skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, I don't think the parent is talking about preserving this gilded crystal egg of a community. They are talking about making Reddit profitable. Two (apparently totally) different things. You could slap banner ads and sneak stories onto Reddit's top posts list and enough users would stick around for you to not only turn a profit, but turn it into a huge return for investors. I'm all for preserving and protecting the fragile, warm community wherever it exists, but that's not what makes a profit, or people would never lament "the good ole days" of community X.
ntpd will step backward if error stays above a configurable threshold for a configurable period of time. We saw it happen after the recent leap second. 1 second exceeds the default step threshold of 128 ms. With Linux limiting the slew rate to 500 ppm, gradual correction would have taken 2000 seconds, and by default nptd steps after 900 seconds.

> ntpd guarantees (under the default settings now [...]) that the clock will never go backwards.

Can you elaborate on what changed? I just downloaded the latest reference implementation, and the man page still seems to indicate that the default behavior is to step when error > 128ms for a prolonged period.
Are you sure about that? This attack requires a js exec in browser to generate lots of traffic containing the cookie. It's a little impractical to use in a SIGINT capacity. My bet is still on precalculated DH like logjam attack.

Still the quote from @ioerror is: "RC4 is broken in real time" so that's either hyperbole or there is an attack better than 75 hours still out there.
Sorry to be pedantic, but Whiplash won the Academy award for best sound mixing; the award for best sound editing went to American Sniper. Mixing involves the spatial and tonal quality of the sound; editing the temporal and semantic quality.

But either way yes, it is very meticulous, and I think you'd be even more shocked to look at the project files, because each individual sound you hear in a film often involves multiple layers of sound or multiple treatments of a single source sound through different mix busses. As a rule of thumb there are bout 10 edits on the sound track for every cut you see on screen. Thankfully there are some tools available to partially automate the process, but in the it requires a huge amount of work and near-endless reserves of patience.

Source: movie sound is what I (mostly) do for a living, though I haven't won an Acamdemy award for it.
Reddit faces the problem of competing in a marketplace dominated by businesses losing money that are being supported by VC money (well really the limited partner’s money). It is very hard to build a business in an industry where all your competitors don’t care about profit and are only interested in growth.
I'd hate to see losing.
EMACs also does this with a VM made from a DSL written in LISP. Of course, I never use either VIM or EMACS ... I am mostly in VS land 99% of my time. I can't even try to imagine what THAT code most look like.
No. It's likely that companies like Uber will cause a shift in the legal treatment of employees vs contractors. I hope that the difference will be eliminated. It's such a fine line already, very difficult to know whether someone is a contractor or an employee. Technology and market forces are eliminating the difference, the law needs to catch up. Universal health care and disability insurance would eliminate much of the difference between those labels.
Well as long as you can cash out before the law catches up it is not a bad strategy.
Here's a tool I wrote that grabs your internal IP and scans your LAN using response timings and HTTP asset fingerprints:

Demo: http://joevennix.com/lan-js/examples/dashboard.html
Code: https://github.com/joevennix/lan-js

If you are interested and have some time, find and contribute HTTP "fingerprint" assets from devices on your LAN to src/db.js.
Uber isn't complying with a law that they supported.

"California has always been on the cutting edge. The CPUC agreement further demonstrates how the Golden State welcomes and supports not only technological advancement, but a better future for drivers, riders, and our cities."

http://newsroom.uber.com/la/2013/01/california-clears-uber-t...
> You don't need capital if you're not expanding.

You don't need additional capital beyond operational maintenance expenses if you aren't expanding, but you do need the existing capital, and that means that either (1) the existing investors need to have their standards for profitability met, or (2) someone else who is interested in operating the assets without those profit demands needs to be willing to purchase the existing capital from the current owners before they decide that their profit requirements won't be met and sell it to someone with a desire to use it for something other than its current insufficiently-profitable use.
This is not unique to Uber. It's a trend.

Step 1: Find a regulated industry (taxi, hotel, liquor, etc.)

Step 2: Create an app and label yourself as being part of the "sharing economy" that is disrupting the industry

Step 3: Completely ignore all regulation

Step 4: Profit — largely because you don't have to pay for licensing, insurance, etc. while everyone else in the industry you are trying to disrupt does
Those laws should not be on the books anyway, the fact they disregard them is one of the main reasons I support uber.
Uber receives massive backlash from taxi drivers, local governments receiving political funds from taxi companies and journalists with agendas. The average consumer loves Uber
Just to clarify, the author is female.
Bitcoin seems instable by design, the major flaw being an anticipation of increase in value due to "limited supply" which encourages people to speculate and horde rather than participate in real economic activity.
I made this prediction some years ago, that the Reddit userbase is change-resistant enough that any change that made it profitable would kill the whole thing. Frankly, I'm astonished it made it this long. But then again, thinking about how terrified the management must be, sitting on this huge treasure trove of active users, knowing that they could kill it with even minute changes... In a way it's not surprising Reddit has been in a kind of design stasis.
This issue is not that CPUC wants this data, it's that state law requires operators to provide the data to CPUC. The article says:

