skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's all just bullshit, and I don't have time to deal with bullshit like that

It's bullshit to you, but it doesn't make Linux bullshit - others prioritise different aspects.

You care about HiDPI - perhaps you are a designer, so it's important. But, you're not everyone. For example, I have no need for HiDPI and I personally have much more focus on the power and control Linux gives me. I wouldn't want HiDPI if I had to give up a proper Window Manager.

Your choice is fair enough, but it's no more than a personal preference.
Talk is cheap and these internet posts - from Tim Cooke, you, and me - are just talk. The security of this nation depends on Apple (and Google et. seq.) supporting us with its dollars as much as possible.

And I'm not optimistic that the stockholders care about anything more than doing the opposite.
To buy US bonds you need dollars to pay for them. So you have to buy dollars, paying with your own currency. Which changes the exchange ratio in favor of dollar by means of the supply/demand law. That's how buying bonds devalues juan.
I don't see how this "reassuring"; to me it's rather very confusing (as mentioned in many other comments).

If Apple could in fact write a software backdoor, doesn't it mean that the backdoor exists, at least potentially?

And how can one be sure that Apple is the only company able to build that door? At the very least, couldn't the right Apple engineer be either bribed or forced (by terrorists or the government) to build it?

"Impossible" should mean "impossible", not "not yet done, but possible".
Everyone unfamiliar with the sea should watch some videos like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSgSMZsMh4A

They all were rescued later, btw. But it was clearly a close thing.
Because you can only deploy it, when you have Apple's private key.
Presumably this is the older non-skylake model. I heard the new one (9350) will ship with an Intel wireless card which already has support in the kernel. But I don't think it's out yet.

I've got the new non-developer version and I did have to jump through some hoops to get the wireless working. And suspend still doesn't work. But other than that it is the best laptop I've used.
smells like a scam
I remember the old dead community of OpenSource Phone - http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page
This is bringing back memories of Allaire HomeSite and my early days of HTML and PHP and CSS and Flash. ColdFusion is really still around?!
If your ambient temperature is 40 K, I submit that you are not human and are, in fact, living on Pluto.

Did you mean Fahrenheit?
Postal Experiments (2000)
Quite a few times I've read of mass lynchings in India:

https://www.google.com/search?q=india+lynch+mob
But how do you get the firmware updated on a locked phone? My understanding is all updates (historically) have required the phone to be unlocked and connected to the internet?
Does seem like the gnome folks value their purity over any kind of usability.

A very popular feature with gnome + thunderbird for awhile was that new email would trigger a desktop notification. Mentioning a snippet of subject and body of the email.

If you thought it was interesting you could click on it and it would open that email in the main window. Handy if you get lots of email and filter heavily, it might be in any of 100s of folders.

Then they decided that notifications should be read only, so now when you mouse over it it goes transparent. There's no way to figure out what email that was, so it just taunts you, then disappears.

As if a notification you can click on would hurt anyone.
That is worth doing; but I still find it quite likely that such a backdoor is existent or doable.
I have exactly opposite experience. What I've bought from Apple ended up breaking or revealing hardware issues after the warranty was over and outside of the series that was entitled for free replacements.

I bought Apple Mouse and found that I have to clean it every week and that to do this I have to break it, because it's not meant to be taken apart for cleaning. And to take it apart I had to deal with two tiny connectors and three very small screws and other paths that are rather hard to handle. Compare with my Logitech mouse: I can easily take it apart with a plain screwdriver and over ten years of everyday use I only had to do it twice.

I tried to install new memory into my old Mac Mini myself (there's no Apple service where I live) and while I'm reasonably savvy with this, I ended up breaking one of the plastic holders and probably broke the sound somehow, because now it is silent. All this was in vain though, because it turned out Macs require some very specific memory chips, usually twice as expensive as normal ones.

The only working piece of Mac hardware I still own is an old Mac Mini that is practically unusable since I've had to upgrade the OS to v10.9 or 10, I forgot which. Everything became so slow I could not believe it. Fortunately, all I need from Mac is to compile code for Mac OS X and I can do this via SSH from my Windows laptop. It certainly works faster this way.

I don't think I'll ever buy anything from Apple unless I absolutely need it for business and that is going to be the cheapest option.
iOS Security Guide [pdf]
> Apple making it abundantly clear, that if they comply (or are forced to comply) with the All Writs Act of 1789 to create this particular back door, then that opens the floodgate moving forward for all sorts of requests to add backdoors/decrease security.

