skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is talking about 2 different things.

If you write a simple Flash program that opens a socket to a remote server, you can embed that on a site and use it to identify certain people running through Tor or any other SOCKS/HTTP proxy. It will only catch people who have configured their proxy very poorly. This has been known for well over a decade and it just catches the low-hanging fruit; it's really not an innovative tactic, you can find it on all sorts of sites. If you use the Tor Browser Bundle, it will route Flash through Tor so you're immune.

However, during Operation Torpedo, the FBI deployed an "implant" on Freedom Hosting's servers which was an exploit for CVE-2013-1690, a vulnerability in Firefox. Wasn't a 0-day, but a lot of people using TBB had not patched yet. This was just some Javascript which executed a small bit of Windows shellcode, sending each victim's IP address, MAC address, and a serial number to an FBI-controlled server. The only way to be safe from this was with an updated Firefox version, and/or running NoScript.
> If they had seen him shooting cans when walking by on the street, and then gotten a warrant to search his house, this would've been totally legit.

The article states this was a rural area, so it's quite possible that his front yard isn't even visible from the road, which is why they had to install cameras (possibly even on his property) instead of parking across the street for a stakeout. Especially given that he was shooting bottles or cans in his front yard, I'm willing to bet it was off the beaten path. I don't know the laws in Washington, but here in Georgia there are laws about shooting near public roads and other people's property. Even though my own home is in a semi-rural area, I'm not quite far enough from the road to do that.
Distributing HEVC content is royalty-free, even commercially[1] - however, royalties come into play with distributing encoders and decoders, and it's the latter that could cause problems (similar to the case of Firefox and H.264 decoding support).

[1] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Documents/HEVCweb.p... - page 7, HEVC License Terms
A free 10 lesson video blueprint for every freelancer
Ex Disney Imagineering VP Designs Infusionarium to Make Chemo Easier for Kids
True enough, but I'm not fully on board with moral relativism either. "The West" (if not the CIA) is on the side of good, and AQ/The Taliban/ISIS obviously is not.
If you're a programmer, your life is made easier if you have access to generics.

If you're a language developer, your life is made harder if you have to add generics.

And if your language gets all the people that are easily satisfied with something "static and faster to write than C" why go the extra mile?

Especially if your goal is not building a commercially succesful language, or an advanced language, or a language to solve 2014's problems, but just to hack on what you have created.

Besides, being a great programmer and a great language designer are two different skills. Would a language created by Linus be that good?
ah, yes. :) very nice detailed summary of some of the issues in this sect of "academia" (I put that in quotes only because all the research seems to be co-written by corps).

I am into audio DSP & am planning to port a couple of audio algorithms (lots of FFT & linear algebra) to run on GPU but haven't even gotten to it because I considered it a pre-mature optimization to this point. I'm sure it would improve performance, but nowhere near what GPU advocates would claim.

My biggest reason?
"PCIe transfer time to/from GPU", plus it would be unoptimized GPU code. Once you read a few of these papers it becomes painfully obvious that a lot of tuning goes into the GPU algorithms that offer anything more than a low single-digit factor of speedup. It's still very significant (cutting a 3 hour algorithm down to 1 would be huge) but if you're in an early stage of research it may be a toss-up over whether its better to just tune the algorithm itself / run computations overnight rather than going through the trouble of writing a GPU-based POC. Maybe if you have 1 or 2 under your belt its not such a big deal but for most of the researchers I know GPU algorithm rewrites would not be trivial. (I've been doing enterprise Java coding for about 2 years now so the idea isn't so intimidating now, but in a past life of mucking around with Matlab scripts I'm sure it would have been daunting).
That was a reason for introducing some of the existing predators. It didn't work. The new predators also like the existing fauna. What other predators are left, which will kill the rats? Cats? That hasn't worked anywhere else.
Nope, legacy code base. FORTRAN.
Actually getting a wiretapping warrant is really hard and you have to execute it meticulously unless you want the evidence to get thrown out. At least, if you are law enforcement.

