skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd love to see what a detailed version of security policies and infrastructure look like in a world of backdoor-less strong encryption from Schneier, the EFF, the Hopkins crew, etc. Something that can be used to persuade, or at least influence policymakers by allowing them to see that another way is possible, one that allows security services to do their job in a way that allows them to feel that their work isn't futile, while simultaneously respecting privacy rights.
I think the need for strong encryption and no backdoors (which as Schneier himself has explained in the past, are always a double-edged sword) are very important and I support them, but that those on the side of it who also have in-depth knowledge about the finer details don't deign to articulate just what exactly the policy looks like without resorting to just a list of what we shouldn't do and vague allusions to "just go old-school" or "utilize human assets more."

A coherently articulated, normative counterfactual security platform would be a better place to argue from.

It's a cousin to the negative liberty arguments: they only list what not to do to in order to avoid hurting people, rather than what we can do to help them (positive liberty.)
Maybe we could frame the question as "If we let the EFF and Bruce Schneier redesign the United States security apparatus from scratch, what would it look like?"

We already have excellent critiques, and are good at articulating "what's bad," but far too little on "what would a good system look like that strikes the 'right' balance?"
This may have been a good idea, but it is terribly implemented. Especially, notes of denomination 500 should not have been banned with immediate effect.

In general many poor people, even in cities, do not have bank accounts and face lot of issues when opening such accounts. Sometimes bank require a "reference" from an existing customer to open an account. Sometimes many such poor families (say 20 families - think of it as a big landed area with 20 small houses) live together at a single address, paying rent for a single room, and the banks will refuse to open so many accounts under a single address. Their are several such smaller issues that crop up when trying to open an account that are not well known and that only the people in a particular city or locality face.

These people cannot deposit their savings since they don't have a bank account to begin with. And they definitely have savings in Rs 500 denomination since 500 is nowadays often used in the markets. Essentially, this ban has hit hard the common people. The very rich are hiring others to do the transactions and exchange of money. The lower middle class and poorer sections are left wanting for cash. Hence, good idea, but bad implementation.
I upload Humbles to Google Play Books, not for primary reading but easy accessibility.

I just wish that downloading a 2MB pdf from Google Books wouldn't take 450MB of local storage.

I've also experienced issues with Humbles not uploading properly to Google. It usually takes Humble about four or five weeks to rectify the issue with the PDF.
> but that opens a whole can of worms

Someone has actually went that far: http://ctypes.sh/.
This is the most reddit-like comment thread I've ever seen on HN
China's Ctrip.com to buy Skyscanner in $1.74 bn deal
I assume that answers like this are difficult to frame because being a CTO probably has to deal with the individual situation in question/the reality of the affair in front of them. You might have to add more dimensions to your question to have it relate to you.

I say difficult to frame, but I do not mean to imply that there isn't a possible good answer that's informative.
2 minutes to apply. Approval is manual, so it depends on the day and time and the availability of the Google employee. Less than 48 hours for me.
What I understand is that nobody should fear a state monopoly on violence more than the left.

What I don't understand is why they don't understand that.
In college I tried to see how many games of Freecell I could win without marking a loss. I got up to 1100 before I played a game that someone sent me (seed) that was unbeatable.
I think the real importance of this announcement is the reduction of needed bandwidth by 97% while still maintaining transmission quality - that's amazing!
You're mostly right. The law actually says

"the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination by privately owned places of public accommodation on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin."

If someone refuses me service as a jewish white man, that's illegal (despite jews/whites/men are not being a protected class)
I haven't had LASIK, but I've always been bothered somewhat by glare/halos when outdoors at night.

In the last few years, it's become worse due to the super-bright LED street lamps that are going in everywhere. Not only are they brighter but they don't seem to bother putting shades/lenses/diffusers on them, so the LEDs themselves are directly in your line of vision. Horrible!
He's moving it to NOAA. Seems like a better fit, NASA can focus on the solar system and beyond while other agencies handle the earth.
I don't know if it is good legislation. But it is groundbreaking legislation and important due to the rise of the Gig Economy. It introduces the idea that Gig Workers deserve legal protection, just like regular employees.
I'm from Subgraph and I disagree.

On Qubes OS the networking VM runs a standard Linux kernel with no special security hardening at all apart from the simple fact that it runs in a separate Xen VM. If an attacker is able to compromise NetVM, they may not have direct access to user data, but they have dangerous access to perform further attacks:

- Attacks against hypervisor to break isolation
- Side channel attacks against other Qubes VMs to steal cryptographic keys
- Interception and tampering with networking traffic
- Attacks against any internal network this Qubes OS computer connects to.

So if you assume that remote attacks against the Linux kernel networking stack are an important threat, the consequences of a successful attack even against Qubes are pretty bad.