"Uber's parent company has refused to provide data on operational data that is required under the 2013 law that legalized ride-hailing firms, the California Public Utilities Commission judge said in a decision issued Wednesday afternoon."
The commodore christmas...memories...was it 12/84 or 12/85...i forget. How could a mass-market computing product explode like that when it booted up into a BASIC interpreter? Could you imagine a product like that released today that booted up into a python prompt? Like this: build_something >>
The people of California can surely now breathe a sigh of relief that the government was able to protect them from this predatory company and the services it offered.
> That EFF and Sunlight could justify spending a pretty amazing upfront investment of staff labor and resources to create that ecosystem demonstrates that the existing vendor-driven market was limiting who could participate.

Not sure how Sunlight and EFF spending staff time on something validates or dis-validates a market.

> They're not the customer, and to treat them that way is a great way to ensure that Congress is never made uncomfortable. It doesn't matter how many staff complain to the CMF about it.

Let's be real: An 85% incumbency rate takes care of that. The reality is: Nobody is going to lose their office because they didn't reply to messages from Democracy.io. Moreover, no congressional _staffer_ is ever going to lose their job taking these messages and throwing them in the trash. There's not going to be some sweeping revolution in Congress because Congress wasn't representative enough.

The fact is that Congress' approval rating is 15% and their incumbency rate is greater than 85%. People already believe that their Congress doesn't listen to them, they also really don't like Congress and, it seems to me, are pretty much fine with that situation, at least electorally. The "This will make Congress uncomfortable" idea is one that's stale and old.

You can call this elitist or patriarchal. But my suggestion is that the EFF and Sunlight do exactly what you are doing at 18F (which I suggested to you 2 years before you took the job, scoffed at, and as I recall were quite argumentative about it. So...): go on the inside and work on problems from there, because if you're connecting firehoses to drinking straws, you're doing more harm than good.

Finally if you want to make it so Congress is well represented by its constituents, make it as easy and delightful to hear from your constituents as it is from a lobbyist. Until then, the lobbyists will always win.
Hacker News 1898 edition
Although I dislike the term "disruptive", this is a great case of just that. Uber aggressively disrupted the taxi industry without regard to rules or regulations and is now seeing the side of the law that appreciates those.

I personally think uber is a great service. The company's aggressive growth strategies can be questioned but given the offended industry is one that hasn't changed in ages, is controlled by a small few, and has lots of issues on its own, I think über is fine.

Another byproduct of their aggressive growth is the amount of money they've raised, which they have been and will continue to put to use on lawyer fees ;)
There is definitely a need for a lot of them, like mandatory safety inspections, vetting of drivers, etc. However, certain aspects of how they're implemented, like the medallion system, are obsolete and need to go away.
Twitter just updated its robots.txt to exclude all scrapers
I can't speak to the insurance side, but I know that in Boston, the sort of times when a surge goes over 2x are the same sort of times that it's very difficult to hail a cab, let alone expect dispatch to send one if you call. If the weather is bad enough to be at a 2.5x surge, I'd never expect to be able to get a hackney cab here. Other cities may not have this problem.
Same file as of a few hours ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150715164726/https://twitter.c...
I think it's important to ask if the laws are necessary or helpful. To use an analogy, would you support a South Korean company who lets consumers use Firefox for online shopping, instead of the state-mandated IE ActiveX control?

For me personally, Uber's expansion has convinced me the regulation around ridesharing does not need to go beyond wha t Uber already does. I can give zero shits that some public bureaucratic can't flex its authority.
With ipv6 there are the privacy extensions[1] for SLAAC which will assign your computer a new v6 address from your network prefix in a regular interval.

This is enabled by default on windows, osx and some linux systems.

But I do wonder whether webrtc can find your other v6 addresses, a host often has more than one.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4941
Losing would be getting banned and staying banned. Many places have banned Uber in the past (SF, NYC, etc.) but they ended up getting unbanned. Portland is recent example: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-06-23/this-is-ho...
If you run "stty -ixon", it will prevent Ctrl-S from pausing the terminal. I understand that feature in the days of slow connections, but it feels rather silly at this point.
Bingo. I'm not talking about "cybersecurity" positions. I'm talking about people doing advanced work in exploitation, reverse engineering and cryptography on a consulting basis or those who work in boutique shops.

I pass the $300k mark annually through AppSec consulting, and this is not at maximum utilization, nor is it a particularly "hard" discipline in security.
I think Uber is a great company
and I love the product.