Of course, if you are the NSA and aren't charging anyone with any crimes, you don't have to worry about suppression hearings and the judge who issued it can never have that decision appealed like they could in a civilian court...
I'm surprised by how low their profit margin is - at least on these $10 plans.
American cities have bigger things to worry about than gentrification
This goes directly to the PDF. It seems to be a useful research paper for people who want to get academic insights into setuid.

For those who would like to read the first part of the introduction, here it is:

"Access control in Unix systems is mainly based on user IDs, yet the system calls that modify user IDs (uid-setting system calls), such as setuid , are poorly designed, insufficiently documented, and widely misunderstood and misused. This has caused many security vulnerabilities in application programs. We propose to make progress on the setuid mystery through two approaches. First, we study kernel sources and compare the semantics of the uid-setting system calls in three major Unix systems: Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. Second, we develop a for- mal model of user IDs as a Finite State Automaton (FSA) and develop new techniques for automatic construction of such models."

For guys like me, the way this concept is explained and how it tackles the supposed problem is a bit too difficult; it probably doesn't help that English isn't my first language and that I'm not an academic.

The document also does not seem to contain a date of when it was written. Do I need to figure this out on my own?

What would be nicer imo is if the poster can explain please, what makes this paper qualify as 'news.' Why did it end up here? After all, well you know, this place is called "Hacker News."

But even beyond that -- Understanding why this was posted could already provide some useful context. Without that, when there's just a link (to a PDF!), the effect it has on me is the same as those "link-only comments": 99% of the time I skip right over them.
It wasn't an "illegal firearm", it was illegal for him to possess any firearm because of his immigration status. There's a huge difference there.

Edit: Reading your comment again, I think what you wrote can be taken either way (he was illegally possessing firearms, or he was possessing illegal firearms). So we may be in complete agreement here.
Anyone on here have day-to-day experience using Julia? If so, what do you use it for? What languages are you supplementing with Julia?
BY REPL I think you mean it's got a console and you access it by running commands at a console? This is true, but also you can create programs which are executable and invoke the interpreter to run them in the way that you can do that with Java or C#.
Are you reffering to backblaze? They do indeed offer "unlimited" backups AFAIK (to the degree that the phrase makes any sense, obviously). They just don't allow for clients that follow "enterprise usage patterns" so to speak. Another way to put it would be that they specialize in a simple services, with a simple UI -- with the inherit limitations that come with it.

I'd personally love it if they (backblaze) started up a sister-service that catered more to what I want -- but I think the cold reality is that it's hard to compete with Amazon S3 on price -- and if you do, in a big way, they can just dump prices to sink your business. At any rate -- you usually don't want to compete on price unless you're the biggest service around -- you wan't the high-margin part of the market...
Those are audio codecs, not video codecs. Xiph worked on Theora for 7 years and never got close to H.264, and Daala is promising but HEVC is amazing right now.
They used to say they don't spend any money on drive replacements (except for labor, obviously) because of the drives having 3-year warranties. Those were using 1.5TB drives. However, the original 67TB pods came out in 2009 and wouldn't be warrantied anymore.

According to their blog they took until 2011 to hit 10PB, which would be roughly 150 of the original 67TB pods. The 6TB drives are 4 times better, so they'd be able to replace all of those with just 40 of the new pods, I'm sure the savings in electricity and rack space would be too huge to pass up.

Then again, they have their own datacenter space now, so space probably isn't an issue but I'm sure electricity is. They said something around $2,100 a rack (which holds 10 pods) for electricity, space, and data. They were incredibly stoked to cut that in half by moving to 3TB drives with the 2.0 version of the pod so I'm sure cutting that in half excited them as well :)
Yes.

