skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My windows box will still happily run unsigned binaries, so I don't see how code-signing would help it there. Unless you were not referring to regular windows/linux as modern

Close: it's not the OS flavor so much as the security configuration. All of the major operating systems can be configured to restrict execution – whether that's mandatory code-signing, only running code from white-listed restricted directories, etc. this can be used by a security-aware admin to prevent whole classes of attacks or escalation for successful attacks.

That's the default on OS X but can also be enabled if you're willing to break with tradition on most other operating systems. That certainly has a compatibility cost but much of that cost is born by users who don't benefit from it.

> With regard to the ad-ware like toolbars, is that really reason enough to lock everyone into a walled garden?

First, the nakedesecurity writer used a click-bait headline to troll for clicks but that hinges on a redefinition for the accepted meaning of “walled garden”. It's highly misleading since Mozilla isn't charging for signatures or deciding which companies are allowed to publish add-ons.

Second, millions of people are affected by dishonest software. I'm not terribly enthusiastic about needing to sign things now but I'm not cavalier enough to dismiss the argument that a minor inconvenience for a few developers is worth more than improving the average user’s experience. Any time I look at my front-end JavaScript logs, I'm reminded of just how many people are browsing the web with untrustworthy code injected into every page.
If you're interested in a summary of Col. Boyd's thinking written for a non-military audience, I took a crack at writing one two years ago here: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/how-winners-win-john-boyd-...
At Radioshack, literally everything is about the profit margin. The store in the U-Village in Seattle is/was one of the top 5 revenue stores in the entire chain, a fact they were proud of when they hired me.

I worked there for less than a week before I quit because the culture was awful. It was a typical commission-based sales environment: We weren't encouraged to actually help anyone, we were encouraged to push bricks of batteries on people because they had the highest margin in the store. No one was to leave without a brick of batteries. Instead of making it easier for people to find a standard RCA cable, we hid them in the back and only left the "gold plated" RCA cables on the shelf. We were not allowed to sell an Apple computer, because the margin was too thin, so we were expected to push whatever PC we had on the shelf.

It was a poison environment, and I for one don't feel the slightest sympathy for Radioshack's demise.
It wasn't a jab at competitors, neither an attempt to make MS seem like /the/ forerunner. Just to say that it's definately a different MS we're seeing.
I would think that the microbiome is so heavily influenced by one's environment (what they ingest, etc) that things like gender wouldn't matter so much. Considering that it's fairly easy to determine things like when someone traveled by simply looking at time series data of their microbiome, locality and diet would be the things that I'd expect to see differentiated.
They fired tens of thousands of employees, including shifting upper management thoroughly. So yes, they killed a lot of bureaucracy.
Pulling Data in R for Smart Analysis
The Official Twitch Blog: Who Hosts Who? Who Hosts You?
3. What happens, when we find out that everybody's job can be hyper-specialized and broken down so robots can do them... which leads to >95% unemployment?

In such a society, 95% of the people will get to do whatever they want, rather than working for a living. I don't see the problem.

Too often, the assumption that near-100% employment is desirable goes unchallenged. We're people, not ants.
Both £ and € are in ISO8519-15
There is no "detection" system. You are the detection system. There is no way of enabling your off-grid connection without shutting off the on-grid system. The interlock switch physically prevents you from switching on the trip for your off-grid system while your on-grid system trip switch is on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbtRxcb-cmA

When the grid goes down, your power goes down. You then have to go trip the switch in your box to shut off the power between the grid and your house. Only then can you switch on the trip for off-grid power bringing the power back up in your house.

I guess you could have some kind of a relay where on-grid power would flow right through, but if on-grid power goes off, the relay redirects the circuit to your off-grid power - I think this is the basic principle behind the automatic transfer switch. Being on vacation or "not detecting a power failure" isn't really an option because as long as there's power, the power would flow into your electrical box from the grid. As soon as the power goes out, the relay that connects the circuit from the grid to your power box would flip to your off-grid circuit. The two circuits aren't connected but your household power can run from either one or the other.

I guess if you're wanting to sell power back to the grid, or supplement your power needs, that's different, but if it's a grid vs. off-grid situation, there isn't a problem.
Have you tried cocaine?
Who are these people excited about glitzy stuff? SaaS startups? Do you know what a small part of the world those people are?
NAR Discusses Section 1031 Like-Kind Exchanges
How does it fare against https://emailprivacytester.com/ ? I'm yet to see a new Email client which doesn't fail at least one of the tests.
No. You can construct two messages with the same MD5, but only if you control both messages. Finding a message with the same MD5 as a given message, or password, is still infeasible.

