skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard opinions along the lines of "thinking too much" countless of times, at first it was kind of depressing but later I've concluded that if you just like to think and analyze things in your mind (which is not so popular thing to do when you consider general population, sadly), people who voice such (negative, I'd say) comments didn't really think about this deeply. Over-analying can be a serious problem (consider some forms of OCD), but when you can somehow control it (but not constrain) it's ok to think as much as one like ;).
There are some good learning resources that take the guided approach:

- http://codecombat.com

- http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/javascript

- http://nodeschool.io

(I haven't used any of them, but these are the ones that I've heard about)
The specific tool they were mentioning is:
https://secondlookforensics.com/

Interestingly enough, look who makes it.
Even most PL research is not type theory; it is its own field.
Are there any benchmarks of this vs ag (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)?

Some of the optimizations are similar (mmap and pcre_study), while others are opposed (ag uses pthreads, grab claims disk I/O is the bottleneck and threads slow things down).
That was just a suggestion for the technical path. Motivation is a different exercise, I agree that the best way to learn is to try and build something you find fun/interesting.
There aren't any unbiased sources on this issue except maybe raw satellite feeds.

Truth is that complex industrial societies use a lot of energy and resources and ecological footprint is a function of that more than their flavor of socioeconomic system. Ultimately ecology only cares about physics, not politics.
Thanks! I think I saw they were showing the screen at CES but I didn't know they were selling this thing!
Even on a more practical level, aren't all major hosting providers ones that follow standards where getting a USB drive onto a server would be extremely easy to trace back? Where was this guy keeping his servers?
It's a hard sell to get me to concern myself with the environment when humanity is headed in the direction it's going. The earth will be just fine, even in the event that we can no longer survive on it, I'm more concerned with the question of if humanity is even worth saving.
Is there any significant historical evidence of mass genocide among seafaring cultures of the north?

It's kind of racist to assume that Vikings "wiped out" a bunch of people simply because there is evidence that they were present in a certain place. "Viking" as a term has its origin in an expedition of some sort, whether to trade or colonize.
goji, mainly because it supports einhorn
Oh, the whole cyberwar situation is far from "hopeless". The truth is nobody to speak of has taken it seriously yet. Security is still mostly an afterthought, if that, almost everywhere you look. Even in nominally security-focused contexts. And much of the activity in places that really are security focused are built around an environment in which software must be assumed to basically be constructed out of styrofoam and radioactive waste, so they end up looking very restrictive in reaction to this reality.

I'm fairly convinced that if we all really tried we could secure things much better than they are today. The personal tripwire I've been watching for is when it finally becomes simply general knowledge that C is completely unsuitable to write security software in and C++ is pretty damned dangerous. (Many people know this, but a large contingent will still push back on that. Once we get serious about security, one of the things that will have to happen is C is going to have be evicted from its current privileged position.)

Lest I sound utopian, yes, this will require immense effort. My point is precisely that we've never really tried that level of effort yet, not that the effort will be low. There's no real reason that the Internet actually has to be made out of swiss cheese, but it will take a significant change of viewpoint before it will be resolved.
Because those most likely to be infected are those with the least political influence. Globally, the rich are much less likely to get sick, because they live in much more sanitary environments, expose themselves to infection less, and have consistent top tier healthcare to prevent infection.

Thus the people who need it least are those who both have the money to potentially fund it themselves and the social power to make representatives care.
I laughed...and then I frowned.
Someone could still reimplement the algorithm based on a description. You can't copyright algorithms. You can (sometimes) patent them, which the original author apparently tried to do. The claim would have been based on that patent rather than on copyright.

(Edited some details I was wrong about)
If there was a warrant, we should be able to get that information, and act on it, and figure out how to avoid it in the future.

