skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, with this plus a URL-shortener as a frontend, you're essentially using the URL shortening service as the data storage.
Well, Facebook spun PHP off into Hack if that counts.
"Cyber databases" was the clincher for me. At least all of the others are using the adjective to (ostensibly) distinguish from a more general version of the same. A cyber-attack versus a straight-up physical attack. A cyber-intrusion versus physical trespassing.

But who uses the term "database" to refer to anything but a store of data on a computer system?

I realize the BBC has some old-fashioned style guide it's using here, but "cyber databases" betrays a bit of a need to revisit that guide.

Edit: I've made a couple of recommended edits for the BBC as seen here: http://i.imgur.com/cewmams.png
Combining steganography with Reddit could be interesting. Random (mildly interesting) photos pushed to imgur and posted to /r/pics by the same user every time.
> Yes, and arguably 50 different sets of problems.

Pretty much like the US, after all.
Don't forget Chronos.

http://mesos.github.io/chronos/
Except it's not. Strozzi used the term to refer to a relational database that didn't support SQL commands, the first modern usage of the term NoSQL was used to describe the slew of databases that copied Google's bigtable approach. (CouchDB et al)
Interesting idea... Since image formats already store a huge BLOB, how much more would it take to make ImgurStorage?

(Ideally, it would be slightly more elegant than just renaming a zip file.)
Trying to get the greatest entropy possible through arbitrary-strength JPEG compression would be an interesting problem to solve.
We are in San Francisco and there are KNOWN bike chop shops operating in plain sight and apparently the police cannot do anything unless the owner finds the chop shop, finds their bike, and it's been registered to that person.

My mates and I were just talking about organizing some type of immediate action network via a twitter hashtag such as "#takedownbikethieves" with a photo and bikers in the area can all amass and collectively liberate stolen bikes. Think of it as social activism and less vigilante justice.
Outsider Artist: Understanding the Beauty of Steph Curry’s Jumper
Not sure why you are being down-voted. This is spot on.
For students from other EU countries, that would probably constitute illegal discrimination. For other students, they probably don't care. Or it's actually seen as an investment in the future as these students often stick around, meaning you get a well-educated young citizen and didn't even have to pay for the first 12 years of her education.
Freedom from terrorism is only modern times bogyman. A hundred years ago, it was anarchists! 50 years ago, it was communists. In 50 years into the future, a new fooist will replace terrorists and the same fight will start all over again.

I think what society need is some government reforms that require lawmakers to do cost-benefit analyses with tests and proofs. If they want to ban encryption, they should be forced to provide evidence that it actually work, and that the cost to society is less than current methods to fight terrorism. It would also likely get rid of many current inefficient methods, like security theater at airports.
Can we encode C&C commands into a blockchain?
Note the Office of Personnel Management's scores in this report, and note the scores of the State Department. Ms. Clinton's e-mails may have been more secure at her private residence :-\

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/eg...
When you say that, I picture this.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=starlings+swarm&iax=1&ia=images
Exactly. Currently working a project that started out as a simple django application with Mongo db (don't ask me, wasn't my decision). It used Parse, heroku, and some other platforms. I'm in the process of building what will replace parse (file storage) using Go, Redis, postgre, and nginx. Then when in done with that, the main api will get turned over to the same basic architecture, though with other parts to balance load, etc. This is more complex because now we have to do a lot more maintenance. Which means that more code will get written to automate things. More programs talking to each other and more different parts moving at different speeds. I love it, but it's complex. And then you realize you are in charge of doing it all. :)
Java's challenge over the next few years is going be how to make compatibility breaking changes to the language and standard library without ending up in the same quagmire that Python did.

If they can do that then I think both language and VM have a decent future ahead of them.
Cyber databases made me cringe.
A Blood Test That Can Tell You Every Virus You've Ever Had
Yes actually and I wouldn't be alone. Pretty much everyone was claiming Twitter was hiding numbers during that time to cover for the fact that they had mostly inactive accounts.
James Bond cars over the years
Air Force eases policy banning transgender troops
If you're a computer, then that's correct.

If you're a human being and you understand that 100 euro is essentially free, especially when compared to the tuition in the US, then the conclusion is a bit different.
It would be cool if they biased the name generation with descriptions using some of the recent work in high quality machine image tagging.

Throw in some ambiguous adjectives and you should have a large enough namespace that matches up with common image contents.
Ye's what?
This is also how hipku stores ip addresses as haiku

demo - http://hipku.gabrielmartin.net

explanation - http://gabrielmartin.net/projects/hipku/
In ES3 you'd need destructors, I think. But yes, agreed on all points :)

And yet-- is the Symbol approach not metaprogramming? It's clearly a much saner way to shoehorn this feature in, but it's still a shoehorn. And the underlying magic in both cases is in fact simple closure scope, which is really what I wanted to demonstrate.

