skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do hackers need PartyPrep?
We are at the very early stages of our startup - PartyPrep, a hangover prevention nutraceutical I hacked together while in the Navy. Recently funded on IndieGoGo, our marketing plan has been focused on organic growth and niche markets. HERE IS MY QUESTION: There was an assumption by me that the tech market would be a better niche to focus on because, lets face it, you guys are smart and, for the most part, would be more likely to "prep" before going out on the town vs. the rest of us who are a bit more reactionary and need instant recovery. So, what do you say, are you guys the right, neh, a viable, target market, or is it back to the white board for the growth hackers among us? I appreciate your honest (and, if necessary, blistering) feedback.
Yep, I concur. There is nothing I've seen about this with any particularly strong tie to DPRK at all. Sony has pissed off enough people, internally as well as externally, that it could plausibly be pretty much anyone. And they have I think the worst reaction to it I've ever seen.

If anyone wants to learn anything from this: don't use P@ssword1 as a password. If you've got that down, you're already better than the Sony studio.
Yes I would agree. I've almost always found HN comments to be helpful and useful. At the worst they are neutral/add no value but are definitely not nasty trolls.
Cancer survival rates are increasing dramatically. They have doubled in the last 30 years [1], and survival rates continue to increase. In the 50's, childhood cancer's such as lymphoma and leukemia were a 30 day death sentence. Now survival is extremely common, if not the norm.

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/surv...
All this really proves is Airbnb knows how to get press. Article should be titled, "Here are pictures of new Airbnb office". It looks cool, will be interesting how it can scale.

The concept of, "not the worst place ever in the world to work" call center isn't some magical break through. See Zappos, booking.com etc.
Creately – updated with fresh new UX
How to Sell to Customers Who Are Being Disrupted
Didn't North Korea publicly denied their involvement? And America businesses are believing NK is willing to go to war by attacking Americans on America soil because of a movie?
Unlike most of the other wysiwyg html editors — Wysihtml makes use of contenteditable so it works inline, on-site and doesn't need a separate window or iframe. It also works on nearly all browsers and platforms, including touch.
9 Slack Hacks We Couldn't Live Without
We are trying to revive and modernise a once popular editor xing/wysihtml5. It is an open source project and we will keep it this way. Keeping a wysiwyg working needs constant attention and care as browser inconsistencies tend to change with every new version. All pull requests, issues and tests pointing to issues are most welcome at https://github.com/Voog/wysihtml.

Voog team.
Just earlier today I had a client asking me about the Sony breach, and I laid out all the reasons I didn't think North Korea was actually behind it -- nor did Schneier.

Then just a few hours later the New York Times came out with an article claiming that they have information from some Washington sources that it has been confirmed to be North Korea. I checked the author bylines, because Judith Miller and the NYTimes, and David E Sanger I could see being politically motivated to make a case like that on some pretty flimsy evidence, but Nicole Perlroth has good tech journalist creds.

So, I dunno. Looks like it might be North Korea after all.

At the moment, I figure there are three scenarios, and none of them are really wonderful to think about:

1. It's China, working through or with North Korea. They certainly have the ability (and in some cases, insider information), and they've been waging a network and technology-based conflict around the world for years now. But, in the past, they've been carefully diplomatic about managing relations between North Korea and the rest of the world; it doesn't make sense for them to suddenly paint a huge target on NK's back, and China's past exploits have been kept pretty quiet. I don't understand why they'd want this one to be big and public.

2. It actually is North Korea. We've been led to believe that they exist in a technological dark ages of sorts, with most of their infrastructure relying on technology that would horrify the average HN user. They're certainly belligerent enough, but now suddenly we find that they have not just the technology to pull it off, but also the talent? How does that kind of talent even develop under a strictly regimented government like North Korea's? What kind of ability do they actually have?

