skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So in the case of someone getting your master password and access to your file you'd be open to someone stealing all your credentials. That doesn't bother you? Especially since you're probably more exposed to attack vectors by being on a Windows machine and having your local file system compromised in some way?
Thanks Paul. I didn't submit this to HN.

But I'll disagree about the news value. The complaint's allegations about what Dropbox promised, versus how the architecture actually works, are pretty strong.

Soghoian knows his tech and he knows the FTC (he used to work for them). I like Dropbox. I use Dropbox. But the blog post Dropbox keeps pointing to doesn't explain the discrepancy between what users were told about security/privacy and how the service works in practice (centralized encryption keys).
Though it comes at the expense of CPU usage, running a GUI on a strictly-timed frame-synced loop makes interaction much, much smoother.
A giant interneuron for sparse coding
> If a TV show did pick on fifty random women from the street and start pointing out the flaws in their appearances then people would be rightfully upset about that too...

So?

Do you really think that it should be illegal for me to pick 50 random people and say "I think that they're ugly because {reason}"? Should it be illegal for me to pick 10 people I don't like and say the same?

Opinons are like assholes. Everyone's got them. How about not worrying about other people's assholes?
When you look at the map linked in the article, http://goo.gl/adHC3, it's remarkable how such fantastic places in the state can be kept open for only $33M.
Because the political climate in California right now is being heavily influenced by a very loud Republican contingent that is strictly opposed to anything that even smells like an increase on taxes for businesses.

(See, for example, the recent article that, in a poll among CEOs, found California to be one of the worst states for business.)
I've worked for Microsoft for over a year now, and they've been exceptionally supportive of my peculiarities. I've suffered massively from depression and sleep disorders, and everyone's pretty willing to reschedule meetings, allow for an altered work schedule, or just let me work from home when it gets bad.

As long as I deliver what I'm supposed to, when I'm supposed to, they're very reasonable.
Lodsys Threatens to Sue Over In-App Purchase and Upgrade Links
Teen Discovers Promising Cystic Fibrosis Treatment
I know that. I was referring to the popularity of alcohol among those with mental illnesses, not its efficacy.
Yes, and we're doing our best to make it as intuitive as possible (re: bite size pieces).

What do you mean by measuring track record? Track record of the PR professional?
WebGL - A New Dimension for Browser Exploitation
Do many platforms have a login-specific crypto call? That is, one tied to the user's system password? (Like Windows CryptProtectData.) That has the added benefit that if anyone steals the disk or resets the user's system password to login to their account, all such secrets are lost.
Setup your space on Rentul Travel Marketplace
If you want to understand the beauty of macros don't read silly trollish blogs. I've said it a million times and I'll say it a million more - look at very good Lisp code that wisely unites elegant runtime code with just enough macro sugar to have something beautiful and idiomatic. So far I can think of no better text than The Reasoned Schemer, http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&.... You get the soul of Prolog in 200 lines of Scheme R5RS. The entire system fits on 2 pages.

This book is written by three true masters of macros and functional programming Oleg Kiselyov, William Byrd, and Daniel P. Friedman.
From your response it seems to me like you didn't read the article. The point of the article is to add a nonce to the standard salt+password scheme so that if you get the salt+password table, you still don't have enough info to brute force the password.

It's not that salt is bad so much as that it's insufficient. It's useful to keep straight up rainbow tables from working and to be sure that two users with the same password don't end up with the same value in the password table.
Puny bandwidth is going to be a problem whether the server is your own or exists at some unspecified location in the cloud.

Cloud storage isn't necessarily bad, but it's expensive considering the cost of storage these days and it might be a good idea to encrypt anything that you don't want to become public information before uploading it onto a cloud server.
Eh, not really. If this were proven true it would destroy a lot of his remaining credibility. The holier-than-thou religious extremist who turns out to be a slave to his base sexual instincts is one of the oldest and most hilarious stories in the book. Unfortunately it can't be proven true, and people will believe it based on whether or not they want to believe it.

Personally, I want to believe it.
> Of course even if Dropbox didn't have the keys to decrypt your files you're still trusting them (or SpiderOak or Wuala or most of Dropbox's competitors) by running their proprietary software.

You don't have to trust tarsnap. Block encryption happens client side using open source software.
That was my thought. Modern telecoms are chomping at the bit to land us in the same boat. In some ways we are already there.
Monads are not related to laziness in any meaningful way.

Monads are just a generalization of a commonly recurring pattern.

All imperative languages can be said to have "monads" in the sense of having a "semicolon operator" (in some languages, that's just newline) that is the monadic bind. You're programming in one "ambient monad" whose power is fixed by the language itself.

Haskell has an overridable semicolon, and that gives you a lot of DSL power. Instead of one "ambient monad", you have lots of user-defined monads useful for different purposes.

