skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading something like this is really strange to me in Australia. We've had chip-and-PIN for ages - August last year, signatures were phased out completely.

I'm paying with my phone via Commbank Tap & Pay [1] and the one part of going overseas I'm not looking forward to is going backwards in banking systems & technology.

Initially, chipped cards were (are?) slower because the approval was transmitted via dial-up (!) or GPRS. The newer terminals (that also support NFC) are using 3G and are fine speed wise. Some retailers even do batched approvals - the terminal does some kind of check and displays "offline approve".

1: https://www.commbank.com.au/personal/online-banking/commbank...
And yet, similar policies have given us "export-grade" encryption and funded projects like the clipper chip.

There's no way a single country can block secure, end-to-end encryption forever, but they can sure make things hard for a while.
Digital Communication Systems
What's the current status of OpenCL? Is it usable as a cross platform compute substrate? I haven't really paid attention to the GPGPU landscape in five years or so...
Ask HN: Tor accessibility for throwaways?
Hi,

I think it would be nice if one could make a throwaway account with the following properties:

1. It cannot upvote or flag comments or posts (I'm under the impression everyone has a multiplier based on magic factors you've found useful in deterring voter rings; this account has a multiplier of 0.)

2. It can only interact with stories it has created

3. It is marked in a different color than "new-user green"

4. It is able to use Tor even though their account is fresh.

Unfortunately my reasoning for this did not fit into 2000 characters. If you'd kindly follow the link below, it shouldn't take too long to read (it's about 600 words). I apologize for the inconvenience.

http://pastebin.com/g1r4V3Ds
It has almost never been a safer time to live in Europe than it is now. Look at crime rates, they are dropping everywhere. Homicide is down, robberies are down. Terrorist attacks happen so rarely that they almost don't count. The number of people killed in traffic accidents in the USA on the same day of the Paris attacks is almost the same as the number of people killed by terrorists. I'm sorry to be so cold, but they didn't even manage to make a dent in the stats graph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_European_Unio...
Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Tookit
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The Google app now understands you a little better
> but they can sure make things hard for a while

Only for their own citizens and trade partners that cooperate with their unrealistic demands.
I think perhaps you aren't looking at this clearly, because with a swap you have exposure to forward credit spread premium - the market's implied expectations about where LIBOR will be versus the rate from the near risk free overnight rate curve. In 2008 this blew out, and in spite of institutional changes, it's still possible that one day this might happen again.
So you do in fact have a long term exposure to forward credit quality, just as you do with UST, except that the clearing house has no taxing power and cannot print money.
The primary deficit is shrinking, whatever one may think of Mr Obama - and that's hardly surprising when you look at unemployment. So your claim about causality requires further articulation.

It's also not the case that a UST position is not collateralised. If I sell short 100 mm tens, and I borrow these on the market against cash collateral from my receipt from the sale then if the price drops 10 points I get that back in my bank account - just as with a cleared swap position.
Of course, that does not take the elephant in the room into account. By using proper steganography, terrorists could use encryption pretty much unnoticed.
> Why are people so uncomfortable deferring their opinions to people who know these things?

I think you might find that a non-trivial subset, if not outright majority, do deferring their opinions to people who know these things.

They often get information and analysis from the news, their government, and that "one guy who is good at computers". I use pgp and gpg, I use ssh, and I am a programmer. I know very little about how cryptography works, but likely enough to appraise someone else's ability to shepherd such discussion and policy.

So what heuristic would you apply here? I love the EFF but they have not succeeded in any mainstream endeavor. I do not mean to belittle their accomplishments, but what percent of people reading this article know what the EFF is?
You get my comment and up vote instead.

I'm increasingly frustrated by the discovery of major projects where this sort of "spaghetti code" is considered acceptable. Few of them deem it a priority to remediate or even just document the mess. Of particular note is the lineage of build system scripts used by first Gentoo then mutated by the chromeos team, finally used by and dramatically simplified by the coreos team who forked off from the chromeos fully and are cleaning up the mess left by the chromeos team hacking away on these bash scripts. There are dozens of places where simple hash bang python scripts would have cleaned up hundreds of lines of bash boilerplate.

I'm incredibly frustrated by the lack of willingness to decide that the outcome is key and the build scripts should be a testable part of the release process and a growing number of places I find have wound up considering the build scripts part of their release tests therefore they should change as infrequently as possible.

Not even going to start talking about programs that don't have stand alone build/install instructions because they always generate builds inside some kind of harness like a Debian or RPM source package.
Tim Cook: Apple won't create 'converged' MacBook and iPad
These machines have backed up the local grocery stores. Seriously terrible UX. Worse, it was a forced upgrade; swipes are rejected.
As brought to our attention in an earlier HN discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271139
This is why I'd rather be a Google(YouTube) than facebook or twitter. Imagine all the fake accounts, likes, bots, unknown spam that are giving us the next geocities.

