skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It only seems like that because journalists like to write the same things as every other journalist. For almost 20 years I read stories about how China would surpass the United States in both economic and military power.

There are a lot of underlying facts to China's investment driven growth cycle that can be explained in math and global trade balances. Their reserves can be spent very fast. GDP growth doesn't matter so much if it's being spent on infrastructure that won't be maintained and will fall apart. In the past year or two, a giant piece of the GDP growth may have been from financial tricks as insolvent companies try to shift money around, offering high interest rates in the process (continous economic growth for a really long time mean no recession to shake out the leveraged companies which are surviving by finance alone, or outright scams.)

In the very long term, I think what will matter is the messed up demographics (shrinking population off balanced by too many males) and lack of diversity.

Japan had a similar death of growth situation after their investment driven model ran out of steam and their demographics shrunk. The big difference being their population was nearly all living a first world lifestyle by that time. China's isn't.

China can still be an important country. They can make a ton of stuff. They can wield outsized military influence globally thanks to nuclear weapons.
Exactly. Plus, all backups of the iphones on icloud are already unencrypted, so half of the phones are already indirectly unlocked.

EDIT: backups are encrypted, but apple have the keys. See below.
It's disputed because 3 countries claim ownership of the the island as it's within their "territorial" (with the exception of Taiwan which claims it because it's still pretends to represent "real China") waters.

China pretty much made claim to all of the waters it's claim extends as far as the shore lines of Malaysia.

China also extends it's claim over waters outside of the immediate territorial waters by building artificial islands so far only within the 200 n/M of their exclusive economic zone which it claims extends it's coastal waters even further (this isn't exactly the case for this specific island (it's land mass was artificially extended, and a large harbor was built) but an important background point for the entire dispute).

So far countries have refrained from militarizing the islands too much sure they might post a couple of sailors here and there but this is a long rang air defense system capable of shooting down aircraft as far as 400km away, this is basically an S-300/400 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_(missile)] "copy" with a much more advanced radar and better interceptors by all counts.
Of course, I went straight to amazon after the experience with Asus customer support and got a full refund in an hour.
In the end, they will have no choice but to comply.

Do people think this a game? Apple doesn't run things, the federal government does, and will, in the end, use it's full power to get what it desires.
I'm not sure you can draw the conclusion that Apple can push OS updates to a locked phone.

What Tim Cook wrote is that
> "install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation."
> "the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession."

So the FBI has the physical phone already. They can deliver to Apple who can disassemble it and either use a JTAG/Flash programmer on an internal connector to manually write new software, or they could desolder the Flash holding the old OS and place a new one.

Both of these techniques are common enough in the embedded industry that I expect this is what Apple means. They probably can't push an OTA software update and force the install on a locked device.
It looks like the dictator/autocratic states in Asia (Russia/China) with its economy collapsing, is resorting to territorial aggression against neighboring countries in order to get resources and get people to look away from its collapse. China exports fall 11.2% in January, imports down 18.8% http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/14/china-releases-trade-data-for.... Russia's ruble collapses to lowest level, with "Inflation reached 12.5% in 2015 while real wages kept dropping, leaving many people much worse off." everhttp://money.cnn.com/2016/01/20/investing/russia-ruble-recor...

With Russia bumping against all of Europe, and China bumping against Japan/Korea/Taiwan/Vietnam/Malaysia/Indonesia/Phillipines, this is going to be bad for world stability.
Quotes from “Jean-Paul Sartre’s Programming in ANSI C”
Looks like this[0] should solve your issue. Also, it's my understanding that there's a way to patch GRUB for saner EFI behaviour.

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/systemd-vgaswitcheroo-uni...
I don't think so, I believe the function calls need to be there at compile time so that the test actually gets run.

But I'll give it a try tonight though :)
I am quite happy with The Great Suspender for automatically suspending tabs - has a good range of options for tweaking.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
Right, US treats their own citizens marginally better, but they're pretty much equally thugish with their foreign affairs.
IBM has open sourced blockchain code
I believe (after the investigations are concluded) that a word used to describe the operations for Zenefits will be 'fraudulent.'

For the rest, as you state, they have been largely clear about their opposition to perceived out-of-date regulation and have worked tirelessly across the country and world to have new rules or exemptions or trials put in place.

Being disruptive isn't the same thing as breaking the law with willful abandon.
iCloud backups are 100% encrypted. Only some iTunes backups are not, and only if the option to use encryption to protect the backup is not selected.
Maybe the linked page is not badly coded at all - maybe that is done on purpose. Has anyone debugged why the mentioned page [1] is consuming so much CPU time?

