skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, it's mostly security nuts like me about security related topics.

Hopping through my own Tor nodes could be a bit counter-productive, as it would make attribution of my circuit quite a bit easier.

I use an extended hop relay with hand-selected nodes, which allows me to use five hops instead of the standard three, and hand-select fast relays that are in nations which are unlikely to share information readily. There's a few more tricks I use to counter e.g. stream watermarking, but at a certain point you reach diminishing returns, as the browser is only so secure.

If I was running a drug cartel, it'd be appropriate COMSEC, but for me its really more of an experiment than anything else.
> I have no idea what google is thinking nowadays.

Google's thinking hasn't changed. They've always wanted to vacuum up everything they could about you and your behavior.

> I think this N5 is my last android phone.

I don't trust Google either. But what about the 99% of smartphone consumers who just want a cheap phone and don't concern themselves about these things?

Google doesn't care about what you, part of the 1% on this issue, think. To update something that Lily Tomlin did many decades ago:

We don't care.
We don't have to.
We're Google.
But why would a person need formal accreditation of they felt that they did possess the required background (assuming it was legal, which it is in Australia and the US). You are trying to impose the standards of the people who granted you that degree, on everyone else. But it's not justified. To an employer, your accreditation counts for almost nothing when comparing otherwise similar degrees (e.g. a CS degree). And you don't need to take a course in ethics to understand ethical issues or act ethically.
SMS is not a very secure channel for that second factor. Better than nothing, but cellular has all kinds of security problems.
Can you give an example of an ethical problem that might be faced by a software engineer, that is covered by these courses, and that these courses would enable a person to deal with significantly better.
As I mentioned above, the goal of C++ is not to provide memory safety guarantees. What it provides is a mechanism for RC implementation. You're free to use or misuse it if you want. It will work only for those objects that you think should be managed with RC, nothing more or less.
If that were the goal, the tweak would be simple -- give out more green cards to people with appropriate education. Let them come here and get jobs.

These programs suppress wages for low-end computer positions. If you were around in the 90s at a big company/government, you'd run into old guys who made big bucks tweaking COBOL and Operator types tweaking Batch jobs. The whole point of COBOL was that you could teach the average bean counter to write it, so the answer to the problem of these guys retiring was to import cheap workers and automate.

My grandparents all came to the U.S. from Ireland. No H-1 nonsense where you get tied to an employer, just plain immigration and a path to citizenship. It should be no different today.
The browser spots MITMs so you don't have to. (If you're thinking about Superfish, no system can protect you against that same system being compromised.)
Valve Showing New Steam Machines, Final Controller Design, VR Hardware at GDC
Let's look at the EFF's proposals:

1. The patent term should be shorter for software patents. It should last no more than five years from the application date.

Software doesn't move that fast. The Internet is now over 30 years old. It's been 61 years since the first FORTRAN compiler. At various times in the past, aircraft technology and radio technology advanced at least as fast as computer technology. Computing is not special; it's just a currently active area.

2. If the patent is invalid or there’s no infringement, patent trolls should have to pay the winning party’s legal fees.

This provides a way for big companies to intimidate patent holders. A small patent holder can be threatened with huge legal bills. The odds of winning a patent infringement lawsuit are about 40-50%, and even if you have a strong patent, it's common to lose.

3. Patent applicants should be required to provide an example of running software code for each claim in the patent.

The USPTO has the right to demand a working model if they are not convinced the patented concept would work. At one time, they did. (Patent models are cute collectables now.) Current USPTO policy is to demand a working model only for things such as antigravity machines or perpetual motion machines. Unworkable patents do not seem to be a problem in the software area.

4. Infringers should avoid liability if they independently arrive at the patented invention.

Absolutely not. Infringers will routinely lie about that, claiming independent invention, and it's really tough to prove intent. There's a provision in current law which allows for a defense of independent invention for, I think, one year after patent issue. That's sufficient.

5. Patents and licenses should be public upon filing. Patent owners should be required to keep their public ownership records up-to-date.

Patent applications are already published at the 18 month mark.

6. The law should do more to limit damages so that a patent owner can’t collect millions if the patent represented only a tiny fraction of a defendant’s product.

A patent is the right to say "no, you can't do that". Infringers aren't entitled to practice the patent at all and then just pay damages if they lose.

7. Congress should commission a study and hold hearings to examine whether software patents
actually benefit our economy at all.

The purpose of the patent system isn't to "benefit the economy". It's to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", according to the Constitution.

As for "patent trolls", according to the EFF's own database[1], there are only a few real "patent trolls", with one firm in Texas being the big generator of threatening letters. The top firm has 15 letters in the EFF's database. (They've sent more.) There are a very small number of patents being "trolled".

