skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article ended just as I was expecting the meat. The article seemed to want us to blame women for this, but never quite dared to say as much outright.

Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one (if you're worried about the nutritional balance of your cocktail, the alcohol will kill you first). A clever name doesn't have to mean a bad drink. The disappearance of federal regulation was interesting, but it doesn't seem like it tells the whole story - it's not like those federal whiskey inspectors have been reintroduced (have they?).
Show HN: Followlotto.com – Written in Go and Martini with Twitter OAuth
Thanks Dang, I misunderstood the Show HN principles. I won't use it for the next Silicon updates.
I used that line to explain to the police officer why I had been sticking raw fish in my neighbors mail. Luckily, he did not have the necessary security clearance to dispute my claim.
Interesting to compare the sophistication of this malware and physical weapon systems such as the Tomahawk cruise missile. One video of cluster munitions shows how the munitions try to attack armor, then vehicles, then groups of people, and then land to become pop up landmines. [1]

One has to assume that the capabilities of the other actors is similar. Makes for a pretty scary picture when you think about it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY9gojFu-_U
Hi all, this was an idea I came up with yesterday and was able to execute in 4 hours with Go and Martini last night in a coding frenzy! Any feedback is appreciated!
Not Born to Die. 6to5 has been renamed to 'babel'
You also have to consider the cost to society locking someone away incurs. You not only remove an able-bodied worker and offload his costs of living to society, you also have to factor in the overhead of maintaining and staffing the necessary facilities.

But sadly putting people behind bars is considered a solution in itself in the US, rather than a means to an end.
I definitely agree with the second part. It's always going to be a back and forth. As for non-US, well, I don't think we can claim a monopoly on espionage.
I'm working on a project which you might find of use in a little while: http://codemancergame.com/
Russian researchers expose breakthrough U.S. spying program
> While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless.

This is a conceit of software folks that's not borne out by reality. Those "worthless" jobs continue to exist because software can do 90% of what those folks do, but shit the bed when faced with the other 10%. Software generally isn't reliable, predictable, or robust in the face of unusual circumstances, which is why humans continue to do these jobs.
Well if it's on the US then they should have stopped when we asked nicely, right?
And then what? They either keep the keys themselves, or the customer has to ensure that the key exists on every device they want to access the data from. If you're a one-man shop that doesn't matter, but if you're a multi-national trying to rollout Office 365, it makes it prohibitive.
"If there is a task, it might be to participate in making "the public" more brilliant, more skeptical, more disobedient, more capable of self-defense, and more dangerous again—dangerous to elites, and dangerous to stability..."

Honestly I think this is the problem. There has been a steady wave of anti-intellectualism throughout certain parts of the country, and in particular the education system itself. This result in a level of distrust in "intellectuals" that creates cultural filter-bubbles and it's very hard to bust other peoples bubbles without putting them on the defensive.

The bottom line is that TPTB don't desire an intellectual public. They are harder to control, are less likely to conform or be silent, etc. I've heard it put like this: "They want someone just smart enough to push papers but not enough to ask too many questions."

Add on top of that the major chilling effects of an increasingly global surveillance state that is edging towards totalitarian facism, and it's easy to understand how many of the intellectuals simply just go about their lives and try not to rock the boat. A good example of this is the state of the fourth estate, where currently just about every reporter who actually goes to the DC press club is more like a stenographer than a reporter. "Officials sources say..." is their calling card (keep an eye out for this phrase). If they rock the boat too much, they get dis-invited from the party in one way or another.

Honestly I think the state of public intellectualism is much more tied into class warfare than anyone has articulated yet.

This is also why I think that art is the new medium for intellectuals. In a surveillance state, subtle and subversive artistic endeavors seem to be the most likely to positively influence without creating defensiveness, while at the same time flying under the normal dissident surveillance radar.

Do not be fooled, with current legislation such a TPP and Net Neutrality, this is only the beginning of censorship and the chilling effect. Only the beginning. They ignored the internet and let us win the 90's crypto wars, but now they recognize the internet as a threat and "it must be brought under control." It's all about control. (as opposed to safety)
Jeri Ellsworth has been quite vivid about the actual, rather than the idealized, version of how Valve actually works; there's some thoughts here: http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi...

Besides shelving the VR project that she was reportedly working on, there's also the Steambox which still doesn't exist (the only hardware to even pass prototype stage eventually had to abandon SteamOS and release on its own), the utter crapshoot that is their attempts at virtual economies (TF2 hats: prints money, trading cards: useless boondoggle, everything involving Counter-Strike: possibly lucrative now, but PR disaster after PR disaster with their fans).