Which comes to an interesting situation: if this was acted upon by NSL, here there's proof something happened, so how does that get explained without breaking the gag order?
LCS stands for "Longest Common Subsequence". I don't know why their docs say "substring". Maybe they just made a mistake?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_subsequence_pro...
WTF?! Since when do we backdoor hardware in The Netherlands without informing the owner?
Seeing how this is a targeted attack on an exit node specifically they're not going to be interested in dumping whats on the system for evidence. Even an idiot will know that someone running a TOR exit node isn't going to be a big fan of logging traffic in detail. Has to be an attempt to keep the node running but in a compromised state...
Donating to the World Food Program
How would you feel about something like

type theory : "computing" :: FOL : set theory

where I mean to say "computing" as generally as you like.
Hey, I am sending you an email.
The main chart in this article is horribly designed.

Quick: try to find July 4th on the chart. The extra whitespace between each month invites you to scan down the left for July and then go over to the fourth cell, which is incorrect.

The chart starts on Sunday, Nov 3, and since each month is given either 4 or 5 full weeks on the chart, the only easy way to find a particular date on the chart is to start counting day-by-day from Nov 3.
Introduction to Keyboard Programming
Reminds me of Nim (formerly Nimrod): http://nim-lang.org/
“I think what these films tell us is that we’re taking a future of environmental catastrophe for granted.”

I stopped reading right about here. Not repressive government, nuclear war, or economic collapse? It's the environment that causes the hunger games. Yeah that seems to be the biggest likelyhood. But otherwise it's a great scare piece.
Unlock iCloud Activation Lock Any iPhones Permanent
I wasn't born then, so I don't know how frequently the recent posts change. I thought I'd share this for posterity.

As sad as the post is, I think it really highlights how much the world has changed in just a generation. I hope our kids look back at the world of today with similar distaste. We still have a long way to go.

http://article.olduse.net/52@decwrl.UUCP
Understanding the general ebb and flow of construction/induction is such a powerful technique for thinking about FP. Any time I'm stuck programming now my two questions are (1) do I have the right data available and, then, (2) what things should I be inducting over?
This is a great example of how the media often confuses the complexities of environmental impact. Here's why:

1. This study is limited to particulate matter pollution, not greenhouse gas emissions. Most readers nowadays associate "environmental impact" with climate change, so it's deceptive of the publisher to not specify that electric vehicles cause less greenhouse gas emissions overall than petroleum vehicles.

2. The particulate matter pollution in this study is a solvable problem, even if you keep the coal plants. Equipment like bag houses and static precipitators are already installed on a lot of coal generators to remove particulate.

3. We are currently in peak coal. Even China is starting to decrease the amount of coal generators that they are building. So the argument that we shouldn't switch to EVs because coal is dirty is pretty useless over the next few decades.

Conclusion: The Economist knowingly published an article meant to deceive the reader and discredit electric vehicles.
You can't expect people to stay around when they can get a new job every year with an at least 10% higher salary.
Well that is not reassuring :-(. Particularly the part about it copying itself to other Thunderbolt devices.
In fairness to today's engineers, modern buildings have a much different cost model associated with them (e.g., ensuring worker safety, environmental costs of acquiring materials, building close to other large structures, designing around high traffic areas, inclusion of non-structural beautification elements like large glass windows). Not to mention, recreating many ancient structures would cost an order of magnitude greater now, due to higher costs of living.
Your comment is indicative of the crisis of legitimacy that has infected our governments, and most of the institutions of stability in our global society. It seems like a small thing; but once the perception that the forces of law and order are themselves lawless exceeds a certain critical threshold things begin to change rapidly. Indeed the United States itself came to be in the wake of the erosion of the legitimacy of Englands colonial government.

There won't be an announcement; but once that threshold is crossed events begin to move rapidly and forcefully and do not stop until a new arrangement of powers is found that society can scaffold itself upon. Who knows what will be the stable state of a world seeded with the idea of networks and knowledgable in their subversion and subornation.
Reminds of how in basic physics, knowing the units of the result you're looking for helps you find the correct answer.

