skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What I remember is a well-argued article pointing to many parts of the hack that would seem to disqualify North Korea"

That article was a classic case of "assume the end result, and then make everything you've heard...including indirect, second-hand rumors, fit the mold you've set". You probably saw that "analysis" on here, and it was quite soundly destroyed as being largely ignorant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8766411

But it went with them because it fits the case.

Further the whole "that bad English doesn't fit how I think bad English should look" is...well it's preposterous. The article also uses a ridiculous email exchange which could be anyone as proof -- again, fitting the mold.

There is literally nothing in that, beyond some person's subjective take on how a person might mangle English (this is one of those classic claims that assumes some grand conspiracy...but that the conspirators were too dumb to get the basic stuff right), that is based upon legitimate analysis.
Thanks, appreciated, but my dear lord, without a PhD in AI systems these things are a bit beyond what most users, me included, would casually play around with. Be great if this tech made it into Dragon Naturally Speaking-like end product to use privately.
Sure. Reader: don't decrypt this if you like sci-fi and don't already know what books I'm talking about!

Oyvaqfvtug ol Crgre Jnggf srngherf ulcrevagryyvtrag nyvraf gung ynpx pbafpvbhfarff. Pbafpvbhfarff vf cerfragrq nf n "oht" - va bgure jbeqf, fbzrguvat gung bpphef nybat jvgu vagryyvtrapr ohg vf abg fgevpgyl arprffnel sbe vg, naq gung cebivqrf pyrne qbjafvqrf.

Qvnfcben ol Tert Rtna srngherf nyvraf gung...jryy...vg pna'g ernyyl or fhzznevmrq rnfvyl, ohg fbzr penml fuvg unccraf (yvxr va znal bs uvf obbxf).
"Not the old terminator theory again that the machine exceeds human intelligence, it seems that everybody misses the point of DNA, once we understand how it really works and how our brains are built we can build things that will exceed any silicon chip or upgrade our own brain capacity and as a bonus we will find more about origins of earth life and how life works."

Actually I doubt this. Our brains and nerves are based on chemical processes which are very slow compared to electronics. Nerve impulses travel at about 60 MPH, versus a bit under the speed of light for fiber optics. That's around 40 billion times slower.

Also, our digital circuitry is approaching the size of individual molecules.

There are challenges with power and cooling, but they seem solvable.

"In the end the "machines" will probably be better version of ourselves that will evolve artificially by DNA manipulation at faster rate than the current natural evolution."

Engineering seems inherently far more efficient than evolution, artificial or otherwise. Even today we can build provably correct, arbitrarily large memories as long as we have hot-pluggable replacement parts. Parallel supercomputers also exhibit interesting traits of expandability, reliability and redundancy.

Many think that one of the first things that will be done with a first-generation "true AI" will be to have it engineer a second-gen AI. And so on...

"I think something like this is more likely to be happening in the universe than our current view of self replicating evolving computers."

Time will no doubt tell... :-)
While it is far more likely that Everett is wrong, science has to start somewhere, and Pirahã people exist on this planet and other people could go check the story. You can absolutely prove him wrong.

Coming up with crazy ideas based on some strange observations is a part of science too.
I know that many people feel that you have to write like this to get anyone to pay attention (maybe they're right), but after enough years in physics, the breathlessness of this kind of reporting really starts to grate.

> international team of researchers has proved

> made the breakthrough

> discovered the 'Rosetta Stone'

I haven't read this particular article carefully, but I think it's safe to assume that words like "reformulated," "clarified," "extended," or "embedded in a new framework" would be more appropriate. Which is fine. New and better explanations are useful and important.

But despite what you may read, we don't find a new Rosetta Stone for quantum physics every year.