It's simply cheapens everything about social media in general.
If the latest James Bond movie were released 15 years ago, I would not have found the villain's plan convincing at all. Using random terrorist attacks as an incentive for governments to participate in global surveillance? Give me a break.

Now, the Bond villain's agenda so obviously makes sense that it took all the suspension-of-disbelief fun out of the movie. I watched it the day after the Paris attacks. I couldn't help but feel as if Spectre were just a historical piece with some fictional characters added for dramatic effect. Of course that's how surveillance creeps into modern societies. We don't even need cheesy villains to act as masterminds of a convoluted plot. The assholes at Daesh can get the job done just as effectively, thank you very much.
Postgres high-availability cluster with auto-failover and cluster recovery
Well, I'll just say there are at least two kinds of people in this world, those who tend to see things for what they are (not 100% of the time but often enough) and those we need reality to really hit them hard before they finally understand.

I see a lot of people on HN, you and @gnaritas included, living in that second camp. Refusing to see reality for what it is and insisting the emperor has beautiful clothes. I imagine you and @gnaritas as people who would dismiss all the mounting evidence as the Nazi's prepared to kill millions of Jews, including openly stating they were going to perfect the techniques used by the Turks to kill a couple million Armenians during the first world war.

Report after report came out of these regions for both Genocides. Images, telegraphs all all sorts of evidence of what was coming and what was happening. There were those who screamed bloody murder and saw the mounting evidence for what it was: A path to genocide. And, of course, there were those who said shit like "Oh, never mind the Armenians" or "Never mind the Jews", "more people die in car accidents every year, what they hell are you people crying about". And millions died.

I am not going to continue going back and forth with people who refuse to see reality for what it is. We --the World-- are not headed for a good place. We could be headed for something truly horrific.

Creating equivalence with car accidents and cancer and arguing from a position of insanely ridiculous minutiae in the face of attacks, threats videos, beheading, suicide bombers, mass killings and the terrorists themselves getting on the internet and social media to tell all of us EXACTLY what their intentions ares. Well, my friend, this is just insisting to be blind to a reality that is out there in plain sight for all to see.

I fear people like you simply refuse to understand even after six million people perish in a Genocide. I would love to be able to interview some of the people who dismissed the mounting evidence for the first and second genocides of the 20th century. I wonder what the people who ignored the images and telegraphs thought of themselves years later as they realized what happened and how they refused to accept reality.

So, that's it. I don't know where this is headed but it looks worst with ever turn. I hope world leaders take action and stop this snowball from hell from leading us in a direction none of us wants to even consider. I am not going to argue with you any more because we obviously don't see eye to eye.

I truly hope you never get the evidence you need to convince you that you are being blind and you are looking at this the wrong way. And I say that sincerely because that day will not be a good day for humanity.
So he's distributing the Anarchist Cookbook?
Unless you happen to be a govt advisor on Iraq.

The medical report was recently sealed by the govt. for 70 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)
No, goading us into war really is their strategy, whether it fits with your worldview or not[1]. They currently rule over lands whose governments we destroyed, using weapons that we brought there and gave to the "good guys". They are well aware of this, and it is what they want.

[1] https://azelin.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/abu-bakr-naji-the...
I remember being impressed by someone using windbg to map an address back to the pointers. I was never useful with windbg but looking now it looks like it has a builtin to scan memory for values; I'm not sure how you'd go back from those addresses to code, though.
Large enough growth markets can tell the Apples etc. that they can either allow interception for surveillance or abandon their market [not too dissimilarly from what Saudi Arabia did with BB] see [1]. I don't think Apple and Google would simply give up on the biggest two markets to take a stand and allow local counterparts eager to comply to take their growth markets away. It's possible of course they take a stand, but I don't think they would. If not the local operators, then BlackBerry would comply.

[1]http://www.brighthand.com/news/rim-vs-india-and-saudi-arabia...
In the last couple weeks, two of the major banks I have credit and debit cards with have forced me to cancel the old cards to 'upgrade' to their chip cards. Aside from the incredible annoyingness and inconvenience of dealing with their forced measures, does anyone have any insights on why they are doing this, and now? I don't feel good about it, and it makes me want to move banks.
5 things to expect at Startup Weekend Lagos 2015
You can use a good number of these today with Retrolambda: https://github.com/orfjackal/retrolambda
Broom and your destiny/ jadhu aur kismat
Indeed. Some of the terrorists were from Molenbeek, a Brussels suburb that has been out of control for the authorities for decades. The same applies to some Parisian suburbs.

