skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case you like obscure references, USL vs BSDi was tragedy, SCO vs Linux and Rationality was farce.

It really is interesting how little the SCO cases actually amounted to.
There's literally no way to break down that idea without turning it into some kind of negation of rights.

For you to ever be 'free' from others doing [thing Z], everyone (you, them, everyone else) would have to be precluded from doing anything that might lead to [thing Z] - and suddenly no one can do [thing A], [thing B], [thing C]...

Not only that, but now all it takes is for someone to make a shaky argument for some action potentially leading to [thing Z], and suddenly you or anyone else can be accused of committing that action in pursuit of committing [thing Z], and/or get locked up because of it.

I'm as averse to getting blown up as the next guy, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing a loosely-defined slippery slope when I see one.

It'd be nice to see a world in which it's very rare/difficult for anyone to do certain things - but let's not pretend we can create a world completely 'free' of anything without sacrificing most of our inalienable rights.
Agree on the spirit of the post. The name really doesn't matter as much. But there are considerations to think about nonetheless.

For example, is the name's domain name available?
Can the domain name be misrepresented? eg. expertsexchange.com (Experts Exchange vs Expert Sex Change)
How about social media names (eg. twitter.com/<name you want>)?

I think nowadays, considerations on names really should centre on availability of the desired name across domain names, social media pages, and avoiding existing trademarks.

Incidentally I blogged about this recently: http://simononstartups.com/blog/2015/05/31/9-lessons-for-fin...

PS. People criticizing Twitter pointed out at the beginning how "twit" or "tw*t" were bad names to associate with the product too.
The Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin Trading
Are you guys also doing "Who wants to be hired?"?

If so, the quality of responses to recent threads has taken a nose dive lately. I posted in the latest month's thread, and I'm starting to see a couple of bad effects:

1. Recruiters who send a canned response to every email in the thread (my post very specifically outlined what technologies I have experience with, mostly Python and Django, but now I'm getting offers for iOS jobs. The recruiters responding aren't bothering to read the posts).

2. Startups who respond trying to sell me their shiny 'get hired' app. These people need to know that this isn't what "Who wants to be hired?" is for.
FWIW, your "meet the nerds" segment is fantastic, original marketing. I expect it to catch on. Above all one wants interesting, inspiring, admirable coworkers.
The average computer has how many places to store malware outside of the filesystem?

The classics are MBR and BIOS.

These days IPMI BMC and storage device firmware are becoming popular.

However, we also have PCI device firmware (eg. GPU firmware, network card firmware), connected firewire device firmware, USB input device firmware... others?
It is ironic in a certain sense. Comments here unfortunately were and are linking the two in a causal way rather than just pointing out the double standard.

The point of these backdoor programs is that there is an asymmetry in how the vulnerabilities can be exploited. The point being that the calculus has been done - right now the benefit to national security (the place of the US in the 'world pecking order' - it's ability to project power and protect its strategic interests) is greater than its detriment to national security.

Now, it absolutely does weaken 'personal security'. Broken encryption, backdoors, weak protocols, federated auth, these things decrease the digital security of companies and persons.

As a person not involved in performing the calculus of national security (again global strategic interests) it is easy to see these programs as merely a threat with no obvious gain. Those concerned with national security and global competition see this as a small price to pay to wield a large amount of global influence.

This is a good way to understand why the FBI will say things that seem so plainly wrong to the HN crowd.

I happen to agree with the HN folk wisdom - that the national security apparatus is there to protect our democracy not the other way around - but to really engage with the issue its important to understand what the 'other side' is arguing more fully.

This is a very complicated space. Very important policy scholars (Sunstein) even recommends reinterpreting free speech to mean something closer to what we've historically criticized China for.

Going forward we need as much informed debate as possible. The national security apparatus isn't going to listen to the public if the public can't understand the issues they grapple with and engage it charitably.

I hope I didn't rant too long.
See Argentina. Free college, university, med school, engineering, PHDs, doctorates, etc. Other problems though.
I thought it was only lossy if the originals you uploaded were >16MP. I tested uploading some <16MP images and redownloading them, and they didn't seem to have undergone any lossy conversion.
Inflatable Garage Allows for On-The-Fly Jet Engine Repairs
Except in the cases where it actually is embarrassing, in which case it is redacted "for national security".
Windows, OSX, Debian, and NSS (Firefox) all have it in their root trust stores. Dunno about mobile.

EDIT: I can't find it on my Android phone (4.3)...

EDIT2: Found it! Was added in 2010 under the name Digital Signature Trust.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/libcore/+/master/l...
Yeah, cool, let's all just stop using encryption for sensitive customer data so we more easily can catch the least sophisticated criminals who don't figure out how to do it themselves.