I get much more excited about science writing where the reader can come away with a better understanding of an actual concept, rather than just a sense that someone somewhere is doing something hard and smart.
I'm fairly certain it was for nuclear proliferation.
Very cool! If I may, what niche is your SaaS product in?
Which kinds of "controversial opinions", BTW?
“Death of a President” (2006 Film)
Three men (one New Zealander, two locals) have recently been arrested and face trial in Myanmar after promoting their bar with a poster featuring Buddha with headphones:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/13...
Congratulations on your progress! What's your plan for 2015 (more iOS, fulltime or freelance)?
Firing bullets at it when the tank is new is just a publicity stunt. Those tanks need to be holding hydrogen for at least five years, all while being cycled from full to empty, then lets see how well they hold up.
Indeed there are plans in my head. But that could only happen if I manage to get a big user base while at the same time I find a way to fight abuse without compromising simplicity.
Here are polished versions of my pkcs7 functions from the crypto challenges if anyone wants:

http://play.golang.org/p/xfAGpytsSI

Also, remember to not leak padding errors and always MAC your ciphertext. Wouldn't want you to spring a padding oracle.
I haven't verified the vulnerability locally, but as of OS X 10.10.1 (14B25), ntpd at least identifies itself as version 4.2.6, which is affected.
The Conventional Wisdom on Oil Is Always Wrong
Not necessarily Sony, but the last missives threatening 9/11-style attacks on movie theaters would count as terrorism. Up until that point it was a hacking scandal against Sony. Once you start threatening the movie-going public, then you move into terrorism.
The toolkit universe seems bifurcated between incomplete stats packages written by programmers and incomplete programming packages written by statisticians.
Sounds like something I would dream of doing - I am currently in accounting. What is your roadmap in tech? And congrats on succeeding!
Some recent S-1 filings have included numbers that show the company spending as much as two and half times their annual revenue on sales and marketing alone.

Some argue that this may demonstrates and unsustainable business model, while others would say it's just an early stage startup and that it'll correct itself.
It's already been done for dogs:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/FarsideDogTranslat...
Is there anything that users can do to help with this? Donating money or hosting, or running a Tor node?

There wasn't any info on the blog about what regular users can do to help with this, if anything.
After Sony, Every Startup Should Prepare for War
Gosh, this really underscores the horrific irony of the MPAA claiming that their free speech is being stifled.
Awesome! Your side project are Android apps, correct? How did you start in Android dev?
Tangential comment: if you are interested in quantum mechanics then you may be interested to read about "Bohmian Mechanics".

I became interested in Bohmian Mechanics after reading an email exchange between Sheldon Goldstein & Steven Weinberg [1]. It contains a few quite entertaining quotes, in particular:

> And since Bohm’s equations make exactly the same
> predictions as those of ordinary quantum mechanics,
> it is not clear what is accomplished by adding the
> complication of guiding waves, except to restore a
> sense of sanity to the whole affair.

Scott Aaronson has a brief introduction to Bohmian Mechanics at the end of his notes on decoherence and hidden variables [2]:

> Again, the amazing thing about this theory is that it's
> deterministic: specify the "actual" positions of all the
> particles in the universe at any one time, and you've specified
> their "actual" positions at all earlier and later times.

Scott's perspective is particularly interesting because he points out some limitations of Bohmian Mechanics. To paraphrase badly, the deterministic particle trajectories obtained from Bohmian Mechanics rely upon dealing with actual particles, position, momentum, in infinite dimensional spaces. It doesn't give you deterministic behaviour in the finite dimensional spaces that computer scientists prefer.

Some proponents of Bohmian Mechanics point out that the theoretical predictions of deterministic particle trajectories for the famous double-slit experiment agree with recent experimental results.

Theoretical predictions: see Figure 1, page 14 of [3], which is an adaptation of a figure from [4].

Experimental results: see Figure 3, page 1171 of [5].

Note that [5] carefully frame their experimental results as "Using weak measurements, however, it is possible to operationally define a set of trajectories for an ensemble of quantum particles".

For further reading, please see [6] for links to introductory writing about Bohmian Mechanics.

[1]: http://inference-review.com/article/on-bohmian-mechanics

[2]: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec11.html

[3]: http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/fil...

