skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I firmly disagree...

They didn't ask him to crack Photoshop or AutoCAD or anything... they're freaking crackmes. It seems like quite a sensible way to approach such an interview since it takes significant time, can be done overnight on their own workstation and isn't a huge requirement like "write us a game entirely in assembly".

There is nothing immoral about cracking a crackme file, which is the very reason why the file was created.
Pascal's triangles animated in canvas
This is such a classic! Awesome!!
Juju + DigitalOcean = Awesome
Is YC a 21st century union?
'Murdersquishing' Them to Death: How Little Bees Take on Enormous Hornets
HN on iPhone 6: app vs. web. (Fight)
Reminds me of Unheap http://www.unheap.com/
But I like it how a majority of the plugins here do not use javascript where as Unheap are all jQuery plugins
Browse videos about consumer products on ProductPlay iOS app.
Do you still sell in picodollars? :)
Interactive site about Tesla
That's a good question and probably critical to answer before discussion. I wonder if an open-ended world could be best described as one where the player finds enjoyment playing without an explicit win condition and/or can solve problems using many different strategies. (Preferably not "canned" solutions but ones where clever use of skills and the environment could even surprise the developers.)
Would be nice to see it evolve into working implementations.js that could be actively used, instead of just gawked at ..
Motion Is Emotion: Prototyping Microinteractions for Apple Watch
How I started a code club and became a better developer
How the Pirate Bay's Clever Hardware Set-Up Keeps the Site Alive
They sure do have a right, they also have the right to get a warrant if they want to search.
AppSec USA Conference Videos
They should file a bar complaint against the AG because being an AG gives rise to the potential to abuse laws.
I saw it on Dan Gillmor's site, http://dangillmor.com/2014/09/16/a-return-to-hong-kong/

Related effort for students: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/known/
Really wish baby-level software analysis posts would stop hitting the top.
Thanks for the great introduction to the subject .. as an avid gardener (permaculture variety) I can say without question that we will add beehives to our environment in the coming years - you've given me a good stash of inspiration to get ready for next year. I'll be a total noob, but am very gung-ho .. so I really appreciate your willingness to share these details in a fashion that can be easily subsumed. If you care to add more info, or perhaps have a follow-up, just know that there's an interested party out here who will pay attention. We love our garden, and we love our bees.
His english is almost as bad as his ability to reverse engineer things.
I really like when conferences -- particularly ones I haven't been able to attend -- post their full videos online. It's even better when there's a short feedback loop, so that the videos are online almost instantly.

It looks like AppSecUSA put their full tracks online, which is great.

OWASP is a pretty nice organization for builders and breakers trying to learn more about software security. For those of you that aren't familiar with the organization, it's a great thing to check out!
The Economics of Sharing
I post because it's true and interesting, but the real trend goes back a lot further: to ~1970.

http://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/producti...

Among other things, I think this exonerates Silicon Valley. Information tech did not cause this. I've smelled an agenda to frame SV and its larger economic and cultural orbit for middle class woes for several years, mostly emanating from curmudgeonly journalistic and literary circles. I think it's total baloney... the dates just don't match up. This murder occurred while the suspect was in diapers.

Interesting in light of all the recent discussion around Peter Thiel's new book which argues that fundamental (as opposed to just incremental) technological innovation has slowed in most areas since roughly the same date. I would add the above graph to the very long list of things that went off the rails in the 70s.

I'm very heartened by all this talk, especially given that it's coming from multiple points on the political landscape. I'm hearing liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all talking about how something really broke around that time-- something I've personally believed very strongly for many years. For years I've said that on or around 1970 "the future was cancelled." As for why-- I don't know. I scribbled down my own hypothesis here: http://adamierymenko.com/c/
Thankfully R3-GUI as dragged the Rebol desktop out of the 80's :)

And there are alpha versions that run on Android - http://rebol.informe.com/blog/2013/04/15/rebol-3-on-android/

But yes still got some way to go. Good news is that there are versions for Windows & Linux - http://atronixengineering.com/downloads.html
Thanks, fixed the wheels. If you get the wheels message, just reload the page.
Show HN: A web based data analytics tool
If physical security fails at your data center, do you have a backup plan?
The Oyster Effect in Software Engineering
>I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.

The easiest thing is to be able to look at the achievements you have, and say truthfully, "maybe if I put my mind to it I could bike across India, but I like what I've done more and I'm better at it than I could be at anything else."

That said, spending probably an hour a day on the entire project, you could probably spend ten-minute blocks of writing (250 words in 10 minutes seems totally doable), language learning (I spend 20 minutes a day between duolingo and memrise), exercise (7 minute workout plus stretching), and other skills that are easily parceled into small chunks.

