skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally I try to do non-random things -- like work on other aspects of the project, you know, in parallel.

That is, if I care about the project at least. When management goes out of its way to make me not care? Then I check HN and WP, just like you.
The pain in fingertips is usually associated with a blood draw from the pad of the fingertip. If you prick the side of the fingertip, the pain is greatly lessened for most people. YMMV, but generally true.
Maybe, but they didn't actually accomplish any of their real goals—making it easy to force Apple to break their security. This particular phone is immaterial, and Apple can always talk big later about how they patched any of the security holes that the government used, to recover face.
..or that for some individuals, those who suffer bipolar (such as myself) or clinical depression, there's a biological factor that has little relation to past circumstances.
Plus they're using this goal to justify not letting you run your code during the interview, which prohibits a "try it and see" problem-solving approach. Asana engineering team, what's wrong with "try it and see"?
Here's a link TFA... http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-cells-into-t...

@the_af: In the future it'd be most courteous of you to provide links to that which you cite; it spares everyone from having to google it ;)
Sure, but if I'm really worried, egress filtering will catch it or the VM won't be allowed to connect out to any non-whitelisted hosts.

Security is about defense in depth, not just "don't run anything you haven't read in detail" - have you read the code of the web browser you posted with?
Okay, excusing how bad the analogy is on a practical basis, let's look at what's going on here.

1. The pirates leave port to plunder, commit general acts of piracy and get that booty.

2. The pirates contract cholera and half the crew is incapacitated or dead.

Point 1 is widely considered unethical, but the reasons that it is considered unethical depends on what basis you hold for ethics (stealing from a person vs stealing from society vs stealing from government vs liberating from "the system", that kind of difference).

Point 2 is tragic (extreme distress), but could also be considered "karmic" (for lack of a simpler expression) depending on your ethical viewpoint.

Is it pure piracy? Well, did they pirate anything? If not, then no that's not piracy, it's misfortune. Did they pirate something and then lose it because of the cholera? If so, then yes it's still piracy, they still committed the act.

>In most societies, you gotta work to eat. I don't think it's necessarily a function of capitalism.

No, it's a function of a living and dying organism which requires sustenance. Capitalism is simply a means of trading value #1 for value #2 between organisms in which the organisms respect property rights (capital) of the individual organism.
Until the next case comes in, where the FBI says that what they tried last time didn't work.
To which they will reply, "we would not have commented on what we found on the device if Apple had been compelled to help us break in to it, and we will not be commenting on what found on the device now"

Holding the case in public, and publishing the contents of the phone in public are very different things
Snowden had the element of surprise. They weren't actively trying to monitor his comms because they didn't know he was a risk until after the leaks. If the state wants to decrypt your messages badly enough, they have resources that they can devote to that (as well as multiple side channels that are probably easier than forcibly decrypting, including the infamous "beat with a wrench" trick). It's not trivial to defeat strong encryption, but it is doable given sufficient interest.
More malicious than being forced to defend yourself, at significant cost, only to say "Nah, changed our mind"? So, plaintiffs can force issues, defendants cannot. And to let them would be malicious?

Give a specific example of something the defense could do that is malicious to the plaintiff?
My info was first hand from the Chief of Psychiatry, Westchester County Hospital, NY, USA. He seemed darned serious, bright, well informed, enormously experienced, and competent.
When the world moves away from oil as means of energy production there will be plenty more Muslims in England and Europe as a whole, it will trigger the largest mass immigration the world has ever seen.
You wouldn't get-rich-quick... you'd agree to a buyout with horrible terms since you'd have zero bargaining power given the circumstances.
Or do it in a language with lazy I/O and don't worry so much about memory requirements.

import Data.ByteString.Lazy as LBS

areFilesEqual x y = (==) <$> LBS.readFile x <*> LBS.readFile y

(EDIT: added line break)
> A bank doesn't give me an IOU when it gives me a loan; it gives me actual money

Actual money is an IOU. From the gov't to the holder of the piece of paper. It used to say so on every bill: "Will pay to the bearer on demand".
How a Bitcoin user celebrated 100th anniversary of Irish Easter Rising
that's not how the security enclave works as far as i know, you can't copy that part off and so you can't copy off + bruteforce the drive?
I use old HP Proliant as a workstation. For $900 you get 24 cores and 256GB RAM. Its pretty loud and power inefficient, but works great for testing concurrent and memory intensive code.
> Am I thinking right when it seems to me like the feds are kicking the can down the road?

