skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Encryption is political engagement. Loosely translated, TLS and PGP have historically been computerese for "get a warrant."

Of course the deep state will use politicians to assert its power, and if politicians do not work for us instead, people will use networks, technology, and trade (or the alternatives) to defend their freedom.

It is a reasonable question to ask, how long does a typical nation really maintain its territorial sovereignty, and which ones are outliers?

Kamp misinterprets the fact that because some states have begun to fight means that they will win. It does mean, however, that crypto facilitates freedom, and it forces the discussion in regard to the limits on elite powers. The crypto genie is out of the bottle. It is on states to rethink how they engage, not us.
Each user-specific setting introduces additional maintenance overhead and rarely used/dead code. Easy to see why they'd want to avoid it.
image caption is a separate, albeit related problem to what I'm talking about.

Ontologies are much the same; they are interesting for the problems they solve, but it's not clear how well those problems relate to the more general problem of language.

word embeddings are also quite interesting, but again, are typically based entirely off whatever emergent semantics can be gleaned from the structure of documents. It's not clear to me that this is anymore than superficial understanding. Not that they aren't very cool and powerful. Distributional semantics is a powerful tool for measuring certain characteristics of language. I'm not sure how much more useful it will be in the future.

Uunsupervised learning from video and images is a strictly different problem that seems to me to be much lower down the hierarchy of AI Hardness. More like a fundamental task that is solvable in its own universe, without requiring complete integration of multiple other universes. Whether the information extracted by these existing technologies is actually usefully semantic in nature remains to be seen.

I agree that we'll get there, somewhat inevitably; not trying to argue for any Searlian dualistic separation between what Machines can do and what Biology can do. I'm personally interested in the 'how'. Emergent Strong AI is the most boring scenario I can imagine; I want to understand the mechanisms at play. It may just be that we need to tie together everything you've listed and more, throw enough data at it, and wait for something approximating intelligence to grow out of it. We can also take the more top-down route, and treat this as a problem in developmental psychology. Are there better ways to learn than just throwing trillions of examples at something until it hits that eureka moment?
Absolutely disagree.

A) Even when the government has the data to stop someone, they don't: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/terrorists-were-already-...

B) Outlawing crypto just doesn't work. You can't outlaw math. You can try all day long, but that only hurts the masses

At some point, you have to realize that breaking encryption has nothing to do with safety, but is all about power.
I suppose that implies that I can "double spend" my ETH that were bought pre-fork, then? Where can I do this?
Does your company get support for its money? If so, ask them to increase the priority of fixing the bugs you are seeing, since you are paying them.
It's amazing and shocking that this exists in a modern country.

We're distracted by issues like 'Black Lives Matter' - which have some merit but are also potentially divisive ...

When it seems there are some pretty low hanging fruit for improvement in this country.

If BLM wants to go after something, it's not bad cops - it's this insane part of the US justice system.
very nice article in SO after a long time !
Made the case for what? In another paper, he wrote:

Since J is now free, and uses only ASCII characters, the requirements set forth in my A Personal View of APL have been fully met.

http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/autobio.htm
It's nice to have an article that puts the answer right up front.
> Perhaps your architecture wouldn't "compile" if the network traffic will go the wrong place, or if a rate limit is above the capacity something is expected to handle, or if the change would impact too many servers at once.

This is an interesting idea. I'm always terrified when I have to deploy a minor configuration change into a production system that gets distributed out; if there was an easy way to apply some sort of check against all of it (you know without having to build something explicitly to do this) that would be awesome.

I wonder if the future of something like this might be using containers. Each piece that gets deployed is in its own container networked together and you stand it up in a staging environment, ensure it's talking together correctly through some sort of set of integration tests then push it into the production environment.
Is that in their EULA?
Show HN: A minimal web-based IMAP client for use on untrusted machines
I'm not conflating the two. Textualists reject reliance on legislative intent, but still recognize that the "ordinary meaning" of the words is what the words meant (in general) when they were written. If the Constitution uses the word "blue" but in 1789 "blue" meant what we would think of as "green," a textualist would interpret the word to refer to what we think of as "green." But she would reject any attempt to dive into the legislative history to see what Congress intended to do by using those particular words.

> Neither originalists nor textualists tend to think that the Constitution is a document under which everything which is not prohibited is allowed; quite the opposite, in fact.

We are talking about state law here. States are not governments of enumerated powers.
Presumably "no precedent" means "relating to privacy and security". To the extent that there are legal wins there, they were either extracted by technical means (e.g. the crypto wars) or effectively meaningless (e.g. 'oversight' of bulk surveillance).
It would be clearer if the title were changed.
You may be interested in this companion piece: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
A related personal experience. I deleted my facebook account few years ago. Much Later (actually around 2 years later), when I wanted to check something related to facebook sdk, I created a fake account but gave my original mobile number.

Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number.

For all those sharing content in FB, worrying about your privacy is pointless and a total waste of time.

My personal opinion is that, Google somehow values people privacy more than Facebook, that why its social networking attempts are failing. On the other hand, Facebook is just ruthless when it comes to handling people's data and that is why it is having much success as a social networking platform.
Unroll.me: Unsubscribe instantly from whatever you don’t want
> but a key distinction here is that you are using Facebook for absolutely no out-of-pocket expenditure

Here's my perspective: I would pay for an ad-free subscription, but they don't offer one. They literally will not take the money I have to offer.

Imagine walking into Stabucks and having them refuse to take your money but instead handing you a coffee and a booklet of ads. Is it bad to throw the ads in the bin? Would the barista become angry and start shouting ads at you too? Or, more likely, ask you not to come back?

Note: I don't use Facebook on the principle that they want to commoditise me instead of taking my money, but I see nothing wrong with blocking their ads should someone not hold that principle.
referring to caffeine as a nootropic seems to be broadening the term 'nootropic' quite a lot. am i misunderstanding what a nootropic is?

edit: i'm referring to the quote saying "So we have two mild nootropics" which i read as counting caffeine as one of them
Wait, are you surprised that adherents to Abrahamic religions would be in support of capital punishment? Each of the holy texts are filled with harsh judgments and abusive punishments meted out by god or god's servants.

Also your comment about Americans feeling like divine judges comes off as a touch hyperbolic, and if that's your experience you must live near some pretty extreme Christians.
I cited it as a thing that killed people and caused an industry overhaul in how things were reviewed... Remember that toyota just was forced to do somthing like this only a few years ago. I'd say the FDA has been cognizant of life threatening code for a lot longer.
I wonder what kind of interesting stats one could dig up from aerial images of the farms near La Crosse, WI. Instead of a grid of circles, the farms carve out a bunch of fascinating patterns in the fractal topography around the river. (I'm sure there are similar layouts in other regions, but that's the one that stands out in my memory.)

Example: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6474645,-90.9363052,5382m/da...
> They figured ways to have both islam and freedom of expression.

Only in 20th century, only after Ataturk abolished the Caliphate after the WWI. Before, only if they managed to set themselves free from the Muslim rulers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Caliphate

Marvel the maximal extent of it:

http://asianhistory.about.com/od/turkeyhistoryculture/ss/Ott...

In Islam there's no concept of freedom, especially not "of expression:"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam

"Islām is the verbal noun of Form IV of the root, and means "submission" or "surrender"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim

""Muslim" is an Arabic word meaning "one who submits (to God)"

Just wishing something to be true doesn't make it true. And anachronisms are only that.
If you must have structured data, use a lisp program. Congratulations on using a format that was designed to be executable. and if it's a build tool, you better believe it's executable. I suspect that Annatar is a Murray Hill purist (I don't know for sure), so he may disagree with me.

Of course, like any real programming language, it's hard to process with regex, but then again, I don't want to process makefiles with regex. And you might have some luck coaxing AWK or the SNOBOL family to parse it, and it would be far easier than doing the same with XML.

>please don't use XML for applications which must run on UNIX. It's a nightmare. It's horrible. No!!!

I'd disagree with you there. DocBook, HTML, and friends, are all good applications of XML (or near XML), doing what XML was designed for: Document Markup.

Seriously people, when you're writing a program in a language that has "Markup Language" in the name, does that not ring any alarm bells?
Because it's not a fundamental error or indeed an error at all.

What you've just expressed is one of those fascinating pieces of mental junk that clutters up social groups, a political desire that's so strongly held you've managed to rationalise to yourself that it's a fact and not a personal desire at all. But it's still not a fact.

It is trivial to use cryptography in ways that yield some sort of balance between personal privacy and the needs of the state. In fact it's almost the default:

• Client-to-server encryption with central message routing is "unbreakable" against neighbours, friends, your employer (when not using their equipment) and most importantly criminals, but is easily accessed by any police officer who can serve a warrant on the provider.

• Disk encryption enforced by secure hardware like iOS, Android, BitLocker etc can easily be given a backdoor by the manufacturers. It's only a few pages of extra code at most.

And that's about it for "mainstream use of crypto up to about 3 years ago" right? It's only since Apple and Facebook started refusing to unlock devices and claiming (wrongly) they have end-to-end encrypted their service so they can no longer comply with warrants that this situation has changed.

