skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slightly offtopic, but it's nice that the default option when signing up is "Never send me news emails". Says a lot, in my opinion.
To your Edit: tell this to the socialist big time thought-police at the HN HQ that will not count your upvotes on your posts if they don't like them I.e.: I have almost twice as many upvotes on posts than the number appearing next to my nickname. Ah hh... "Land of the free" -- as long as they do and talk as they are told!
It's interesting what a chilling effect the evil "gamergate" people have.

By making it clear they target anyone who stands up for women in gaming or for freedom of press they have intimidated people who would usually be up front in their support for the people attacked.

I hope someone can come up with a sensible strategy for dealing with these trolls. I'd like to see real-world consequences.

The article indicates there are "some well known names" involved in the group. Who are they and what companies do they work for?

(Written from a throwaway, which says a lot doesn't it?)
Aha, it is postdoctoral treadmill: http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html
Two factor is not a good solution either. Having to lug around your phone pulling up randomly generated strings from an RNG on both ends... defeats the point. Instead of an RNG seed, have a shared secret.

Of course, you need a trusted party for that, but that is how oauth and friends work. And how Persona should have worked. Logging in to anything should be clicking login and everything happening behind the scenes, because you are already trusted and authenticated by a dozen other services that whomever you are trying to access should defer to to identify you.

At least that is what Persona was supposed to do, and then fell flat due to slow adoption. But it was a chicken and egg problem through and through - nobody would use an immature Persona, and Mozilla abandoned it before it had time to shine.

Oauth is the maimed cripple of what should solve all of this, but at least it gets the correct UX to end users most of the time, even it if means wading through a half a dozen login buttons from various services selling your identity.

Considering modern browsers all support synced data stores, why the hell is there not some standards pushing api a la webrtc (in scope and adoption) to get randomly generated unique id keys made browser side for each service you use, that you can then sync between devices and across your browser "account"? Persona was meant to become that, but it died. Where is the successor?
Ms. Wu's bitterly sarcastic tweet pretty much says it all:

> The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe.

> Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women.
Yeah, I am wondering the same thing. When they hide behind anonymity (cowards) what the hell can anyone do to A) support these women and B) stop these people from creating a new account and repeating the behavior.
BCPL, though I've never used it (my exposure to BCPL was mostly swearing at it because early parts of AmigaDOS was written in it, and at least that version of BCPL annoyingly stored memory addresses shifted, so when dealing with them C you could never de-reference them directly), was my dubious inspiration for avoiding typing early on in my compiler articles [1].

This before I went overboard and started layering a Ruby compiler on top of it. While I'm adding a tiny little bit of typing to it these days, it's only to distinguish "must be a Ruby object" from "can be anything".

You can get away with no type information for surprisingly much. The main hassle is dealing with layout of structured data, but even then it's relatively straight-forward to deal with through a combination of memory and documentation (but maybe it's the assembly programmer in me - my first compiler was written in m68k assembly and then gradually translated into inline assembly in the language the compiler was for)

That core is not by any means a fully fledged usable language, though, which BCPL of course was/is. Martin Richards, the creator of BCPL even still has a web page for it that includes a BCPL distribution [2] with both examples and the compiler.

[1] http://www.hokstad.com/compiler
[2] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/BCPL.html
He was initially denied bail, in part because an illegal assault rifle and a bulletproof vest had been discovered in his house during a police search.

Lovely. This "illegal assault rifle" was likely only cosmetically different than a completely legal rifle. Hell, that rifle is probably legal in most of the other 50 states.

And who cares about a bullet proof vest? Or are those illegal in CA?

The guy certainly isn't a saint, but holy crap this is a great example of the gov't punishing someone using confusing laws against victimless crimes when they can't nail him for what he's actually doing because it's legal.
I'm watching the work done by Steve Gibson with interest into a password replacement called SQRL. It's just a spec and he is developing the proof of concept software, but as far as I know it is not a commercial venture at all.

https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

Abstract:
The SQRL system (pronounced “squirrel”) revolutionizes
web site login and authentication. It eliminates many
problems inherent in traditional login techniques.
>The other odd point is that we shouldn't be advocating stronger methods of choosing passwords because we should be using multifactor authentication. I don't dispute that we should be using multifactor authentication in more places, but even in that case weak passwords are a problem!

Only he never says that weak passwords are OK. Instead he says that we should not let people decide them, and instead use a uniformly random distribution of passwords (i.e. generated automatically).
Update: my computer died shortly after Andrew's talk with Jessica. I finished off the day with some old fashioned hand written notes. I'll transcribe those this evening and get them posted.
Maybe this would be a good time to plug my proposed solution to this problem:

http://dswi.net/
> Except for the fact that he was selling them secret compartments, witnessed one stuffed full of almost a million dollars in cash, and continued doing business with them.