Let's also make it crystal clear to the more sophisticated criminals that they do, in fact, need to do it themselves.

Giving the FBI an easy way to put small time drug dealers in their pocket should obviously be a top priority of software companies.

I will vote for any politician who will tell these people to go fuck themselves.
More like a privilege because my tax dollars pay for the sharpie that they have to use to black out "buttlord" from all of the documents. That really adds up.
Ask HN: What are your favourite Management and Time Management techniques?
A while back I downloaded a pomodoro app and I have been trying to focus for the 25 mins and its really difficult in the world of emails/hangouts/facebook/linkedin and the phone but I found it definitely interesting and I will keep trying. I was just wondering what other people used in this space.

If anybod has an good management frameworks I would like to see those too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
As a member of a totally distributed UX team, yes.

We've been looking for just a simple whiteboarding tool that updates live, supports a pen tablet, and lets us collaborate around any rough UI language. We haven't found any that have stuck.

This has the potential (haven't used it much yet) to enable us to quickly sketch UX concepts at early stages collaboratively, which is huge.

We don't do real mockups that are persistent and used as a base for development anyway—it goes straight from paper sketches to HTML prototype. So this fills a real hole, just rough enough to work together on, just high fidelity enough to make sense to others.

Side note, "mockup" is such an ambiguous and relatively irrelevant term for whatever happens at this stage. A mockup here is just whatever you need to visually communicate the UI. The simpler and more malleable the better. If everyone understands the concept and how it translates to a UI in your application framework, then the process was successful.
Since when are SIM cards going obsolete?
Relive the Apollo 11 Mission One Tweet at a Time
I'm a self-documented jerk! There, see, I did it again!
Fovea detector (optical illusion)
Android phones use SIM cards in most of the world.

CDMA/locking the device to an account is basically a US only thing.
This. It boggles my mind how scared people are of terrorism, especially domestic terrorism. If you live in Pakistan, where suicide bombings happen all the time, I can understand being scared of terrorism. But in the US? Come on.

You know what I'm scared of? I have to drive two hours four days a week. I am much, much more likely to die in my car. Hell, I was more likely to die in my car while I was in the military. Most people know someone who either got injured or died in a car crash. It happens all the time. How many people know someone who died in a terrorist attack?

But we're surrendering our freedom for the latter, which is a ridiculous phantom bogeyman, while we vigorously defend our right to die on the roadways.
Also massive spoilers for the end of Contact. The novel, not the movie.
An X86 Design Flaw Allowing Universal Privilege Escalation
7 Reasons Why Users Delete Your Mobile App
There doesn't seem to be any priority on freeways. I could route across the entire U.S. and never get on a freeway....
"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business" might be a better title, and I totally endorse it. BCC was cloned at least five times, AR at least once. (I don't mean "Someone entered the market" I mean "Someone literally had an oDesk project whose description was 'Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com.'")

You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses.
I've actually had a jlist subscription, one of the other options he links, for much longer than Candy Japan has existed. Although I do reading material, not sure when they started doing snacks. If it was before Candy Japan as well, then they wouldn't have had much different impact on him that wasn't already there at the start.
Wikipedia is a bit more vigilant with banning than abandoned blogs are :)
I actually had the same query last year when I pushed a place I work at to use a combination of Yahoo! Pipes and Zapier for our Facebook postings. I asked for a smaller plan (we only need about 600-700 zaps/month at the most) and was just instructed by their support to utilize their reward program[0] which offered an extra 50-100 zaps/month based on what you 'complete,' and it included things like (IIRC) liking them on Facebook or following them on Twitter.

It seems like that program has since been limited, however, as it now redirects to a referral page[1] only. A combination of a couple referrals around the office and performing the required tasks gave us about ~650 monthly "zaps" at the time and we haven't needed more than that so far. Still, I would have happily paid $5/month or something to avoid the hassle (and be able to pay them for their wonderful product).

[0] https://zapier.com/rewards/

[1] https://zapier.com/referral/
Fault Tolerance and the Five-Second Rule
Jesus Christ - way to bury the lead. The headline reads 'prevent encryption above all else', but three paragraphs in:

"But Steinbach's testimony also suggests he meant that companies shouldn't put their customers' access to encryption ahead of national security concerns -- rather than saying the government's top priority should be preventing the use of the technology that secures basically everything people do online."

Here is the actual hearing: http://www.c-span.org/video/?326360-1/hearing-cartoon-contes...

The hearing was concerning ISIS use of social media as a recruitment platform and how it related to the recent shootings in Garland, Texas and in Boston on Tuesday.

