skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a deobfuscated version of that:

http://pastebin.com/TwP9bAc4

This is a pretty common malspam campaign that's been seen for the past few months.

No exploits, it just requires a Windows user to save and run it. (Depending on OS version, there will be at least a few security prompts to get through in order to run local JScript.)
When I say price gouging, i mean the economic definition, which is a very very specific thing:
IE when a coercive monopoly raise prices to levels that wouldn't exist if there was competition.

This does not decrease the supply of housing, because it's a monopoly, they are doing it because they can, not because supply is low.
I lived in the South (Santa Catarina) from 2003~2011. I don't know what the situation has been since, but while I lived there the living standard of people in the Southern states went up by a lot. Working class families suddenly had access to buying cars, flying both internally and abroad, and a bunch of other changes. Most of them were driven by the incredible industrial growth at the time, but the supposedly incompetent government of Lula did a great job of keeping the country's economy under control while countries like Argentina (where I grew up) went through the typical boom/bust cycle of fast-growing economies.

So yeah, this sounds to me like the grumblings of the typical political discontents who would credit Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the PSDB for anything good that happened in the country, even after 8 years of PT presidency.
Top Developer Hiring Trends
I had a recruiter turn me down for a job interview as I didn't have experience with 'Marcos' on my CV. I think he meant Macros, but I was too busy laughing to find out.
Shameless plug: http://michal.io/machine-learning-resources/
Exploring Genetic Variation with Google Genomics and Tute
> AWS is always going to include a premium because they take care of the DevOps portion of your infrastructure.

But wouldn't that apply also to SoftLayer?
If this were actually doing as the title suggests, it would demolish the possibility for any personal DIY projects that require heavy equipment/materials. Indeed, bulk home goods and appliance sales companies should be up in arms.

Luckily, they're just trying to make it possible to get around without cars, not illegal to use cars, which is likely to dramatically increase the possibility for lightweight cooperative social interactions.
Oh, I know what you're talking about. We too had some instances (actually, a lot of those) that would run for a year with no issues. The problems started around the time you tried to push EC2 instances beyond an "idle, handling some requests just to keep from falling asleep" state. Pushing IO (even with provisioned IOPS) caused random IO stalls, pushing CPU caused REALLY uneven performance, etc.

And the only solution provided by EC2 support was always to buy more instances to keep them cold and happy. The problems with that approach (just to name a few): the cost (for a young startup burning money on idle infrastructure like that is not very wise IMO) and the fact, that the time to design, develop and deploy scale-out approach for each of your backend services is the time you could have spent trying to build your product (again, startup-specific; you'll have to think about across-the-board 100% scalability at some point).
It was a the worst in a few decades.
High quality GIF with FFmpeg
The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations [1] made age discrimination illegal beginning in 2006. Before that it was not illegal. The 2010 act, among other things, extended protection for age discrimination to other people such as prospective employees.

I'm British, and the fact that we only got around to this in 2006 seems to me to be fairly shameful.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Equality_(Age)_Regul...
Do you know there is a field studying general artificial intelligence? They have a conference[1], journal[2], and a slew of competing architectures.

What you've basically described is that mainstream "AI" is actually quite divorced from what the public thinks of as "AI" -- something matching or improving upon human-level intelligence. Still, there are those still working on original grand dream of artificial intelligence.

[1] http://agi-conference.org/
[2] http://www.agi-society.org/journal/
Believing PHP has a higher chance of being crackable is like the myth that Windows is more vulnerable than OSX and Linux.
I have found Gitblit Go (http://gitblit.com) to be the easiest to setup and maintain (upgrading is just unzipping).

It's dead simple, and I haven't had any issues in almost two years (though my needs are small, just supporting a small team with very low volume).
The trouble I have with this article is that it seeks to remove any personal responsibility from the person it claims is the "target" and victim of the sting. Any bad decisions made by Osmakac are written off as having been coached, or a result of his being "Schizo-affective"[0].

The article title claims the FBI "created a terrorist", but then presents these things as factual:

- He travelled to Saudi Arabia to get holy water,
but later claimed he actually wanted to end up
in Iraq or Afghanistan to fight American troops.

- He argued with Dabus (the Palestinian shop owner)
that Islam and democracy were incompatible.

- He physically attacked the street preachers
outside the Lady Gaga concert.

...all of which happened before the FBI got involved. Furthermore, the FBI only got involved because Dabus, the shop owner who Dennison had suggested he meet, turned Osmakac in. And why did Dabus do that? Because he felt that:

...he was doing his civic duty in reporting Osmakac
and the young man’s interest in acquiring weapons...

As terrible as the Patriot act is, this all sounds like the government got this one right. In particular, the article doesn't show that Osmakac would have behaved any differently if instead of being handled by the government, he had found an actual small arms dealer and weaseled some guy into giving him $300.