Eg : if you're computing a speed ( m/s), then you'd better divide something that has a distance unit by something that has a time unit.
It would make more sense to me if the universe was built from precisely nothing. Thus everything around us would be merely abstract, but because we are part of it, we experience it as being real, or tangible.

The fact that multiple beings live in this abstraction is of course also an illusion, for we are all one.
I'm trying to understand that too.

A Linux server (I'm guessing for no particular reason it's a Linux server) would have no reason to automount a USB stick, and its console would be at a login screen (so a HID device would gain nothing).

So my guess for the intrusion scenario would be a "cold boot" attack: plug a specially prepared USB stick, open the server case, short the reset pins in the motherboard (AFAIK, modern motherboards still have the pins for the reset button, even though modern cases don't have a reset button anymore), and tell the BIOS to boot from the USB stick. The USB stick then dumps the memory, which still has data from the previously running system (since it was an unclean shutdown), with some luck including cryptographic keys.

That scenario would also explain why he briefly saw the server back on the KVM: they might have been using the KVM to interact with the BIOS.

The defense against such a scenario would be to aggressively shut down all processes and kexec to a memory-wiping kernel as soon as any unexpected device (not only USB, but also PCI and others) is seen, or if the case is opened. Also make it send an alert message through the network with the details whenever it's triggered, to be able to diagnose why the server shut down without warning.

But there's another possible scenario: the "bureaucratic confusion" scenario. It's possible that the systems at his hosting location got confused, and thought he was no longer a client. The apparent intrusion would be a techie repurposing the servers for another client.
Must admit I'm slightly amused that this is even being considered as a plausible theory. They're busy executing elderly with AK47s...thats very far away from physically cracking open servers in a western data center and inserting USB devices with targeted attack software.
And even back then people were putting bad subject lines in their messages. I guess I can't blame it on "kids these days" any more...
> Security is still mostly an afterthought, if that, almost everywhere you look... yes, this will require immense effort.

What I keep thinking, though, is, what would be the total dollar cost to make security a forethought, with information technology being pretty ubiquitous? I think it might actually have serious economic impact -- is it possible we literally can't afford security, as a society?
Yea, the repetitive analysis usually stems from using the same model of which to analyze the data by. It's insufficient. That helps me turn it off, listen to other people, go about my life, learn new ways of thinking, connecting, interacting, helping, participating, and then I continue to re-evaluate myself, existence, and my place in it. I still can't shake the depression, though. Unless the entire world existed in a state of neutrality or bliss, I don't think I could. It's just an echo of sadness, something I have to distance myself from internally and examine scientifically, which allows me to remove it's control over me, and instead direct myself in ways I can improve the world, but, /shrug. I'm not perfect and I'm never going to exist perfectly and life is never going to be perfect, if perfect even could exist.
I'm sure even the Netherlands has some kind of mechanism in place to allow this if a sufficiently powerful court order is in place.
I'm the author of ag[1]. File searching stuff interests me, so I took a look at grab. Sadly, grab only compiles on Linux right now. Some of the mmap flags and cpu_set_t aren't defined on OS X. I was curious about the performance claims, so I benchmarked grab and ag on my code directory. Times are medians of five runs. I used a Lenovo X140e running Ubuntu 14.10. It has a 160GB Intel SSD, 8GB of RAM, and an AMD A4-5000 (4 x 1.5Ghz Jaguar).

ggreer@boron:~/code% du -sh .
8.3G	.

ggreer@boron:~/code% time ag cpu_set_t
ag cpu_set_t 4.45s user 5.25s system 295% cpu 3.285 total

ggreer@boron:~/code% time grab -R cpu_set_t .
grab -R cpu_set_t . 13.31s user 21.67s system 35% cpu 1:38.28 total

30x faster, but these benchmarks aren't a fair fight. Ag ignores binary and hidden files by default. If I tell ag to do an unrestricted search, it's still 2x faster (43 seconds vs 98 seconds). Even with cold caches (echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches between each run), ag beats grab handily:

ag -u cpu_set_t 19.62s user 32.56s system 90% cpu 57.433 total

grab -R cpu_set_t . 15.48s user 37.89s system 37% cpu 2:22.67 total

I haven't profiled grab yet, but there's definitely some low-hanging fruit. For example, it looks like grab could get a big speedup by detecting literal patterns and using strstr() instead of a whole PCRE engine. Also, FileGrep::find is calling pthread_mutex_lock/unlock even if there are no matches to print. Adding a condition around that makes grab 1.5x faster.