Although there is a lot more going on in the original that justifies its use as a test image; varying levels of subtlety of detail (the two parts of the top of the hat, DoF, and especially the feathers or whatever you call it) as well as the human in it.

original being referenced: http://bellard.org/bpg/lena.html
I'm referring to the Austrian School of "economics" held to be the True Formal Science of Humanity among "Hayekian libertarians".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology

As noted, "Austrians argue that ... empirical data itself is insufficient to describe economics which in turn implies that empirical data cannot falsify economic theory".

You cannot coherently mix a Bayesian epistemology and a Hayekian-Austrian politics: the latter denies the possibility of the former (ok: it only does so in worlds without dualistic souls... but still), while the former considers the latter to have no likelihood function and therefore be nonsense.
Ending the War on Fat – TIME
SpaceX does not need radiation hardening for rockets which are only briefly in space. That's hardly the equivalent of satellites which need to be in space for years.
Ask HN: Status of Google's End-to-End Project?
Google's OpenPGP-based End-to-End project was kicked off with considerable fanfare in June:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842233

Following a period of steady development, progress seemed to grind to a halt. There has not been a commit since October 6:

https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/source/list

About 90 minutes ago, the wiki was edited to replace issue reporting links with a generic 'Under Construction - Please hold on!' message.

Does anyone know what's going on?
> he needed four different programming languages. No single language was suited to the task at hand

Are we so behind in the world of software development that people don't understand the concept of metaprogramming? If you have to write code for two or more languages, just use a meta-language (it could be Python or Lisp, for example) to write code for each language as needed. People discovered this concept as far back as the 70s (see how Smalltalk is implemented for example).
The white LED strings look very nice and I definitely agree that white incandescent strings have a very short market life left. But the colored LED strings which are sold at Home Depot and similar merchants in the USA have very different colors than the incandescent strings.

I personally find the colored LED strings to have very unpleasing colors compared to incandescents. I've tried a few different "brands" (in quotes as the brand is mostly meaningless afaict) of LED strings and all were not to my liking.
This is exactly it. There are a lot of people who have argued passionately about this (the same crew of commentators appear with the same complaints in every single Go discussion), and now they are so deep in their advocacy that they feel their pride depends upon aggressively and vigorously defending it. It has gotten worse every time this has come up, and most of the comments are the logical conclusion. I mean seriously one of the comments calls it "ghettolang" without parody. Is this really Hacker News?

And exactly as you said -- for those people so offended by this: Move on. Use something different. Go isn't for you. As someone who has integrated Go very effectively into my life, I'm rather glad the Go team isn't listening to every railing fanatic and their pet issues.
I'd love for Google to release ISO and VM images of ChromeOS but it seems they really want to bundle it with low spec hardware (will never buy Acer again).

AFAIK you can compile your own ChromiumOS but last time I tried I wasn't even able to configure the buid environment right.
App Santa: iOS apps up to 60% off sale
> Nobody can sell the derivative work without permission from both authors, which is as it is with patents.

This is patently untrue.

Just as an example, there was a recent thread on reddit about how someone's Adventure Time fanart was used by the rights-holders of Adventure Time for a Tshirt that is now selling at hot topic (link: http://www.reddit.com/r/adventuretime/comments/24syra/hot_to...)

Unless the derivative work falls under fair use, the rights-holders can use it however they want.
I used to work in this area, on a system that also used multiple languages.

Physics simulation: simulate wireless signals propagating over different kinds of terrain. This was performance-sensitive, and in C. At some point we stuck real hardware in the loop, so we had VHDL too.

Behavioral logic: simulate the behavior of each node in the network, including algorithms like selecting available transmit/receive channels and transmit power control. This was less performance sensitive, and in C++. At some point we also had Prolog in this layer, for doing channel selection subject to arbitrary decisional constraints.

Simulation setup: select a number of nodes, place them on a map, tweak behavioral knobs, etc. This was not performance sensitive, and was in a scripting language.

