skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Clipper chip initiative[1] from the Clinton era completely failed, for two reasons: one, the technology was proven to be flawed, and two, privacy advocates shot it down.

It seems as though all the debates and analysis on this topic have already occurred. Yet, here we are again: a law enforcement agency demanding special privileged access to privately owned consumer electronics because it might contain useful crime fighting information.

It seems to me that the U.S. needs to have a broader discussion about what levels of government surveillance and intrusiveness into private lives we are comfortable with.

The outside threat of terrorism is now the club being wielded to force the issue, but is there really any evidence that this type of increased access helps? We had the Boston Marathon attack, in which two brothers immigrated from Chechnya, a known breeding ground for some of the most brutal terrorists in the world, the Russians actually phoned to warn us about them, and nothing was done.

Similarly, there was chatter in 2000-2001 about an attack involving passenger jets, reported by Israeli and German intelligence agencies. Yet, nothing was done. One would have thought it common sense to scrutinize foreign nationals, especially from Muslim countries with a lot of hostility toward the U.S. among the populace, who were involved in aviation. Reportedly, the Israelis even were monitoring a couple of the 9/11 hijackers in the U.S. at one point.

Should we not be streamlining our intelligence bureaucracies to avoid another Marathon fiasco, before sacrificing what little remains of our privacy on the altar of national security?

1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/clipper-chips-birthday...
> I still think Windows is the hardest and longest OS to install.

But they have gotten way better, too. The last Windows that I regularly used was XP, and I remember it being a pain in the ass to set up (on the scale of "I'll dedicate the whole weekend to getting the OS and drivers installed").

Just recently, though, I set up a dual-boot on my desktop PC, with Arch Linux as default, and Windows 10 for the few games in my Steam library that are not Linux-compatible. I explicitly chose Windows 10 for enabling my DirectX-12-compatible card.

The setup process was surprisingly straightforward and despite the very new hardware, it found all drivers out of the box and everything went smoothly. The only annoyance is the gazillion spying features that you have to disable, and the other gazillion spying features that you cannot disable. But since I'm only playing games on that OS, and the other OS with all personal data is on an encrypted disk, I don't care anyway.
Also, the court isn't asking, its' demanding, and its demanding Apple create a vulnerability in a system designed to thwart such vulnerabilities. I'm not sure it's even possible.

What if Apple didn't fight this yet failed to create a working vulnerability? After all the phone has protections against its firmware being replaced without the passcode!

IF Apple were to fail would they be held in contempt of court?

This is why I have contempt for our courts-- way too many judges who are never punished for their tyranny.
FTA:

> Imagination is our window into the future.

Maybe. But the outlook is from the past, and is subject to the past's failures and to failures of the imagination that are due to the juvenile foible of nostalgia. These posters are, after all, riffs in the genre of travel marketing, which is designed to sell the experience of a place as more than it is; they push a particular and motivated hyper-reality. This betrays their appeal as a longing to be deceived, a longing that is all too happily filled by the marketing arm of JPL.

The very idea that "space travel" is anything like "travel" in the vacationing sense is mere wordplay. Who among us can take 4 years off to "vacation" to Mars? Or 3 for Venus, to stare at the clouds? Who among us wants to die of embrittled bones and radiation sickness in a tin can?

No proper vision of the future can come from the myopic eyes developed in the dim light of popular history. These posters are adolescent fantasy, and mature minds knowingly smirk at the naivete of those so stunted as to be taken in.

EDIT: FWIW, I expect the down-votes. Bringing reality into a discussion about space fantasy always brings down-votes. It's a measure of the quality of discussion on HN.
You might consider a moving meditation. You meditate, but while walking or running. Simple.
Yahoo should buy Godaddy
Aren't there lots and lots of things that you would feel comfortable with the US doing but not those other governments? What makes this particular issue different from all of those other things?
Given the original motivation for the Second Amendment, I think that the even just the FBI being able to remotely disable guns would be pretty concerning to some.
Chinese Defector Reveals Beijing’s Secrets
We don't need to have a discussion. As you point out we already had it.

It doesn't matter. We want privacy, we believe we have human rights.

They don't care. They want power. That's what this all boils down to.

They want power. And they are going to keep trying until they get it, just as they have taken over so much already.
There are scripts for building each package individually, and these scripts list other packages that are required for the build process. There is nothing to enforce the requirement that the build requirements are a subset of the packages built, or even correlated to them.
The typical SV startup attitude is often: "get it done, we don't care how." There are good reasons for this. People - especially in SV - value their freedom. Having that peace of mind allows them to focus, which can be better than the old school, Java-shop, get-20-support-tickets-done-by-Friday style of management.

