skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, it's not just the octave. The interval between a C and a C is a unison. The interval between a C and a D is a second. Two octaves are a fifteenth (not a sixteenth). The entire thing is one-indexed.

It's perhaps better to think of it as the number of notes you have to count before you reach the second note, starting with the first. If you start with C, you have to count one note before you get to that same C. You have to count 8 before you get to the second C, and 15 before you get to the third.
Humans being the error-prone creatures we are, I wonder how it could work better to a longer word-based code, but allow for certain kinds of errors: for example, 1) word order doesn't matter, 2) it tries to correct a word not in the built-in word list to the "closest" word in it, 3) maybe you only need, say, seven of the eight words to be right to get in (then it might remind you of the real code). You can do a little calculation to see how many words you need to get to the desired number of bits then.

Pretty different from passwords as we know them (#3 means you can't simply store a bcrypt/scrypt'd code--you could build something complicated tricks to square "allow one word wrong" with not storing plain PWs: each word is 10 bits and what you tell the user is really their secret code + a parity/ECC word, and correction happens before a convnetional password check--that rabbit hole goes deep, though.) But if all this gets average folks remembering more entropy than before, that makes it kind of interesting.

On the study (which I admit just skimming), survey in 2010 suggested about half of Mechanical Turk users were located in the US (http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographi... who learned English at school would probably do better at memorizing a password in their native language. (I studied French many years in school, but I doubt I'd memorize a set of random French words as easily as English words.)
> The jump from recidivism rates to characterizing public safety is a giant flying leap out into a chasm.

It's a direct corollary to the argument that not convicting them would harm public safety. The assumption made by both is that commission of crimes harms public safety. If that assumption is false then why do we even care about punishing those crimes at all? If they're not hurting anybody then there is no harm in letting them keep doing it and we should just repeal those laws rather than worrying about how well they're enforced.

> That there are places with lesser sentences and lower crime is a good data point for establishing that a society need not rely on imprisonment, but it actually isn't instructive as to the effectiveness of imprisonment in other societies.

The thing about facts is that they're all probabilistic. Nobody knows anything 100%. This is true even in hard sciences but it's especially true in social science. If you want to make the argument that then facts don't actually exist, fine. People are still going to call things facts when they're only mostly sure instead of exactly 100%. And sure, better data is always great. Let's commission some new research. But meanwhile you still have to work with what you have rather than what you would like to have.

> Also, note I said "completely disconnected"

But you're not providing any evidence for your position. Crime rates have gone down everywhere regardless of the presence of "tough on crime" policies. The recidivism rate is so abominable that doing nothing instead would at worst not significantly affect it (because it can't get much worse) and with nontrivial probability would reduce it.

> I'm at least somewhat aware of the speculation and research into lead and criminality (my favorite question is how the lead effect might compare to the Sesame Street effect)

The article goes into this. Lead was banned in different localities and countries at different times and the crime rates in each place matches the lead level in that place in the preceding decades better than it matches anything else proposed as an alternative.

> An alternate explanation of the trend you speak of in your last paragraph is that stricter enforcement has made criminality less attractive

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/crimestats

The clearance rate has been essentially unchanged since 1995 (the oldest date available). Moreover, a primary cause of the recent reduction in prison population has been imposing shorter sentences. Meanwhile the crime rate continues to fall.
Check ProductHunt, on the search bar just type in GIF. You'll get the entire list of GIF products. Hope you find one suitable for your needs.
> Receiving information first was so valuable that some speculators, at times in cahoots with telegraph operators, were willing to cut the telegraph wire after the news had been received!

How nice to learn that scorching the earth, and destroying [anything of] value to create wealth has such a well-established pedigree and history.

