skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand... Based on the evidence we have, we can’t prove for certain that NSA is doing this. However, our proposed Diffie-Hellman break fits the known technical details about their large-scale decryption capabilities better than any competing explanation. For instance, the Snowden documents show that NSA’s VPN decryption infrastructure involves intercepting encrypted connections and passing certain data to supercomputers, which return the key. The design of the system goes to great lengths to collect particular data that would be necessary for an attack on Diffie-Hellman but not for alternative explanations, like a break in AES or other symmetric crypto. While the documents make it clear that NSA uses other attack techniques, like software and hardware “implants,” to break crypto on specific targets, these don’t explain the ability to passively eavesdrop on VPN traffic at a large scale."

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-...
SpaceX Plans to Resume Falcon 9 Rocket Launches by Mid December
> I think "regardless regardless of what positive effects it might have had otherwise" is generally the foil in accepting the full FSF position on political topics.

I don't mean to say that these effects are irrelevant in any general sense, I am saying that in the context of listing disadvantages of Amazon e-books, it's relevant to mention that the contract that their customers have with them allows them to delete their books at their discretion, and that they have been doing so. I certainly don't see how they went "over the top" by just mentioning it.

> [...] you're missing out on the collective benefits that make the current transition to shared, administered, cloud-based technologies so powerful for the users that adopt them.

Just in the interest of not being extremely vague about what exactly those benefits are, let's look at the case in point. Amazon pulled two books from customers that had paid for them, from what I understand over a rights dispute. The books were not only "in the cloud", but had already been retrieved and stored on the customers' devices for consumption, and Amazon went out of their way to delete them from the devices as well, using a backdoor. What exactly was the collective benefit of the cloud in this case? How did the shared, administered, cloud-based technologies empower the users in this instance, if we take "users" in this case to mean the affected customers? Is a deliberate backdoor into your device an inevitable aspect of cloud based technologies?

Who did benefit from the action? The winners in this were probably Amazon and the claimant in the dispute. It certainly wasn't the customers. If it was your intention to address the case in point in the above quote, I think that you are conflating "cloud-based technologies" with a generally shitty customer rights, as if the two need to go hand in hand. Meanwhile, tons of people are using "cloud-based technologies" illegally to download books in without agreements and format and device lock-downs that completely screw them over at the whim of the distributor.

> Users are willing to accept a massive spike in convenience and utility for the drastically-less-than-1% chance that Amazon kills their favorite book from their device, without their consent, with a refund.

Some are not, or may not be if they had the effects detrimental to their rights listed to them.

> That's not evil; it's the nature of progress

What do you mean by progress here? In the most general sense of the word this is a rather meaningless conclusion. I don't see how the tax analogy explains it. When I pay taxes, I do it for the benefit of society. The money I pay actually go towards infrastructure and welfare. When Amazon removes a book from my library, how does it benefit society? Would Amazon go bankrupt if they did not do these things?
It's easier to train a professional and prepared candidate in some fraction of job skills than is it to train a very skilled candidate in business proprieties, especially for an interview that starts with a multiple-choice test.
Literally everyone.

The power of the government getting into your personal life to blackmail you into submission (for a multitude of purposes) is something everyone needs to worry about.

The fact that they are the defacto spy agency means they can simply lie about you, and claim their spy powers tell them so, and therefore you are guilty. (Just make sure to claim national security privileges on the information gathered so they cant argue against their accuser.)

I might be wrong, but I feel like I must have misunderstood entirely the thrust of your comment due to how oppositely I interpret this question.
I guess its important to make allowances - especially for non-native English speakers.

I worked on a portlet system a few years back (oh the horror!) with a Chinese dude. Super developer. It wasn't until the last day that I figured out what he meant when he said 'poorer led'. Should have figured it out sooner looking back :D
(maybe I'm misspeaking, but in general I think this holds whether it applies to your case or not so I'm going to say it anyway)

Once/if you have kids, you'll get to relive that joy of libraries all over again. :)

(unrelated: my school libraries also prevented excessive photocopying of books.)
that package manager looks pretty sexy.

I'm pretty much running a similar stack on a laptop in gentoo. took a lot of work to unmask it all, though. would a howto be useful to anyone?
I like Dave Barry's explanation of electricity (e.g. http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/Perl/Misc/electricity.txt )
including

"the electric company sends electricity through
a wire to a customer, then immediately gets
the electricity back through another wire, then
(this is the brilliant part) sends it right back
to the customer again. This means that an
electric company can sell a customer the same
batch of electricity thousands of times a day and
never get caught, since very few customers take the
time to examine their electricity closely.
In fact, the last year any new electricity was
generated was 1937."

and

"AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet
long enough without touching anything, you would build
up so many electrons that your finger would explode!
But this is nothing to worry about unless you have carpeting."
Newspapers aren't people lying to your faces though.
Please refrain from posting personal attacks like this on HN.
Wow. This article is the definition of tl:dr.