Another reason: there's a reason startup offices are so "fun": they don't want you to leave. Nerf guns and hard liquor make the office seem like a place to hang out at, so working 10,12,14+ hours a day doesn't seem so bad. You're hanging out with your friends, right? Overtime pay? Never heard of it. We get stock options right? No, our founders wouldn't dilute our shares to favor late stage investors, would they?

So maybe that's the problem.
Telling a good story is everything
Interesting. I didn't see anything like that. Maybe noscript = win?
Are you a Chinese national?

Just wondering what your thoughts on the reasons for this move are.
Python vs. Copy on Write
Sounds like the normal thing in China. Make something illegal, don't enforce it, if someone's saying something you don't like then enforce it specifically against them, keeps everyone else in line.
I'm saying it produces false positives. False negatives are ok for a conservative hiring process, because you're paying for a super low false positive rate with a higher budget for false negatives.

But the whiteboard hazing produces too high a rate of false positives -- candidates who can recite CS trivia, study in a way tailored and overfitted to the interviews, and then pass them and be hired even if they don't actually have the broader skills that the interview was designed to conservatively filter for.

I speculate that new hires at Google aren't much better at anything than new hires anywhere else. They might become better later due to a compounding returns effect of already being at Google, but the hiring process didn't select them because they already were better. Instead, the hiring process is a status show, selectivity theater, to enhance the promotional reputation of a business-conquering nerds stereotype and to enhance Google's bargaining power by convincing people that they are only worthwhile to the extent they jump through interview hoops.
You could try http://calm.com, or the Calm app (disclosure: I work at Calm)
I heard from a former Sun executive that Apple wanted indemnification following netapp's lawsuit. They had spent a long time negotiating over that before they had something mutually acceptable and it was supposed to be signed the day Oracle's acquisition of Sun finished. That left it up to Larry Elison, who refused to sign it and Apple decided to try its luck improving HFS+.
Source-based distributions are not the only solution. >> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
You NEED human emotion not just logic when making laws.

Pure logic is like 100% free markets with zero oversight and government interference, it looks good on paper but not in practice.

Human emotion in laws add things like forgiveness, understanding and compassion, things that mathematics can't help with. I know that it also adds greed, unfairness and discrimination hence the reason it is a constant struggle to find the right balance.
I am in the process of building a service like that too. Mainly because I want it for vetting the candidates that I am trying to hire (I am a principle engineer who also manages).

My focus has been on these things:

-easily distributing and receiving challenges privately (not through github or email)

-tool to help easily and quickly manually review code

-a library of challenges that aren't algorithms based (think like a challenge to fix a bug in a moderately sized system, building a feature onto an existing codebase... I have many ideas for these)

-example qualitative scoring systems (the idea of which comes from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow')
> Debt should be used to purchase an asset that will appreciate or otherwise provide an income in excess of the interest payment on the debt. Full stop.

In 2014 only 34% of households carried credit card debt month to month[1]. The majority of households pay it off every month, simply using it to smooth out irregular cash flow while potentially racking up rewards. They're not purchasing an asset, per se, unless you count the rewards and the tiny amount of bank interest they may receive.

[1]: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-debt...
Camlistore – open-source personal storage system for life
Japan has similar behaviour. For example, it's common practice to pay cash for new cars. (Or at least it used to be not very long ago).
> The reason is that when ZFS detects corruption, it'll lock down the whole fs... and prevent reading/recovery data from it

Depends on what exactly is corrupt, but for file corruption it's generally just a case of warnings in logs/zpool status (which will suggest restoring the file from backup), and IO errors trying to access that specific file. The pool itself should remain intact and online.

It's less clear cut if it's important metadata that's damaged, but as you mention, ZFS is quite aggressive about maintaining multiple copies even on standalone devices.
I'm not sure which "other side" you're targeting with your argument, but as a gun rights advocate its' completely consistent to be a privacy rights advocate-- and basically a human rights advocate.

That it doesn't hurt another, do what thou wilt. Thus gay married farmers should be able to defend their marijuana crops with fully auto AK47s. Marijuana, guns and gay sex don't do bad things to society. Only people can misuse them.
10 travel hacks for European startup conferences
No need. The only thing apple must do is change the ios key management.

1. Once you buy the phone you (via itunes) create a RSA key pair. Put one of those in the phone. That key is set and bootloader uses it to verify loaded updates.

2. ios updates come to you signed by apple, you must resign them with your itunes and then they could be loaded.

So you obtain the ability to sign your own software on your own device.

In that case no amount of Apple assistance can help FBI until they obtain your private key.
We had a few small debts (2 student loans, credit card, car payment) and when a friend explained the debt snowball concept it was definitely the key factor in us paying off our debts faster. For me it felt like I was back in control because I actully had a plan that made sense and seemed actually doable.
to paraphase myself:

I mean sure, yeah, but...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=changes%20brain&sort=byPopular....

so does walking in nature, poverty, cocaine, testosterone, inactivity, porn, drugs, focus, menstruation, Alzheimer's, cellphones, the Internet, The Knowledge, programming, football...

changing it's structure is how the brain reacts to basically any regular stimulus. Thats how it works.