Is having large amounts of cash illegal now? I still don't see where this guy actually broke the law.
...when Anaya had glimpsed more than $800,000 in cash. The prosecutor contended that seeing such a large sum was tantamount to seeing drugs, since Anaya surely must have deduced the source of the money.

Wow! It just gets better!

What next? If a friend buys an expensive car when I know he has a low paying job, am I guilty of not turning in a "drug dealer"?

Even if you don't think drugs should be legal, it should be abundantly clear that the War on Drugs has resulted in a significant loss of individual rights.

This article really ruined by evening...
Docraptor, http://docraptor.com

It uses the Prince engine (http://www.princexml.com/), so it supports paging, headers, footers, page numbers etc. in addition to standard HTML+CSS3. It's great overall but quite pricey.
Ask HN: Inverse of Product Hunt?
Does the 'inverse' of Product Hunt exist, where posts are business problems solvable by software and upvotes are money users are willing pay for a solution? A rough equivalent could be a one-to-one relationship (1 biz to one dev) as established by a freelancing marketplace (e.g. odesk, elance, etc.), but I'm thinking along the lines of a many-to-one (many businesses to one dev).
For a bit of context. Ron was specifically speaking about VC partners that find and pick companies to invest in. He notes that the folks actually using these new products should be the ones deciding if they are worthwhile investments.
For the author: What do you think is the biggest flaw of spreadsheet programming? It seems like the biggest advances you are trying to make are "cells within cells", prototype oop, and immutability.

For me, it always seemed like the biggest problem was that once a spreadsheet grows past a certain size, it becomes unmaintainable due to the makeshift unspecified schema, layers upon layers of hacks, and the repetition due to the lack of good abstraction tools. While your demo was impressive, it seemed like it was going in the wrong direction when it comes to addressing these issues. Databases and data processing often seem to form a ugly mess when mixed too closely. I concede that might be a hasty judgment, since I haven't really had the chance to play around with it yet.
Using Cocoapods with Maven
So is a flight instructor responsible if the guy he is training is most likely intending to buy a Cessna and smuggle cocaine in from Mexico?

Even if I agree with you that he is guilty of conspiracy, the sentence is bananas. Someone I went to high school literally killed 2 people and got a shorter prison sentence than this. If this is the law working, something is completely wrong. I can't fathom how any non-violent, effectively victimless offense, can warrant 2 decades in prison.
>Two factor is not a good solution either. Having to lug around your phone pulling up randomly generated strings from an RNG on both ends... defeats the point. Instead of an RNG seed, have a shared secret.

Google Authenticator has TWICE gotten out of sync with my Authenticator apps, including Google's own accounts and my WordPress installs. I've had to turn it off and just resort to single-factor auth, or using stuff like Mailchimp's own app.

2FA is great in theory but it's failed twice for me and it's been a huge hassle.
At least in my house, all Internet traffic still has to go through my router. Could that be the place where we control who and what our things talk to?
Here's a different perspective on anonymity that I think few people appreciate or even consider http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-m..., which also might point to a solution to the problem you mention.
From the decision of Anaya's 2013 appeal [http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-10th-circuit/1642115.html], here's a synopsis of the evidence that swayed the jury to believe he knew what he was doing. Its not just the 800K.

3. Sufficient Evidence of Knowledge

At trial, the Government presented evidence that Mr. Anaya

• built multiple hidden compartments in vehicles for the DTO that were insulated to mask the smell of drugs;

• witnessed $800,000 in one of his compartments in a DTO vehicle;

• used “kilos” as a unit of measurement for building compartments;

• communicated by phone with the DTO through a secret code to discuss compartment sizes; and

• warned Mr. Crow not to discuss the compartments or how they worked with anyone to avoid police detection.
have a reference that isn't a rumor site?
Am I misunderstanding what the author means by 'real release' in terms of OpenSSL? OpenSSL themselves pushed 0.9.8za and Apple later adopted it after a significant amount of nagging in the developer's forums on the issue.
This narrative you're pushing here is a very hard sell considering this is one of their most prominent banners: http://www.nichegamer.net/media/2014/09/gamergate.jpg

Being the interenet, there are naturally aggressive and violent people who will throw harassment around. With regard to this issue, it is downright false to claim that they originate from, or are encouraged by, any one camp, as there are examples of harassment originating from both sides. One of the more prominent journalists writing articles supporting gamergate was mailed a syringe filled with mystery liquid; far from a friendly gesture.

