skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the "Security" page:

> Urls are ephemeral, they are NOT stored anywhere (neither your secrets). The content you share lives encrypted in the URL.

> The decrypted content can ONLY be accessed by the people that you shared shared the data with by means of login and email verification (as opposed to, let's say, Dropbox links which can be accessed by anyone who has the link).

(note: "shared shared" is present in the original. I hope that gets fixed)

> Secrets are signed with HMAC SHA256 and encrypted with AES 256 CTR using keys that live on the Sharelock server

So it seems that the server holds the keys, and doles them out to users that prove their identity. And the URL holds the secret. So we're pretty much taking it on faith that the server never logs the URL anywhere (not just in the actual backend, but in access logs for any middleware or load balancers or anything else).

As for authentication, the animated slideshow on the front of the site says the user has to login with a Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Twitter account (I assume that secrets shared with twitter handles must use the Twitter login, but for emails it presumably uses any of them).

I'm a bit concerned about the identity verification angle. If someone manages to compromise any of those 4 accounts, then that means they can then decrypt any URLs shared with that user (if they manage to get at the URL). Twitter accounts being compromised is not that uncommon. And it would be especially bad if the sharelock URLs are then sent via Twitter (say, Twitter DMs) to that user, because then the attacker has both the URL and the keys. Or perhaps the user doesn't even realize they have an old Microsoft account, one with a pathetically weak password, and the attacker breaks into that.

In fact, that may very well apply to me (I don't use anything that requires a Microsoft login, but I did once have a (rarely-used) Windows Live login, and if Microsoft converted those into whatever their current authentication setup is, then I probably have an account with a terribly weak password).
> Soylent is made for easy, cheap nutrition.

I'd add balanced, certainly more so than fast food and microwave meals.
Normally people grow out of doing stupid stunts to "stick it to the man".
Micro-Apartments, Tiny Homes Prefabricated in Brooklyn
That may turn out to be interesting.

The business model of this machine (well, aside from the advocacy/self-promotion angle others describe) is that one person buys this, then allows others to use it to finish their "80% receivers". (And then they do a hell of a lot more work to turn it into a safe, functioning gun, but that's assembly, not machining, a lot more people are good (enough) at the former than the latter.)
In the long term, this is always a possibility. Which is why for the future survival of our species, we must venture outside our solar system. Likely even outside our stellar neighborhood.
In my experience, PR and third party validation will build a brand, not advertising.

I do agree that the person who wins the perception of being first in peoples minds will win the branding battle...but I do not agree that the second place competitors won't build strong, viable companies.

In fact, there are many examples of big brands being overtaken by smart positioning.

Avis claimed, "we are number two so we try harder." to overtake hertz.
Enterprise overtook avis by differentiating itself with a different distribution channel (central biz district instead of airports)

IF you aren't the first mover, you need to position yourself opposite the first mover and you will gain market share. This doesnt mean you shouldn't try. It means you should be smart about how people perceive your brand and your competitors.
For me, this is not just a few minute dish with no side effects. It's also remembering to have ingredients on hand, making sure I actually use those ingredients before they go bad, dealing with kitchen clutter, etc..... Hoping I don't get bored of it in a week and spend hours on the internet looking for more quick breakfast recipes, especially ones with similar ingredients but different tastes. (There was that time I made 100+ breakfast burritos and froze them all. I ended up tossing the last 20, because the thought of eating them was just not acceptable.)

On the other hand, when I do manage to make breakfast, I feel like a million bucks!
What an excellent post! I don't agree with every point, but this is thoughtful, clearly articulated, and the thought process reminds me of PG's best writing.
> Our economies are highly tuned up for the climate of the past 100 years, which was unusually stable. We should be aware that the kind of forward planning our parent's and grandparent's generations did based on the assumption of climate stability is not likely to be viable in future as the climate returns to its state of natural volatility, almost certainly helped along by anthropogenic contributions.

Nicely put.

To be honest, when I'm having these conversations I don't go near the whole debate of global warming / we did it / co2 / etc.

I think its simply important to acknowledge the climate is changing, and we need to get with the program. Why it's changing is a whole other thing for another day.
Glaciers get winter snow too, though :)
The same law they use to define a "finished" receiver as a controlled item. My guess (I am neither a law enforcement officer nor a lawyer) is that it would be part of http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=70394195a3edf623eba... given that covers most transportation.

That said, my father maintained a federal firearms license for 30+ years in order to be able to send and receive guns that he had engraved. In his dealings with the ATF he noted you could agree with them or take them to court but there really wasn't an option for suggesting directly they didn't have the right to do what ever it was they were doing.