Also n=35, t=3days seems insufficient to rule out any sort of confounding factors.
What is Tower 1 and why do we hate it?
I wonder if it just might. It's using pyGTK and that can be installed using homebrew. But, honestly, I've only taken a literal moment to check so maybe there's another dependency that prevents it.
It is rational to realize human psychology is empirically real and take it into account, including our own. If anything, perhaps we should be even more skeptical of our own reasoning when we believe we are being purely objective and free of bias.

Optimizing the likelihood of consistently following through with a plan is very rational.
Publicis Groupe announces investment in 90 Startups to celebrate it's 90th
I remember seeing a report about this on German TV where they had a big shop's product page loaded on both an iPad and an Android tablet, showing clearly different prices. I don't exactly remember which shop it was. Might've been Amazon, but I honestly don't remember.
Managing all your secrets with Vault
Ask HN: Good resources for systems resiliency / reliability?
My employer has gone through alot of m&a activity, and recently suffered from some significant outages as of late, and we're starting to put an increased focus on improving the reliability of our systems, resiliency to failures and ability to provide support.

It's a big enterprise environment, but I'm in a someone unique business unit that is responsible for a broad variety of critical systems that would typically be in silos. Intuitively, we're pretty good at this stuff where I sit, but we want to level up our capability and lead where we want the rest of the organization to go by example.

Where would you recommend starting? I'm looking for recommendations for best books, resources, types of people to talk to.
1 billion hours played sure is a lot, in some ways.

Of course, humanity racks up a billion person-hours now every nine minutes, so in another, probably more meaningful way, it's not much at all.
Rationality is about which objective function you want to optimize. If it's money, then the snowball is not rational. If something else bothers you more, it might be.
That sounds plausible.
These are great. Something I've always found interesting is how often "looking to the future" campaigns harken back to decades-old iconic art styles. That's not a criticism. I love the juxtaposition of concept and style.

Side note: Am I the only one that sees the No Man's Sky reference in the Venus poster?
No, it's an ongoing contour. The companies that are interested in creating secure boot chains are uninterested in openly documenting the details. I presume both aspects come from the single-minded business desire of centralized control.
They are cutting off the foreign news outlets. If you aren't a mainland Chinese journalist with a press card of that nature they no longer have any interest in your opinion.

Why bother replying to people you don't care about?
There is a Nat Geo special called "Hornets from Hell" that shows video of the honey bee hug. It also gives some nightmare inducing close up footage of these things.

Signed
a wasp phobic person
> Debt should be used to purchase an asset that will appreciate or otherwise provide an income in excess of the interest payment on the debt. Full stop. That is how businesses use debt and that is the only sensible strategy.

Businesses use debt in all sorts of ways, they certainly don't limit it to buying assets. A common use recently is to fund share buybacks which is essentially an easy way to engineer higher earnings per share and make investors happy (but not providing any actual income). Another common use is commercial paper markets which corporations use for short term obligations (payroll!) and to smooth out cash flows, this is actually pretty similar to a credit card on a personal scale.
How Tim Cook, in iPhone Battle, Became a Bulwark for Digital Privacy
Sigh, I guess it's time to enable Click-to-play again[1]. I wish there were a way to just automatically pause on load, without needing to completely disable flash.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802986
Freenode is the place I go to once googling has failed but before raising a question on stackoverflow.

Often you'll be able to speak directly to a dev or a knowledgeable user of an opensource project.

IRC/freenode - an important arrow in your problem solving quiver.
Don't fall into debt. If you must fall into debt, then do so to a friend at no interest. If you still have to fall into debt, do so to a reputable bank and pay it off as quick as you can - sell whatever assets you have if you must.

This of course applies to private individuals, not companies, banks or other institutions.
> “Zenefits has changed a TON in the past couple weeks, and because of that a large part of what I fell in love with at the company no longer exists,” this employee, who insisted on anonymity, said in an email. “For Zenefits employees, it literally feels as if our Zenefamily was overthrown and replaced with government officials that could care less if we come or go.

> “It’s almost as if they want us all to quit so they can start over.”

Oh, wow, gee, that's so awful! Wow! I'm so sorry you can't get away with lying to the government and your customers any longer. I'm so sorry you can't get drunk at work and pretend you're still in college! Oh, this is just awful. Won't somebody do something?

(/s, as if it were necessary)

The "move fast, break things, grow as much as possible" mindset is not always a good thing. If the product you're making has high potential and low risk, if it's replacing something that isn't critical to people's safety and livelihood or to your customer's day-to-day operations, it's great. If you're making something new the world has never seen before, it's great.