Subgraph OS hardens the Linux kernel with grsecurity, which includes many defenses against exploitation which have historically prevented local exploitation of most security vulnerabilities against the kernel. Exploiting kernel vulnerabilities locally is so much easier, probably never less than an order of magnitude easier. It's so rare to reliably exploit kernel vulnerabilities remotely even against an unhardened kernel that teams present papers at top security conferences about a single exploit:

https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Ortega/Whit...

I know it's contentious to say so, but I don't believe that anybody will ever remotely exploit a kernel vulnerability against a grsecurity hardened Linux kernel, especially since RAP was introduced:

https://grsecurity.net/rap_announce.php

The threat of remotely attacking the Linux kernel through the networking or USB stack was always low in my opinion, but as the threat approaches zero it raises some questions about how justifiable the system VMs are in Qubes OS considering the system complexity and usability impairment they introduce.
Or you're using Chrome.
Nvidia and Microsoft continue to play friendly competitors in the AR space. Holoportation is quite similar to Nvidia's Virtual Eye tech, and MS [s]is using some of Nvidia's optics tech[/s] [EDIT: is using Nokia's tech to compete with Nvidias AR tech] in the Hololens. Could Nvidia get big enough that Microsoft wouldn't buy them?
I forgot about this. Yeah, that was one of my favorite games on WinXP as a kid.

I even installed it on my Linux machine once, under WINE: if you miss it too, I reccomend you do the same: works like a charm.
It really is straight out of 1984.

Never mind the fact that such surveillance has never stopped or even mitigated a terrorist attack. Nevertheless, this security theatre continues, at the expense of everyone's civil rights.

It's sad and scary.
The scary part is that touching the two connectors of a supercapacitor is an instant discharge. Which might prove pretty dangerous.
Do you mean an absolute reduction of 97% (100mb/s to 3mb/s, for example) or relative (100mb/s to 53mb/s)?
Thanks, but I understand the economics of software reasonably well.

Note that we are discussing "no deadlines or release dates for specific features", not just a magical world without consequences.

If you are looking for how this works, Poppendieck's books on Lean Software Development go into both the theory and practice. But the basic notion is that you control costs via scope control, waste reduction, minimizing WIP, and continuous improvement. One still delivers things quickly and efficiently; it's just that deadlines are not used as a control mechanism.

Once you're through Poppendieck's work, I recommend "Priniciples of Product Development Flow": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007TKU0O0/
> When it didn’t matter—when it was Facebook, when it was Twitter, when it was email—it was OK to let programmers, to give them the special right to code the world as they saw fit. We were able to do that. But now that it’s the world of dangerous things—and it’s cars and planes and medical devices and everything else—maybe we can’t do that anymore.

Mark this mindset as the beginning of the end of the open, inclusive programming world as we know it.

Schnier visited RIT (my alma mater) last spring, and his presentation revolved around the threat presented by IoT and the growing need for national legislation to encumber it. I asked him a pointed question about how this scaled to the _international_ level, which he decided mostly not to answer (focus on domestic policy first, and such). Because the answer is simple: _it doesn't_. Without global collaboration, this philosophy is the beginning of national internet feifdoms - moreso than what exists today - and the beginning of the end of the global collaboration we freely enjoy today. I value this freedom a lot.

I respect Mr. Schneier for his poignant responses to popular security issues and his ability to be a public face for computer security, but I strongly disagree with where he's lobbying we take the future to. Maybe I just can't accept the hard reality that "security isn't easy" and that government regulation is the only way to force security on people.
University Teams Choose Between Bitcoin and Ethereum
Firefox says "part of this page are not secure (such as images)". You'd think Apple could make it all https.
> If hiring hundreds of PhDs to create a general purpose learning agent, all while publishing all the intermediate results in freely available papers isn't a moonshot with socially beneficial outcome, then I don't know what is.

I'm sorry, I don't buy it. What exactly are the social benefits of general purpose learning agent?

It's an impressive technical and scientific challange, agreed, but most applications that I can immediately think of are harmful to society (reduction of white-collar jobs, increased potential for surveillance and profiling, etc) - so how would such an agent be used to actually improve society?
My 15 Minutes of Fame (and Why Airbnb Is Killing It)
> I don't think there are any amnesic features like in Tails nor strong isolation between gateway and workstation to prevent IP leaks like in Whonix.

Subgraph sandboxes run in a network namespace with no direct access to the network or ability to view any of the physical network interfaces on the system. There is no way for an attacker to send network traffic directly or to discover the real IP address of the system without breaking out of the sandbox.
Django's opinionated nature means it fits together better. Random django packages will do admin, ORM handling, etc. in a single consistent way whereas flask packages typically don't.

E.g. what seems to be flask's most popular CMS uses mongo as a backend.
It normally is! But. It has catastrophic failure modes. (Yes, pebble beds. Let's talk about realities, not if-onlys.)

