skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Calling it an invention is a misuse of the term and puts writing software on an undeservedly high pedestal. There is no "invention" here except in the sense that an Apple copyright lawyer might say. That is, trivial obvious changes.
I for one am happy for this issue to be at the forefront of discussion.

The worst thing that could happen is all of these requests going unspoken, buried beneath less important topics.
But BSD true doesn't support --version, how are you going to check your version of true without a locale-aware version string (and yes, gnu true is locale-aware, and contains 2k of strings including 48 encoding names and 36 format strings — 10 of which are duplicates, and for some reason refers to the SHA2 utilities)

(I dimly remember an essay about similar issue in a similar mainframe command (maybe in JCL?) taking a bunch of revisions to actually get right?)
I had a really bad experience with an iPhone update and a password storage app.

I had been running my iPhone on iOS 8.x. No need to update to 9.x.

The day finally came when I was forced to allow the update.

Now, without my knowledge the update also enabled automatic updates of apps. All apps were thus updated to their latest versions without my explicit consent.

I chose the app I am using to keep hundreds of account passwords specifically because they DID NOT transmit anything over the internet at the time I got it. I could do what they called "wifi sync" to synchronize and backup my database to the desktop version of the same software running on my PC within the same network.

Well, with the forced update "wifi sync" went away and now the only option is "internet sync". I did not realize this whe the app ran through and synchronized to my PC.

So now the dilema. This fucking company is doing this because they want to sell cloud storage for your data and force you into an annual subscription in order to be able to "internet sync". And, of course, the huge violation of the security of my data which, up until the unauthorized automatic update, had been kept private and never left my network.

Not only do I have to find a new password and data vault that will not try to take ownership of my data and pull a bait-and-switch after, I also need to change every simgle password I have due to my database now being in their cloud.

Unbelievable.
Sweet article :) But it doesn't mention that they made their own "vodka" (or whatever you'd call ethanol distilled from fermented mixed carbohydrates).
Only if you think Apple should be an unhackable "trusted actor".

Let's face it, the fact that Apple can be compeled to create this bypass is a civil rights issue, but the fact that it can create it at all is already a security bug. One that, in their defense, they seem to be trying to patch a step at a time in newer versions of their devices.
The main point here is that neither the government nor Apple could guarantee that this backdoor software would remain safe. If the FBI brought the phone to Apple to update the custom OS, the software would then exist, which is inherently a dangerous situation. Furthermore, suddenly a precedent is set wherein Apple is obliged to continue unlocking phones for the government with custom created software. I sincerely doubt any organizations involved would tolerate the continual creation and destruction(can data be truly destroyed?) of customized OS's each time the government needed access to a phone. That means, the incentive is to create and maintain this backdoored version of the OS, setting up the exact vulnerability Apple is trying to fend off.

Basically, this project, from whatever angle it is approached, has a non-zero chance of backfiring dramatically thus risking the security and privacy of millions of iPhone users throughout the world.
"Organic" methods produce considerably less food per unit of land (and other inputs) than conventional farming [0] (that being one of the reasons for the price difference). How does that make it "more sustainable" ?

"Right now, roughly 800 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and about 16 million of those will die from it17. If we were to switch to entirely organic farming, the number of people suffering would jump by 1.3 billion, assuming we use the same amount of land that we're using now."[0]

[0]http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogss...
Don't you see the slippery slope here? Next, the German or French police will knock on Apple's door. When they get access, China, Russia, and others will line up next.

Moreover, who says that the FBI or some other agency will stop after this iPhone, or the next 12 iPhones. Why not push to get their own signing key after they succeed in this case? They will try to get as far as possible.

We live in 2016. many of our devices with our private data are directly addressable from anywhere in the world. Intentionally weakening encryption and security in any way is a dangerous proposition.

It's good that Apple fights this tooth and nail. Sure, it may align up with their PR. I don't care, it benefits every citizen of the net who wants privacy and security.
> my first time engaging in an Internet flame war

Please don't.
I thought I recognised the URL! This is by the same genius as Elevator.js: http://tholman.com/elevator.js/ (Turn your sound on.)
Ask HN: How does one become an ethical hacker?
I'm interested in becoming a ethical hacker. May I know what does it take to become an ethical hacker?
The domestic government doesn't need legal precedent to ask Apple to do things either; it usually just helps in the case of political cover and the inevitable pushback from the public or other branches of government.

With regards to international politics, if the USA can demand that Apple unlocks devices for any reason, then the US government will have a hard time defending a decision to aid Apple in resisting a foreign power when it requests the same broad privilege.
JS++ Easy, Fast, Powerful. Nearly No Learning Curve
Is it really that hard? Just make the very first thing executed a check for the specific device ID and crash immediately if it doesn't match. Since the code is signed the check can't be removed or changed.
Django bug #2273: username is case-sensitive
it remains true in windows 10, although it can be changed via some registry fudging.
I really wonder sometimes about the great gap there lies between the problems that we face in third world v/s the problems that are faced by people in first world countries.

Here in Delhi, and even more so in rural parts of India, connectivity to services like internet,banking,healthcare etc. is still a luxury for the majority. Most people here wouldn't even understand this hot issue of iPhone unlocking request by FBI.

When I see folks on HN, indulge passionately in discussing the most minute detail of this Apple issue, I really wonder how long would it take for my country (or for that matter, the majority of the world population that still lives in poverty and distress) to come to a stage where we can start thinking about the next basic right that comes once you have achieved the food, water, shelter part of life, that being privacy.
You've taken that comment in a most uncharitable way. Please avoid nasty polemics here.
I don't have access to a Windows machine right this moment to check, but a cursory search of the internet gives no indication that this tool has been released in any subsequent update. If it had, you'd think there'd be some fanfare, or acknowledgement, or documentation, or experience reports from users, or anything.
> consider the difference between a "cool guy" and a "cool attitude"

I always thought the ideas were conflated. That to be 'cool' originally meant to be unflappable in the face of adversity which was akin to having a cool attitude.
A generator is also known as a compiler. The main difference is that in a generator, sometimes the rules are hardcoded.

In fact, almost all of books pertaining to design of compilers will help you in designing good generators.

Additionally, not mentioned in an otherwise great article directly, only implicitly in those "frameworks" part, is an expert system. An expert system is more general logic framework than grammar-based system, that uses first and higher order logic (backward, forward propagation, "blast" methods, simplifications etc.) to derive solutions given some starting "nouns", the set of which can be generated using any other method. The main pro of an expert system is that if the rules are properly encoded, it will not generate anything outside the constraints (except maybe bottom which means invalid input). This makes expert system reliably easy to control, and a large enough expert system can actually encode a grammar and a good story structure.

The main drawback of those is that until recently, they had trouble dealing with existential statements (e.g. for every monster in a set, the monsters XP must be within a delta and increasing by at least delta2) but that has been mostly fixed in advanced languages such as Isabelle/HOL - things have come a long way since Prolog.

As for "perceptual differentiation", tere have been attempts to construct difference-tracking neural networks, mostly successful, and use a certain way to generate novelty and detect such input, in addition to being self-training.

Sadly, nobody yet succesfully combined both of the above to create a machine to generate novel logic. That would be sort of a true AI - maybe a worthy extension of OpenCog.
For an in-house installation, it would also be useful to have an editable front page of some sort. Here, you could publish notable projects, or perhaps the ones most sought after. It would also be a channel for news, faqs, etc.

I created an issue at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13239.
The EFI spec is a horrible disastrous mess, but in theory you could be reading and writing EFIvars at runtime to dynamically configure boots - ie, "reboot to safe mode" would set the evifar next boot parameter to your initram-fs fallback. It would not be complicated to implement pam / polkit support for unprivlidged users to set such things without authenticating root.

It does not change the fact the fault lies with shitty proprietary UEFI implementations, and nobody writing free software is at fault here.
The security issue of Apple being vulnerable to being compelled to create signed backdoors would still remain, in that case.
Because nothing says nimbleness and agility like a name that suggests you are so heavy that you distort the very fabric of spacetime.

What's the backstory on this company? Who are they and why are they on the front page of HN?
NSA has a budget larger than the combined spying budget of the Eurozone members, and it's renowned for being very aggressive and constantly pursuing technical improvement. Why would you be surprised that NSA succeeds? How would you stop them?
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and please don't conduct flamewars here.
Mark Klein did first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
DDG team can be really slow with feedback.

Last year I submitted fixes for several bang searches, and I received an answer from them about three months later.
Bill Gates sides with FBI on Apple encryption, says scope limited to one iPhone
That's why Linux Mint wins. It look completely like MS Windows. Taskbar, Icons, Keyboard Shortcuts,...everything is similar to MS Windows. As a Windows user, I find it most easier to use and that's why they are winning.
Doesn't work with Android Chrome for me
Show HN: Budgets-as-currency: less crypto, more data science
I have a few questions:

a) When is the first alpha release planned ?

b) Did you go the Coq/Agda route with dependent types (only total functions can be defined), the Haskell (once the DependentTypes extension lands) route (partial/looping functions can be used in types and may need to be evaluated at compile time, the compiler can loop, there is no associated coherent logic), or the Idris route (only total functions can be used dependently) ?

c) How extensible is the Standard AST ? (e.g. would it be possible to define something like the Coq tactic interface from within the language, or through a compiler plugin ?)
3 Key Lessons for Marketers in 2016 from Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
NHTSA Just Approved GM's Fancy New Rear-View Camera Mirror
Good lord, presenting distinct data points with content and a name as a filesystem mount is a "problem".

The EFIVars table is stored in mainboard flash as... file(s). Probably only one, since the firmware isn't going to be using a filesystem.

But it is still a map of key-value pairs. That maps perfectly fine to a filesystem.

Nothing about the "brick your laptop with rm -rf /" is the fault of any free software component or philosophy. By the specification of UEFI itself the efivar table is for transient data storage between the OS and the firmware. It is supposed to be mutable, removable, you can do whatever you want to it as an OS and the firmware can do whatever it wants as well and neithers behavior should stop the world.

All this was is a demonstration of why proprietary firmware is bad, and that again the free software community needs to work around broken proprietary crap that cannot obey its own design documents.

If you want to soapbox about how everything would be easier if we had to link a library and access all OS level data through some 50k command API instead of through files... I'm not sure you are going to actually find an instance where people are improperly treating data as files, because almost anything can be treated as a file. You can implement it poorly, but if it is data and it has organization you can put it in a filesystem.
Iun-niu ti casexh

I keep thinking of implementing a crude translator for that lovely language but lack the skills. Anyone interested in playing around with it?
They created / update / maintain Scala and it's suite of tools and packages (akka etc.)
> When you're facing a subpoena, you don't knowingly lie.

Not that I believe Apple's CEO is lying, however…

You don't knowingly lie if you think the risk of getting caught is unacceptably high. That last part is important, I think, and indeed, you state, "because he knows someone will find out", so I know you get it. However, I don't think we should forget that a great deal of the concern we have presently in this thread about the government's capability in introspecting our technology is indirectly the result of the DNI lying under oath¹.

¹I know your post says subpoena, but it seems similar enough that its worth reminding…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11150197
Breaking SameOrigin Policy due to server misconfigurations
That's not necessary. Simply tying the encryption to a strong password instead of a 4-digit PIN would have been sufficient to prevent a firmware update to a locked device from weakening security, at least in this particular case.

Throw in a memory-hard key derivation function to make parallel brute-force more expensive.
After watching this whole thing play out, I'm seriously wondering whether 'sloppy' was actually 'on purpose because this is a great chance to establish precedent'.
First off, learn to hack?
What is wrong with academic publishing?
If you want a serious answer based on how things actually work, it's this: the US Government doesn't expect you to be ok with it. They're not asking your permission. They do not care if you dislike it. The goal is to have the upper-hand on specific types of information globally.
Imagine a translator who is 50% fluent in source language and 100% fluent (native) in target language. He would often misunderstand the source text and, even though he can produce target language natively, the translation would be incorrect.

Now imagine a translator who is 100% fluent in source language and 50% fluent in target language. He completely understands the source text and, using only simple sentences, can accurately convey the meaning in the target language.

This thought experiment demonstrates that the knowledge of source language is far more important for the accuracy of translation.
Each attempt takes 80 ms. That's in hardware. There is a separate retry delay that increases exponentially then tops out at 1 hour per unsuccessful attempt. The 10-try limit is the number of consecutive unsuccessful attempts before the device erases its stored encryption keys (effectively wiping itself).

It seems that the attempt limit at least is not hardcoded and can be updated, as it has been increased in the past by an iOS update. I would suspect the same is true for the attempt retry delay time. Either way, this is only specifically applicable to devices newer than the 5c, which doesn't have a Secure Element (or "Secure Enclave" in Applespeak).

In any case, given a software image made to the FBI's specifications, the time to crack a phone depends on the complexity of the user passcode. If the user had a 4-digit numeric PIN it could be cracked in under 15 minutes. On the other hand, with a sufficiently complex passcode the expected time to brute force the device could be literally in the millions of years.
I phrased too extremely then. Function should be added as a lens of analysis, but I still think that purpose should not be used in isolation because it leads to discussion with moral expectation, rather than functional expectation.
Fedora on non-rooted Android phones – 2016 update
What if there were a limit of 3 unlocks a year? Like in NFL football, where the coach is only allowed to challenge 3 plays a game, even if each challenge is successful. (I know, still too slippery a slope)

Or if each unlock cost the requester a $10 billion fee (donated to charity)? To make them think harder about when to use an unlock.
A generator is also known as a compiler.

I'm really not sure I agree with this, at least at any useful level.

I work on solving constraint problems (one of the mentioned options in this article). I have a reasonable knowledge of compilers, and excellent knowledge of the inside of a constraint solvers, and there is very little, if any, practical overlap between the two.
Sounds like an expensive military strategy with all that walls.
Do you have any good resources on that? :)
Germany notches up record budget surplus in 2015
I really like the design of that phone. There is a "mechanical" look and feel to it, very different to the usual glossy/flat high end phones of today. Anyone else feel the same way?
Not bad, I was worried they'd pick some version of "reactive" to confuse us all even more.
I appreciate the information. I'm curious, in reference to the original quote, how much of the existing ES5 optimization story do you think can be leveraged (at least within V8) to bring ES6/7 on par with raw ES5 and how much needs to be greenfield optimizations?
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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but AIUI, here's what a smartphone is, or can potentially be, capable of acquiring/giving up to persons unknown (in addition to everything willingly given up to FB/Instagram/Tinder/Grindr/Google):

Your face.
Your voice.
Your conversations.
The faces, voices and conversations of people you associate with.
Your location at any given time.

At least with the aid of helpful little 'check your health' and 'security' apps/add ons:

Your prints.
Your DNA.
Your health problems or illnesses, if any.
Well, we know a lot about the crystal structures of several high-temperature superconducting compounds. You could always make an educated guess of a new one based on these and then test it for the Meissner effect.
Never thought about that, however the costs are still far to high and the amount of paperwork and administration that patients are subjected to is just a nightmare.
Razer Raises $75M from China’s Digital Grid at a $1.5B Valuation
Barclays Says Sharp Yuan Devaluation Needed to Shift Psychology
GitHub repo: https://github.com/tholman/texter
Not out of the box at the moment. But it would technically be possible to do. Feel free to post a suggestion to https://github.com/realm/realm-js/issues so we can see the interest.
Ok, but this is more about practice then theory. Theory we already have a lot, however for C++ i can't find any usable thread safe map except the intel tbb which i was unable to compile last time in my specific environment (seems to play nice only with visual c++ on windows).
This one looks more compact.
> but you can have only one phone number on that mobile device

Not necessarily. There are phones which can hold two SIM cards.
> Insurance doesn't seek to prevent the inevitable. That's not why we buy insurance. We buy insurance to insure against catastrophic risk.

Ideally, that would be the purpose of health insurance, but in the USA its used to pay for essential health care such as regular visits to your dentist or general practitioner, or to get the negotiated rate on prescription drugs.

When people talk about the inevitability of healthcare use, they don't refer to heart attacks, an onset of cancer, or broken legs. They refer to chronic conditions like arthritis, or high blood pressure that will plague the vast majority of people simply because of their increasing age. These chronic conditions are seemingly inevitable, and are factored into the cost of health insurance.
Bill Gates Says Apple Should Unlock the iPhone
Mastercard rolls out selfie ID checks
Tatag is platform that (1) guarantees a team's funding via its planned budgets and (2) encourages market participants to refuse payments from disreputable teams. This approach inverts the typical dynamic of competing for scarce funding that are blindly accepted by payment recipients.

Any and all feedback are welcome.
Bill Gates: Apple should unlock phone for FBI
At least in some states you can buy a form of insulin over the counter. It is an older formulation and apparently it is not the easiest thing to DYI figure out the correct dose. NPR had a report on it a while back. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/12/14/45904732...
In theory, the opposite, because a compiler knows that a constant binding never changes so the value it references can be inlined everywhere it is used without having to do runtime checks. But I think engines are not doing this yet.
> Everyone is used to having one of these things that they carry around in their pocket, and scarcely anyone really needs any other general-purpose computing device.

Unless they want to read something, or type more than a paragraph, or do anything collaborative. Because it still feels a niche role, not a general computing one, the ability to connect to service providers is the dominating characteristic.

If anything, I see "phone" moving to be a description of service, and devices are just named device-specific things. People have already started dropping the "smart" part and just assume that a "phone" at LEAST can call. I now distinguish between "phones", "flip phones", and "land lines". If I don't need to talk, why not just get an ipod and a laptop? Each device is much better when giving up the domain of the other.
I hadn't heard of this fallacy before, I agree that what I wrote may be interpreted as a good example of it. I shouldn't have used the word inevitable.

I don't think that if the FBI wins the current battle then all is lost. But I do think that the FBI intends to fight all the battles until they win the long game.

That said, I don't hold any side in the argument.
> That requires a 100% open phone (hard- and software) and enough knowledgeable people willing to invest time in looking at the code.

Which, sadly, seem to not exist (cf the long term bugs in OpenSSL et al)
Toshiba Nixes Wearvue, Its Smart Glasses, Less Than One Week Before Launch
Sounds like a Javascript framework or Lighttpd.
Well... fortunately we have arXiv for open access e-print repository. This is what you should quote:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.07079

I don't know if you are aware of this but there are many scientists out there that do need the site you've mentioned in order to function. This kind of exposure is going to kill their chances sooner than expected. The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.
Awesome, some of his other projects are also good :)