linhat

This is most interesting...

  The garbage traffic came from about a hundred thousand
  infected servers, most noticeably, in LeaseWeb B.V.,
  Hetzner Online AG, PlusServer AG, NFOrce Entertainment
  BV, Amazon and Comcast networks. That said, the attack
  was distributed evenly across thousands of hosts and none
  contributed more than 5% of the total volume.

I used to host a lot with Hetzner, and while quite expensive, they mostly responded to these kinds of things very quickly and with a certain level of technical competence (which definitely cannot be said of every hoster). Also, I'm quite surprised to not see OVH in there, as their network has a kind of "reputation" for these things...

  Fighting back would‘ve been a little easier, if the abuse
  departments in most of the mentioned companies didn’t
  process requests 9-5, Mon-Fri only. (Hours more befitting
  a scuba-diving shop in Vatican.)

Business as usual I would say...although I don't scuba-dive...

Edit: formatting

Favourite features:

* plain text edited in vim ;-)

* links (to other wiki pages and content), move cursor over link and <Enter> will open wiki page, link in browser, image in image viewer, pdf in ... all from your console

* manages todo lists (including status indicator auto update for sublists: [.]->[o]->[O]->[X])

* headers (mostly useful when exporting to html)

* table creation and management

Overall a very lightweight and tightly integrated vim plugin, but gitit looks quite interesting, might give it a try.

After playing with various (note-taking) applications/apps I found all of them severely lacking (for several reasons). I was always for the lookout of the one-size-fits-all application, which I obviously never found.

Realizing that there is no such system/app I split things out:

* Important Stuff as well as trivia -> CalDav... believe it or not, but CalDav beats most other systems/apps out there, it's accessible on almost any device and you usually have a wide variety of applications to edit your "calendar events", use different calendars for important vs trivia

* Stuff you read on the internet -> obviously (synced) bookmarks (firefox, chrome, opera and others have builtin sync)

* Ideas, plans, drawings -> A5 pen and paper notebook (most people will advocate moleskine, I prefer Leuchtturm notebooks (to each his/her own)

* Research, papers, references -> good old text files, index + txt + pdf + bib (vim + vimwiki + git + some zsh alias like wiki="cd ~/wiki/; git pull; vi index.wiki; git commit -a; git push; cd -")

So far, this works quite well, although I have to admit that while separation is king, it also hinders creativity at times, so I'm slowly starting to integrate other things into the wiki (write firefox bookmark and caldav importer/parser, thinking about scanning/digitizing notebooks...) to be able to cross-reference things. The long term goal is to create a visualization that allows me to visualize (duuuh) all this data in different ways (especially useful for research and connecting the dots).

Hope this helps and I would really be interested how others manage this, especially regarding research, papers etc (Mendeley and others just aren't flexible enough for me...).

This axe looks really awesome, physics for the win.

Also, instead of using an old rubber tire, I highly recommend building a variable length, tensioning chain, much like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrLiSMQGHvY Makes chopping wood so much more fun.

And then, there is also the stikkan: http://www.stikkan.com/ Perfect to hang it up next to your fireplace to do some more fine grained wood chopping, cutting larger pieces into smaller ones.

Just to be clear, I meant that water collected from pure air should have no salt in it at all, so drinking large amounts of it will be unsafe as it will draw those salts from your body (osmosis and diffusion), just like drinking large amounts of seawater might increase your blood pressure, but more importantly, it's very hard for your body to get it out of your system, your urine produced by your kidneys is not saltier than saltwater, so you need more water than you can drink (with seawater) to get it out again.

So my original question still stands, is it unsafe to drink large amounts of water collected from pure air and do they have to take care of that in any way? Or will simply eating salty food fix it? I still have not found an answer in the article.

EDIT: From further below in the thread:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatraemia

and its counterpart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernatraemia

Isn't the generated/collected water like condensed water free of any kind of salts etc. that would naturally occur in ground/drinking water, so shouldn't it be unsafe to drink large amounts of it (much like it is unsafe to drink large amounts of salt/sea water due to the saline imbalance)?

I wonder how/if they address this?

  I'm waiting for the first system that is equivalent of C++.

Not gonna happen anytime soon. C++ is much more than just a programming language, it is an entire "ecosystem". You have toolchains, libraries, drivers, APIs, existing software stacks, all written in C++ and able to interface with C/C++ directly, i.e. no translation layer needed. You're not just gonna replace that with a new language.