Because of those catastrophic failure modes, nobody except governments want to assume the risk. And governments only do it because they have sovereign immunity from those whose interests they're supposedly representing.

I firmly believe that any interested parties who want to go nuclear, should, and reap those rewards. If you can't find an insurer, go find wealthy people who believe in your design to indemnify you.

Just don't pick my pocket to build it and then poison me.
You realize that the word 'racist' has lost all meaning by now? It simply means 'people I disagree with'.

I think it's lost meaning starting with 2011 (thanks, Obama). See: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=racist

Notice how frequency of use spikes by 500% over last 5 years. That means that either the world has got immensely more racist, we started noticing it more or the word has just got diluted to where it doesn't mean anything (by a factor of 5, to be precise).

I happen to think it's the latter.
Have you use any of those commercial offerings? I've honestly never heard of them before. Can i, as a regular consumer go purchase one of those operating systems and use it on my laptop?
When someone bemoans the fact that a significant chunk of the our generations intellectual and monetary capital is invested in trivial matters it isn't necessarily that they wish google and Microsoft ought to save the world instead of make phone operating systems and ads.

If they have any sense what they want is for we as a species to put our money, our labor, our hearts and our lives into matters of importance to the human race.
Hard to square that idea away with observable concepts like how hormones and brain damage affect people. One could say that the brain does all the computation, and the link to consciousness is one-way, but if that consciousness-link isn't affecting the physical computation, then that doesn't explain why our brain makes us talk about being conscious. That consciousness-link-thing would be entirely unrelated to why we talk about being conscious and should be called something else.
It doesn't punish people intentionally trolling because they know to just create a new account. It just punishes people with unpopular opinions who are honestly trying to participate in the community.
This is the sort of thing that could spur on an interest in Windows as a mobile platform again. Imagine if someday you could "holoport" to meet and talk with people using your phone and a pair of glasses.

Of course, the article in question requires a setup in the car, which allows them to place cameras, and currently it still requires Wi-Fi grade signal for it to work.
Yeah, I think most job postings are so poorly written that there are too many false positives and negatives to use them for much filtering. The main thing I'd eliminate first off is anybody requiring Agile certifications; organizations that lean on that have basically given up on thoughtful hiring.

Good luck with your search! If you're in the Bay Area, feel free to drop me a line when you go back and I can recommend some places.
Also, there's literally no way to clean it up in case of accident and you have to keep it out of harms way for thousands of years.

Theoretically, we can put CO2 back in the bottle. Practically, we can do it now, just not with enough efficiency and scale to make it worth it.
Hope you agree that "oriental" is offensive, even though every Asian person I've ever met in my life told me it wasn't -- or you get banned from Hacker News for not being a social justice warrior. We're so liberal in San Fransisco, we accept everyone, as long as you think exactly like we do about everything. If you don't we're going to tell you how to think and how to feel and censor you if you don't comply.
The problem is that if you email them to your device, the books in your library lose their cover picture.
I always have to copy them manually with Calibre to keep the cover.
My React/Redux links list has a page pointing to a number of useful Git tutorials and resources, including several that dig into Git's internals: https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links/blob/master... .
I really want to like Elm. When I'm writing JS/React code, I sometimes think "this would be so much nicer in Elm!" - especially for architectural issues. But the few times I’ve actually tried doing something in it, I find that the parts of what I want to do that fit cleanly within Elm’s walls are really nice, but the parts that don’t quite fit get hard quickly. Suppose I want to do something with the DOM that doesn’t quite fit into virtual-dom’s model -- I suddenly have to make a complicated JS interop and work around things to get at the raw DOM node... whereas with React I can just hack something together, try it with users, and learn that I should actually be doing something completely different anyway. Or maybe I don’t actually know yet what I want to have happen in every possible condition? Maybe I feel this way because I just don’t have enough experience, but it may be a fundamental trade-off involved in how Elm makes it hard to do things wrong.

Has anyone had some positive experiences with prototyping / rapid design iteration with Elm and can share some tips / encouragement?
Is there room for malpractice here?
Maybe you should be thankful. The option to not wear glasses is way too convenient. My eyes are unprotected from UV and impact. I might remember when operating a chainsaw or pouring sulfuric acid, but that's about it. Operating a circular saw or pouring bug killer without any protection is too damn convenient.
Or by printing it in a book. There's LOTS of reluctance to ban actual, physical books in the US (and plenty of reasons that any ban would be struck down).

That said, up to the mid 90s it was theoretically against the law to show a foreign national a printed-out copy of DES. Crazy. I think it was published in magazines . . .
The model is the null hypothesis here... I don't think the parent comment was wrong w.r.t. this.
> Then, they cut the electric supply wires to EVERY Supercharger with commercial grade tools (they are big cables).