Edit: And I guess my broader point, to make this more constructive, is that in JS these kinds of idioms live on a continuum of metaprogramming, and for the sanity of your co-contributors you usually want to be doing as little of that as necessary. Like others, I'm wary of presenting something like your example as a "design pattern" without that context.

Edit 2: To illustrate what I mean, I swear to you that if this pattern is adopted widely you will find code like this in the wild:

... = > {
let accountNumberKey = Symbol('accountNumber');
return class Account {
constructor (accountNumber) {
this[accountNumberKey] = accountNumber;
this.accountNumberKey = accountNumberKey; // ??? but transaction log works now

...
That just segfaulted my brain. Everything we may ever write in the future is already there, you just need the address.
They do have some official tutorials, but it's up to you to read the documentation and code to figure things out. It's not as bad as it sounds because everything is fairly straightforward. Bring patience, though.
Better one-to-ones
>You seem to think this is something the US is unfamiliar with. The US has been one of the largest targets of attacks for a long time now.

Or so they say -- to make the case for more budget and that they are "victims too" not just agressors. And of course to paint some provincial BS backwaters as "credible threats".
Sorry to double comment, but this is exactly how my hobby project hipku works

http://hipku.gabrielmartin.net
This is perhaps a stupid or uninformed question, but if databases are so vulnerable, why is so much information still stored in cleartext? It seems to me that taking the extra step to strongly encrypt data prior to writing to tables would make the intruder's job much harder.

I speak not only as a programmer and database guy from way back, but as one of the millions of Anthem subscribers whose personal data was stolen a few months ago in a massive breach.

I know that "data breach" might well mean the keys were stolen which decrypted an otherwise secure file, but the terminology suggests that the breach was simple access into the system rather than acquisition of the precious keys themselves.

Someone with superior knowledge of these things, kindly explain.
Thank you for being the only one to understand that the word free was not what i was complaining about. The replies to my post have been both amusing and horrifying, and you are a shining light in a sea of shortsightedness. :)
A counterintuitive name can be an excellent choice. Who would'a thunk you could name an airline "Virgin" and get it off the ground?
i don't see how that argument makes sense. Yeah there were no wire taps, but there also weren't any wires for criminals to use to communicate. Criminal investigators have histroically been able to get at any place where there might be evidence, with a warrant. The historical maxim has been "the law is entitled to every man's evidence." You could put a lock on your desk drawer, but that can be easily bypassed with a warrant. There is protection against warrantless searches, but once due process is given, a court's power to compel the disclosure of evidence is almost unlimited.

An encrypted hard drive is a totally unprecedented thing in that regard.
Functors and monads!
ermm... elaborate a bit more on this? please?
But the government will use this as yet another excuse to pass more cyber surveillance laws.

Also, with the FBI promoting an anti-encryption culture and the NSA promoting an anti-security culture in terms of what laws politicians should pass, it's only a matter of time before that culture spills into the government's own agencies, too.

For instance, politicians can be brainwashed so much by the NSA/FBI that encryption is some "dark sorcery that only terrorists and child pornographers use" to the point where they'll start voting against bills that aim to secure government's websites and so on.
Your IP Address as a Haiku
Do You Really Need a Smart Watch? Or Just a Smart Watch Back?
Ha, right! Especially since the URLs can get very lengthy depending on the message.
Yep, I was trying to figure out how to say what you just said, but you did it better.
GoDaddy doesn't make money on domains. They make money on the auxiliary services like email, hosting, etc.
Managing schema changes with MongoDB
I'd only do it to people I know after backing up the original. I wouldn't want someone to actually lose their files.
Sorry to see Pipes being sunset. It had a major design and UX influence on a number of us during the early Web 2.0 days. Kudos to the Pipes folks for a seminal creation.

On a related note, a couple of us have been hacking on a Pipes like user experience around Data Integration and Analytics with Web feeds and APIs -- we had been planning a separate announcement but thought this might be a useful place to post if there are others who are looking for alternatives. Please message me directly - my contact info is in my profile.
That's not really how it has worked. CAs can't be trusted because, in part, the USG wants to corrupt them as needed. Encryption systems get weakened because the NSA wants to be able to break them. Vulns don't get reported. Etc. It isn't a "double standard." The tech industry well has been poisoned in the same of surveillance.
Only in the "hacking the system part". Otherwise it's an abuse of a service. There's plenty of cheap data hosting elsewhere on the net.
It seems both unrealistic and weirdly dismissive toward China to call them a "provincial backwater" and suggest they don't have computer experts capable of attacking US targets.
There is a lot more interesting stuff in the article than what you list. The title is central point of the article, I don't see why it's dumb.
Open-source sheet music catalog
Where will you store the key?
And that somewhere would be Usenet 2.0.
Or, perhaps, you're getting downvoted because you said something stupid.
Lol You Have a Zune
Great read. I think the biggest takeaway is how they organize and run their operation. There's a tiny amount of high talent and dedication people that really control the process. They're open for contributions by whoever wants to try. They internally filter the wheat from the chaff to find those who contributions are truly useful. They give them extra power in both what ends up in the distro and helping the filtering/discovery process. The rest are still allowed to attempt whatever contributions they can. The model seems to hit an optimal point to bring in more good than bad.

