skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If software and hardware could be ‘sealed’ in some way to prevent an attacker from examining data in main memory, even if the attacker had administrator level privileges on the machine

1. all it takes is one DRM free copy on bittorrent to make this scheme fail

2. how would they prevent me from grabbing images on the screen and turning them back into books? Or scanning a physical book.

3. blind people need to do this conversion anyway, to run the text through text to speech

Remember, it only takes one DRM-free copy on filesharing to make the DRM invasion a useless failure.
I don't want to downplay the significance of this writing - thank you for calling it out!

I do want to gently call into question the danger of the attack surfaces that you have (I think accurately) spelled out:

1) "Doxxing with calls to action (that — and trust me on this — people DO act on)."

For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway.

Those that aren't, and who want to stay anonymous, have a big job doing so - not just from trolls, but from the NSA and corporate advertising culture.

2) "Swatting (look it up). That nobody has yet been killed in one of these “pranks” is surprising. It’s just a matter of time."

This is purely a political problem. Clearly there's a flaw in the system when police can enter a home by the say-so of someone they haven't verified to be in that home. A sensible solution here is to work to abolish (or nearly abolish) so-called "SWAT" teams. For those that remain, obviously their standard of probable cause needs to change so that the scope no longer includes phenomena that are so easy to defraud.

3) Physical Assualt

In a general sense, this is already illegal under law that is widely supported. It's worth adding sexual assault as well.

The example that you give, which is disgusting of course, seems solvable by some kind of client-side solution that prevents machines from activating photosensitive epilepsy.

At the end of the day, there's not that much that somebody can do from a world away. To the extent that there is, I assert that the solutions are largely political, social, and cultural.
Ask HN: What is happening with Arc? Are there any news?
I would really like to know if there will be any updates to the Arc language. Apparently people are actively developing HN in it, but there haven't been any news or updates to the language in years. It would be really great to hear some news and to know that the project is alive and is being developed =)
Dealing with Data Breaches – Why Having a Plan May Not Be Enough
I started developing in 2001. The number of customers is less than I would like. There is not much marketing going on. A little bit of content marketing, AdWords, guest blogging.
Please let us know what you think.
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Protecting content from users is a failed game. This kind of protection is useless. At the very least, they need to decrypt information before it passed through our eyes and ears - that's the weak link in the chain.
All those features apply to C++ and Object Pascal as well.
After reading this, I'm battling the urge to suggest technical solutions to social problems. Except that in this case the social problems are caused by the fact the internet is a house built on sand and the underlying protocols don't support authentication or accountability to anything like the degree traditional public conversations did. That said, the choices that were made in the 1980's and early '90s to support pseudonymity and to allow the flexibility that meant that tools like NAT and anonymous forwarding could be developed and deployed may have been the right ones for that time.

I suspect that one outcome of the wave of vicious trolling that has been building the last few years will be stronger laws against online stalking and harassment, possibly even a national quick response network to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security can protect American citizens from these "lawless online thugs".

I don't have an answer for you; but I know that I am saddened that some of the smartest and most technically adept people I know are viciously harassed for their public participation in the technical community. If you think being a woman in public justifies rape threats or death threats; I have no respect for you. If you think that sort of thing is just a game, you need to grow up. And if you think the current situation can go on indefinitely without winding up in one of a number of drastic failure modes; you're fooling yourself.
I am slightly disappointed in the lack of mention toward posting over a 24 hour period, and by extend to toward the timezone coverage of the users. Although I have seen article pointing toward this in the past.
Peter Thiel’s Book Zero to One: The Contrarian’s Guide to Changing the World
Why do I have to enable "whatsappsharing.com" in my NoScript filter to see the graph?
Batteries are ~30% efficient. Sending power to end users is ~85-90% efficient (though less, of course, if there's overcapacity, and then it drops very fast).

So let's say you'd get 30% * 85% ^ 2 ~= 20% efficiency out of it.

If you're talking Australia. Outside of CBDs, why would you so much as bother with a grid connection at all ? Solar panels + a solar boiler + in-house batteries will probably be about as reliable as grid power in Australia. Plus it'd be truly distributed.

What we need is a Solarcity company in Australia.