Prototyping and data analysis: this was in Matlab. It's the lingua franca of the engineering world.
I don't know Ruby (boo hiss on me!) but I find Julia very easy to read and write. It's not production ready (in my opinion) yet, and I tried to use it at work - and found I couldn't because of some of the glitches in the windows implementation (specifically loading images in the case I tried, where it used to back door to ImageMajik and this took 20 seconds to bring in a gif). It does seem very good as a glue language. I think that the good thing about it is that it is really nice to write with very powerful syntax and semantics but also very fast (until you hit a corner case...)

I think that the corner cases will get rubbed out one at a time in the next year or so, and what will be left will be truely impressive. The fear I had was that interest would wane before it took off, but the libary growth in the last 6mths makes me increasingly confident that the Julia community is robust enough to deliver.
It's not that it's hard to remember, it's hard to type in. At least that's my experience (I use a few 16+ character passwords/passphrases). It might be easier if it's all lower-case, no numbers etc -- I'm not sure -- I've not tested myself.

But in writing the above, I had to hit backspace at least once -- something that's a bit hard to catch when you're typing blind into a password entry field, like when typing in the pass-phrase for unlocking a LUKS partition, or logging into a console session. Or even typing in a login password in a graphical login manager, like the windows login prompt, or gdm/ldm/xdm etc.

And it also takes time. Especially if you only get it right on your third attempt.
A separate BSD firewall box to prevent any connections outside Tor would've prevented this, or thegrugqs p.o.r.t.a.l. box. These attacks will only get better, FF 0day isn't all that expensive so simply disabling JavaScript won't be an option in the future, which prevented the second attack where a custom exploit was used by the FBI.

What's the legal defense if a random .onion address is posted claiming it's leaked juicy Sony emails and scripts and it turns out to be an illegal porn site full of FBI snitchware? How do they draw a legal distinction between a pervert and an idiot who clicks a link?
Best gifts / items for yourself and others (hardware, software, or other)?
It's holiday time and people buying stuff... Why not buy good stuff that will last?

What are some things you have gotten that are a "great investment" / nice buy? IE quality things you use every day or very often that significantly help you / make life better / easier... Maybe tech related maybe not...

For example a few items:
Typematrix keyboard (http://typematrix.com/)
Use it every day and it makes typing faster and more enjoyable... If it broke I'd definitely buy another. Though I am considering a mechanical keyboard...

Another ergonomic item...
Evoluent mouse (http://evoluent.com/)
Nice to use on and off with a standard mouse, though I don't like it for gaming...

Miracle Rice Cooker (http://miracleexclusives.com/miracle-stainless-steel-rice-cooker-p-157.html)
This was such a great investment, I use it frequently and it makes cooking healthy meals simple and easy (it can cook way more than just rice and steamed veggies...) And you'd be surprised how hard it is to find an actual "stainless steel" rice cooker.

Hands free dog walking harness (http://howlingdogalaska.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=27&products_id=105)
I have 3 dogs that pull, using a leash like this is a life saver.

A couple items I'm considering....
A "stone" french press since I've broke the last 2 glass ones I've had...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008JCGEI8/

New monitor... no idea what yet...
Sorry, but I can't see the value of posting this to hacker news. As evidenced by many people in this thread assuming it's from one of the core Go development team, it's not.
Glass cockpit aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft sets course for future space travel
Can you center a grid of images using only CSS?
> campaign finance regulations are anti-free speech.

Lessig has actually said that he supports the Citizens United decision for exactly this reason. I'll badly paraphrase from "Republic Lost": Lessig says we should exhaust tools to encourage broader campaign funding (and thus political speech) before we should do anything to limit speech. This clearly implies that there may come a point where limiting political speech is called-for, but I agree that we're not there yet.
Yeah I would rather all the awful formats would go away. But the process of removing them tends to just birth new awful formats into existence :(
I used to use an ohm meter and a binary search algorithm to find the broken bulb in the series strands (waaaaay back in the day). My dad gave me the task as a challenge. I was quite young and into electronics, but it was before I had access to computers (or even calculators for that matter).
>Yet at the same time Go seems to have a much bigger adaptation than Rust. What's up with that?

