skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"People voluntarily link things like phone numbers and email addresses to their Facebook accounts"

People voluntarily are idiots. Never connect a phone number to your FB account and use another mail address if you really need to have an account.
Climate change and geoengineering
Introducing the JavaScript Internationalization API
More to the point, he has more data.

The startup world is a community that only wants to hear from the successes. Those who fail are laughed off as being bitter. PG has enough insight and decency to see a larger spectrum and speak on it.
Adobe acquires stock company Fotolia to boost Creative Cloud asset supply
MDBM is a hash, a pretty scalable one and fairly light weight. It is so fast that a common usage is to log updates to a log file and just rebuild the hash from that after a reboot. We've been doing that for years, works well for us.

I'm guessing you are one of the people behind some other technology. Goody for you but do you really think you make your case by dissing anything else? If you have a solution that works for you, great. SGI, Yahoo, and other companies have found a use for MDBM. SGI was using it ~20 years ago and at the time there was nothing that came close to the same performance.
15-line hash table in C
You're completely right, I think I had read it as \. rather than \\. and thus didn't understand it. Thanks for helping me get it straight in my head.
"If you look at Japan or the US, the increase in life expectancy has coincided with a drop in the birth rate"

I don't think one caused the other.
A simple ssh honeypot in 100 line of code #golang
I don't see any details, but it would be straightforward to have a token (available as a bar code or a qr code) that represents a digital signature of the photo/identity information, with the signer being the state of Iowa. Or a TOTP to make it harder to use a screenshot for this purpose.

Or for police specifically, it could look up the token in the state's database to access a photo and have a human verify that the photos match (and match the person presenting the id).

The structured information is easy to sign; the photo is more difficult. I'd be curious if they had anything intended for this.
Yet Elon Musk is remembered is remembered and regarded as an entrepreneur, not as as a physically attractive person. Contrast this with women who are regarded as "sex symbols" and you'll see that their physical appearance is used to overshadow and demean their achievements.
Caveat: Guesswork ahead:

I think this is smart. It's heading off Amazon and their 'Local' initiative (marketplace + angies list) and Amazon's end-goal of Local, which I believe is cutting UPS/Fedex/et al out of the loop. I could see a scenario where contractors requested through Amazon would deliver your packages for that day in exchange for no Local fees, or something to that effect. Amazon saves on shipping, and more deeply embed their customer in to their own ecosystem.

Fedex, by doing this, embeds themselves more deeply in to the businesses they work with, so that switching from Fedex to UPS or to AmazonShipping is not just a matter of changing the carrier, but also changing your IT team/some other logistics team.
You probably inherently understand that obesity is widely considered a moral disease.

Therefore, the only solution to a moral failing is trial by fire.

So, by recasting obesity as something OTHER than a moral failing, well you are removing the very thing that lets a portion of society feel superior to others.

And you can't do that.
Some of this stuff, sure, it's not necessary at work so you are taking a risk of it becoming public for no reason. But some of it is necessary in a corporate office. I have emailed HR questions about medical insurance or 401ks that I wouldn't want to post on my Twitter. Identifying the beneficiary of my life insurance policy doesn't seem like something I want many people to know, yet HR has to. What else are you supposed to do than use the internal systems? You have to trust IT/Security with that stuff.
Nah, they didn't care and I didn't want to piss them off so I just handed the code to anyone who asked for it.
You're exactly right on that because I am transitioning from young guy to old guy and can see it happen.

That doesn't mean my old eating habits were sustainable though forever. I think we need to be able to reduce our consumption if we aren't growing anymore.
> Jason Spaltro, then executive director of information security at Sony Pictures, called it a "valid business decision to accept the risk of a security breach" in a 2007 interview with CIO Magazine, adding he would not invest "$10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss."

Who even hires these people?
Of course it does: checking for halting reduces to checking for bug-freeness. See the other comment in this thread.
To me it is because this just traps you into constantly using the drug instead of adapting to the fact that you have gotten older and should eat less.
I wish people would stop calling this a hack. It's not a hack, it was a cyberwarfare. I know someone who was working on the team trying to recover from this attack, and Sony Pictures is basically fucked. Their IT infrastructure has been utterly destroyed, meaning they can't even pay their employees, pay their vendors or take orders from customers. They don't even want to use computers anymore, people call and text now to avoid any sort of central infrastructure that can be hacked. They had to switch to all-manual processes, and it will take months or likely years before their infrastructure is back within some sort of semblance.

But by then Sony Pictures as an entity may no longer exist. From all of the emails being released ridiculing their own talent, to their employees having their privacy destroyed and financial accounts hacked, who could work for this company again?

