skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The speed with which the news is published, retracted, updated, edited, syndicated, these days is having interesting effects on other industries.

One example is the algo trading systems going off strat due to a news posting, which may then get revised a short while later, but by then it can be too late, the portfolio is already affected.

Another industry affected is the research, advisory and consulting houses. Clients pay them for a reasonably constructed set of arguments and viewpoints, but fast news means the client can in some occasions validate or invalidate those paid for opinions in almost real-time, potentially lowering the value.

One day, maybe we will have a slow news movement.
If that's really what you think, you have sooo not any clue about what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is much faster and much cheaper than the current financial system. How can you say nobody needs it?
Ask HN: Image (ddrescue / dd / Ghost) windows phone 8X?
Hi,

Is there ANY way to get the internal phone storage as a block device so it can be imaged (dd / ddrescued / Ghost)?
It's an HTC windows phone 8X, internal storage only ( i.e.: without an external sdcard).

use case:

-Restore deleted files

-Restore/fix a corrupt file system & get back files after a crash

-Full system backup for quick restore w/o re-installing, updates all over again

[No problem to root the phone or disassemble and directly connect to the chip]

Thanks!
The Value of Perspectives
...

It takes days to send money with SWIFT and the costs are much higher. Bitcoin is a superior technology that provides substantial benefits to banks. That's why the 3 biggest banks in the Netherlands are seriously looking at using Bitcoin for their payments.
"Completely separate companies" is overstating it a bit. Operationally separate business units of the same company might be closer to the mark. Their "About" page doesn't even try to describe them independently, saying only that "Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation." And the footer links directly to sony.com.
Could someone explain why all of the = signs have 3D after them?

$x =3D ...
Popular ICEs for mobile hybrid app development
Even though I am a massive supporter and advocate of whistle-blowing and leaking (in the public interest), the state of a lot of the journalism around this is appalling - esp the Gawker article. (Though the Wired one is pretty responsible in fairness.)

Unless Sony has shown to be doing something malicious (which I don't think it has - other than some horrific Adam Sandler movies recently), then the angle of mining the data just to create click-bait headlines is particularly infuriating.

Yes, it is right to report such a large cyber intrusion in the public interest, especially if people's data has been taken (and Sony already had this problem occur before - so it is worth pointing out that they had a chance to tighten up security) but trawling through the internal data of an innocent private company and exposing it online, just to gossip, is particularly poor journalism. Having worked with a lot of media, you can be sure they rightly wouldn't be too happy if people did that to them - just for kicks.
Russian Hackers Identified as Most Skilled by UK Counterparts
In theory, the same should be possible with IR light instead of the visible one. Many (all?) digital cameras are infrared-sensitive, which is easy to test by just pointing a TV remote at a camera and pressing a button. So one can simply do a morse-ish code in IR and then have an app parse it out.
It's called 'cognitive dissonance': when two 'cognitions' (ideas, or feelings, or facts) contradict (are in 'dissonance'), we feel uneasy, so we resolve the situation by suppressing one cognition. To do so, we usually need to resort to convincing ourselves of what are really logical fallacies or sophisms. E.g. cognition 1: I only buy from companies that are good; cognition two: company I bought from did something bad. Fact is I have something from the company, so the only resolution is: accusation against company is false.

An easy way to convince yourself of something that is not rationally true is by evangelism: telling others that yes, this is the best way or greatest thing. The more you repeat it, the more you will believe it yourself.

This phenomenon is especially strong with something that people derive identity from, like religion or (especially for juveniles who have not yet developed a complete identity) psychological feelings of affiliation with subcultures revolving around a certain music genre or goods that project a certain lifestyle to others (designers goods like expensive hand bags, shoes or iPhones).
The link is to a web archive of a a mailing list. I'm guessing the software doesn't properly handle the quoted-printable format of the e-mail.

In QP a = is used as the escape character, and =3D is the escape sequence for =.
The Rise of Cache First
This is not insane enough to be a funny joke, but it is too insane to be real.