Well it has to do with Rust not even being 1.0 yet, whereas Go has been stable for 5 years...

Or with Rust changing some syntax in every point release for most of it's design cycle, so even early adopters had a difficult time.

Or maybe with Go having Google behind it, with the increased visibility it entails... (Rust, for one, never had huge Google Developer convention sessions exposing it to thousands of devs -- or any conventions for that matter).

And yet, we're already seen increased adoption for this pre-1.0 rust, major community playahs like Katz getting in the core team, more posts and libs every day, etc...
A Time-Lapse Map of Nuclear Explosions Since 1945 – By Isao Hashimoto
Creating Models in Koajs [Screencast]
>> "Someone can die, but not have been a failure in life."

I think it's referencing the fact their body has 'failed' i.e. died. Not that they were a failure in life. A post mortem is usually carried out to figure out why the person died i.e. what part(s) of their body failed.
1. What approach of Lessig's are you actually arguing against? To clarify:

He was originally in favor of strong controls but realized that the free speech problems were too large. Now he favors supplemental approaches to enable candidates to compete without going after large donors.

2. But how will you reduce the government under the current system? Isn't campaign finance reform a necessary step?

3. Ditto number 2.
It's not expected, it's average. Thousands or millions of painters do what they love and never become Van Gogh.
They worked in Morocco 10 months (https://medium.com/founder-stories/ten-things-we-believe-2c8...) but a tourist visa is only good for 90 days. I like the story and I'm glad the local authorities don't mind.
I don't think any of this makes Firefox OS a contender for a great IoT project over say Android. The hack is taking advantage of the subsidies and scale of a mobile phone. It happens to be running Firefox OS. Firefox OS on its own doesn't have much to do with it.
It amazes me as a software engineer, that we build our economic system in such a tightly coupled and complex manner that as soon as anything bad happens anywhere in the world, it seems to affect everyone (just look at the oil price fall - you would think that is good for everyone - oil getting cheaper, but apparently not). It seems exactly the opposite of what we aim to achieve with good software, yet the people building it this way seem to encourage it.
I suppose Google's algorithm also bases itself on the current information trends at the time of searches, and with the ridiculously large amount of news stories about the kid, it is to be expected (I live in South America, and we also got a lot of reports about the kid).

Now, the kid is not your average school-goer, but definitely petite enough to get himself in this situation. I blame him, but definitely not as much as the reporter, this looked like a load of BS right from the moment I saw it.
In Spain or in Australia or in Sahara desert you could get over 1000 Watts per square meter of irradiance in summer.

So with a 40% efficiency you could get 400Watts per square meter if there is no clouds and the panel is perpendicular to the sun.

The good thing is that in Spain, Australia or Sahara desert you have entire months without clouds in some places.
Actually .. I'm an Oric-1/Atmos fan, and have also recently been able to give my old 8-bit collection a revival courtesy of disk-emulators being released for the old hardware .. it has re-opened the old world to me again and again, and I have the privilege of watching my kids get into it now, too .. nothing quite like the sanctity and peace of mind of having the kids use a computer that has very little chance of running a web browser, though. That's something the speccy users have got up on us Oric people, heh heh .. ;)
What packages should be free on the Unity Asset Store?
Hi,
We are a team of developers that think many things in life should be free and open source.
So, if you could wave a wand and magically turn one of the following packages free, which one would it be: 1) Fantasy GUI pack (normally $15) 2) PlayMaker (normally $95) 3) Asset Hunter (normally $10) 4) Behavior Designer (normally $65) 5) Highlight Glow System (normally $15) 6) Universal sound FX (normally $20) 7) Energy Bar Toolkit (normally $30)
WARNING: Your wish might come true so be careful!
About us: our open source and free packages can be found on the asset store and on Github. I don't want to post links to avoid self-promotion so let's just say that if you google "unity open source framework" you will find us.
Google Earth API has been deprecated