And personally, I think we jump too quickly to the "he's just crazy" defense [1]. I don't want to live in a world where acting out on a dream you had absolves you of personal responsibility for your actions in the real world, which is apparently what The Intercept wants to believe.

[0] http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizoaffectiv...

[1] I'm not a psychiatrist, but I play one on The Internet

[edit: formatting]
Google Computer Science Capacity Awards
Semaphores are surprisingly versatile
This is a great list, and I've added it to my evernote database for future reference, thanks!

On a slightly different note, has anyone else noticed that people have gone back to making bookmark pages again? It used to be that everyone did that, and then Google came along and well you didn't need a bookmark page because you could just search for what you were looking for and find it? But now people are going back to bookmark pages.
We made BlippyBot as hack project to make our Tweets more fun. It's really simple to use. Mention the bot (@blippybot) and a query term (excited) in your tweet. BlippyBot posts a relevant GIF. Hilarity ensues! :)

You can try it out without even connecting your Twitter account, but it works best when you're connected so that the GIF flows naturally from you in the conversation.
No! I know I mentioned this just yesterday - in the thread in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207824 - but this is yet another new attack. And they're going to keep coming, and there are passive attacks…

Like I said yesterday, if you're using RC4, stop now, and go back and consider what may have been compromised by attackers recording ciphertexts and cracking them when it became practical.
>>> in California, a black person is 10 times more likely to serve prison time for a marijuana arrest than a non-black offender. And across the US, black offenders are 3.7 times more likely than white offenders to be arrested for possession.

While these numbers are prtty shocking, when you look at WHY this is happening, it's pretty obvious why the numbers are so skewed.

Generally speaking cops tend to focus on high crime areas, which tend to be where low income, minority residents live. As such, the odds you're going to stop someone who's black and poor who just happens to have some weed on them grows exponentially.

Add in other issues like COMSTAT tracking and making police departments more accountable for their the cost of their resources to tax payers. They also have to prove they are indeed lowering crime means they're almost forced to arrest and convict low level offenders to prove they're doing their jobs. This then makes departments institute arrest quotas, and questionable tactics like stop-and-frisk.

The last point is also the federal government and their grants they give to high performing departments. If you're department is on the dole for federal money, you think they're going to do anything which would jeopardize that? The very nature of taking federal money makes them do anything to make it look like the tax payers money is doing some good.

All of these make the low-income minorities very susceptible to being arrested and then convicted by a system which is very much stacked against them.
> i think in most cases it's harmful to give one single
> iota of a fuck about whatever it is you do for work
> unless you work for yourself. 40 hours of every week
> of your life, at a minimum, is being used to further
> someone else's goals, and you have no choice in this
> because you have to survive.

I agree with your sentiment for the most part. For many (most?) jobs this is true.

But software development feels like a potential exception to me.

Being passionate about your boring-corporate-CRUD-coding job can do more than further your corporate bosses' goals. It can be self-investment as well. By improving your own craft by "passionately" coding for your corporate masters you can put yourself in a position to command a better salary, get a job you actually like, start your own business, etc.

Of course it's very very very possible to passionately... slave away for somebody else as a coder without furthering any of your own goals.
Leaving me with an entire annual savings of $24 over Github.

I should probably set up SSL, backups, patch it occasionally, etc., which is going to pretty quickly eat that up.
This has little to do with rent control; It's all about development costs. New units get built with mortgage rates that are far above the standard rental rates. Buyers can't rent units significantly below their cost so they hit the market at the high rate. These units don't get rented, so they stay listed prominently.

Meanwhile, a tenant leaves an old building and the landlord starts looking at existing rental rates. What do you know, that one-bedroom I was renting for $1500 two years ago now goes for $3500. I guess I'll up the rate! It's not as nice as the new unit, but at least it's not stuck in BFE China Basin (people will pay a premium to be near food / park / Muni).

That's how rent rates got so high: development costs > listing rates > matching rates. Period.
> It is an ambitious idea, but city officials obviously feel that the personal motorcar does not fulfill a function that walking, biking and taking public transport cannot.

Except fucking over the people who actually live there for the benefit of people who exist there transiently.
"Interestingly, the idea that it's your property and you can do what you want with it was often the justification not to rent to people of color, the disabled, and other disadvantaged groups."

Rent, maybe.
Sell, no, since that would be a restraint on alienation :)

"Governments see benefits in keeping housing affordable. Do you like having restaurants with waiters, stores with clerks, streets that are swept, trash collected, and so on? then those people need places to live too."

Sorry, but I don't see how this problem doesn't solve itself without any intervention.

If none of these people can afford to live in your area, and they aren't getting paid enough to commute, they'll go elsewhere where they can.