Yes, but who knows when they'll ever get this good a case again?
I used to work in a project that was trying to program using rules. I gave up on rules.

Sorry about that: I just couldn't see rules as an effective way to specify a problem or get a solution.
Hard to verify.
Perhaps if the FBI or other law enforcement continue to use the supposed vulnerability - eventually information obtained from a breached iPhone will appear in court as evidence..
I feel like cases shouldn't be droppable unless both parties mutually agree

So if you made a bad decision to enter into litigation with someone, you're held to the consequences of that even after you've changed your mind? Unworkable in practice, and even in theory it's bad because you might wind up setting a precedent for someone whose case was similar to but better founded than yours.
Somewhat agree, but Apple DID have a court order they were fighting. They did choose to fight this legally adjudicated and issued order. The owner of the phone and the law enforcement both wanted the phone decrypted.

FWIW, I agree that privacy is ignored and should be respected, but apple chose this fight. I'm glad they did, but they knew it would cost them.
It's odd that we rarely hear from you guys on sites like this one. Why isn't there a VM that hosts JCL and which you can pass your own projects around on?

I wonder whether part of the problem might be that it's so awkward to replicate mainframe style init on desktop operating systems. Desktop OS init tends to be very pale against a mainframe. I'm working on a project related to this at the moment.
I run SuSE Linux 5 with FvWM, Enlightment, KDE 1 and Gnome 1 (and Gnome 1 over KDE!) with less RAM that 72MiB, on a AMD 5x86DX5@133MhZ-PR75

For web browser, elinks could be an lightweight option.
Stop thinking about "overkill". It's such a foolish pre-optimization. If sometching helps you solve a problem quickly, just run with it.
If you break your arm and then go into the emergency room, you don’t say, “I have pain-in-my-arm disorder”.

Haha! How true.
You can't copy that part off to another device but you can reflashing the chip on the device.
Legally none. Ethically? I think it's worth debating what sort of public trust should be granted to government that sits on an exploit.

But it also requires knowing how they did it. I think most likely they copied the flash, started iterating passcodes, and then reflashed the phone everytime they ran out of attempts. That's sufficiently obvious (to me anyway) that it's not much of an exploit worth documenting and also there's no software fix for such a thing. You'd need to put the passcode attempt counter on some separate piece of hardware that either can't be externally read or reflashed.
I don't think the iPhone in question was of a generation that had the security enclave, was it?
yes you are right, that's what I meant. Sorry
From what I understand, the iPhone in question is an older model, without the secure enclave.
This is pretty cool, how does this integrate with the UX?
How are suicidal ideation/attempts and 'successful' suicides explained by this hypothesis?
Strict enforcement of the rules can kill internet communities. We are not robots. We make mistakes. We can consider context. We can forgive. We can consider the spirit of the law as well as the letter.

These 'rules' are not black-and-white orders handed down from on high. They are guidelines shared with us. We are free to disagree with these rules, to follow or ignore the rules, to enforce the rules or not, and to face the consequences of those decisions. We are thinking and reasoning beings associating freely.

The question shouldn't be, "Was a rule violated?" The question should be, "Does enforcing this rule in this instance help achieve our goal?" In this case, I believe I could make a compelling argument for both sides; but I am not convinced that thinking in absolutes will achieve our shared goal.
I'm not sure about public sentiment - have you seen polls about it?