[4]: "Quantum interference and the quantum potential" -- Philippidis, Dewdney, Hiley -- Il Nuovo Cimento B, 1979; [paywalled article] -- http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02743566

[5]: "Observing the Average Trajectories of Single Photons in a Two-Slit Interferometer" -- Kocsis, Braverman, Ravets, Stevens, Mirin, Shalm, Steinberg; Science, 2011 -- [PDF] http://materias.df.uba.ar/labo5Aa2012c2/files/2012/10/Weak-m...

[6]: http://www.bohmian-mechanics.net/whatisbm_introduction.html
Too expensive... Why all monitor services charge so much for so simple service?
"I don't find it moral to prevent somebody from doing something today, because $HYPOTHETICAL_BAD_THING might happen tomorrow."

That argument might have had some validity in prior times. Now, way too many people are dying from multi-drug resistant strains of TB, staph, etc. Just spending a few minutes with Wikipedia on those two bugs, I'd guess we're close to pushing 100K people dying a year due to them.

And from prior reading it's a lot worse in places where they can be obtained without a prescription.
What you describe is not evidence of anything. One could take the exact same set of observations and equally well conclude that this is a false flag operation.
http://earth.nullschool.net
Or forcast.io's embed: http://forecast.io/embed/#lat=49.2803&lon=-123.1122&name=Van...
The targeted servers are directory servers, which are not what the user runs. AFAIK there is nothing that can be done short of supporting TOR through donations, so they can focus on whatever needs to be done.
This is pretty cool, although I will admit my imagination may have went a bit wild in the few seconds which passed between my reading the title and the page loading. I conjured an image of an 8-bit dynamic animation of weather across the globe.
There's 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in the scale of ordinary structures and the scale of the hyperloop. There may be a solution, but so far AFAICT no one has actually come up with even a plausible-sounding story. You can't simply say, well, we've solved the problem for small structures so surely we'll be able to solve it for larger ones.
This article gets the paper totally wrong. Learning that the uncertainty principle gives rise to phenomena that popular science calls "wave-particle" duality was taught to me in quantum 101.

From the abstract: "This idea...upper bounds the sum of the interference visibility and the path distinguishability. Such wave-particle duality relations (WPDRs) are often thought to be conceptually inequivalent to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, although this has been debated."

I'm quite surprised that anyone would think that those relationships wouldn't be direct consequences of uncertainty. They are directly analogous to position and momenta quantities.

"Here we show that WPDRs correspond precisely to a modern formulation of the uncertainty principle"

No surprises here.
Am I the only one who thinks naming your company after a religion is a little unpleasant?
I straight up skipped all the explanations about the actual dialog, but, then again, I'm not a linguist.
This reminds of of the time I sat the cold/flu aisle looking at cough medicine for so long... Through the haze of my head-cold I finally figured out that there were three different products by the same company that had the exact same dose method, dose size, and active ingredients. The only difference was the name of the product and the price.

*EDITED:

Front: http://i.imgur.com/ZkcPiEY.jpg

Back: http://i.imgur.com/gOj5uYK.jpg
Personally, when I first heard of Zenpayroll and Zenefits I though they were similar enough services that they might be associated with Zendesk. I think there's definitely possibility of confusion.

http://marklaw.com/trademark-glossary/confuse.htm
Not every male who hangs out here is necessarily rich, successful, and white as you seem to imagine.

???

You're reading a hell of a lot into my comment that wasn't there.
Take a look at David Deutsch's work on quantum mechanics, information theory, quantum computing, etc. I especially like http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563

Cool stuff.

(Related, possibly, is the concept that QM is simply probability with ranges from [-1,1] instead of the traditional [0,1]: Negative probabilities imply things that happen that we cannot measure. Or something like that, it's been a while.)

(Now if only I could find that wicked cool graphic showing the hierarchy of mathematics (ZFC or something near the bottom) and physics (QM and GR, sitting atop currently irreconcilable branches of math)....)
I think so.

