skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slightly over half of inmates in state prisons are there for violent crimes, and only about 8% of federal inmates are in for violent crimes. [1,2]

Disparities in sentencing guidelines between powdered and crack cocaine have had very real effects on sending more poor people to prison:[3]

While a person found with five grams of
crack cocaine faced a five-year mandatory
minimum prison sentence, a person holding
powder cocaine could receive the same
sentence only if he or she held five
hundred grams. Similarly, those carrying ten
grams of crack cocaine faced a ten-year
mandatory sentence, while possession of one
thousand grams of powder cocaine was required
for the same sentence to be imposed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...

[2] http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_federa... (note that this is from 2002)

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act#Sentencing_...
An online multiplayer challenge for anyone interested in A.I. Programming
I wonder which features of Perl 6 would make them want to use it at all.
Chocolatey makes life on Windows much easier. Support the Kickstarter!
Show HN: Share content that people love to read on social media and email
When to fly to get there on time? Six million flights analyzed
Every US flight in 2013 analysed
Logistically non-trivial? Sure. Impossible? I don't think so. For example the IRS manages to do an operation of similar scale every year, in a couple of months.
And this is how Skynet was born.
At the risk of sounding really stupid. Can someone ELI5 what's going on here and why everyone thinks its so amazing?
For people coming from dynamic languages, especially Ruby, it's worth looking at Elixir. Elixir runs on the Beam VM (same as Erlang) and is fully Erlang compatible while fixing many of Erlang's warts, including offering a Ruby-inspired syntax and macros. Here's a fun introduction: http://howistart.org/posts/elixir/1
This is a no-fun zone :) I thought the comment author meant to release (the kraken) out in the open - to test publicly (or at least on LAN) available services. Or am I missing something?
Easy, bud. You're risking seeming uptight ;)

The alien thing is a reference to "Unfunky UFO," by Parliament. I recommend you listen to it. And don't clap on the 2s and 4s.
Yup. I was "senior" in my first job, because I was the only software engineer in the team, still in high school... other guys (designer, manager) were in their 30s/40s. I was hesitant to put Senior for this job in the CV, but this was the truth... :)
Really hope the kickstarter gets funded. Chocolatey is a marvellous tool. It would be great to see it go to the next level.
That should read culturally inferior, not morally.
Every US flight in 2013 analysed
Probably nothing; the momentum is too huge at this point.
In general, I would say impersonating a criminal in order to get into an organization isn't bad. Generic impersonations can also work as well, but it starts to get fuzzy there. Impersonating an NGO could still harm other completely unrelated NGOs. Then you get into impersonating a known entity and you have the potential to cause real damage. I don't want someone impersonating me or my family, that could cause a real, lasting damaging impact even if just by a bad reputation.

I can certainly understand a company having the same thoughts and issues. That's why banks spend money on fighting phishing attacks, someone leveraging a banks branding to hurt consumers hurts the reputation regardless of the bank's lack of involvement.
Its exciting to think we (the USA) might slowly be waking up from the nightmare that is the war on drugs.

Hopeful for continued progress!
Why not just have all URLs be mutable aliases for hashes?
It starts with an invalid .jpg (literally a text file containing "hello"), and by trying over and over, changing random bytes and tracing the execution of the decoder program as it is fed the corrupted input, it will drill deeper and deeper into the program until it has gotten far enough that the input is actually a valid .jpg, without any human input.

Fuzzing like this is a very effective technique for finding (security) bugs in programs that parse input, because you will quickly end up with "impossible" input nobody thought to check for (but is close enough that it won't be rejected outright), and whoops there's your buffer overflow.

