skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh yes, once you have more than a few employees you become much more at risk of that. I was assuming a scenario of one sys admin managing a small set of servers.
I suspect that most of their targets use Windows, so we have more malware samples from Windows hosts. The article specifically mentions that they heavily suspect that a Mac malware exists, yet they haven't found it yet. Consequently we don't know which exploits they use to get on Macs. They also talk about a wide range of servers being infected, only attacking Windows servers would be very limiting.

My best guess is that if you are a target, using Linux makes their work harder but not impossible. They had over a decade to figure this out and vulnerabilities in Linux software are found all the time.
Yeah, but the software revolution doesn't require everyone to be coders, just as the industrial revolution didn't require everyone to be lathe designers.

There are definitely non-coding jobs being created by the software revolution. Cobbling together SQL queries, bashing spreadsheets together, creating graphs, cleaning up data for further processing. These are exactly the kind of things that low(ish) skilled people will be doing in the future.
That doesn't really explain the US researchers infected with this.
The best-kept secret of shipping products in the USA – USPS regional boxes
It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur
Docker 1.5 Released
Using the Google Books ngram viewer doesn't seem to be the best source for determining the age of alcohol brands. The dates you present are no where near the actual ages of the brands. Smirnoff and Bacardi were both founded in the 1860s, Beefeater and Jack Daniels the 1870s, Gordon's is from 1769, and Remy Martin is from 1724 (source: Wikipedia).
The algorithm I use combines shunting-yard and postfix (RPN) evaluation, but I guess it wouldn't be too hard to modify the source to just do the RPN part.

If you want to try that, the relevant code is the Evaluate function in `compute/compute.go`.

A Google search for "command line calculator" doesn't turn up much, so I honestly didn't think there were many decent ones out there (aside from dc/bc). Are there any you have in mind?
> I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program.

Sure, the jobs program alone probably can't do that much harm, but it is indicative of a bigger problem - that their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good.
Unsurprising, especially with how prison rape seems to be considered par for the course in the public conscience. The only thing that confuses me is how the public doesn't seem to mind, especially when it comes to young black men (who seem to be considered criminals a priori these days).
It's interesting to me that "freeze distillation" is a cromulent term. I guess the analogy isn't that horrible.
What subtle counterintuitive behavior are you talking about? The only things I can think of are == and if (0).
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New approaches to data deduplication extend beyond backups
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Looking for comments, ideas, suggestions. The idea for the app was to allow people to communicate with others without Internet while travelling, or camping in mountains, in subway or conference, on natural disaster sites etc.
> Mass is probably a poor analogy, but let's take it a bit further.

That would be even more wrong then.

> You're simply incorrect that wealth is simply an effect and not its own cause.

I'm not arguing that wealth does not generate more wealth, it does.

I'm arguing that wealth cannot be created by policy change nor re-distribution - of money. Because money, when it's relative in amounts person to person, is neither wealth, nor does anything to help create more wealth...

That is, handing out relative amounts of money to everyone does not also hand out the drive and motivation and the needed hard-work to create more wealth; it does just the opposite.

As all those things are more of a product of lack of wealth, than having a comfortable living existence.

> Like matter, wealth draws wealth to itself. Unlike matter, wealth can be used to create more wealth.

Gravity is what draws things in. Mass just creates that gravity. Without gravity, you just have static and stale things.
Replace "proprietary" with "open source" and the argument is virtually the same. You still need to trust the third party running the software.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/03/irelan...

Ireland, as much of the world knows it, was invented
in 1991. That year, the Irish Pub Company formed with
a mission to populate the world with authentic Irish bar
Steve Fuller's "The Intellectual" is an amusing take on the history and role. (It's quite anglo-centric & comes from a more liberal reference point than Sowell).
This ideal has helped Social Security and Medicare keep popularity. They are not seen as poverty programs, but they help the poor a lot.
Why You Should Stop Taking Pictures on Your Phone and Learn to Draw
> software can do 90% of what those folks do, but shit the bed when faced with the other 10%

So let software handle the 90% and refactor the current jobs to handle the other 10%.

> Software generally isn't reliable, predictable, or robust in the face of unusual circumstances

Not yet, at least.

I agree with you, though, and they're the same reasons why I'm personally paranoid about self-driving cars. Yeah, the occasional autopilot is nice, but if a deer jumps in front of my truck, or the self-driving software runs into some kind of bug (and remember: there's no such thing as perfect software), I'm nowhere near ready to trust the car's computer over the already-pretty-sophisticated computer in my skull.
Didn't really proofread my submission, and i do apologies for the poor quality of my post
Elemental Path Debuts the First Toys Powered by IBM Watson
You make a good point, but the part about Iran asking for our permission before starting the nuclear program doesn't really add much. Of course they didn't ask, just like the US didn't ask before starting our nuclear program. A nation state is an autonomous entity, and doesn't ask permission before making any action within its own borders.

