skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because the attack occurred on networks and computers belong to Sony Picture Entertainment based in Culver City, CA.
Now that anti-prohibition measures are passing in various states - posing a threat to the feds' cash cow (the "War on Drugs") - the feds are now trying to stir up nonsense over supposed "cybercrime".

The intrusion in this case was most likely done by an insider, the feds themselves, or a hacktivist group. The feds routinely break into private systems and are known to go to great lengths to construct elaborate string operations [1].

The timing of the press release is highly suspect. An investigation into an international security breach can take months or years. The feds rarely comment conclusively at the outset because such statements can compromise the investigation. They've provided no evidence whatsoever to support their claims.

Tipping off the purported culprit in this way by claiming to have identified their tell-tale attack signature would make it harder to track future breaches. (It's like publicly announcing that a suspect's phone is being tapped.)

This press release violates standard operating procedure. And why haven't the feds filed charges if the investigation is all "wrapped-up"?

If a foreign nation was involved, there's no evidence that's the case. NK has been the subject of scathing media criticism in the west for years, but other critics weren't targeted in this way.

As others have pointed out [2], the intruders initially demanded a cash ransom. The theory that the attack was linked to a movie release was originated and spread by the media.

[1] "The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror" - http://trevoraaronson.com/book/

[2] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/12/fbi-north-korea-to-blame-...
>nor do they have all of the required algorithms required for proper timekeeping.

I hear something like that a lot, yet all my systems run openntpd and all of them are keeping proper time without issue. What exactly is so not proper about it, and which algorithm exactly does it need to be "proper"?
Petition to save the Interview movie
I fully agree. Performance is not even that important, but for much of the Node.js/MongoDB hype cycle, thats what people often claimed was its biggest advantage; that "average" developers could now write servers that scale beyond what was thought to be practical.

But if that isn't true, then JS has to be measured against other languages on different merits, and e.g. Ruby and Lua are just as suitable for quick prototyping.

Anyway, these discussions usually end in language zealots downvoting each other and not much else, even on HN. Facebook still runs on PHP, so theres that.
"Proportionate" retaliation means releasing emails from one of NK's top commercial film studios?
At what point is an entity sufficiently advanced enough that what makes it up isn't considered artificial any longer? How are we not just sufficiently advanced biological robots? We don't consider ourselves artificial, yet we respond to stimulus and react to it according to the programming of our DNA and "mind" (nature + nurture).

If artificial is a designation meaning that it is created by humans, or another entity to serve a purpose, then what happens when that created AI has the ability to choose to create something itself? This "artificial intelligence" designation only works when a "creator" is trying to create an intelligence, then once it exists and propagates on its own, isn't it an "intelligence" of its own right?
I've seen this happen so many times, it feels like the norm. I guess it's inevitable though, it's more interesting to work on something "new" and "cool" than adjust your mindset to year old design decisions.

Would be interesting to know if there is a relationship between years of experience in programming and how likely you are going to inject the latest "cool" design pattern / framework into code. Personally I have become far more cautious about this stuff. I'd rather adapt what is already present than subject anyone else to an abstract monstrosity I just cooked up after reading the latest hacker news post on the latest hype.
Yes, they are. Also, I believe most pain medications (apart from opioids) work by knocking out some part of the immune response.

Now, even assuming that the medication doesn't actually interfere with your immune system and just gets rid of the symptoms and makes you feel great, you should be aware that your immune system deliberately makes you feel crappy ("sickness behaviour") so that you'll rest and give your immune system a chance to kill the infection. This is more an issue with the flu rather than the cold.
http://savingtheinterview.com/
thanks for the tip! we're on it
Nope, it is because they have announced the 1.0 release. You can build stuff in it without having the platform change from under you now.

2 years ago it was all alpha / betas.
At the very least, a documentary about filming the film _ala_ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_of_Darkness:_A_Filmmaker...
that's actually how we built the tool. the symptoms you select are each tied to active ingredients that they treat, and then we show you products (including generic/store brands) that contain those ingredients in the comparison table below. do you think this isn't coming across as we'd hoped?
I don't know what it is but I really like the design of this site.

That out of the way it will be interesting to see what comes out of F8 this year, specifically in relation to Parse - I would be expecting big announcements especially considering after Google acquired FireBase earlier this year.
Scaling Meteor is my biggest concern right now as I contemplate diving any deeper with it. I'm well aware of Mongo's oplog but the lack of Mongo sharding, the sticky session requirement, server resource consumption (RAM required per client), lack of proper offline support (last write wins) and sheer devops work required to scale is off-putting. Hopefully tomorrow's release of the remaining Bulletproof Meteor content will ease my worries. But I cannot shake the feeling that in terms of cost, something like Firebase would work out to be much more cost efficient.
Also, the whole ecosystem of wrappers is plain silly. It feels like the MDG & the community are just reinventing the wheel time & time again. Oh we got Cordova support? What's that exactly other than some CLI tools? Of course any web tech should support Cordova, that's what it's built for. The Ionic Framewoek are light years ahead in this regard.
There is a rather huge difference in the psychology of the two. A committed racist is dangerous, while your average troll has some internal issues that have a low danger level. Trolls can escalate, but the type of people they talk about in the article are already there.