I expect that should the ATF decide that these things should not be allowed to be transported, they will do so under some rationale based on Title 27. Whether or not it is legal for them to do so, is something the courts would have to litigate, and something which neither FedEx nor UPS would be likely to do (DD could as they would have standing as the party being harmed).

In the Ars coverage (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/fedex-wont-ship-t...) the ATF was quoted as saying:

As a way to get around that law, manufacturers can make a product that isn’t technically a gun, but gets as close to the line as possible. The Ghost Gunner CNC mill requires that the buyer provide their own semi-finished lower, which is sometimes dubbed an "80 percent lower."

"The term 80 percent receiver comes from the seller, that’s not a term that we use," a spokesman from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) told Ars last year.

"That’s a term from the seller or creator of the device that it’s 80 percent of a finished receiver, therefore it is legal. That’s not a determination we make."

In short, in the ATF’s view, either something is a firearm or it isn’t—and if it isn’t, it can be sold without restriction.

But in January 2015, the agency released ATF Rule 2015-1 and clarified that a gunsmith or machine shop cannot use its tool to refine an 80 percent to make it a suitable firearm, but the ruling does not affect CNCs owned by individuals.

"Nothing in this ruling affects the ability of individuals to make their own firearms for personal use, as allowed by law," Ginger Colbrun, an ATF spokeswoman, told Ars by e-mail on Tuesday.
Booking.com is a great site. Perl may be the implementation language but the design and process implemented could be done in any of a number of different languages. It's the design that makes the site outstanding, not that it uses a particular language.
Wouldn't want one of them to go stale.
well written and makes good points
Indeed, at least I've added a fuse and Schottky diodes to protect the PC but I'd love some advises on how to be sure people won't fry their USB controllers :)
I also got rid of Corporate OS in my laptop and phone, what about on layer down: the hardware. And one level up: the apps; specially Internet apps like your email, cloud storage, etc. Most importantly: what about social networks and IM?
Take a screenshot and zoom in on text, chances are that you will see lots of subtly colored pixels around it.
My argument is that it will take at least 2 years for any brand to lock you out. This post assumes that the moment the press knows about a market, it's too late.
Plus, even if you are late to the game, you can position yourself opposite the market leader and overtake them.
It's downvoted because it's a troll comment that doesn't further the discussion at all. It's irrelevant.

I use Android because it let's me have defaults. See? Irrelevant statement.

Everyone has different needs, just drop it.
Lenovo website HACKED
Is there a chance this paper will be available as PDF? I' finding it difficult to read the readcube version. :-(
This is vigilante justice. No authority held Lenovo accountable for their blatant and repulsive disrespect for their customers privacy, so someone else did.

Vigilante justice is bad, but lack of accountability for corporations when they pull off stunts like this is far far worse.
srcco uses srclib to link references to their definitions and to remove the comments from the code view. I only added comment offsets to srclib-go, so srcco only works with Go for now, but I want to add them to the other srclib toolchains too. I'll be hacking on that this week, and if you're interested in contributing to srcco or a srclib toolchain, ping me! samer@sourcegraph.com
For me (a DIY user, not official mostly), it's entirely this. I am apparently so bad at making food reliably, that i would skip meals - heavily. Skip, and eat poorly when i did actually eat.

I like food quite a bit, but i just don't cook often enough or well enough to eat healthy and regularly. So, i found a solution that works really well for me.

Of course, if i had lots of money and a personal cook, i wouldn't drink soylent. I would gladly eat normal food, all the time and on time.
Well, firstly, we should define what "sigma" means. Most people interpret it as it relates to the Normal Distribution.

In that case, a +10 sigma event will occur with probability 4.26361e-81. Each year consists of about 3.1536e+22 femtoseconds, which are 1e-6 the length of a nanosecond, which is the smallest unit of time I've ever heard mentioned in Finance. So, even on that time scale, and with millions of derivatives and securities, I'm not seeing much possibility for a 10 sigma event.
I thought that they wrote the BASIC interpreter using the machines in Harvard's computer lab.
IIRC, Carl Sagan's Cosmos has a scene of this event from the monks' perspective.
Bezel: Apple Watch Tool for Visualizing Your App
You just came up with one version of the issue. What if your hypothetical AI waits until it's smarter than humans before it 'starts doing something.'
Yep, you got it right. Re: holding the keys, response below. The encryption keys are on the server. We encourage you to deploy your own sharelock instance. We made that super easy with Herok. There is no storage, just a node app. And then you can configure the apps to use that Sharelock instance. More about it: https://github.com/auth0/sharelock#host-your-own-sharelock-s...
What I have tried to convey, perhaps not successfully, is that as a king he had to think strategically about his kingdom's interests, not about theological disputes. That is why even in those times it was understood that the king, as a worldly power, was separate from the church's power. By emphasising that separation, regardless the finer points of catechisms, he strengthened himself and his country.