My take is that HN crowd is completely unrepresentative vis-a-vis the opinion of majority on this issue.
compiler writers write compilers in programming languages, not in syntax trees. Lisp is arguably the only language you write your code in "trees", but even then, it's still all lexical. A syntax tree is not syntax, it's a tree.
1996/1997 or thereabouts.
Which is why I said "loose" criteria, not a rigid ruleset. ::)
While I agree, the counterargument will likely be that all of Apple's lawyers are on salary and as such Apple's legal costs would be no different with or without the court proceedings.
Can you blame them? That CS degree provides essential knowledge when it comes to solving some of the world's most complex problems: to-do lists.
Ah. Thanks for the link. I wasn't aware of that.

Will modify future behaviour :)
Sure, but what's a little perjury between government officials: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/how_james_clapper_will_get_a...
Git 2.8 has been released
The funny thing is that Asana is possibly the worst performing web app out of all the ones I use on a regular basis. I have a strong suspicion there's at least one or two O(n^2) algorithms hiding there that could use the same kind of attention and reasoning abilities they expect from their candidates.
Blind Fish That Crawls on Land Holds Clues to Evolution
I wonder which security group helped the FBI. There must be another whole world of, government friendly, security researchers I don't hear about.
The FBIs motives have always been nakedly transparent in this case. They had no interest in the specific phone, they wanted to use it as a wedge issue to force a precedent. Once they figured out this avenue was a bust, they withdrew to find a different angle. Since everything is classified anyway, it's irrelevant if they actually cracked the phone or not but if they did, it was probably by buying an exploit from the NSA TAO store [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog
Exactly. I'd go so far as to suggest a new term, since "Virtual Reality" seems to bear such a terrible burden of near-complete immersion in some practically unbounded realm with total mobility and Holodeck-like possibilities. Instead of virtual reality, think about virtual presence. VP, if you will.

What are some really cool situations in which you can simply be present and be completely immersed? When I refocus my perspective this way, I think about being at a movie -- in a movie. Maybe I'm the gunner in the Millennium Falcon. Maybe I'm just a spectator on a nearby ship. Or maybe I'm sitting in a sports arena, as if really at the game, watching it and taking it in in a way I can't through my TV alone. Maybe I couldn't afford tickets to the Radiohead tour, but I can buy a virtual seat at any of the worldwide tour venues and see the concert with those crowds. That seems really fucking cool. I want to do that. I want to do that right now. And I don't need to run or jump around when I'm there. All I want to do is sit, and watch, and listen, and be present. And be immersed.

Whenever people think of VR, their thoughts immediately turn to gaming, and then they get disappointed when they realize that VR Skyrim or VR Grand Theft Auto (or what have you) isn't in the cards anytime soon. Instead of thinking about awesome scenarios where VR will fall short of the status quo, we should think of fun scenarios where VP will be a big step up from the status quo.
We will see a parade of similar cases until the government wins and sets the precedent.

Witness the relentless series of attacks from SOPA, PIPA, NDAA, ACTA, CISPA, TPP, etc.

Losing only delays the inevitable because they can just play again, time after time.

Eventually they'll win one and that's all it takes, game over.
The thing is that Yarvin's been a huge edgelord with his neoreactionary blogging. And then it turned out people took him as seriously as he hoped to be taken ... and this is now hanging over his startup business like a radioactive anvil.