In turn, your area will start to suck, so you'll either pay them enough to commute, etc.
Stalk what's happening at home with the Camio app
So's NULL, but that doesn't mean you should use it.
With no plan to use them, they suffer no economic harm if I remove it then right? :-) Or what if we put opaque camera lens stickers over them?
in which scenarios it makes economical sense to use AWS compared to real hardware?

There's three types of workloads that make sense to run on EC2:

a) Extremely spiky/seasonal loads (batch jobs, event/campaign traffic)

b) Loads that can be structured as to run entirely from spot-instances (worker-pools)

c) Loads so small that the markup versus rented/dedicated hardware just doesn't matter
When you total up the amount of land that we dedicate to cars, it's absolutely staggering. I read a stat a while back (can't find it right now), that something like 33% of the land area of Seattle is paved vehicle surface. I'm sure Seattle isn't more paved-over than most other cities. Then, when you realize how this staggering amount of land is used to separate living, working, and other activity space, you begin to feel that we're living in little islands surrounded by fast-moving rivers of lethal steel--lethal steel that results in toxic gas and water runoff that sickens the remaining population that isn't directly killed at a rate of tens-of-thousands per year.

Gosh I hope we can figure this out in my lifetime.
Clickbait to the max.

"The city’s proposed Grünes Netz, or “Green Network” will create pedestrian and cycle paths to connect the city’s existing, substantial green spaces, and provide safe, car-free commuter routes for all residents."

That is awesome, but it has nothing to do with banning vehicles.
I've seen and fought issues with hanging and/or stalling EC2 instances, and the decision was made to move to physical hardware - it was one of those tradeoff choices you have to make about paying N dollars to throw money at hardware vs. M dollars at person-hours to investigate.

It's definitely kicking the can down the road (eventually you have to build such that failing infrastructure is transparent to your eng team), but I still think it was the right decision at the time. YMMV obviously. :)
I'm generally a fan of anything to remove cars from the city center, it is really an improvement and transitions us from the inefficiency of single-occupant transportation to group movements. As you point out, it also introduces logistical complexities for downtown residents, but when everybody is in the same situation it is perhaps easier to build comprehensive solutions.
Despite my initial excitement at seeing a senator advocate for some patent reform a review of Senator Hatch's history left me less excited. He has supported copyright extension, and advocated for COICA. It seems he only cares about intellectual property abuse when it prevents people from making money.
That's awesome! What kind of work did you have to do? What did you enjoy what not?
Having listened to almost all the StackOverflow -> StackExchange podcasts, the idea was to cover both obvious questions (that was more Spolsky [1]) and long-tail questions where Spolsky and Atwood were both in agreement.

Both were in agreement about the horror of forum threads. One of the direct targets however was ExpertSexChange's pseudo-pay wall. The big idea behind SO was reducing friction for finding answers to programming questions. Today, "What is REST?" would probably be killed because it is too broad for StackOverflow and better answered on WikiPedia.

[1]: See Spolsky's famous How do I move the turtle in Logo: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the...
Rhodonea Curve (2012)
This is a no-brainer if you've ever done anything at scale.
The explanation is rather simple - hardware is always "on the premise", yours or Amazon's. Someone needs to swap drives, motherboards, man the networking gear, run cables, etc. Amazon doesn't really get a break on the hardware cost because 10,000 servers do not cost less per server than 100 servers (in fact they cost more as the volume goes up if you need them to be identical). When it comes to labor cost - if you have enough hardware for at least one full time datacenter tech, you're in the same boat as Amazon.

So you're paying Amazon to do the same work you would do otherwise - only you're subject to their rules and procedures and Amazon being a profitable business needs to mark their services up.
Meanwhile, I bought an original iPad, and a first gen iPod Touch that my kids are still happily using today. My 19 year old daughter learned (via Youtube) how to replace iPod/iPad screens and has a small side business going...
San Francisco's rent control, at least, doesn't apply to building built after rent control was passed. [1] I believe that's a deliberate attempt to solve for the scarcity concern.

[1] http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=1036
We didn't seem to have any trouble banishing people from the streets, so I hardly see the problem.
Real hardware has always generally been cheaper.

AWS is a success because there are no upfront costs, it lets you scale up very quickly, and you don't need in-house hardware expertise to maintain your machines. People are willing to pay a premium for these advantages.
What? The plan provides car-free routes between desitnations, how does that fuck anyone over?
Can you explain? I live in the middle of a city and have no car, and would feel delighted, not fucked over, if cars were banned (or made to pay extremely steep usage fees) in the city center.
I feel the same, but I think the short form is a great feature. In fact, this format is inspiring me to start my own frequently published podcast (feels like something I can do, vs the longer formats)
This is great. Companies with a lot of cash who are concerned about their brand image such as Comcast and Scientology will be snapping these up.
But the fear and thoughts should instead be directed to how one can solve the economical an social challenges that arise when AI removes a lot of jobs. That is the issue here, not some Skynet-thingy destroying humanity.
Jeremy Parish has a great video retrospective of Adventure, which goes more in-depth into its historical significance and influence. It also helps to see the game in motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxDXie_2wck
Ok, we changed the title from "Google Search app silently logs Firefox address bar searches".
So let's go simple here:

Just because i've lived somewhere, means i get to live there as long as i want?
So once someone's got theirs, nobody else gets a chance?