Valve spins the utopian image, and generally keeps the veil down enough that goodwill and fandom manage to sustain the myth, but I suspect the cart's been off the rails for sometime, and if it weren't for Steam we'd have long seen a very public failure by now.
A large airplane operating on autopilot with two pilots in the cockpit is not operating autonomously. Autonomous implies no pilot at all, that is, you merely tell the UAS some set of commands like "go to this address, confirm recipient and their order, hand over the goods, return to base". The person interacting with this autonomous UAS is akin to an operations manager for an airline. They are not a pilot. Eventually it may not even be a person, that too could be software that just sequences a bunch of errands to the nearest available UAS.

What's actually required by an autonomous system is closer to a large percentage of FAR 61 and FAR 91, which are pilot certification and general operating rules, respectively. Your very basic recreational or private pilot conforms to both of those sets of regulations on every visual flight. For instrument flights requiring positive separation from air traffic control because the pilot can't see and avoid themselves? That's another layer of regulations and conformance. For charter flights, that's FAR 135 a whole separate set of regs. For commercial passenger flights, that's FAR 121 yet another separate set of regs.

Track down a FAR/AIM manual and start reading FAR 61, 91, 135 and the AIM part. A bulk of this needs to be incorporated into an autonomous UAS controller. The details of course have to change, possibly by a lot in some cases, because we don't have things like primary or secondary radar or radio communications at the altitudes UAS's will operate. But there are analogues and they need to be invented, specs defined, infra created, and so on. And while some of this could be implemented in proprietary form, the portions that require communication or cooperation in shared airspace have to be publicly documented.
> the heterogeneity is insanely high.

To expand on this: the heterogeneity is so high that they don't (as meta-analysis guidelines say you should) report the figures. This is why in the figures, you see tight confidence intervals around zero, but also equally-tight confidence intervals many effect-size units away. That's an alarm bell for trying to draw any sort of meaningful conclusion: it means there are so many variables at play that you have no idea whether the net should be zero or big. (Also a concern given the observation that many countries have seen dental problems fall considerably as they developed, which is a big confound.)
Vernon B. Mountcastle 1918–2015
>Programming languages should be minimalistic

If we follow this to its extreme, everyone should switch to Brainfuck.

The complexity contributed by a feature is partly a function of how unintuitive it is. "Goto" is so intuitive that it's essentially free, in the sense that it doesn't really increase the cognitive burden of the language. (If misused, it can greatly increase the cognitive burden of individual programs in the language, of course.)
tl;dr Go with what you know and are comfortable with.

Any of those you mentioned could be used. Personally, I prefer a more hands off framework such as Express (Node.js) or Bottle (Python) compared to something like Rails.

Where do you see Sinatra or Flask fall short? That may help us in answering your question.
Which countries did ask permission before starting their nuclear programs?

The countries that have nuclear weapons, who do they ask to be allowed to keep them?
> The right obviously objects to redistribution.

This is inarguable.

> The left prefers inefficient redistribution.

This is an obvious strawman. The current inefficient solution is a compromise between the left (who want the government to help the poor) and the right (who don't want the government to help the poor, but can be persuaded if you mix in enough penalties for perceived sin.)

In order to have an efficient solution you need a majority of people voting to agree on what the goal is.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/03/irelan...
The whole "embedded programming is scary and impossible" sentiment seems to be pretty common these days. I mean, it's impressive, but well within the reach of an interested nation-state or even a skilled hobbyist like Sprite_tm.

It seems like the prevalence of modified router firmwares (and botnets based on them) should make it clear that firmware modification is A Thing That Happens(TM).
If You Can – How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly [pdf]
Yes, but at least in the case of AI, it's so primitive and so far away from being any type of intelligence that the only intelligence is in the name. Sorry, that doesn't count, especially when you're talking about putting valuable resources into something that may never materialize: real AI. I suspect that the same applies to synthetic biology at this point, though I'm no expert on that.
Indeed.

Folks who are really interested ought to read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399532870/

I'm very glad that Old Tom Gin is finally starting to become available again.
This product journey led us to sell Basquiat and Warhol online
"if you're a multi-national trying to rollout Office 365" ...if you're competent, you already issue your own certificates for other purposes and install them on the computers you own. Therefore maintaining additional keys would not even cause adding more manpower than what you already have.

