skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The protocol and crypto are also open source. The only thing about Telegram that isn't open source is the server. They've hinted that they might open the server and allow federating in the future, but they have no timeline for doing so.
This is truly awesome, thanks for your help
There's more people underground in Colma than there are above it.
Honestly, out of every argument I've heard in regards to this whole debacle, this is the absolute BEST one:

> This FBI court order, by compelling a private sector company to write new software, is essentially making that company an arm of law-enforcement. Private sector companies are not—and should not be—an arm of government or law enforcement.

I get that, if court ordered, a company many have to hand something over. But to be court ordered to work for the government completely changes a company's business model (even if only slightly). It hampers their business (Apple isn't going to magically find, and then fire, the engineers who would need to work on this; they would have to be redirected from other projects).

Yes Apple would be compensated for their time but that doesn't change the harm it could do to their business, not just from a PR standpoint, but from the fact that they are forced to become a government contractor* and would need to redirect / shuffle resources from other projects.

* Yes yes I know Apple participates in government contracts but being forced into one is a little ridiculous.
Many (if not most) chips that need to be secure keep any secrets like private keys on a region of silicon that is tamper resistant. When you attempt to open the package, the region is destroyed beyond recovery.
> In fact, it's never a good idea to write these kinds of things in the first place.

She was trying for her own version of "The things we think but do not say!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TohbD69ugSA
The CPU contains both the UID and GID on all iPhones (old and new). The Secure Enclave, if available, contains it's own UID for it's own key derivation.

https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-...
I'm not sure what part of their secure enclave system counts as 'obscurity' and it wouldn't make sense to hate on a company just for the sake of hating on them when they're doing the right thing this time.

Surely that would just make one a mindless hater, no?
I do not propose a diet (and I should not diverged into the health - that was a mistake indeed). What is important is that with potato, rice and other starchy food without added oil one does not need to consciously limit the amount consumed while staying on normal weight despite apparently excessive calories.

So the comment that started this thread proposing that people consume too much is not true. It is just that people consume too much of wrong stuff. The solution is to limit bad items so normal body feedback loops work, not the amount of food.
Anyone willing to get this to appeal property taxes for the poor in Detroit?

The city after the 2008 crash hasn't automatically revalued property values. It isn't unusual to be paying $8000 in property taxes on a $25,000 house. Investors are buying the houses at tax foreclosure sales, renting them back to the owners and then getting the property tax bill slashed.
Open-source religion
Snowden has been tweeting about skepticism being warranted. Especially skepticism of the FBI statements, since law enforcement is allowed under law to lie (at least out of court) and mislead in order to further cases.

Some questions to ask:

- Has the FBI stated that they do not already have the pin for the device? They did state that the device is locked but I didn't see it stated that they don't already have the pin. So do they? It's not a crazy question. They have a good reason to pretend they don't have it.

- Has the FBI stated that the device was ever in the physical possession of the suspect during the time since the last backup? Or are we all just assuming this? This information is not going to be given voluntarily.

- If one FBI agent has provided testimony that he and some Apple engineers could find no feasible alternative, that should be taken as the findings of just that one agent, not the entire government. What about the rest of the FBI? What about the NSA? If these questions aren't asked, the FBI has no reason to answer.
You could purchase a subscription.
You can recognize the sounds in this song a few seconds before you hear them
How does one change the password they supposedly do not know and need Apple's assistance to retrieve?
Isn't that about Meta, not Magic Leap? I can't find any info about a Magic Leap product coming out in the near future.
It's almost entirely irrelevant to the rest of the economy. That is not an exaggeration.

During the dotcom bubble crash, Cisco all by itself destroyed more market cap from top to bottom than the entire unicorn bubble is worth combined (and that's before inflation adjusting for 15 years).

This current tiny mess? It's hardly even a single line sideshow to the rest of the US or global economy, what's going on in China, the commodity markets, negative interest rates in Europe or Japan, etc. A ~1% value drop in just the US residential housing market is worth as much as every unicorn combined.
> but I don't question their motives

...really? Isn't this among our foremost duties as effective, responsible, mature citizens?
You can write everything as you like in DNS.
IPv6 is not a problem.
Here's an example from Australia: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/how-asics-a...

Not deliberate censorship (excluding the 1200 they did intend to censor, of course). I've had many dealings with ASIC throughout my career and can assure you that most of their 'bad actions' can be ascribed to incompetence rather than malice.