I'm glad I took a look at grab. Despite its shortcomings, I learned from it. I'll definitely try out a few tricks grab uses that ag doesn't, such as thread affinity.

One more thing: The author of grab is right about counting newlines. It does hurt performance. Still, I enable it by default in ag. I think the tradeoff is worthwhile.

1. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

Edit: The mutex locking change was so straightforward that I submitted a PR: https://github.com/stealth/grab/pull/2
Despite the article, I think the title's premise is very interesting. The resurgence in popularity of dystopian sci-fi really seems to me reminiscent of Peter Thiel's "indeterminate pessimism" - the attitude that the future is inevitably bad. This is a terribly unproductive attitude to have, while the opposite attitude of "determinate optimism" characterizes us during times of great progress.
The novels of John Brunner

The Sheep Look Up (1972)

The Shockwave Rider ( 1975 )

both seem shockingly contemporary in the worlds they portray.
Modernized Space Camp Allows Kids to Simulate Frustration Over Lack of Funding
Adjuncts typically don't get paid a salary; they get paid a certain amount for each course they teach, so they aren't on that schedule. UN pays their adjuncts $1,130 per credit[1, Section 6], so someone teaching four courses each semester would make $27,120 per year.

[1] http://system.nevada.edu/tasks/sites/Nshe/assets/File/BoardO...
iCamPro – The World’s First Intelligent Home Security Robot
Lifehackforyou(rus)
What prevents us to be objective?
To assume the only adversary is ISIS would be extremely foolish. Any actors within a system side with particular groups and ideologies. The Tor project maintainers align to an ideology shared with many other groups, just as ISIS align with a shared ideology, NSA/FBI etc share another... More likely NSA/FBI/nation-state level, or a large hacking group, although the former has clear motive here. ISIS has little motive for this. Use your common sense.
Measure More: Improving Estimated Total Conversions
I am guessing the reason they aren't putting ads on Quora yet it would limit their ability to raise money. Uncertainty drives the theoretical value higher because while the average CPM on ads might be say $10, they can project because of their higher quality content that they will be able to charge $25 or $50 CPM or something like that. So, they can sell projections and vanity metrics instead of actual revenue to investors.

Also, not having ads means they are totally product focused, not focused on ad sales and driving up their ad rates. That helps them keep their team small so they don't burn through money hiring to build up and sell their own advertising system.

Last, not putting ads on their site insulates them from the ups and downs of the advertising market. If ad prices drop one quarter, their future projections have to change a lot because of the real numbers.

Long story short, I don't think if Quora put AdSense on their site that they would have been able to raise $161 million dollars.
People drinking more in the winter should surprise no one. Bad weather displaces other pastimes, and people simultaneously feel more depressed because of the lack of sunlight.
"Expert Political Judgment", by Tetlock, has a lot to say about this. It adds data to the story about the Fox and the Hedgehog. Basically, the hedgehog knows one big thing and tries to force the world into their mental model. The fox knows many things, allowing him to be more flexible thinking about a messy world.
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These do look like serious problems, but it seems to me that all or at least most of them can be fixed. (Are there any "deal breakers"?) What they need is cryptography experts to do more than comment publicly (which is commendable, I am not criticizing), but also contribute some fixes. It is open source after all.

To say that the whole thing is a waste of effort and money is a little strong-worded I think.
Guess and check (beast, as I understand it) requires some prior knowledge of the data format. I was imagining something that worked against entirely random data.
Are you just parsing the text and covering all those options? Or are you doing some sort of natural language processing?