I read it differently. Apple is saying that if they make this particular backdoor, then this very backdoor can also be used in other scenarios, to crack other phones (i.e. the backdoor would apply to all iPhones C, not just to this one).
Delicious now showing sponsored links in their RSS feeds
mldb looks great.
But I was referring to distributed model building, in a horizontal way. Which SparkML does, and TensorFlow says it does.
If they can implement a distributed Gradient Boosting Tree across nodes, maybe even with GPU support (Although I'm not sure if it's applicable) that could be huge.
Buildling Distributed Systems from Scratch – Part 2
I wouldn't call it "critical" like that. If robot farming became impossible for some reason, and old farmers started dying of old age in large numbers, and if there really were a shortage of farmers or farm laborers, then those who really needed their services would offer a higher wage, raising the price until some young people took it. Assuming Japan has a functioning market economy.

I wonder where this claim came from? (not sure how serious the concern you're talking about is, but let's run with it) Who benefits from persuading concerned authorities to push more young people towards farming? How about farm owners, who would have to offer higher wages to a less-competitive job pool? I wonder if they found it cheaper to just tell interviewers that the sky was falling?

Whenever you hear someone claiming an urgent economic "crisis", be suspicious. Very suspicious. With a moderately healthy market, often this just means someone will have to pay higher prices--which, as far as they're concerned, is an outrage, a scandal, and an emergency.

Edit: Googled around to figure out what stories you might have read. And, let's see:

"... Japan Agriculture (JA). With its tight links to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the agriculture ministry, and employing an astonishing 240,000 staff in Tokyo and around the country, the JA is probably Japan’s most powerful lobby. It campaigns to keep high import tariffs on farm goods: the tariff on rice is 777.7%, that on butter is 360%, while sugar attracts a 328% levy." http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21576154-fewer-bigger-plo...

"Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, has promised to protect “sacred cows” — including rice, beef and dairy — from the deal. Rice carries an almost spiritual significance here, not to mention a 778 percent tariff." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japans-farmers-face-an-...

Hahahaha, welp. Right, then, maybe you don't have a functioning market economy. That sounds to me like the real problem. I know my recommended solution. Hmm, I find it cool that I "called" that one. It's also kind of interesting to see what these Western publications are doing, and how far it leans towards uncritically swallowing the crisis story.

The Economist one is focusing on the TPP, and it is mostly critical of the JA. The Washington Post one--I give them credit for mentioning the important facts, but they exhibit no sense of their proper weight or their meaning. The article is titled "Japan’s farmers face an existential crisis", the first time they mention the agricultural lobby is in the 7th paragraph, and generally it seems like "Oh, gee, things just are that way" amid a sea of distracting details: portraits of individual farmers, their history and aging concerns, oh and by the way it takes a combined effort from the local and federal governments to "experiment" with "reform" of a few farms because they're so heavily intertwined that the government insulates them from market competition with a 4x-8x trade barrier and who knows what else, and also here's what this proud farmer has to say about his profession. Eeh. Just strikes me as bizarre.
This is probably the reason why someone else wrote it. Because writing in "your voice" but without filling words is incredibly hard. But then, it's not the CEOs job to be a good writer.
"""
To further discourage brute-force passcode attacks, there are escalating time delays after the entry of an invalid passcode at the Lock screen. If Settings > Touch ID & Passcode > Erase Data is turned on, the device will automatically wipe after 10 consecutive incorrect attempts to enter the passcode. This setting is also available as an administrative policy through mobile device management (MDM) and Exchange ActiveSync, and can be set to a lower threshold.

On devices with an A7 or later A-series processor, the delays are enforced by the Secure Enclave. If the device is restarted during a timed delay, the delay is still enforced, with the timer starting over for the current period."""

Delays between passcode attempts:
Attempts Delay Enforced 1-4 none
5: 1 minute
6: 5 minutes
7-8: 15 minutes
9: 1 hour
"But they're completely backwards and corrupt, and have no idea what they're doing."

What do you mean by that?

(Your story seem to tell quite the opposite.)
Or nanoc and yekyll if you look into the Ruby world. I think everyone chooses a static site generator in their favorite language anyway.
I don't know what the parent meant, but I can assure you that in France you're (usually) taught that the ^ stands for a lost letter -- it's what helps remember where to put the accent.
It really is about the details - sometimes you don't notice them until you really need them. Examples:

- MBPs have the best wifi of any notebooks - to my knowledge, they still are the only ones to have 3 MIMO streams. Right now, my TX rate is 585 MBit/s.

- Thunderbolt and I/O: we recently started to stream our tech meetups to Youtube. The two thunderbolt ports are processing two 1080p streams from BlackMagic Mini boxes - other laptops simply don't have the necessary ports or enough PCIe lanes to do this reliably.

- We just got Dell 4k/60Hz monitors. Most of our MBPs can drive them just fine via DisplayPort, others can only do it at 30Hz, if at all.
> Samsung, whomever can and do modify the code -- those modifications aren't generally open source.