Even if you try 3x10^17 ~= 2^58 in two weeks, MD5 has 128 bits of entropy so you'd need 2^70 ~= 1.1x10^21 times that to exhaust the space. Wolfram Alpha says that's 3.3x10^9 times the age of the universe.
They weren't really part of "the scene", maybe because they hailed from Great Yarmouth, which (without wanting to offend anybody) is not exactly the hippest part of the UK. Also I think they appeared a bit later (could be wrong about that).
SO seems like less of a discussion board, and more of a snapshot in time: 2009 seems about right. Once the so-called "moderators" started deleting, editing and locking most of the answers, I was definitely discouraged from contributing. There WAS some gold buried in some of the less upvoted posts and comments, but "no soup for you."

One other little note, and don't know if anyone else noticed this, but SO is somehow biased a bit towards Microsoft. It's no big deal, but I thought I would mention it. http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/

As SO fossilizes, I think there might be an opportunity to create a new programming QA site.
I've done account recovery for my gmail account a few times without any issues, and it's the main email for all my other accounts, so I can recover them with no issue. Then again, I actually keep my recovery information updated, so it takes about 2 minutes to recover my gmail account.
Rights to Your Data and Your Own Uber God View
The Shape of Things to Come – On Apples Jonathan Ive
That's the book that got me interested in fractals and mathematics back in high school. If you want a non-layman text, check out http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Fractals-New-Frontiers-Science/d...
The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's where you need them the most. The assumption is that users with high enough rep will simply be more polite, logical, and kind, without any sort of agenda to propel. That, of course, was a naive assumption which is slowly blowing up in their faces, if they notice.

Meanwhile, nobody at the top cares because Jeff has moved on and everyone else just cares about site traffic and ad revenue (or at least that's my impression).
That may be the reason why the law was made, but that situation simply does not exist in reality. Any 'off-grid enabled' battery system that's worth anything at all would isolate the house from the grid when it kicks on, else all manner of bad things could happen, including having your battery drained on somebody else's load or the aforementioned electrical worker zappage. It's also trivially easy to accomplish said isolation.
Routinely using SSL even when it's "unnecessary" makes life harder on the NSA, which is all the justification I need.
I call that the SU-SF shuffle.
Right, that's all context around this situation. Obviously companies want whatever they can get.

But it's actually less grim than it seems:

1. there are laws,

2. the price pressures exist for the coordinating companies as well, as long as there continues to be competition, and

3. 'real' autonomy has a lot of benefits for people who are into that.

So first, there are already laws for this. (Which may or may not be sufficient regulation, but they cover a certain amount of what's discussed in the article, hence the lawsuit). Existing laws already stipulate what is/isn't a private contractor, for instance.

Ie, for work like programming, usually one can't be mandated to work in a specific office, or on specific hours, unless there's something about the job that particularly demands it. (Not that this sort of thing comes up a lot in programming, but there are definitely laws around this).

And in fact it's much easier for companies like Uber and Handy to be targeted for misclassification of workers than the more informal economies of construction workers, etc. So if there are holes in the law and they get plugged, that could be cool.

Secondly, "taking a heftier cut than it should from the business transaction" isn't a very damning indictment. But if Uber faces real competition with Lyft, for instance, the cut they can take is dictated by the market, both for drivers and passengers!

Lastly, it's not just workers taking on risk. Workers also gain freedom.

That sounds comical to some.

But I know a lot of people who are very passionate about volunteer work, and absolutely love jobs that they can do for a few hours a week and forget about -- even if it means they're living very simply. (I'm one of those people myself).
Entrepreneurial Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg
Would a broken RNG be a risk to leak private keys? As in, even if the key was generated on a safe kernel, merely using the key to encrypt or sign data on the broken kernel would compromise the keys?

This article mentions DSA private keys and poor RNGs: http://rdist.root.org/2010/11/19/dsa-requirements-for-random...
I remain skeptical that all 5 million units are in daily use.

A healthy fraction are probably in serious use by skilled embedded developers and a certain range of users like XBMC fans. Another serious fraction are probably using them for the actual educational purposes of the system.

