skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I've reversed-engineered a private API, now what?
I'd like to discuss the ethical aspect of using a private API.

I was able to reverse-engineer a secure HTTP API of a website with over 10 million users to enable access from third-party clients (one has to authenticate with their login and password). This hack allows you to access you own data on the website, that's it, there is no malicious intent.

I have several options here:

* publish it on a popular blog and wait for the company to act on this (they probably won't be too happy)
* report the vulnerability to the company, and when the fix it, publish the information

I really want to publish this hack, as it could be useful for others to learn how to reverse engineer APIs, and I also believe there is no reason why said API should be private in the first place, they should open it.

What would you do?
The agile green ape

jumps in the ancient mountains.

Autumn colors rest.
Leading with the Paul Rand "Eye Bee M" rebus is always cool:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/gooddes...
Pushing those kinds of costs onto the drivers seems to be one of the main points of Uber.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/understanding-the-econom...

>Since no one can provide plausible Uber growth theories based on major productivity/service improvements, one must consider the possibility that Uber management’s growth strategies may be at least partially based on drivers it would not want to publicize. The labor exploitation hypothesis suggests that Uber not only hopes to avoid paying higher costs that might be needed to attract drivers away from competing companies, but hopes to actually achieve driver costs lower than what existing companies face, by exploiting significant information dissymmetries. One key is Uber’s “independent contractor” approach, whereby those drivers provide the vehicle, vehicle maintenance and liability insurance. As mentioned earlier, traditional business logic suggests that this approach could not work because existing companies could always get much better rates than individuals acting in isolation. In these situations Uber has shifted the full vehicle capital risk (normally borne by a taxi company) to the driver; this allows Uber to grow without raising much capital, but there is no evidence that drivers are being compensated for their (collectively) large capital contribution, or the risk that Uber exercises it rights to suddenly terminate the contract of the person who had purchased a vehicle on its behalf. Similarly, the typical taxi/limo driver may not understand the true maintenance/depreciation costs of intensive commercial use as well as professional fleet managers, and multiple reports indicate Uber drivers do not always understand the requirement to purchase commercial insurance with significantly greater liability coverage than their personal policies (carrying paying passengers would invalidate their personal policies and violate laws in most cities).
Tre criteri infallibili per non accettare soldi falsi
I had thought about similar ideas a few years ago. I don't think this approach would get very far in court as it's essentially just an encoding.

My thought experiment was be to do something like mapping the copyright work in question to the bible or US Constitution then apply that as input to a reversible Markov text generator to produce output containing nothing but realistic text from the bible, constitution, etc.
Same basic family of loopholes as Airbnb and other "sharing economy" services.

Shift legal liability for regulation following to the end provider, ignore the fact that very many of your providers are almost certainly breaking laws and/or contracts (eg. leases) and hope nobody notices until you're big enough to be a difficult target.

Seems to be a pretty effective model here in the US.
SICP and HtDP are two very different books that have the unfortunate feature of using somewhat similar languages (which are syntactically very similar, hence causing the confusion).

I was recently re-reading SICP, and was amazed by how cleverly structured it is. It somehow goes for an entire fifth of a book without any data structure at all. It retrospect, I consider it something of a virtuoso achievement to have pulled that off while writing a book that is utterly compelling on every page. However, the only way it can achieve that is by focusing _entirely_ on what we call "domain knowledge". As the kind of person who has always loved the play of numbers, I was immersed fully and barely noticed what was happening when I read it as a student. To most students, however, this material is both uninteresting and difficult, and difficult material that isn't even relevant to the domain is especially uncompellling.

Of course, diving into data early means you need a lot more help structuring your programs. HtDP focuses precisely on that problem, _using_ the data to drive the structure (inspired by earlier efforts such as The Little Lisper). And this highlights exactly how very different the two books are. It is much like the comment about the US and UK: "two countries separated by a common language". The coincidence of using (almost) the same language in both books has, sadly, created a great deal of confusion on this point.
Ah ok, Thanks for letting me know... I am in middle of pumping up the server, so should get better performance in some time... :)
Will let you know as soon as I am done with it!
Finally, something to do with my 1st generation iPad.
I know there are libraries out there; I was talking about getting more things standardized so programs can mix and match these libraries with fewer translation layers. For example, boost spirit is a bit out there for most projects.
Since that's undefined behavior anything (including and especially things worse than a segmentation fault) could happen.
It's tethered using lightning cable.
— Delicious users, circa '07