If you are multi-national and not having your own certificates, I'd be happy to do some consulting for you.
Sigh. While I'm interested to see the discussion this generates, the prose is turgid. Nine pages wrapped around a small number of nuggets, including some interesting history, but the core of which is this (edited down further for brevity):

The huge personal disappointment—and it puzzled me for a long time—was that junior professors did not, by and large, give us work I wanted to print [in "n+1"]. I knew their professional work was good. These were brilliant thinkers and writers. Yet the problems I encountered ... were absolutely not those of academic stereotype ... the "inability" to address a nonacademic audience. The embarrassing truth was ... [that w]hen these brilliant people contemplated writing for the "public," it seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial language with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous. They dumbed down, in short—even with the most innocent intentions. The public, even the "general reader," seemed to mean someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than themselves.... The public signified fun, frothy, friendly.... [T]alking down to readers in a colorless fashion-magazine argot is such second nature that any alternative seems out of place.

This was emphatically not what the old "public intellect," and Partisan Review, had addressed to the public. Please don’t blame the junior professors, though. (Graduate students, it must said, did much better for n+1, as they do still.)...

But the additional philosophical element that made this complicated arrangement work, and the profound belief that sustained the fiction, on all sides, and made it "real" ... was an aspirational estimation of "the public." Aspiration in this sense ... [is] something like a neutral idea or expectation that you could, or should, be better than you are—and that naturally you want to be better than you are, and will spend some effort to become capable of growing—and that every worthy person does. My sense of the true writing of the "public intellectuals" of the Partisan Review era is that it was always addressed just slightly over the head of an imagined public—at a height where they must reach up to grasp it. But the writing seemed, also, always just slightly above the Partisan Review writers themselves. They, the intellectuals, had stretched themselves to attention, gone up on tiptoe, balancing, to become worthy of the more thoughtful, more electric tenor of intellect they wanted to join. They, too, were of "the public," but a public that wanted to be better, and higher.

Which I largely agree with. It's a discussion I've been having elsewhere.

But my God, Mark! Fewer words. More meaning.
I stopped using infix calculators a while back in favor of RPN/stack calculators (dc) because I get quite tired of parens. Is the program structured such that this change would be simple? Otherwise I feel like this is simply yet another CLI calculator.
'were', I think, may be more operative. I first heard that statistic about a long time ago, more like the '70s. Mathematicians don't seem to be very useful to the NSA's current hacker paradigm. (Note what we haven't gotten from the Snowden leaks so far: any sort of major mathematical or theoretical advance. Amazing hacking infrastructure, though.)
I agree, but I'm not questioning whether or not the service sector is growing. The rise of the freelancer/contractor in any given industry seems to have grown exponentially just in the last decade alone. If we assume this to be the "answer" the free market has, I simply do not see how this is sustainable on a large scale. It seems to me that we would rapidly have an excess of service providers in an ever-shrinking pool of service consumers. Furthermore it would introduce a whole new set of issues from exploitation to underbidding/cutting.
>If we follow this to its extreme, everyone should switch to Brainfuck.

Yeah, we shouldn't.
Without getting into uber-pedantry, I completely agree.

That said, if I had a nickel for every time I saw two completely platonic persons hugging in a business meeting, workplace, etc., I'd have a lot of nickels.

Some people prefer to hug. My wife, for example, finds handshakes creepy, and the myriad of rules surrounding them even more so. As a woman, she (thankfully?) has never had anyone complain, but nobody knows if anyone has ever been weirded out by it.

Still, it's premature to break out the pitchforks and take the word of one person we don't know about the insidious actions of another person we don't know without having at least heard both sides.
It would be interesting to quantify the difference, but for what it's worth the restaurant example at the beginning is described as having sound-absorbing walls, so that must not be enough by itself, and all the other examples seem to involve rooms that have adjustable characteristics, something that would be hard to achieve without active systems.
SIGINT won't won't detect two people conspiring in a bug-free room.
CogniToys: Smart Toys Powered by IBM's Watson
I didn't pay 100% attention to the dialogue at the beginning, but I was led to believe that Charles was "along for the ride" and not experienced enough to know what to do in emergency.
No, the two revolutions are a lot more similar than you think. The industrial revolution was fueled largely by the technology to harness huge quantities of fossil fuels to power modern machinery. The underlying supply of energy didn't change - those fossil fuel reserves had been built up over hundreds of millions of years, as we're now learning (to our chagrin) a hundred years later. What did change is our ability to extract that energy from the world around us. After the industrial revolution, we woke up and found out that we had previously been literally scratching the surface of the resources available to us on this planet.

Similarly, the Information revolution has been fueled by a huge increase in our ability to collect and process data. That's allowed new means of production that use existing resources in a much more efficient way. No, there's no new energy flowing into the system - but there wasn't with the Industrial Revolution either, we just figured out how to use energy that was previously believed to be useless.