The thing this attack does is raise the bar as to what to expect. The worst we had heard until now was credit cards being stolen for quick gains, maybe some business secrets being stolen. But in my mind it started with lulzsec a couple of years ago where the attitude was for anarchy and cyberwar. But if the new trend is for companies to get destroyed, then cybersecurity will go to the next level where every company has to assume if they get hacked, they will get destroyed, so it becomes probably even more critical than other business processes.
Hmm? Ada uses the apostrophe for character literals and to introduce attributes. Strings are arrays; indexing uses the same `array[index]` syntax as any other array.

S: constant String := "Hello";
H: constant Character := S(1);
Ask HN: Is this tiny sideproject (www.thankadeveloper.org) a good idea?
Hi HN,

Roughly a year ago I was listening to burnout of an Open Source maintainer on The Changelog. It got me thinking about more ways to say "thanks", to promote that sort of culture I guess.

My idea is simple. It allows a person to put in a github repo, and a message of thanks. It then grabs the latest commits, pulls out a random email address, and sends an email of thanks to that user.

Now, I can guess what you're thinking at this point, ICK, unsolicited emails (and that is partly what is putting me off doing anything, and just quietly letting the site die). However,

1. All messages would be moderated. No spam or anything nasty would be sent.
2. Every email starts out apologising for the intrusion, and allows the person to permanently add their email address to a blacklist (so if you never want to be emailed again, you won't be)

I'd love to see people add this to their github repos, much like any other badge. But maybe I'm dreaming. I'd really like some feedback before doing a Show HN or anything else. I was thinking maybe it'd just be "A Christmas Thing" ..

Now, I know there are things like git-tip etc., and I know people use twitter etc. so I'm honestly not sure my idea is worth doing at all.

Anyway, if you have the time to give feedback, I'd sure appreciate it. I don't want to annoy / antagonise the developer community!

The un-launched site is at http://www.thankadeveloper.org.

Thanks!
ClearTax (YC S14) is hiring: Re-imagine personal finance in India
Part of my point (which i obviosuly didn't communicate well) is that Fizz concatenated with Buzz is a premature optimization. It's the developer taking advantage of a linguistic coincience. The instructions are to output 3 different strings based on %3, %5, or %3 and %5. I have never seen a set of fizzbuzz instructions that actually specified that the last option should be a concatenation of the 1st two. It's always specified as a 3rd string that people independently notice is a concatenation of the two.
This is correct. As a zero-knowledge proof it is, sadly, trivially broken. (Not just in a theoretical sense. As you mention there just isn't enough entropy going into the hash. It's like asking for your age and gender, but only providing a hash to some other party so they can verify that you are who you say you are, without your divulging what information you were just given. That doesn't work - you would leak everything, because 1-100 (age) M/F (gender) only has 200 possible values. 200 hashes later your counterparty knows what you were asking to check.)

But that doesn't mean this couldn't be done properly.

There are actual zero-knowledge proofs. I liked this primer. You should read it!

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/zero-knowled...

It is 100% possible for there to exist absolutely zero-knowledge proof in many instances. (Such as the one in the article.)

So, it could be possible for example (I don't know an algorithm) to check whether a phone number you were given is in someone else's set of phone numbers - without either your learning what the other's set is, or the other learning what phone number you're testing.
Even the most barbarian, uncivilized tribes have had a shaman or chieftain and a set of principles to follow and taboos to avoid. Arguably (since I Am Not An Archaologist), Hammurabi's insight wasn't having laws, but writing them down, and abstracting the force of law away from the immediate will of the god-king.
They've been fixing computers for other companies for a while now, it sounds like they're expanding that business. It seems like a good idea, a lot of the time and expense involved in that process is moving around the parts and machine to be repaired. They're able to optimize that better than most other companies.
Yes, exactly, it's complicated.

I was going to say I expect more out of HN commenters, but then I'd be lying. The people here are perhaps "smarter" than many, but their heads are made out of the same fallible gloopy cholesterol that the rest of us are. Cognitive biases are for everyone, and in some ways worse among those who refuse to admit the essential hormonal/emotional nature of our brains.
Comparative morphology of popular xkcd characters [pdf]
I would actually like to be retired from the public politics-of-software within 5 years, focusing instead on the constructive and technical. (I'm looking for a replacement.)

I want to be successful, and so far things are going well and I think I will be, but I also think that success will make me less perceptive on what's actually going on. Ultimately, the way to know a society is to talk to the people at its bottom. In my case, most of the things that have awakened me to the evil lurking in our community (meaning technology, not just "startups") happened 2-3 years ago. Ten years from now, I hope to be an expert on other things but my evilology will have rusted.
Also, am I blind or can ZDnet honestly not tell the difference between their headline saying that Amazon denied AWS was being used by Sony in a DDOS, and Amazon's actual statement saying that such an attack was "not currently happening" ?