Though certainly if you don't mind switching services every three or five years it's a smaller factor.
Keeping an entire population of humans alive (possibly around 20,000 - 40,000 individuals [1]) on a space ship for at least 100 years (time required to reach Alpha Centauri with nuclear based propulsion [2]) is quite a technological challenge. So I wouldn't say it's just political, but I agree it's plausible.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576513...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion
Pretty soon here in France they'll make cars illegal due to protests from the blacksmith's union.
I've been using Air Display for a long time for when I'm on the go. Does anybody have experience with both and which is better? Never really had problems with Air Display - if you don't expect it to work as a full external display. However lag has always been very manageable for me
Getting 21,000 users with accelerated lean startup
Meet the SEC’s Brainy New Crime Fighters
Anything like this available for Windows? Wouldn't be bad for an email/IM screen.
Most kids games won't run on it.
Seems to be artificially created by access to money for funding.
I don't think so. It's like saying we have Heineken, so why would anyone want a craft beer?
You could have used Air Display :) I do really like this use though, never thought of using my old iPad as a permanent extra display.
Ionization actually reduces the effective temperature massively - from O(v^2) to O(v) at high (read: re-entry-like) velocities.
In the case of Uber it's not just the regulatory cost that is being pushed onto the drivers but the capital risk of vehicle purchase and maintenance as well.
First, if possible, I verify a PGP signature. :)

Then, I dunno, I generally just fumble through it based on the standard desktop user's beliefs of which options go in/under which UI widget.
The Swiss Army Knife of Network Devices
Over 300 BTC More Swept from Blockchain.info Wallets
"When a dirty page is written to disk, write() to the same dirty page is blocked until flushing to disk is done."

I'm not sure I got this, but this seems similar to vsync - making sure only complete 4k pages are written to disk, and then flipping the buffer and processing the next one.

But what error condition does this guard against? It seems this is only useful in a non-journaled file system.
Product launches tomorrow, so hardly any comparisons can be made. It seems to be promising - wired connection means higher bandwidth and improved latency. Supposedly can do Retina resolutions at 60hz.
30,000 People Really Did Buy Poop on Black Friday
Mine is full of kids games. Admittedly I've run across one or two games that didn't work, but it's not like I've ever experienced a lack of available kids games.
What is your goal? It sounds like the moment you publish, you expect the company will close the API. So you will actually be blocking third-party clients.

How about making your own third party client, but not publishing the API details until they are closed?
Makers need fast solutions to create and control connected products
Depends on the definition, as you predicted. In general I agree with Dawkins that mono definitions don't even make sense here. [1]

There never was an Australopithecus mother who gave birth to a Homo child, for every child ever born belonged to the same species as its mother.

However to give some rough idea, then in the context of this space exploration discussion, when I say "Human" I mean everything starting from the first person who learned how to cook [2], all the way to potential future versions where there's only a brain within a cyborg body.

[1] http://edge.org/response-detail/25366

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_...
Blablacar will not be affected by the law, because it is carpooling. You're not paying for a service, you're sharing the cost of the ride.
I live in the second biggest city in the country and see coyotes almost every morning. And there are reports pretty much every year of bears wandering into town.

I'm not sure I buy wild animals as a reason for cops to carry guns, but there's a lot more of wild animals in a lot more places than you seem to think.
I'm really surprised to see modern discussions of Perl in bioinformatics, normally when I see any mention I assume that either a) it's an outsider who is snickering at how backwards we are or b) it's an old timer who has never gotten with the times.

I've been in the bioinformatics space for about 13 years now and I've only come a small handful of perl scripts, all of which have been legacy programs. Even when I started in the field, perl was viewed as somewhat anachronistic. All of the end-user software I've written (read: For researchers) has been in R, Java and a wee bit of scala.

These days all of the researchers I know are using some combo of R, Python and to a lesser extent MATLAB. Many have useful C and/or Java (and/or Scala) skills as well.

My personal experience is obviously not exhaustive but I find it hard to believe that many people are using Perl these days, and IMO that's a matter of good riddance.
My thoughts too. The main reason is not the engines, but the frame itself. It's not very commercially viable spend days in a hangar, after few hours of flight, scanning for the micro faults.
The Evolution of WordPress in 2014 and Beyond
Banning products and services in demand by every day people has a long history of working out.
The rise in the Accelerator trend has created a ton of badly behaving accelerators around the world.

Many insisting that they need to apply their own "local flavor" of business dealings, instead of directly applying the American models, in order to make it work in their country. Turns out that this usually means acting in extractive ways instead of value-adding ways. No care for their reputation and actively seeking out entrepreneurs that they can extract the most from.

Too bad that there's really no purely founder-oriented resource out there. Every major community online is really slanted towards the benefit of investors, or freelancers, which have different needs than startup founders. I started to make one a while ago, whenever I'm not so broke I'll someday launch it.
"Will they be able to compete on price?"

Sounds like the current low prices are the result of cutting corners and not having adequate insurance. Which makes me side against Uber here.
People drink craft beer because they taste better, not because it gets them drunk better. In fact I'd wager that people whom drink beer because of its alcohol probably prefer Heineken, since it gives the same end state at half the price.
With IPv6, you can give each site a separate address and encode it as a haiku. Poetry to replace DNS.