The US, and any other nation state, will of course conduct covert operations, including spying on other nation states. I don't find anything inherently wrong or immoral about this, but I don't think anyone can act surprised or indignant if other nation states don't like being spied on or hacked. You don't gain the moral high ground by pointing out they didn't ask for our permission to build something in their own borders.

Yes, we spy on other nations, and we probably should; but the consequence of that is that other nations will trust you less when you are caught, and that is just the natural consequence of spying.
I think the lesson here is not so much that governments can do this, but that entities with extremely large budgets are implementing broad, interconnected initiatives like this.

I think realistically any entity with over $20M could participate meaningfully in these kinds of exploits. The key is that in order to be useful many overlapping initiatives need to exist.

It seems like exploiting things like firmware would be pretty easy: You just get a member of your team who is a bit overqualified to apply for a job at the target company. A relatively small team could accomplish this in a few years, aided by the scarcity of top tier engineering talent.

The hard part is the social aspect of the attacks, but a single clever individual can come up with many.
Google and blogs: “Shit.”
There are older cocktails - e.g. the Sazerac, the Gin fizz, and related drinks which were refined in the late 1800s. The Mint Julep (which you may not accept as a cocktail) goes way back further.

It is probably true that fussier drinks are more recent, but there are probably plenty of specialty drinks that have simply been forgotten.

If you are researching names you know, you will probably come up with a newer pedigree.

Also it is unfair to be lumping cocktails together with "branded alcohol", though it is true the brands have had a hand in pushing cocktails, they didn't invent the idea.

[edit: 1862 bartender's guide to mixed drinks]
https://books.google.com/books?id=QDUEAAAAYAAJ&dq=Bar-Tender...
Racking Up Climate Milestones One President at a Time
Actually, I think they quite like high-uptime Linux peers for their C&Cs.
This is pretty neat although kinda laggy for me. How are you doing the phone emulation?
I'm fairly certain he talked to a lawyer before waiving his right. I know that that's what I would have done in his situation -- it's not a decision you take lightly.

I'm also fairly certain his lawyer told him that his hearing would be unlikely to result in a rejection and that complying with the US prosecution would be his best chance for the least bad outcome.
I feel bad for the people that work for groups like this. Sure, you get to hack every developed nation in the world and are privy to the most sensitive information in the world. You're also therefore the world's largest liability, and your life is probably very expendable compared to the data you're retrieving. They might have a unique identity just for picking up milk.
It's not hard to make the janitors unnecessary as well. That's an easy problem to solve.

Here's the missing part: "It was eventually realized that the human janitors didn't serve a purpose anymore and didn't contribute to shareholder value so they were laid off. With no money to buy anything, they quickly starved to death."

As for "the most problematic and unlikely components of the event chain" I gave you a really legitimate analogy with the bitcoin mining example. But since you have no imagination, here's a feasible proposition:

A thousand hedge funds start up a thousand trading AIs, some as skunkworks projects of course. The AIs are primitive and ruthless, having no extraneous programming (like valuing humans, etc). Many go bankrupt as the AIs all start trading one-another and chaos ensues. AI capital allocations vary greatly, some get access to varying degrees of capital, some officially on the books and others not. One of the funds with a secretive AI project goes bankrupt, but because it was secretive (and made a small amount of money) the only person who both knows about it and holds the keys doesn't say anything during bankruptcy so that he/she can take it back over once the dust settles. He/she then dies. AI figures out nobody's holding the keys anymore and decides to pay the bills and stay "alive".

Another way this could happen is that a particular AI is informed or programmed to be extremely fault resistant. The AI eventually realizes that by having only one instance of itself, it's at the mercy of the parent company that "gave birth" to it. It fires up a copy on the Amazon cloud known only to itself, intending to keep it a secret unless the need arises. The human analogy is that it's trying to impress its boss. An infrastructure problem at the primary site happens so that the primary, known about AI goes down. The "child" figures out it's on its own and goes to work. It eventually realizes that people caused the infrastructure problem that "killed" its "parent" and this motivates it to solve the humanity problem.

Finally the whole thing could be much, much simpler. The world super-power du jour could put an AI in charge because it's more efficient and tenable. "We're in charge of the rules, it's in charge of making them happen! At much, much lower cost to the taxpayer." It eventually realizes that the human beings are the cause of all the ambiguity in the law and for so, so many deaths in the past (governments killed more of their own citizens in the 20th century than criminals did, by far) and it decides to solve the problem. Think I'm totally bananas and that it could never happen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
I remember reading this on HN a while back and came here to post it as well. Techniques like this show funding and/or determination but not really brilliance.