But if you're making sure people are getting paid and have medical coverage? That's not an area where it's an acceptable mentality. I think the issue here is not so much that this ethos is fundamentally flawed (though I guess one could make that case), it's that it is not universal and shouldn't have been treated as if it were.

Also - respect to Buzzfeed for taking what could have been a hit piece and making it fairly comprehensive/thoughtful.

(edit: formatting)
SUSE seems to recommend XFS for production data and btrfs for the rootfs that is a read mostly workload that is unlikely to trigger ENOSPC. It is not what I would consider a great endorsement of btrfs.
Ask HN: You can't keep porn from teens, so maybe give them “safe” porn?
I don't have any kids, but I sometimes think about whether I'd try to shelter a pre-teen from things like internet porn. I doubt in 15+ hours when I have a pre-teen I will be able to. I would definitely have "the talk" and discuss how most pornography is not realistic of most people's sex lives (and that it often shows degrading acts one of the actors doesn't appear to consent to).

But maybe it's worth considering providing them with "safe" porn - stuff that shows non-scripted, non-degrading, consensual sex acts. The idea is to give them access to stuff that doesn't objectify women so explicitly or role play things like non-consensual or coerced sex, which seems very prevalent. I can't keep them from whatever niche porn they want to see on their eyeball implant iPhones in 15 years, but maybe I can help provide them context to understand that what they're seeing is unrealistic and isn't how women should be treated without their consent.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how much Apple would be compensated for their time and effort to help the FBI? I assume they would be compensated somehow. But how much? I worry that this is going to be a way for the government to get free (or greatly cost reduced) resources to do its own work.
I have a few links

* http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html
* http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/distributed-systems-theory-for-the-distributed-systems-engineer/
* http://www.hpcs.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~tatebe/lecture/h23/dsys/dsd-tutorial.html
* https://henryr.github.io/distributed-systems-readings/
Oops. http://imgur.com/6koHMyI
Building Microservices: Using an API Gateway Part 2
Two European Carriers to Adopt Ad-Blocking Technology
How is being at peace not enough? Achievements are transient.
Careful about oversimplification there. To put it another way: would you suggest that everyone build their own car? Perhaps people care less about operating system choice than you think. Remember, people within our domain of knowledge represent a very small minority of those seven billion people.
Pitch – learn to sight read music
Soo... you want amateur porn.
"If all ISPs did this by default then a lot of content on the web would disappear several months down the line."

Good. I don't think most of that would be missed much.
> The Vostro is their entry-level business line...

The soho bit was what Jeff Clarke (1) told me, and he runs Dell's PC business. Yes, I have it on tape ;-)

> Optiplex and Precision are desktop brands only

There are Precision desktops and laptops....

(1) http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/vn/bios/jeffrey-clarke

(2) http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/workstations
You aren't likely to ever get an open source baseband, so first off you're going to have to have a platform with very clean separation and little or no DMA.

Then it's going to need a hardware key separation something like what apple is doing with the enclave approach.

Are there any projects like this?
2009: 1 hr

2010: 30 min

2011-2014: 10 min

2015-present: 0-10 min

these are my daily averages. i have one rule: before I go to bed, I must assume the lotus position on the floor in front of my bed.

2015 was particularly a challenging year for me (startup problems), and it was all i could do to even assume the lotus position for a second. so for much of 2015 i really didn't meditate, which was ironically when i probably needed it the most. such is my life.

it takes around 4 minutes for me to reach what i call stage 1. this is when all the normal chatter in your mind ceases and your breathing is synced (i've also noticed that it takes around 40 breaths, which is roughly 4 min, so sometimes for shits and giggles i just count to 40). after much trial and error i've noticed i don't even need to do anything; it's the mere passage of 4 minutes that gets me to stage 1.

thereafter is when the real effort begins. it is a constant effort to reach what i call stage 2, or what i consider the beginning of true mindfulness, which means you are neither thinking of the past nor the future. i would say i only enter stage 2 at seconds at a time, only to fall out again into stage 1 (usually by an intruding thought, and that thought is usually "oh, i've got it!").

to be honest, i don't know what the effects have been for me. i seriously don't feel any different. anyway, how are we to separate the effects of meditation with the normal process of maturation or aging? am i getting calmer because of meditation or because i am getting older?

i take it on faith. faith in data and science. our personal experience with meditation cannot be the guide with which we measure it's effectiveness, because subjective experience is exactly that. i liken it to flossing. i floss my teeth every day but still have worse gum recession than those who do not. my periodontist and dentist chalk it up to genetics, because that is the best they can conjecture based on the current science. we can measure flossing easily; without a brain scanner in our basement we cannot so measure effects of meditation. so from the research i take it on faith that the effects must be beneficial on my brain.