skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's simple thuggery

No, it's not, and this is where your approach and mine differ. You're trying to speak as though your audience is "people who might be encouraged to write something like this"; I'm speaking as though my audience is "potential victims who might underestimate the danger of CryptoLocker".

People, especially technically savvy people, constantly overestimate their ability to avoid problems like this. Every time there's a popular thread about malware on Reddit, there will be popular comments along the lines of, "I don't know how other peasants get infected with stuff like this, all you have to do is (not click on the wrong things online || run my favorite software || use an ad-blocker || use Linux || use MacOS || only browse the web on Wednesdays)".

That is the kind of mindset I have to regularly defeat in order to get people to take sensible precautions, like having backups, and CryptoLocker is the one piece of malware out there that I can effectively use against that mindset, because I can point to my highly technical business customers (with current enterprise-class AV and ad blockers and Chrome/Firefox and and and...) that have been hit by it, I can point to news articles like this one about governmental agencies paying the ransom after being hit by it, I can use it to scare a few over-confident people into doing the thing they should have done all along to utterly defeat CryptoLocker: get a good backup system.

Frankly, the best thing that could happen, in the long run, would be for half a dozen people on HN to go, "Oh, that thaumaturgy, he thinks CryptoLocker is cool, now I'll write a clone of it too," because, after the initial horror and pain of data loss and suffering that many people would be subjected to, suddenly backup software would be one of the most popular projects in the computer industry, instead of being the totally unsexy project that nobody really wants to bother working on, and my job would go from, "let me spend 2 hours trying to convince you to listen to reason and spend money on a mediocre backup system" to "here's the really great all-in-one backup system that you already know you need, call me if you need anything else".

Your approach doesn't convince anyone that CryptoLocker is a threat they should take seriously. My approach is consciously intended to protect people from their own bad judgement.
Nutanix hits the highs and sees off rival in trial to deliver hyper-convergence
The tag line "Get your 30 minutes free server" is extremely confusing.

Do you mean to say "Get a free server for 30 minutes"?
> ... the United States' No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which further tied schools' funding to standardized testing results, by making students your biggest problem.
> by making students your biggest problem
> students your biggest problem
> school
Open Source .NET libraries that make your life easier
Reddit, HN, GTA Online.
Man oh man, I'm convinced that people that administer this type of interview atmosphere are partially taking enjoyment in a sort-of hazing ritual - it's like they had to go through it, so now you have to as well.
No, because the 0.08% is a percentage of the _assets_. So if your return is 8.24% of assets per year and your fees are 0.08% of asserts per year, then your fees are 0.08/8.24 = 0.0097 of your returns. Or in other words 0.97% of the returns. Rounding gives you the 1%.
No you won't need a degree to get started in software development. However, for computer science don't think of the degree as just a piece of paper some employers look at, there are some key courses that help build a foundational understanding of how computers work at the lowest levels, like assembly.

This might be important if your interest is in compiler development since that deals directly with how to optimize things with the CPU, stack, etc.

Maybe you should go get a meeting setup with the person in charge of CompSci department and see if they can persuade admissions or give you advice.

The vast majority of coders are working on Information Systems and you don't need a CompSci degree for that or any special math skills. It is just what some people call "CRUD apps" but the fun part with these is really helping non-technical folks do things and be efficient. Sciency based CompSci jobs are the minority.

Side topic: why is Mathematics called "maths"? across the pond its always been "math"
yea, at least with GNU Make it is probably best to use $(shell cat tmp.ci.pid)
Solving the Closest Vector Problem in 2n Time
no more flash sales! \o/
It's not such an issue these days though - all the non-toy AWS instances have dedicated cores, sometimes dedicated processors.
What are you developing? Simpler web apps with all your heavy tests running on a remote server, sure no problem at all. Heavy duty 3D applications in C++ with large data sets and long compile times, not so much.