Harbor Freight bolt cutters, $30, would do it. So would a sawzall. A hack saw would too, but be slower.
System76 Oryx Pro review: Linux in a laptop has never been better
That's actually what Bruce wants - and he figures the only way to enforce it is through regulation. He's given up on the sensibilities of individual companies and programmers, and would instead like to rely on regulations to make some basic guarantees.

You and I know the basics of computer security. We can take a crack at designing a secure system and maybe do okay. But the argument goes like this: Yes there are security conscous programmers, but there are also many which are not. And those people work on products which make it to market. How do we stop those products from making it to market? Government intervention. He's given up on education and relying on the informed developer, and would rather rely on public policy. I find it a bit sad.
Gonna read a book.
Central limit theorem means there are lots of cases where normal distributions are directly applicable.
BTW. your parent seems to mistake "inside" with "the
brain" which seems like a category error.

I was just paraphrasing the article itself, which says "inside my head". I think it's pretty clear what this means.
I don't think this works:

Suppose there's a method for calculating a fake choice token from a true choice token. This means that applying it to a fake choice must also produce corresponding fake choice tokens, otherwise a fake choice could be identified in this way. And by induction, any number of applications of the function must also reach a matching choice.

(This isn't a complete proof, but chasing up the remaining loose ends makes me think such a system is impossible, or at very least extremely complicated, and almost certainly impractical for non-mathematicians.)
> Variable-length bytes is a feature that Python does not have.

That wasn't my point. My point was that, as far as integer objects are concerned, there is no concept of "byte" at all, not even a fixed length "byte" of 8 bits. There is no concept of "chunk of data operated on as a single unit by the hardware", and there is no concept of "unit of data of the underlying storage for this object". There are just objects representing integers of any value you like.

The only kind of object in Python for which a concept of "byte" in your sense exists at all (if we leave out modules like the ctypes module) is the byte string (str in Python 2, bytes in Python 3). For those objects, you are correct that "byte" is always 8 bits in Python, and there is no way to vary it. But that has nothing to do with the underlying hardware; it is just the data model that Python has chosen for binary data.

> if you want to represent a binary data type with N instances where N>255 (e.g. an integer in a range from 0 to N where N>255, or from -N to N where N>127) then you either need bytes wider than 8 bits, or you need to worry about endianness.

Only if these things are exposed to you at all. In Python, you don't have to worry about this for integer objects because you don't see the underlying storage at all; things like what endianness is used to store integers > 255 are implementation details of the interpreter. Frankly, I find that to be a good thing: if I wanted to worry about stuff like that, I'd be programming in C, not Python. But of course different people will have different needs and preferences.

> UTF-16 and UTF-32 are encodings of unicode which use 16-bit-wide and 32-bit-wide bytes respectively to encode those code points.

I understand that you prefer to use this terminology; but my point in that particular comment was that it is not the terminology that is used in the Unicode documentation, which is the closest thing we have to an "official" terminology for Unicode. As is shown by what I quoted, that documentation clearly uses the term "byte" to mean 8 bits; it refers to UTF-16 and UTF-32 as encodings that use 2 or 4 "bytes" to encode a code point. It does not use the term "byte" to refer to 16 or 32 bit chunks of data. So it seems misleading, or at least potentially misleading, to use the term "byte" to refer to anything other than 8 bits when talking about Unicode encodings, since the Unicode documentation does not give the term "byte" that meaning.
So what's the solution? When other people keep making and buying products that communicate over the Internet, because it's easier, what do you do about it?
They have some equivalent series resistance and internal resistance, but yeah, try touching the two conductors of a Li ion cell together. Batteries and bombs are basically the same thing -- store energy and release it very quickly.
My impression is that most large-scale clean energy projects go for wind power, indirect solar energy (use sunlight to heat up some medium which then drives turbines or rotors) or bio fuel - with more exotic stuff like geothermic energy where it's applicable.

Solar panels seem to be one of the most inefficient clean energy solutions - so are they actually relevant here?
New technology makes solar panels 70% more efficient
Do you... realize it's actually a live webpage your testing on? It's not like the server checks to see if you wrote exactly the right answer. It just checks to see if an alert is fired. If it didn't work, it's because you didn't do it right.

<script>alert()</script> most certainly works unless you have noscript.
These Are the Lobbyists Behind the Site Attacking Elon Musk and Tesla
You are a perfect case study for why anecdotal evidence is categorically useless. More than a century of carefully studied evidence still hasn't managed to squash this way of thinking.
Yep. Keep IoT on the LAN, or give it the same respect you would any other networked computer.

However, the day the the Internet Era of Fun And Games is over is the day that the internet keels over dead. The Internet was (almost literally) built on fun and games.