Might be worth copying in other projects. Supporting this is the other, highly-successful organizations that use a similar model. Far as Linux, there's always exceptions to the rule and lets not forget it depends on GNU work done differently. That hybrid, immensely popular development doesn't compare apples to apples with about anything. I treat it like its own category.
Exactly, you are agreeing with Mithaldu (and me).
This is right, but it doesn't address my comment.

Did this play a role in the breach? Almost certainly it did not.
“Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

― James J. Lachard
Specifically, what's wrong with Ellison? Kalanick? and Spiegel?
Not sure why this one got downvoted, its a good point. Enforcing stupid laws and the endless 'war on drugs/technology/whatever hot button issue happens to be popular' results in the astounding crime rates seen in modern America, and to a lesser extent the UK and Australia.
You're welcome, thanks.
> 2) Those 3 billion mobile phones either are Android, in which case they don't exactly run Java, or are insignificant featurephones with mobile Java that again nobody cares about.

It may or may not be as relevant as before, but one of the smartest things that WhatsApp did was to care about mobile Java.
If it's a relational database, the core function of the database is to make it searchable. If you encrypt the fields, you have to decrypt everything to search them. So if search or relationships are important to you, encrypting the whole database would be disruptive.

There is a type of encryption called "homomorphic" which could allow you to perform operations on encrypted information. I haven't ever tried to implement it and consider it one of those seductive ideas that probably can't get implemented correctly in practice. But if there was a way to deliver an entire encrypted database and still make it useful, homomorphic encryption is the only way I am aware of that would make it work.
That being said, that is exactly what Carrizo is about.
yes - its been done several times.
Notice how both his, your initial and your second comment don't say anything else besides that the title is linkbait and that it says free where in fact you pay a very very small amount?

You might have been complaining about something else besides free, but information about what would that be is totally absent from your comments.
Yahoo Pipes was probably one of the best examples of letting non-programmers be developers. I created a lot of useful pipes back in the day for friends and family. Used a particular craigslist one for years.
If this idea appeals to you, you may also be interested in the 2009 paper Graffiti Networks:
A Subversive, Internet-Scale File Sharing Model [0] by Andrew Pavlo.

tl;dr: the researchers discovered that MediaWiki instances were good soft targets.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/static/slides/graffiti-dc401-o...
There isn't such a centralized database yet. With NSA surveillance and FBI calls for backdoors, that is quickly changing as various three-letter-agencies gobble up all the data they physically can and in the process make themselves easy and obvious targets.
You say the JVM is hard to run fast because it has a stack-based architecture.

That argument doesn't make any sense to me - by the time you are in your dynamic compiler, and you have an IR in something like sea of nodes, what difference does it make in what format the program was represented on disk? The stack part of it has long gone by then.
Yep. It was much easier than writing a layer to translate Microsoft Unicode into real Unicode. But he wasn't a business user. I wouldn't dream of telling the business users what tools to use to get me the information I need. Not because I can't, I absolutely can, but because if it's a business use case, it's worth engineering a real solution. This was just a temporary hack to get us through a tricky data problem. Installing it on his machine and working out a procedure took 10 minutes. Would have been quicker if his machine didn't have the characteristic slowness and inscrutability that Windows machines operated by non-techies exhibit. That procedure carried us through until I could work out a saner way.
Research Assistant, Teaching Assistant. Thats usually how. (its not really for free)
It's likely that scare tactics and politics will use whatever justification they can to achieve their goals - including politicization of large media events.
Kirk McKusick is still an important person in BSD.

This story omits the role of NetBSD in opening up development in the BSDs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#History
Best option is actually to get a job where you'll be working with other senior programmers and then understand your company's source code. That's how I did it - my first job had Ken Arnold as the CTO, then when I got to Google I'd lurk on Jeff Dean or Rob Pike's code reviews (everything is public internally at Google, you can see what everyone's working on). The big advantage of this is that you understand the business context behind the code; it's really hard to understand code in isolation without understanding the purpose behind the code and the goals for which it was written. A secondary advantage is that you've got ready-made mentors.