I am not currently asleep. That does not mean that I was not sleeping earlier, or that I have never, ever slept.
Don't nest fragments. Just don't. Fragments are half baked. Nested fragments are half (quarter?) baked.

In most cased the inner fragment could be made into a custom View, and those work a lot better. Most new Android developer do not make enough custom views. They are the fundamental unit of UI re-use. It's relatively simple to extends FrameLayout or RelativeLayout, encapsulate a view normal views, layer your logic on top, and you have a nice usable component.
I hate to be that guy, but...

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
By that logic, the police should be able to search your house or car if they're not locked.

The Canadian Supreme Court isn't known for it's intelligent decisions.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/w5/justice-system-scrutinized-woman-hi...
I think actually you need both. The Amazon fire tv's remote is critical but I miss not being able to cast from a phone.
So that I can cold call someone who might be interested in my product, even though DataLogix only told me the hash of their phone number.
The messages from GOP seem more like desperate attempts to not sound like English first kids. It's awkward in places where maybe a translator service would use the wrong word, but with language structure for sentences that would not come from such a tool.

Someone wouldn't structure sentences as they do AND make word mistakes like they do. The structure is too "good" to make mistakes on terminology. It's like a bad Chinese accent in a cartoon.
Is the moral of the story that Sony condones denial of service attacks?
Have you tried pitching the b2c companies on angellist with customized proposals for how you can help them sell their product(s)?
Track user data without being creepy
> In fact it's illegal for someone to not accept legal tender.

No, its not illegal not to accept it (that is, the law does not punish failure to accept a tender of payment made in the currency designated as legal tender), however, the tender of payment in such currency may discharge the debt whether or not it is accepted, which would leave the party failing to accept the payment without any recourse through the legal system to collect the debt in the form it would prefer.
Thanks for the plug. While it's probably not clear from those two links, the IL builder actually tries to use the type system to enforce much more rigid correctness rules. For example, removing any of the opcodes in this example will result in a compile-time error because the IL would become invalid:

il {
ldc_i4 6
ldc_i4_0
ldc_i4 7
add
mul
ret
}
Considering it seems to be just Python, I don't see what makes it Ubuntu only.
Unless that internal corporate network is airgapped, it was put on the Internet for all intents and purposes.
The fixes are minor and don't detract from the narrative. Instead of saying "Your universal machine that can compute anything," they could have said "Your universal machine that can compute anything that can be computed." No less impressive to someone who isn't listening to the details anyway, but true instead of false.
Who gives their phone number to store clerks? "Sorry, it's unlisted."
There's too much of a benefit to his brand to not write. YC gets first pick of so many startups because people say, "I want to get advice from THIS guy"

As for the overall issue of "Talking your position" - everyone does it. Left and Right leaning economists get different research conclusions. You just have to be aware that it exists. And despite this, the advice from PG, Peter Theil, Marc A and others is different, despite them all being long startups.
After using Nix and NixOps, my sense was that a Nix package manager module for puppet&co would be really really useful. With NixOps, my concern was that I need to have a trusted OS, and I didn't feel comfortable having to use a custom build of something Ubuntu-ish.

Maybe there's a way to convert or bootstrap any Linux OS into a NixOps-compatible distro. But I didn't see anything.
Is it just me? I find the term "smartphone" to be rather dumb. I prefer to call them handset computers.
I really have no idea why they keep unreleased feature films not on an airgapped network before the release date.
I hate to be that guy, but, from the same source:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
If there is, the 'someone else' would still have to do some rate limiting. Otherwise, once again, I can just run this algorithm for all possible phone numbers.
I found myself in agreement with the post but then when I saw the flow it looked far too general purpose. And as a computer input device it looks like a nonstarter (sorta like leap). I was envisioning some very specific tasks.
No, you don't need to do that for every non non local symbol. You only need to do that for external symbols which are shadowed by a local symbol (which has never happened to me so far).
Little known fact, Geek Squad actually used to have locations in certain FedEx Kinko's stores (when they were still together).

They decided not to expand the program, figured this was the natural result.

Source: Used to work for Geek Squad.
Yea the second gray hat is most definitely black. That's not morally questionable, you sold a vulnerability to a bad actor, anyone can see that that is illegal.

Leaking documents like snowden is an actual moral gray area.
"It has happened to you, and it has probably happened more than once."