The ultimate issue is: “don’t be a provocateur and then whine when you find out that the people you deliberately pissed off are pissed off at you.” http://philsandifer.tumblr.com/post/141737493541/responses-y... (and note, that's a somewhat sympathetic post)
The HTC Vive has a camera in front. It's very limited right now, but it's very likely that future headsets will feature an AR-mode that'll enable you to still see the real environment around you.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377716.
I actually find it easier to write a bit of the spec, try some code, write some more of the spec. They're often intertwined in my process.
LIFX will for sure will give you some free ones, I'm sure!
Yes, just had someone send me the link to the HN Guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Makes sense. I will conduct myself differently in the future. Cheers :)
I think I know what you mean but don't forget there is a specific and horrible case here too. Many people died and now the FBI has access to the phone. I don't know what the odds are that they will find anything useful in way of easing the pain of the victims or preventing an occurrence, but certainly it seems highly plausible. And at the very least a lot of resources going into this part of the investigation can now be used elsewhere. They were able to access the phone and (hopefully) it required some expensive physical+software breaks, which seems to be a reasonable compromise in the privacy vs security debate.

I think this is a great outcome.
You may be right; I have not. I had read that most of the big companies like Facebook and Microsoft, at least, were against the FBI on this issue so that is more of what I meant by "public" sentiment, although now thinking about it, that means I've made a much less compelling argument.
That's a great viewpoint if your target is monoculture. Which is sometimes the goal, such as your example of testing. It's a terrible viewpoint if your target is persuasion or compromise.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of global-regulation.com.

The search is free but almost all of the technical standards aren't free. The reason for that is that the SDOs (organizations that make the standards) license them out and don't provide them for free. There's no way around that, except perhaps for people like you to use only free standards (although some are written into laws so there's no choice in the matter).

If you're someone who buys IEC standards then you'll notice that the prices of those are the lowest available because those are sold directly under a reseller agreement and we have some influence over the price.
I have recently found that I can't trust most of the things written on the internet anymore. Every piece of writing is suspect and that's incredibly tiring. It just seems that PR-media-marketing juggernaut is always on the look for things that are perceived as trustworthy and trying its best to simulate them. Hope that at least HN will remain unpopular enough so that we will still be able to have real discussions here in the future ;)
Yes, absolutely - and another reason is that it forms a sort of "de facto precedent". Even though there isn't a USSC judgment, in future people will (hopefully) refer to "the time the DoJ tried to do X" and the theory is this is citation enough.
Show HN: A Micro Heroku-Like PaaS for the Raspberry Pi
>I think the Everest situation is actually a little sillier, in that you have a bunch of people coming home saying "I climbed Everest!" and everybody forgets the little detail that they had personal staff prepping their every way.

This doesn't really invalidate the accomplishment though. Everest is so extreme that getting to the top, even with support staff, is damn impressive.
And the DoJ stopped fighting.

If the DoJ ultimately won the case, then it's fair that Apple should have to pay their legal costs.

But since using a 200 year old law to force Apple to do work they don't want to do was a legal stretch, if the DoJ lost the case then again I'd say the DoJ should pay Apple's legal costs.
Point 3 reminds me of Haskell trying to prove certain grammars correct at compile-time or C++ calculating factorials using template meta-programming.

Very cool to show off to your geek programmer friends and impress them, but I really question the day-to-day usefulness when considering the added complexity.

I have never ever had bugs in my code from somehow having invalid Unicode code-points in my paths. 99% of the time, replacing '/' with '\' and handling drive letters gets you there. I realize certain classes of bugs could happen, but I'd rather take that risk, have a bug, and fix it, than burden the type system and libraries.

In a way, I'm a little sad that modern computer languages are going from C's extreme of "always trust the programmer" to the other of "never trust the programmer". Bugs are bad, but language usability, ease-of-use and simplicity are also worth fighting for.

Having said all that, I am really happy to see Rust being awesome in the general case and appreciate all the work you and the rest of the team are putting forth.
I've needed user.useconfigonly for years. I constantly forget to change email when I start working on projects in different contexts.
According to the WSJ article, a former Theranos employee has claimed that the commercial Theranos lab routinely diluted fingerstick blood samples and tested them using conventional machines from other manufacturers.

If true, this raises two questions in my mind:

1. Were the non-Theranos machines approved for testing diluted blood samples? The technology may be approved only for blood samples with normal concentration.