The EFF was arguing for this in the previous session of Congress. Once it came out how weak their case was, the legislation was dropped.

[1] https://trollingeffects.org/lawfirms
My anecdote: similar to you, but still allergic to cats. I have asthma attacks in the middle of the night if she curls up on my pillow, I have antihistamine eyedrops at hand, and not even my ADHD-brain dares to forget to take meds.

I've moved and gone on various diets and nothing really did anything. I give myself another year or two before I look into allergy shots (at the moment, trying to get pregnant and my allergist refuses to start them). It's rather frustrating, but oh well.
Given how bad NSA and GCHQ (the presumed good guys) have been, STASI would have truly been frightening. They probably would have terrified Sauron.
Which is entirely contrary to the results of this research, which indicates that exposure to peanut proteins at a young age radically reduces peanut allergies.
We fixed that problem by dropping back to under 2GHz; focusing on clock rate rather than IPC and energy efficiency was just a stupid time for Intel and the industry.
> Defining a software patent is not hard. A patent is a software patent if you can infringe it entirely with software. Software can't infringe a patent for a cholesterol drug or a light bulb, so those aren't software patents.

Presumably, by "entirely with software" you mean "entirely with software running on a [hardware] comupter." And that's why so many companies oppose eliminating "software patents" even though it seems like a no-brainer to many.[1] We're not just talking about your typical troll patent, but e.g. techniques for processing signals from MRI machines. We're talking about the software behind self-driving cars.

> But if you can't price patents accurately then you don't have a functioning market, which is fundamentally why we end up with such poor quality patents in software -

Your right, this is a huge problem. It would be a lot better to have fewer, stronger patents with well-defined boundaries.

> If you want less vertical integration then what you want is more modular systems, open standards and free software. Which is the opposite of what software patents do.

Your two examples support my point. I think it's underestimated how much we owe the open PC ecosystem to the fact that Microsoft could rely on strong copyright, enabling them to make money selling an OS. If it wasn't practical to protect the OS as a separate product, they would have had a tremendous incentive to get into the PC business.[2]

As for open standards, most of our hardware standards are built on patent pools. They enable companies to cooperate to build standards, while keeping out freeloaders.

[1] http://partnershipforamericaninnovation.org

[2] We have more open source than ever in the hands of ordinary consumers, but only because software has taken a backseat to hardware and services that can be more easily monetized without the worry of piracy. Everyone uses web browsers, but there's no money in building web browsers. Instead, the two major engines are developed by a cell phone company and an advertising company.
Looking at how much money Colorado is raking in, I honestly think it's just a matter of time before other states fall in line with legalizing marijuana. Awkward banking situation be damned.
Does this include the tests that run on other database servers?
The Pirate ships have pretty much always had hulls that were large modular pieces, but not completely sealed.

The Tugboat was one of a long line of floating ships; they all had one-piece hulls so that they'd be completely watertight.

Though you could get the pirate ships to float if you used ballast and sealed them off with the right bricks; I got mine to float in the backyard pool.
I stuck with it through college, and the Federal Rules of Evidence are burned into my brain as well. :)

>I suspect that's the sort of thing that's an annoying waste of time to trained professionals :-)

In mock trial, we once had a Brooklyn criminal court trial judge preside over the proceedings, and she would overrule objections before even hearing their full basis, which I understand is not uncommon in certain jurisdictions, which means on-the-spot research is often not even possible.

Representing yourself is hard. But I certainly think a person should be active in his or her own defense. By all means, research precedent, examine statutes, and dig into regulations. Even professionals miss things. And even the best attorneys have multiple cases that split their attention, and far less of a stake in the outcome than the accused.

For the lawyer it's a job. For the defendant it's his life.

But when the rubber meets the road a professional attorney is the way to go in a court proceeding. Even if you are in fact so good that your attorney is only repeating an argument you constructed, they will do so bringing a vast amount of experience to bear.
A service like crashplan or backblaze should largely take care of that for you. Unlimited incremental backups for a fixed monthly fee. If you discover a file has been corrupted, you just go back in the incremental versions until you get to a good copy. If $5/month is still too much, you can even point it at one of your own machines. You still get the incremental backups; you just have to provide the storage space.

Either way, the key is not just to have multiple copies of the most recent iteration of a file, but to have an automated system of archiving past versions - of everything - as well.
How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
The old way took tens of years and a couple hundred thousands of dollars in food and board. Plus there is no way in nature to take a DNA sample left at a crime scene and turn that into a rendering of a face.