Umm, no. Why on earth would I give my phone number or email address to random shops? This is crazy. I surely don't want merchants to contact me "about other stuff I might want to buy." This assumption sold as a certainty in this article is somewhat disturbing. Do others from the US feel the same way? (I'm from Germany. Different culture?)
There doesn't appear to be much architecture stuff which is more recent, but I had a look through this book today and it seems to hold up pretty well. It would be great to see a bang up to date version though.
This fits my experience with distributed MongoDB -- which I never tried to use beyond 1.8 or so. The moment you make a MongoDB distributed, you're putting an immutable schema on it.

Not literally immutable, because you can change it, but changing it is more difficult and more perilous than starting from scratch.

Wasn't the point of MongoDB was supposed to be that it's all flexible and schemaless? You might ask that. You might not get an answer. Like I said, I never use MongoDB as a distributed system anymore.
To add some specificity to gamegoblin's reference, I quote from page 28 of the IBM 1401 Data Processing System: Reference Manual[1]:

The two factors to be combined are added within core storage without the use of special accumulators or counters. Because any storage area can be used as an accumulator field, the capacity for performing arithmetic functions is not limited by standard-size accumulators or by a predetermined number of accumulators within the system.

[1] http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/140x/A2...
Convention of States: A Project of Citizens for Self-Governance
As an experienced Android dev, I cannot agree more. I have never had a particularly fun experience with fragments, although they definitely have their place. Custom views though... I love them more every day.
Streeem in Go by mattn
This.

IMO the higher up the chain you are, the more responsibility you have to secure the systems you are responsible for.

I feel like it's a perceived lack of accountability (from the perspective of the hackers) of the executive team that leads to these kinds of leaks. When they feel they aren't seeing justice - as defined by them - then I think they're more motivated to do something about it themselves.
I glanced through it but nothing caught my eye that much. you should elaborate why this is silly if you're going to take the time to leave a comment here. :)
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, the classic book following the development of a new minicomputer in the late 70s.

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

Stealing The Network: How to Own the Box. This is a collection of fictional accounts of "hacking" written by hackers. Real world techniques are described though its in lightweight detail, the aim of the book is more to give an insight into how an attacker thinks. It's quite an enjoyable read too.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealing-Network-How-Own-Cyber-Ficti...

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen. This one's a true story.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingpin-Hacker-Billion-Dollar-Cyberc...

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software By Charles Petzold. I still have to read this one, but I expect it would fit in with what you're after quite well.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...
I understand your feelings, but I'm not avoiding anything. :-) I wrote a compliant solution instead of spending my time begging for something else.
Logstash 1.5.0.beta1 released
>Attaching serious liability to holding data on systems that aren't secured

That was the intent with Massachusetts PII law 201 CMR 17 which stipulates a $5000 fine per incident. I've always heard this interpreted as "per user record exposed" though apparently that's in dispute. $5k per exposed user could add up, but so far I don't think the law has had much impact. (btw it applies to anyone holding MA resident's data wherever the company is located / data is stored). California has a similar (earlier) law I believe. Perhaps we need this to be adopted at the Federal level.
I hate to be that guy, but, I'm voting both of you down for hijacking the thread _and_ violating the rules by talking about it!
Also new pricing: http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2014/12/11/announcing-new-pri...
Fatal error: recursion limit reached.
It does probabilistic inference![1]

So many open source "Knowledge Graph"-y type projects concentrate on building them like databases, with a query language that assumes the data in them is correct. You see this in things like Freebase, DBPedia and Wikidata, where they typically end up in a triple store and you query using SPARQL.

This isn't how the real world works, and there isn't a lot of publicly available software that takes this into account. There aren't even than many papers about it (the Microsoft Probase paper is one, and there is work from Florida University(?) about using Markov chains to reason while taking probabilities into about).

I'm excited to take a look at this.

[1] http://deepdive.stanford.edu/doc/general/inference.html
It would be awesome to see a Nix package manager module for puppet, saltstack, ansible, chef & co.

I think that for package installation and rollback, a simple model like that proposed by DJ Bernstein with slashpackage http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html seems to accomplish the same goals but with much less complexity.
The author of "The Other Money Problem," seems to assume readers are not aware of change or that Paul Graham can't continue to be honest and interesting now simply because he makes more money than he did previously. According to this theory, J.K. Rowling would be less interesting to read now that she's rich, but I would argue that her new work is better. Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, same thing.

Each of Paul Graham's essays were written as he slowly evolved into the man he is today. He was changing the entire time. Also, he knows more now than he did before.

The thing that saddens me is not Paul Graham getting advice from friends, it's people who try to take some of the shine off.
That was going to be my suggestion too. With the added benefit that is supports multiple arguments.
Just because the damage to the company was huge, it doesn't mean it was anything else than an ordinary hack in a less-than-secure computer network. I can totally imagine hackers deleting data/disabling systems/leaking emails just for the lulz!