skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Equation Group: The Crown Creator of Cyber-Espionage
At least one of the metals in the alloy would need to be higher density than gold. There are a few but I don't think any of them are easy to get: http://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip?f=d41d8cd98f00b204e98...

EDIT: tungsten + platinum looks viable as sibling comment mentioned.
Yep, this is how forums work. Tools are very rare compared to other sold services because making tools are hard, and making a tool that people want to buy even harder.

You may see software like TheBestSpinner, XRumer and another one I can't remember the name of, basically a Wordpress comment spammer cannon that sell thousands of copies, more than that person would make using these tools themselves.
Yes, this is common. It's not just tech companies. As an example, a number of years ago Best Buy had a huge round of layoffs amidst a revolving door of unsuccessful CEOs.

Stores that were closing did not know until a specific date, when they'd go into work as usual and open a securely delivered packet. If the packet delivered was packet A, it informed them that they were laid off, effective immediately - all employees of that location. Packet B informed them that they were not closing. They had no idea what the case would be until the morning they opened the packet, and the packet was delivered the previous night.
What are you using to embed LaTeX?
Any ssh key generated with a bad RNG could be easily crackable, as an example.
It's pretty much useless now that Google actually penalises people for this - pretty funny that brands who use to do this now have to beg for their spam to be removed.

Basically they would spam these out to not look overly spammy, and have their website and name listed as their website they are trying to promote as people use to believe that having millions of shitty backlinks is good SEO.
At 'American Sniper' trial, questions of sanity vs. insanity
Thank you for the insights! Could you elaborate more on the challenges of convincing regulators to allow you to partner with bitcoin exchanges? Clearly it's not prohibited, if SVB is able to do it with Coinbase, but what exactly are the regulators saying or doing that prevents you guys from getting into that game?
Ask HN: Are there programs whose halting status is undecidable?
Can you write a program for a Turing machine for which no human will ever know whether it will halt or not? A few rules/assumptions:

- I'm not talking about a program too long to read, because that's boring, but something whose halting status is essentially unknowable. After all what if humans solve aging, solve solar catastrophe, etc.?

- I assume Turing machines have no random number generator, so you can't write a program like "if rand() > 0.5 then halt else spin."

- I'm asking about programs that are not just undecided but undecidable. For instance you could write a computer that halts iff it finds a positive even integer that is not a sum of two primes (cf. Goldbach's conjecture), and no one knows yet whether that program will halt. But who's to say someone won't figure it out in a hundred years? Can you write a program whose halting status is demonstrably undecidable?
I've brainstormed a discovery model where your content gets seen by say, 100 people. If X% {buy|pay|like} it, then another 100 people see it. And so on. Rotating.

Any sites that do this?
Yes, a simple image upload feature would be most helpful. But this is sweet!! Like the markdown-based input better than Google Powerpoint.
Flagged. This, of course, is totally fake.
I would hope ab -c 5 -n 1000 would be enough. I've used -c 5 because the VM wasn't exactly beefy, but that's still quite a few requests.
Suppose a developer generated an ssh key while running -current and shared /home with -stable. Then the vulnerability would long outlast the use of -current.
Aaron Fazulak from Designation: Design Changes Lives
> it's for payment processing, reach, marketing, infrastructure, testing/approval,... app delivery, etc.

But if your app is free, then there is no charge for those services. How does it make sense that theit provision only costs Apple money if your app costs >= 1 cent?
This article refers to https://securelist.com/blog/research/68750/equation-the-deat...