I love the product too, but I also think they're the exact opposite of a great company. Or perhaps we have different definitions of the word "great." How are you using it?
Nations should die and not exist. Shouting nations names with pride is shameful and dumb. Nationalism kills. It’s an awful, toxic ideology.

Death to all nations. May no nations exist in the future.

(If you get to spew your ideological bullshit I get to spew my own deeply held and utterly impractical ideological bullshit believes. No, seriously, I want nations to not exist eventually. I think the world would be vastly better without them.)
I think basically the only way to do that is to somehow sell reddit to their users and convert it to a non-profit entity at the same time.
The demoscene is still producing a rather large volume of C64 demos:

http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+6...
Why do you believe there is a need for this? Vetting of drivers, saftey etc can all be done under private insurance and/or review systems

This idea that the government should protect everyone from everything is very dangerous.

Further I have never really felt safe in government approved taxi's so the idea that the government today is providing proper safety inspections and vetting of driver is laughably naive, Taxi regulations is a money scheme for government and has 0 to do with safety
Whoa, Jared Leto?
That's not true. Uber is paying for insurance for all drivers while in a ride. Furthermore, why is licensing needed? You know a $40 billion company wouldn't be a scam.

I see companies like Uber disrupting the industry by removing inefficiency. Licensing, medallions, appeasing public bureaucrats, etc are inefficiencies. That's not to say that regulation is inherently bad, but we need to let new industries grow and see its challenges first -- instead of applying outdated concepts (like medallions, licensing) to new technology.

For example: USPS, by law, has a monopoly on mail delivery. Just imagine if USPS banned all e-mail providers and forced you to use your @usps.com inbox. Is this a net benefit? Is the taxi industry banning all ridesharing apps and forcing you to use taxis a net benefit?
>I think it's important to ask if the laws are necessary or helpful. To use an analogy, would you support a South Korean company who lets consumers use Firefox for online shopping, instead of the state-mandated IE ActiveX control?

If a country is a free, sovereign country, and not a dictatorship, then companies should respects its laws. Period.
Just a quick follow up to this, I just had a look at the X11 license ( https://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy#X11_Licen... ) which mentions a 'copy' of the software. In my interpretation of the license it also means a binary copy.
You don't get it? The answer is simple: money. Money makes the world go 'round.
I think it's decent, but quite a few people I know browse imgur for Reddit content instead of browsing Reddit. They say that the UI is "too confusing".
> Those laws should not be on the books anyway, the fact they disregard them is one of the main reasons I support uber.

You realize the law at issue is a law Uber supported which legalized ridesharing services in California?
I remember paying about 2 cents in fees for a transaction and having it go through within the next two blocks during this stress test.
so what does that mean?
And mirroring aswansons's comment[1] above:

One of my best memories was Christmas 1985, waking up to my dad fiddling with the A1000 in the living room. He learned enough from the ComputerLand salesman to type `dpaint` at the `AmigaDOS>` prompt and launch the coolest thing[2] I'd ever seen.

That computer was my only machine from 1985 through 1997, when I finally got a secondhand 486DX2-66 to replace it. It wasn't until well into the 2000s that I had a computer that could do the things I could do with that Amiga.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga...
Who decides which laws companies need to respect?

Hey, I have an idea, how about voters.
The clocks go back an hour every year here in (most of) Australia. Every year, on a specific date 1am-2am happens twice.
From my experience, people will shop on the company's website, but will complain how they blatantly ignore local laws on news sites and forums, a la Uber, Airbnb, Tesla.
I definitely do not mean bug bounties. While it is possible to make a full salary pursuing bug bounties, they are a poor investment of time.

For example, if I am paid to do an exhaustive penetration test and source code review for a company I'll be paid $10,000/week. I might not find a single vulnerability (doesn't happen often), but I still did the work.

If I pursue a bug bounty for the same company I might find nothing at all, which means I earn nothing. I also most likely won't earn $10,000 in bug bounties in a week.

Aside from this, there is a bit of classism in the security industry. Bug bounty hunters are predominantly people from developing countries who do not know how to find even the most simple CSRF flaw, which is really quite sad. They do not have access to the same education and they are mostly hopefuls who want to "break in" to the security industry.

The "crowdsourced security" model touted by HackerOne and BugCrowd doesn't really work, where "work" means you can replace a real penetration test from a real security engineer with it. It works if you have people like Frans Rosen, fin1te or bitquark (famous bug bounty participants) pursue bug bounties on your software, but it doesn't work for the other 9/10 people who will fill your inbox with pointless, invalid reports. For this reason, bug bounty participants are not very well respected unless they have a reputation for good work because of how much noise the average bug bounty generates instead of valid reports. On the other hand, you'll find most successful security engineers don't spend much time pursuing them.
Talking to Pluto is hard Why it takes so long to get data back
Uber is legal in some places.