One interesting idea from the the "Flash Boys" discussion comes to mind. What would happen if trade executions happened ONLY in timed batches? When the exchange first opens for the day, pull a random number from RNG that provides values from a power distribution. The number will be the delay until the next execution time. Queue executions, and at the given time process them with the standard best-price execution algorithm. (Yes, some of the queued executions would be voided because the stocks on offer had been matched already at a lower price.) Then pull the next random execution delay. Rinse and repeat until stock exchange closes for the day.

I'd love to see how that would affect the HFT front-runners.

(Disclosure: I work for a betting exchange. I have a decent understanding how trading exchanges operate under the hood.)
I still run Tiger on a PowerBook G4.
I first heard about this recently listening to Dan Carlin explain that since the Mongol armies were all calvaly, they could use this technique and eliminate the need for supply lines, making them super mobile and self-sufficient.
Black pudding and fried egg rolls are my fuel for skiing in Scotland... :-)
Gamergate Shows Tech Needs Far Better Algorithms
In Norway we also eat blood sausage (blodpølse), blood pudding (blodpudding) and blood potato dumplings (blodkomle)[1]

[1]: http://www.haaland-kjott.no/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/NRK35...
Lost Cosmonaut Breaks Silence About UFO's – Contact
QoS Considerations for Carrier Grade Clouds: Location, Location, Location
A window.fetch JavaScript polyfill
“But think about the scenario of a loan officer talking to a prospective client. To software people, that looks like voodoo. The idea that you can sit across the table from somebody and get a read on their character is just nonsense."

This coming a Venture Capitalist...
It's a good advertisement for Marc and it serves a marketing purpose of continuing to get him media exposure which is good and keeps him on the radar of entrepreneurs and other VC's and burnishes his image more in the media. So he ends up getting more exposure.

Business wise of course he doesn't have to be right all the time obviously only right enough to have some big scores. Besides people rarely do follow ups detailing the missed predictions and even if they did they would mention the successes that made up for the failures and how that's kind of the VC model.
Sam Altman: Most of the time you get paid in proportion to the value you create
This functions very well! Thanks for the suggestion, looking for something like this that can save locally
These are both excellent points. I've done a bit more digging, and updated the article to reflect them. Thanks!
Yep, that's it!

I suppose it is more of a publication, but I turn each interview into a podcast as well.
Great story, definitely interesting -- as a black guy that has been to japan, I'm surprised I've never heard this story, and it seems super probable (the reactions/circumstances)
He's simply trying to talk "up" bitcoin, builds a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If bitcoin takes off some day, Marc was the guy.
One only need to re-implement the interfaces actually used by the DEs. IIRC GNOME had a page listing those interfaces on their wiki and systemd has remarkably good documentation about its public interfaces.

Also consider that until now many of the things you listed were done by shell scripts that every distro reimplemented differently, so if you're happy with such ugliness you can pick it up as-is. ;)
Thank you for pointing out that there's a dead comment worth reading. I turned showdead on, and it absolutely was.

I just want to restate what jen_h said: Everyone should turn on showdead and read that comment. In addition to the comment being comprehensive, they also claim to have worked for the NSA. If that's true, then they have a unique and important perspective on this issue.
> Most consumer transactions are weighted with a 3 percent fee.

This is the single most fundamental misunderstanding in the bitcoin camp.

First of all it is only in some countries like the U.S. where fees are in the 2-3% range. Others have regulated that fee away already. In fact, the U.S. just recently regulated debit card interchange down to 0.05% + 21 cents.[1]

Second -- and this is really important -- most of that fee goes back to the consumer in the form of reward programs. That's primarily what they are funding: 1-2% cash back programs, free travel, etc. Not the "100,000 people and 1970s mainframe computers" that Marc describes.

So, the opportunity to lower fees (1) doesn't exist in many places, and (2) where it exists it consists of taking value away from consumers.

So no rational consumer will voluntarily transition over to a lower-benefit instrument. If U.S. merchants really wanted to experiment with the future of "lower fees", just try accepting debit cards only (not credit cards). See how consumer like it. Great for merchants, not so much for customers who want their cashback programs.