That will certainly change quite soon. In the earlier days, FOSS was not a concept that masses were aware of, but now is different. There is increasing competition in the smart-phone world and if one of the other manufacturers (say ASUS) makes their Android modifications open-source, they will see a drastic increase in Sales. To keep up with competition, Samsung, etc. will also have to do the same. In other words, competition will ensure the success of open source.
Just unlock the freaking phone for them...
My mother in law is in this therapy right now. The doctors were surprised it isn't working (prior chemo worked pretty well giving her another year of life, once it stopped they switched her to this treatment). They're looking at hospice care right now.

When the cancer gets to stage 4, you're looking at when not if the cancer is going to kill you. So to everyone you know that doesn't get regular checkups, encourage them to do so. Both my parents have had cancer but it was caught early, my mother in law never went to a doctor after having her last kid ~25 years ago.
Thanks, I certainly have my eyes peeled for news about metastatic ACUP (or any related diagnoses) but as far as I'm aware there's no silver bullet anywhere yet.

Right now the strategy is to kick the can down the road until there is a solution: traditional chemo, then the blunt immunotherapy of ipilimumab + nivolumab/pembrolizumab.

Also (with oncologist's knowledge) adding in very speculative but reasonably safe extras like a COX-2 inhibitor, anti-histamine, and melatonin. (Certainly not the well-targeted approach I talk about in my other comment, unfortunately!)
GitHub supports now issue templates
Can't find an official announcement on this yet but check https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/new.

It prefills the issue with the content of the file "issue_template.md" (https://github.com/owncloud/core/blob/master/issue_template.md). Seems like we luckily chose the right file name two years ago.
>>A magistrate judge, an Apple employee, and an FBI agent agree to meet at a local bar. Only the Apple employee makes it. Why? Because the bar didn't have a back door.
You're on OS X so probably don't care but ...

a. Hardware drivers are not independent of distro

Technically most drivers will land-up in the main-line kernel at some point. But, for testing whether a "whole" laptop works means making sure all the drivers are working at the right version - it's fiddly. Consequently, what you really care about is whether your distribution supports that hardware version.

b. Getting support for a Linux laptop

In many ways the fact that users had to load Linux themselves in the 90's has been the biggest problem for users now.

If you want a "Linux" laptop you should buy one with Linux preloaded. That way you'll get one with a known working configuration on the hardware and software. If something doesn't work there's a venue for you to get support - the person who sold it to you. Otherwise, if you do have problems you're stuck doing whatever "the internet" tells you to do - half of which will probably be wrong, or it's just happenstance that it worked for them.

That's why buying from a Zareason, System76 or Dell (XPS 13) is important

c. Lenovo certifies but doesn't provide support for Linux

Lenovo does a type of certification for Ubuntu that means it "works for them". But, AFAIK there's no avenue to get support from them if the hardware doesn't work. Generally, it does work (writing this on one now), but you're stuck if you have problems.
I wonder why no one pointed out that privacy boils down to trust:

That letter might be the truth or could be some kind of decoy. Maybe the backdoor will come and Apple knows that already and they try to limit the damage to their brand.

Like "we tried to resist having a backdoor installed, but we couldn't do it ultimately".
As the article mentions, Germany had a big battle around such changes 20 years ago. It has settled down since. Some things in language are pretty arbitrary, and if it's a sufficiently small group of changes, it's probably no big deal to make that change. Matters would be totally different for English I guess ;)

In general I would oppose changes to the language by committee, in particular politically motivated ones, but this seems to be fairly uncontroversial (only that it defies tradition, but "natural" changes in language do so too).
Imagine you were to take the example further, unlocking the device required a sequence of fingerprint reads, with a precise ordering. i.e. left-ring finger, right index finger, right little finger, etc... That sequence would be a passcode, just as a precise sequence of keypresses would be. The government can insist on all your fingerprints, but not (in this argument) the correct sequence of uses of those fingerprints to unlock it. If it's only a single finger this same argument could apply.
Apple can comply with the FBI court order
Yeah, I hate their shortcuts. I'm actually selling mine because of this, and just run Windows+Linux. (I use Windows at work)
I'm afraid I'm too skeptical to get the same assurances as you.

Apple accuses the FBI of playing language games with the term "backdoor", but I think Apple has done the same. The fact that they can push weak OS updates to a locked phone is the backdoor. This means that they can already comply with the court order, and they likely will. This letter covers them from PR damage.
From their FAQ: https://neo900.org/faq#peripherals

>We unfortunately cannot provide free baseband modem firmware, as there is no option available on the market which would be able to fulfil this requirement. Even if it existed, it would bring very little value to the users, as operating a radio device with modified firmware on public networks without recertification is prohibited in most jurisdictions of the world and privacy concerns in cellular networks are mostly related to what happens on the network side, not inside the device.

