skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Siliconian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in wireless gold,
Crying Media Company Vertically Integrated!
As all before them they willfully extirpated:
The Back of the Book and the Front and the Middle,
Until all that was left was digital piddle,
And Thought and Word lay dead and cold."

This poem really is really depressing. I hope it's not our
future?

I'll get down voted, or Hell flamed(I really hate this cliched way of speaking), but here goes; I'm all for
progress, but I don't want to dumb down journalism so
it fit's in a digital format. After reading that poem I
started to think about the book A Brave New World, and
odly enough I looked up how old someone needs to be if
they want to be a US President--yea--I forgot.

One other thing has been on my mind after reading this article, and reading a lot if comments on HN over the years.
I'll paraphrase because I'm old and lazy, 'Apple didn't break the law. They were required to maximize shareholders
profits. I don't see a problem?' I've seen this line of thinking a lot. In my world, my father taught me, "Just
because it's legal son--doesn't make it right!"

Maybe it's just me, but being Editor of a magazine like the
New Republic requires a very special person--a little age
and wisdom(not out of a college text book) seems like it
would go a long way? Along with a long apprentiship that
many Journalists were once required to endure?

Don't get me wrong, I value youth and believe a lot of entrenched men of authority should be put out to pasture, but when it to situations like what transpired at the
New Republic--my butt twitches. I picture the new editor sending back stories with TLDR. Ugh-
This was in a comprehensive i.e. a bog standard school and was in the middle i.e. vocational stream - possibly the approach of having specialisation at the middle and upper school works better for feeding children into UNI/Vocational track.
>As for your second point, I find it somewhat paradoxical, I assume you would agree with me that computers are becoming more and more common (including smart phones). And yet you think that the knowledge _about_ computers will decrease?

He's speaking of desktop computers, so not including "smartphones".

A smartphone users doesn't need to have 1/10 the knowledge about OSes and desktop computing a Windows/OSX/Linux users needs.
>This is why I love the idea of a Chromebook-like device that essentially has a browser as an OS. You have the security features of the browser model without the additional "security" restrictions of "we won't let you install any app that [doesn't look the way we say it should look | competes with one of our apps | doesn't support our agenda | hasn't paid us to regulate it | etc.]".

Err, for starters you can't install any app that's not web based with such a model.
That's unexpected. Why would it behave that way?

The animations I've seen that purport to show the general public how DNA replication works indicate that it is a sequential process. The DNA is split into two strands, kind of like a zipper unzipping, and then bases are added to the two strands to form the two new complete DNA molecules. One strand (the leading strand) has the new bases added one after the other in the same direction. The other strand (the lagging strand) has them added in short called Okazaki fragments.

Errors on the leading strand should be independent and occur at a constant rate, and so having useless zones should have no effect on the number of errors a given useful zone gets.

The lagging strand is more complicated, because you have at least 3 distinct things going on: finding where to start on Okazaki fragment, filling it in, and recognizing the end. I suppose that allows for a different kind of error on the lagging strand (messing up recognizing the start or end of an Okazaki fragment) that would affect multiple consecutive base pairs. Useless segments would increase the average spacing between useful segments, and so would decrease the chance that a given multi-base error in a useful fragment affects multiple segments.
> After a few months of team work on the same code, one day, somebody got careless with the "x" key in vim and deleted the semicolon after the for.

Not to detract from the subject at hand because you do have a point, but that sort of error is caught by patch reviews. Even on my own projects I review diffs before/after I commit them.
The mantra "inheritance is the root of all evil" starts to bore me. Dot net framework is object oriented and uses inheritance. Java core API / standard lib is object oriented and uses inheritance. Every single iOS framework is object oriented and uses inheritance ( the ones written in Objective C at least). Android api are object oriented and use inheritance.
Even Operating systems have been built with object oriented designs from scratch and ended up working quite well ( BeOS).