Even where lower fees have been forced through regulations (Australia), it did not result in a general 2-3% reduction in consumer prices. Guess what, merchants kept that margin.[2] This is why big merchants like Walmart are resisting Apple Pay in a futile effort to push their own CurrentC, a new instrument that bypasses card networks and deducts directly from your checking account. But guess what: it takes value away from consumers. Exactly the same problem with bitcoin for consumer payments.

This is why it will have an extremely tough time replacing credit cards -- and that's before we even get to the matter of consumer protections. You need a trusted intermediary to be able to enforce chargebacks, which protect consumers against ripoffs. You can't do it with insurance alone; you have to be able to reverse transactions. So by the time you add intermediaries back in, Bitcoin is just another centralized card network with an exotic protocol for moving money. It's the next Discover card, sans card.

There may be more specific niches where bitcoin is useful. But this notion that bitcoin will save us all 3% on purchases is just plain uninformed. And unfortunately it's at the foundation of so much of the investment in this area.

[1] http://www.heartlandpaymentsystems.com/Durbin/What-is-the-du...

[2] https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/assets/Hot-Tu...

"Another predictable result is the absence of evidence that consumer prices have fallen as a result of lower merchant discounts. This is not surprising because the cost savings are too small to be measurable with any degree of confidence. However, based on the economics literature on pass- through effects, we believe that it is highly unlikely that consumers have received any significant benefit over the period of time considered given the likely sticky prices and high concentration in the Australian retail sector."
Turn Your Smartphone into a Cosmic Ray Detector
Agree "this coming from a VC" but at scale it makes more sense to have something like a community rating system (or algorithm) rather than having to make individual decisions face to face. Doesn't mean mistakes can't be made (by either the loan officer or the community or that it can't be gamed but it definitely provides a benefit)

Marc isn't investment in a large number (relatively) of entrepreneurs. He can afford to take the time to incorporate "across the table" into his decision making process.

(If I've misunderstood your point please let me know..)
Getting better to code from a Beach – Learning Programme Hackership goes on tour
For me, 70kb on average looks too much to me if I am basing on Gmail’s statistics. Each page of Gmail is 50 individual email threads (that is, not counting the number of replies).

I have a total of 12,592 pages and according to Gmail's usage report, 2GB belongs to Gmail and 1.47GB belongs to Google Drive and Photos. So 2GB/(5012592) is about 3KB per thread?

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Let alone the amount of attachments (some are a couple MB).

And Google said "Attachments sent and received in Gmail as well as your email messages use your storage.” [1]

[1]: https://www.google.com/settings/u/1/storage?hl=en

So this number Gmail is showing would be the compressed storage space taken on their side?
"Clan accrue CIA marine slide + Matte Virgil auric libido booby"

>128 bits of security (10 diceware words) not terribly difficult to memorize, easy to type. The + is just to make memorization easier, same with the capitalization. They can't hurt the entropy, and make it easier to remember.

Pretty much all of my passwords that I can't store in a password safe (encrypted file) are of this sort. That's not a ton, but memorizing 5-10 10-word phrases is pretty easy. If you can memorize Jabberwocky, this sort of thing is easy.
Glad to help. Seems simple enough that people might think of it.
This is a great reminder for me to follow through on making the recipe for chocolate blood ice cream from Jennifer Lagan's book Odd Bits[0]. I already checked with a local butcher and got the details about sourcing blood from their partner abattoir. If anyone has attempted this before and cares to offer extra tips, I'd be grateful!

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Odd-Bits-Cook-Rest-Animal/dp/158008334...
Or you could use the method of loci and learn a 10 character password in 5 minutes. I wrote a simple program which creates a random password and suggests keyword images...
iOS 8.1 release statusiPhone jailbreak
Startups that get big have more than one founder.