I don't have any more information than this. If someone can quote specific FCC regulations to back this up, I would find that very interesting :)
24 Hour Pharmacies in the UK – Alphega
"The sky is falling ..." No, it isn't. All there is, is that there seems to be less appetite for endlessly unprofitable ventures that get away with dismissing the idea that they should be bringing in more cash than they spend within a reasonable time frame. Furthermore, is the entire VC scene actually needed? Lots of startups do not make use of their services and are doing absolutely fine ...
Not possible without backing it into iOS with some update that FBI is claiming will be used on one particular phone in this particular case.

Apple reasons that there is no way to guarantee no one will take the same update and apply it to other iOS devices. Or government taking this a step further by making Apple to build that into future update for the whole user base.
As a compiler writer, I can tell you that in JS, local variable lookups do not incur any kind of dynamic overhead. The performance of modern JS engines is much closer to C than you might think. Dynamic language optimization is also not so recent. Most of the techniques implemented by modern JS engines were invented for the Smalltalk and Self projects. See this paper from 1991, for example: http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/implementation....

Python is just inexcusably non-optimized. It's a bytecode interpreter, with each instruction requiring dynamic dispatch. Integers are represented using actual objects, with pointer indirection. The most naive, non-optimizing JIT implementation might get you a 10x speedup over CPython. I think that eventually, as better-optimised dynamic languages gain popularity, people will come to accept that there is no excuse for dynamic language implementations to perform this poorly.
My thoughts. The only reason i need cloud storage are automated backups. Therefore i need something that just works and will in the future. Amazon/Google/...
They "can" do those things because they're a tyrannical government that can do whatever it wants without answering to the people. They will be able to implement self-driving cars at a huge scale because they can just say "fucking do it" and outlaw human-driven cars and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Such amazing scale!
You are correct... see this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

Brezinski at a press conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g

Major powers, and imposing control over the awakened masses.

https://youtu.be/4usbR_kKCDs?t=397
While basically being on Apple's side here, as I understand it, jailbroken devices are unofficial builds of iOS that have some security features removed (e.g. limits on which apps can be installed).

Is it not possible for law enforcement to get what they want from that, if all they want is a custom build of iOS that can be hacked around? And why is it even possible for that to work if the data is supposed to be kept secure?
What it means is that the best the FBI can come up with is "Make a way for us to brute force attack the passphrase." And brute force attack is worthless for a strong enough passphrase. That's what is reassuring.

Not to mention that this is for the iPhone 5c. As other comments have mentioned, newer iPhones have the hardware-based Secure Enclave which add to the difficulty of breaking into the phone. https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf
The $4 cannot be the cost of the phone but the government-subsized end-user price tag.
The point of a search is to gather evidence, requiring the evidence that would be the result of a search is obviously a non-starter as a system.

That kind of reasoning allows wholesale collection of communications data by the NSA and other agencies. Since that practice has been widely criticized, there must be something missing from your argument.
So, it is far from a simple problem. For common infrastructure, one can argue governments could fund open source in the same way they fund highways and bridges and physical fiber optic links. But I am not so sure that model would be the best to innovate in end user applications, and I say so as someone working on publicly funded research software.

There is something to be said about the market's ability to make decentralized decisions and focus on satisfying people wants[1], so a centralized software economy is also not a good solution. The problem with markets here is that strong privacy and open source are, for the most part, positive externalities. As a user, the benefit you get from having strong privacy yourself is not usually noticeably high, nor that of having access to the source, specially for a non-technical user, yet society arguably benefits from both. Usually the answer to a problem of unaccounted externalities is government regulation, but in this case, large-enough-to-matter governments have been unanimously on the side of less privacy, rather than more (as is the case of the original article).

[1] Ideally, software should be designed so that it preserves privacy as much as possible while achieving its function, and is open source, and it provides all the million features and reasons people use something like Facebook, Snapchat, Youtube, etc. Just having privacy preserving software written for and by technophiles is not and can never be a complete solution.
It's not a backdoor to the phone only being unlocked by the passphrase, but a backdoor to the number of attempts limitation.
The Apple 5C is an older phone not even manufactured by Apple anymore, and, for the longest time, Apple had capabilities that allowed them to brute force iPhones under direction of a court order. Apple has some concern, clearly, about it's customer's security, but doesn't care as much about this particular iPhone Model's security, as it does about the general principle that, without explicit legislation such as [1]CALEA 47 USC 1001-1010), that technology companies such as Apple would then come under the whim and direction of all sorts of requests - there is no explicit restraint in the All Writs Act of 1789 - they can now be told by police agencies to do effectively anything necessary to the pursuit of an investigation - and you know, with 100% certainty, that once the "good cases" are used as an excuse for this, the crappy follow on scenarios will also be making use of the All Writs Act of 1789.

It's massive, massive overreach - and if Apple doesn't draw the line here, it will quickly spin out of control.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
It absolutely is the job of the CEO of the world's (second) most valuable company to be a good writer.