skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By the way: many people in the past, including here on HN says that Elop was right, and that the reason Nokia died was 100% apple+google fault.

Here in Brazil Elop effect was interesting: it was VERY obvious, yet noone here knows who the hell Elop is.

To put it simple: When Elop released that stupid memo, Nokia had 67% of Brazil smartphone market share, and the share was still rising, and Nokia utterly dominated in the non-smartphone market too. Right after Elop memo, the first thing that happened is that suddenly the communities died (although Nokia store DID suck, there was at least in Brazil a vibrant freeware app community that shared stuff in forums), then just some months later you could not find phones for sale, even new models, because the import companies DID heard of Elop memo, and decided to not risk importing the phones, even if shopkeepers still wanted it.

The end result was funny: Elop nuking of Symbian was so hard, that in Brazil other smartphones could not keep up for a while, and we temporarily had a decrease in smartphone use, and a increase in feature phone use, and that increase came mostly from truly crap chinese companies, because not even Nokia feature phones could be found in stores anymore.
Nervana's Python Based Deep Learning Framework
For some values of "random strings of text", you could include compressed video from porn sites and bittorrent.

How much would you bet against "the bad guys" already using those as steganographic comms channels?
Neat project.

There is also a Postgres/Postgis extension pgRouting (http://pgrouting.org/) that will do routing in the database.
ShapeShift.io – Instant Exchange for CryptoCurrency. No account required
Believe me, I wish that were the case.

The truth is that every year is way bigger (and thus harder) than the previous year. We have a graph that shows traffic over time vs response time over time, and thankfully those lines go in opposite directions, but it's only due to the continuous work of dozens of engineers as we discover new ways that large amounts of transactional traffic and data can play mischievously together. And while doing that we also have to move the needle on product: if you look at a screenshot of Airbnb two years ago and compare it to today, it's very different (especially on the native apps and mobile web). And the screenshot you'd be looking at is probably just on the guest side, which is simpler: on the host side, we've done even more that's invisible to the casual traveler, like automatic pricing recommendations based on geographic and seasonal data, major investments into fraud detection and prevention, global currency exchange, etc. Not to mention all of the tooling, monitoring, and alerting that needs to happen to support all of that growth.

None of this stuff is free and usually it requires rethinking how old systems work and interact with each other, especially as we do more complex calculations with larger amounts of data. To be honest I'd say we're generally about a year away from hitting the wall, every year. We've made a lot of improvements (when I joined almost four years ago we were maybe... two months away from hitting a wall? Super scary), but if we all just phoned it in the growth in usage would overwhelm us quickly.

Re: San Francisco — yeah, it's definitely tough to recruit out of a single geographic pool. SF is probably the best area to do it in, since there's a large cluster of really great engineers here, but there's no doubt we miss great talent that won't or can't relocate. It takes a lot of work to do remote engineering offices well: how do you make sure that the engineers in satellite offices feel connected to HQ? How do you make sure they work on meaningful projects, but also don't miss out on context and information that comes from humans naturally chatting to the people that are around them? These aren't unsolvable problems (and a number of more-established, older companies have already solved them to some degree, and even some startups that are trying the Moneyball-style approach), but as a team we haven't done it yet. We do have remote non-engineering offices, so it's not impossible to imagine some day having a distributed eng team, but today we're just in SF. Some day, maybe? It takes work but there's certainly payoff for extending your reach.
Deployed on the server or to the device? If you are referring to device, I'm extremely doubtful.

I remember that Oracle had a Java booth at the San Mateo Maker Faire 2014. I was at the Faire the entire 2 days and would pass the booth every so often in the convention center. I hardly saw anyone take any interest in the idea of Java on embedded devices, and the booth remained empty despite some good presentation with large signs and plenty of floor space.

Anecdotal? Maybe. But I think many device guys would cringe at the idea of something as bloated as Java running on a device. I've done my share of Java on server and Android at Google, and I certainly do. And by bloated, I mean things that come with Java-- large dependency trees, libraries, verbose code etc.

I think both NodeJS and Python are gaining more mindshare on the device-side:
https://github.com/rwaldron/johnny-five

If you mean server-side, I would agree more. Java is certainly fast enough to run the data collection frontend. Kafka and Storm are great libraries that you can fit into a Lambda architecture for processing real-time data. And of course there are frameworks like Hadoop, Mahout, etc for the batch processing end.

Still, there's MQTT which isn't Java-centric, and IMO lacks an adequate message broker in Java. And Go is a another good option on the data collection side as well, and will probably get better.
If only some brave explorer would travel west from the California desert. There are ancient stories of a vast ocean of water there, if one could believe such a thing.
Terrorists are already going to use encryption... so "stopping the terrorists" is a weak argument (not the one used here, but just saying).