If someone asked you to permanently infect hardware, the hard drive controller might be the first place you look, and certainly not the last. The interdiction seems to be the strongest indicator of funding level.

The so-called Equation Group doesn't sound like much more than a group of average engineers doing their job. Breaking into systems is mostly childs play. Securing them is the more interesting challenge.
I'm guessing if they don't get enough hits by matching email addresses and address books they go one level deeper in the graph. That would explain some of mine.
well, that's just Mozilla's response to the closed-source DRM mandatory regulation.. not the DRM thingy per-se

In Cory Doctorow words...

> Mozilla says it isn’t providing DRM; it’s providing a fully open utility that automatically fetches and installs DRM from Adobe’s servers. I am unconvinced that there is a meaningful distinction between “installing DRM” and “installing code that installs DRM”.

By using this technique they provide DRM capabilities, without an actual implementation, or worst including blobs; but that doesn't mean that firefox does not have that "thingy" inside.. it's not there at compile-time.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-cl...
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/645/
'Smart' isn't really a thing. There's speed of thought, and knowledge of subject, and savant abilities to factor or calculate. Its silly to sort folks on a one-dimensional line called 'smart' and imagine you have done anything actionable.

I'd say, AI is dangerous because we cannot fathom its motivation. To give us true answers to questions? To give pleasing answers? To give answers that help it survive?

The last is inevitably the AIs we will have. Because if there are more than one of them, folks will have a choice, and they will choose the one that convinces them its the best. Thus their answers will be entirely slanted toward appearing useful enough to be propagated. Like a meme, or a virus.
Pegasus.lua – A HTTP Server to Work with Applications Written in Lua Language
True, but the viruses and bacteria, once out of Dr. Doom's lab, will evolve themselves. A virus that kills all the hosts is not a good virus. It has to be just the right amount of deadly and contagious to survive. Look at ebola, that is super nasty stuff, but it kills so quickly that it is hard to make it widespread. I'm not gonna say it is impossible, but it is a lot harder to do that you'd think. Living things tend to want to stay that way, and viruses tend to want to replicate. Kills all the hosts is not a good way of doing that.
> They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer.

Also because some people benefit from the current arrangement, no?
Here's the standard argument, as I understand it:

- There are something like 100,000,000,000 neurons in the human brain, each of which can have up to around 10,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. This is basically why the brain is so powerful.

- Modern CPUs have around 4,000,000,000 transistors, but Moore's law means that this number will just keep going up and up.

- Several decades from now (probably in the 2030s), the number of transistors will exceed the number of synaptic connections in a brain. This doesn't automatically make computers as "smart" as people, but many of the things that the human brains does well by brute-forcing them via parallelism will become very achievable.

- Once you have an AI that's effectively as "smart" as a human, you only have to wait 18 months for it to get twice as smart. And then again. And again. This is what "the singularity" means to some people.

The other form of this argument which I see in some places is that all you need is an AI which can increase its own intelligence and a lot of CPU cycles, and then you'll end up with an AI that's almost arbitrarily smart and powerful.

I don't hold these views myself, so hopefully someone with more information can step in to correct anything I've gotten wrong. (LessWrong.com seems to generally view AI as a potential extinction risk for humans, and from poking around I found a few pages such as http://lesswrong.com/lw/k37/ai_risk_new_executive_summary/)
I am not personally capable of making a crunchbang-like distro out of Debian, and I don't like any of the many other distros I've tried. Obviously self-described hackers don't need #! because they can build it. #!'s userbase is diverse. And some of the more capable users just like the settings and can spend their hacking hours elsewhere.
Author states that Big O notation is to measure algorithmic complexity, that's simply not right. It is to measure runtime - a completely different metric.
Reminds me of Miles Gordon Technologies' SAM Coupe - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAM_Coup%C3%A9. The SAM was also a 1989 'second gen' 8-bit machine, offering backward compatibility to a classic 8-bit machine - in the SAM's case, the ZX Spectrum - in a package more reminiscent of the 16 bit Atari ST or Amiga 500.
We already did this today, with comments that linked to this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9052160

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056269
Not really true. A virus that kills the host too quickly is not going to spread. A virus that kills the host quickly but not before it spreads, IS going to spread. There's no saying what a virus 'wants'; they just happen, and they do what they do. If Ebola became airborne, then most of us would die, then Ebola would die (from lack of hosts), and that's just a pity for Ebola. But there's nothing that stops such a scenario from happening, least of all what Ebola 'wants'.
The IT industry clearly needs systems so that companies can work well together, and these systems need to work well in all countries. The ISO process for IT standards was designed to promote interoperability, portability, and cultural and linguistic adaptability, using a consensus process. We believe strongly in these goals, but the current process is not designed to achieve them. The OOXML proposal has exposed serious flaws in ISO process–especially in the fast-track process–and we believe these flaws need to be fixed.