That's not even including other techniques like key escrow, the dual-EC RNG that the NSA was pushing (with the interesting fillip that it's got a cryptographically strong "unbreakable" backdoor!) and a whole host of other tricks that aren't really used much (we think).

PHK's article even spells this out for you - Kazakhstan breaks the supposedly unbreakable TLS by simply insisting everyone configure their computer to allow them that ability, a feature well intended by the TLS designers.

The truth is that there's a vast middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all" and it is in that middle ground the virtually all services we use today sit. Enough crypto is used to keep out ordinary criminals and snoops, but not enough is used to keep out determined governments with jurisdiction. The point the author is making is that attempting to pursue the ideal of unbreakable crypto (a) won't work and (b) will actually end up making privacy worse for everyone.
I think this point of view isn't just wrong it's actively harmful.

It completely ignores what happened - which is that various government agencies skirted around constitutional law, subverted public discussion of the matter [0] and have still not been brought into adequate compliance (Since it's incredibly hard to demonstrate standing and not have the case squashed [1]).

And after all this the author is saying the problem is that the users aren't part of the political process? I would say until powers and programs employed by government agencies are brought into accountability (let's not forget the CIA monitoring the computers of it's own oversight committee [2]) and a transparent debate is allowed to take place, there is precisely nothing better to do and encryption everywhere is precisely the correct populist and democratic way to fight it.

>Just this past week Kazakhstan announced that a "state root certificate" would have to be installed on all computers wanting to use SSL/TLS/HTTPS out of the country.

Yes backwards nations like Kazakhstan might be implementing "state root certificates" but this is just clearly demonstrative that the power is on the side of the users in this debate. Isn't having these kinds of crazy measures on ballot in Western countries precisely forcing the political process the lack of which the author of this paper is criticizing?

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/06/watch-t...
[1] https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel
[2] https://theintercept.com/2014/03/05/congress-intelligence-co...
How about a FLOSS archive that provides peer-reviewed and signed application from a trusted source only?
Automated security updates? A security team that can provide fixes independently from the upstream authors?

...because I just described how Debian worked for the last 20 years.
> Actually, the configure debacle doesn't have anything to do with terrible software practices.

I don't mean that reason to use configure is bad. There are many different systems, and being compatible with them all requires some kind of check / wrapper system.

I mean that the design of "autoconf" and the resulting "configure" script is terrible. Tens of thousands of lines of auto-generated shell scripts is (IMHO) objectively worse than a collection of simple tools.

See nginx for a different configure system. It has a few scripts like "look for library", and "look for header file". It then uses those scripts multiple times, with different input data.

In contrast, configure use the design pattern of "cut & paste & modify". Over and over and over and over again. :(
Teachers in my mother's district in Virginia also work on a contractual basis. However, they renew their contracts at the end of the school year even though they aren't actually working and getting paid over the summer. As a result, they are technically employed and ineligible for unemployment.
I feel like DNS is one of the best ways to do service discovery but its complexity is always baffling to me. I mean I understand roughly how it all works but if you asked me to stand up DNS internally for various servers to use it...might take me a while.

I've wondered if it's simply because I don't know it well enough or if we need an easier, more simple solution to replace DNS in internal networks. There are a ton of ways to do service discovery.
APL\B5500: The Language and its Implementation

Gary Kildall

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12223304
For clarification:

What does the Gmail API add over IMAP?
It is real, and many similar samples exist. People in the industry can usually ask around and get copies.
Yeah, I mean, you CAN at least parse a porcupine dipped in curare with Regexes.
In this case it would be fair to note that this outage did not affect all connectivity (web traffic would be unaffected while ICMP were blocked).
Not necessarily. You don't need to introduce compromised crypto (that's exactly the problem that's happening currently). I think the point of the article more shows that by using TLS everywhere the government is incentivized to attack it a lot more.

This isn't just governments either. Corporations do things like proxy HTTP traffic to cache pages and save on bandwidth (some ISPs do it too). By moving that to HTTPS traffic you are removing the ability to do this, and that gives them an incentive to do things like install root certificates for all their devices. Now your banking website has it's traffic sniffed as well, all in the name of caching the youtube videos that get distributed around the office.
> If you're new to learning about regression and want to use it, I would prioritize the statistical issues.

There is absolutely no need to take the statistical route in least squares regression. In fact, it needlessly complicates things. Interpreting least squares regression as the minimization of the sum of squares of the residual is a straight-forward way to understand the technique.
This was a fairly interesting read but I don't really like the opening line.

> In the eyes of her persecutors, the author Maris Kreizman
was guilty of the following counts: being a woman, being Jewish, criticizing Donald Trump, and tweeting at all.

Internet trolls aren't persecutors -- they're kids that say mean things on public forums.