Rather than investing in these suburbs and getting human eyes and ears on the ground. We spend many millions more on bombs and anti terror units.

Encryption is an easy scapegoat and convenient for power grabs. Saying 'we mismanaged these suburbs' takes political courage.
My intuition is that police would prefer hostages behave passively to maximize their odds of survival.

As problem solvers and technologists it's tempting to think we hold the cards, but I think this is an example of problem technology does not do well at. Capabilities for hostages are necessarily capabilities for hostage takers. The reality is if someone is determined to kill many people, they are going to succeed.

Maybe we should focus on making life better for the people still around to enjoy it, and promoting peace and nonviolence in our own communities.
I strictly compartmentalize. You could call it lying, I suppose. But it's mostly just not sharing anything between compartments. There's nothing complicated for me to remember.
NTPsec beta released
what is your startup?
The design of the Strict Haskell pragma
So Paris will do a 'lot' about it, the French will do 'something' about it, the EU will do 'little' about it, and the world will do 'less than nothing' about it?
The issue isn't whether the invasive surveillance is acceptable or not.

The issue is that it won't work. If you introduce mandatory backdoors into any commercial messaging system, it will not be used; the Bad Guys(tm) will simply return to using open source crypto, like pgp-over-whatever that we've had for decades.

I.e. if strong crypto is outlawed, then only outlaws will have strong crypto.

The intelligence agencies know this. Anyone pushing for backdoors in the name of counter-terrorism is either a fool or a liar.
So if the government is complaining that ISIS now uses technologies that it can't yet crack... and they know this... who exactly are they intending to spying on? Not ISIS, just the rest of us.
I am more afraid of the bs lobying people try to push using terror attacks than i am of actually dying in an attack.

Just by looking at the numbers and the actual risks involved in being effected.
Like the saying goes, if you outlaw guns, only the outlaws will have guns.

Seriously. Ever heard of steganography?

Police being able to listen in to communications for selected individuals, based on court orders is of course something that is necessary for safety, nobody is arguing that. The difference is the scale of the ability to survey. You can argue that the scale doesn't matter, but it does. The only difference between uber and your local taxi company with 10 cars is also scale. Being able to scale surveillance trivially is the thing that must be fought against, because it erodes the freedom of people. After all, the freedom of people to live their lives as they wish is what we're protecting after all, isn't it?
Be sure to test your code. Even if it's obvious that it should work.

Learn everything you can from code reviews. If you are not humbled in code reviews then the reviewers are doing it wrong.

Get good at the non-programming parts of the job too. You'll be surprised at how much of your day will be spent on configuration, builds, etc. Try to learn this just like you would with programming instead of asking the senior dev to set something up for you.
> They could demand access to interception or else the app [store] is not allowed.

Thus forcing terrorists to use Android or a desktop OS? Big whoop.
> new, difficult-to-crack encryption technologies

Have there been any NEW encryption technologies lately? The only one I can think of is ZRTP. Everything else is based on well understood and well tested theories.
I think this essay made it pretty clear she wanted to be in the background. Gender equality is about allowing individuals choices and respecting and supporting those choices.
Aye, reading these articles is a salient reminder of how disconnected journalists are from reality, and thus how easily hoodwinked by authority (when they are not simply complicit with it).

We've been able to send end-to-end encrypted messages to multiple simultaneous recipients, via arbitrary de-centralized transports, using standardised protocols & open-source tools, for decades.
Typical. They blame Snowden, too. 'Hey, look, a chicken!'

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-abou...

More people should read that story.
It's not as if they can't tell Google to put out a 'special' version for their country. Or put out their own infiltrated version and take whatever measures necessary to "own" the OS. They could poison DNS for "favorite terrorist distro".

It's not to make it 100% foolproof, it's to make it so that any misstep would reveal them. In other words, make the whole of their communications system leaky _somewhere_ not necessarily everywhere.
Not. But I hate NSA&Co even more as they use such tragedies to further their agenda[0]. If spy agencies did their primary job and focused more resources on actual spying and infiltration of terrorist organizations (not mass surveillance as they do now), I'm sure results would be much better.

0. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/encrypted-mes...
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/05/the_eternal...

Here, read and understand.
> This only really shows that Jessica (assuming your implication of who the primary judge was in that instance) may also advocate for particular founders, not just veto some.

Unless you are going to accept everybody or reject everybody, there are going to be valid reasons to advocate for some founders and advocate against others. I don't understand why you insist on focusing on the latter but ignore the former.

> Then lady justice should not make a decision.

So you only make decisions when you have a logical argument that justifies a particular choice? You must lead a very...interesting life.