So which is it? Joke or real?
I'd still trust sqlite to be more reliable than git. For instance, I've previously had git crash and burn with some extremely obscure error message when disk space ran out.
Live Coverage of the Orion Flight Test
Recho – App Lets You Record Geo-Located Sounds
I started to learn maths again in university. The library was a great place to learn the history of it (I started to get into the history of Encryption)

As for learning how to do stuff with maths. I'm a huge fan of being taught it - then again i'm the sort of learner who really gains when showed how to do something and then left to practice.
No, just the sort of people that are attracted to ruling the world.
Since so many smart people interested in DVCS are looking anyway: anyone knows whats happening to veracity scm? QA has been offline for months.

It was really promising but now seems more or less abandoned.
Ask HN: Self Hosted/Free Tier SaaS Offerings Similar to Statuspage.io?
Hi,

I'm looking for a self-hosted lightweight free web app or a free tier offering similar to statuspage.io. Suggestions? (DigitalOcean has an awfully nice status page also - https://status.digitalocean.com/)

I'm currently using https://github.com/eustasy/uptimerobot-status-page on a free tier AWS account; however, I really need to integrate more than just system uptime.

I'd like to communicate new release notes, known issues, scheduled downtime, show more about the system's health, zendesk integration possibly, etc.
People become really invested in brands and start to associate it with their identity. Apple has an amazingly powerful brand that people who identify with tend to do so very strongly and for reasons they're not quite aware of (think of all those "think different" type ads designed to make each owner of an Apple product feel like a special snowflake).

Attacking the brand feels like attacking them and they get defensive about it.
Yet again, none of what you've written here is actually true. I suggest you peruse the wiki page.
I would say even the food safety analogy is appropriate. Sure, food safety is important; that doesn't mean you have to spend hundreds of millions of pounds in "food safety researchers" who will conduct rigorous scientific experiments to find out the best ways to limit the spread of germs and implement them, an in-house doctor with medical supplies who will treat customers that get food poisoning, etc.

It just means there's a minimum, a bar, that they shouldn't go below. Everyone has a different bar, but most people generally agree on things like don't pick up food off the floor, don't leave things open or out, put things in the right places, make sure you wash your hands, etc. (I am not a food safety expert).

Of course, for a startup, it depends on the product or service they're offering. A startup payment processor should be very security conscious, as the stakes are high. A movie logger should have the bare minimum that all startups should have, i.e. strong encryption, basic security protocols, etc.
Quantum computing is so powerful it takes two years to understand what happened
Windows Store used to be extremely bad pre-Windows 8 - I live in Uruguay and it basically didn't work unless you lied repeatedly about your location, age, etc., and required several factory resets (that was my experience with a Nokia Lumia 800).

It turned me off Windows as a mobile OS, but from what you're saying, it seems they've cleaned up their act now.

Edit: it seems they're still boneheaded with regards to the Xbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8698610
7 Effective Ways to Grow Your Business Using LinkedIn
TLDR; it appears that quantum computing can factor whole classes of numbers at once, not just single numbers. This may lead to even larger blacklists for RSA keys or even cripple RSA altogether.
NasaTV looks like its struggling with load. Use http://www.livestream.com/spaceflightnow for a better stream.
Oh, and earmuffs become EARMUFFS, which is also nice.
try programming a multiplayer game - they encompass all things computer, to a more thorough degree than other things, for example security - anybody can make php site, but can you make on that cant be exploited, the players cant make a cheat and fly around or they players cant keep spawning items they want, its a challenge even for senior devs.

a game has: packet level networking, multiplayer, graphics, direct input from keyboard/mouse, security or anti cheat, copy protection, server/client model, physics or collision detection, video integration or codecs, oop, modules or libs, etc...

and you get to optimize your game (and to see time you optimize, how much each tweak changes the FPS)... it might even be mandatory to optimize your game... whereas with php if its not fast who really will notice. at least thats my thinking -- also its very possible to make a web based game with cakephp+websockets+angular.