That's awfully shortsighted. What about Bezos and Amazon?
Forget about NSA, allowing government officials with secret sauce information to cash in and come back peddling some other wares is a violation if the public trust and erodes public confidence in government. Government employees and military officers are compensated well and have generous job security that nobody else has... That's why they are supposed to be held to a higher ethical standard.

It's now almost an assumption that some General or Commissioner is spending the last years if their career sucking up to various third parties (at taxpayer expense) to ease the transition into private sector life. That wasn't the case decades ago.

The NSA case is more egregious because these folks are literally reading our mail. There can be no tolerance for even the appearance of ethical lapse of impropriety. Every aspect of these peoples professional lives are secret -- how can the public or US attorney be assured that the country isn't being sold out to enrich individual aspirations and wallets?
You learn something new every day. I've only ever heard the term used to refer to machine-level virtualization. Thanks for the information.
Gene Pool Engineering For Entrepreneurs [pdf]
Definitely agree. I'd love to see this integrated into Sendy, it would completely idiot proof the process.
Unfortunately thalmic labs is very developer unfriendly, so while the Myo still might have potential, working with the closed source code makes it very difficult to expand the functionality, especially in linux. I suspect it's just another expensive paper weight.
I'm working on the necessary sslsplit support here: https://github.com/fix-macosx/sslsplit

I've just about wrapped up support for correlating connections with the local responsible program (see branch macosx-process-info); I also need to put some thought into how to handle non-TCP traffic.

I'll be posting Yosemite setup instructions later today; my plan is to collect a corpus of data from a default installation. One thing I could really use help with is providing a web-based visualization of that data.
I disagree.

It seems to me like english is "more perfect" if you are trying to build a straightforward model of a language like a software developer might.

The article suggests that there are some convoluted rules in other languages which make it much more difficult to model the language.
> most of that fee goes back to the consumer in the form of reward programs.

I don't really buy this. Why not just not have the fees and let prices be lower so that consumers have more cash? Cash is always better.

I assume most people never take advantage of most of their points, essentially sacrificing that 1-2% to the credit card processor. The processor knows this, which is why they do it.
It's called "boudin noir" in France, it's quite popular, cheap and very very delicious.

I wonder what the author means when he says "sometime in recent history, we forgot how to use blood". Who's we?
The government wants to study ‘social pollution’ on Twitter
The short answer - it's not accurate or reliable enough to do anything useful. It is just an expensive toy and worse, artificially difficult to hack. (the raw data is restricted, even to developers)
Server running with potatoes
I haven't seen any evidence that he's particularly smart. The guy had an early success that convinced him he can see head and shoulders above others. This turned him into a write-only visionary. Like many such people, he's entertaining to read because of the strength of his convictions, but it's probably a bad idea to take him too seriously.
On linux, pthread_mutex_init can fail and return ENOMEM.
Bypass doulCi lock iOS 8.0.2 and iOS 8.1 version Just release
How is his a hardware platform?
I wouldn't say floppy ears and mottled fur are baby-like.
Your last point is true, also rewards and loyalty programs have a lot of influence over people. It's similar to how gamification works in games like FarmVille. People get really into it and want to get more airline miles, level up, etc.
An Author Confronts Her Number One Online Critic
Either way, loan officers do not talk to clients much any more, it has all been automated. "Computer says no" etc.
Personally, I think of it as giving your employer "first dibs."

"Hey, I've decided that I'm now worth $X. Since you've already hired me and it's less hassle to stay than to change jobs, I'm giving you the opportunity to meet my price before I look elsewhere."

Assuming that you didn't just pull $X out of your ass, the company can then make its decision accordingly. But if you really think you're worth $X, I find it strange that you would get declined by the company and then say, "...oh. Well, I guess I'm not worth $X, then. Never mind." At the very least, you'd be looking at other companies that are willing to meet your price. After all, you got your number from somewhere, right?
Korea has a version of black pudding as well, it's called soondae. Pig's blood, vermicelli noodles and spices encased in pig intestine. Pretty tasty.
What we give away when we log on to a public Wi-Fi network
1 and 2 are easy. Sort the words and use levenshtein distance to correct unrecognized words to the nearest valid word, prior to doing the password hashing. 3 is slightly more difficult; for 7-of-8 you'd have to store 9 hashes, one for the full list, and 8 more hashes resulting from removing one of the 8 words. What you gain in user friendliness costs you since you have to store several times the hashes, and you have to run multiple hash computations for each attempted login.