(Or, Australia has uranium mines ... why not go nuclear ? Fuel is free)
Not even close. NeXT was bought, because Steve Jobs was still there.

I very seriously doubt Apple would care one second about NeXT if that wasn't the case.
>willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff

Serious question: why does this even bother you?
48V DC has been in multi-client data centres (Telehouse, TeleCity etc) for years. It's a standard voltage in telecoms kit. The data centre I was involved in building out back in 1999 got this as standard.
> But not everybody can or want to buy iPhone. Or even expensive Android with NFC...

An Android phone with NFC is not as expensive as you think, and it will be cheaper by summer 2105.
And by summer 2105, payments by phones/smart watches/wrist bands would be ready as well.
There are a few videos and reports from Xerox people on how their management managed to fail to make Smalltalk and Lisp Machines mainstream.

Sadly AT&T was more effective bringing their research into mainstream.
After finishing One Month Rails, what next?
> Second, sending this information in plain text undermines decades of efforts by libraries and bookstores to protect the privacy of their patrons and customers.

Someone needs to sue Adobe over this. That way we can stop such future invasions of privacy from DRMed machines in the future.

Also, Microsoft will do much of the same with Windows 10, collecting data not just on ebooks, but any file you might open, and even characters you may type. Digital Editions is one app. Windows 10 is a whole OS, which makes the whole thing a lot scarier:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2373838/microsofts-...
> It's a logical error to say that DRM itself is evil when some of the instances of it are evil.

All of the instances of DRM are evil, because all of the instances of DRM'ed stuff prevents practical and unlimited sharing.

In the digital world, any limitations on copying bits are akin to virtual restraints and locking information away. It prevents you from doing anything else than what the golden prison allows.
A long uphill battle for Ello to succeed and unlikely tp stay ad-free/hate-free
You missed a very important thing.

The language can also be used for systems programming and the standard toolchain has native code compilers.

Not something you can currently say about Ruby implementations.
I had done timezone analysis for Hacker News submissions, in February: http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-submissions.png

More likely than not, comments would show similar behavior. (I didn't include it in the post because those types of charts are much harder to make)
Looks more like they're looking for known pieces of domains rather than really parsing the domain as a whole.
Your simplified question isn't actually a question. But if it were, my answer would be "no". There are many ways in which that could not be true.

For example, as I already mentioned, public food safety ratings benefit new market entrants more than they do existing restaurants. Ergo, every existing restaurateur might oppose them (or at least decline to pay for them).

Another possible reason: dominant players benefit the least from public health ratings (because they already have a large established clientele and good word of mouth), but they are the ones with the largest surplus for things like this. So it might not happen because dominant players wouldn't work to make it happen. They might even oppose it.

Or another: humans have many known cognitive biases, including ones toward competition and zero-sum thinking. Perhaps prominent restaurateurs would oppose regulations that would benefit everybody because they would focus on benefit to competitors.

Or another: restaurateurs are very busy people, or perhaps very focused people, and so wouldn't have sufficient time or awareness to understand the benefits of a scheme like this.

Or another: even if they actually stand to benefit on average, individual restaurant owners might fear exposure of health issues, and would rather keep things quiet just in case (the loss aversion bias).

Or another: the costs of the program are short-term and obvious, but the benefits of the program appear speculative and/or long term, and nobody is willing to take the risk or take the short-term loss.

Or another: the program might not pay for itself purely in terms of increased restaurant business profits. However, it does pay for itself when health costs and human suffering are taken into account. In other worse, restaurants wouldn't do it because making people sick is a negative externality.

Or another: maybe nobody has gotten around to it yet. There are plenty of things that businesses do now that they didn't do at one point. Not because market conditions were different, but because things take time. Actual humans have to actually think of the idea and then get a lot of other actual humans to make it happen.

So off the top of my head, that's, what, eight holes in your argument from orthodox free-market dogma. Presumably an economist with relevant experience could find more, as could a public health expert or a restaurant owner.