"If it looks like a duck..."

I would be interested where you fall on zero tolerance.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's very rare on earth so it has to be manufactured. So the oil companies totally would love you to switch from the oil they will sooner or later not be able to fracking get anymore to hydrogen which they can raise prices on until the day when nuclear fusion becomes something they could sell again as long as it remains expensive enough to be sellable.

Hydrogen is dumb, at 300 miles / 450kms a fuel cell I notice there is no mention of the price which is laughably much more than gasoline is today. Then they say that mileage is further than "most" electric cars. True except for the Tesla which actually 85kwh edition has at least 450kms of range. And also Hydrogen cannot be regenerated from breaking which makes it less efficient than full electric. In the future it maybe possible to charge your car with solar or wind or fart energy, but not if your Petrol Company lobbied alternative fuel car runs on a Hydrogen Fuel Cell and has the acceleration of a brick on wheels at 0-100kms in 9.6 seconds. A hummer does that in around 10.5 seconds.
Google Files Suit Against Mississippi Attorney General
I can't help but think about V'Ger.

As a machine it was only capable of pure, cold logic with no emotion, but with its new-found sentience V'ger began to question its own existence. It asked the philosophical questions faced by so many lifeforms: "Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?
most sense
Here's an example of a really simple CRUD app. To give you an idea, I literally just wrote this in the last 10 minutes.

https://gist.github.com/themeteorchef/aa48a086824d9736033d

I added some inline comments to explain how everything is tied together, but if you have questions shoot me an email/gchat! ryan.glover@themeteorchef.com.

If you're looking to build a quick CRUD app, Meteor would be a great candidate.

Edit: In this example, the interaction would be when I type a taco name into the field provided and click "submit," it would immediately appear in my tacos list :)
How about taking cyber security seriously?
Great! So now doxing and stalking are totally awesome as long as it's being done to people we dislike, right?
Yes because trolling is not necessarily hateful. I would go as far as to say that for the most part it isn't.
Exactly the virtual closet I'm looking for. Kudos guys!!
BlackBerry Narrows Loss in Quarter, but Revenue Declines
How to be a maker
Ionic with Parse as back end
Depends.

Are these the kinds of trolls that hunt people down in the physical world, or send nasty letters to employers to get people fired, or send SWAT teams to people's houses?

All of those have happened. All of those are trolling.
Quote from Wikipedia article on Green Threads: "Linux native threads have slightly better performance on I/O and context switching operations."

Some of the actual context switch in native threads is performed by the CPU, where as with green threads it is not. On top of this, the whole stack is copied upon a context switch.
And any of us who've worked in a corporate environment know that Sony is by no means exceptional in that respect. There are security vulnerabilities all over cyberspace just waiting for someone to exploit them (just as in real life). We're protected mainly by some combination of good will, disinterest, and fear of punishment (also as in real life).
A server-side programmer's journey into the wilderness of JS
It's in the same ballpark as the amount of water vapor that comes out of the tailpipe of an internal combustion engine.
Interesting to me that no one has responded.

My personal experience - the acoustics of open offices are generally awful. The past two days in a row, for example, have started with me actually saying out loud "what the hell is that sound?!" to my neighbor after hearing some weird-ass HVAC squealing/squeaking/screeching sounds.

No partitions, lots of collaboration, no noise cancelling.

HVAC noise is a constant, but not in any helpful way.

I can hear people 40 yards away having a conversation - not the contents of it, but I hear voices, and yes they are totally distracting.
As far as I can tell there is no or not much data from experiments that contradicts existing theories or is unexplained. It is of course worthwhile to probe theories in currently unexplored territories but this is getting more and more expensive. No unexplained data, no new theories based on that. Our current problem is just that we don't completely understand our theories and how they fit together. So unless we are lucky and find some important new experimental data, supersymmetric particles for example, there is not much we can do besides reformulating our theories and looking at them from all possible angles until somebody sees something nobody ever saw before.
Totally with you. I'm currently fascinated by cryptography and the encoding of value. It seems to me that alot of what we do is in some way encoding value, from a less scarce form to a more scarce form, and the highest encoding of value is to be found in money. Bitcoin for example, is a conversion between alot of energy input and a little bit of information output, I wonder what different ways exist to reason about this exchange.
How to Send Email Like a Startup
A Centennial Tribute to Novelist and Screenwriter Budd Schulberg
If I go to http://www.iodine.com/cold-and-flu and click "Cough", I'm presented with a comparison of Delsym, Mucinex, etc. So the first thing I see is the brands. Then I can look down and see what those brands contain and the generics. But the brand is given prominence.

