of tens of thousands -- but very, very much not a standard offer for a generic 28 year old engineer.]
On the flipside, it could be that Apple is laying the groundwork (as they tend to do) to evolve these more advanced features into the language. One could imagine Swift becoming quite divergent from Objective-C in the future, but for the initial release it would have been foolish for any number of reasons to try to introduce anything other than a small step forward from Objective-C.
The Single Particle Double Slit Experiment