As I mentioned in another thread, i'm 100% not a fan of people having some magical right to continue to live somewhere just because they've lived in that place, or their parents have lived in that place, a while.

It's essentially "blood right", and I emphatically believe it's not a great way to decide who gets to live where.

Not that i'm a fan of just kicking people around continuously, mind you, but things that end up doing the above (like endless rent control), are not societal good to me.
Will Hebrew also be supported? With vowel points?

I could simulate such letters with icons but I wonder if they look acceptable on different devices (iOS, kindle etc.)
In the "enterprise", my experience is that incentives/expertise fight hard against successful integrations of 'best of breed' products. In large organizations, features for developers are (at least minor) headaches for the build team, so they don't get rolled out.

Github has raised the bar on what to expect from an integrated SCM, and others have followed suit, so I don't much value added by specialist vendors. I kind of think of it like car radios; you used to have to replace the factory system with a third party product, now almost no one does. The deck that comes with the car is plenty good enough, plus it has the integration with the steering wheel, etc.
Of course it does. Their intention is to convert the roads to those paths, which is something they can't possibly do while still supporting cars.
Yes, as everybody knows, web hosting is free.
I still think equation numbers on the left is a mistake. Ideally, for smaller screens it would split across multiple lines. Or, it could choose the positioning based on screen size.

For me, MathJax can't render my equations. I use some techniques to get a vector with an arrow on the bottom. Two commands I used all throughout my thesis are:

\def \rV#1{\hbox{$#1$\kern-0.38em\lower0.85em\hbox{$\vec{}\,$}}\,}

and

\def \Vec#1{\hbox{$#1$\kern-1.0em\lower0.4em\hbox{${\scriptstyle \rightarrow }$}}}

These won't work in MathJax (understandably).
The price wasn't far below anything. The price has historically been average, if not above above average. Those problems persist because "bad landlord".

The only difference now is the skyrocketing rates in SF due to dot com 2.0 immigration. The same thing happened back in 1999-2000. EVERYONE had to be in SF for the boom back them, so rates skyrocketed. When the bubble burst, rents leveled off while the rest of the country eventually (almost) caught up.

Plus there's the "Google / Facebook" stipend. Google & Facebook were having a hard time hiring because employees couldn't find a place to live. Google / FB started offering $1k / mo above asked monthly rates to help employees get units quick. That also helped bump up even the worst apartments up to unrealistic levels.
Start and Run Your Own Profitable Business in South Africa
I have a slightly more nuanced point of view. I pretty much write OCaml code for a living, and rarely use objects, but that's because they are rarely useful (as a general concept, nothing to do with OCaml).

To give a concrete example of a program where I happened to use objects for the first time in ages[1], most of the program works by defining a set of types[2], and then using simple functions to work on those types. The program is essentially: transform the input structure to another structure to another structure. All the structures are publicly defined making it really easy to understand the program and debug when things go wrong. The flow of execution is simple and obvious, and the compiler picks up possible errors in that flow because of the strong typing.

But there happened to be one place that I wanted the ability to hide data + use implicit variant code alongside that data, and then I switched over to using objects[3]. It's a narrow use case and I've written a lot of code without ever needing that.

Of course in OOP languages you essentially have to use objects to get any work done, and so people go crazy and it's impossible to follow the flow of execution.

[1] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/tree/master/v2v

[2] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/v2v/typ...

[3] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/v2v/typ...
Seriously! It's crazy.

We live in such an auto centric society. I often think, why do we have the parking lot in shopping centers go all the way up to the front door (so you have to cross in the path of cars to enter the building)?

Why don't the aisles go directly up to a big sidewalk/walking area in front of the building and that's it? You could have turnarounds every few for picking people up and something dedicated for emergency vehicles, but it's crazy that you have to cross in front of cars to enter the building, when there's 0 reason for those cars to drive right in front of the building!
Why would 10,000 servers cost more than 100 servers? It seems like if you are buying all of your parts in bulk they are going to be cheaper. I'm pretty sure Intel's pricing on CPUs are cheaper by the tray than individually.

I know at least when I've bought 20-30 servers at a time, I was able to get a lower cost than when I've only been buying one.
"Scandinavians traded for fancy glass objects from Egypt and Mesopotamia as early as 3,400 years ago "

And believe it or not they were doing the same thing 1100 years ago as well.