Markets are a fine technology for accomplishing particular purposes. But like any real technology, they have practical limits and known failure modes. Which should be unsurprising given that they are implemented on people, who are rational to about the same extent that cows are spherical. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
It would be fun to whoop up an LDA analysis of this data.
Vancouver's temporary tech boom
Freedom of speech. The one jerk of a teacher I had, made me realize this.

It is better they are out in the open, that they are confronted publicly. Those standing to be counted are not the dangerous ones.... it is the 10 more who agree silently.

If it is driven to silence it does not disappear but is spoken in whispers. It is better that they are challenged in the open.
That's a completely valid question, and the answer isn't something concrete. I think on one hand it's just overall indicative of the site's priorities (and again, I completely acknowledge that it's those same priorities which also helped foster the subreddits that I love) -- on the other hand, I think it's just the sense of heebie-jeebies, like being a pro bono lawyer for the mob or something -- as though my presence there is somehow contributing to something that I desparately don't want to exist.

More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet that an internet community that places harsher standards on acceptable content would result in a better environment for those involved -- but Reddit's stance during the celebrity photo stuff reinforced their position of 'Reddit as a platform', and I don't see that going away.
>[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.

You joke (I think) but it's more like it went through a years-long period where it was really, really terrible. It's gotten better lately as far as I can tell. I'm posting there again after giving up on it years ago.

But, they don't really have stringent moderation, I don't think. It's more that when they do moderate, it means something, because you can't just register another account and back to business as usual. Being an asshole costs money there, and most assholes are apparently not willing to pay the price.

I don't know how to duplicate it without getting the critical mass first. It would be interesting if reddit suddenly switched to a paid model, but I really doubt that will ever happen.
If this thing is real, you could just have your phone "load" different cards to it.
Wow, this is even worse than I ever imagined. It is unbelievable how far trolling can go and what the costs are in life for the victim. I don't know you personally Kathy but I really feel sorry for you. You deserve respect for having the courage writing up these thoughts despite of everything that has happened to you and your family in the past 10 years. What's even worse how easy it has become for us to judge from the sideline with smug remarks on Twitter. Sad, really sad.
function adder(x) {
return function(y) {
return x+y;
};
}

var plusthree = adder(3);
var plusnine = adder(9);

plusthree(2); // 5
plusnine(3) // 12
plusthree(4); // 7

adder is a function that returns a closure that closes over x. If the function that's returned were a normal function rather than a closure, the x that you pass to adder would not within the scope of the inner function, and you wouldn't be able to reference it. Calling plusthree or plusnine would simply fail. However, because the inner function is a closure, it remembers x.

Every time you call adder, a new closure is created, with its own version of x, so you don't have to do anything extra like creating an object to store it in. The language runtime takes care of all that boring stuff for you.
Tina Tour
> If people are less inclined to upvote, then they would be less inclined to downvote as well, offseting it slightly.

That's not exactly true. Since more people can upvote than downvote, the threshold for downvote privileges is > 325 karma. So downvoting is reserved for those that frequently interact with the service in a positive manner. Downvoting could have had almost zero impact done to it due to the small set of people with that privilege.

As quantity increased, and newer less frequent users stopped upvoting, because there was no way to discern one's value in that interaction. Downvotes could have held at a similar frequency, because of it's smaller group. The decrease in upvoting could be accountable for a large portion.

Also, I rarely used a mobile device for interacting with HN, until 2-3 months ago, because the interactions are quite crappy (one of the reasons they mentioned for opening the API up.)

Edit: It's actually interesting, that the upvote/downvote ability wasn't considered impactful, since you mentioned it further down in the article.
Two ways: (1) the uploaded information appears to include book licence details; if the book-scanning aspect is true then this amounts to scanning for DRM-stripped or otherwise out-of-licence material. (2) Details are light on the new DRM scheme Adobe introduced in DE3, but some are claiming it to involve requiring always-on network connectivity; if that is true, then this information leak may be linked, or at least may not be blockable w/o also preventing access to DRMed books.
The Firebase JavaScript library makes make this impressively straightforward to use. I built a clone using React.js and Firebase's library. Because v0 of the API requires a request for each news story, it's not possible to use Firebase's React mixin yet.

https://github.com/ssorallen/hackernews-react
That is an implementation issue.

There are plenty of JVMs to choose from, even pauseless ones.
> For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway.