Basically spend some logging how much you stress your CPU and GPU during a normal day developing. If the results are "basically never rises above 5-10%" then the macbook will be fine.
I don't know if he is still selling them, but:
http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/index.html

Dave Haynie, one of Commodores hardware engineers, films the last day at the Commodore plant. And the layoff party afterwards. Hilarious, informative, and sad at the same time.
Hijab Tutorial Inpiration 2015
I'm confused too, since it could also mean "Get a free server in 30 minutes"?
4,800 commits without commit messages? Whoa.
"Hackpad has been acquired by Dropbox."

closes tab
It is not necessarily about using trigonometry, but rather a basic level of maths or English that is missing, with functional innumeracy and illiteracy.

It is multi-factoral for sure, but there is also a culture of being fine with saying "I can't do maths", and having people responding with "Yeah, I cannot do maths at all".

The exams I took had trig & literary analysis, but, then the lowest possible grade I could get was a C. The bottom set could get a D or C if they got pretty much everything in the exam right, and being sat next to someone taking those exams, I can assure you there is no trigonometry or analysis of passages in there.
Your metaphor is a little flawed. It's more like allowing a random person off the street to babysit your child then they kidnap them. You could have avoided the whole situation by not allowing some random person into your home.
Only that it doesn't support Acronis-style incremental images. So imaging takes more time and space. It also (last I checked) doesn't provide a way to automatically delete old images (but that's easy enough to script). It does do full images very quickly and reliability though, which is worth it for me. I tried for a long time to like Acronis. Even submitted several bug reports. But I had no end of problems, and even aside from the annoyance and wasted time, I don't want to trust a program with such quality control issues with my backups.
Are You Prone to Trading Impulses?
CYBERSECURITY INFORMATION SHARING ACT OF 2015 IS CYBER-SURVEILLANCE
I'm a grad student in the department this is replacing, but will be continuing on to the PhD program in EECS.

I'm really excited to see this happening, the department it was replacing needed a bit of help and it's good to see MIT doubling down on the idea that sociotechnical systems are worth studying.
I see your point, thanks for the feedback.

Although my work is mostly based on infra nowadays, i use vagrant & docker to test things locally so i think i should move my worry over to the 8 gb memory part :)
got the same message..
I don't think connectivity is much of a problem as is RAM.

And once you have just enough RAM and swapping, you realise that the biggest problem is organising the open tabs in browser.

We have just approached the state when computers can finally fully assist us. The problem is in the software. There just isn't a way to manage our shared computer memory.
Server Error

403 - Forbidden: Access is denied.
You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.

This is not a Physics problem, it's a server configuration problem.
> So, best case scenario I get market returns?

Yes. Note: This is a surprisingly accurate description of reality. Aggregate hedge fund returns are goddamn terrible.

> Then why not just invest in an index fund?

Well, you should, if you're trying to maximise your expected outcome. Of course, not everyone is trying to do that.

In particular, what if you run a pension fund which is currently underfunded, but for political reasons is claiming to be adequately funded through the expedient of assuming that future returns will exceed any reasonable expectation of market returns?

If you invest in an index fund you'll get market returns; since that's not enough this means you will miss your targets, and be unable to pay promised pensions, at which point you'll be fired. But if you give all the funds cash to a hedge fund, or engage in some crazy snowball derivative[1], then you'll probably do even worse than an index fund, be able to pay an even lower percentage of the promised pensions, and you'll be fired. Which is actually no worse for you. But you MIGHT do really well, and actually be able to pay the promised pensions. Not likely, but if it works you avoid you getting fired, and if it doesn't you were going to be fired anyhow, so why not give it a shot?

All of why is completely hypothetical. The fact that many US pensions funds are horribly underfunded using any plausible actuarial projects and are simultaneously investing heavily in exotic asset classes is just a funny coincidence.