If you can't get a job and need to go the open-source route, then Rust, Chromium, V8, Django, and the Linux Kernel are all good options. Again, the guiding principle is to pick software where you're familiar with the outside, so you have context when you go look at the inside. Reading software in isolation is hard, so you're often best off volunteering to fix a couple low-priority bugs on the bug queue, and then diving in to start with them. Existing volunteers will often point you to the right spot in the code to get started if you're doing productive work for them.
That's a pretty extreme speculation. There has been only one non-state-actor use of WMDs, ever: The Aum cult sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. They could have done more damage with a simple bomb.
No, but it means that breaches like this will be even more dangerous to the American public, since now such breaches will have the potential of exposing access to "secure" backdoors and the wealth of surveillance data various LEAs have accumulated.
In science and engineering, PhD students are typically paid a salary and have their tuition waived. This is mostly funded by the federal government though the NSF, DOE, DOD, etc.
Which explains why the FBI thinks backdooring encryption is a good idea, despite it being the literal opposite of one.
That's interesting. I'm unfamiliar with Operation Aurora. Can you recommend a good source for more information?
It's a Wordpress default that images are links to themselves.

Why it's a Wordpress default is beyond me...
Background: Germany has tons of foreign students, many from countries with poor school systems. I don't think that their performance is informative about how someone from the US would fare. But yes, speaking German is certainly a plus, even if your program is in English.
Quick to laugh or smile? It may be in your genes
This seems sort of speculative to me - at least too speculative to base (important) policy on.

The way the US government would be likely to handle this situation is that they would recognize the threat and mandate that no such single database be created or that one be separated were it to exist. I don't know that they would change their mind about backdooring products and services when they can mitigate the scenario and address concerns a much easier way.
> An encrypted hard drive is a totally unprecedented thing in that regard.

Then governments with enumerated powers would need some unprecedented powers to get into that unprecedented thing, right?
They have some. And there's some stuff happening. So? China will do with it what exactly?

US, for example, uses their data aggresively all the time to get leverage on trade agreements and diplomacy, including on its European "allies".

China doesn't seem to do much of those kind of shenanigans, except with Asian countries, and certainly not to the US.
The blog is being served by a server called Cowboy, some quick Googling shows it's written in Erlang.

Overall if Oracle doesn't screw it up, Java (at least the platform) does have a bright future.
Pull model kills it for me - I know I can use the 'push gateway' and setup a grep of 'exporters' but then you've just killed the 'easy to deploy' advantage.

I still think something like Riemann/Influxdb/Graphana is the best bet for a roll your own type solution. Riemann is a really flexible router/aggregator/alerter with realtime metric display and it can throw everything over to influx/grafana for dashboarding/time series analysis.
> Even if other countries discriminate against Americans, the US would still benefit by NOT discriminating against citizens of these countries.

Some Americans would benefit. Others would suffer because competition would be tougher. And of course no one wants a social safety net because that would reward laziness or some other awful protestant work ethic bullshit.

If unlimited immigration came along with a robust social safety net (at least single-payer healthcare and a basic income guarantee) I would be right there with you.
Actually tons of people in Africa have Android phones by now...
How to Get Swagged by Hipmunk
Even the Wikipedia article is pretty good. Honestly I would recommend Googling around for it. There's bound to be declassified aspects to the attacks you can trace down if you are dogged, but it's likely you'll find everything you want with standard internet search.
Also worth mentioning is the excellent talk[0] given by Tobias Schottdorf at FOSDEM 2015 about the high-level design and impetus behind CockroachDB.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndKj77VW2eM
Why? Actually using existing standards would have worked just fine. Making existing standards easier to use might have helped, but the problems in government use of IT extend far deeper than just the choice of crypto standards.
"Aside from Benchmark, Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and FirstMark Capital also participated in the round."

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/04/peter-fentons-latest-inves...
Seriously. Unless you want something dogging your tail to shoot past and you're outfitted with a very robust landing gear assembly. Doesn't look like those conditions are being met here.
By shaping it in the form of a question asking "how?", the author makes it seems as if there is anything of any substance to the how. The reader who does not know that it's simply free will assume that there is something special about the students, or something special they might need to do and clicks on the link to find out what that special thing is.

The bait is accepted, and the trap is sprung, ad impressions are achieved and the reader learns the banal truth:

There is nothing special to do or be beyond being human beings and educated enough to be accepted by a german school.

Stating outright in the title "All students get a university degree for free in Germany" would be honest and forthright, saving someone maybe a few minutes if they don't need to know anything more. But it is not used because it would result in less clicks for the author and less ad impressions.

It is clickbait.