Now it can be done with $100 worth of DNA analysis and a few minutes of compute time.
The patent system is very badly designed for pharma. The cost in pharma is in the clinical trials, but the patent is awarded for creating the drug -- long before the trials.

Rather than being a reward for brining an innovation to market, the monopoly (patent) is awarded long before the bulk of the work has been done. No reward is offered in the patent system for doing the hard and expensive part -- proving efficacy and safety. But the patent means that even if you choose not to spend the money to bring it to market, nobody else is allowed to.

Something like 95% of pharmaceuticals fail to be effective and safe. In other words, 95% of pharmaceutical patents are for inventions that ultimately don't work.

"A patent for something that does not work" ought not be allowed -- the pharmaceutical patent should only be awarded after efficacy and safety has been proved (incentivising the hard part).
Toronto, not Edmonton.
The article notes that they used data from 23andme, a commercial DNA profiling service that is $100.
> The forces that currently have power in Kiev had a choice back then - violent coup vs. fully democratic impeachment of the democratically elected president.

I don't buy the argument that it was a coup. It was a mass protest which spiralled into a political crisis when Yanukovich disappeared, which could only be resolved by appointing an acting head of state and calling new elections.

The officials who are now in power (Poroshenko/cabinet and the MPs), were elected afterwards. They weren't in power before the elections, so they couldn't impeach anybody.
"Turing committed suicide in 1954, by eating a cyanide-laced apple, although the circumstances of his death were ambiguous enough (deliberately) so that his mother could maintain, for her own sake, that it was an accident."

I feel that this is an unfair statement. There are lots of reasons to believe Turning's death wasn't suicide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Death

I also think that Fermat deserves an honourable mention for particularly poor timing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem
> So what is the bootstrap process going to be? Other than already have a Go compiler I mean. Or is it have a Go cross compiler?

What's the bootstrap process for the C compiler part of the compiler?
I'm Jewish, and I grew up in Australia, and I never got to eat bamba with my friends as a child because of my peanut allergy.
>> We also have a manager who run a code consistency checker and flag any submits which don't conform to the standards

Why don't you do this during build time using build plugins or using commit hooks instead of a manager doing it?
No Hypatia? Skinned alive by Christian mob..
The fact that this looks at grad schools rather than undergraduate schools weakens its argument substantially. Students of all capability levels end up in all sorts of undergraduate institutions -- some community college students are brilliant, but didn't have the resources to go to fancy private colleges, while some students at Ivy League colleges struggle to keep up.

The PhD programs, however, eliminate quite a bit of this variation in their own admissions. The student I know who got into Harvard but took the full ride to UCLA excelled at UCLA and had PhD programs actively recruiting her -- she had her pick of the "tiny minority" listed in this article. City College of New York has more undergraduate alumni who have won Nobel Prizes than almost any other university in the world. And since PhD programs are generally funded through fellowships, students don't have to come from wealthy families or take on large loans to attend.

My pet theory is that the top PhD programs basically execute the main selection force -- identifying the students most likely to be tenured academics from hundreds of public and private colleges nationwide -- and thus it's no surprise that there appears to be a direct pipeline between them and university faculties.
The Wi-Fi sniffing drones are here
It's really not sexism that freestyle went out of fashion. All the guys that did freestyle were left behind, too. They were also laughed at and ridiculed. The only reason Rodney Mullen kept his career going is he learned to skate street and he did it really well. If one of the female freestylers had done the same I'm sure the sport would look different.

It really frustrates me that the author complains skateboarding isn't/wasn't a meritocracy. Number one, when it was one and the sport became more dangerous and athletic, the girls couldn't keep up. Number two, it isn't a meritocracy anymore because there are 'girls only' competitions where girls are sheltered from having to compete with the boys but they still get prize money and gold medals. If you compare a girl and a guy skater at the same skill level the girl will have more money and opportunities coming in.

I don't think she really wants skateboarding to be a meritocracy, she doesn't want the pro female skateboarders to lose their sponsorships because there are hundreds of guys who are better than them who are looking for sponsorships. Unless she wants to redefine the merit of a skateboarder as the ability to convince people to buy things. That's problematic as well. If we're being honest, doing stupid and dangerous things is largely the domain of young dudes and that's why they're a better target audience to sell skateboards to.

But this is our current culture, calling things sexism sells.