[1]

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=1M
How  to Upgrade Your Office Using Science
Quantum Equation Predicts Universe Has No Beginning
But why would you even think apple, google or facebook would be a good bet to defend your privacy in the first place ? They got the most terrible track record of not caring about.

If you have things that you need to be private, don't put it on a smartphone.
I hate these kind of imposed spelling reforms. I'd much rather let language evolve naturally.

Dutch has also had a very controversial spelling reform in the 1990s, which changed some very logical spelling rules into very arbitrary ones. I still resist, but I seem to be the only one.

Pannekoek!
You don't own apple hardware, so you can't protect your device.
If I were Cook, I'd draw a line in the sand. If we are force to comply, we exit the phone business, because we won't make phones that compromise our customer's security.

But that would take more balls than anyone left here in this "Land of the free and home of the brave" seems to have left anymore.
Maybe not, but they are strongly correlated. Strongly enough to make an aggressive assertion like "You're talking nonsense" unwarranted at best.
"Hell is other people's code" is curiously missing from the list.
This is a great way to build public awareness for this issue. Hopefully this will allow more people to get involved in the fight.
I agree, you should be very careful about DRYing tests. Making sure and endpoint touches the authentication layer seems like a very good case to break that rule of thumb.

I've been writing Web Applications for a while now. There was only a handful of cases where I needed to repeat the same test case over and over again (authentication being one of them).

If it happens too often, it's a good tell that you're missing a responsability delegation into a concrete module/class somewhere.
In the PDF, the author says something to the effect of parallel lines on the sphere always cross, and points to the longitude lines in the graphic as an example. But the same example shows lattitude lines that appear parallel on that surface, and don't cross.

Does anyone know why there is an apparent contradiction?
I agree with you. Still, I think it's unfortunate that the same character is used for two different sounds. I'm having a hard time with my French colleagues saying "pidsa" instead of "pittsa" :-)
I think the ask is for a custom recovery mode tool / image.

See https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/DFU_Mode

Not same thing as an OS update.
Ok so is Vulkan basically assembly code targeting GPU's? If so, my only question is - why the heck did it take so long for it to get here?
ExUnit.Case.test/3 is itself a macro.
My reading of that PDF is that Secure Enclave software can be updated too, it simply does an independent verification of the Apple's digital signature.

So while the Secure Enclave enforces the delay between brute force attempts, Apple could still release an update that removes that delay.
I wonder how good the IMU is? If it's any good at all, this might make an excellent device for pairing with my VR rig and using as an input device.
$99 “laptop Shell” for Raspberry Pi or Windows 10 Continuum
I have a dumb question but ... how do you know when to check? I suppose I should google that. AFAIK doctors don't generally check until you show some kind of symptom (no idea what those symptoms are)

I also remember a Ted talk about a high school student who designed a way to test for any cancer for $0.01 per test with 99.9% accuracy. No idea whatever happened to that

https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_andraka_a_promising_test_for_...
They are, but apple have the keys : https://thehackernews.com/2016/01/apple-icloud-imessages.htm...

So basically, they could be in clear text, it's pretty much the same.
How to get hired at a startup when you don't know anyone
I made different experiences.

And do you have this ultrabook or ever touched it yourself?
not at all. I'm just pointing out that you're both trying to make your points in such a convoluted way that neither is gaining any ground.
It's Hollywood, Jake.
I often do this with OS X Chrome:

killall -9 -m "Chrome Helper"

It kills all Chrome tab renderers, but you can easily reload them where you left off. Ultimate battery saver.

Chrome seems to even remember textarea / input contents.

Edit: Not that I've ever had any issues with that simple killall, however the following might be safer, it tries to match the process path, name and "--renderer" command line parameter:

pkill -9 -f "Google Chrome\.app/.*/MacOS/Google Chrome Helper .*--type=renderer"
I like the position apple is taking, However, after reading the letter, I noticed it misses a point I consider even more important than just "a dangerous precedent".

Apple is selling devices on the whole planet, not just in the USA. So, what's the FBI (an American agency) is requesting is not dangerous for only American citizen, but also for iPhones' owners in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania. Hell, these people are not even part of the debate, because they don't belong in the "American democracy".

If I'm going to be affected by someone else's policies, I would like to be at least allowed in the discussion.
There are a few interesting points in this discussion that all of the C/Rust/C++/ObjectiveC/Go/Java discussion has swamped. For those who would like to find the discussion that is not argument about computer programming languages:

* Is Google Public DNS a potential mitigator? Sub-thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11113113 .

* Is Google Public DNS a potential exploit vector? Sub-thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11111300 .

* Are there any BIND settings that are potential mitigators? Sub-thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110646 .

* What happens if one's DNS proxy server doesn't itself support sending >2048 byte answer messages to the BIND DNS client library in the first place? Sub-thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11111617 .