There are, however, a lot of people who wish to paint gamergate as woman-hating trolls - the kind of people in the media who have a lot to lose, who always pick up on these sort of outliers and point to them as the bulk of the movement, to try to distract the public from the real message of gamergate, which is that they want proper ethics and integrity in gaming journalism, not 10/10's for games made by your friends, or articles brazenly insulting your readership.
I'm sure there is a lot more and it seems to me that most, if not all of that can probably be obtained/experienced without the violent hits that are at the heart of many of these controversies.

The sad truth is they are the modern gladiator and we are the spectator lusting for the violence. Why else would someone be able to make such incredible amounts of money to throw a ball around?
Generate SVG using an XML DOM library and then convert to PDF using Inkscape on the command-line.
> - have never heard of large-scale testing for infection

Every pregnant woman gets tested, isn't that large-scale enough?
Great reply!
The article really smacks of hype and sensationalism. There is no need to lie awake at night obsessing over the ammonium "smelling salts" he provided. Those ampules cannot help you if you are injured.
Criticize? I didn't see that in the article. Your 19 minute old account, with its oddly oblique responses to the article's actual points, makes me very suspicious.
Wait, it's "common sense" to you that we should be sentencing non-violent offenders to 20 years in federal prison? How does that make sense?

What is the cost to tax payers of putting him in prison for 20 years? What did he cost tax payers in helping the drug traffickers move their drugs a tiny bit more effectively? I can not imagine that this nets out positively for society, and it effectively ends this guys productive life.
No, I think they are eating undercooked meat. Remember, a cat can only spread it for about two weeks. The people who do get it from cats are most likely not washing their hands after cleaning the litter box. That is eating feces, just indirectly. I do not do that, I wash my hands.
You are perhaps missing the point, then. You are vastly more likely to get toxo from undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables than from cats, especially if you don't clean litterboxes yourself. Recoiling in horror from cats and cat owners is not productive behavior.
My question is how crazy jerks are able to find addresses for targets they want to harass? Simple public record searches? I think in this age, having a very common first and last name combination helps protect your privacy.
I generally come down strongly on the side civil liberties, but they don't become involved in this case. Anaya knew exactly what his clients where using the compartments for; even asking them not to tell him makes that clear. That's the equivalent of clamping your hands over your ears and singing "lalala". He knew. He kept building them anyway, using them to subsidize his other business. Conscious avoidance does not protect you from the law.

When confronted with the knowledge -- $800k IN CASH -- he then charged more than his normal amount to fix it. Again, don't be bloody daft. That's a decent middle-class net worth, in cash, concealed in a car. Unless someone's a billionaire, there's no reason to have that type of walking money besides illicit drug sales.

Any reasonable person would know what was going on, and in fact, Anaya did. That's why he's in jail.

As for your, well, stupid friend example -- you need to do more than just know. You need to actively aid. Which Anaya did! If you have a friend with a low-paying job and far too much money, I'd advise you to avoid holding "packages" for him, or installing concealed compartments for him, or straw-purchasing weapons for him. Again, don't be deliberately obtuse.

edit: One more point. Anaya's calculated ignorance is like Goodell and the videotape. The only way goodell didn't see that videotape is he didn't want to, and the only way Anaya wasn't confronted with exactly what his customers where doing was he actively avoided it. Also -- as mentioned elsewhere -- the compartments were insulated for odor? Come up with a legit use for that.
The way Twitter handles these types of incidents needs to change as well: https://twitter.com/StuHorvath/status/520750049702473729
This is sort of off topic, but the fact that every change to the source requires (on my machine) 3-4 full seconds to recompile, without optimization, is indicative of the compiler performance problems that remain my main roadblock with Rust.
That program refuses to compile not because you can't cast to/from arbitrary types in C, but because you don't make your intent explicit (assuming I read what you tried to do correctly). Try this:

int f(float x) {
return *(int *)&x;
}

On one hand you demonstrate that C cares a tiny little bit about type, but mostly because of implicit numeric conversions rather than any serious attempt at stropping you from bad casting.

I do agree with the point that C isn't "typeless" in any real sense, though.
"The bottom line is, Anaya didn't play ball with the DEA. They went after him to punish him for not cooperating, not because he broke any laws. It's a travesty and a scathing indictment of the current legal situation in the United States"

Exactly. 10,000x this. The fact that 90% of charges don't go to trial means that the whole thing is rigged towards scaring people into accepting guilty pleas. If he had accepted a plea he probably would have gone to jail for a very short amount of time. By protesting his innocence - which he clearly believed - he effectively lost 10x more than if he had just given in. That is horrifying.
This article really disappointed me. It isn't about how cryptographically "horse battery staple" is not correct, it's more that passwords in general are the wrong paradigm for security.
For those who want to reproduce the ping example, get espeak and run:

ping mit.edu | sed -u 's/.*/ping/' | espeak
Things like this make me feel physically uncomfortable.