OK, you may argue as to whether this was his explicit intention but it undoubtedly was the effect.
It is interesting how they are using various biological models to develop their own model. They gave their model a reward system and a memory. It will be interesting to see how far deep Q-networks can be extended and at what point they hit the wall of diminishing returns.

|Nevertheless, games demanding more temporally extended planning strategies still constitute a major challenge for all existing agents including DQN.

|Notably, the succesfsful integration of reinforcement learning with deep network architectures was critically dependent on our incorporation of a replay algorithm involving the storage and representations of recently experienced transitions.

I am not for sure what data the replay algorithm has access to, but I wonder what happens if you extend the amount of data it has. This might be the brick wall this algorithm hits of diminishing returns.

It would be interesting to hear what the authors think could help help improve how their model deals with temporally extended planning strategies.

As someone who grew up on Atari, Nintendo and Sony this is pretty cool work.
"The biggest issue with exceptions like this is that first-time founders often jump into a saturated market and think "we can do better -- look at all the counterexamples", but they end up losing the overwhelming majority of the time."

I'd be curious to find data to back up that assertion - I've personally seen way more people/companies fail trying to skate to where the puck is going to be vs. just going after businesses where there are already existing solutions. But again, this is anecdotal data.

The best example I have of this is Google. Search was done and owned by a handful of players - they innovated and won. But to your point about definitions - did they win on that, or win on creating Adwords (which they were also not the first mover on)?

Perhaps it comes down to this: entering a market where there are low switching costs means that you can enter late with a significantly better product - but it has to be 4x better (that's my rule). Meaning the product has to be 4x better than the existing solution.

If, however, you're entering a market with high switching costs, then the benefit probably has to be great than 4x - maybe 8x. As an example - look at all the people trying to get people to switch off of Salesforce.com. I don't know anyone that likes this product - but no one can switch because the costs are too high across the board - organizationally, data-wise, software - while the resulting CRM might be marginally better. That means that startups going after that can get traction with people who don't have a CRM, but not with existing CRM customers - and thus bang their head against the wall/fail.
The code is online if you want to play with it.
https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/

If you're interested, one of the main authors (David Silver) teaches a very good and intuitive introductory class on reinforcement learning at UCL:
http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.silver/web/Teaching.html
I've used it mainly on project-specific things, for example reaching out to musicians, indie labels, and festivals about a music-related service. Or reaching out to other developers/startups.

It helps to follow and get to know them a bit first, too. On Twitter, you can engaging in mini conversations with just about anyone, and once you're familiar with someone you can tweet at or DM them without coming off like a cold-call. Basically, just be yourself and it works wonders.

That said, I still tend to shy away from a lot of online interactions (just look at my stunted comment history on here for example ;). Yet when I do put myself out there, I tend to be surprised at the positive response.
Almost all CS PhD's I know, (mostly all professors), are pretty bad at actual programming, and very skilled in theoretical aspects of computer science.
Unlimited small arms proliferation? A great way to add to the destruction of everywhere between Nagorno-Karabakh, Lagos and Nairobi.
yes, it is seen as a standard CDC device so you can use donglePi from a Raspberry Pi.
Hardly need "private bootleg" footage to discover this reality. Pat Helland (at the time, working at Amazon) wrote a paper about it maybe 10 years ago.

http://adrianmarriott.net/logosroot/papers/LifeBeyondTxns.pd...
The abysmal Smartwatch market
How much -profit- should they be making?
White House Doesn't Want You to Know the TPP's Effects on U.S. Copyright Laws
working in telco, that sounds accurate :D
nice one !!
Regarding the access logs angle, the image shown on the front page shows a URL that starts with "https://sharelock.io/1/cuwcRv64IR5ivYP...". Presumably that garbage text is the start of the secret.

It would probably be a really good idea to move the secret into the fragment of the URL instead. Fragments aren't sent to servers, so they can't possibly show up in access logs. But the client can still access the fragment, and since the decryption presumably happens client-side, there's no reason for the server to ever even see the secret.
|> This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

|We've created a universal learning algorithm that can take a multitude of inputs and consistently respond correctly without having to re-define the model for each game or problem.

Further along in the article, it turns out it is actually a subset of games which don't involve long term planning strategies.
You are still reading a very Whiggish, anachronistic view of history into what happened. With a corresponding value judgement that Catholic England wasn't worthy of survival, and that the great achievements of the Glorious Revolution and parliamentary democracy were a given at the time of the break with Rome.
Of course LYSE (http://learnyousomeerlang.com/) and then "OTP in Action" after you know the basics. But!