It should be noted that 1 and 3 both reduce entropy significantly.

A system that lets users omit one of the words in their passphrase will end up with users omitting one of the words all the time (why would you type more than you have to, particularly for passphrases of 20-40 characters?); the effective security of an 8 word passphrase with that system is worse than if it was a 7 word passphrase with no leeway for forgetting words. With a strict comparison but a passphrase of one less word, attacker then has to guess the right 7 words. By allowing a word to be forgotten, the attacker can guess any of 8 different 7-word passphrases and get in.

Any system that reminds you of the full passphrase has to store the passphrase unhashed (or equivalent, like, with each sub-hash, storing a hint for the missing word), which is unacceptable.
I based my estimates on the best numbers I could find. That said, my spam numbers were in fact incorrect (spam is small and gets deleted). Accounting for that, people save an average of a year's worth of email.

If you look at the growth in email users over time (~6%/year), most accounts are probably > 1 year old. I'd assume the disparity comes from people deleting messages.
Thank you, I will check your rates next time I need to renew my certs for sure!
>Why not just not have the fees and let prices be lower so that consumers have more cash?

For the same reasons that coupons are immensely popular. You can target consumers who have the greatest price elasticity, and take advantage of those with the lowest.
Ok, the exclamation mark now works on reddit too:

http://social.gnod.com/reddit:IkmoIkmo!
Prospector: Python Static Analysis for Humans
Besides length restrictions, why not just use the mnemonic as the password? It's no harder to memorize and, IMO, easier to type.
In the UK it's not uncommon with fried breakfasts, but it's called "Black pudding".
What about consumers that don't take advantage of reward programs? Does it make sense to have an infrastructure doing round trips on value for everyone when not everyone wants it? Are there not considerable inefficiencies in maintaining reward programs over just having straight forward transactions? Could we not build more efficient and automated reward programs into cryptocurrencies for those that want it?
Doctors Tell All, and It’s Bad
Michael Jordan and LeBron James are associated with basketball. Referring to sneakers as "tennis shoes" suggests perhaps you are not in a targeted segment of the market.
> Would you help me understand why this isn't closer to the security of a random 6 character password?

There are about 80 characters you can type, so a 6 character secret has 262,144,000,000 permutations (80^6) which is about 38 bits (2^38 is 274,877,906,944). 2^60 is much larger: 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 and its sixth root is 1024. So 1,024 memorable "characters" are needed.

There are about 4000 unique word-based three letter prefixes:

$ cut -c 1-3 /usr/share/dict/words | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | uniq | wc -l
4051

So 1,024 of those being associated with memorable words seems credible.
It's probably not very convincing as an argument

It really isn't, sorry. Having to share what should be private personal details with my employer and coworkers in order to get fair compensation is unreasonable. Plus as others have mentioned it's a potential gold mine for lawyers.
You've been able to BYOD on GSM networks (ATT / T-Mo) for quite some time, at least since 2009-2010 that I know of.
Something can be both necessary and the wrong implementation. Is it necessary for NSA to do everything it is doing?

Also, IronNet intends to charge clients $1 million per month according to another article.

My position is that, if someone is in charge of defending America, then their first impulse shouldn't be to start a private company to charge clients millions of dollars to protect them from hackers. If Alexander has truly invented something so revolutionary and also completely unrelated to his work at NSA, then why doesn't he give to NSA or some other agency to help protect us all?

Why? Because this is the same old story of government->corporation=get rich.