According to Dunbar's number, the average human can maintain meaningful social relations with around 150 people. If you have more than 150 followers on Twitter, you therefore must have followers who are not known to you personally, viz. "the public". That makes most of us "known to the public" in some way.

Calls to action matter. History has plenty of examples of situations in which somebody manages to provoke a group of people into attacking some individual by selectively or misleadingly disclosing information about that person, even if that information is untrue or nonsensical. My favourite example is the case of a mob attacking the home of a British paediatrician after someone confused the word "paediatrician" with "paedophile"[1] (yes, this actually happened).

This could happen to anyone, and the information being released doesn't even need to be true. Are you sure you've never done anything publicly that couldn't be twisted against you by a sufficiently malevolent person? And if you haven't, what would stop them from just making something up?

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.so...
I'm curious if you don't mind sharing, how many people are working full time on the HN codebase right now? I don't know if that number is even less than or greater than 1.

I'm also curious if there's a straightforward way to serialize these closures. I'm guessing no or at least they would not be persistent across restarts.

FWIW, if I were working on HN, I would be concerned that at some point, HN will require more hardware resources to scale, and it may require some fundamental architectural changes, like more separation between app logic and DB. I wonder to what degree you have scaling plans, like if we hit capacity X we would need to replace subsystem Y.
And I think that's at the heart of why there isn't a technical or legal solution to these issues.

Whatever solution will be found will be a social one, that's the only way to actually change what people feel and think and believe. And if they feel and think and believe it, they'll act on it in one way or another, no matter how you try to prevent it.
Ugh. At the very least, this kind of victim blaming attitude and lack of empathy is presumably exactly the setup for people jumping on the harassment bandwagon without thinking things through.

1. You're pretty much advocating mob rule. Also, are you seriously comparing the threat that internet hate-mongers vs. the NSA poses to the average Joe or Jane with an internet persona? I dislike corporate and government spying as much as the next person, but what immediate threat does the NSA pose to Kathy?

2. It's not hard to dream up a scenario (any immediate severe danger to one or more members of the public?) which, once the police starts believing the "witnesses", would make it irresponsible for them not to act on it. You just need enough "witnesses". From what I gather, the attitudes of some police forces, particularly in the US, could certainly do with adjusting, but that's an entirely separate problem.

3. Yes, as I'm sure you'll remember from the OP, once someone gets beaten up or worse, the authorities will take an interest. Not before that. You can't run around in real life constantly threatening people with violence, what makes it OK to do so via electronic media?
Please point Californians who think this at a photo of Tokyo.
> However, the demand is nowhere near as volatile as the supply can be, and you can't keep power as inventory, so it's anyones guess how this all plays out. Certainly we can't become reliant on solar/wind supply as this would be disastrous.

This is bullshit. Our civilization has done this for thousands of years, in a different area - food. This is just a return to different mode of operation with regards to energy, but it's not really economically impossible.
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I don't think that the lack of compression is a matter of speed. After all, C64 games did it all the time. The reason is more likely that it is convenient to store graphics and code plainly in the ROM since it can then be mapped direcly. The NES didn't have enough RAM.
As far as I can tell, it was always the case, yes.
Yes, but that's a very different kind of system. AWS has to deal with a very large number of servers handling authentication for client that aren't trusted by the credential owner.

HN has clients with credentials accessing a single server. It would be much easier to just store the serialized data in Memcached or Redis since the system is already centralized and use a token to look it up. Doing so requires less bandwidth and less messing with cryptography.
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What if I told you that around 35% of the population is just terrible, and another 50% is too busy to do anything about it? Would that change your mind?

I'm not claiming these are the numbers, just pointing out that there are numbers, and I'm wondering where you would draw the line, if you would draw it at all. That is, giving these people a forum where they can freely associate, normalize their behavior, and find sympathetic friends, might make them a greater threat that if we just did everything we could to marginalize these assholes and atomize their communities/roach dens wherever and whenever we found them.

I really do emphasize the might here - I don't have an answer. But, I do think it's something that needs to be given serious thought, rather than reverting the default 'freedom of speech must be preserved' position so tempting to the typical liberal.