Putting it another way: I understood that you are indexing off of the active ingredients, I was wondering why you chose to emphasize the brand name products (or how intentional that was...).
Ask HN: What would be deviantArt's valuation
What do u think about http://www.deviantart.com/ valuation. It should atleast be more than undeserving dog vacay.
If I can get what I want more cheaply from Vendor A than from Vendor B, the question of whether Vendor B is charging me more as an agent of the state or on its own behalf is unlikely to be relevant to the decision.
Seems like a cool idea. Nothing comes up when I search cities in VA. And when I went directly to their pages I got a rails error:

http://banklocal.info/locations/va/3174-virginia-beach-va
http://banklocal.info/locations/va/827-richmond-va
The FBI always publishes stuff like this. For example did it after the Silk Road was taken down. It makes people appreciate the FBI.
China is the country with known cyber attacks on the US(according to our government, but hey we are accepting the FBI's answer that this was NK). China has also been posturing with Japan in the surrounding waters(Sony is a Japanese company no matter what legal wrangling they use for Sony Pictures Entertainment). China is also a border country of NK, how inconceivable is it that a North(or South) Korean/s was working for China?

But apparently NK was bothered enough by another comedy movie making fun of their backward country that they executed a sophisticated months long cyber attack and then released the spoils of war for free with only some anonymous postings detailing their motives.
To comment on your post (the following numbers correspond to your listing):

1) Yes, "Hardware Engineering" is a very broad term. You'll have multiple levels of Hardware Engineers all working on different aspects of a design. However, this isn't much different from Frontend + Backend (and their associated languages).

3) Multiple parties working on one device, remotely, is possible (see: http://www.protoexchange.com - shameless plug). We've worked with multiple engineers on a single hardware device. The hard-part is that the debugging typically requires each party to have the same piece of hardware physically available.

It would be interesting to chat more about OSHW if available :)
Take Two Hikes and Call Me in the Morning
Comparable to the amount of water produced by gasoline vehicles.
Who gets the authority to define "troll" versus "vigorous debater on opposing side"?
Great post. I know far too well the effects of “reverse competition” on the families of incarcerated individuals. Not being able to call and tell your daughter “Good Job” on her most recent report card, or discuss with your son the consequences of your actions that led to incarceration, are just a few moments that rarely occur due to exorbitant telephone rates for prisoner phone calls. Bi-partisan research supports the fact that the more connected an inmate is to his or her family, the less likely he or she will reoffend upon return to society. While both sides of the political aisle get the key factors to successful reentry, neither has until recently, been willing to tackle the crux of the ‘disconnected from society’ issue. This is one of the reasons I started Pigeonly - we saw a problem technology and a little bit of creative thinking could help solve.

In Q4 alone our Telepigeon product has provided over 4.5MM low cost phone minutes saving inmates and their family members over $750K in phone cost, that’s real money we've been able to put back into people's pockets.
I think what threw me off is the use of the word "immune suppression". That word has a specific meaning when referring to drugs and tends to refer to drugs that to interrupt immune response far upstream. These drugs have severe side effects as your body can't fight invading viruses and bacteria.

I think the difference with cold remedies is that they tend to interfere with immune responses that are far downstream that tend to be more symptomatic, rather than major mechanisms by which the body's immune system works.
"being a good person" is a competitive advantage

I get so much mileage out of the phrase "Don't worry, we aren't the phone company" it is unreal. Sure, we have hard costs associated with providing services, but I'd rather loses a few bucks occasionally on an account than routinely bite the hands that feed me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Chen

He's (/was) a Gawker network journalist who prided himself in doxxing violentacrerz (va) on reddit. VA was responsible for moding a few of the NSFW and unsavory subs, one of them being jailbait, on reddit. Agree or disagree with the sub, it's crappy to dox someone and go after their job/family/income etc. Then again bluelisting is the goal of SJWs these days.

He's also got a few other not so thrilling things that he's participated in as well... but I'll let you read the wikipedia article.

I don't think that article does it justice about the particular situation: Read more about VA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brutsch
The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (2013)
The medicine isn't supposed to improve your recovery time, it's supposed to lessen the ill effects of having the cold. Your comment doesn't make sense in that context at all.

"It takes about 1 week to get over a cold if you don't take medicine. It still takes 1 week to get over a cold with medicine, but you'll feel much less hindered by the effects of the cold itself."
No it isn't. We prosecuted US officers for doing the exact same thing in the Phillippine-American war, albeit not very energetically.
Peter Jackson Must Be Stopped
Usually it's the person who is the most offended. [Which means the observer]
None of those are trolling. Those are harassment. Trolling can be used for harassment but is not the same as harassment.
“The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.”