I didn't meant something so abrangent, I meant something simpler. For example, `ls`:

Instead of `ls -l`, `ls complete` or `ls with metadata`.

Instead of `ls -L`, `ls following symlinks`.

Instead of `ls -a`, `ls all` or `ls with all`.

I don't remember exactly what I was thinking.
Fair enough with the first two.

> An anti-science agenda is policy. You can't be accepted as a Republican unless you go against science on at least climate change, for example.

There are many examples of sitting republicans such as Mark Kirk, Bob Corker, Michael Grimm, Susan Collins, Lamar Alexander, Chris Smith, John Thune, Rodney Frelinghuysen and likely more who are are card-carrying Republicans, elected as Republican and acknowledge 'at least climate change'. It's not mandatory.
I don't think that the scenario you're sketching here is far fetched at all. Code re-use and recycling inside technical companies is very common. If any code you wrote there turned out to be great/good at something you'd never know where it might end up. Perhaps in the processor of some killer robot in the future.

I wonder where the code that is running inside the drones today comes from. Some one who never meant to be involved in those things must have written either the compiler, specs or actual code that these things use to do their killing, I can't imagine any company (no matter how secure they might want to be) designing a completely new processor architecture and tools and compilers and all that from scratch.
I remember there was a time period not too long ago when the calendar lined up* with the one from like 1989 or 1992 something like that and 2600 started releasing a bunch of their editors old radio shows from that year as a weekly podcast - as if on a ~decade "delay".

I usually only pop on one of their podcasts when I'm really bored, but I followed most of that while it was happening because of an interesting effect. For some reason hearing about stuff from the past on the same calendar day and day of week just really made you connect to it more.

I saw this the other day too, and bookmarked it because it brought that cool feeling back. It's a really neat idea imo.

* lined up in terms of days of the week - so if the 3rd of March was a Monday the one year, it was the other too
These two files were renamed after Microsoft more or less parted ways with IBM.

IBMBIO.COM became io.sys.

IBMDOS.COM became msdos.sys.
Spoiler/save-the-click: "© 2014 Raytheon Cyber Products. All rights reserved. Second Look® is a registered trademark of Raytheon."

> The Raytheon Company is a major American defense contractor and industrial corporation with core manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military and commercial electronics.
As a librarian-programmer, I continue to find it interesting how interested HN is in libraries/librarians.

I wonder what that's about? Seriously, I'm not entirely sure and wonder. Some kind of nostalgia for the 'information technology' of pre-computing society?

(Personally, while I still work in libraries, I share btipling's [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781169] general lack of optimism about the future of libraries, alas.)
The I.T company of the future
> Or they are after some people who they know absolutely depend on Tor to operate. Just wild speculation though...

Maybe this is related to the Sony hacks, the authorities could know about a forthcoming data leak or threat. Taking away a major source of anonymity could prevent the information getting out.
I remember that the first Everything was at everything.blockstackers.com.
Lovely stuff. I wonder how close you could get to making this stuff in your garage now, given a silicon wafer and maybe a vacuum chamber. (I imagine the etching chemicals would probably make you unpopular with your neighbors...)
Vampire fiction got big in the 80s, at a time when lots of people were worried about a certain blood-related disease.
Kind of a more loosely structured WikiPedia, with fewer rules and a lot more opinion. It's probably more comparable to the original wiki wiki web, by Ward Cunningham (c2.com, which contains a little bit of everything, kinda like everything2), though it evolved in different directions. It developed more focus on creative writing and commentary over the years, with less emphasis on encyclopedia style articles or technical articles, though I haven't paid attention to it in like a decade. I was very excited about it when it first came about, though.

It was closely related to Slashdot, but when Slashdot was sold, E2 remained independent.
Yep, that's a perfect analogy. And people have actually used type systems to formalize the concept of units. :)