And there is no central Internet Corporation for Assigned Haiku. This is what namecoin was meant to be.

Chilled apes and fat sprats

aid bleak brave prone ace ace ants.

Ace ants aid sharp beaks.
I see now, I should have been reading better - my bad. I also read in this thread that Air Display had some troubles with Yosemite, but I haven't updated on my work machine yet so I hadn't seen these problems.

Streaming over USB seems promising though, I needed to plug in my iPad for the battery.
Bit of an aside, but the "horizontal" propagation of laws from state to state has some structural reasons that it favors certain kinds of laws more than others. Mostly the large role of the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), which draws up model laws and organizes campaigns for them to be passed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Law_Commission. It has no formal power, but it has a well-established set of supporters, working relationships with legislators, staff to do the actual drafting work who are familiar with the law of all 50 states, etc.

The ULC in principle is interested in a lot of areas of harmonization of what they consider well-written laws. But its biggest political support is from multi-state companies that want a uniform commercial operating environment, so it has been mostly successful there, via the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), a set of model regulations for commerce. Businesses can get some of what they want in this respect more directly, by lobbying the federal government to directly pass uniform national laws, enforced via federal preemption. But it's possible to achieve a more comprehensive degree of uniformity, avoiding constitutional issues with federalism, by going the UCC route. It formally preserves federalism (each state voluntarily enacts the UCC), while still producing the desired outcome due to the heavy pressure states feel to conform to the UCC, lest they be perceived as "bad for business" (every state has passed it, though in a few cases with modifications).

The other area they've been somewhat successful in is family law, due to widespread concern over problems that arise in cross-state divorce and child-custody proceedings if the states have very different family-law regimes. So many states are willing, absent some strong lobby in another direction, to sign on to a "national best practice" in that area.
Like the Dinosaur and the triangle symbol icon.
Also a great Python port which we use heavily:
https://github.com/daviddrysdale/python-phonenumbers
Sometimes I wonder how much of Apple and IBM starting to work together was due to the shared love of Helvetica Neue.
Well never used the site before but after reading the comments I signed up. Thanks for the heads up on a better service then what I was using.
Error Resume: Hundreds of goods sold for a penny
Annals of Innovation
You sure it isn't just the limitations of the medium? Threaded discussion lends itself to longer messages. And since the author of the post isn't guaranteed to be here, we can't ask questions and expect an answer. If we were on IRC, I'd expect more of a two-way conversation. Instead we have people sharing their comments (Hacker News often reminds me of blog comments.)
Just one technical comment - that parser will break on many FASTA files. They can also include '.' & * characters ('.' is often output by sequence aligners to indicate sections outside of the model, * is there for aa but not dna/rna and I have seen them in sequencer output for uncertain positions). I think this kind of edge case variance is possibly why the various Bio-* tools have not been very successful in all, you end up spending hours trying to work out why it's not working with your particular inputs.

On a personal viewpoint: "Take a look at the REPL dump below and see if you can work out where we are implicitly using $seq as a Str rather than Seq:" - this section pretty much sums up why I've always hated working with Other Peoples' Perl. To accurately follow someone else's perl requires either an encyclopedic knowledge of the language and it's edge cases or very heavy documentation and a set standard of coding practices. It's a shame that this looks true for Perl 6 as well.

Great for personal use, I guess. But by and large I'm glad to see more projects switch over to python.
Seems to me like an excerpt from Powers' book on the subject, Drugs 2.0.

It's a great read. Starting out describing the evolution of drug use, and the relatively recent implementation of laws to control the substances. Progressing on to the present day, describing the point we're at now - use of TOR and dark net markets to acquire these compounds, pseudonymously, over the internet.
> b) it's an old timer who has never gotten with the times.

As someone who knows the author of the post, that is mostly true ;)

In all seriousness, while I generally agree with your sentiments I don't think that Perl is dead within Bioinformatics. Not least since major data providers, e.g. Ensembl, write their tools in Perl.
Well,the difference is ride-sharing is more or less tolerated,if it's not for profit. Very few people offering shared rides make money out of it.It's usually paid,because it's more about sharing expenditure.

UberPop,on the other hand,is a private taxi service.It's not about someone saying he goes to Nantes and has room for 4 people,for a 15€ fee.

Given the price of the train,the development of ride sharing and inter region bus travelling(which was still illegal a few years ago),is a good thing.

I cant believe how insanely expensive the train is today.The SNCF also stopped providing a lot of services (low cost train,stations,...)they deemed not profitable enough just to push for the high speed rail.in 2005,you could do Paris-Nantes for 15€. It took 4 hours,but who cares.