Where the Q&A rapport is found
http://25zbkz3k00wn2tp5092n6di7b5k.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/f...
Wow. I have a lot of reading to do. Thanks!
In-depth podcast about libuv
This is very interesting. As a med student with a programming and CS background, these efforts are particularly appealing to me. It seems that (polling healthcare workers, mainly docs) technology (EMR) is more of a hindrance than a benefit, which to me has always seemed like poor design, gamblers fallacy + overwhelming costs associated with changing software in a large hospital. I don't see how this can change unless there are standard protocols that allow for flexible data entry and analysis. The problem I see with this new system is that it doesn't (at the surface) appear to offer anything new, whereas asthamMD is creating objective data and a unique pipeline between healthcare teams and patient. It seems like we are just waiting for some software revolution that actually saves doctor time and improves patient outcomes - rather than generate data for administrators and bureaucrats at the cost of inefficiency.
Yeah this looks viable. This would make the best fake bar. I don't think the metal even need to be alloyed, you can just pour in one first, then the other.
Obviously at some point you have to stop discussing something and start building it.

No, see, that's where we are having problems: there is a perfectly valid answer of "It's good enough, or simple enough, that we will leave it as-is barring a really big leap".

Assuming that you've got to build something to replace the status quo is still itself an assumption. Saying, in effect, "Hey, we've got to build something" naturally disallows a reasonable engineering conservatism.

Software gets better not as you add things, but as you remove them--people keep forgetting this.
Show HN: Haystack – Simple graph abstraction over Hbase
X Helicopter Flight 3D Free
You can see a much fancier text-generator of this sort at http://eblong.com/zarf/mutagen/about.html

(I once ported it to Python and wrote a parser for a more-convenient syntax like the OP's, then never released it partly because I'd hate to see spammers using it.)
A 60 page document to explain how to compress text name/value pairs that are mostly unchanged between requests is "reasonable"?

A static compression table with proxy authentication fields in it, as if the network between your browser and LAN proxy is somehow the bottleneck, is reasonable?

This is a most over-engineered protocol, one where nobody knows how tables were constructed or from what data and nobody can quantify what the benefits its features will really be. For instance how much is saved by using a huffman encoding instead of a simple LZ encoding or simple store/recall or not compressing it? Nobody knows! Google did some magic research in private and decided on the most complicated compression method, so therefore HTTP/2 must use it.

This HTTP/2 process is insane.
it would be interesting to see spam bots generate more and more intelligent content in a war of the AI.

http://xkcd.com/810/
It was difficult to have any clue what she was going on about, except that she expects other people to solve her problems for her and do things for her. I wonder what gave her that idea.
Yeah, but between every government giving up on banning or limiting or backdooring encryption, and now, a lot of damage can be done. Lots of criminal charges, lots of wasted effort, lots of crapaganda spewed.
Australian tech startups may help plug mining hole
The guy who published a book about XSS, which ended up causing an XSS exploit on Amazon via the "book preview" function[1] is my favorite version of that.

There was also an attempted attack on the Swedish voting system via a handwritten SQL injection attack, but that was unsuccessful[2].

[1] https://drwetter.eu/amazon/storedXSS-vuln.at.amazon.html

[2] http://alicebobandmallory.com/articles/2010/09/23/did-little...
I didn't mean it to be a viable suggestion - I don't think it is one. If you're testing density to within 2.7% you are doing other tests (suggested elsewhere by others in this thread). All I was saying is that although I do think the author is wrong (there is no problem of fake gold bars), the existence of a simple density test isn't why...
I really hope nobody in government uses this leaked version for 64bit Intel / Unix. This is buggy and requires to be run as root...

please don't.

Buy the Alpha version or ask whether it is possible to buy the new version.
Interesting! Do you currently compete with banks or will you do so eventually? Are your products independent of the banks your APIs interface with?
UN envoy: Syrian government willing to suspend airstrikes in Aleppo for 6 weeks
Proofreading. If your ad copy has silly spelling mistakes, how can I trust your code? Otherwise, good presentation.
Fascinating, thanks for the explanation. I'm curious: I thought blogs/forums/etc output user-supplied links with rel="nofollow" so google ignores them... so how is the link actually beneficial (even for a short period of time)?
I will put money that they use the incorrect email template (acceptance vs reject)
Human White Blood cells attacking a parasite
Suggestion: Firewall tcp/80 for a day
After noticing how much stuff OSX 10.10 Yosemite sends to and from the 'net in the clear (triple-clicking any word on screen will beam the text to the entire Starbucks unencrypted(!)), I decided to firewall off tcp/80 as an experiment.