Beyond this, given that every level of access the U.S. government has been given in any kind of automated fashion has been abused... "Fuck 'em" ... They do not have a right to violate the 4th ammendment at any given level just because "papers" and posessions are digital in nature.
My burning question: will Hydra be open sourced too?
I'm not interested in debating Microsoft's motives, because the engineering issues here are straightforward.

The Bitlocker "diffuser" code attempts to make it harder to make targeted changes to plaintext, without making it Hard to do so, because making it Hard is prohibitively expensive.

No mainstream full-disk encryption scheme makes it Hard to tamper with on-disk plaintext. The best anyone does is allowing attackers to randomize a wide-ish block at an attacker-chosen offset.

It is hard to use that primitive to pop calc.exe on boot, but it remains a powerful primitive: attackers can replace integers in trusted code or data files with very very large integers, and then exploit the resulting memory corruption.

The commenter below explains the performance implications, which are real.
The remotes I reverse-engineered were universal ones with generic MCUs, so their datasheets weren't useful: Skylink model 69 with an EM78P468N, and Skylink model 39 with an HT48R30A-1.
Alas, those are Varroa mites. Not helpers, but blood-sucking (or the bee equivalent to blood: hemolymph) aliens that are causing quite a problem for beekeepers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor
You were not fearmongering; I was preempting in case someone accused me of doing so ;).

I agree with your analysis if applied to contemporary dangers. But I've been not-so-subtly hinting towards biotech for a reason - as it progresses and the "tools of the trade" become both cheap and possible to DIY, the "required financial resources and personnel" drop sharply. People brewing up dangerous viruses ten years from now in universities or hackerspaces, whether on purpose or by accident, don't seem like a big stretch of imagination. And I honestly wonder, how are we, as a society, planning to safeguard ourselves against that threats. We can barely handle the diseases that occur naturally. People don't realize how dangerous this stuff is, because - again, except from natural diseases - we've never had to deal with a self-replicating technology before.

I'm not saying we'll need to drop privacy and anonymity entirely, but I suspect that they will be affected by any good solution. I'd probably sleep safer if I knew that there's no easy way to anonymously obtain necessary ingredients. You'll never stop a very determined attacker, but they're not the problem - random nutjobs with an axe to grind are.
That case is different. Virgin started with music records and was already a huge brand by they time they launched the airline. They launched tons of products and all of them were called Virgin (mobile, cola etc).

May be a better question would be "Who would'a thunk you could name a record label 'Virgin' and get it off the ground?"
> The reason techies find solutions like these unpalatable is because there is no technical way to provide these capabilities without simultaneously weakening protections against attacks from other entities (criminals, other governments, etc).

Right, the golden key problem.

> Also, while you, personally, may think it's okay to buy and sell cocaine over the internet, many of the other people signing/writing this social contract would disagree.

'Social contracts' rarely refers to specific stances on policies/issues. He was likely using it to refer to the underlying implicit agreement the term usually refers to (the agreement to live by laws, etc) as opposed to any actual document you might be thinking of (like a constitution or something).

From that standpoint, I agree with him - there are some issues which will only ever be 'resolved' by reconsidering the underlying stance we take on what our societies can or can't do, and revising the underlying social contract the societies we choose to live in are built upon.
Thanks to the AirBNB engineering team for creating this.

I'm sure you guys get this question all the time, but what are the biggest differences between this and Luigi / Pinball? And why might a data team migrate from Luigi to Airflow?

Reading through the docs, I can see:

- a richer UI

- task history

- cmd line interface

- very small codebase, more easily extensible and less rigid than Luigi's
I don't see the problem... we've got lots of free educational material, catering for all learning styles, and lots of commentary on it by others to help assist you in choosing what to use.

People are learning to code in record numbers

Teaching someone else to code has never been easier (and is getting easier all the time)

What exactly is going wrong that needs fixing?
If Cloud Haskell is going to reference "Erlang-style concurrent and distributed programming" and the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), I think it's warranted on the site to also see a comparison of what, if any, differences there are between the two in philosophy or differences in the Cloud Haskell's interpretation of those two things. Will some features be prioritized over others?
Global aviation is the fastest-growing cause of climate change
The thing is while they were refusing to release the data there were strong indications that those numbers were very weak. Seriously go read up about it.