Sure, Halide may be seen as just some syntactic sugar (much like quite a few bits and pieces of C++11), but it actually provides you with a different level of abstraction than say OpenCl, MPI or OpenMP where you are very specific about e.g. level of concurrency (which heavily impacts the design of your algorithm) while Halide tries to almost completely separate algorithm and scheduling.

As a computer vision researcher, this looks very interesting, although somehow I have yet to understand how they want to generalize highly complicated optimization patterns (access order, locality, pipelines, platform limitations ...), especially since some algorithms (other than the shown blur filter) require quite complicated access patterns on the image data and can only be hand optimized most of the time (that doesn't imply that they would not benefit from general optimization at all, just that they might be way faster when hand optimized). Still, if Halide produces faster code for some cases (e.g. filter operations amongst others), it will still be worth its salt.

The only non-FreeBSD systems I have to deal with by now are my Cellphone (Android) and my TV (funny enough, also Android). Made the switch from YOUR_FAVOURITE_LINUX_FLAVOUR after having to deal with (st)Ubuntu way too much at work.

Nonetheless, as much I prefer running FreeBSD on any kind of server system (as I have been for years), after using it on my (fairly new) laptop for a couple months now, I really wish there was better (new and shiny) hardware support (a commonly acknowledged FreeBSD deficiency, so yeah, I knew what I was getting myself into). Given, I only bought it because my old laptop was stolen at work, it belonging to the Haswell family did not really help (no internal WiFi [Intel IWN 7260], no hardware accelerated graphics [HD4400] and so forth...). But hey, who am I to complain, time to get hacking, which I suppose is more in the spirit of the BSD culture anyway and I'm not going back to NIX.

So yeah, glad this book got updated, most likely picking up this new edition...

I wish I could upvote this more than just once. Using 'struct' instead of 'class' and combining that with templated "pure functions" [1], when applicable, make for some really readable/maintainable/extensible C++ code, which, although often overlooked, is a multi paradigm programming language (the OOP proponents want you to believe otherwise ;-). Especially, as mentioned in the article, the fact that if you're honest you almost never really need private class members (that might later force you to create set/get-ters) really resonates.

These days, I prefer to create an interface using the PIMPL idiom [2] completely hiding the underlying implementation, whilst the implementation itself preferably consists of data structures and collections of these (hence 'struct') and some templated functions to modify these. This also resonates with an old C mantra: design data structures first, model functions after their behaviour or something similar [where I just cannot find a quote for].

My main gripe with using 'struct' in favor of 'class' is probably the compatibility problem with other programmers that might become confused as to why you are doing such weird things...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_pointer

So, is anybody here actually active on academia.edu? Asking, since as a computer vision researcher (3D reconstruction, obstacle recognition/identification, augmented reality, ...) I am constantly looking for scientific resources, and to be frank, it is quite annoying because it can become really time consuming.

So a genuine question, is the site worth signing up for? I remember when mendeley just started, there was lots of excitement about it, mainly because it was sort of marketed as the last.fm of research (giving you good recommendations for your scientific interests), but then it turned out to be just meeh (getting bought by Elsevier didn't help much ;-).

Also, on a side note, are there any other good sites doing something similar out there (like a reddit/HN for insert your research interests here type of site) that are actually any good? I'm sure there must be a lot of other researchers active on HN...

I do not know where this op-ed piece was intended for, but I think you should have written it anyway, stating just this feeling of yours. There was/is/will be so much media frenzy about this, every article (even if you think you really had nothing useful to say, which you actually do), op-ed or not, that does not resolve to sensationalists headlines is just really helpful.

Could we please all relax a bit.

If the government tells you, they have a technology that can in principle be used, depending on type and quality of encryption, history shows us that this either means they can decrypt almost everything, or, most likely, not much. Both ways, they are not telling the complete truth at all.

Especially the german government likes to tell us that they have something that can in principle be used for something, like using your issued ID for online activities, a nation wide health-card system, a working toll collect system, etc., the list just goes on and on and on...

Anecdote: I remember, a couple of years ago, sitting in the audience of the yearly Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin in a talk by a pretty popular lawyer specializing in internet laws and regulation (IIRC the title was something like You have the right to stay silent; if you understand german, watch it, it's hilarious), where in the Q&A session somebody jumps up and tells the audience (paraphrased):

...the last time the police raided my home (much laughter from the audience) they took my encrypted disks with them (probably dmcrypt/luks or truecrypt) and after almost one year they still have not been able to decrypt a single bit of it...