But it did remind me of a professor I had in College - he described himself as one of the two most expert hypnotists in the world - and described how the CIA kept asking for his help. He had discovered that people could be hypnotized to do things against their will, and with no memory of the hypnosis. He said that they would react just like Oswald to their actions under hypnosis. And my professor believed that the other expert worked with the CIA.

Truth is definitely stranger than fiction.
While I appreciate the sentiment you're going for, it should be notes that you have no authority to give medical advice, and OP should not go off his prescriptions based on your comment. What you should have said (and what OP should do) is to have a discussion about that possibility with his or her primary care physician. I don't care what the circumstances are, people should not accept unsolicited medical advice from anonymous users on the internet without fact checking with a doctor. Not all doctors push pills the way you're describing.
Vine Co-Founder Among Those Laid Off by Twitter
At a large company it is very difficult to try new things quickly. Flat hierarchy, smart people and great culture help but not enough to make a drastic difference.

I have found it helpful to understand this from experience - as opposed to theory.

Trying new things quickly is the biggest competitive advantage of an entrepreneur. A sharp focus on maximizing this advantage does make a better entrepreneur.
I guess I'm excepting Beetle and focusing on Jetta and Golf. They're not everyone's thing, but I love them, and they have their niche.
Why should there be no penalty to the judicial branch for abusing the fourth amendment?
What is the "show you the receipt" scam?
Do you have a 20 foot wide screen and top of the line surround sound system at home (not the mention the snacks)? Going to the theater is a much better experience to me than sitting at home.
Thoughts on how to implement prototyping as part of the design process in an organization. Interested to hear comments...
Not sure but Assassin Creed: Syndicate is around the corner so we'll probably find out the next part of the story.
David Davis, will all due respect, is completely isolated in his own party and mostly fulfils a theatrical role these days.
Of course, this should be expected. The information is worth millions, possibly billions of dollars. Certainly it attracts many attacks (and certainly they aren't all foreigners).

Dow Jones is negligent if they didn't implement very strong security, strong enough to make stealing the information not worthwhile. If the info is worth $10 million, spending $1 million to steal it is a simple decision for a criminal.

If you were such a criminal wouldn't you surveil the systems of all major news publications? All you need is to find one bit of market-moving information before it's published - a draft article, an email to a reporter, etc. - and, it seems to me, you can take in millions or more.

Maybe you'd also surveil the communications of Silicon Valley tech companies.
personally, i think it would depend on how much of an information advantage i had i.e.

1. oh that picture looks nice, i'll buy it, and then have it appraised thinking it might be worth a couple hundred bucks

2. Is that billy the kid? this could be really valuable, let me see if i can get it for a song
How does that work exactly?
Ask HN: Writing code with diff-readability in mind?
While this isn't a very dire or pressing matter, I think it would be interesting to discuss.

It's often considered good practice to use trailing commas in multi-line arrays (where language syntax rules permit); e.g.

[
'a',
'b',
'c',
]

going further, would it also make sense to start an else-if check train with ``if false; ' ' ? e.g.

if false;
else if check 1; etc
else if check 2; etc
else if check 3; etc

for a real-ish world example:

https://gist.github.com/Syrup-tan/c78f781c9b500b802fec#file-w-sh-L33-L56
https://gist.github.com/Syrup-tan/c78f781c9b500b802fec#file-w2-sh-L33-L56

the second way grants a refactor-er the ability to re-order the elif checks without modifying any of the statements, reducing the chance of basic errors. It also makes diffs simpler to read.

However, in exchange, it sort of violates ``Principle of Least Surprise ' ', as someone reading the code may not understand what the ``if false; then :; ' ' is doing there. ( ``: ' ' is the null-operation in sh)

I'd love to hear more thoughts on this practice.

edits: readability & highlighted section in gist ( no wording changes )
This sounds like advice never to begin farming.
>I hear that O-1 review has become less favourable to founders over the last 1-2 years.

Is this because it wasn't intended for that purpose and the system is cracking down on founder's using it as such?