But I fear that the majority are sitting in desk drawers, booted once and tried and then left to gather dust. I compare them to treadmills. Some buy them and use them religiously but most buy them with great intentions and leave it at that.
Can anyone ELI5? Honestly, I'd settle for an ELI12 on this one.
and how many of those people were from Nokia that was acquired by them?
The American Education of Vladimir Putin
Did Google X steal this famous architect's life's work?
I see 'em audiophiles drooling over this.

just look at this homemade battery in some audiophiles basement:

http://6moons.com/industryfeatures/roadtourlivingvoice/3.htm...
I actually did the numbers a while ago and even the Fukushima plant which ended up exploding produced less deaths than the Next Big Futures numbers for world coal and landed in the middle of Sustainable Energy's numbers for European coal.

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...
I can see this being useful for running proprietary and non free software. However, we should strive for all software to be free software instead. Because if I download free software, I have the community of developers to vouch for it. If I download proprietary software, I can't really trust it.
"All the processing happens within the SlideMail app itself."

Kudos to this. Bunch of scammers like Google try convincing you they HAVE to have your data for these things to be possible.
But not everyone that uses Linux compile X libs or Firefox themselves (a very tiny fraction do). Why does it make sense to have include headers and source?
But in our current schema of society, it would indicate that 95% of the people would be on some sort of subsistence form of government aid.

In that case, they will do what they want, as long as it doesn't include costs. That seems like a very dead society, with people depressed about no work and no money.
Like a love shack, but using electronics.
But Radio Shack was the only place I could think of to buy one.

Homedepot is where I got my last soldering iron. While I agree with the conclusion that

Radio Shack didn't just miss the boat, they sank their own ship when they switched from being the only place where strange electronic parts were sold, to being another cell phone shop.

I disagree with what that boat would be, they should have been more best buy\fry's than following hobbyist electronics in to the super niche that it is today. What I don't get is why they started to sell computers\ electronics then pivoted to brookstone crap gizmos and cell phones.
You may very well be right; I am looking at this from thousands of miles away, after all! And I'm sure everyone here would enjoy hearing your perspective on it, seeing as much of Hacker News (I'd reckon) is in a similar boat.

That said, it should be understandable why I'd take your comment with a skeptical grain of salt. Slave-owners in the Southern United States (something which I'm in much closer proximity to, though perhaps not temporally) typically had a lot of justifications for owning slaves, ranging from "We're helping them establish a modern culture!" to "We're introducing them to God and Jesus!" to "They like to work; they were bred for it!" to "We treat them pretty well, actually!" (this was a blatant lie in many cases, mind you) to "What else would they do if we were to not give them work to do?". Similar justifications persisted throughout the days of the Jim Crow laws and their ilk; even after slavery had been abolished once and for all, the now-free black populace was - in the South - rarely (if ever) encouraged to deviate from manual agrarian labor, since that was popularly believed to be their "place". The Civil War was indeed a pretty powerful wake-up call to the ways where the North's automated/streamlined manufacturing and agriculture - using machines instead of men - mopped the metaphorical floor with Southern slave-driven manual labor, but it took a long time for the South to fully realize that.

Today, the United States is still dealing with high unemployment rates of various minorities - including blacks. This is likely caused by automation in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. It sucks for those who don't have jobs in the short term, but - ultimately - it'll encourage those who were previously stuck with factory and farm jobs at best to seek educational financial assistance (which is available for low-income households) and work their way into better careers. I'll take that - along with the bit of ultimately-temporary unemployment caused by it - over blacks and Hispanics (among other minorities; Asian immigrants were victims of this as well, but a large-enough portion of the Asian-American population eventually managed to achieve white-collar jobs and top-tier academic performance that the public view has shifted in the other direction entirely) being treated as if manual labor is the only thing they're good for.

You can't blame me for seeing the parallels here. If India is willing to burn money on giving people menial busy-work for the sake of "employment", it should be more willing to instead burn money on giving those people subsidized education and placement into more modernized roles (like operating or maintaining the machines which replaced their old jobs, for example). The reluctance to do so indicates - to me at least, as someone who can relate his own experiences to this - a cultural or societal unwillingness to allow them to do so; the reasons for not doing so are certainly not ones grounded in rationality or economic common sense, which thus implies a more emotional line of thought.
Player in what? The Surface looks interesting but its very, very expensive compared to either a laptop or a tablet. Their phones are underwhelming regardless of their massive 'mobile/cloud' first initiatives and are now the bottom-basement phone for the ultra cheap buyer. Office365 is interesting but predates Nadella's leadership. Azure never panned out to be the Windows EC2. OSX keeps eating up laptop marketshare (go to any college campus, no one has windows). Surface RT was a complete disaster. Win8 was underwhelming at best.