[1]: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-02/portuguese-...
If I'm not mistaken, this is just talking about parallel construction, right?
Isn't this why you have centralised government. Every town doesn't need to do a procurement process for basic logical infrastructure. The government acquires personnel and skill sufficient to implement the infrastructure and does so in all areas vs. private companies it has to be more cost-effective as there is no need to pay out profits. With logical infrastructure there is no overhead for equipment retention and maintenance. In short why doesn't the gov offer IT support to ensure that government services have properly configured networks, backups, and such - a police department doesn't need freedom to not make backups or to have no firewall.

Private companies would still be involved in filling procurement orders for hardware needed to implement the logical infrastructure.

It's like having 10,000 offices write their own dress-code, you only need a central standard gov dress-code for office workers; individual locations could overload or enforce the code as they see fit but you reduce the workload using scale.

A police department should be more like a fast food restaurant [or at least a UK one], you come along with a pre-built infrastructure and implement it, rather like "apt-get police-department", bang there you have it cookie cutter infrastructure.
I'm holding off until the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu goes on sale -- but perhaps I shouldn't - does anyone know if it is exactly the same as the one being sold now running Android?

If so, I might get that one and install Ubuntu myself.
It's a GPU problem.

The difference between Win98 and OS X 10.10 is screen resolution, animations and virtual desktops.
From the abstract:

> While this constraint can be intuitively demonstrated with a simple illustration and is simple to prove, it has
never appeared in the literature.

Ok, I would love to see a simple illustration here :)
ErgoDox EZ: An incredible mechanical keyboard
What to do about boltons - and you will get boltons.
Which interface were you thinking they invented? the WIMP-style interface was borrowed from Xerox PARC. The MacBook was a shiny laptop. The iPod had a menu system much like other MP3 players of the time; they mainly made it a well-organized, consumer-friendly menu system with a bigger screen. The iPhone's main interface innovation I can think of was making the screen bigger; they did use a virtual keyboard, but so did the Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton of years before. The iPad, interface-wise, was basically a big iPod Touch.

Don't get me wrong; those are all very polished products, and they took a lot of technical smarts. They were much more usable to a mainstream consumer audience. But the non-Apple versions of those products were generally fine for non-consumer audiences. And Apple's marketing is masterful; I've never seen a tech company so good at generating hype.
This is great, specially as it can give some help to Qt on mobile phones.

EDIT: Just noticed that the sale is only available in the Spanish store. The German one still shows "It will be available shortly".
Given the college or hacker environment, a six-pack or 2l over the course of 18 hours isn't a lot to drink. Healthy, no, but then neither is doing a 12" pizza solo and that was pretty commonplace as well. Coffee shops didn't exist, and even if they did, it's hard to beat a quarter a can. Hacking without caffeine? Gunna take a while...
The Wacko in the Morning Show – For Sunny Goodman
The Discrete Gaussian Strikes Again
Can't wait to be rid of Android. Its endless insistence on upgrading me to the latest version is driving me batty.
> As for your ethernet example, that's too bad. Wifi capabilities will get better for every year that passes, too.

I beg to differ. I've gone from 802.11g to n to ac and I've yet to see any noticeable gains bringing me even close to plain old Gigabit ethernet.

It cannot compete nor compare when it comes down to even individual aspects: reliability, individual throughput, total throughput (due to shared medium access), nor setup speeds.

I'm not just talking "a little bit slower". I'm talking 1 minute guaranteed to succeed (ethernet), vs 1 hour guaranteed to fail (wifi). In real world performance, it's orders of magnitudes slower. That's measurable. That's a fact.

For lots of use-cases wifi is utterly useless. Have fun trying to backup media to a iSCSI volume over wifi for instance.

I'm guessing you don't live in a heavily populated area where the wifi-bands are over-consumed and have little more effective BW than 25mbps to offer. The same crap I was promised would improve half a decade ago. It haven't.

A huge part of the tech-hungry power-users lives in these places and suffers through this subpar performance. We're not happy with mediocre wifi to cover our needs.
Attacking rich people with a knife is a net good. It means they'll hire body guards, then if they have a medical emergency there will be someone there to assist or call an ambulance. If you hadn't attacked them then they could have be choking or having a cardiac infarction and not have anyone there to help.