It wouldn't be very secure of Tor could be over-riden by an ISP inserting a bad DNS record in their servers.
Sounds like a busy year! Sorry to hear about the accident, but congrats on all the accomplishments! All the best to you.
The Crazy History of Star Wars
Thanks! "Trust" on the internet is never a thing and I have been growing suspicious of it more everyday. Way back when you could almost trust your DCC on IRC but lucrativeness involved with the 'unwashed masses' in using the internet make this horrible problem for a technologist exploring new things.
To be fair, Zen is much less a religion than Christianity, some would even call it a philosophy.
A more realistic way to fight this is to make Lava layer programs less harmful by keeping documentation and testing efforts consistent throughout the project (and back filling when previous developers didn't).

The constant narrative in the example is developers having no idea why and where things are built a certain way. With more information and verification, gradual changes and refactors can be more manageable.

Avoiding Lava layer applications is not feasible, so calling it an anti-pattern is silly.
And what about something like this to 'collect' hydrogen?

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/article/?id=13372
> The particles pile up behind the slits not in two heaps as classical objects would, but in a stripy pattern like you'd expect for waves interfering. At least this is what happens until you sneak a look at which slit a particle goes through - do that and the interference pattern vanishes.

Could any of the physicists here verify whether it is the case that detecting the slit the particle passes through destroys the interference pattern. I had the impression that the path of the photons could be determined without destroying the pattern.
How fun, I'm looking forward to using "Oh krak!" as an interjection. :-)
For humans, because of the diversity of sounds we can make, apparently the only thing approaching a universal word is "huh?" [0].

It'd be interesting to see how many sounds a monkey can make. If it's a very low number there'd probably be more universally used sounds but I'd imagine it's probably greater than most animals. I couldn't find a useful way to search for that. Unfortunately a lot of the results tended towards the "What sound does a monkey make" type of response and I'm not versed enough in linguistics or monkeys to query more efficiently.

You can see on the map [1] that the Ivory Coast and Tiwai Island are more than close enough for the monkey's languages to have split off at a much earlier stage and evolved differently. I'd assume this is more likely the case.

So I'm going to assume no, a monkey taken and raised elsewhere probably wouldn't instinctually jump into the trees upon hearing a "krak". But even the article states there are more experiments that need to be performed (although that particular experiment is a little insidious considering the intelligence of the animals you're kidnapping from (maybe if you saved one whose parents were incapacitated in some way)).

Of course, you could just go to the zoo and yell "krak!" at some of the monkeys and see what happens! Might get you some weird stares! ;-)

[0] - http://www.newstatesman.com/martha-gill/2013/11/what-one-wor...
[1] -https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tiwai+Island,+Sierra+Leone...
The project would have to publish new source code containing new servers, and get everyone to upgrade immediately. I don't think there would be another way to restore the network (which is by design).
They gain HEAPS pointing at North Korea. They can say that it shows the threat that the US has from other countries on a hacking front, and that they need more funding around a cyber defense initiative. IT can't be - oh anonymous (or some group like them) since no one will take it as seriously.

They want to point at a country that will say "damn straight we did it" even if they didn't (North Korea is perfect!)
Detecting which slit does destroy the interference pattern, yes.
Deb Roy's TED talk is kind of interesting on this subject. He captured the initial 3 years of son's language development and did analysis on it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word
To put it another way, I think you are much more likely to absorb powerful ways of thinking while being entertained if you read https://what-if.xkcd.com/ than if you read http://phys.org

What If shows by example that you can apply quantitative reasoning to the most outlandish situations and actually draw interesting distinctions and conclusions.