The subject of encryption is not the primary focus of the hearing, but when it does come up I think he makes his point clear at about 39:30 when says this: "I think we need an honest conversation and get past the rhetoric of what we are talking about. We're not talking about large scale surveillance techniques. We are talking about going before the court, whether the criminal court or the national security court, with evidence, a burden of proof/probable cause, suggesting a crime has been committed or in our case there is a terrorist and showing that burden of proof, having the court sign off on it, and then going to those providers and requesting access to the stored information or communications that's ongoing. So we're not looking at going through a backdoor or being nefarious - we're talking about going to the company and asking for their assistance. We suggest and we are imploring Congress to help us seek legal remedies to that and asking companies to provide technological solutions to help that. We understand privacy. Privacy above all other things including safety and freedom from terrorism is not where we want to go. "

He later goes on to suggest expanding he scope of CALEA to include more than just telecommunications companies.

If people are going to debate this topic, I think they should start from his actual position and not a half sentence soundbite.
> I thought it was pretty unlikely that anyone would also bother sending specifically Japanese candy.

Living in Japan, I often hearing foreigners coming up with the great business idea of selling Japanese products back home. Candy is pretty common as an idea.
Continue to read. You will find that this was the target of the operation. It was not the vector that allowed them to get in (not soley). It is usually the case that a successful breach gives very wide access, so I would suspect this as well.

I think you'll find that on the whole I am right. That the system was there for US intelligence and the Chinese were there for counter-espionage and that the backdoor allowed the Chinese used the system to access email information that they would have had to compromise a different way to get - thus their getting access through a back door.
Airbnb Adds a Pricing Recommendation Tool for Renters
It's a collaborative sketching tool; not a collaborative mockup tool.

It remains flexible enough to play with visual concepts outside the restrictions of a UI kit. That's a good thing in my book.

I've actually been looking for a collaborative sketching tool for quite some time; but using terms like 'live whiteboard.' Seems closer to that.
Heads up, the quality of responses to recent threads has taken a nose dive lately. I posted in the latest month's thread, and I'm starting to see a couple of bad effects:

1. Recruiters who send a canned response to every email in the thread (my post very specifically outlined what technologies I have experience with, mostly Python and Django, but now I'm getting offers for iOS jobs. The recruiters responding aren't bothering to read the posts).

2. Startups who respond trying to sell me their shiny 'get hired' app. These people need to know that this isn't what "Who wants to be hired?" is for.
I agree. I was going to get into this in the next post, but actually it seems that the pie has just gotten bigger along with these competitors (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22japanese%20candy%2...), and it doesn't seem to be impacting the subscriber numbers.
What "guesswork"? What "black box"? Microsoft's code is the most comprehensively reverse-engineered in the world.

Somehow, between the beginning of the Linux era and, say, 2005 or so, people forgot how to efficiently comprehend large assembly programs. But it's not 2005 anymore; it's fully ten years later. Virtually every software security team in the world has multiple people on staff who know what basic blocks and control flow graphs are. There are credible open-source competitors to IDA, and arguably the best disassembler currently available costs something like $80 and backs assembly out to C.

Closed source software imposes meaningful, significant costs. It's reasonable to prefer open-source code, or even to require it. But we cannot reasonably make the excuse that closed-source code is a "black box" anymore.
Indeed, these claims always lack context of what is being attempted. If you are using Erlang to perform matrix multiplications on large datasets or some kind of CPU intensive work, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.

But if you want to parallelize and distribute less CPU intensive tasks and have fault tolerance, then it's a good choice.
Would you use this dashboard
Cloud Haskell has seen a lot of work by a lot of folks, but it's important to remind folks that it's not meant to serve every possible workload, nor is it necessarily the ultimate design for distributed compute in Haskell. It's good for some things, but not everything.
The thread is talking more about stack versus register-based VMs than call stacks.

The great stack vs. register-based debate is, in my mind, somewhat like the CISC vs. RISC debate—a fun water cooler conversation, but not too relevant in practice. All performance-focused language VMs lower into a (usually SSA-based) IR soon anyway, so the difference only ends up mattering for VMs that are deliberately kept simple for code size, simplicity, or legacy reasons (like Lua, or CPython).
Facing Elite Bloat, Airlines Move the Goal Posts
Sure.. tell that to some of the unscrupulous people in Nigeria and Russia that run a lot of the scams that don't seem to be held responsible at all.
And yet, when traveling, keeping the UI in English is a challenge. The auto complete lists show localized (by IP) headers. And if you call support, they provide a number that responds in another language.
I used a combination of Yahoo! Pipes and IFTTT personally. I'm not sure how people are using IFTTT on its own.

For me, I would do the data parsing on Yahoo! Pipes and prepare everything to be triggered, and then the actions would be performed on a service like IFTTT (where the instruction was to just post whatever new item came in the feed).
Yes, JList has been been selling snacks / candy online for much longer than we have existed. I'm not sure if they had a subscription before or after.
I'm very happy to see that this is released under the Apache license.
That's not what it says, and that's not any of the sections where it says it. §2037(e) says you need a surety bond.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fin&gr...