3. It's neither North Korea nor China. This is the most disturbing one to think about; now that the NYTimes and Washington are involved, it smells a bit like the kind of political maneuver with propaganda that we saw in the run-up to the Iraq war. At the moment, this is still really feasible, and it makes me wonder what Washington's motives might be.

Only time will tell for sure, I guess. Whoever is actually behind this, they won't be able to stay quiet forever.
This may be true, but #2 and #4 are pretty weak explanations.

#2: There's no such thing as "Traditional Korean" (just South Korean, and North Korean), so saying that they don't speak "Traditional Korean" in NK is pretty severely misunderstanding the language. The Korean locale/encoding is very easily changed as a setting, obviously, but it's also possibly used by NK hackers because it would let North Koreans type in Korean. Saying "North Koreans don't speak the same kind of Korean as spoke in South Korea, and thus wouldn't have a Korean locale set" is kind of like saying "Americans have their own dialect of English as distinct from the British, so they probably will not have any English-language keyboards."

#4. Doesn't the fact that the hack seems to be for retribution and not for personal gain precisely fit the motives of a propaganda-oriented country? Would you expect a dictatorship that works on propaganda and political influence to really negotiate some sort of deal with Sony?

My bet is that it's some mercenary hacking group hired by NK, not necessary a state-sponsored thing but by a few high-up individuals within NK --- but not by North Korean hackers themselves.
Cosmos – A new logic programming language
In my experience (on HN and other places) economics orthodoxy is always unpopular. People like to believe "if only if weren't for X assholes, the world would be much better". Economics teaches that the assholes are us: the primary thing preventing the world from being much better is the political and economic barriers to redistributing wealth.

Redistributing wealth is hard. Much easier is to invent schemes like unions which enrich certain lower class people, while (silently) making other lower class people poorer.

As you point out, globalization and outsourcing has made Chinese and Indians much richer. But they are not very visible, so who cares about them? They should have waited their turn, and eventually Western unions would have granted them jobs with "fair" wages ;-)
new look is neat and awesome !
“In a typical environment, the cubicle is your world and the rest is the company’s world, and they’re very territorial about the cubicles. We wanted to evaporate that territorialism and turn it into a collective place.”

How does that read to anyone else? "People really want an anchoring personal space and lol they can't have one"?

This article has nothing about working there, as the title claims. A call center that's not hell to work at - what about the work? Call time target pressure? Lack of access to information or power to change anything? Things people complain about.
Nice analysis.
But fk, can you stop blaming China and NK for these thing and put some facts to back up your claims?
> ARM has a sticky overflow flag "Q".

This is surprisingly expensive to implement fast and correctly in a modern OoO core. The most likely implementation would end up taking Q as a dependency for every qadd/sub, which would be terrible.

> You can somewhat do the same purely in software with the compiler, but the lack of a "sticky" flag means it'll need to access - and potentially stall - at each point where flags would be overwritten by another ALU instruction.

The jump depends on flags, but by definition has no further dependencies. So long as it's untaken and predicted as untaken the cpu can never stall on it.
Ok, so what makes a threat credible enough to instill terror? Seriously, terror. I'm not talking about a level of concern that causes people to modify their behavior around media consumption, I'm talking about the level of terror that breaks your enemy's will to fight. Again, terrorism falls within the spectrum of warfare - not criminal behavior. I'd argue that the identity and reputation of the aggressor needs to be established for a bomb threat to be considered terroristic. Even the CIA, an entity that would benefit from a loose definition of terrorist, refuses to classify a group as "terrorist" unless they have expressed intent and demonstrated capability.

It wouldn't make any sense to exempt states from the list of potential terrorist actors - because the state invented terrorism. As I said, spectrum of warfare. Now intelligent people can disagree about the ability of individuals to declare war... but then terrorism is restricted to the state. I hope you've misunderstood my WWII example, because otherwise you've just argued that civilian children, elderly and infirm were somehow not bystanders while huddled in bomb shelters. My history isn't super strong, but I don't think anybody has ever argued that the British engaged in total war - which would be necessary for children to be classified as anything but bystanders.
I wonder why not use interrupts for overflow checking? (Maybe x86 still doesn't support that - my knowledge of it is very old.) That seems smarter, if the overflow is really going to be an exceptional case..