Not that it's much of a comfort; the outcomes of giving power to evil are roughly the same as giving power to stupid.
I use xcape [1] to have the best of both worlds: a quick press-release tap means Escape (great for vim), while holding it down makes it act as Ctrl (great for shell and other stuff). It's wonderful :)

[1] https://github.com/alols/xcape
For those interested the the full text of the essay this passage is from:

http://cliffarnold.com/macvdos.pdf

The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS

Published in Espresso on September 30th, 1994

Umberto Eco
You can write as you like in DNS.
IPv6 is not a problem.
"Vendor Lock-in" is a meaningless phrase if you start applying it to GitHub. You're talking about competition. GitHub competes and people like it a lot. That's not a lock-in.

Your business won't end if you switch to bitbucket. A developer might grump at you for a day. Big deal.

Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. They're the ones with a lock-in. They could go into a corporate coma and money would still print itself and climb into their pockets for the next 20-years.
> Personally, I've always thought that type safety provides the most benefit at boundaries between codebases: you have people composing pieces that they don't understand, and the types serve to guide how those pieces can be composed to result in a correct program.

Yeah, type safety is definitely a big benefit when joining pieces together, but writing normal Rust code does this too, it's only the cross-language boundary that suffers (this is of course the most critical one, so having tools that avoid mistakes here is important, like autogenerating a C header). Joining random codebases together is especially common with cargo making it so easy to pull in dependencies.

Please don't misinterpret me: I definitely don't disagree with you that having in-language type safety and generics are important, but those are fundamentally not things you can guarantee when you're doing things across languages.

> Within a library, it's not uncommon that the core data structure or processing is only correct because a human looked hard at it--I would be surprised if Rust implementations of, say, font rendering, used types internally to guarantee the correctness of their rendering relative to a formal specification. Instead they're using types to make sure they process all input, or make sure they handle memory safely.

I would hope/expect libraries to use types internally. That's the easiest way to have the computer stop you screwing up. E.g. the standard library does, the Vec type contains a RawVec to manage memory ( https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/a212264011289885bdb8b... ) and similarly with HashMap ( https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/a212264011289885bdb8b... ).

> an assumption-free one compiled considering generics to be opaque blobs and using dynamic dispatch for trait methods so that the same code can be used for all instantiations of the generic function.

> For example, a function parameterized over an unconstrained type T can't do anything useful with values of that type, except dropping them. Thus code would be generated in which the call to the drop impl would be dynamic.

This sounds nice on the face of it... but it also sounds outlandishly complicated to implement. On the latter quote, a function can also move data around, and moving (unknown-size) data around seems difficult, e.g. what's an always-works impl of the following?

fn push<T>(x: &mut Vec<T>, y: T) { let z = y; x.push(z) }

Note, no bounds.

Calling object safe methods (like a destructor) is the easiest part of implementing this.

> I think this can be made to work w/r/t non-object-safe trait bounds as well, but I'm not sure how to justify that.

I'd be... surprised; non-object safe traits suffer from all the problems of the `push` example, and more.
Material Cost = $0. Brilliant.
I see. While it is probably true that the number of people who use it for AC circuit analysis and other applications for which the rotation analogy is appropriate is rather large, complex numbers are not "fundamentally about" rotation.

In fact, the reason they're called "imaginary numbers" makes perfect sense if you were a mathematician 500 years ago - one method of solving cubic equation manipulated the square root of negative numbers in intermediate steps, which of course doesn't make sense, but by the final step these square roots canceled out and the final answer was correct. So they named them "imaginary numbers" to kind of tell people "don't worry whether this makes sense, it's only used in an intermediate step, they're not real numbers". So, naming a concept after its most common use is exactly what got us into this situation!

In addition to the modelling-rotation and solving-cubics aspect of complex numbers, last year I used them in a factoring-things context in a number theory class, for example to prove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_of_Fermat%27s_theorem_o... (read the "Dedekind's Proof" section).
Said bar was mentioned in the article, even.
Please do not try to meditate while driving, especially if you are a novice.

Meditation is about not responding to internal or external stimuli which is the antithesis of the mindset you should be driving with.
I love when big agriculture pays for studies to protect corporate interests.

I'm 6 foot tall, and I used to weigh 340 pounds. I ate my whole grains, and drank my wholesome skim milk, I limited my meat and animal fats intake, I tried their suggested amount of cardio (but was too fat to not feel too shitty afterwards). I did what the FDA said and what my doctor said, and I kept gaining weight.

I decided to tell the entire establishment to fuck off, and went strict Paleo: no grains (no corn, or wheat, or rice, or soy; no pasta or cereals or breads or whatever), no refined sugars (not even things like honey or agave syrup), no dairy (except very limited hard cheese low in lactose and hormones), and even got rid of any caffeine; and I ate all the meat and meat fat I wanted, all the veggies I wanted, and more fruit than I was under the grand FDA plan.