I wonder if he actually believes that. The description reads like a simple 2 minutes hate for TV ratings. A diet brand of that hidden camera catch-the-internet-pedo show.

Even putting that aside for a second, what does it mean when people in the media talk about "starting a discussion?" Whenever I hear it, it's said by someone that appears to have a mind already made up, from a media platform that doesn't value and engage in audience participation. Even bloggers with websites allowing comments tend to have an adversarial attitude towards their audience because of the signal to noise ratio in their comments, an attitude that pushes the level of signal down even further. The "discussion" often looks like like-minded bloggers talking amongst themselves lobbing pot-shots to and fro with a circle of differently likeminded bloggers.

We've been having a ground-up discussion about flaming and trolling on the internet for decades. Now that internet harassment has become a hot topic, the media has rolled in and is having a top-down discussion amongst self-appointed "very serious people" that seem rather incongruous with what my many years of experience on the internet.
If they are wrong, then they take a hit to their credibility. The Republican Party would pounce on this and never let up. It would not look good in the public eye if the government's cybersecurity apparatus – which the president just spent the past year and a half defending – fingered the wrong country behind an attack.
Help Homeless in Your Community – Pledge Day 2014
It's probably not wise that they release malicious binaries or details about foreign hacking infrastructure to the general public. That doesn't leave the with much direct evidence they can release at this point. Remember, it is an ongoing investigation and will be for quite some time considering the scope and severity of the breach.
Why competitions should be transparent
He was a crook (1994)
How NASA launched its web infrastructure into the cloud
This is my final comment in this thread. Yes, I was obviously being facetious, although having burned by the internet's ability to pick up on that in the past, I should have known better. Perhaps a better way to put it would be that in terms of population density (which is what really matters when we're talking about mass transit) the middle of the country loses out to either coast by a considerable margin. (Sorry.) I can't think of a simpler way to put it than the map on p. 24 of this PDF (http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/reports/c2010sr-01.pdf). You're looking for clusters of dark-blue squares arranged on a line. I see two (three if you count Milwaukee-Chicago but at 100mi. people will just drive.) One of them has a well-developed rail, bus, and highway infrastructure, and the other does not. End of argument.
Well, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole...

The shell only gets CTRL+Z when it is in the foreground.

The tty driver, which contains a copy of the forground process group id, sees the CTRL+Z, and rather than buffering it to pass to the foreground process, interprets it to send a SIGTSP to the process group that is in the foreground. A well behaving program will either handle the SIGTSTP then send itself a SIGSTOP or just act as if SIGSTOP has been sent. Then a SIGCHLD will be sent to the parent process. (In this case the shell) which can then set another process group or process, including itself, to the foreground process.

Some of the details may vary depending on the terminal line discipline being used... but the important part here is:

The shell isn't actually getting the CTRL+Z, its handled by the tty/pty pair that is in charge of the input at the moment.

Fascinating page about all this here: http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php
"Proportionate" doesn't mean "identical", particularly when the two parties involved are not otherwise similarly situated.
Nerds on a Cruise Ship
It would be interesting to know about eating and lifestyle habits in such situations.
That's an interesting point! I still think that non-human intelligence would be... non-human. Maybe the Snorgblats will find us in space and ask themselves, "Can these 'humans' share our Snorgblat experience if they can't feel wzinx, yowfli, or even writznok?"
GitHub Object-Oriented SDK in Java
Why limit yourself to new compilers? Every new version of an old compiler could be suspect, every line of code in general. There's no point in being this paranoid, nobody has time for all the audits that might be theoretically desirable. Almost everything you do on a computer relies on trusting an untold number of components.
Just a note on city populations: the only reasonable way to compare different regions (on just about any metric) is (at the very least) at the level of the MSA. The Chicago MSA's population alone is a number larger than the total you've reached.
Taking Time Off
> seems hard to compete with pingdom

As a DevOps, I'd like to disagree with this. Pingdom previously was a joy to work with. Now that they're attempting to bring in PagerDuty-esq features (escalation policies instead of simple alerting), their UX leaves a bit to be desired. Also, I don't have high hopes after the Solarwinds acquisition.
On a tangentially related note: here is a comparison of various Python runtimes (interpreters and compilers including Nuitka and PyPy) on a fairly complex scientific code: http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6388

The shootout, however, is from August 2013 so getting a bit old by now.
Well excuse me for not reading your mind as to what you meant by "that." :P

I'm not aware of anything that shows that people who take medications to alleviate symptoms take longer to recover than those who don't, while they're often more comfortable in the meantime. That seems sufficient to establish "overreaction."
If Cavemen Had CAD, This Is the Home They’d Design