Doing this alone won't make you great, but it'll be a baseline and a foundation you continue to lay. You can build on that.
I am downvoting you for unnecessarily swiping at the candidate by forcing your minority opinion on him. "This is a test of morals, and you failed" is a harsh judgment that only you and maybe a few other crusaders hold. Do not authoritatively state it and expect others to support you.

Don't make it look like you are being persecuted. You are the one lording over a minority opinion over someone in an attempt to persecute them.
Design Tools for Web Developers
I don't think you're wrong, The interview tactic is not useful for testing morals, your interview is testing the interviewee's aptitude for identifying underhanded questions (and/or their ability to sidestep a pointed questioning on a skill they're weak at).

But if somebody says "we want to hire you, pick this lock", your first response has simply got to be "wait, we need to discuss this."

Is the lock attached to your competitor's back door, or did you just place a lock cylinder on the meeting table? Remember, you're hiring a locksmith.

You've provided the applicant an ethical and legally safe environment to apply their skillset and tasked them with proving their skillset. What do you expect to happen?

How many of your everyday business skills can be used immorally? If you preface every demonstration or application of your abilities with a moral clarification, my immediate thought would be "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"
Hehe.. I worked for Numega back then. I did tech support and I still remember how often we got tech support requests from people and companies wanting a way to prevent SoftIce from being used to crack their software. So many times I tried to explain to people that there just wasn't really a good way to detect that it was happening that couldn't just be circumvented by the debugger.
How to Run the Android Emulator on Amazon EC2 and Google Cloud
> * Bees have been surviving without humans for a long time.

While this is true, the point in the article about 'feral' hives and genetic diversity was pretty interesting.
Actually, I had that stroke the first time I tried anti-migraine treatment (eletriptan). I have no medical proof that there was it was a cause though.

Before that, I was usually taking 1000mg of aspirin too.

My advice if your migraines occur in high stress times (mine did): learn auto-hypnosis or find anything to lower that stress level...
Ads are just the visible parts, so many web pages are bloated with so much invisible tracker/analytics javascript code etc. collecting data to be sold.
I've seen this article template rerun any number of times over the last couple of decades.

"Why don't we enjoy the video games of today as much as those we played when we were twelve years old? It's because the video games of these decadent times lack [insert whatever the particular author's imagination can come up with by way of special sauce whose secret has been lost]."

Sorry, no. It's because we're not twelve years old anymore.
Show HN: Mailmatch – get social data from your email lists
Who are the hosting providers used by the top 1M websites?
Duke Nukem? Doom? If your standard for good level design is Duke Nukem, then the conversation is over, with the conclusion that we have different quality standards.

I played Duke Nukem as a teen, with truckloads of time on my hands. While fun, the game requires teen-levels of free time to get unstuck here and there. Nowadays I would definitely not spend the time I did.

Make a level big enough and people will get lost. Different people will get lost in different points. So, the solution is to either make smaller levels or to lock out areas. Even Fallout, a master piece for these games, closes out areas in critical puzzle points so it can reduce search space.
> It's a good time to support their work.

To add to this: The EFF works tirelessly to protect rights online. It's always a good time to support them.
A minor correction: The iPhone 6+ renders at 1242 x 2208 but scales it down to 1920 x 1080. So 30% more pixels at 50% more power?
No?

Someone made a claim that controlling the hardware and software stack was the driver for being able to do well, powerwise.

I'm saying that controlling the hardware and software stack probably had less to do with this performance than the GPU only needing to push 40% as many pixels.
I would also bet the overall hardware PM is better in Apple's chips.

Software wise, there is only so much you can do that has any real impact, given that screen is 40% of power and cell is another 20%.

Past that, only real way to save power is often to make stuff run faster.

But to give you some perspective, if you take any of these phones, turn off cell usage and shove them in a drawer, they should last at least a week.
This whole discussion made me curious, so I tested it. Dropbox doesn't rename files. It creates new files. All you have to do is delete the new files (which are really "forks" of your current data) and you have your working tree synced with your data store again. It's really easy.
Also related is differentiating between the things you want to happen or change vs things you want to change your self.