* How exploitable is this? What about Windows? Sub-thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110443 .

* What about MacOS 10? Sub-thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11113471, and a mention of BSD libc at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11111702 .
Ask HN: Should I come to work while sick?
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/04/17/lavabit-company-...
That is an excellent point, and of course you are correct.
It could be A LOT more clear. The first sentence is, of course, obvious to everyone and probably already known by people searching for help on sapply.

If you have a family of functions that "sort-of" do similar things, the most critical thing to communicate is some clear sense of when to use one or another of the functions. This doc degenerates into unhelpful jibberish instead.

Perhaps a close reading of it would have helped the OP, but there is a unnecessarily high cost in frustration.
I originally learned about the Enigma from Len Deighton's "Blood, Tears, and Folly" (http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Tears-Folly-Objective-World/dp/0...). In it he doesn't even mention Turning, and gives full credit to the Polish code-breakers. I thought the recent focus on Turning was more of a "Hollywoodazation" of the event than anything else.
Ok, I read the entire thing once again. Nowhere in there do they state that they can comply with the request, only the consequences that would result if it were possible. In fact they say they "even put that data out of our own reach".

If it is stated very clearly, can you quote me a sentence?

In the security guide linked here it seems possible for this iPhone model but not later ones.

Edit: According to the discussion below Apple can ship updates to the secure enclave. I don't know if that's possible to a locked phone.
But if you're planning on brute forcing the encryption key, this side-effect doesn't matter.
Instead of FBI paying apple engineers to hack a phone, why don't they ask their kids !? It would probably save millions of dollars.
Add engagement features to your existing live app
Humor aside, non-durable construction creates more electronic waste. For a place with 1 billion+ people I'd think twice before creating something that won't last.
They state that they can push an update that makes brute-forcing possible by disabling software-enforced delays between attempts.

Apple's security PDF says that the iteration count is calibrated so that one attempt takes 80ms in hardware, so that's the hard limit on the brute forcing speed, regardless of any updates Apple releases.

This means that a long alphanumeric passphrase is secure, but a 6-digit passcode could be broken in half a day, and a 4-digit passcode would take just a dozen minutes.
LOL security???

That code doesn't belong on a computer that ever connects to the internet.
One of the greatest crimes of recent history is allowing lawyers to write a document so confusing only their circle of lawyer buds can understand it. Much of the "legal" world is so obfuscated that ignorance SHOULD BE a valid excuse for breaking the law.
Survey on Cross-Platform Mobile App Development Frameworks
Hello,

I'm in the middle of writing my Master's thesis in Applied Computer Science, focusing on cross-platform mobile app development frameworks.

I've developed a survey to gain insight into interest and familiarity surrounding 12 of the most recurring frameworks found in academic and industry literature.

The results will be published as part of my thesis, and in a blog post (Medium) later this year.
The survey should take roughly 2-3 to finish, and is anonymous.
Thank you in advance.

Survey link: https://surveyplanet.com/561cb2cda06be968625576b4
As a french programmer, since I'm about 12, and expatriate for about 20 years, I learned long ago that:

1) I needed a qwerty keyboard do I don't develop RSI trying to type braces on a french one.
2) I also decided that getting RSI trying to type the accents on a qwerty keyboard was silly.

I thus type french without any accents at all. Sometime the result is funny :-)
Apple could also put the software under a free license. The community could remove any backdoors that Apple is required to put in. They could still sell the hardware if they wanted to keep making money, just like Google does now.
some things require more understanding and experience, for no obvious benefit...in which case they're anti-patterns, or not best practice in language design.

there are a lot of things in R that are good but it's an old language and there's a lot of cruft.

like "R has three object oriented systems (plus the base types), so it can be a bit intimidating." http://adv-r.had.co.nz/OO-essentials.html

and believe it or not, there are things that require looping through a data frame and when I had to do that a few years ago it was unbelievably slow... going multithreaded was non-trivial, writing that section in C was non-trivial...ended up rewriting the whole thing in python and was a lot happier.
Yeah pairing things can be a pretty annoying process especially if it ever loses pairing.

I've used Xbox Smartglass before which works pretty well as a controller replacement. I haven't tried using my phone as a remote. Do you find yourself having to look at your phone to control stuff?
I am happy AAPL is taking this stance. But I can't help but believe that is has very little to do with liberty, and very much with the bottom line. Either way, I guess we should be grateful for little mercies.
Ah yes. You are right, I was confusing those two things. Thanks for the clarification!
I like to imagine that in the end the people run things. (I know, I know.)

Apple may have to comply with this order (after appeals), but this also helps muster the troops for the battle against universal backdoors.
TIL if I close an app, my battery last longer.