I've looked into the O-1 based on the fact that I'm (legitimately) a top expert on a very niche field. If I ever move to the states I think it's my only possibility since I work for myself.
Thank you for the reference!
I'm kind of willing to give the Bond franchise a pass on this front. It's been a brand, if not its own mini-genre, for longer than I've been alive. And it's not like Hollywood is performing brand necromancy on it; it's been active for a good bit of that time. It's more like Doctor Who and less like Charlie's Angels.
for quality-of-life;

https://gist.github.com/Syrup-tan/c78f781c9b500b802fec#file-...

vs https://gist.github.com/Syrup-tan/c78f781c9b500b802fec#file-...
Also "Not long after that, I secretly gained access to his forum" seems like a CFAA violation. Though law enforcement may not care to prosecute, I don't see how it's different from "I secretly gained access to an internal AT&T forum" which would likely see an average citizen facing years in prison.
Sure they do. The details of your private life gives them a source of great power: to embarrass you, expose you, blackmail you, and destroy you. Why would they want this power? Because you might threaten to expose them or otherwise oppose them.
Pre-Register: 2015 Performance Engineering Survey
Ask HN: How can I promote my opensource tool to hit broader audience?
Hello HN, I have built an opensource tool that I found useful in many occasions for different things. How can I help spread the word about it in hopes to help others that have similar issues like I did? I do not plan on monetizing it, but rather try to get it to broader audience in hopes to help others and get better feedback for future improvement... Or maybe the problem isn't there at all, or the people are not perceiving it as one?
Does anyone know how this relates to the "built-in" flash component of Chrome? I don't actually have flash installed on my computer (so it's not available in Firefox or Safari), but I can use it in Chrome because it came with it. Will it just automatically get updated the next time Chrome is updated? Or is there some explicit step I should take outside of waiting for Chrome to update?
Probably no way to say this that doesn't sound overly snarky, but:

If we're talking about justification rather than law, the question can easily be turned around to become "What gives you the right to prevent me from making a digital copy?" Because you made the thing? More likely than not, I'll pay you if your work is any good.

Content producers seem to want to make the jump from physical to digital to gain its benefits without their customers realizing those same benefits, such as the ability to try before buying, or format shifting, etc. They treat this relationship as inherently adversarial in nature, and that's even before DRM gets added to the mix.

If your work is good, I will pay you. You lost the ability to control whether that happens before or after I've sampled the work, and you can thank decades of bad business practices for the justification for that.
Star Trek is full of unfortunate, badly executed attempts at what should have been good ideas. Discovering that all the humanoid species in the galaxy are genetically related would be worthy of an entire season, and might actually make the setting a bit more plausible. But it was just sort of ham-handedly dealt with using silly treknobabble and then quickly forgotten about, because heaven forbid anyone take some science seriously on a science fiction tv show.

There was also a species that had a galaxy-wide empire and used portals instead of starships to get around that only got mentioned once or twice, despite apparently being able to move stars around. And the Dyson sphere could (should) have been it's own series.
That was the argument before Snowden, but we now know that the government passively records and stores as much information as possible on anyone. So they can build a secret file on anyone should they feel like it. And they'll use every piece of information at their disposal (private family life, shopping and travel habits, what websites you browse, what media you consume, etc.) to profile you. Ever download a copyrighted file or view pornography? That will be used against you.
From this point of view I don't think the opposite of "simple" is "complicated" but rather "full-featured". Softwares who try to follow the KISS philosophy often implement the usual 80% of functionalities that take 20% of the time, and leave the rest to other projects.
It's an extremely good idea to lawyer up sooner rather than later, because visas are a huge pain in the backside, and getting it wrong can end up causing a lot of cost and stress.

I was lucky; my wife is from the US, and we've been married for longer than 2 years, which is the magical combination that makes it a lot easier - although obviously, that isn't particularly helpful if you aren't / aren't planning to get married to an US citizen.
I'll admit to not knowing what ControlPersist is. I have some reading to do, it would seem.
Ask HN: Email analytics for your business or newsletter?
A friend and I are tossing around the idea of building a Chartbeat for email. Using pixel tracking we'd show helpful real-time data (number of opens right now, opens today vs. one week ago) and deeper stuff (users that open emails most often, read newsletters the longest, etc.). Would this be something anyone would want to use?
Darpa Wants Better Air-To-air Networking
Funny Lagrangian view on natural elements property. Even the other businesses are just selling combinatorics.

ps: really nice kind of humor running in this article, love it

```
you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small
objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will
attract dirt
you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small
objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will
attract dirt
```
Unusual star could be alien megastructures
I could imagine a naive Bayes classifier would do the trick when it comes to figuring out which ads were written by the same person.
Sure, if you dismiss all the evidence there is, then there's no evidence. If that reassures you, great. Just don't be surprised that the rest of us are not reassured...
I'm vegetarian, not vegan. Some buy only organic, fair-trade food instead of the cheapest, mass-produced variety. Some people are actually informed about the sources of their clothes and choose not to buy some.