I went from 340 to 214 in a year. No increase in caloric burn, no decrease in caloric intake. Less than a year after that, I hit 184. After that I started weight lifting to fix my lack of muscle mass that years of eating the FDA diet caused, and under this diet I built muscle faster than I ever have before (mostly due to the increase of good protein sources from meat, the kind of meat the FDA demonizes).

I feel better than I ever have, I think faster and clearer, and I sleep better. So yeah, let them publish their studies all they want, if being fitter than I've ever been in my life is 'fat and unhealthy', then fuck them, and black is white, and we've always been at war with Eurasia.
Make Prototyping Less Painful with These Tips
Where should we donate to to maximize “net good”?
Making a rash decision seems selfish since it would satisfy the desire to "do something", even though it's almost guaranteed to be wastefully inefficient compared to whatever the most optimal cause is that you could be donating to instead.

But not doing anything from decision paralysis is only barely better than actively doing harm, unfortunately it's where I think a lot of people (myself included) are stuck on.

What should we be allocating resources on to maximize "net good"?
I'm pretty sure it's "just" extraordinarily difficult. With some things, the difference between the two is vanishingly small. Like, in principle, flipping a bit takes a certain amount of energy. So you can take how many bit flips the best algorithm to do something takes, convert it to energy, and compare it to "total energy output of the sun for the next one hundred years", then call it pretty much impossible if the algorithm's number is bigger.
It's kind of an interesting idea. Doesn't seem like it would work for RSA cryptography, though -- in that model, your private key is a pair of prime numbers, and your public key is their product. It's hard to produce both factors from the product, but it's pretty easy to produce one factor if you know the product and the other factor.
Is this available for use in South Korea? We're an on demand cleaning service in Korea (http://getmiso.com) and use SMS for a lot of purposes but would love something like this.
I'm not convinced this is true in general, even if it is often true. Signage is unclear or absent. Certain departments are probably corrupt or inept.

There are also times when avoiding tickets is basically impossible. My local (and relatively large) community college brilliantly decided to do all three of these things at the same time:

1. Close down the third largest lot on campus.
2. Lease out half of the second largest lot on campus to local businesses.
3. Oversell permits for the remaining parking.

As a result, students began parking on the city streets. But the local residents didn't like that, so the city made those streets permit only (and only gave permits to local residents)* . The college's response was "get here early," which at best is not a solution and at worse, exacerbated the problem by making parking even less available in the early parts of the day. Later they added a meager shuttle solution which they didn't even keep for an entire semester (the parking situation lasted for YEARS rather than months because of theft, lawsuit, and resident concerns about the job site).

Frankly, I would be impressed with anyone who didn't get a ticket over that time period and still managed to make it to classes.

Looking further, the local downtown simply has inadequate parking. The downtowns of other nearby municipalities are the same. It certainly makes political sense to keep parking prices low and just ticket the hell out of violators rather than raising prices to keep demand in line with supply and making consumers and businesses unhappy. I'd be very surprised if these municipalities hadn't worked out the math and figured out which results in more money for them.

*Those roads are still (and probably permanently) permit only, so the only ones really suffering are going to be the short-sighted locals.
You're welcome, thanks for signing up.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627112

Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8nbzl/reverse_...
I think I'm for this.. Voting is a right, right? Though, I do understand that registering "to vote" has more to do with party affiliation, and the selective service.
>My interpretation of which is that yummyfajitas feels that labor is scarce and therefore overly expensive at $15/hour.

Okay, I can see that. Your response was kind of an aggressive way of putting it, but yes I agree that it is kind of rude to complain that the market rate for menial labor is higher than you'd like, and to say that there is a labor shortage when the prevailing wage for unskilled work is still below what a reasonable standard of living costs, considering what that means for the less fortunate.

On the other hand, it's pretty reasonable to say "I'll by services up to $x per hour, but not above that."

This is a lot of the 'basic income' debate, because obviously, giving people survival-level money is going to dramatically decrease their willingness to do unpleasant jobs for survival level money. Personally, I kind of like that, as it removes a lot of what I think of the consent problem of capitalism... remove the threat of starvation, yes, and some people won't work at all, sure, but you also remove the moral comparison between work and slavery, and a lot of the anguish and ethical issues that come with firing someone.