Lots of stuff breaks, of course.

If you're an app developer, try doing this sometime, and fix everything that breaks. Your users should be able to keep 100% of their traffic encrypted - you cannot assume an encrypted L2 network.
The addressing is designed to take advantage of spatial locality - adjacent addresses will be adjacent in the cache too.
> And listening to everybody saying that hard work will get you places.

I try to work harder than average. If you don't, you get a lazy reputation, may not get a good reference, and might be one of the first to go in a round of lay-offs. However, I make sure I'm never the hardest worker. Some of the hardest working people I know are poor and too often taken for granted. I've never seen the hardest working person in a company get a fair deal. So, it's a balancing act, trying to work hard but not too hard.
No, I use word because I still think the UX is leagues ahead of LibreOffice.
The fact that it's not Epic is a huge plus in my book.

Eef: I've seen the horror that is Epic's 1980's terminal SQL nightmare backend. Lipstick on a dead, rotting windows-only pig running on citrix.
It's unfortunate that TLS ended up being optional in HTTP/2, but if the big browsers only support HTTP/2 over TLS (as FF/Chrome have said they will do) then we might see very little non-TLS deployment.
Have a look at the W3 HTTP WG mailing list. PHK and others voiced all of their objections there in detail over a long period, and you can also read the rest of the WG's responses: https://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/advanced_search?keywor... (all of PHK's posts to the list, in chronological order).
Since this will be released in Spark 1.3, you can track the dev. in the 1.3 branch on Github https://github.com/apache/spark/tree/branch-1.3
Princeton Is Teaching a Free Online Course About Bitcoin
The French were winning in Algeria, but the population was unable to stomach what its soldiers were doing, and voted overwhelmingly (>80%) in favour of decolonization, pushing the government to move from an over to covert control over the colonies (from actual colonies, to Francafrique). Many African leaders today are French-trained, French-selected and acting in French interests (although these increasingly seem to be a subset of US interests) and as such are better thought of as "black governors of French territory".

It is relatively easy to control a country. Send it back to the stone age, keep a limited size, but modern and efficient force close by to protect the administrators of what ensues against the occasional attempt. Cf the French Marines who stopped two coups on Omar Bongo's palace, or the 1,000 troops flown in from Chad to defend French interests in the ROC.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...
Getting Back to the Beginning
Those of use that worked through the first dot-com bubble can surely tell better stories than that.

There is no graceful way to do it.

One company I worked for, there were probably 200 people, and the CEO gathered everyone into a big room and started talking layoffs, kind of beating around the bush. But essentially saying a core team will stay on, while everyone else is gone.

A person asked, when will we know if we are on the core team? And he just blankly answered, "Oh, we spoke to those individuals this morning" - Yeah, the collective gasp was something I will never forget. I had only been there a week but made the core team. 4 months later the company was out of business.
yeah, this machine seems to be able to do it: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/GoldXpert-SDD-Portable-Countertop-XRF...
Can this light make you high?
Ask HN: Options for super cheap SSL certificates?
Often times when I am working on a project or demo, I want SSL purely for basic privacy. I can host my apps for ~$15/mn in AWS, so spending $60+/yr for an SSL certificate seems silly...especially when I don't think this thing is really going anywhere yet.

Self-signed isn't a great option as I don't want to distribute my own signing cert to potential customers/people using or testing my app.

Am I missing a trick? What do you guys do?
It's so annoying when people use that useless number to make a point. Journalists do it all the time.
Show HN: Electronic Paper Display + Bluetooth LE + Lithium Battery
One of the most interesting things I've read (or listened to) about expertise is a podcast interview with the author of The Sports Gene[0].