There are ethical and moral implications and trade offs for all. I think that judging the OP because VW makes a diesel car that gets only 35MPG instead of 42 and saying it's equivalent to buying clothes from sweat-shop brands is disingenuous at best. As I said above, I do not agree with the lassie-faire sentiment of letting corporations do what they want to buying whatever.

EDIT, for context, the highest level commenter was downvoted below 0 before.
Community: How humans, like ants, use emergence to create things of value that no one mind is smart enough to pull off alone.
Chronostasis - how perception of time slows when you move your eyes quickly
This is more or less what I've heard. Early espresso machine tech was based off mechanical relays, and they didn't play well with early electronic temp sensors. Also, temperature stability was not really a thing anyone was talking about to that degree, so it wasn't a priority for manufacturers until noise was raised.
See Chrome Component Updater:
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3204698?hl=en
> Another benefit of SpiderOak is that they de-duplicate your data, so you may end up using less space on SpiderOak than you do on your own machine.

This benefit soon disappears due to two reasons:

1. If your files change, SpiderOak saves versions of them indefinitely, with each taking up space (of course, all the deltas and stuff). There is no simple way to set it up so that file versions older than X days/years get deleted. The SpiderOak client is completely useless if you want to delete older versions of files because you'd have to wade through all your directories and subdirectories looking for files with multiple versions.

2. The SpiderOak client has also been buggy and ends up creating file versions of unchanged files too (like photos you may have saved once on your computer and never touched). So there's no easy way for you to get to specific places where files have several versions stored and do some cleanup.

This cleanup of older versions matters a lot more if you have a smaller account quota, lesser free space on your account, and you're not willing to pay for the $129 a year 1TB option that is heavily pushed (compared to the other tiers) by skewed pricing on SpiderOak's part.

Overall, SpiderOak is still better though. Dropbox is more dishonest in its approach to deduplication. Dropbox dedpulicates data across user accounts (so if you and I store the same free eBook from Project Gutenberg on our Dropbox accounts, Dropbox saves only one copy) and deduplicates data within your user account for files you may have replicated across folders. But in both the cases it treats your space quota as if deduplication is not done at all, effectively charging you for more than the space you're actually using.
If you're having trouble following the instructions to secure SSH on OSX, try following the directions here: https://mochtu.de/2015/01/07/updating-openssh-on-mac-os-x-10...

Without using the brew dupe and ` --with-keychain-support` flag, I was getting cipher errors when trying to use SSH after following the instructions linked to in TFA.

NB: I am not a security expert.
1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist.

I've also acquired a nice guillotine paper cutter and a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 and have probably scanned 40 or 50 "trade" paperbacks with it, 6 years of Scientific American, several years of Air & Space, Nature: Materials, and assorted other magazines.
So true. If the Egyptians could see what we play with every day, they would be amazed. I imagine there is quite a bit of shock for people in deep jungle/desert tribes that still live in huts when they are introduced to "modern" technology. Magic is probably the best way for them to explain it initially. Of course, "magic", usually just means, "something I do not understand".
From what immigration lawyers have described to me, USCIS is cracking down and making the requirements for an O-1 (And EB-1, by proxy) more strict.

What they want is "objectively verifiable" evidence in the form of press, recognition, awards, earnings, etc. What they value much less now than they used to is famous people telling them how awesome you are (e.g. getting your famous investor to write you a letter is less valuable now). Their stance on this is that if you're as awesome as you say you are, there should be objective third party validation available.

So in your case, since you are a very top expert in a very niche field, you should be able to produce objective verification from experts in the field, peer reviewed publications (or well regarded publications in the field), and so on.

The good news is that the visa actually is designed for people like you :)

Once again though: Talk to an immigration lawyer, this is not immigration advice, just things as I know them :)
If they told you, maybe you'd try to defeat it or create your own version in furtherance of patronage. Instead just be aware:

There's software. Out there. Doing something. (and it's always watching)
It's actually not as great as they make it sound. It would awesome if they open source it so more features can be added. As it stands today it is grossly overpriced for what it does (and how it does it)
Google Search results are not a creative work protected by copyright.
This article doesn't have a whole lot of info on what is really going on.
But why is it news worthy that a US court would NOT allow testimony that a UK and Europe court found it lawful? So these other courts found that it was lawful in the US?
Why don't you pay one of the several startups doing book-scanning services?
Elon Musk and Sam Altman on Thinking for the Future [Video]