I'm pretty sure not much has changed with ciphers becoming even stronger these days. I, at least, sleep well at night, trusting that my PGP2 encrypted mails are safe.

I'm not so sure anymore about the password length limitations (or any other weird password requirements for that matter).

For the longest time I was wondering why my bank would ONLY allow a 5 digit password, alphanumerical only and it MUST contain at least one letter as well as one number, while they let you choose your own username completely free of any restrictions, including special characters. After thinking about it for quite some time, I remembered all these sites where your password had to be as least 6 characters (now 8 seems to be a general minimum).

By forcing users to use EXACTLY 5 characters at least you cannot use the SAME password your already using for your mail and whatnot, except for the fact that there is nothing preventing your from simply dropping the last character (but you sure would NEVER do that, would you ;-), assuming of course you already have letters as well as numbers within the first 5 characters.

While 5 characters seems extremely weak, If you get it wrong 3 times, your account is locked. Locked as in "you have to call them and identify yourself with A LOT OF DETAILS about your account and transactions" to unlock it and reset your password.

I have no idea how they store passwords and it doesn't really matter to me, while it probably should. They are a BANK and if they get hacked and their customer password database gets compromised, I am sure they will have worse problems to take care of.

What I would really like to see is their evaluation of security versus added support work for locked accounts.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton

One should need to remind oneself of this every single day.

Could you elaborate your dislike for mathematica and matlab? In my university departement a lot of people are using matlab while I somehow prefer C/C++ as I still cannot get my head around it.

Since we are already talking about legislation, how good/bad of a climate does New Zealand's law present for entrepreneurs? Asking because I have been fascinated with the country ever since (and also with it being almost the opposite part of earth when you're from Germany it's the farthest you can possibly get away from home for a change ;-).

So, any Kiwis around to give some insights?

> The idea is for NASA’s commercial partners to demonstrate the safety and operability of the new craft on their own employees before the agency risks its astronauts.

The keywords here seem to be 'risks ITS astronauts'. With all the money they (rightly) have spend on human safety in an outer space environment they now assume somebody else will do it for them? This confuses me to no end.

So it's like getting test drivers for space vehicles now. Oh my, times sure have changed...

Couldn't get this to work in Chrome on OS X, suspect it has something todo with some of my extension(s) blocking needed stuff.

In addition to an "Incognito Mode" (where you might still want some extensions enabled) we really need a "No Extensions/No-(Popup)-Blocking mode" so sometimes one can enjoy stuff like this while keeping sane during normal day to day browsing.

EDIT: just watched after disabling all my extensions and restarting (yes, that was necessary) Chrome, only to realize that i'd already seen it in 2011...

I really do not understand why they chose to do so. In my opinion, it does not improve readability at all, even worse, when the spacing between type and name gets big, your eyes need more work to figure out the correct line relations.

Furthermore, this can generate horrible commits, for example:

  int x;
  int y;

becomes:

  int   x;
  int   y;
  float z;

after adding ONE single variable. But your commit will contain changes for the above 2 lines. This will make for an insane experience once your variable list grows to a certain size (including multiple spacing changes) and you intend to rollback/cherry-pick/time-warp. Then you will get to deal with the full wrath of conflict resolution. Also, your commit (of one logical line change) contains way to much meta info, which also decreases commit/diff readability.

FWIW:

  SIMULATION ENDED. WINNER: NONE.                                               SIMULATION TIME: 02'00
                                 @@@@   @@@                                                         
                        @ @ @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@             @      %           @                      
          @@@        @   @ @@@@@  @@@@@@@@@@      @@@              %%%%%   %   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%       
       @@@@@@@@@@@@  @@@ @@@@@@    @@@@@@@@@                @     %%%%%%%%%%%@@%%%%%%%%%%%%%        
      @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@   @@@@@@@@                    %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%        
      @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@  @@@  @@@@@@          @@@@@@ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%         
  @ @       %%%%%%%%%%%%    %%     @@@     @      @@@@%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%    %%         
             %%%%%%%%%%%%   %%%%              @  @@@  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%@             
             %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%@             @@ @@@@@%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%              
             %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%                @@@@@@@%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%   @           
             %%%%%%%%%%%%%%                   @@    @@%%%%%%%@ @@@@@@%%%%%%%@@@@@@  @  @@           
               %%%%%%%%%%                     @@@@@@  @   @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@                 
                 %%%     %                  @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@                 
                  %%%%%                    @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@     @@@   @@@@                    
                       @@ @@@@              @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@        @     @ @    @               
                         @@@@@@@@@                 @@@@@@@@@@                @@  @@ @ @             
                        @@@@@@@@@@@@@@              @@@@@@@@                   @@  @     @@@        
                          @@@@@@@@@@@              @@@@@@@@@  @                      @@@@ @         
                           @@@@@@@@@                @@@@@@   @                    @@@@@@@@@@        
                           @@@@@@@                   @@@@                        @@@@@@@@@@@@       
                           @@@@@                      @@                         @@@  @@@@@         
                           @@@                                                           @        @ 
                            @@  @                                                                @