Many people did reject Twitters claims of growth and they were largely proven right when Twitter started releasing MAU.
Reminds me of http://www.spammimic.com/encode.shtml
Wonderful quote. Reminds me I should just go home and rest instead of staying back late to get more things done.
I don't see anyone claiming a backdoor contributed to this breach in particular. It's just a bit ironic (and convenient, frankly) that the news would break on the same day an FBI official calls to further weaken U.S. digital security under the extremely dubious assumption that the U.S. government, now and forever, would be the only power capable of exploiting those weaknesses.
Holyvent – Events have never been so live
Cyber attack hits 4M current, former U.S. federal workers
Absolutely. You don't have to look far to see h1b sponsors lourding it over their captives heads. Further, if I recall, green card application clock can get reset if you change jobs.. So even if you aren't being abused, you might camp out underpaid at an h1b sponsor till you get that.
IIRC the list of attackers isn't very stable other than China being #1, the US almost always being #2, and Russia usually being pretty high. Right now it's a close race for third between Bulgaria and Russia, and the Netherlands isn't launching any attacks.
I think I may have found an issue with this. I tried to get directions, and it fell off a random road and then proceeded to have me swim across the San Francisco Bay:

- http://i.imgur.com/wWilOoC.png
It is funny how USL vs BSDi hurt BSD at first, but then SCO targeted Linux not BSD for a reason. Terry Lambert has a lot of posts on the backstory behind the settlement BTW (clue: you can thank Ray Noorda).
Hmm, I don't think you're totally right.

>Former government officials with knowledge of the breach said attackers successfully accessed a database that flagged Gmail accounts marked for court-ordered wiretaps.

To me it sounds like Gmail was compromised, and during the compromise, the attackers identified a database containing information that was of great intelligence value to them. This database does not appear to have been the vector that allowed the attackers to get in, nor was it a "backdoor". I suspect the attackers also had access to many, many other databases.

It's certainly possible the primary intended goal of the breach was to access this information (for counter-intelligence purposes), but it's not how they actually got in, nor did it help them get in.
Well that already happens. Lets make it more obvious who contributes what.
Most adults have settled views on religion which they are unlikely to change during their life. A Muslim, Jew, mainstream Christian or a person of any other religious persuasion is just as likely to be totally uninterested in the preachings of a Mormon.
Seems rather pro-biased towards Java.

Case in point:
1. Not a single mention of its main competitor .NET.
2. Not a single mention that as Java becomes more and more closed source and proprietary, under Oracle's stewardship, .NET becomes more and more open source and community driven (in the true sense).
Oh no, the Chinese are stealing all our datas in an unprecedented cYbErattack!

I didn't realize it was Thursday again already.
The next 20 years of genome research
One the one had, a driver's license is not required in many German cities on account of their public transportation systems. However it is useful sometimes for intercity travel. But then they have a culture of ride-sharing too.
> ... you can comfortably assume its probably encrypted.

Or compressed, so you'd need to be able to detect every compression format ever created. I imagine that any time somebody serializes a succinct data structure [0], you're going to have to add a signature for that as well. I'm not confident that even an organization with the resources of the NSA would be able to keep up with that, you'd have to make illegal the writing of data structure libraries. Of course, the optimistic bureaucrat would see this as an opportunity for the creation of another federal entity, like the patent office, where code can be submitted for registration and approval. The Department of Circumlocution™.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succinct_data_structure
Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea
I agree if you express it not in terms of probability of event (rouge individuals pop up every day somewhere) but expected damage. There is only so much one man can do today, so it's right to focus on big risks and not small ones. But technology tends to change things, and I fear that upcoming biotech (and possibly pure nanotech in more distant future) will drastically change the equation, giving unprecedented power to rouge individuals with ill intent. The question is, how can we defend from that; how can we minimize the amount of damage one person can do?
It's just as fast to draw a browser window, button, or text box in Balsalmiq as it is to draw a rectangle in Precursor, but the former makes it unambiguous what I'm talking about.

The point of low-fidelity mockups is to make the conversation about the the overall design without focusing on detail. If "low-fidelity" means moving from basic web elements to basic geometry, it seems to me like that hinders the conversation more than it helps.
The new Google Photos storage is lossy unless you pay for it. That doesn't rule out using the images in a different way though.
So I guess it won't be available in the US. I've been using the browser rather than install the current behemoth app. I'll be curious to see what sort of permissions the lite app uses compared to the current one.
We chuckled and moved on.
Proving a policy change's future effects is generally impossible. Congress does have panels of people who write reports on the possible/likely effects of legislation. Not sure how frequently they use them, though.
The NSA’s Domestic Cybersecurity Surveillance
I just closed a project that did just this with a Microsoft CA. What issue did you have?
Algol 60?
I feel like I addressed this very directly in the article, but I'll repost the main points of "what's wrong" here for further discussion...

This economic model is so ingrained in our DNA, that we hardly ever question it, and many would go as far as to hold it up as a triumph. But the truth is, even if this system works at the grand scale, it’s hurting both learners and teachers in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Here are just a few:

1) The system we’ve created is assumed to be a meritocracy, but is actually driven far more by popularity and market trends than it is by the quality, relevance, depth, and effectiveness of our learning materials.
Although it is far from a zero-sum game, the current model is much more competitive than it is cooperative, and so suffers the consequences that come along with any competitive environment.