In this particular case, the fuzzer is going beyond just throwing random input, as it considers which changes to the input trigger new code paths in the target binary, and therefore should have a higher success rate in triggering bugs compared to just trying random stuff. And don't forget, this will work with any type of program and file type, not just .jpgs and the djpeg binary.
Just a quick note, even though it's been mentioned already: I let people and even encourage them to copy my method and use a similar title to me own Learn X The Hard Way. That is all.
I've come to similar realizations during my programming career, and realized the value of simple mindfulness in all tasks, especially while communicating to those around you. I've found simple mindfulness to be like a superpower in our age of constant notifications and hundreds of tabs. I even try to force myself to be mindful while checking my email by dealing with a single email at a time (thanks to Mailbox app), and consciously delegating emails and tasks to a particular time if I'm unable to deal with it immediately. In my experience, multitasking is a sleep depriving, mentally taxing, stress inducing, debilitating activity which only reduces quality of life from every conceivable angle, and hurts productivity in general.

It all boils down to one thing: have a single conscious intention when doing something. This takes practice, but eventually you can do it for anything and everything. I've found this can even make routines like brushing your teeth very enjoyable and meaningful (see here: http://www.fastcompany.com/3036363/how-to-be-a-success-at-ev...)

Also, there is a clear rebounding shift towards desktop computers being serious work tools, as opposed to consumption devices, which is what mobiles and tablets are for. This is undoubtedly a trend that is already happening, and I think that OS and software designers need to respect that. It is an unfair, deadly sabotage to mobilify desktops while upsetting the highly focused workflows of programmers, graphic designers, architects, writers, business managers, video editors, students and academic researchers just to pander to a generation of ADHD social network addicts (I'm looking at you Windows 8).

As for people arguing that you simply need self-control and discipline, they are kidding themselves. Focus and concentration are extremely delicate things to create and preserve, and it is a designers responsibility to make products easier for their intended purpose, not simply demand "self control" from their users.
Maybe they could take a few hundred millions of that, and their staff on hand, and develop something that is actually useful and monetizable when it becomes obvious Twitter will remain unprofitable.

They probabily will, in fact; the real question imho is whether they try to build it on top of the Twitter serviceor in spite of it.
The equivalent in the Perl world is at https://metacpan.org/recent.
>You can't rent a server from a datacenter using bitcoin

Why not? A google search for this reveals several companies who offer this.
> Check the statistics.

I'd love to. Link?

> Why else did the people under Plan Jefes CONTINUE doing their jobs - kind of for free, really - after the jobguarantee was replaced with an income guarantee?

Again, link? I can't find any reference about that program dropping the work requirement.

> I don't expect a job guarantee to provide only unskilled jobs, either.

I didn't claim that. Finding useful work for skilled laborers is far easier than for unskilled, and unfortunately most of the unemployed are the latter, which is why that is the more difficult problem to solve.

Edit:

From your other comment:

> Yep, the question is whether as a society you'd rather have them building bridges and schools or forming bands and writing (mostly pretty bad) poetry.

Again, bridges and schools are built by skilled laborers. Employing them is not that difficult part of this plan.

Also, its not a direct trade-off. Employing someone for a set salary is far more expensive than just giving them that money. BI becomes an easier sell when you recognize that PWA is both less effective (what about the people who can't work?) and far more expensive.
DHTs are susceptible to Sybil attacks. A key/value store based on a cryptocurrency would be a better approach if you're looking for a decentralized key/value store that guarantees that the data is available.
But, I don't want to do TLS. I'm not in the encryption business. Instead, I just want to send data across the network.

The OS used to do the networking for me. It exposes the BSD sockets API, which is pretty simple and nice but is unfortunately no longer safe to use. Yet, the kernel doesn't offer anything else.