what do u think?
I suppose what I meant was that you point out that the coercive behavior of some operators is counter intuitive; ergo type coercion in JS is a mess. I dont think that follows because some operators behave in a coercive fashion more convenient than many other languages.
http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv also seems to be working reasonably well.
“Brendan’s an idiot”
Rails Gemfile Teardown – 2014
That's the third time this has been posted in the last 9 days. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=buttocks#!/story/past_month/0/butt... .
I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but the way he tells it he literally makes up random stuff that looks good and tosses it in there, so I guess his subconscious?
No, that is Apple's fault, they have a list somewhere of all your purchases and all they have to do is make sure you can download them again.
File storage service account scheduled for deletion
Just received this message from copy.com, a file storage service.

===

Hello Salman M,
You are receiving this message because there has not been any activity on your Copy account for the past 60 days. If you would like to continue to use Copy, it is important that you log in within the next 30 days in order to keep your account current. If we don’t hear from you within 30 days, your account will be deactivated and any data that you have stored on our servers will be removed.
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Thank you,
— The Copy Team

===

What use is a 60-day file storage?
Show HN: Sellfy Market – Discover best digital content directly from creators
We get Stacked Memory HMC soon, Its not hard to envision a 2U server with ultra high speed 1TB+ Memory in 2020.
At 10nm, 2U Server would get a Dual 32 Core Xeon.
Everyone would do In Memory database and computing, most of today's scaling problem would be 10x easier then. It would properly take a lot longer to reach the scale problem Google and Twitter once had.

So i dont see distributed computing become the norm either. At least not in the next few years.
Are you on twitter, nicklaf? You sound like someone I'd want to be following.
Zeds reply is interesting as well:

Yep, that feature is awesome. :-) And yes, I think if it you come to me
and say it's all stable now then I'd easily give it a try, but I have to
be practical and get shit done.

In other words, it's nothing personal, just business.
what if we werent evolving... what if we are from space, and we are devolving slowly into apes, that we didnt share the common ancestor, we are just closer to it, and less devolved, and right now there are only 20000 gorillas left, who are really, more devolved humans...

actually why isnt this possible? ive been thinking about this for 2-3 days and i am not sure what the flaw is.

unrelated but also... supposedly there are 8' tall supergiant human skeletons at the smithsonian... hundreds of them.
I am not a sysadmin or network security guy, so I have to ask: how could hackers siphon as much as 100 terabytes of data from Sony's network without being noticed? Shouldn't they have indictors to see their bandwidth was running dry? If so, did the GOP do it slowly to avoid drawing attention?
mattdeboard, the wording on the landing page is fixed, thanks for the feedback.
AppGyver employee here! The QR code sharing is just icing on the cake (tasty icing, but yeah) – the basic functionality of creating a stand-alone IPA/APK and sharing it via TestFlight or TestFairy is still there, just as strong as it is with Cordova/Ionic.

Good point about a whitelabel scanner, though – we'll consider options to make the flow of sharing a prototype/development version even better.
Security is also incredibly, incredibly hard. Google were hacked quite hard as well, remember?
Well, your first line doesn't make sense, since the first two comparisons are using type coercion but the third isn't, so it's like saying `0 == false` but `0 !== false` how can this be? (" " != "" is the same as " " !== "")

The second line at least uses type coercion, but still you are making the wrong assumptions. true could be coerced to many strings 't', '1', 'true', 'yes', 'on', but they chose to use '1' (You may not like it but I think it's a good choice). Infinity on the other hand has not many choices when coercing it to a string I can think of '∞' (which is difficult to type), 'Infinity', and maybe 'Inf.' so I think they made a good choice here.

I'm not saying type coercion in js has no problems, but you said that it's a mess and I just think you chose the wrong examples.
I've worked with several adult learners on this but almost no adult is able to learn math just for fun - unless they have a project or crucial examination to work towards. But, you do have a project. You should use that.