On the enterprise side of things, a lot of sysadmins are shocked at the low quality of security updates and the massive delay in getting them out. How many were recalled in 2014? Nadella's personal mission at MS was redoing QA and as far as I can tell, he's somehow made it worse. Tabletizing interfaces in Win8 and Server 2013 was a questionable move. Office 2013 is a pig with lipstick and is known for its horror stories. Licensing has somehow gotten more bureaucratic and expensive.

I'm not fan of Ballmer, but I think the Ballmer/Gates magic was a real thing for a time, and its obvious this magic needed Gates to work. Nadella's Steve Jobs impersonation is becoming tiresome imo. The cloud/mobile first initiative ate from MS's core competencies- rock solid and featureful enterprise software. The only thing I can say about Nadella is that he's recognizing how important a classic start menu is for enterprise users and its coming back in Win10. Out of all of MS's products, Win10 is the only thing of interest. "Me toos" like its budget tablets/phones or the buying of skype or minecraft, just seem like desperate moves from a company that has lost its way. Frankly, I'd like to see enterprise broken off from loss leaders like surface (which is sold at a loss) and all the things its giving away for free as a sort of catch up to FOSS dominated and Apple dominated areas. One just seems to be eating the other, and the one being eaten is the moneymaker. MS is just too big and is chasing so many tails. Nadella fought to keep the xbox division when investors were pissed about it last year. How much political capital did it cost for him to keep that pig?

I certainly don't think MS is going to fail anytime soon, but I don't think its somehow changed its ways. Its still too many chefs chasing too many targets, many of which are probably unhittable for such a bureaucratic giant. Windows phone goes for 50 bucks nowadays and the sales are still unimpressive. Getting this late to the mobile game is a killer. There may be no way to recover lost marketshare that mobile has taken. How many billions will Nadella burn through trying? We're almost three years into the Surface line. When does it finally pay off? When do I actually see one in public?
To clarify the Windows 10 situation, they used some unfortunately vague language when they announced it, but it's not a subscription. The 1-year thing is a limited giveaway period to push Windows 7 users into upgrading quickly rather than waiting.
I wanted to thank you for doing the processing on-device.

Too many mail clients are trying to sync you mail up to their servers, which creates no end of problems - Security, Compliance, and just general creepiness.

I look forward to learning more about your app! I'll certainly try it out when it launches ;)
I've been using IRC to ask questions instead of Stack Overflow for some time now. Each room has its own character, but I've found people are generally very helpful.
You mean the freenode channel ##php? Oh, I know what you mean.

The problem is that very many people are not able to google and then ask in IRC. On the other side (the regulars), all they see every day is a torrent of "stupid noobs".

And I totally understand everyone who either retires from answering questions or turning into a sarcastic a..hole towards noobs.
None of what you say debunks my thesis: Iran is implicated in modern terrorist activity. This was in reply to the person who said Iran has not been implicated. I linked to a reputable source with citations. I am baffled by the down votes. Are we disagreeing with the source material I referenced? How about a response that repudiates my claims instead of redirecting the conversation to something completely unrelated to my comment (Saudis, Israelis, etc). To be blunt: the world has many bad actors (including the US), but it is absurd to say Iran is not at least "implicated" (which is different from proven!) in terrorist activity given the facts I referenced.
Microsoft has always failed when they have tried to enforce their own standards in the industry. Moving away from this mistake and recognizing that promoting something that is relevant and makes sense is the only way to go forward is a huge step.

Funding new interesting ideas will always help them also secure a better seat in the open source community as most startups rely on open source technologies.
My biggest "regret" was deciding to stay in the ERP space. When I originally jumped in via an internship, I did so because I wanted to get a better understanding of the monolithic systems that ran most the world. I got pulled into an interesting project, became an expert of sorts, and before I knew it I found myself with what felt like golden handcuffs.

I'm hard pressed to say I actually regret it because I've gotten myself to a very comfortable point in life with plenty of options and I've met a bunch of great people along the way. I really only dislike my ERP choice because I've become an expert in technologies that aren't easily leveraged outside of the enterprise space and my interest there is waning.
Zero-volume, one-sided surface, non-orientable bottle: the ACME KLEIN BOTTLE
No kqueue is not an acceptable alternative as it uses file descriptors to "watch" for changes :(
There is much less entropy than there should be, but more than none.