Today,it's 50 up to 100€ + if you dare book a trip on the same day you're travelling.
>Will they be able to compete on price if they do that?

Can they even be considered to be competing now, if they can't assure me that the driver will be able to cover expenses if he injures and/or kills me or other passengers?
Combatting Explosive ATM Attacks
Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible to Use
There was a good talk from IBM's head of design about what they are doing earlier this year [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvsnezSMdYk
DIY Xen: Shrinking a Linux Disk
PyDev of the Week: Tim Roberts
I haven't seen examples of folks trying to use iPads (for example) as X11 displays, likely because it's outside my area of expertise. Do you know of any examples?
Long-distance ridesharing firm Carpooling arrives in the US, partners with Uber
What has SQL done to deserve this?
Does startup imply burnout?
NavigationKit: A library for Turn-by-Turn navigation
Good overview. Having worked at a GDS subsidiary and written about this topic, another thing to add is it depends on how many caches there are between you and the root database. Airfares are heavily cached so the data that is shown in search results is often stale; only the final booking (when you actually pay) is the real number. The more contention for seats as you get to the last few the more likely the final price can jump. For example, Google's flight data is very stale since they don't do any booking, they don't really have to update all that frequently, which means they can return results from their own cache fast.
Application Readiness: The Key to Surviving OS Disruption
Finding a taxi in Paris at night can be an ordeal, so besides regulating the competition, what's the rationale behind banning a low-cost, on-demand alternative?
Do I need an iDevice to view the video as well? Wont play here, would be interested to see more how this works.
Reminds me of this cartoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F2OOrtU2VE
That's the only thing their webpage said to me 'we too!'. I used to enjoy improving the visual qualities of data (Brett Victor and previous inspirations as extrapolation) but nowadays it's more of a fad of form over content.
>“Currently, those who use UberPop are not protected in case of an accident,” he added. “So not only is it illegal to offer the service, but for the consumer, it’s a real danger."
I'm still using delicious.
Great story.
Is it fair to say, if he had had internet, television, cinemas and tons of friends around, he would never have achieved that?

I see our kids every day staring at various screens, being miles away from any creative impulse and getting really mad, if we discuss (or execute) internet access limits.
In IT, beware of fad versus functional
The weary white wolf

yawns in the wind-swept wetlands.

Autumn colors blow.
"Window Networking TroubleShoot Error: The connection between your access point, router, or cable modem and the internet is broken."
the same prolog problem is defined for what happens when you supply both arguments, if the statement is true it will eval to true, if it is false, it will eval to false. if neither, it will generate all possible solutions, one at a time.

:-use_module(library(clpq)).

fib_aux(N, A, Sum,, F) :-
{ N = 0, F = 1};
{ N = 1, F = 1};
{ N >= 2,
N1 = N - 1,
Acc = Sum,
NewSum = A + Sum,
F = F1 + Acc,
F1 >= N1 % to not run infinitly for unsatisfiable question clp_fib(N, 4).
},
fib_aux(N1, Acc, NewSum, F1).

fib(N, F) :-
fib_aux(N, 0, 1, F).
We have coyotes in the city limits of Atlanta, GA and black bears are regularly spotted in the nearby suburbs. (In counties with population over 500k) I would hesitate to say there's only a handful of areas with bears/coyotes/etc., as over 90% of the US land area is considered rural. To be sure, most wild animals are more afraid of us and run away rather than attack, but it's a legitimate thing that law enforcement has to be prepared for.
MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
Ah, so you're the one! ;)
Banning dangerous and illegal services is fine if the providers don't clean up their act.
Best math lectures since Herbert gross.
I have no problem with officers having guns safely stowed in the car, but I think carrying them all the time is excessive. This would be completely sufficient for all animal problems,and probably 99% of situations where you actually want to shoot at someone.
[Guide] How to Block Savetubevideo.com Referral Spam to Your Website
Since there is no traditional long distance car service threatened by it (the SNCF isn't worried for the moment), I'd say blablacar is safe.

ps: music band tribute username ?
Show HN: ReactSkitterTransitions – A react component for advanced js transitions
I have a little bit similar, just not so sad story.

I was ~12 years old (around 2004), I really wanted to learn programming but all I had was a cell phone (one of the first budget class phones with GPRS, Nokia 3510i). I had very little access to internet / pc (about 30min/week) and couldn't speak English, Russian, or any other major language.

So I tried to get my hands on any PHP code examples, type it in using my phone, and upload to FTP using some online forms.

Eh, funny times. I wrote a bit more about it http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2013/07/30/writing-code-with-a-ce...
Author here, there's a simple demo here: http://rawgit.com/guillaume86/react-skitter-transitions/mast... .

I only ported 2 effects for the moment, but porting from the skitter code is pretty easy (just time consuming).