So please, next time you say that it's impossible to build anything big and reliable with this design because YOU or people you know ended up in a mess, think again whether the problem really comes from the language, or the people.
Note that when they talk about the "National Security Authority" (which only Google translated "agency") they actually write in the article "Nasjonal Sikkerhetsmyndighet" (NSM) which is the Norway's security authority: https://www.nsm.stat.no/ and not the US' NSA. So what we know is:

"No Norwegian authority contacted by (the daily newspaper) Aftenposten said that this equipment belongs to them. Aftenposten has no reason to believe that the Norwegian authorities are behind the transmitters."

The (shorter) article in English as written by Aftenposten:

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/Secret-surveillance-...
The article written in proper English by the same daily newspaper:

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/Secret-surveillance-...

The Google translation can be somewhat misleading, as explained in the other comments here.
"Russia is also really big and has all the resources it needs to recover from anything"

Sure, but industries will be destroyed and people die, starve and be forcibly relocated. That's what happened to ex-USSR a lot because the rest of world did not see any reason to rebuild a country that in fact yielded to them.

You are free to "don't understand", but the damage I mentioned was done. Don't then be surprised when people you considered harmless want to nuke you for all the good. All the good that, strictly speaking, you did not have to do.

"Second of all, if they lost the cold war, I don't get why they'd want another one"

If Germans lost one world war, why would they want another one?
The (shorter) article carefully written and edited in English is here:

"Secret surveillance detected in Oslo"

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/Secret-surveillance-...

"After being alerted by Aftenposten the Norwegian National Security Authority (NSM) started their own investigation. On Friday they confirmed that they had found traces of «something».

- We have found something. All the data are not ready yet, but we have also found signals from IMSI-catchers in Oslo, says Hans Christian Pretorius, department head in NSM."
Set Theory?
DEV TIPS MYSQL, TINYMCE HTML
There’s More: Edelman Did This Before, and Worse
> I must say it's not as bad as I expected,

Every programming language leaves you a flavor in your mouth, it can be bitter and sweet. I like the idea of having living object in the DOM, it feels a little bit like smalltalk from a distance. but the language itself? I prefer to run a neutral VM or a secure native client in the browser to run other languajes.
How on earth is a private company allowed to "provide legal input" toan AG?
Pretty much, although in some areas its used more legitimately than others.
I was more trying to explain the intuition of why single nucleotide mutations (resulting in non-viability or undesired effects) are probably more likely in a strand of DNA with regions removed versus a strand of DNA left as-is.

Basically, trying to give an example of the grandparent's point. (i.e. fewer nucleotides to be flipped -> more likely that an important one will be). I agree that it was a poorly executed analogy. The metaphor I was trying to make is that on the 'vast field' a random single point mutation is probably going to land on an individually unimportant nucleotide, and in the 'narrow beach' (the smaller strand/higher geninfo density) an individually important nucleotide is more likely to be hit. I'm still probably not articulating my point well, sorry.

But I think your analogy is better for a subtly different point; describing how DNA replication works in a system, where stands can be selected out, errors corrected, and genetic information can be preserved at a systemic level.
Been playing around with runabove as well lately and am liking it so far. Ideal for personal projects that need a bit of resources.

Hopefully the 1GB plan will be available soon. That tweet is from October but it doesn't appear to be available yet.
> Thirdly, Bitcoin has done 6 years in a row what critics have always said it cannot do

The one thing that hasn't changed a great deal is accessibility to them. When buying, you are either subject to waiting periods, or have to conduct the transaction in cash in person. No one in their right mind will take credit cards or PayPal for them. I believe this is the major hurdle to adoption of crypto by the mainstream public. Writing tools to make BTC easy to work with is the easy part. Until they can be bought at Walmart or your local check cashing store, it's going to be a fairly rough road for new adoption.
The opening paragraph of this article is a stunning
victory for anecdote in its long war against data

Mark one up for hyperbole followed up by a misinterpretation of the article. USA! USA!
The United States at least seems to think Norway is important econoff to have an active intelligence force on the ground. In 2010 it was revealed that the US Embassy had a special unit of 15-20 persons to do surveillance in Norway [0].