I think you're mistaken that your existing tactics won't get you further. This is how most people learn, by trying things out and building on them until they understand what works and what doesn't - standing on the shoulders of giants.

For practical purposes, your satisfactory solutions are a great piece of learning and the start of your understanding. You're maybe experiencing some discomfort about it, but that's normal. Keep going!

P.S. You said "from first principles", which has a specific meaning in math. It's a kind of philosophical ideal in math that you start from nothing (forget about high school math) and carefully and precisely build the subject of mathematics on top. Some of the answers here picked up on that phrase, but it probably isn't relevant to the other interests you mentioned - to do programming or electronics, you will want to build on the knowledge that you have learned already.
member345, the wording of the landing page is fixed, thanks for your patience. If you're on the mailing list, you'll receive something from us in the next few days.
In manufacturing it is normal to scan 100% of the products with QR codes for quality Assurance. We do, some times we use custom QR codes, with less CRC error checking.

The reason is that computer(connected to) cameras could read them much better than barcodes(which need lasers or high definition cameras). Camera sensors are so cheap now and they let you read 2D instead of 1D, so you could add much more info, with simple hardware(like not having to control the illumination environment so much).
I normally disagree with the excessive snark here but OP is right here.

Things are getting ridiculously complicated.
Steve Jobs could have said whatever he wanted without it being true.
The problem isn't in him saying it, the problem are certain persons who believe it and repeat the nonsense.
You like Apple (or Google). You think they're one of the few companies in the tech sphere who know what they're doing. You feel they respect their customers. You like their leaders. You want the future of tech to be in their hands.

And yet, every time you look online, you see people talking about how horrible they are. People laugh at you for using Apple (or Google) products. A number of non-controversies about the company's products come up every year, just to give angry people another link to click on. And when the real controversies come up, all they do is reinforce people's established opinions. "How just like Apple (or Google). Fuck that company."

You don't want this stuff to become part of your identity, but in the end, your hand is kind of forced.
The No CAPTCHA problem
Oh, another Benedict Evans article with an agenda?
Has anyone tried re-mapping the textures from the sphere amd the object onto a flat surface?
Some bright soul seems to have sailed their boat into the launch area - looks like it is going to be delayed :(
I wrote my thoughts on this protection http://homakov.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-no-captcha-problem.h...
Rovio Employee Negotiations Concluded
Currently the launch is on hold for a couple of reasons:

1. There is (was?) a boat in the exclusion zone

2. The second stage propellant needs more conditioning

The hold was going to end in 2 minutes, they're going to cycle the clock to at least T-9mins when they've decided exactly when T0 is.

EDIT: as of 12:07 GMT we're at T-10mins.
Shell 'art' made 300,000 years before humans evolved
A bunch of Amazon EC2 machines that were also running web sites seemingly part of the Sony Playstation network were seeding the torrent for a day or so after the leak:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/03/strange_things_afoot...
Coffeeroasters are just Crazy Scientists
Median in SQL
Which parts were inaccurate?
The truth at the time was that there was no known hazard to health.
Opera 26 marks return of Opera for Linux
Fixed now, thanks for catching it!
Just your basic IDE. I use Visual Studio and a command line (npm, grunt, bower, ...)
Have you seen Battlestar Galactica?
So, in my eyes, competency in programming isn't about knowing everything there is about programming. It's about finding knowledege. There's no shame in looking for similar problems on stack overflow (so long as you don't directly copy if you're in a place which that sort of things matters) and you slowly start to see patterns in your problems, which makes you look a lot smarter than you actually feel.

Unfortunately, you do need to get good at reading doc and code examples. Thankfully you generally get both, but not always.

Having some SysAdmin knowledge goes a long way; terminal command on Windows, Mac and Linux can be a real life saver when all the fancy GUI stuff fails.

The best way to get experience is to actually get involved in coding something medium to large. Its not easy just to jump in, but a lot of open source projects can have some very easy bugs to fix.