/s
That's exactly the sort of situation I am talking about. When there is a problem with some piece Ubuntu's ecosystem, the answer is "It's not Ubuntu's fault, RTFM for <other software>."

Knowing that information about Ubuntu goes out of date and that changing the search criteria helps: [1] doesn't make Ubuntu less complex [2] prevents it from being as user friendly as Windows for a broad audience.
AWS Wants to Put Machine Learning in Reach of Any Developer
This is a funding campaign to mass-produce a fully assembled version of the ErgoDox open-source hardware design.
I am tempted to change the function checkPRS so the bot won't be able to accept pull requests...
Eamonn Keogh is a major advocate of Dynamic Time Warping and this should be kept in mind while reading this paper.

(he does have interesting stuff here: http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/selected_publications.htm)
A C grade at GCSE mathematics is usually considered a minimal passing grade.

Typically, a student who can interpret and answer simple ratio and proportion questions will reach a C grade.

I would expect a student who scores lower than a C grade to have some significant difficulty in answering this type of question:

"Here is an ingredient list for 2 cakes; write an ingredient list for 5 cakes."

As you might understand, students below this level are excluded from almost every skilled career.

In my experience, there are very few students who are intellectually incapable of reaching this level, but there are many (37% of all students in the UK) who don't reach this level because they don't have appropriate educational opportunities.

Universal access to good education is not a solved problem.
The Web Designer’s Guide to Programming
Sorry, no. Apple is a device company. Both hardware and software are instrumental to the success of any of their devices.

How could you say the creator of the modern-day smartphone is not a hardware company? iPod? iMac? MacBook Air? iPad? Their hardware may even be their biggest differentiator. Samsung's new Galaxy S6 is a perfect indication that competitors are far behind Apple's innovation in terms of hardware design. Same goes for the Google / TAG partnership for creating a new watch. Any time Apple releases a new device, competitors follow, primarily in terms of hardware.

Apple is not a spec company, sure, but many of their key innovations show up in their hardware's form factor, aesthetics, and finish.
You probably mean static, not strong typing.
> x86 license is not transferable so if AMD is acquired then bye-bye to AMD x86 chips.

Why? If AMD gets acquired, that might just mean that the buyer now holds AMD stock. I can't see how that could possibly affect the license agreement.
A point he still believes in. In 2008 he made a million-dollar bet with a highly-paid money manager:

http://longbets.org/362/

Seven years into the bet, he's way ahead:

http://fortune.com/2015/02/03/berkshires-buffett-adds-to-his...

For those interested in the coin-flipping analysis, I strongly recommend "Fooled by Randomness", which is a smart, passionate, and funny examination of how that problem plays out in the investment industry.
You'd have to ask Meizu, they decide which handset they ship.
There isn't any reason one of these wouldn't work on a GSM network in the US, right?
what are the standard apps to replace the google apps?
World’s first head transplant volunteer could experience “worse than death”
FTL Research, Philosophy, and Starship Congress 2015
definitely, I am brute forcing since it has two sticks and I don't know if they are l/I/1 or l
Norwegian municipality loses 25 000 classified documents in the mail
GSM yes, 3G no.
Nice touch that the clock on the screen shows "14:10", which is of course similar to the latest released Ubuntu version (14.10, from October last year). Coincidence? :)

Not sure how the phone version of Ubuntu is versioned (http://www.ubuntu.com/phone didn't help), though.
Not a coincidence. :)
English summary: When Rana municipality changed archive system they choose to send 300 000 documents, of with 25 000 was classified, on an usb stick trough snail mail. When the envelope arrived it was torn, and the usb stick was missing. The Rana City manager warns any finders that it is a criminal offense to misuse data one does not have legal access to.

Since that does not state that the data was encrypted we can probably assume that it was not.
MediaTek? No, thanks.
Upvote, because correct and precise language matters.