However as I understand it this "Surveillance Detection Unit" did not spy against the Norwegian state, but against more asymmetrical threats like islamists and other that feared could act on their own against the US. They did however operate in the same area (downtown Oslo).

1: http://www.newsinenglish.no/2010/11/08/still-no-answers-from...
>So you need to sit back and start thinking why is it that Bitcoin keeps growing and reaching milestone after milestone

Because it has the support of a vocal, passionate, educated community of tech people, some with a monetary stake in having it succeed, combined with the hide-in-a-bunker, sky-is-falling crowd, still feeling the effects of the financial crash.
App Stores and App Distribution Drive the $700B Mobile Internet
I'm honestly really confused by this article, and would love if someone could clarify this for me (no pun intended). The author mentions that classical inheritance is to be avoided and prototypal inheritance is one of the language's best features. Then he goes on to state that the constructor pattern is also to be avoided and suggests that this is something people use in an attempt to use JS in an object-oriented way.

Correct, me if I'm wrong, but using the constructor pattern (and new) in Javascript is the only real way to create an object that has a prototypal link to the constructor function's prototype. So what does this have to do with classical inheritance?
Thanks for this link. Most of the data I deal with is in relational SQL databases so this looks very promising for my use cases. Maybe its just me but most of the graphing libraries and APIs are geared towards JSON data.
Another similar idea (from back in 2008[1]) is to use the Bittorrent DHT as distributed storage for C&C commands. I have no idea anyone has implemented a real-life bonnet in the intervening six years, but it seems plausible enough.

[1]: https://iseclab.org/papers/securecomm08_overbot.pdf
Most Wonderful Time
The people that develop GNOME chose to depend on the D-Bus interfaces exported by some systemd-provided services (eg. logind) because they actually solve some problems they were facing with a clean and robust solution. Yet they made sure that the dependency is optional, to accomodate those that for a reason of another do not use systemd.

This means that systemd is not insidious, it's valuable.
The TNR was never profitable though and likely could never be given its current structure.

But I wonder why buy and gut TNR if you could have just started a separate endeavor. TNR isn't that strong of a name - it is just a name is relatively small circles of elitists.
Yet, they have Turkish founders and CEO.
More than an expert traveler, the fire ant is the ultimate invader
> Sure, the European Union is not Europe, but that's like saying "America is not the US, it's the whole continent" (that is, correct, but nobody cares, people will still use the name).

I think that is a bad comparison. When anyone says "America", they almost always mean "USA". There are also a lot fewer cases in which most people want to talk about the Americas as a whole, and each continent tends to be denoted by South- and North-. "Europe", on the other hand, seems to always refer to the whole continent (people can disagree about where the Easternmost point is, but other than that the usage of the word is very crisp). I don't see how conflating the EU and Europe is appropriate at all, and I haven't seen much of it.
Obsolete technologies that will baffle modern children: in pictures
They should also mark as Non-Secure the situation when you are being MITM attacked by your employer - custom root CAs on Windows boxes are quite common.
Working across borders for our children's digital safety
Marking HTTP as non-secure implies that HTTPS is secure. The large company where I work has quietly rolled out the Zscaler HTTPS proxy and my colleagues are unaware that, despite the assurance given by the green padlock in their browser, their connection is most definitely not secure.
I don't know if any of the web sites are still up, but King of Fighters 2000 was the first arcade game that I remember with both fairly difficult ROM encryption and a public, documented effort to crack it. The cart was being dumped by two groups, one based in Italy and one in Taiwan, that posted loads of pictures and a detailed technical explanation of what they had to do. The project deserved a book like Hacking The Xbox.