We are surrounded by problems and it can be easy to become bogged down trying/wanting to solve them all yourselves. Realize you are not alone, that many other people are also working to solve those problems. Try to focus on finding the problems that you can solve and that you want to solve.
Original and Funny Pictures / Memes from JoyPanda
I think there could actually be a case be made that it should require the users consent. Just like the EU has recently mandated that websites have to get the consent of users to use cookies.
Yesterday's thread with exploit code, enables any website to perform arbitrary code execution. Apple needs to fix this in iOS7, not force users to upgrade to iOS8 while it is still buggy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348843
Critique groups and beta readers?
MIT "hack" comes from the pranks and unauthorized adventuring that many undergraduates came to enjoy on campus. (eg. http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/misc/best_of.html)

Hack was then used by MIT's TMRC of which many members became involved with/helped build the AI-lab. The first third of Hackers (http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Anniversar...) gives a good perspective on the evolution.
This Hamster-Wheel Desk Is a Sad Statement on Modern Offices
First Blood Test to Diagnose Depression in Teens
Who Needs Side Projects?
Scientists Have an Answer to How the Pyramids Could Have Been Built
Realistically Speaking, I think this is still at least another 6 months to 1 year away from moving to Aurora or Beta Channel.
The Ideas That Won’t Beat LinkedIn (& Some Which Might)
Always check your arithmetic, always check your arithmetic, always check your arithmetic...

No, let's just keep repeating old classic bugs.

OpenBSD's reallocarray(3) is a step in the right direction, but I've always been concerned about the focus on multiplication; needing to allocate x*y+z bytes is a rather common pattern. I suspect there's still plenty of additive arithmetic that goes unchecked.
The original article makes a point of contrasting Mass Effect with System Shock, which is I think why parent mentions it. I don't agree with everything you say here, but it's a lot more interesting and useful for the sort of point the author was trying to make than what the author actually wrote.
"If I take a letter, lock it in a safe, hide the safe somewhere in New York, and then tell you to read the letter, that’s not security. That’s obscurity. On the other hand, if I take a letter and lock it in a safe, and then give you the safe along with the design specifications of the safe and a hundred identical safes with their combinations so that you and the world’s best safecrackers can study the locking mechanism — and you still can’t open the safe and read the letter, that’s security." -- Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier

If you distribute a program with broken security, it needs testing and fixing. If this was a real program, as opposed to an exercise, it would have gotten a security advisory.

So, the only failed "test" here would be writing a reverse-engineering-resistant program and expecting that to provide "security", and that's less a test of morals and more a test of competence. But as an exercise, written to be intentionally buggy, this was quite good.

Now, a good question to ask before this exercise would have been to ask the inverviewee to discuss the idea and implications of prompting for a password in a client-side application; look for them to explain public/private key cryptography and security versus obscurity.
I apologize. I wasn't really replying to you, but also to many of the comments on this story that have been more insulting to Orin Kerr. E.g. "It is completely irresponsible of a man of his intelligence/qualifications to post something", "He still sounds like a government key escrow apologist,", "you should lose your fucking license to practice law.", "Sounds like an apologist and a shill for the entitlement mentality".

I disagree with your sentiment that we should weep for the future of our world governments. I think things are slowly changing around in the right direction, and a lot of that is thanks to people like Orin Kerr who are capable of changing their minds when presented with hard evidence.
Except for the security industry where I guess this would really be your day job, any job with embedded programming close to the metal is not really far from this.

Granted, you don't have an adversary so you won't find any anti-debugging tricks dropped into the code, although at times you'd be forgiven for thinking they had.
Does Google still do this too? Last thing I knew Google would stick you wherever they decided, not necessarily where your strengths were and where you wanted to be.
There have been many threads where people have gone back and forth with you at length. "They're bitter and can't think of a valid response" is one possibility, but "they can't be bothered to launch into the same long conversation in response to basically the same comment" is another. It's bad form to simply declare that it's the former.

For the record, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to your position though I think some of your arguments are not well founded, and I downvoted this comment and its parent.
I think an 86 is meaningless because of the source. We already know, 100% for certain that the majority of those reviews come from people who accept bribes. The fact that you dismiss the rating based on real people, and value the score based on bribery is pretty sad.
EMC Said to Have Held Merger Talks with HP
I'm not even sure it would be illegal even if you just started using Javascript miners on every page as a condition for viewing the page - with or without notice. I don't think many people would consider it illegal to display an advertisement in a page "without authorization", or run an animated advertisement.

That said, running these things without user consent isn't even the business model - they are specifically talking about allowing users to choose whether they'd like to do bitcoin mining or view ads, and they haven't released the product yet, so, basically the reason it "could be illegal" is because someone could take it and use it contrary to the intent of its creators in such a way that their actions have dubious legality. Should we also arrest all mask manufacturers because someone could wear one when robbing a bank?
A smartwatch with a pulse sensor could easily detect an arrhythmic pulse, which can be a symptom of atrial fibrillation, one of the most common causes of strokes. You couldn't diagnose a stroke itself just from heart rate and blood pressure, though. There's way too many other factors that can cause variations in those.
J'aime bien!

What technologies did you use?
Remote Work: Practicing What We Preach
The party might be ending for mobile CPU advancements
Hey Small Businesses Texting Your Customers Works – Appointmentreminder.org
Quepy – Translate Natural Language Queries to SPARQL
I do not understand start ups like Domino. It seems to me like it is essentially the equivalent of running an AWS instance along with a git hub account. AWS does not require any sort of hardware maintenance on your part and it takes only a tutorial or two to learn how to install R and run code on it in parallel / across multiple instances.