> So in my second chapter I sort of tell a story I call the 'Tale of Two High Jumpers,' in which I sort of profile two high jumpers, one named Stefan Holm, who over the course of 20 years--and by his estimate, 20,000 hours--made incremental progress every year, to the point where he became one of the best high jumpers in the world. And then in 2007 he travels to the World Championships, and is met by a total unknown, a Bahamian jumper by the name of Donald Thomas, who just recently had started high jumping, basically because he had found out he was good at it on a lunchtime bet at his college. And so, Donald Thomas is closer to 0 hours, and Stefan Holm is closer to 20,000 hours. So they average 10,000 hours. But Donald Thomas actually wins that competition. And so I thought it was a good story to explain the fact that not only is there huge variation, but different athletes can get to the same place with both different biology and different training programs.

[0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/david_epstein_o.htm...
And no mention of the best of breed - "The new statesman" with Rick Mayall ... he will be sorely missed.
What Do Dogs Do in Bed?
One public dataset that I think people should analyze is how competitive rating changes based on number of events you participated in.

For example, in programming competitions the history ratings of everybody is public: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank.

One of the most well known competitive programmers is probably tourist: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=222.... He started at a rating of about 1200 when he was 12yrs old but took him over 5 years to increase it by 2000 points. For everyone that kept at it for equally as long, you can see a similar trend in trajectory. The only difference is the slope at which their ratings increase.

(The ratings probably mean nothing to you, so for some calibration, people with a rating of about 1500 can easily pass a google interview, and I think a fresh CS grad with no practice will probably start at around 1000. Which probably gives hope to the average CS grad since even for the world's best, it took them about 10 years to get to where they are.)

I just thought this was a nice way to quantify growth vs practice.
Completely agreed. There isn't a credible competitor to Excel, because Excel isn't in the spreadsheets business--spreadsheets are in the Excel business, and nobody else is good at being Excel. (This is distinct from the file format, because we're talking about bug-for-bug compatibility at runtime too.) Even Mac Office isn't sufficiently good at being Excel to be Excel.

Until that changes--I'll check back in a decade or two--LibreOffice and friends, no matter how legitimately good, will be also-rans in the corporate world.
Doomed white dwarf stars to spawn supernova in colossal crash
There's a writer from Esquire who's basically made a living doing experiments like this. He's written things like The Year Of Living Biblically [1] (self-explanatory), The Know-It-All (he read all of Encyclopedia Britannica) [2], and other experiments.

There are a lot of others who have done similar things. Matt Cutts from Google does 30 day experiments. Karen X Cheng learned to dance in a year. There's something about contained experiments that are quite compelling.

I'm doing my own version of this, as a writer. I'm working on writing 1,000,000 words [3]. I'm doing this in 1,000 sets of 1,000. I'm currently at 240.

760 to go.

–

[1] http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-year-of-living-biblically/

[2] http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-know-it-all/

[3] http://visakanv.com/1000/
For demos, buy a wildcard certificate, and put all of them on subdomains.

For projects (assuming you mean something you're releasing to the public), use a reputable SSL provider, however much it costs. The most expensive are a few hundred a year. Even if you have 10 projects running simultaneously (which is unlikely), that's only ~$3k, which is a pretty easy amount of money to make back.

A more realistic number of projects is around 3, and a cheap certificate could easily be less than $100. You can change the domains as you shut down and start up new projects, so your total every year doesn't have to be more than a few hundred.
> For instance how much is saved by using a huffman encoding instead of a simple LZ encoding or simple store/recall or not compressing it? Nobody knows!

It's not all about compression ratios. From the HPACK spec (https://http2.github.io/http2-spec/compression.html#rfc.sect...):

SPDY [SPDY] initially addressed this redundancy by
compressing header fields using the DEFLATE [DEFLATE]
format, which proved very effective at efficiently
representing the redundant header fields. However, that
approach exposed a security risk as demonstrated by
the CRIME attack(see [CRIME]).