Worth a read if you can still find any of it. It also kind of marks the end of an era in arcade hardware -- that was the last major effort of a manufacturer to really lock down a game through this means; afterwards everyone switched to the more advanced disc-based systems that were hard/impossible to emulate instead of being hard to decrypt.
Linode and IIRC Slicehosting had these.

I'm just glad they actually took that idea from them and anybody that provide any services should have these tutorials... It makes it much more approachable for people with little system admin skills.
This is a short version of the story. The full version in available only in Norwegian.
FWIW, keybase.io do the same; they store the root of the merkle tree into the blockchain with a similar principle of throwaway addresses, making it the whole database they handle basically unforkable.
"found something"? Seems a little vague to me.

I hope they have a couple of hundred boots on the ground, going build to building to hunt thus devises down. I don't see why the Norwegian state should not react in the same way the Swedes dos each time they detect a foreign submarine in their fjords: to hunt for it with an overwhelming force.
Are you planning to elaborate on why? Because just saying "This is stupid!" does not carry a lot of weight.
How about using `Object.create` (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Referen...)?
You can also use Object.create, __proto__ setter or a custom abstraction. However the constructor pattern is in practice used everywhere and I find nothing wrong with it, in fact in the next language version it will get first class syntax through the `class` construct. People need to accept that same keywords mean different things in different languages, just because Javascript `this` and `new` are not like Java `this` and new` doesn't make it better or worse.
Why would I use it?

With a push of a button, you can
instantly talk to individuals or
entire groups.

So no matter what I'm doing, or how deep inside a problem I might be, one of my group can disturb me at any moment with no warning? Consider:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25009451/ProgrammerInter...

I just can't see why I would use it - I have existing solutions of email, SMS, phone, what does this do that I can't already accomplish? It looks like I can have conference calls. Is that the only "new" thing?

As I say, I can't see a compelling case for it. It's not up to me to say why not, it's up to you to provide one.
I expect that at some point, someone will write a Elm -> Haskell thing (like Elixir -> Erlang).
I'm always sceptical of so-called "drop-in things". PHP Plumber is supposed to contain "Drop-in create, read, update and delete functions" -- what is that even supposed to mean?

But the bigger issue for me is that there is practically no license information. It's supposed to be built ontop of Laraval, but what does a buyer actually get? Can I use one license for all my projects? Do I need to buy it for each project? Is it anually? What about use in non-commercial projects? Am I required to put a credits link somewhere?

Considering I get something similar by just slapping Laravel + a few bundles + Bootstrap together, I don't think this startup idea could fly, much less could substain a business for a longer period of time (and if I bought into it, I certainly wouldn't support to be dropped a year later because you go out of business).
Very interesting.. I'm guessing you can do less than a minute on granularity? That's a lifetime to me.

I'm working on my own little system based on Riak for storage and their new search functionality to index the streams(what I call a unique metric). I have a goal of graphite API compatibility though so it can be a drop-in replacement for me. Worked out a schema for mapping graphite metric names to the stream dimensions, wrote a graphite function parser/lexar, etc. Atlas should definitely be worth a look for some fresh ideas :)
Looks interesting, but without more details on what you can configure or how much it will cost, it's hard to get excited.
Almost, he is also converting ordinary dicts that get added as items to his own Dict class to enable you to keep using this syntax further down the tree, so you'd need a small wrapper around __setitem__.

But yes, the idea of storing everything twice (once as an item and once as an attribute) just so you can unconditionally add defaults in __getattr__ is… bizarre and will break things horribly as soon as you accidentally do something like:

myDict['get'] = 'foo'
One thing I find wonderful about any of the free operating systems (not sure if you're running one) is the entire stack is there to explore on every level. One thing I find enjoyable if I'm looking for something to do is target a subsystem of Linux and drill down.
But if you do it like that, it's almost not worth packaging into a library and posting to hackernews. :)
Can I ask why you would want it to be "professional" and who deemed this not "professional"? I mean, the language's name is derived from Monty Python - I don't think anyone would consider that "professional". Hackers are notoriously clever and comical - shouldn't our work reflect our culture?