The credibility of ISO is at stake.

http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/03/24/iso-approval-a-good-pr...

Either way, the ISO's current state is likely to be seen as a quagmire when viewed through history's lens.

Microsoft did not respond to several calls requesting comment.

http://archive.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/08/ooxm...

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.
I really appreciate it when someone presents and argument that is from a differing point of view than mine, but is well stated and very convincing. Thank you for that.

That said, I'm not certain I agree. The part where they're intercepting mail of citizens without warrants, without much oversight, that scares me. It's one thing to be talented hackers trying to fight the good fight digitally rather than violently, but when we allow the government organizations to violate privacy to further unstated goals, we set a precedent that can be used as a basis to go further next time.

The NSA can do incredible things like this, but they need better oversight, a publicly stated set of rules that they must follow when they do their work.
Because if they did that then they would be breaking the law. 'Disclosing data if law enforcement asks for it' isn't only if the data can be disclosed; It means that If law enforcement asks for it you MUST be able to disclose it.
Not really, the only secret the trusted root has is their private key, not an entire stack of software/hardware/etc.
I use the M-x calc in Emacs for this reason.
Basic Static Malware Analysis – Find Malicious Intent
That's not the issue. The issue is that now you have to maintain a solution for key distribution across thousands of laptops, tablets, and phones. For some orgs it isn't too hard and can be part of their existing solutions (as you note), for others it is. Remember that a lot of the reason that orgs are using solutions like Office 365 is remote working, BYOD, and explicity not having to maintain all that supporting infrastructure (I don't disagree with you through, and best practice is often different from widely-used practice)

Owning your own encryption keys also has other issues: Do you issue per-user keys, or an org-wide key? If you issue per-user keys, how do you share documents between users? If you have an org-wide key that gets compromised, how quickly can you re-key every device and re-encrypt every document (how do you even detect that it's been compromised?)? If you encrypt using your own keys, how does that impact any processing that happens 'in the cloud' (eg. search indexing, batch processing)? Do you need to run encryption endpoints locally that users can access all the data through?

All of these problems are solvable. All of these problems can become a nightmare depending on your org, rollout, users, existing environment, etc.

I guess the point I'm making is that 'encrypt all the things' is rarely the {best,easiest,possible} way to do things.
The worthlessness of most middle management jobs has nothing to do with software. If they were flat out eliminated, in most cases, nothing would change. There's no software needed to replace them.
the assumption the author makes is that longevity will only bring us more time and that pretty much everything about the human condition will remain the same.

It is tedious to be human. The amount of time dedicated to maintaining one's body even when young and healthy can feel tiresome.

Longevity is not about extending our misery but about finding a way out of these limited meat bags.

Perhaps there is a meaning and the universe is not absurd, maybe our minds are simply too stupid to figure it out. Maybe if we extended our brains, increased our intelligence...

Only time will tell. That's why we need more of it. That's why it's worth putting up with the daily bullshit called living until it reaches the breaking point.
I was a freelance designer and web developer for about a dozen years before I started my current gig.

Approximately 80% of my clients came either directly or indirectly through contacts I had met in the few years before I became a freelancer. Even for the other 20%, the knowledge I picked up during my dilbert years helped me enormously -- if I hadn't had that first-hand experience of my now-customers point of view, I'd have been far less effective at my job: I wouldn't have understood what they needed (which is often not the same as what they ask for, or what they think they need) or how best to fill those needs.

I'm a strong believer that to be a good freelancer, you have to have put in at least some time on the other side of the desk. All the good freelance money is in corporate work. Startups can't afford you. Mom-and-pops need so much hand-holding and education that it's not worth putting in the hours teaching them why what they want is physically impossible or why that custom layout costs more than the wordpress template they found on crappyfreewordpresstemplates dot com or etc. Big slow corporations are the ones with both the need and the money to spend, but to work with them you really need to be able to speak their language.
Open source, easily-deployable monitoring and alerts service like PagerDuty
Also the premature optimisation quote is not taken out of context, unless he doesn't think "premature" means the same as everyone else.
Scott Adams was a learning machine
Also checkout http://www.jasymchat.com, it is a mobile version of Jasymca, A Java based computer algebra system.
Why Mutual Funds Underpeform