Seriously, you should always close what you do not need. It is not only for energy efficiency, but for security as well.
Cleaning the Air
> corruption is everywhere, not just in China

If the famous US corruption cases, like Flint, have taught me anything, it's that corruption in US is on much lower level than in countries like Russia or China, and people and media are much, much less tolerant to it.

Basically, Flint scandal could never happen in Russia because no one would ever give a fuck.
The Secret Sexual Life of Zhou Enlai and the Limits of Historical Knowledge
Thank you, and I'm proud of Lavabit. They're at the top of my Balls list now.
That's what helped me learn French in school. I had no idea whether "fenetre" was male or female and whether it had an accent, until I remembered "fenestra".

Didn't help, though. I dropped it as soon as I could (and I dropped Latin a year earlier).
What's all this talk about pushing updates to locked phones? I have to get involved every time there's an OS update for any of my iDevices. That damn red dot on Settings.app just stares at me while I try to find a time I'd like to be without my device for half an hour.
It's not really built into ‘hardware’, it's enforced by the Secure Enclave, which is software-based and accepts software updates signed by Apple. It's secure against kernel exploits and third-parties, but not against Apple.
Apple's encryption appears to be done in such a way that government entities can safely use them as well as "consumers." But what may happen, is that Apple will be force to produce 2 kinds of iPhones. One for consumers, with strong encryption, but a "backdoor" for warrant "cough" based access. 2nd type of iPhones for government use (string encryption, no backdoors)

They may already have this in place now, but what we are seeing now is a show. They are testing how people/consumers are going to react to this situation. Out government probably figures that nobody will care in the end.

In the USA, we have lost our liberty. It's time to wake up and see what is happening. It's getting worse & the people within our government are working hard to enslave us even more.
I wonder if we can then reduce this example to a 1-finger sequence. Could a court require you to turn over all of your fingerprints, but not identify the (1 character) sequence?
If it can work with one phone, Apple can easily modify it to work on any phone
If it was an iPhone 6, the FBI could just use the dead finger to unlock the phone, no?
>If you did commit a crime, we want to convict you.

That's a massive assumption in an age when there is a law, somewhere, that make you and me criminals. It's a small ask for laws that are impractical to enforce remain impractical.
I actually intentionally got the "900p" lowres version (also matte) because I didn't feel like dealing with HiDPI support. I _love_ the click pad. 3 finger click (for middle click) is a million times more reliable than 3 finger tap in my experience.
Not really Mac specific since it's a feature of Chromium and by inheritance Chrome.
Which Type of Exercise Is Best for the Brain?
Secure Enclave is not really ‘hardware’; despite being isolated from the main OS and CPU, it is still software-based and accepts software updates signed by Apple.
We're the odd folks out in wanting the matte screens.

Glossy looks way better in stores (especially since Apple controls the lighting to make glare incredibly unlikely) and in pretty much any case where you do not have direct light. It's what the public wants.
I agree, I may have been a bit open ended with my previous statement.
S-400 long range capability is mostly theoretical, as there's no stock of the 40N6 missile capable of it. Especially doubtful in case of China, given the secondary nature of their missile technology.
Assuming the attacker used Touch ID.
Some of the big PC vendors have started catching up. I just bought an HP Envy for my father in law, and the hardware is pretty solid, and it had some features I really like(256GB ssd and 1TB hybrid drive, 16gb ram stock, nice display). It is really snappy, and despite his being non technical and wary of moving from Windows 7 to 10, he got on with it really quickly.

I think there is another issue with PC battery life here. Nothing heats up/drains my macbook pro's battery life quicker than windows 10. I have tried various power settings, but nothing ever quite "fixes" it. I have had to do the following "tweaks" to improve battery performance of Windows 10:
1)Disable Cortana(at least as much as you are able to)
2)remove this "phone companion" app that seems to reinstall with every new update
3)adjust power management which noticeably slows performance and or annoyingly shuts down the screen.
4)randomly go in and kill rogue battery robbing processes

Mac OS seems to seamlessly handle power management regardless of what Im doing- including multitrack audio recording/processing. I never hear the fan while running OSX only. But without fail my laptop heats up and the fan starts cranking while I have Windows running. I am getting closer to not ever needing to run windows, but I still do some .NET work and work with Sql Server. For me, its a huge turn off to hear a laptop constantly fighting to stay cool. In fact this is the major flaw I saw with the HP laptop I got my father in law. It would get hot and crank the fan. In my anecdotal opinion, windows is a poor laptop OS, and I don't see how there could be a better pc/laptop/tablet until Microsoft figures out how to manage power. I don't have a use case for Linux, so things could be better there, but Linux is still relegated to niche users for the most part in laptops.
misspelled title in Washington Post. wtf