On the factual side of things, I wonder where parent commenter lives; as far as I can tell, it's pretty easy to get the cheaper sort of manual labor done for $15/hr in silicon valley. If you are paying more than that for a cleaning service, either you are a generous employer willing to pay above market wages (perhaps to secure a trusted person over the long term) or you are using a service that is eating up most of the difference.
I think there's rather more to the Illuminatus trilogy than that. And I say that as big fan of Eco who has enjoyed his deeply obscure stuff as well as his more well-known works.
Starting with Tor version 0.2.7.1 it is possible, through Tor's control socket API, to create and destroy 'ephemeral' hidden services programmatically. Bitcoin Core has been updated to make use of this.

This means that if Tor is running (and proper authorization is available), Bitcoin Core automatically creates a hidden service to listen on, without manual configuration. Bitcoin Core will also use Tor automatically to connect to other .onion nodes if the control socket can be successfully opened. This will positively affect the number of available .onion nodes and their usage.

This new feature is enabled by default if Bitcoin Core is listening, and a connection to Tor can be made. It can be configured with the -listenonion, -torcontrol and -torpassword settings. To show verbose debugging information, pass -debug=tor.
Is there a reason Apple can't take apart the phone and access the hard drive directly?

Maybe put the hard drive on a dev board of sorts. AFAIK, most cell-phones have dev board versions that the mfg's engineers use to test various component hardware revisions no?. There they can access it through root? I might be missing something here.

It would be hilarious if after all this, they find nothing on the phone. GENIUS!
Their control of users' devices is for the purpose of keeping out malware, not quite the evil thing you're making it out to be.

You make a good observation that the EFF and Apple are on the same side here. I just don't see how that's a surprise, given that all the control of users' devices Apple exerts is primarily for the purpose of protecting the privacy of the user, something EFF also cares about.
There's an Android app that does something like that, "The vOICe for Android" by Peter Meijer:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vOICe.vOICe&hl...

website: https://www.seeingwithsound.com/

It's also available as/on a web app, Raspberry Pi, NVDA, and Windows.

It apparently works: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/computer-program-allo...

Apparently there is a similar iOS app called EyeMusic.
10 1/2 CRO Mistakes and What We Can Learn from Them
Maybe the FBI should concentrate their efforts on finding that someone and asking them what the password is.
After the 10th or 11th reading of Rose I had internalized the book well enough that I wasn't finding anything new and could recall whole pages of it from memory, but I keep rereading it every year or so because of the sheer sensual pleasure it evokes. I must be up to about 25 readings now and I was just thinking it was time for another.
Risking get fire for self-adv, but some time ago I made a very simple static HTML-based ePub reader (does not even support contents or pictures), but with some sync over Google Drive. I used it mostly because I have a wide diversity of platforms in my possession, and want to sync between them. Here's the link: https://h5reader.azurewebsites.net/#
Do what you need to do to get a job, but this makes you beholden to your friends for a job. Plus you can only work where your connections work. Could you get a job without connections just based on qualifications?
I think you are mixing up the law enforcement and intelligence community.

These request are coming from the law enforcement side of the government, not the intelligence community. Given their mission, the intelligence community has no interest in having a public discussion around backdoors, since the last thing they want is for the people they are targeting to be aware of any backdoors in their mobile devices.
If you believe that they don't make sense, take the opposite position
That sounds like a great use case, thanks for sharing. We're not in South Korea yet but please create an account and we'll update you as we expand.

PS your site looks great!
IMHO this is just an act to restore trust in companies that was lost after Snowden's leaks.

NSA never needed physical access to our computers. The companies worked directly with them.
> A bit more consistency doesn't have to come at the expense of terseness and expressiveness.

Yeah, mathematicians are often ambiguous out of laziness, because they have no incentive to make it terse+unambiguous, and making it terse+unambiguous takes more effort than making it terse.

Also sometimes you cannot get maximal terseness and unambiguity at the same time. For example if f is a function of 2 real variables, you fix the first to be x_0 and take the derivative with respect to the second, I would write this as f'(x_0, y), but I'm sure you agree that this is ambiguous to some people.
Normally I tell everyone to read The Name of the Rose first and be happy, but for you I think you should start with The Mysterious Flame of queen Loana, even though it's one of his less accessible works. Much of it is a fictionalized memoir on how fascism became embedded in the fabric of daily life during Mussolini's reign, although this concern with mass movements and the dangers they pose to thinking individuals is a consistent theme in his work.
They probably did a reset, and since the phone was owned by the employer, they probably had access to the email and user details required to initiate an iCloud password reset.

Unfortunately resetting the iCloud password disabled automatic iCloud backups when the phone was on a known wifi network.
Linux is equally dependent on binary driver blobs as BSD, isn't it?
At least the mayor is quoted in the article as saying so:

“We have 1,500 aboveground residents,” Mayor Helen Fisicaro
said, “and 1.5 million underground.”
This could also be an act to regain trust and make us less paranoid.