I would think that the best approach is to set up a global overflow handler, driven by an interrupt, and then maybe for cases where you actually want to be able to overflow, a special C primitive (that would use instructions that avoid overflow in some way) could be useful.

I am just wondering why the article doesn't mention this possibility at all.
Well, I tell you what I'd do - I'd create a Stephen Colbet-esque character that "adopts" the looney rant and injects some very questionable additions and subtractions from it (slowly, over time).

Now the discerning reader/caller/emailer might notice nothing or might get some slight food for thought, or they might notice that I'm basically trying to destroy the meme, and in an effort to "defend the defense against the war on Christmas" might highlight how I was not Ben Stein, nor did I even support his views - hopefully this new meme would spread so the "faithful defenders" would know I was a "fraud" and to avoid citing me.

Of course, all this takes time, effort and a bit of planning, but if people were emailing me all the time, I might just do it so they'd leave me alone.
Why don't other attacks act as a litmust test here? One person opening an email doesn't open up access to every system and all the data in one fell swoop. Ok an email was opened. And then... It takes time to go from one system to the next, so why did his happen so fast?
Betabook: The Portable Whiteboard for the Digital Age
Except death of a president and Day of Jackal are not saying haha we are going to kill the leader of a country.
Looks really neat! I guess this happens when the company is run by 2/3 designers.

It's interesting how vocation for people in charge can cause large differences between organisations (and even countries).

This article have some graphs comparing countries:
http://www.economist.com/node/13496638
> 1) That might be a credible criticism if the benchmarks game claimed to be some kind of exhaustive comparison.

(I.e. literally your paragraph before the thing I quoted in my comment just above.)
i guess it is obligatory here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=tH...
Mark, the Azure CTO, gives a good breakdown of the time taken for each portion of the incident recovery in this video: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Inside-the-Azure-Storage-Outa...

That may help address these questions. Just FYI, I am an engineer in the Azure compute team.
I am really curious about this, are there any Airbnb folks here who could connect me with someone on their support team to chat about their approach?
> “Someone will be on a call, and you can see it’s difficult and another agent will sit next to them and listen in and give feedback while the call is happening,” Harvey says. And as much as the CX team is encouraged to solve problems in a hierarchy-free setting, “it’s a default that you ask at least one person how you might solve that problem,” Yu says.

As far as I can tell, this is the deliberate opposite of how most call centers are designed. Most call centers prioritize leaving your neighbors alone so that they can get better stats. I wonder if Airbnb's metric-taking also has this approach in mind.
I think he meant that the malware that was used was pretty advanced and the information that was hard-coded would've taken a lot of time to gather. The movie's premise was only publicly announced last June.
Besides increased theft, it also means the cocaine that is available will have more adulterants, people who can't get it will turn to other drug such as methamphetamines or dangerous pills, dealers who do have supply will temporarily become wealthier creating new conflicts or power plays, the cartel will have to recruit more vulnerable people to become mules, etc etc.

But most likely, within a month or two prices will probably stabilize again.

And the state is left with an expensive prosecution, judges, lawyers, public defenders, paid police witnesses, forensic experts. Not including the whole cost of catch the guy in the first place.

And the drug war theater continues on and the law enforcement and legal industries continue to line their pockets.
> 2. It actually is North Korea. We've been led to believe that they exist in a technological dark ages of sorts, with most of their infrastructure relying on technology that would horrify the average HN user. They're certainly belligerent enough, but now suddenly we find that they have not just the technology to pull it off, but also the talent? How does that kind of talent even develop under a strictly regimented government like North Korea's? What kind of ability do they actually have?