(edit: it's really disappointing to see this catching downvotes.)
Modern Lego design has come a long way. You might be surprised by how versatile some sets are:

http://rebrickable.com/
I'm Live-Tweeting My Facebook Ad Campaign
The largest open database/API of barcoded products
This could be a place for students to apply social pressure on the university they are attending. How can the university program claim to be good if they don't hire their own?
'Nobody My Age Can Afford to Stay Here Forever'
I wrote this elsewhere, but there's actually a lot else at play. And if you're female, you'll get extra pressure from family, friends, significant other, etc., to choose the school that is close to them. Essentially, if you opted for a school in the 10-20 range for personal reasons (e.g., family, proximity to significant other, other obligations), you've opted into playing on super-hard mode, where you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to get as far as someone who opted for the best school to which they were accepted.

I definitely don't think I would have appreciated the difference if I hadn't experienced both in such a short time frame.

The top universities often:

1. Send grad students to conferences (including travel costs) whether or not they have results to present that year. (If you're at a slightly suboptimal school, you might only get to go if you have results to present, which you probably don't your first year. My labmates and I would volunteer and spent a day and a half stuffing swag bags and registering attendees/handing out badges for a conference so that we could get access. Students from better schools just had their tickets covered by their schools.)

2. Hire lab techs and admins, giving grad students more time to do actual research or write papers. (Otherwise, you might spend more than 40% of your time doing work that doesn't move the needle for you, professionally. You may be picking up your professor's dry cleaning, or taking care of administrivia around getting them a visa for their next talk in another country, or booking them plane tickets.)

3. The name of the school makes it more likely that the student gets a grant proposal accepted by the NIH/NSF/other agency, even if the quality of the grant proposal itself is the same. Getting a grant/fellowship/award on your CV makes a HUGE difference when applying to post-docs or faculty positions. (You'll also have access to more people who will give you more valuable feedback for how to write a better grant proposal.)

4. Top schools often protect students from bureaucracy and streamline the procedures in place for everything from getting access to a new facility, to what happens when you need to replace your student ID. (See (2) above.)

5. You're more likely to get a smarter or harder working undergraduate student to mentor and help out with your research. This matters more in the life sciences and fields with "benchwork," (e.g., wielding pipettes) but it applies to tasks that involve coding as well. In better schools, a larger percentage of undergraduates opt to get some experience in a research group, and you get both someone to delegate actual research tasks to, and you get to level-up in people-management.

There's a lot more, but you get the idea, I think.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en
Unfortunately, we recently lost Ralph Faudree under terrible circumstances as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Faudree
"When I'm hiring, I have an HR intern (or the external recruiter) strip anything that could indicate gender or race from the résumés before they get their initial evaluation. For the ones that make the first cut, I have the recruiter print out code from Github, with the username redacted. This has resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of women who make it through to an actual interview."

https://devmynd.com/blog/2015-2-mind-the-gap
I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion at the end. Supposing that sidechains can be mined simultaneously with the bitcoin at no additional cost, and that there is a fixed bitcoin <-> sidecoin conversion (not market based) built in to the protocol, bitcoin would never completely lose its value, because it could be converted to sidecoin at the same rate it would be before. The market price would be fixed to some small price differential below the price of the amount of sidecoin it could be converted to.

The thing about bitcoin is there are a lot of things done "wrong" with it, that are impossible to retrofit into it. However, the network effect means that it's also impossible to switch to another altcoin without completely devaluing bitcoin, which would mean that the altcoin would be devalued because it could happen to the altcoin as well. I agree with that part. However, something that's pinned to the value of bitcoin like what I've read of the sidechain proposal would be a way to do that.
Well, and saving money/focusing resources on crimes other than cannabis enforcement compound the economic value of legalized cannabis.
I'll be the first to admit I'm a dumb 20 year old that largely doesn't understand the world. You seem to know a great deal about the intricacies of the history in the middle east. I know nothing. I'm genuinely curious, though, do you think there is no argument for what I said?

>If you're young [...], and you have very few economic opportunities, and your society is incredibly corrupt, then a radical change becomes very appealing,

I recall looking at the revolts in Iran in 2009 [1] and what I saw was fundamentally different than what you see with ISIL. I saw people disenfranchised with the middle east governance and culture, but they were not angry or vindictive. They were productive and wanting to change things. I think that exists in the middle east, and I think that they're separate from Islamic extremists.

Meanwhile there's the anti-American camp... Is their hatred because of our actions?

* We funded Osama Bin Laden. [2]

* We trained people fighting for ISIL. [3]

* We killed 130k+ innocent civilians in the region in the past decade and a half. [4]

I think it's plausible. Sure, they might dislike us even if we hadn't done those things...

That being said, I think reasonable people in the middle east have reason to dislike America. (I think any reasonable person has reason to dislike America's actions.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_elect...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA%E2%80%93al-Qaeda_controvers...

[3]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/08/west-training-s...

[4]: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/