There are at least two languages that work on Erlang VM and offer alternative syntax. There's Lisp Flavoured Erlang (http://lfe.io/) and Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/). Elixir, in addition to syntax, improves on some aspects of Erlang which make newcomers uncomfortable, adds more powerful metaprogramming utilities and adds modern features like browsing the docs from REPL. I found "Introducing Elixir" (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030584.do) rather good as a starting point and you can do quite a lot with it. But, in the end, you have to at least know how to read Erlang docs, because Elixir won't (and doesn't even try to) cover all of Erlang libraries with friendly wrappers.

Personally I'm used to Erlang syntax, which is small and consistent and I like the "explicit is the only way, no implicit things ever" language philosophy of Erlang, but Elixir is a fine language to learn and use. There's a web framework called Phoenix which despite being very young is already better (subjectively) than pure Erlang frameworks.

I used Erlang twice professionally: for writing a kind of reverse HTTP proxy with caching and for writing a backend for web app using WebSockets. It performed very, very well and was quite pleasant to write. Both things are running non-stop for over a year now and never crashed and were not restarted even once, despite being changed significantly in the meantime (that's just an anecdote, of course).

Erlang is a bit odd and has much smaller community than Python. Lack of libraries may be a problem. I'd never use Erlang for something I'd use Django. I would consider using it for things I'd otherwise use Flask, but probably wouldn't chose it in the end. But it's my "go to" tool for situations where I'd use Twisted/Tornado or gevent now.
Arxiv paper, with more relevant (albeit highly specialized) information than Nature's abstract:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.2689.pdf
I saw that, but it seems the whole point of this thing is to make it easy to share secrets, and everybody hosting their own instance is about as far from "easy" as I can think of. Some people will surely do it, but the number of people who will is going to be extremely low.
I like the basic idea of it, but I think their implementations were too soon. We aren't too far off now from where the only way high-end phone CPUs are behind low-end laptop CPUs is power consumption and heat dissipation.

Maybe in another 5 years, it'll only be a mobile CPU because the power consumption is ramped so far down. Then you could plug in a big cable and get enough power to run full speed, plus your gigabit connection, massive drives, multiple monitors, mouse, keyboard, etc. Heat might be a tougher one to solve though.

Or maybe we'll stick to syncing the data over the cloud instead and keeping the two platforms separate.
> My area is honestly pretty lacking in a good developer scene in general

Definitely, definitely leave then. There's exactly zero point in sticking around somewhere that won't support you in your desired career.
Would secure-wiping the phone if involved in a legal discovery process be considered destruction of evidence?

Yes, if it's not part of a routine process.
The jet stream, being chaotic, can be affected by anything.

That said, the locations of the Hadley cells changes depending on how much heat is stored in the system, and adjustments to this is part of the whole El Niño, La Niña cycle. As you increase the rate of energy storage, this results in various chaotic changes, that can increase extreme events.

But the real problem with the rarity of the event is that you arrive at that figure by a probability model assuming independent storms, probably with a Poisson model for frequency. However storms are not actually independent events. If you have a stable pattern that results in many storms following the same track to Boston, the odds of an extreme event are way higher than the naive probability model would have suggested.
Your objection is hypothetical/abstract and when you ground it in specific use cases there are plenty of patterns that emerge addressing how to deal with the inconsistent state. For example, just-in-time/read reconciliation, batch remediation, actually making some subset of actions transactional/consistent and suffering lower availability there, and so on and so forth.
While it's not an exact parallel, core collapse supernovas unleash large amounts of neutrinos. These are detectable on Earth even before the light from the supernova explosion reaches us. This was the case with SN 1987a, where about 2-3 hours before the visible light reached Earth, neutrinos from the event were detected [0].

In the intervening years, we've actually build a "network" of neutrino observatories that cooperate and share event data, called SNEWS (SuperNova Early Warning System) [1], that will (hopefully) give us a little warning before the next major supernova event.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A#Neutrino_emissions

[1] http://snews.bnl.gov/
Yep. Although not related to this kit specifically, a friend of mine built a energy meter much like a kill-a-watt using a raspberry pi.

It plugged into 120 vac on one side, and usb to computer on the other side. He didn't end up doing enough to isolate the 120 vac side from the usb side and fried his computer. It was pretty impressive damage as it managed to fry the motherboard, CPU and memory.
It's awesome that you made it all open source. You could probably spin up some kickstarter since making them in bulk would be cheaper (plus you get something for all the work you've done). I'd be happy to get one.
Sort of. This appears to be an Atmel ARM board with the pins broken out in a Pi-compatible way. I imagine you could reprogram this to act as an I/O expander, but at that point, you're probably better off just getting a dedicated GPIO expander.