Surety bonds are not 1:1 reserves.
Not that this is a common attack, but to add to the stew - I knew a guy who left his leather jacket in his car, which was a soft-top convertable. The jacket thief simply sliced open the top and took the jacket.

These days I just tell people to consider the inside of their car a public place, and never to leave anything in there that you wouldn't leave lying on your front fence or similar. There are simply too many ways for people to get into cars to win that game, and ultimately, few things will stop a thief who's willing to damage the car (hammer through a window, or knife through a soft-top, for example).
Yes, that's called "completely missing the point for little rhetorical gain". I did not say it was solely anyone's fault.
I feel like I documented what I learned from other people and what I discovered myself. Is there something I portrayed inaccurately?

Really, I'm just glad people decided the story of the scope of the FBI aerial surveillance was important enough that they investigated it, and are telling it now. It doesn't matter so much who did it first.

I did enjoy saying I "scooped" AP because for a long time I was unsure whether I had uncovered something real and maybe instead I'd fallen into unreasonable paranoia, and then they came along a month later and confirmed everything I had discovered. But they went far beyond that and did actual reporting, talking to the FBI and digging up documents. I just had an SDR and Google. They're the professionals and did 10x as much work as I did, and got more impressive results.
I'm in two minds whether or not to consider if the domain is available when choosing a name.

On the one hand I don't think it should be a factor, on the other hand I know I'll be checking anyway.
Sounds like the cure is worse than the disease...
In the early days, people used to joke that Oracle dbs were like roach motels. Data goes in, but doesn't come out.
Apache Kafka and Spark and Database = Real-Time Trinity
Bullshit. EndGame stole my middle out compression algorithm!
Again? I thought we went over this in the 90's. Sigh.
DevOps Landscape 2015: The Race to the Management Layer
Oh agreed, but it's tough. And yes I have control over it: I chalk it up to weakness (inability to say "no") vs. being rude and selfish. Arguably, I'm not being rude and selfish enough!
Isn't Chronos more of a distributed scheduler ("fault tolerant cron") than a workflow engine?
Lots of people will steal your idea if it is good, but few will be able to execute on it correctly. There seems to be something about the people that copy other people's ideas that stops them from fully grokking what is involved - maybe it is those that are too lazy to come up with their own idea are also too lazy to correctly implement the concept.
Please cite such a case --- meaning, a case in which a software vendor faced civil or criminal liability for revealing the existence of a backdoor shipped in its product. Since you used the word "proven", a single example seems like a very reasonable request.
Yes, it's obvious to sell Japanese products abroad. Quite possibly many were started completely independently.
You think "more processing power and memory" "negates" the difference between hardware and software encryption?
That does sound like exciting greenfield though; sounds like a refactoring/scale out project.
Laughing and crying through the new Google Photos
Up next, PiCoin: proof of work is finding the index of the goal data in pi.
"Meet Our Engineers" would've been much better copy.
"U.S. spy agencies mounted 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, documents show"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-spy...

I'd imagine it gets higher each year.
My competitors actually seem to be executing very well, possibly better. For example http://www.japancrate.com have organized things very well, managing to import the boxes to US in a shipping container and then forwarding from there to local customers. That is obviously the right way to do it if you want to target mostly US, but I just lacked the expertise to pull it off.
If it comes to that, whether there's a legal right to have said guns is pretty much moot, because the people you're using those guns to resist aren't going to respect that right. If you're prepared to fight your government, you don't care whether it's allowing you to have the means to fight it.

Therefore the right to bear arms as a defense against tyranny is mostly empty words. The way to prevent tyranny is robust public institutions and a democratic culture. Weakly democratic states fall to autocrats all the time. There is no culture of democracy so the number of power holders a would-be autocrat has to cow is few. Democracy, real democracy, involves orders of magnitude more people, it's that much more difficult to overthrow.
>It has grown under Oracle -- both in openness and adoption.

No it has not, basically Sun did all the hard work on this areas.

If Google looses (lets hope not) the lawsuit vs Oracle, I hope they give Oracle what they deserve and switch to C#. Either way I am not using Java (I don't dislike it!) for anything outside of Android.
I can tell you what's so impressive: 1.) It does not just answer isolated questions but it has a reprentation of the discourse. You see that when guy in the video follows up on a previous query related to mortgages. 2.) It is incremental, that means it starts processing the input while you are still talking. That's what allows it to be so fast. In principle, that allows it also to interrupt your sentence and ask for clarification. 3.) It has good understanding of complex topics and that allows it to ask clarification questions and additional details needed to answer a question.