So you're right, but you don't go far enough. It should all be in the kernel. Instead of tls_config_set_cert_file() we should be using setsockopt(2). Until we can, however, we'll have to rely on user-space libraries.
What utter crap to write. Seriously, are you for real ?
Came here to say this. Normal window managers are great for normal computers where you don't know whether it's going to be used to do graphic design, spreadsheets or whatever. But for IT people and especially programmers it is insane not to specialize your machine, to spend half of your mouse gestures on moving windows around, maximizing, minimizing, finding them in the clutter you are producing.
”The kid-gloves approach that the DOJ and the SEC take with Wall Street is as inexplicable as it is indefensible,” says Dennis Kelleher

Well said. Here's hoping this will result in some civil suits against individuals at Citi, if not actual jail time.
Website Streams Camera Footage from Users Who Didn't Change Their Password
Try checking these out:

http://thephpleague.com/

They are very high-quality libraries.
Isn't there a reward for whistle blowing financial crimes?

She already did the leaking to the regulators. The legal system buried it.

So this is more like meta-leaking. The article is her ignoring the US legal system because it's been literally purchased by the banks and lets the billionaires get more billionaire-y while the rest of the world burns.
Or, you could design a product so that it makes it easier for the user to fulfill the intended purpose.
>Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.

This is the just world fallacy. How much people earn isn't analogous to how hard they work, how important their work is or how challenging. It's a product of supply and demand.
Perl 5 is not going away for a long time.
If you find problems in a local Apache, it's a good bet those may also be problems with some remote Apaches somewhere on the Internet.
This is how I understand it:

1) JPEG file structure is complex (much more so than a BMP file for example).
2) Imagine you didn't know what it looked, but had a tool that could "read" them. djpeg in this case
3) What the fuzzer does is "peek" at how the djpeg tool reacts to random "fuzzed" data. It's smart about it, understanding when a bit of data makes the tool do something new (code path)
4) After millions of iterations it "learns" how JPEG file structure works and can generate valid JPEGs.

This might not be very relevant for JPEGs, given that you can just Google their structure. This is cool because it shows how the tool could figure out (or find a weakness in) something where you don't know how it works.
Conceptually the output generation and the trace collection aren't coupled. As long as you can (a) instrument the target to collect traces and (b) programmatically feed it variant inputs, the same technique will work.

(This isn't a new concept, although afl is a particularly tight implementation of it; you can look up the paper for "autodafe" for a (much) earlier version).
This describes a program (afl) which is given another program (djpeg, some kind of JPEG parser - takes arbitrary data and decides if its JPEG or not) to play with.

afl starts feeding it random inputs gradually gaining limited understanding about what it accepts and what it does not.

Eventually, it gathers enough info (based on strace'ing, google it, and its output) to start pulling JPEG images out of thin air like it's nothing.

The catch is, that this afl program learns this all by itself, and it can do so with any other parser program (like ELF parsers, GIF parsers, whatever). It is a general purpose tool.

Also, similar concept can be applied to things like web servers, or any other servers (since they parse what clients send them).
Thanks everyone for your continued interest and support of this project as I work towards completing the second draft!

Unfortunately, it looks like the traffic spike has once again caused my webhost to kill and block the web application's process---so I'm going to have to move over to a better cloud service and an async web-app to better support this level of interest from the community.

I will announce the re-launch of LLTHW through my blog, which is syndicated on Planet Lisp. Until then, I do highly recommend Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, also available online for free at: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
I'm a backer, aren't you?
Within the last year, I think, somebody posted a link on HN to early Facebook code. I hardly glanced at it, but I remember that it looked well-structured and perhaps well-commented.
Here's hoping this will result in some civil suits against individuals at Citi, if not actual jail time.

That's the problem, right? Years of "we're getting to this soon!" "We're on your side!" "We're going to get those bad guys!"

Then, you look back, and 5 years later you see nothing has happened. The "justice" system is lying, running out the clock, and just trying to hope everybody ignores bad people in powerful positions doing bad things without any meaningful, and personal, repercussions.
Launch party will be just you and me :) Thanks for backing!
I can't tell if you're being ironic or not.
In Gnome 3 there's a nice notifications on/off button in the notifications tray. I like manual controls.
Yes, lots and lots and lots of them. Peach is the most popular example.
No such thing. Use a real language.
We're solving some of these issue with Netlify (https://www.netlify.com), since we'll run your Octopress (or Grunt, Middleman, Jekyll, Docpad, etc) builds on our servers when you push to Github.