2) Because being highly skilled at both writing and software development is rare, those who can do it well are often get the most attention and influence from the software world, turning these folks into “thought leaders” that drive the overall direction of the community.

3) Producing high-quality educational resources is obscenely, ridiculously difficult and time consuming. So the people who can invest the effort are typically either from a position of economic advantage, or are backed by monied interests.

4) As a result, the materials that get produced, and the topics that get covered widely are based on where the money and social buzz is at right now. Those who are doing original research, particularly things that are experimental or exploratory in nature, are not well supported at all.

5) Because we’ve tied blogging and teaching and tweeting to hireability, plenty of people enter into the bazaar not because they particularly want to, but because they must do so in order to “prove their worth” to potential employers or clients. Again, this clearly benefits those who have lots of time and resources to burn, and burdens everyone else with massive amounts of shadow work. We cannot be surprised at the lack of socioeconomic and cultural diversity in light of this point.

6) The success of the few enables the selling of dreams to the many, creating a cottage industry of infomarketers. In effect, these are the folks who sell pickaxes and maps to gold prospectors, and it’s no surprise that their business is booming. Some of these folks are brilliant and insightful, but many are hucksters.

In light of all this, we cannot say “this is just how the internet works”, as true as that statement is now. We have to ask, how do we make things better for our future selves and those who will come after us down this road?
Agreed. I'm in the middle of implementing one of the lesser DBs, and have all of the engineering ahead of me that requires. Unfortunately this doesn't look smart until 2.0, which is probably years away. Too long to wait for.

I can always scan-and-switch when it's ready.
Luckily, I know of a scheme to compress the address 100%! ;)
What Do Teachers Do After Saying Goodbye to the Classroom?
You can instead extend Overcommit [0] or pre-commit [1].

[0] https://github.com/brigade/overcommit

[1] http://pre-commit.com/
1. The following macro does the captcha:

[macro-captcha]
exten => s,1,Answer
exten => s,n(retry),Wait(2);
exten => s,n,Set(pin3=${RAND(100,999)});
exten => s,n,Playback(reallivehuman);
exten => s,n,Wait(1);
exten => s,n,SayDigits(${pin3});
exten => s,n,Read(pinent,,4)
exten => s,n,GotoIf($["${pin3}" = "${pinent}"]?ok:retry)
exten => s,n(ok),Playback(queue-thankyou);

2. The whitelist jumps around the Captcha macro in the incoming context:

exten => 6199111111,n,GotoIf($["${CALLERID(num)}" = "2024561414"]?whitelist)

exten => 6199111111,n,Macro(captcha); * Do captcha
exten => 6199111111,n(whitelist),Goto(inbound-calls-main,s,1);

This also buys me peace and quiet during the few days leading up to election day. (Political robocalls are what caused me to implement it).
I honestly think the qualifications for high-ranking national security folks in the United States includes things like "played with G.I. Joes a lot as a kid." These people are almost caricatures.
It's all so recursive, man.

That's the Ars re-publishing of a storify post I whipped up in 15 minutes so I could post it here on HN 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9647468

And you can see my initial comment on HN from a month ago where I laid out the beginnings of what I had found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508812

As far as I know, the list of almost 20 front companies and 100 aircraft is new, but maybe someone can show me where that was published before. And while it might be new, it wasn't actually difficult to come up with, and has at this point been independently compiled 3 or 4 times by different people. (One of the things I tried to do with my post was show how easy it actually was, and hopefully inspire other people to do similar research, or keep going with this story.)

Certainly going years back there were a handful of aircraft mentioned as possibly being FBI, and a couple companies mentioned as being fronts, and there were people claiming that planes squawking 4414 or 4415 or using JENA or JENNA callsigns were doing FBI surveillance, and it was those pieces of information that helped me synthesize the larger context and identify the specific aircraft involved.

Ted Bridis, an AP editor who worked on the AP story that broke the story in the mainstream media, wrote a really awesome comment on reddit that described their investigation and the background of all the fragmented pieces of related info that predated their work, and gives a great illustration of what real journalism is: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/38eoud/im_sam_richard...

> The author apparently didn't consider the possibility that those people on the 'conspiracy/paranoia/gun rights' sites may have already done the same research that he did

Like I said, it would be neat to find that someone had compiled these lists already. If you can find a link, there would be some journalists who would be interested in seeing it.

It's also true that this isn't "new" in the sense that we've known for years that the FBI is doing aerial surveillance, and we could guess at the scale (but we didn't actually know the scale, and now we have some sense of it). But I think now that we see how many planes are involved, how often they're flying over so many cities, and we have lots of screenshots of circular tracks, people (including a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee) feel it more viscerally and aren't necessarily happy about it.

This article by Kashmir Hill is much better than my slapdash post, with context and stuff: http://fusion.net/story/143739/how-you-can-track-the-fbis-sp...