See, this really isn't the case, and why most people believe this is beyond me, when a google search would suffice. I'm not criticizing you, actually, just pointing out that there's an incredible amount of misinformation out there about North Korea. Look at these photographs of a technology trade fair in Pyongyang this summer, for example:

http://www.northkoreatech.org/2014/06/23/another-look-at-the...

Most telling, IMO, is that a 32G usb is being sold for USD20, where at the time of writing, the same product was nearly USD16 on Amazon US. That's a remarkably low markup for a product, especially for one in North Korea. Also considering that it's a high volume, low price product with so little of a markup makes me think that other technologies must be very available and accessible, and that NK is hardly the technological dark ages that popular discussion has us think it is.

Of course, this all isn't to say that NK performed the hack, but I hardly think that a lack of infrastructure would really be the barrier if North Korea really wanted to train a cadre of hackers.
Absolutely. If the situation were reversed we would do the exact same thing and we would celebrate it as a wonderful idea (although it would be cast as 'stimulating the national economy', since citizens here can't participate in international policy).
Hi totony, unfortunately with the way our systems are designed today, it's typically trivial to usurp admin later on when the user escalates privileges, even after the USB device has been removed. Examples such as injected LD_PRELOAD, adjusting PATH to MITMA sudo, etc.

In my example, we interestingly see how by default, OS X does not require additional permissions in this unique scenario. Crazy!
What about a slight variation of #1: North Korea massively funding a Chinese hacker group to carry out the attack.
Selected 13-16 year old age group and was asked for favorite type of alcohol.
RocksDB meetup, December 2014
Yes! John Regehr seriously advocates that [1] and I fully agree to him.

[1] http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1154
I recently got a teensy 2.0 for rooting my chromecast, (which it does, roughly by appearing to chain 32 usb hubs, better description at https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2014/hubcap-chromecast-root-pt... )

They are nifty little dev boards, as you can pretend to be a variety of different devices, but the real benefit in my mind is the ease at which you can use the solder pads to build a device and connect it to usb. YOu can dump roms.

The teensy 3.0 is a 32 bit arm processor and has extra ram and flash memory, which is certainly an improvement over the 8 bit avr processor... that said the teensy 2.0 or 2.0++ might be better if you have arduino experience. Both are great boards to play around with, and I expect lots more exploits based around pretending to be various usb devices.
I use a lot of high latency connections (my country has rather slow ping times to major internet centres - around 200ms) and sometimes connections just get "stuck" when loading the CSS.

This results in seeing the title of the page with a loading spinner and a blank white page. If browsers actually rendered the page (is CSS really that important on a news site?) I would at least be able to see the content.
as others have said below. the CDDL or 'cuddle' license as some chose to pronounce it. Is incompatible with the GPL, which means two things.

1 - We can't just take the code and add it to the kernel.
2 - The patent and other legal grants in the licence won't apply if we try to reverse engineer a compatible GPL2 equivalent for the kernel to use, which will be a HUGE risk for the few companies that would probably consider the cost of reverse engineering worth it. And before you say it can be done without company support. I have 2 things to say, hows that going for the ReiserFS 4 fans who wanted to keep improving that, and in order to continue the work on ZFS effectively, the existing ZFS developers have 'ganged up' and now try to work on everything so that the openzfs project can be a single source of truth for the ZFS source code, and a reverse engineered version would be very unlikely to benefit from this, and would therefore require even more developer time just keeping up with the improvements 'upstream' in ZFS from the 'original' ZFS codebase.
Looks like a lot of the same ideas behind the Internet Archive, but focused on asset creation rather then preservation.

I also like to see more people moving into the Patreon-style market - Patreon has probably figured out a lot of the pain points and will probably rightfully hold some permanent market share for being first, but I think the ability of nonprofit/coop projects to be more agile and respond better to user needs due to the general lack of ulterior motives will be valuable for this specific business model in the long run.
The fact that an amateur on the Internet can dig dirt up speaks scores for the US (as flawed as it is) than it does for China.