The -oid suffix means 'having the form or likeness of'.

Androids are not small men.
What department is it replacing?
How can something like that make you batty? For sure Ubuntu phone will never invite you to upgrade ...
Just as ridiculous: trying to cancel a Skype Premium account. Last time I checked, the official instructions on how to do this used screenshots from a version of Skype that was replaced long ago, indicating buttons and links that haven't been available in years. The only way to cancel a Skype Premium account appears to be to contact customer support and beg. The last automated renewal cost me 70 euros, for a service I don't use.
Unsolved Problems in Physics (2003)
I remember when AMD were the best performance per dollar: it took Intel a long while to catch up. They then released the Athlon 64 (which I was the proud owner of) and, again, Intel had to play catch up. I've never touched AMD because they simply became irrelevant.

I really hope AMD pushes the industry ahead once again. Though, they haven't had the best track record when it comes to power and heat.
How does using a library qualify as reinventing the wheel? Not everything needs to be done in kernel space. User space is a lot more flexible - for instance, an application can decide to use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL, but it can't change the IPsec implementation in the kernel.
The 11 Best Smartphones You Can Buy in 2015
> Let's be clear, most jobs don't require "academic excellence" they require abilities pertinent to the job.

I agree, perhaps I wasn't clear enough that I fundamentally disagree with the system I'm describing. The separation between academic and trade jobs was false even in the 19th century, and it is absurd in the modern economy.

> I don't believe it's that at all. I don't believe that most children have an idea what they will do for work until late in to their adolescence

They pick up implicit ideas from their environment and their parents. It is not as conscious as you are making it out to be.

> IMO those same kids will be more than happy learning to make stuff out of wood, or learning about drawing, or learning to grow plants, or learning to make clothing despite not knowing if those skills will feature in their careers later.

Yes, I agree, but the difference is these things feel more immediate than learning trigonometry, which seems like a very long-term investment which is unlikely to pay off, or literary criticism, which feels like a shibboleth for being able to pass for middle class.

I actually think we need to meld the practical and the academic much more - it's not about allowing the 'non-academic' to learn practical skills which will allow them to scrape through, it's about using design, electronics, programming etc to justify picking up useful academic skills which would otherwise seem remote, and also to teach practical skills and practical problem solving to students who would otherwise disappear off into the realms of the ivory tower.
For me the review stopped being relevant when the author mentions being a Pebble watch owner. Ie I don't personally relate to people who already own a smart watch (to me a pebble watch is geekery for the sake of geekery).

I'm more curious about the impressions of someone who has no smartwatch and doesn't think they need one but are happy to give it a whirl and see how useful they find it after a week.
does WhatsApp support Ubuntu Phone?
AMD seems to only succeed with outside help. K6 was all NexGen, K7 was practically a DEC Alpha, new mobile chips were only possible due to ATI takeover. Sadly there is no one in sight to buy out/poach from/take over to make the next performance bump. Intel and AMD bought everything that moved. AMD even picked up Cyrix leftovers from National Semi (Geode). What is left? insignificant VIA(centaur)? Vortex86(Rise mP6)? Not to mention they seem to be taking ages coming out with v8 arm, all they do is talk and produce slides, with no products in sight.
RAID 1 (or say RAID 1+5) sounds like a [local] backup to me - what am I missing. Are you just saying local backup is insufficient or is it something less obvious??
New video series: Intro to machine learning with scikit-learn
Google has 88 apps in the Android app store. Which ones are you looking to replace?

Edit: Here's a list of the "core apps". https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/CoreApps Notably missing are email and SMS apps, so I'm not sure what they're using for those.

Also, you won't spend as much time in siloed app experiences on this OS. It's all about Scopes: http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/features
Basically like the Jolla phone then, which only has 2G internet in the US.
Side-by-side Nim and Go
Yeah, I get that a lot. I don't believe in commit messages. I know that 99% of developers are disturbed by this, but I think it's the best way to work so I'm willing to deal with people not liking it.