You'll still want a local Octopress install running when you're really developing, but at least with this setup you don't need anything installed to add new blog posts or edit content.

You can even fix a quick typo from your phone through the Github web UI.
I like that ArangoDB can be extended by micro services. Does this not raise security concerns, because user code is executed on the DB server?
To the Sr dev in texas making 65k you seem underpaid to all the rest in tx. Are you the only employee? I work in DFW and SR's make 90-110k.
Not really, because it depends on collecting traces from the target, and if you can do that you can usually just read the password out of memory.
Show HN: Using React inside Ember.js
Someone other than the current politicians need to be in office for this to result in any serious consequences for the banks. The banks have bought the politicians in the U.S.
Awesome - quite a few HN people in SD. :) Thanks for backing!
$50M is approximately what the prison industry has spent in the past decade in their push to increase jail sentences:

http://www.thenation.com/article/173122/what-does-millions-l...
Awesome Motion Planning
I knew of "dang" but totally mistook it in this context, haha.
I attempted to start a positive comments thread earlier, yours seems to have done far better so I'm going to repost my thoughts here too:

I've requested an invite.

I see it as a replacement for the ditigal photoframe pc I built a few years back out of an old laptop and have in my kitchen. Its running XP with a heap of autoIT scripts I hacked together, controlled by an MCE remote. I use it every day to listen to news headlines and check the weather while making my morning coffee and for streaming jazz while cooking dinner.

I think I'd prefer asking Echo to play these things than going through the hassle of upgrading the photoframe pc from XP.

I'd gain some functions such as easier music streaming, shopping list stuff, etc. I'd lose a few functions; I occassionally use VNC on the photoframe pc to display a recipe or twitch stream. I can do the recipe on my phone and put the twitch stream on my TV and turn it so I can see it from the kitchen.
BIO is just a thin, generic interface for reading bytes. If you want to use std::string, you can easily write an adapter.
I agree that computers are designed for open-ended productivity, but multitasking is simply dead-ended productivity. Because of the way our brains work, it serves no purpose at all, and stifles any kind of serious work. Unless your purpose is to mindlessly surf through a cesspool of information.
See also: Microsoft Code Digger [1], which generates inputs using symbolic execution for .net code, and EvoSuite, which uses a genetic algorithm to do the same for Java [2].

[1] : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nikolait/archive/2013/04/23/introduc...

[2] : http://www.evosuite.org
For people on OS X who want to give tiling window managers a try but don't want to switch to Linux/Xmonad: I've been using Amethyst[1] and throughly enjoying it.

It's pretty clearly still early on in its development, but I've been enjoying pretty substantial productivity gains from using it.

[1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
"the idea that Mexico would become a peaceful _utopia_ overnight if only you could buy crystal meth" - Mike_hearn

Mike didn't just shift the goal post, he packed it up, shipped it via fedex, and had it smelted.
First time i've heard about ArangoDB ,and it looks quite interesting.

When did the project start?

Could the Foxx thing be an independent application ?
I completely agree. On one hand, it's absolute insanity... but then if you think about how we (I) learned systems, it was by exploration. I typed things in that little back box called "terminal"... sometimes I broke things, then I would search on the Internet for a solution... I would try that, usually breaking things further. But ultimately it was a great learning process.

I've known Charlie and the Penn Manor Technology team for about two years now, and what they are doing is absolutely fantastic. I think they need more support from the software engineering disciplines.
The solution in most of these cases is "handcuff one of the bastards publicly; then the people put down their pitchforks and forget about all the accomplices".

Don't believe me? Look up how many people went to jail for:

* Tycho

* Global Crossing

* Enron

* HealthSouth

* Madoff

* the S&L Scandals of the late 80's

* Washington Mutual
This is likely an erroneous argument with little evidence to support it. Violence between street dealers and drug consumptors is unlikely to be the largest source of drug related violence. After all, if the street dealers started killing their custies than no one would buy from them. It's bad for business.