Presumably, Domino does not take unparallelized R code and transform it into parallelized code - so if you have to use the parallels R package (or some equivalent) anyway to get it to run on multiple cores, what really is the value add? Am I missing something?
Ditto. I really can't think of anything better to say:
Working with Xamarin tools is infuriating. You come to expect them to apologize for the level of unreliabity, instead, not long ago, I got an angry reply that I should be careful when reporting bugs and that I'm insulting them. Never did, but I might start.
related pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
How Google Works. Eric Schmidt
This is the first ever analysis I've seen of this that really digs into the different corollary factors - awesome! A perfect example of what I hoped 538 could do more of.
Notes and errata:

Simple answer to the question posed in paragraph two ("How did a few asset managers earn more money in a single year than Pierpont Morgan did in his whole life?"): inflation. ($1.5B in 1913 is about $36B today.)

Threshold for becoming an accredited investor is $200k annual income or $1M net worth.

Particularly interesting is the overlap between hedge funds and VC investors / angels, considering the similarities.
>But I also know believe that "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect".

I'd reconsider that position for a number of reasons. Not the least of which being that it is a logical contradiction.

Nobody is born knowing how to practice things. This is something we learn as we acquire skills, learn about goals, learn how to channel our energies towards meeting said goals, etc.

Thus practice is itself a skill that requires practice to develop.

Since our practicing of practicing will necessarily not be perfect, we will not be "practicing practicing perfectly". So we will never achieve the state of "perfect practice", and thus we will never be able to make our practicing "perfect".

Thus the statement "perfect practice makes perfect" becomes equivalent to "perfection is impossible, since we can never achieve perfect practice".

In my experience people who think like this end up paralyzing themselves with doubt and never produce anything of value -- not because they are incapable, but because they think themselves into a cage of inaction. They become so terrified of not doing things in the "correct" or "perfect" way that they just end up doing nothing at all.

You can't practice anything perfectly, as you unwittingly proved, so just do something. If you require external feedback to validate your work, put your work out publicly and feedback will come. The process is write -> publish -> critique -> polish, not become perfect writer -> publish -> everyone loves me.
I don't know how to make it any clearer. You connect as user A. You authenticate. You can only do things user A is given permission to do. Yes, people are suggesting talking directly to the DB. We want that because we already use our DB this way anyways, but we have to have a completely unnecessary web layer sitting in front of it just to pass the request directly back to the database without doing anything to it.
You're missing the point, and you make it seem like everyone should be an expert in everything. Not everybody that uses a computer understands the thick stack of technologies at play. It may seem simple to you, but that's you.

When my car makes a noise, I take it to Don the Car Care Man because aside from replacing the battery and windshield wipers I can't do much. If they told me I needed to get part X replaced, I'd trust their input and buy part X.

When people visit eBay, there is an inherit level of trust placed in that site. It's a legitimate business used around the world. If a listing links outside of eBay and is asking for personal information, not everyone understands that such behavior is a sign of an attack.

My grandma doesn't know what a URL is. If I told her to visit my companies website, she would ask where it is in her bookmarks. Just like I would ask where part X in my car goes. To me that's a very basic question; to a car expert they might be thinking: "Good thing this guy is having us take care of the problem".
The article actually explains away a lot of the differences from 1970-1999 by accounting for aging and household size.
So good enough to get things done, even if it could use a little refinement?
My guess that most people that disliked it had troubles with the theme (they express it in the comments using degredatory terms) or were not able to cope with the lack of jump scares. Or both.
Right, and the hammer in my house could be used as a method to gain unauthorized entry to someones house.

The problem here is the word 'unauthorized'. What if the website has an EULA that says something like "By visiting foo.bar.com your computer will be used to mine Bitcoins, if you do not accept this agreement please close this website". Now by most legal definitions I understand it is no longer unauthorized, the TOS authorized such uses.

Next, why should mining Bitcoins be directly illegal in such a manner? Are stupid, slow, annoying flash ads that play music and videos illegal? They are 'programs' that use my computers resources for the end result of generating revenue for the website.
Keep in mind a 4 digit passcode can by cracked in a matter of minutes by a normal powered laptop.
Well, so far that's what the whole case is about: whether the students should have to comply with the subpoena.
You might enjoy this: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Specifically the part where it talks about how the current establishment is squeezing the value-creating workers (teachers, police, factory workers, artists, mechanics, etc) while ballooning the "bullshit jobs" (school and hospital administration, lobbyists, PR researchers, consultants, etc)