They don't care in the slightest that she's a woman or Jewish -- those are just easily identifiable characteristics that can be used for insults and slurs.

Not that these trolls need any defense but 'and tweeting at all' is honestly insulting to the trolls. Most of them probably don't even know or care who this woman is outside of a screencap of her tweet appearing on some image board. The entire culture is based around anonymity and shunning identity in favor of ideas.
Well, there was a declassification of cryptography as munitions, which was very important. But that kind of proves the point, doesn't it?
In many cases you can do staged or partial rollouts, observe error rates or whatever suitable metrics you have, and then continue with the next bunch of servers.
UK Visitor Numbers Boosted by Slump in Pound
Thanks Matt. Totally get it. I think because Kickstarter starts feeling like a store, its easy to forget the situation of the campaigners: super early on, having invested their own funds to come up with a prototype that they're now crowdfunding to come to life. Thinking about it in terms of expected value, Kickstarter never makes sense. Thinking about it in terms of providing an incremental X% chance that something cool will succeed and come to life is I think a much more realistic representation of what Kickstarter provides.
Since I am working on a similar problem at the moment myself, It'd be great if you could share some insights on fixing the 3D deformation -- I imagine fitting a polygon followed with a warp transformation could be an "ideal" process?

In the contrast problem you mention there, I found (in a few samples that I tested with) that adaptive thresholding seem to be sufficiently good [0].

[0] I am using ``skimage.filters.threshold_adaptive`` for this.
Facebook’s legendary algorithm demystified
How about the first amendment to the United States Constitution?

Also, I believe trustworthy and political to be mutually exclusive.
Possibly poor phrasing on my part, but that doesn't affect my point.

Also, Google stores personal data, which makes it an issue. Privacy isn't just about sales, it's also about malicious actors having access to it.
Let's go by Wikipedia:

> Nootropics (pronunciation: /noʊ.əˈtrɒpᵻks/ noh-ə-TROP-iks)—also called smart drugs or cognitive enhancers—are drugs, supplements, or other substances that improve cognitive function, particularly executive functions, memory, creativity, or motivation, in healthy individuals.

I think it would fall under that definition. Then again, so would adderall.
I'm not sure if evernote does the same technique, in my experience, evernote app scans documents pretty well most of the time.
I've been mixing Trader Joes Coffee Concentrate with Soylent for breakfast for months. This seems like a no-brainer.
> been through burnout several times

Wait--what?! How?

I don't want to discount your story or make light of it, but are you sure you've been "through" it? Maybe you meant to say you have closely avoided actual burnout several times?

You don't go "through" it without traumatic damage. The title doesn't say "minds turned to ash" for nothing.

I can't imagine anybody going through burnout twice, you have to be extremely unlucky AND stupid because the trauma turns up the alarm bells to eleven if you even get close to it (which is also lot sooner than before). This is some existential dread level of avoidance we're talking about here, the kind you need immense willpower to overcome. I'd do anything to avoid having to go through that again (maybe if I had children).
> without consequences to the persons named

I would hope so (everyone makes mistakes some of which may lead to HUGE issues) and not giving them a chance to learn from it is a bit unrealistic. At the same time, however, I have been part of organizations where something has gone wrong and us engineers basically all had to "take the blame" otherwise the single person likely would have been fired. I'm confident Google is not like that but it's always something I think about.
Well, yeah. But I can't trust him out of hand.

Are you a Plan9 user, by any chance?
You can use alt+left with one hand, just use the right hand alt key.
Is there a contribution guide?
The basic premise here that crowdfunders are investors is wrong. They're idea backers - people that are willing to donate money to see great ideas come to life. Kickstarter says this themselves, and it's a little strange to make the jump that a backer == and investor. Wouldn't you agree?
No one is ever obligated to view ads. I'm not stealing from the billboard company because I keep my eyes on the road, and I'm not a bad person because I mute the television every five minutes when NBC runs ads for things I don't want during the Olympics.

The browser is our user agent. Facebook can serve whatever it wants, but we're under no contractual or moral obligation to look at it.
Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number.

Do bear in mind that many of those people likely have your phone number, and will have integrated Facebook with their smartphone's contacts list; they could easily find loads of people just from that.

I'm not saying that they have deleted your old account, but it is possible that there are other explanations.
Hi Jedd, I don't think it's possible yet but RemixOS is an Android based OS running on both intel and arm that makes Android usable with keyboard and mouse.
The same goes for ChromeOS. Both are running on Arm hardware.
Another option is to install Linux Deploy on Android, install a Linux distro and view the display by connection with vnc, X or framebuffer to localhost.
Even though pricey, an Acer Transformer T300 (wintel) as tablet and computer gets the job done as well.