Phys.org style reporting urges you to accept by argument from authority that the universe is mostly made of dark energy, and gravity is made out of particles traveling backwards in time through 11 dimensions or whatever it was I read last month I can't quite remember. These ideas come from actual serious research, but they aren't powerful when presented this way because you can't apply this style of reasoning successfully unless you have tons and tons of training working in the specific areas they report on.
interesting - how does this work?
fair enough! yeah as we've been playing with the design, the generics have moved around a bit. we're still playing, and we absolutely mean to stress generics. that said, from the user's perspective, the thing that's easiest to find on the store shelf is the brand-name product, and then look next to that on the shelf to find the generic equivalent.
What you're talking about is a bad implementation of a design stemming from its inherited technology. Essentially, attempting to refactor the technology or the design first is a bad idea - fix the implementation.
It's not as simple as you'd think. Monitoring 1 website is easy, monitoring 1M websites and gathering results in realtime from stations around the globe to make a proper decision is a different thing. Significant bandwidth, and CPU are needed to achieve this, not to mention relying on third party services like twilio and sendgrid to notify customers and that cost money too.
Centigrade or Fahrenheit?
Grenada the country or the first result from yahoo's geocoder (i.e. some street with "grenada" in it's name in a US state)

unrelated ... if it is the West Indian country - how is the technology / hacker scene there? I spent early internet working in Dominica (Commonwealth of)
I was a bit surprised to see this from T-Mobile, but the charges go back to 2010 and it also looks like other major carriers have been hit with similar charges.

T-Mobile still has my vote as the 'least-evil' but it looks like there is still room for improvement.
Stefan Behnel (one of the Cython leads) posted a more detailed critique of the project after the EuroPython talk too:

http://blog.behnel.de/posts/indexp241.html

Nuitka's author's reply here:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fB1tgJ...

I sympathise with the developer because I think the tone of the criticism he's been getting is very far short of nice.

...But...On a purely technical level...I see a lot of problems with his response.

I think there's real merit in this project on the distribution side of things --- not the optimisation side. I hope he pivots the project in that direction.
I noticed this too today. Doesn't seem to affect the homepage but every other page is completely broken.
Because the clients need to get the list of nodes from somewhere.

You can read more about how this works at this URL:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt
Wow, congratulations on your success! Have you maybe thought about redesigning your homepage? I'm certainly not in your target audience, but it was a little bit hard to understand your value proposition - maybe think whom you are selling to (CTOs, CEOs etc.) and adjust your copy accordingly. Good luck and hope you succeed in fundraising!
But taking out four nodes isn't enough to cause a full consensus outage.
stop blaming non-developers for the problems created by developers.

It's the result of developer who don't have the maturity to consider the long term risk of their decisions. That has nothing to do with the business leaders.

I freelance which means I see a lot of shit. In any given week I can touch/work with 10+ tech stacks across both Windows and *nix. When you do that on a regular basis it gives you a different perspective on things.

In particular, you write/design code in the same vein as the code around it. It doesn't matter what your personal values as a developer are. Consistency is more important than that. I have been known to pull people to the side and ask them "I'm about to do X, how do you normally do X in codebase Y? I want to do it exactly the way you do".

If you're going to change the way something like a DAL accesses its data you better be able to either do all of it, or you do none of it for exactly the reasons the article stated.

That is purely a technical decision, and the blame for that lies with every single developer who chose to introduce a new tech into the stack for no other reason than sensibilities.
I'm not saying the FDA does a good job of catching this activity early. The only way they find out is either through inspections (they are horribly understaffed) or through product complaints.

When do they find out they drop the hammer. Most (all?) Ranbaxy plants are banned from importing product into the US and many products were recalled.
Hey there - I'm that Angelotti :).

My problem with this approach: As I'm quoted as saying in Jim's article, I just think it's a non-starter for most people to do this, ie keep an inventory of sorts in their medicine cabinet and recombine them as needed. Jim is thinking like a doctor, not like your average, non-medically-trained person. There's a reason pharma makes combo products — people do like getting multiple ingredients in one pill. It's convenient! Most people have neither the patience nor the medical education to recombine individual generic ingredients on their own. And trying to do so could actually put them at higher risk for drug interactions or other human error. You have to read and reconcile warnings and directions labels from 3 or 4 different product packages, instead of just one.