To help with recruitment, I add everything I can to github. Even if its bad code it will at least show improvement if you keep going with it (I still cringe at my first attempt at python).

A friend of mine wrote a book about getting hired (helpfully titled "Getting Hired") in the computing industry, it offers some great advice about the employability side of things: http://books.stuartherbert.com/getting-hired/

Hope that helps!
Obvisly HN reders have zero idea what "apprenticeships" are.
This article only touches lightly on what I believe to be Reddit's primary weakness, namely the inability to elect moderators for various subs.

I hope you don't mean elected by the users, because I can't imagine a more miserable online community than one where moderators are chosen by user vote.
New T-zero time 7:17 EST

UPDATE ( 7:14 ) - Ground wind violation, Launch delayed.

UPDATE ( 7:46 ) - New T-ZERO time 7:55

UPDATE ( 7:53 ) - Launch on hold. Another wind violation.

UPDATE ( 8:15 ) - New T-ZERO time 8:26

UPDATE ( 8:23 ) - Launch on hold again.

UPDATE ( 8:28 ) - Left and center booster anomalies ( Valves sensors, showing not closed ). Quote from official NASA blog : "A fill and drain valve on the rocket did not function correctly. Standing by as rocket and spacecraft are safed."
A lot of things are possible, but not necessarily probable. We have a lot of evidence that we do share common ancestors with apes, and no evidence about coming from space.

> supposedly there are 8' tall supergiant human skeletons at the smithsonian

People also supposedly sees Elvis, faces on Mars and claim stone statues are crying blood tears. Don't pay attention to claims without evidence and scientific verification.
My inner 5 year old can't help but snigger at this headline.
If you want to be more employable then you need to concentrate on the skills that aren't coding[1]. Develop your communication skills, your organisation skills, being a better fit in to company culture (going for drinks with coworkers for example). Faced with two candidates who can both do the job, pretty much every hiring manager will give the job to the person who'll be easy to work with and a better fit in the team than the person who can write fancy code.

[1] Assuming that you can code. If you can take a spec for a site and turn it in to working code then you're already good enough.
AppGyver employee here – any text editor works. We like Atom ourselves. (There's no direct integration with any IDE tool at the moment.)
> An honest question to those of you who feel the urge to defend your favourite company from all accusations, what makes you do so?

Whatever psychological mechanism it is, I'm sure these companies are abusing it (or would if they could).
Works with my stylus on a Surface Pro. Feels way more natural than doing it with a mouse since I'm literally moving a pen in circles.
and do you count the unskilled subcontractors from the building trades - when we had our roof instalation done recently a couple of guys came a few days before and put up the scafolding - are they part of the "solar industry"
It's amazing how many desires of its own our mind has. The desire to be good members of a group. The desire to be consistent, even if it leads us to be consistently wrong. The desire for big explanatory abstractions at the expense of interpreting reality to fit into them.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm struggling with this damned primate brain.
Re/code is claiming that Sony will officially name North Korea as the source of the attack:

http://recode.net/2014/12/03/sony-to-officially-name-north-k...

Sony Pictures will officially name North Korea as the source of a hacking attack that has exposed sensitive files and brought down its corporate network last week, two sources close to the investigation tell Re/code. An announcement could come as soon as today.

Details of what Sony and the security firm Mandiant will announce are still being finalized. But the sources confirm that North Korea will be named as the source of the attack.

A Sony spokeswoman declined to comment on the timing or the news, but said “The investigation continues into this very sophisticated cyber attack.”
No, SWIFT is not slow. I move money from US to EU in 12 hours thru wires and pay a flat fee of $20. SWIFT is fast, it's just a messaging system, but slowness comes from elsewhere, for example, going thru correspondent banks. "Seriously looking" is a gross exaggeration. Banks always look at alternatives, but are very careful about changing their proven methods!
16 companies and their revenue
For a network the size of Sony's, it seems like that volume should be relatively easy to smuggle out. Maybe not all at once, right?