There are theoretical limits to the amount of energy our planet can generate, but if you study physics you'll see that the amount of energy extracted by human beings is roughly 1/1000th of the energy available to us [1]. The limiting factor is our technology, not the raw resources in the environment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
War chest  $257B
Brian Krebs had an interesting follow up to this story -- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/02/the-great-bank-heist-or-...
I don't know how you managed to pull misogynist tones out of this--author merely pointed out that, to increase patronage, bar owners moved towards more open and public spaces. It's just what the market wanted.

Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one.

So, again, you're missing the point: strong mixers (sweet or sour!) cover up bad ingredients and also cover up bartenders being incompetent. It's not a choice between sweet, sour, and whatever else in a good mixed drink; it's a bartender knowing how the flavors fit together in the drink, and knowing how the flavors vary across brands and years of theoretically the same ingredient. For example, there are several different manufacturers and brands of gin, and what works well in a gin and tonic may fail to test nearly as good in a proper martini.

It's more economical and requires vastly less skill to dump vodka or well tequila into a sour-mix and thrown in some cubes and give to a patron, than it is to pick the right tequila off a bar, pair with the right liquors, and add just a slight amount of mixer for flavor, and then serve.
Your last sentence says a lot. Given our track record it's likely that people left without means of acquiring money are pretty much told to go fuck themselves.
In C at least. Anyway, that's probably due to the significant amount of discussion about goto. Perhaps "ironically" goto is a good feature only because it's criticized enough so that it's typically used correctly?
So what's happened in the 12 years since 2003?
The attacks were highly specific to the targets they were going after. It's a large team with massive resources - if you become a target, being a Linux user will not protect you from their attacks.
Marc Andreessen’s plan for fostering more “Unicorn” startups
UR = UNITEDRAKE ("Regin", basically?). And that'd probably be rmgree5@nsa.gov: that's the format their addresses are in.

This does seem to be, broadly-speaking, NSA's top-dollar brand-new 0-day-laden (at the time) malware, that they use to launch their less shiny stuff, which is more awkward and a massive overfunded modular boondoggle. This does not seem to be as freely shared around with the "Five Eyes".

By the way, there are innocent machines in the US infected with this thing, at this very moment. Anyone care to explain that?

The hard-drive component should be completely detectable, if you don't boot from it, based on the (small, sadly incomplete) fragment of (Cortex-M0?) stuff I've seen. Power-cycle it, send an ATA reset, read the MBR and following sectors. Look out for the NIC "option rom" persistence module, too - you may be well-advised to do it from something really exotic that doesn't run x86, just in case! (Independent hackers are running (µ)Linux on hard disks now, so it's not surprising a huge agency able to spend billions of dollars of tax money funding contractors on tiny pieces of this project got something of a head start!) Not sure of a good way to detect it in software, but it's not perfect, so it probably can be redpilled somehow.

Watch for "CD-ROM"s that unexpectedly have ATIPs, I guess?
Frankly, I was pretty appalled how the European countries reacted during the Snowden affair. Not just interfering with the travel of a diplomatic plane he was suspected to be on (just imagine someone did that with the Air Force One), but also keeping mum and looking the other way when he was requesting asylum after telling everyone what the US had done to their citizens (and governments).

That was the saddest display of spinelessness I've ever seen, to be honest. I never felt that ashamed of my country and the EU.

The excuses about him having to be on German soil to request asylum were especially infuriating. Considering the government's reaction thus far, it is painfully obvious Germany would receive and grant an extradition request faster than you can see "Volkssouveränität".
HTTP Strict Transport Security Comes to Internet Explorer
> You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding.

True, but that's not the only job that will be in high demand in this here "software revolution", nor is programming the best comparison to factory workers in the first place.

In the short term at least, I figure we'll see high demand for help desk and field repair technicians - two realms that are ultimately necessary for software to revolutionize anything. Eventually, the global population will likely become increasingly technologically-literate and be less dependent on human interaction in order to request support; should this occur, there will then be a shift of employment away from help desk, but I expect field repair technicians will continue to be in high demand for a very long time.

That is, until sufficiently-advanced synthetic intelligences become reality, but at that point we're all screwed, so it's kind of a moot point worrying about that :)
This malware isn't needed to infect every individual machine. This is just another tool in the long list of tools that the NSA has. Compromise the CA's and a few other key infrastructure machines, and now all our communications are laid as bare as plaintext. The fact that I'm not interesting enough for the NSA to target me individually does not mean that my communications are secure.
Corenominal was somewhat wrong, however. For people like not-a-hacker, they tried and realized that all the customization that corenominal went through is more than they are willing to learn. It takes a LOT of time if you are a total end-user. Crunchbang has different types of users. No small portion of its users fall under "novice who wants an efficient, simple, but not Puppy Linux-puritanical distro."