I almost believed it would take the full 48 hours...

Just having the most fun playing a round of "thermonuclear war" (well, actually, it's mostly playing itself), better than any (AAA) title I have been playing lately. This one is going to take forever. And I am glad that we moved from printed output to graphical displays, the amount of forests we would have had to cut down...

I wonder what part LG actually plays in this shortage. When you are producing a device for somebody else that is strikingly similar (as in sharing the exact same hardware platform) to one of your own devices, which you are selling for way more (with of course small but nonetheless important differences)...well, something just screams conflict of interest to me. I am in no way accusing LG of doing so, I'm sure they have had their contract with Google on this and followed it to the point, but still, something just doesn't feal right.

Uhm, well, maybe just my paranoia distortion field kicking in, I for one hope I am completely astray on this one.

Linkbait? Nothing really new here, they 'released' their trojan a while ago, it's been found 'in the wild', the CCC disassembled it. They found MAJOR problems within it, e.g. crypto was a joke. They actually released their own control tool for it [1](GERMAN). Then they found the 'update' capability which basically allowed a loyal servant (or an attacker) to upload and execute whatever they choose to do so.

What drives me mad is ALL OF THIS was paid by federal taxes (not so sure about the 'Billion Euros', but most likely a lot) and all they got was something close to NetBus/SubSeven/Back Orifice (last one developed in 1998!!!). Digitask (a complete joke) is still employed by us and sadly (or maybe luckily) there has been happening not much since then on that front. Politicians keep blaming somebody else and apparently NOBODY outside Digitask has EVER had the chance to analyze the original source code of it (which is in itself a complete hoax). Best of it all, apparently, this entire 'program' has so far not yielded a SINGLE success story.

[1] http://ccc.de/de/updates/2011/staatstrojaner

Nexus One owner here. My device has a lot of scratches and scuffs, it has been magically lifting itself out of my pocket on a few occasions including riding a bike at full speed. Needless to say, when it hit the ground it not only totally disassembled itself, it also received a few more scratches here and there. My MacBook Pro is different by the way, no scratches after lots and lots of usage.

The verdict: I couldn't care less. It's a phone and after putting the battery back in and the cover on, it never ceased to work, it didn't even change my user experience in any way (broken glass, buttons etc.)

I would not buy a phone that requires me to put in in an ugly case, but I would also not care much about a few scratches here and there as long as the phone doesn't break.

So if you buy a phone partially for it's supposedly amazing design and then hide it inside those ugly rubber casings or whine about small scratches, well, than you lost me along the way.

Same here.

I do not really understand the need to have a 'window manager' inside vim. I'm a long xmonad user and I think tiling window managers are great (wish there would be a worthy native os x implementation), but adding yet another plugin to my vim setup doesn't really seem feasible, especially when one can map its core functions with a couple of lines. Vim provides uncountable ways to manage splits, including resizing, switching etc, and then there is still vim's great tabs feature to be discovered to reduce the on-screen mess splits can produce...

That said, hat-tips to the author for managing to create a plugin for vim using its rather obscure vi/ex language.

While I think this idea is awesome, it solves a common problem in a unique and creative way, I sadly cannot watch the video: "Unfortunately, this EMI-music-content is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights."

Oh my, one more video I cannot watch just because I am german and one more day of my life ruined by them :(

> It is probably less useful today due to ongoing miniaturization of imaging sensors.

Not really. Dig into concepts called sparsity and compressed sensing, which are quite similar algorithms (not really the algorithms, but the underlying ideas).

I can't find the authors' original website, only this old wired article from 2010: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_algorithm/2/

So especially with the ongoing miniaturization of imaging sensors, which will allow you to take even bigger and bigger pictures, there are issues these algorithms could solve, unless SD cards get really cheap really fast I guess.