2. Were the non-Theranos machines qualified to test blood samples collected by any method? Some researchers think that capillary blood collected with a fingerstick may be too contaminated to produce accurate results.

In other words, was Theranos negligent with respect to federal regulations for use of these machines? Someone with clinical lab experience may want to weigh in.
Actually that might be the opposite: when their lands get more viable to live and prosper, without foreign intervention, wars, corrupt governments, etc to destabilize them and get their oil resources cheaply.

After all they have been staying there for centuries before oil became a thing.
One paradoxical thing about discussions here is that often I see a bad post, followed up with a really good reply. And I want the two to be seen in tandem, but if I sink the parent I also sink the child. So I often upvote both.

Just a stray thought.
I'm sure Apple already knows how they are doing it.

The tech that FBI is claiming to have cracked is the iPhone 5C which does not have the Secure Enclave hardware that all later iPhones do and which are far more of an actual challenge to crack.
I guess under the assumption of everyone following sane versioning practices, maintaining alias symlinks, and/or really solid package management and compatibility testing, this isn't such an issue. If the system admin was compiling a lot of their own libraries and binaries that don't necessarily follow those best practices, it becomes more of a problem. The system admin doesn't know what functionality in the library is used by each binary and weather or not the upgrade is really necessary. If the binaries are self-contained and statically linked, the maintainer of the actual software can stay abreast of security updates in the libraries that they are using and ship updates only when vulnerabilities affect functionality that they use. The sys-admin then only has to download updated binaries if truly necessary and tracking any dependencies on the end-user system becomes unneeded. Not really arguing that it's a better setup. It does mean that software maintainers have to stay active and on-top of security patches. The complexity is inherent, it's just a matter of shifting it around onto different people.
I struggle to understand the relevance of this comment. What have I said that indicates I think such web apps don't exist? Of course they do. My point is that they don't mean you can't run a better browser, for other web stuff.
Only if you backed the Kickstarter. If you bought it after the Kickstarter ended you don't get a free Rift.
Jezen/is-thirteen: Check if a number is equal to 13
It'll be easy enough to infer which it is later because if they have actually got data out of the phone then they'll amend the complaint against the co-conspirator(s) with the newly available information.
you know that old saying, "Poor Asimov had writers block once; it was the worst 30 seconds of his life"
What about Cellebrite thus www.cellebrite.com. This article seems to suggest it is them - http://gizmodo.com/the-company-helping-unlock-the-san-bernar...
OK. But what does it say about the scant majority of the country that at least tacitly (through polls) supported the FBI in this?

I think this whole thing is every bit as much a trial balloon to see how the public accepts the various arguments. And I think that's still unclear. The polls suggest a scant majority supported the FBI, but not enough to get Congress to change the law make it clear companies can be rolled over by the government.

That means there will be a next time.
Disappointing. The links to Triplebyte and Stripe are far more informative.
In 16th century there was already Habsburg-Ottoman war. Europeans were pretty much aware already, what Islam and Muslim are.

At this time, it was just English who were slowly finding out, how to manipulate Ottomans and Berbers against other Europeans.
I've been dreaming about getting one of those old Sun workstations with monochrome bitmapped display that used to be the thing when I was an undergrad CS student in 1984.

I remember being so impressed at the size of the monitor and the crispness of the display...and plus the fact that the workstations only seemed to be in offices that had "clout."
That's kind of like saying that all of Apple's engineers are on salary, so even it it takes a team of 100 engineers 6 months to write the software the DoJ asked for, there's really no cost to Apple.

Businesses don't often pay employees to do nothing, that legal team would be doing other corporate legal work if they weren't working on this case, and I'm sure they paid outside consultants to help with the case.
You and me both!
Is there any evidence that any actor in the world is (in general) capable of figuring out the contents of e.g. an AES-encrypted message with the key unknown, assuming good opsec and a good implementation? I agree with your statement that state-level actors have strong capabilities, but this seems like a blanket statement which is likely untrue.