Minneapolis
http://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-joins-other-cities-re...
This looks like it's trying to exercise every dark corner of the user's browser in order to ensure that the browser is a real, eyeball-facing browser and not just a URL fetcher, PhantomJS/SlimerJS, or a clickjacking plugin being used to fraudulently click ads.

It sounds like it would be quite easy to circumvent just by running a real browser... especially with lightweight VMs.
gwern, you are an absolute force of nature when it comes to generating and collecting and presenting information in a useful way. Thank you.
Is this your gut/bias speaking, or have you done legwork on the rate of various incidences in Uber rides vs taxi rides, and based upon that seen that the regulation is unnecessary?
Only Switzerland somehow approximates a system where the voters decided that.

In any case, the State still has the decision - that's exactly what judges like this one are for. One court order and Uber can be shut down the next day.
Absolutely nothing from Twitter should be appearing in search engines.
Programming is API's all the way down. Point to an API in the programming language in your shop, and be like, "how productive is it really to start overloading methods in this API to have effects other than they intended?" Because what they're doing is effectively the same.

The verb is the method, the post content and query string are the arguments.

Not only would it be incredibly confusing for newcomers to the system (and there invariably will be), why add to the cognitive load when you can simplify things instead?
Or is there?

These regulations pre-dated the internet. They existed in a time before information was easily shared and available. If I wanted to know how "Yellow Taxi Co" vetted its drivers in 1980, I would have needed to write letters and wait weeks for a response. That's not practical when I desperately need to get somewhere stat.

But now, I can open up my phone and find out how exactly Uber vets drivers in a minute. If I don't like that, I can use Lyft. Or SideCar. Or, call a cab. I see these regulations like forcing drills to come with a OCR "Don't it yourself" failsafe. I'm an adult. I can choose my own 'risk vs cost' profile. Let me decide, and cut the red tape.
Working on Plastic - a structural code editor for ClojureScript (Atom package)
https://github.com/darwin/plastic
You know a $40 billion company wouldn't be a scam.

Bernie Madoff's investors would disagree.
Uber doesn't make money.
They pay for some additional insurance. They don't require drivers to carry commercial insurance. They don't require drivers to get passenger carrier permits. They don't really have to follow or comply with any of the other regulations imposed by the CPUC or things that plague the taxi and limo industry.

All of these things have costs. Uber didn't remove the inefficiencies from the system, they just ignored the laws that cause them. I too can remove "inefficiencies" from my bottom line by not paying my taxes, right?

I love Uber. I love that's it's on demand. I love that it's cheaper. But if you recall the time before UberX—when their was only black car service and all drivers had to have Passenger Carrier Permits, commercial insurance, and comply with CPUC rules and regulations—it WASN'T cheaper. The minimum was $15 a ride. SF to Sausalito was $80.

Uber started with a great premium service that was compliant with the law and fixed a real problem. Uber expanded by saying, "We need to grow. Fast. The law no longer applies to us."
Google's Material Design Lite
For some funny comparisons: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do...
Greek Lawmakers Approve Terms of Bailout Plan
This is the essence of why it's incredibly difficult to bootstrap a profitable startup in a market that already has one of more funded players in it.
What are these competitors? From what I can tell, there aren't any viable "reddit clones" that it's competing with. Rather, it's the more controlled social media (Facebook/Tumblr/etc, profitable at this point), specialized forums (rarely profitable, but not very expensive to run) and anonymous imageboards (4chan/8chan, hardly profitable and no VC money either)
I'm drinking it plain and quickly, like medicine. It's not offensive but I don't want to become offensive or boring over time.
User _fs makes the excellent point that

The only fear of GMOs that I have is knowing that certain crops have been genetically modified to not die when they are caked in pesticide. Good for plants, bad for me, as I have not been genetically modified to eat crops with layers of pesticide on them.

Strangely, this post was downvoted. Even more strangely a response to _fs's post by goodreter, that simply provided support in the form of a link for _fs's point about secondary negative effects was quickly downvoted.

As _fs alludes to, even if GMO crops have no negative effects on organisms that eat them, there are a lot of potential negative externalities that need to be considered, monocultures in food production, the unprecedented control of a food supply that patented genomes give to individual corporations, unforeseen interaction between a gmo and the surrounding ecological systems, etc. etc.

With _fs's and goodreter's posts, both of which are perfectly reasonable, being downvoted as well as the other posts downvoted in this thread(which all seem to share the characteristic of being somewhat skeptical of gmo) I'm not entirely sure there aren't monsanto shills hovering on this thread.
Details from http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-fined-7m-kee...

> The judge agreed with utility commission staff who said Uber has not filed all required reports, specifically about how often it provided disabled-accessible vehicles when requested, places where drivers tend to turn down ride requests, and the causes of accidents.