How do you even deal with something like that?
Having worked in places with those kinds of rules I can tell you most of those passwords is written down. At one government shop we did an audit and found the longer and and better a password is (and the faster it expires), the more likely users will write it down. Not only that, 70% of them put the written down password in their top right desk drawer.

We also found a large percentage of our fancy two person authentication safes had both combinations written somewhere on the signout sheet.

You can't make peoples' lives too difficult with security directives. They'll start to ignore you no matter how much you threaten them.
We aren't planning to launch on HN until monday... though I'm guessing this far down the thread we won't get a huge spike in traffic.

> Can they please figure out which bacteria are actually important and then I will take that? Instead of eating actual shit. Thanks.

That's exactly what my co-founder and I are doing :) http://www.generalbiotics.com/probiotics
ping mit.edu | sed -u 's/.*/ping pong/' | espeak

is even funnier...
Sounds like a great reason for an 18 month prison sentence to me. 24 years? None of your bullet points involve pointing guns at people, destroying property, menacing society, etc etc.
The future of Machine Learning – Mattermark is hiring
Hear – An app that lets you anonymously talk to people and eavesdrop on talkers
Clear patterns did arise when the Human Microbiome project did this :)

http://academy.asm.org/images/stories/documents/FAQ_Human_Mi...

That represents the consensus view (ie no exotic theories). The really good stuff starts on page 10.
> For the few passwords they do need to memorize, you should focus on making them dictionary-attack resistant, not just strong from an information theory perspective.

Information theory is exactly how you measure attack resistance (dictionary- and otherwise). The entropy measure in the XKCD comic already takes into account dictionary attacks. That's the point.
Yes, there are laws against activities that are prohibited. These include laws against the distribution of heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana. The government established his knowing conspiracy to distribute these substances, and he was convicted! The system seems to have worked here.

Certainly, he wouldn't be spending 24 years in jail if he had played ball with the DEA. Instead, he decided that his criminal co-conspirators were dangerous enough that he shouldn't play ball and instead risk jail time.

ADDED: To elaborate, conspiring to commit a crime is itself a crime, and has been for a long time in the U.S. There's no need to worry about ex-post facto laws, as the parent claims. You can participate in the commission of a crime doing any number of normally legal activities, such as driving (e.g. driving a getaway car). Your intent to commit a crime is what matters. The prosecution established that Mr. Anaya knowingly assisted the drug smuggling operation in concealing its shipments, hence the conspiracy conviction.

In addition, the physical location of Mr. Anaya isn't relevant to his prosecution in Kansas. He was prosecuted in Kansas because the criminal conspiracy involved transporting drugs into the state, using his modded cars.
The question is, why does "#gamergate" get the blame for this? This trend of vilifying any group one disagrees with based on the actions of individuals with no indication they are even connected to the group is pretty disturbing. Remember when Jack Thompson got death threats? Remember how it was not acceptable to pretend "gamers" were at fault for that, but rather the individual people committing those crimes were at fault for their own behavior?
I keep getting downvoted for no obvious reason.
Rabies is horrible and obvious. This is mild and subtle. It is not more extreme then most of the random things in your environment that modify your behaviour.
I was there as well this morning, and this is correct.

Ron C. added: "People in their 20s are the good pickers," and said he wants his investment team at SV Angel to recruit younger folks to join them by the time they hit 30 years old. He said that older and more experienced investors are better at giving advice to the companies they fund.

In other words, the "age bigot" quip refers to the people picking the investments, not the people receiving investments. I don't know what Ron C's views are about younger vs. older founders, and as far as I recall he didn't make them apparent today.
I sold a boat once to a guy for $3k. He paid me in cash. Small bills. Is it my business where he got that money from? I counted the money and moved on. He ran a pizza shop or something, I'm not an idiot, I'm pretty sure he was skimming money off somewhere to avoid paying all of his taxes. Am I now responsible for that? Is it my job to call the IRS and say 'hey, this guy just showed up my house with a suitcase full of 5s, 10s, 20s, and bought a boat from me, which no sane person would do unless they were pocketing cash to avoid paying taxes'. I don't think it is.
American Nobel Prize winner stopped and questioned by the TSA over prize
Computer Science vs. Applied Math?
Hi, I'm currently a computer science student in my third year. I'm thinking about switching to applied math since I've ended up more interested in math, but I'm not sure whether this will limit my opportunities in the software industry.

I've taken almost all of the computer science classes for the major and have a good deal of programming experience. Would I have any trouble getting hired by large companies / getting past HR because I have an applied math degree instead of a computer science degree?

Also, if I decide to stay with the computer science major, how difficult would it be to get into grad school for applied math? I know that's a fairly general question, but any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks.
Why would you go on antibiotics on vacation if you aren't sick?