Instead, most heinous drug violence happens between cartels and gangs at the levels of production and [major] distribution [pipelines]. These darknet markets are usually filled with well off youth buying drugs for themselves and their buddies who alternatively would have been unable to source the drugs or would have texted their neighborhood dealer to meetup in a McDonalds parking lot.
> Koch Industries recently gave a grant “of significant six figures” to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to support the defense of indigents

A small fig leaf compared to the Koch budget, but interesting.
there's definitely a need to reduce and mitigate orbital debris, but the monetization is polarized to NASA, ESA, SpaceX, and possibly Bigelow Aerospace when they get their structures operational and I think YC will want something that's not restricted to a few agencies and space companies. I'm jus tthikning out loud however
Why do we need modules at all?
Spot on! And also more important
You're right. I'm wrong. I retract that part of my comment and apologize.
Playbook to Build Apps with PhoneGap and Famo.us
The fact that this has been going on sickens me. The entire US infrastructure is corrupt (actually probably the entire world's infrastructure). There was the article a few weeks ago about how the Federal Reserve was in bed with the likes of Goldman Sachs, and a whistleblower came out and still nothing was done.

But what do we do as a generation of people that don't want this? The closest thing to come was Occupy Wall Street, but that fizzled out. Is there a way to organize ourselves and vote in blocks to get rid of these current politicians and elect a new generation that hopefully isn't as corrupt? Yes, I know, it's a pipe dream.
Etcd-ca: Golang certificate manager
I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the DoJ's argument regarding criminal convictions of the banks. The concept of corporate criminal conduct is somewhat problematic, and the collateral consequences of conviction can be dire for innocent third parties.

But there is absolutely no justification for their sheer and utter lack of diligence in pursuing criminal cases against individuals. Holder, Breuer, Bharara and those who worked with them ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Ask HN: Ad Networks that support https?
I am trying to find an ad network that will work for https pages but I can't seem to find any reputable networks.

Right now I use AdSense and taboola, but I would like another full featured CPM ad network for standard size banner ads.

Any ideas?
Wow, I wish I lived in a world where 'wrong' was well defined and eternally, universally recognised.

But I don't.

Neither do you.
Not that routinely... Guns have developed a reputation for either being scams or the seller getting busted routinely (almost all the BMR busts were related either to poison or guns), never sell well (which is why SR1 shut down its Armory section after a few months - no sales), and around half the markets outright ban sales of them (see my census http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20survival#data ).
It is obvious but completely ignores my question. As an aside, I can't think of many governments that would willingly divest themselves of access to tax revenue/citizens.
Anyone have any suggestions for how to get a similar setup on OSX?
The Dot-Com Kids: They Are Young and Wealthy (2000)
Unfortunately, we can't do anything to fix the past. It is clear that there was a cover up. The number of banking execs that have gone to jail can be rounded down to zero.

I wish our politicians / president would grow a pair and do what is best for the American public and break up the big banks and remove them from political donations / lobbying.
Precisely. We've seen the IRS, OSHA, BATF, and other 3-letter agencies turn into the play-toys of the powerful (to say nothing of militarized police and swatting). It's no longer unreasonable to think the FBI could be used for political shenanigans (and depending on how you read history, that's part of the FBI's origin anyway).

It's interesting, after all, that Catherine Engelbrecht never had the trouble she found herself in until she got involved in politics. (and it's also interesting that the 7 of Lois Lerner's hard-drives under Congressional subpoena could have magically failed simultaneously) Not that it's one-sided, either: power corrupts, and I'm suspicious of both parties (and no, the answer isn't: well let's just make sure we always keep the other party out of power).

The FBI may not want to silence potential leakers, but the FBI answers to someone who may think differently, depending on how the political winds blow.