This specification defines HPACK, a new compressor for
header fields which eliminates redundant header fields,
limits vulnerability to known security attacks, and which
has a bounded memory requirement for use in constrained
environments. Potential security concerns for HPACK are
described in Section 7.
do you have any profiling information to share? if you could post it as a github issue, we'd be very interested. This sounds unusual.
ClicnScores, les news en live en quelques clics
To some of you reading this who haven't been to graduate school, this mistake is not as large as you might think. A lot of graduate schools have the policy of overadmitting and then pruning out during the oral exam (which usually 1-2 years into the program). I do not know if CMU is one of those schools (I attended one which did not have this policy; also, this policy can vary by department within the same school).
Try hacking together a rudimentary one over a socket opened by AT commands. Embedded programming including cellular modems for the win, Bob.
How Can You Tell If Your Dog REALLY Loves You?
Would it be a pedantic asshole who corrects kids not to say sheeps but sheep?

Or someone who actually cared about children and learning?
Can you go into more detail on what happens when you triple click a word? Most new OSes are very chatty (Win8/10 also suffers from this).
Recruiter email leader board, fwd to bad at recruitervalve.com, good to update
>Fargo made over 8x it's budget in income on the original theatrical run. That's major success.

Well, it's budget was a tiny (by Hollywood) $7 million, so that's not saying much.
Following the source links, it seems they may be using this comment from here http://bos.sagepub.com/content/71/1/85.full.pdf+html:

>"Most recently, in December 2014, the
Notebook did an exhaustive review of
Israel's nuclear arsenal and concluded
that claims it has 200 to 400 warheads
are probably exaggerated and that the
country's stockpile is more likely in the
range of roughly 80 nuclear warheads
(Kristensen and Norris, 2014b). Getting
the size and composition right is important
because it hints at Israeli intentions,
and can therefore have a significant effect
on threat perceptions in the Middle East
and the potential nuclear aspirations of
other countries in the region"
Worrying about the 70/30 share is premature optimization—first build an app and get downloads on a large scale without buying installs, good luck man.
Very true, alas, the ways which are good for people are, regrettably, not the ways that are good for the company lawyers. In addition to the emotional/honesty difficulty of a good postmortem, there's the fear that somebody will say something to trigger a lawsuit, spurious or otherwise.
That is an interesting summary.

grep is a search tool. sed is an editor. awk is a programming language. Describing them as a series of supersets is not invalid, but it's an interesting perspective that I had not considered before!
I'm not sure I understand how picking apart her experiences one by one in order to be critical of a few of them is condoning blatant sexism. Why am I only allowed to accept her entire article as a whole?
But we all know which UW is the right one :)
Can you give some details and links to bugs involved?
This is just the worst article I've ever seen, and the focus on Israel seems like it's hinting at anti-Semitism. I can't figure out any other reason it's mentioned so prominently.
Like kicking it up to the application layer?
On my end, it runs great in Firefox but runs at 3 fps in Chrome
Spot expensive patients so they can be denied and reap more profit.
Then the bar is not heavy enough, because you've run out of room to add tungsten on the inside, and adding it on the outside would change the volume or shape of the bar.

Tungsten is less dense than gold. Not as much a difference as actual twinkie filling, but either way you're stuck with a similar issue.
The Huffman code is optional and the spec says not to use it on sensitive fields (no mention of what those are). You can use a separate LZ on each header field, compressing really long headers and not having information leak between headers and the bodies. You think they tested that? Or did the people who didn't know about CRIME in the first place just react? Where are the numbers that show a static huffman code that was created from some unknown dataset at one point in time and can't be extended because there's only a single "compress or huffman" bit in the protocol is needed? Like I said, insane.
Yep, that is pretty old school. http://NoMoreCaptchas.com pretty much eliminates bots and all you have to worry about is human farmers manually writing comments with links embedded in Viagra or what ever the latest pharmaceucitcal is.
Here's a few more members from the top 10:
http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=198...
http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=227...
http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=226...
http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=228...
http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=227...
http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=227...

They all started at a "green" or "blue" rating (i.e., no prior training) and it took all of them a bit of time to hit "red", which is the arbitrary point you can start calling them an expert.