Oh sweet irony.
Both problems are undergoing active research. They are indeed orthogonal (albeit one can somehow reduce the severity of another and vice versa), but with a finite resource and time you sometimes have to choose.
For context, see Fight for the Future's blog post on why "numerous problems with [the Sunlight Foundation's] data and their methodology make it impossible to support their conclusions": http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/105475259503/why-is...
Iran’s New System to Identify All Web Users. How to Bypass It?
The latter might be true, but the first part isn't worth much as most governments would flat out deny they hacked into a large foreign company.
Sysadvent
What's in a Var?
Sony Cancels Plans to Release 'The Interview'
Either change "None/don't know" or add a "don't care/doesn't matter" option. For example I don't want to limit the selection to just "girl toys" or don't particularly care how much I spend. Also you might want to stop asking the favorite alcohol question to people buying gifts for 5 year olds
Apple halting online sales in Russia
Blackberry Classic goes 'back to company's roots'
Won't help you on iOS.

Incidentally, it feels these days like half of the websites I open in TweetBot's WebView break completely, usually due to a delayed pop-up ad. It's the dumbest trend, which, at best, only works on desktop.
Google's Very Rough Transition
Are you suggesting it's difficult to find articles that criticise China on the Internet?
The amount of $20 isn't relevant. What's relevant is how hard it is to come by $20 in the DPRK.
Here’s a typical day for a pampered Google engineer
GRSecurity users have to actually upgrade their kernel anyways:

> On those systems, assuming that the mitigation works correctly, the impact of this bug may be limited to massive memory corruption and an eventual crash or reboot
Yeah I haven't experienced any BTRFS problems, it could just be people stuck on RHEL running kernel 2.6 / 3.2.
My personal favourite: 'Information doesn't want to be free' by Cory Doctorow

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20763766-information-doe...
Intercal is the reason I just chuckle when people say brainfuck is an esoteric programming language.

And also why I cry when people create languages that are one simple regex away from brainfuck and call those esoteric.

Soo also: Malbolge, so evil that the only non-stupid programs in it were generated by LISP scripts
I'd like to see a real-world, reproducible BTRFS bug on 3.18 that's a serious problem.
That bug has been fixed, please update your kernel
Recurrent Models of Visual Attention, DeepMind
Huh, thanks for the link.

Pretty much all of the very little I know about North Korea comes from articles like http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/04/glimpses-of-human... (e.g. #17 @ http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/04/glimpses-of-human...). Or http://www.asianscientist.com/2012/12/topnews/dprk-north-kor... -- that, plus the lights-out situation at night, plus their previous difficulties with rocket technology and their impoverishment, altogether gave me the impression that they're a couple decades behind other developed nations, technologically.

I always figured at least a little of that was propaganda of sorts, but there was also the occasional "I visited DPRK and took these surreptitious shots of what I saw" article that seemed to substantiate it.
Analyzing Stack Overflow Careers to measure demand for dev skills (Java wins)
Making the Internet a utility–what’s the worst that could happen?
Man, they are RIGHT next to China where this stuff is manufactured and available for a lot less USD than the US pays. You want markup, just look at New Zealand.

Edit: also what camperbob said.
A lot of these points seem weak.

#5: Maybe they were trying to avoid the Streisand effect?

#6: Why would a disgruntled insider be more media savvy than a state famed for propaganda?

#8/#9: while this may be true, neither provides much evidence for or against the DPRK being the attacker

#10 isn't even an argument.
Is it relevant to me? No, not really. But then again, neither is Snapchat or Facebook. So, what do I know?

Wall Street seems to think Marissa Mayer's doing something right. (Their stock is up over 300% over the last 3 years). I haven't looked over their recent quarterly reports, maybe those would hold some key info: https://investor.yahoo.net/results.cfm
Surging E-Commerce Growth in Nigeria