"Professional", to me, is boring - it's what the pointy haired boss wants you to be because anything remotely outside of the box doesn't conform to their risk-averse norms.
Wow thanks a lot for this! I'm researching more into it but this overview helps a ton
When we started to learn robotics, our first assignment was to teach the robot to draw a square.

Its actually a good "hello world" exercise:
http://youtu.be/RmfP2rHV7io
What Is the Flux Application Architecture?
Horseshit. Anyone can learn cryptography, and anyone (just look at the history of the code) can add code to OpenSSL. The problem is that the parent commenter is correct, and that writing serious crypto code takes a serious research commitment. Nobody wants to do that; they just want to get the "crypto" hooked up to the "web chat" as quickly as they can.

It is frankly exhausting hearing the repetitive drone of people who couldn't exploit a CBC padding oracle if their life depended on it complaining about how crypto is a secret cabal.
>Because it's too visible, hard to get out of any sort of modern corporate network

Valid point

>depends on propagation therefore extremely slow

0 confirmation transactions are instant

>public evidence of communications

Sure, but if obfuscated who's going to look? Even if encrypted with a symmetric key on the client, you'll need to reverse engineer the client. Packers and obfuscators can make your life very hard indeed. However I'm sure there's a way to did it with perfect foward secrecy (or at least an reasonable amount).

>additional constraints in the form of money spent for transactions

You don't need to pay for a c&c server any more, that's money saved.

>increased complexity on the implant and so on and so forth.

Sure

>In fact, I can't think of a single good reason why this would make a practical malware comm protocol.

How about completely anonymous, no c&c server to take down, and cannot be killed without killing Bitcoin with it?
Some reasons why I think this would be a good idea (as a BACKUP comms channel), though I admit I am no experts in botnets:

1) It only requires a handful of outgoing TCP connections. This is fine if you are targeting windows consumer boxes

2) It is near-impossible to take down this communications channel. If your regular C&C server gets raided/taken down then you can broadcast the new connection details using this

3) You only have to spend anything to make a new broadcast. If this were to be used as a backup C&C channel that would rarely happen, and it's fine if that were to be slow too.

4) Regarding complexity, the client will already be complex if you're going to be implementing crypto to verify commands which you should do anyway. I don't really see why complexity is a bad thing here either if it works fine.

You're right that the evidence is not really ideal, but many other comms channels used in the past have had that property, such as twitter accounts.

> There are far better ways to get this sort of reliability without shooting yourself in the foot by accepting all the handicaps I mentioned.

Do elaborate?
I have never seen anyone saying that pythonic refers to some objective truth. It refers to subjective but real concepts as clarity, simplicity, explicit-ness, etc. There is also one thing that is not really pythonic but still important, it's reliability. Here addict is not reliable because it is unclear what happens when you call "addict.get" or other dict built-in methods like keys, items, etc. Something is reliable when it works equally for all values in the value space. dict['x'] is reliable because it works the same even if you replace 'x' by 'get' (or any other immutable value).
> I think it's extremely naive to think history is over, when it comes to that sort of behavior, even though it's hard to imagine it coming from anywhere but Russia today (in Europe).

War isn't necessary when you can effectively control the government through other means (gaining sensitive intel on, blackmailing, threatening members).
The big question for Norway, as they say, is "who is behind it?". The big question for all of us is how commonplace this is. It seems like it's easy enough to do, and law enforcement etc. don't seem to be looking for it actively/publicly.
Implementing an entire 3rd party python library with behavior almost the same as a defaultdict is unpythonic because a reader of the code base now has to learn an entirely new library for functionality that could be represented in a 10 line extension to defaultdict.
Why we built (or rather, build) Adfinch?