Also, your use of the word "justice" is not, um, justified. Whether or not someone gets funded by YC is not a matter of justice. Nobody has a right to YC funding.

> What theory allows you to accurately predict what I will do, purely based on your observation of me, or even under cursory verbal examination? I don't think that there is one.

You're right; there isn't one. So what? Do you have a theory that allows you to accurately predict how a food you've never tasted before will taste to you? How a color or material you've never seen before will look to you? How an experience you've never had before will feel? Yet somehow you manage to taste new foods, see new colors and materials, and have new experiences.

You don't need a theory of how something works in order to do it. People accurately threw spears long, long before anyone discovered Newtonian physics. People ate nutritious food and got energy from it long, long before anyone had a theory of how metabolism works. And people make accurate judgments about other people even though nobody has any very good theories of how the human mind works.

> That people in this thread believe that there could be one is strange.

That you believe that you need logical arguments and theories in order to do anything at all is strange.
It's certainly convenient, but I find it a little scary that the PIN is not needed on purchases under $100. Granted, your phone is going to have its own security lock before you can run the app, but what about the smart chip debit cards in your wallet?
> Indeed. Some of the terrorists were from Molenbeek, a Brussels suburb that has been out of control for the authorities for decades. The same applies to some Parisian suburbs.

Can you explain that a bit? There is not enough political will to impose order there or something else?
It means that anyone strange to the code is able to pick a pile of printouts and have a ruff understanding of the code.

Which is very hard in languages that are a pile of hieroglyphics.

This is very important in teams of 50+ developers, scattered around countries with high attrition rate, having various skill levels.

Also generating boilerplate is just 1% of what an IDE is capable of.
We were among the first 10-15 customers at Zenefits (IIRC), and they were really great when they were small. The problem is that they scaled far faster than they could handle, and we are now happy customers of Gusto.

My only rule with Benefits and Payroll is: do not make me look like an ass in front of my employees. If they don't get paid, or if they lapse in coverage, that makes me look like an ass. They give exactly zero shits about which company failed and where and why; they only know that they lapsed in coverage or didn't get paid. Zenefits screwed that up multiple times, and Gusto has yet to let me down.

That's not to say Zenefits is filled with bad people - I happen to like Parker quite a bit, for example. They just aren't set up to help me win quite yet, whereas Gusto seems to have figured it out.
One of my good friends is Canadian, and he is a manager at a Shopper Drug Mart in Toronto. He said once Canada went to chip-and-PIN, that the incidence of fraud essentially went to zero. The only time there is fraud is when the cashier isn't paying attention and allows a transaction that is swipe instead of PIN, via some special way the customer can swipe the card (pulling it out too quickly or something).

The idea that PIN doesn't bring fraud down to almost zero is ridiculous and it really is about fees. That's why debit card transactions with PIN have such low interchange, because the PIN brings the fraud down to essentially zero as well.
They don't have to block every user using unlawful encryption -- they just have to have a law that lets the penalty be enough that a few high profile convictions will deter enough law-abiding people that it isn't worth the risk.

At that point, they can simply listen to all traffic and, if there are packets that aren't listenable due to encryption, assume ill intent, then be free to react appropriately.

Assuming high enough signal ratios in detecting encryption, it might actually prove that encoded messages, or steganography proves to be more effective at preventing state-level eavesdropping... they won't prevent a determined state from getting your secret content, but it could be enough that, if the messages looked unencrypted, they would be passed over for the more obviously encrypted messages -- hiding in plain sight, as it were.

Note, this is not an endorsement of any privacy invasions whatsoever, but musings on what a post-4th-amendment-obliteration world might look like for the privacy-minded.
That's an argument against centralized encryption with corporate sponsors. Says nothing about government ability to control distributed applications of open-source crypto.
Cryptography exists independently from any corporation that may or may not use it in a messaging system.
Tech-savvy people often miss the forest for the trees on this one. Once you get past the engrossment in implementation details, the fundamentalist political philosophizing, and the harping on spurious and mostly anecdotal evidence for Western police states, there actually is good reason for government surveillance of W/Obama scale. There is a distinct threat that global terror will increase in scope by orders of magnitude, due to a) gains in message efficacy, b) positive feedback loops for recruitment (i.e., bombing Iraq over and over again), c) weapon availability gains, d) geopolitical posturing, or e) a black swan. Of what has been revealed from Snowden's leaks, the worst intentional (read: potentially malicious) invasion of privacy was NSA employees making fun of tapped conversations. If that and you not being able to torrent 24-bit flacs off of what.cd is the cost we have to pay for security in a future which is less certain than is widely acknowledged, sign me up.
Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden