skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> All Writs Act may be scaled back or ruled unconstitutional

Totally agree with the broader point (I think they're scared of a restrictive precedent), but I don't think a law that's been on the books for two hundred plus years is going to be out and out declared unconstitutional. It's extremely broad in the number of domains of application but that doesn't necessarily mean that it grants overly broad power.
That's almost certainly not it because it destroys the chip in the process and if the key isn't recovered the data is forever locked (even with Apple's best assistance).

> “Testing is required to determine whether it is a viable method that will not compromise data on Farook’s iPhone,”
> the Chrome/Firefox model of endless updates.

When I first heard about Chrome's secret updates I freaked out. Now I have used the chrome stable channel for years and have yet to see anything serious magically appear. It is king of disconcerting though to see the UI change. For example the new gray bookmark folders are still confusing my eyes. They disappear into the background for me.
what sort of cases?

Could you use a while loop instead?

I feel like (as long as the numerical case optimizes to the same thing) the for-in loop (and occasional use of the while loop) is clearer.
Sure, there's an extremely well known vulnerability in the iPhone 5C hardware.

Lacking the features introduced in later ARM releases it has an unsecured AHB or AXI bus allowing any device that can connect to perform arbitrary DMA (which can in turn allow arbitrary code execution).

It would require a certain degree of technical sophistication to execute that attack, but the resources required would be well within the reach of a state-level investigative service.
I'm a size 8 and willing to let you eat one from my pair of favourite shoes, if that is more amenable.

But of course, only if The Most Interesting Douchebag In the World™ is even remotely involved.
Setup is relatively easy but maintenance and deliverability are not worth the time.
I disagree – Chrome is the new IE. Why? It's simple: your analogy focuses on being non-standard, but actually misses the most important bit which is control of the market. Chrome is just as much non-standard as Safari, but you wouldn't know because it controls the market. Since ostensibly everyone uses Chrome, it gets to effectively dictate the standards while everyone else plays catch up – Chrome is the de facto standard to which others are held.

I'm not saying Chrome is a bad piece of software – it may or may not be but that's beside the point. What I'm saying is that when you and many others complain about browsers not being standards compliant, I'm willing to bet you mean de facto standards compliant – i.e. whatever Chrome dictates. Just like IE used to.

IE came up with all sorts of features that became de facto standards and in many cases these days an actual standard – @font-face anyone? Microsoft strong armed everyone else into submission until Google decided enough was enough. But it's not like Google did it out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because their business depended on people having the ability to consume the web. They need the web to be great, because otherwise they couldn't have sold so many ads on: the web. So their products need features, and it just so happens that a lot of us got to benefit as well. Compatibility however, isn't really important. At least not while they control the market. What they say, goes. It'd be very difficult to create a site these days that won't work on Chrome, but it's not uncommon that you find disclaimers around the web say "optimized for Chrome" or worse: sites just not working at all on anything but Chrome.

Now they have done, and continue to do a lot to advance the state of the art. But so did IE back in the day. At least until the competition died out.

I for one am glad Safari is weird – I only wish there were more weirdos.
The people saying that 10 years ago were quite obviously being unrealistic. Holding such an opinion back then was essentially predicting that C++ would be replaced by Java, Python, etc.

Now, we've got languages like Rust that offer improved safety mechanisms without really sacrificing expressiveness or runtime performance the way "managed" languages do, so there's a real alternative for software that needs the highest performance or best battery life.
> It worked NY/London but at ~$20k/seat they couldn't fill enough seats several times daily on other routes.

Your price is way off.

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...
Is it just me, or the link not really to a spreadsheet. I was hoping to filter the data so I could compare my salary, but I'm just getting a big ol' useless HTML table that looks kind of like a spreadsheet.
If you're in the NYC or bay area, there are a few quant groups on meetup.com that have regular events. Might be a good place to drop in.
Hey! I work on Fellowship -- definitely would encourage you to stay where you are if accepted; office hours are done over video chat, so you wouldn't be at a disadvantage.
This needs to be decided once and for all.

A savvy judge would not allow the Department of Justice to cancel the hearing just to avoid setting a precedent.
>What's a consumer's interest in asking for a receipt? Especially when you can get a discount instead?

Because some people need an alibi. Patrice Oneal put it best: https://youtu.be/RrBPmoIAyts?t=100
Supposedly it's not possible to reflash the phone without the new code being signed by Apple, which is why the FBI needed Apple to do it in the first place.
Why not just change it by 50-75k? You're a pretty big outlier anyway, not like it matters in terms of median.
> The ability to reflash the phone and avoid triggering the unlock erase was a pretty obvious workaround.

Could you explain that a little for me?
Is it a down payment? Or an option?
Hulk Hogan awarded another $25M from Gawker and its founder
The article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11332965 seems a bit more substantive and that thread is far more active, so I guess we'll treat this one as the duplicate despite its having been posted earlier.
They went to a great deal of effort to start this case, it would be preposterous if they hadn't exhausted other routes beforehand. They're quite obviously backing away from it on purpose.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l...
Sorry I thought you meant that 3D touch made the keyboard selection the killer app for the iPhone platform.

It seems like a year and a half is a long time in mobile phone tech. Google apps have already said that the browser that Blackberry is out of date (which speaks about both the release cycle of Blackberry for a newish phone and Google).

Either way, the touch interface is very cool on Blackberry.
This is perhaps the best thing about income inequality: Things with initial high cost, low volume are doable until investment dollars, etc, can reduce the cost.

I'm really excited to see this!

However, there's no indication as to what kind of seating you're going for. Will these be economy, premium economy (aka, US-national business), or business (aka, lie-flat) seats?
Oh man what hilarious story! Thanks for posting it.
Liam – An Innovation Story
They aren't nitpicking, it's a shitty thing to say. Period.
Here's one approach you could use if you had a reliable zero-day at your disposal. I've been out of the jailbreak scene for a while, so I might be way off the mark:

1) Have zero-day ([0]) that can be used to deliver executable payload over SMS (think Stagefright). iOS devices can receive text messages before the filesystem is decrypted. Perhaps Apple should close this vector.

2) Deploy dylib that patches the SpringBoard UI (where the lock screen lives), disabling the code that counts incorrect passcode attempts

3) Brute force the passcode

[0] http://www.wired.com/2015/11/hackers-claim-million-dollar-bo...
Paradoxically, increasing processing power actually improves battery life, which is one of the most important features of a smartphone. If the CPU can finish its tasks extremely quickly, it can spend more time in a low-power state. Also shrinking transistors usually causes both an increase in performance per watt and a reduction in the number of watts used.
New 13.3 inch Android e-reader
> there is even a button to uninstall the app directly from the details page, which is a scary feature for developers and PMs. You never want your users to consider deleting your app to improve their battery life.

Awesome. Pressure on developers to improve battery usage is great. Now we need pressure for ram usage and speed.

Does iPhone have this? (Curious, not slamming).
> The ability to reflash the phone and avoid triggering the unlock erase was a pretty obvious workaround.

Or just replace one of the off-chip AHB/AXI devices and inject code via DMA. It won't work beyond the iPhone 5C, but I have yet to come up with a plausible reason why it wouldn't work there.
> Most evolutionary experts, like the late Stephen Gould, espouse Punctuated Equilibrium.

I agree that PE seems to fit the fossil data better than "slow, steady, gradual". But I'm not sure that "most" evolutionary experts agree. (Or maybe I'm just 20 years behind the times?)
Would it be foolish to think they struck some kind of behind-the-doors deal with Apple?
> I suspect that the intelligence and law enforcement communities are afraid that if this case goes to the Supreme Court the All Writs Act may be scaled back or ruled unconstitutional.

It's not that the act is unconstitutional, it's that the interpretation of it that the DoJ has been selling to magistrate judges in ex parte hearings is extremely broad and would never survive appeal.

The Supreme Court has made it very clear in multiple rulings that A) The AWA is certainly constitutional and B) it is extremely narrow in its powers and it doesn't grant courts anything even remotely similar to the powers the FBI has been pressuring magistrate judges into believing it has.

So, essentially, by avoiding a highly publicized appeals smackdown, the FBI can still convince magistrates to issue wildly out-of-line AWA writs, and use those writs to pressure companies/people into doing things they wouldn't be held to if they had the time/money to actually appeal.

edit:

> The All Writs Act goes back to 1789 and is used for all sorts of things, like wire tapping, obtaining call and ISP records, etc

Also, I see this mistake a lot (I'm not saying you're making it, but it's a pretty common one). The AWA doesn't actually give the government the power to wire tap things, etc. There are separate statutes that authorize wiretapping. All the AWA does, per the Supreme Court, is give courts the authority to issue common law writs in the course of carrying out powers conferred by some other statute. The AWA is described as being a source of "residual" (secondary) power that only acts to help carry out some primary source of authority.

The DoJ has been pushing an argument that the AWA is a source of primary power in-and-of-itself in any area of law where congress hasn't passed a law saying a court can't do X thing, and the writs don't have to have antecedents in common law. This more-or-less contradicts any number of Supreme Court rulings. They've only been getting away with it because they get a magistrate Judge to issue them by asking for them in "emergency" ex parte hearings, meaning the other side isn't present to offer a competing argument, which the FBI excuses by arguing its a time-sensitive matter (even though it generally isn't). One of the amicus briefs in this case was submitted by 32 law professors, who pointed out that this violates due process.
What I've noticed in this industry is that there aren't really standards for titles. Some people brand themselves as seniors after maybe 3-4 years of experience for better pay, and often the companies that are hiring them are none the wiser.
On regular (non-Managed VM) App Engine, developers are encouraged (but not required) to access services such as Datastore or Mail via App Engine specific APIs. The SDK includes a Development Server that emulates these APIs locally for rapid development.

The Node.js runtime on App Engine Managed VMs encourages you to write against public APIs for Cloud Platform (and other) services - including the public Datastore API, which means your code on Managed VMs is written similarly to how you might write it anywhere else. As such, there's no limit to the potential APIs you might want to emulate.

The gcloud CLI tool does early support for emulating two of the more popular Cloud Platform APIs used by Managed VMs customers, and we hope to add more - you can read more in [1]. In this way you can locally emulate services when writing code that talks to them, independent of the platform you choose to deploy too.

As to builds, your application is re-built at deploy time (not run-time) as a Docker image, cached, and distributed out to new instances as needed. As with all Docker builds it is hermetic and so any code running is the same across all instances for a given version.

(Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud Platform).

[1] https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/beta/emulators...
The reason why I don't use signal is because it uploads all my contacts to their server, something which I don't want. I don't mind adding a contact by hand.

I currently use Threema, which seems to be pretty secure. Unfortunately, it is not open source. A killer feature in Threema ist that you can exchange (and verify I believe) the certificates physicly. You just scan the other party's qr code (it think it is either the fingerprint or the public key) and it saves it to the contact (it will not save it to your phone it will just remember that user with the id ABC uses that certificate. But until it is open sourced, we can only use the good ole PGP.
I don't really care if universities hire hedge managers to manage their endowment, but it's absurd that schools with multibillion dollar endowments still charge tuition. Yale has ~12,000 students and a $26 billion endowment. Tuition is ~$45,000 per student. $45,000 * 12,000 = $540 million. They can't spend 2%(540/26,000) of their endowment per year on free tuition? What is this money for?

Of course this ignores financial aid so Yale's operating costs are much less than $500 mil/year. If you're going to donate to a university your money will go much further at a small college that actually needs your money and will actually spend it rather than hoarding it. TMQ had some great articles about this topic back in the day. http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/page/TMQWeekFour140930/robert... Halfway down.
He threatened a boycott. Apple has to do something.
The ACLU showed a plausible path forward by just desoldering the storage and just rewriting it and trying again when the phone wipes it.

John McCafee and others (ex US govt officials IIRC) have mentioned decapping as a serious option for the NSA.

Snowden and Richard Clarke (advisor to bush on cyber security, advisor to Bill Clinton on counter terrorism, etc) have said the NSA has ways without being specific about how.

I don't think this counts as a serious vulnerability. If you have access to the kind of hardware and technical ability the US govt does, Apple probably isn't too concerned about you being able to break one phone at a time with significant effort involved.
Totally agree, especially regarding relative cost of living and work / life balance.

That being said, cost of living is probably the most difficult to asses as there are also many relative variables.

work life balance could probably be assessed simply by an average work week length. I theorize work life balance is affected on an exponential scale with every additional hour.
A great service! As a grad student I experienced how much time can be sunk into applying for grants. It can be a real deterrent to looking for new sources of funding and partners.

I love that I can enter information once, and have it formatted automatically for different applications. This is such a time saver and relief from tedium.
especially if the Supreme court becomes more liberal with the next appointment

This is the only thing I'm not so sure about. This issue doesn't seem to divide neatly along liberal/conservative lines.
Quora now has 100M monthly visitors, up from 80M in January
Or you'd get contacted my recruiters offering you sacks of cash. Or you'd get an offer and be able to see what current employees and competitor employees make.

Secret salary information has near exclusive financial benefit to the employer. The only employee benefit is protecting their feeling.
How to Use Keywords in Web Page Titles to Improve Search Engine Rankings
Yeah, I scale my salary expectations a lot depending on work conditions. For example, I offer a huge discount for working on free software. On the other side of the coin, these days I'm not sure there is enough money in the world to make me agree to work without doing TDD.

Basically, Nobody has ever offered me less money than I need to live/retire on. Everything else depends on the job for me.
Are there other areas you or other readers can think of in which a technology that was previously available or in use went away entirely with no replacement?
Rihanna: The Anti World Tour in Vancouver BC
> If you take the naive approach and assume it's just a matter of getting models with the same number of parameters as the brain has synapses, our biggest models are about a million times too small.

And if you had that hardware, what would you run on it, exactly? There is no off the shelf algorithm which we could plop on that futuristic GPU and say, yes, this will definitely yield a general human-level intelligence. That is my point. We may or may not have the necessary hardware, but we sure don't have the necessary software right now.
> Plus the Top Gear thing was OBVIOUSLY comical. Since Top Gear is a comedy show after all.

This is not obvious to a casual viewer of the show. I've watched a few episodes from time to time and it seemed like a show about reviewing cars to me.
GARLIC SUPPLEMENTS: CAN GARLIC SUPPLEMENTS PROTECT Your HEART?
Sure, this counts as a compelling usecase. Maybe your API just lets users list Items chronologically since that makes sense for your site, but someone else wants to get Items by location.

Many times, the only way to do what you want with data is to use the API to get everything, then transform it locally. This is obviously really inefficient (and sometimes impossible).
You didn't look through the comment column, did you?
This is true, but if you never take the effort, I'd expect you to build a pretty bad API.
BENEFITS OF DOGTRA: WHY YOU MUST HAVE DOGTRA DOG TRAINING COLLAR
I will review the video you mentioned to make sure we are not misleading any candidates unnecessarily. I have done 500+ interviews at Facebook, 100 for coding. I have also read thousand of interview feedback, and there has not a single time when the point about "++ instead of += 1" coming up. So something is obviously lost in translation here, and we will correct that. Thanks for the feedback!
...at the expense of slowing down the adoption of agreed-upon standards to the point that they can't be reliably utilized because of compatibility issues? This is not exactly a new scenario. At least Microsoft has moved on.
Weird. I can click on that link and it forces a redirect to the HTML view, but I can copy/paste it to a private window(i.e. not logged into Google) and it works fine.
Some other attempts to raise aware of ciphertext malleability and AEAD modes:

* https://tonyarcieri.com/all-the-crypto-code-youve-ever-writt...

* https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/05/using-encryption-and-auth...

* Many articles on http://www.cryptofails.com
> the physical properties behind the symbols

Maybe my interpretation is a bit mathematical and a physicist would
disagree but I wouldn’t call the speed of light or the Planck constant a
“physical property”.

In case of the speed of light the actually geometric thing, that exists
w/o resorting to some arbitrary choice of units, is causality. In the
case of the Planck constant there are different equivalent properties
that I would call “physical”, but it all boils down to representations
of symmetries.

The gravitational constant is more complicated and I’m not quite sure
what to make of it. Setting it to 1 too means that we get rid of all
units and we measure length in multiples of the Planck length. But so
far there is no experimental evidence that the Planck unit is something
special that could be interpreted as some purely geometric property. I
wouldn’t call it something “physical” with what we know today.
There is not always one with the capacity for that kind capital.
Last week the former US "cyber czar" Richard Clarke called the FBI out directly for doing it solely for legal precedent, and stated that virtually no one even in the gov't were on their side: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/former-cyber-czar... >>Clarke noted that Comey and the Justice Department were not getting support in their case from the defense and intelligence communities. "The Justice Department and the FBI are on their own here," he said. "The FBI director [Comey] is exaggerating the need for this, and the Attorney General [Loretta Lynch] is letting him get away with it."<<

But the weird thing is that, from the beginning, most legal experts thought the likely outcome would be that All Writs would be found too broad, so the FBI had to have been suffering from some hubris + bad legal council. So maybe someone with enough muscle finally called them out on it?
> There are tons of self-taught people in IT

What I'm getting at is that they still needed to be taught reading, math, etc. just to get to the point where they could teach themselves how to use technology. I don't think that piecemeal homeschooling can prepare most people to do that sort of thing. A quick glance at historic literacy rates in the US[1], particularly the meteoric rise in all demographics starting in the late 1800s, speaks volumes about the effectiveness of formal schooling. Illiteracy dropped from 20% to 7.7% in one generation (and even more dramatically within unprivileged demographics.)

This doesn't imply that only state-run systems can work, but I think it's clear that state-run systems do work (which is my original point: contrasting state-operated free schools to the war on drugs.)

> I honestly don't believe any of it couldn't be done with different methods or groups.

Absolutely it could, no argument there. The Prussian-style classroom is not the only one, even if it's the only one in widespread use, and there are some legitimate problems with it. That being said I don't see how 90%+ literacy could be accomplished without state involvement. It certainly hadn't happened before, and writing has been around for a long time.

Sorry if I took us way off-topic (war on drugs). My point isn't really about what sorts of schooling we should have, but rather to point out that the schooling we do have provides an interesting counterpoint to the harm caused by the state in pursuing the war on drugs, and is something for anarchists to chew on when railing against the depredations of the state.

[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy
The GP isn't talking about flashing an unsigned image. They're talking about physically connecting to the NAND flash chip, making a disk image, and then every 9 attempts, resetting the state of the flash back to its initial state. The image as the phone currently exists is already signed by Apple, so no cooperation from Apple is necessary.

The major weakness with this model of iPhone is that it keeps the number of failed attempts stored in the NAND flash, not on the CPU die, and is therefore vulnerable to having its state reset like this. It's a fairly obvious attack that the FBI must have known about, but failed to mention in order to try and set precedent.
Someone is going to need to clean the data. People are spamming it like crazy.