Besides overridable semicolons, monads are just a plain useful abstraction of data structures.

Monads are incredibly useful in a huge variety of programming tasks (non-determinism, effects, exceptions, parsing, and much more). They make Haskell code utilizing them far more broadly useful than code I've seen in any other language.
I assume that Apple's IP lawyers knew about this patent when they were researching about in-app purchases. Morally right or wrong, why didn't they just license it then? Patent trolls are one of the few groups of people I'd rank beneath telemarketers on the scum of the earth scale, but they are a known quantity and can be avoided for much less than the settlements they ask for later. Especially for a company with a multibillion dollar IP fund like Apple.
I completely identify with this point. A member of my family suffers from depression and she's generated a list of things that she has to do when she feels particularly depressed. They are all pretty basic things for most people -- things like showering, making a cup of coffee, doing her hair, etc -- but things that can feel impossible. She gives herself the ultimatum that she has to do these things and it usually helps.
How can they even claim something like that and get away with it? Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Central Coast/Napa vineyards, agriculture production, services, travel industry, world-class hospitals like the Mayo Clinic, Stanford, UCLA, Cedars-Sinai, and on and on.

There are only a handful of places I can imagine would be better for business.
Smarter Atomic Clock on a Chip Debuts
I just found your company today listed as mailguns customer list. You guys are doing awesome stuff!
Dropbox does encrypt your files, it's just that, naturally, they hold the key.

Even if dropbox's claim was technically correct, it was absolutely misleading. When you say "this data is encrypted" people assume that you mean "... in a way which adds security"; if the same people who have access to the encrypted data also have access to the decryption keys, you might as well be using ROT-13.

If I ask Dropbox for another users files, guess what? They don't hand them over.

Modulo the recently-fixed vulnerability which allowed you to download data if you knew some hashes, that is.
The symptom is anhedonia -- the inability to experience pleasure. You can eat a delicious meal, play outside in the sunshine with little kids, have great sex, and through it all feel nothing.

It's like when a finger is numb -- you touch things with it thinking, "How odd, I ought to be feeling something." But you don't.

It's not just feeling down. It's your brain's ability to feel pleasure being physically broken.
> If we're talking about high-level abstractions, this is probably not the best way to describe Haskell. (In fact, Haskell's type system is notoriously ad hoc, compared to languages like ML.)

In what sense is Haskell's type system any more ad-hoc than ML's?

They're almost equivalent, except for Haskell's type-class extension, which is used for ad-hoc polymorphism. Support for ad-hoc polymorphism does not make the type system ad-hoc. It means you can use (\*) for multiplication between any type of number, which is very useful.

Many GHC extensions to the type systems are also based on sound theory (Rank 2/N types, Type families, GADTs) and not ad-hoc. ML lacks these too.

Haskell is one of the forefronts of applied type theory, AFAIK, ML seems to stagnate in this area.
Sony yet to fully secure its networks 
The expert found a handful of security flaws in Sony's networks while remotely studying its systems via the Internet to see how difficult it would be to penetrate the electronics giant's systems in the wake of the attacks.
Security researcher John Bumgarner discovered a potential bonanza for hackers by using little more than a web browser, Google's search engine and a basic understanding of Internet security systems.
There is also the sense I have though, that what I am paying for is also:

a) their raid on my files
b) their electrons
c) their sysops and their training and certification and their corporate deals with seagate, and netapp, and cisco, ...

As I said, my dockstar died, I will replace it with a USB hub, but, it is a bit of a pain when what I would prefer to be doing is anything more interesting, fun, or profitable.

Regarding puny bandwidth, I am not sure I understand your point. I get about 12M down and about 600K up, and my understanding is that is fairly typical for a home cable connection (in the US). But that 600K up limits my downloads anywhere else on the planet if my files are stored at my house and served by local server there.

If I store the files in the cloud, I get Google's or Wuala's or Dropbox's bandwidth to my device.
I can send those emails myself.

However, PayOnlyIf does make it much more interesting. It aligns incentives.
I'm sure you more knowledge of Pakistan than I do, but I find it hard to believe that encryption is so rarely used that the Pakistani government can afford to monitor and investigate anyone who sends an encrypted communication.

It's also a little grating to have you lecture me on my assumptions, whilst simultaneously making unfounded assumptions about me.
Seconded, I dislike the evasiveness I detect and the corporate speak. It ignores the actual problem, which to me opens up even bigger problems when you just stick your head in the sand.
People were complaining about the falseness and emptiness of life back then too!
Off topic: Is your username a reference to BBC Three's Old Gregg "episode"? I sure hope so. =)
It doesn't have to be a careful long-term plan. I suspect a lot of "conspiracies" are actually emergent behavior in the system of laws and incentives.
It would be great to have a comparison of fluff to meaningful innovation today vs. decades ago. How many man hours were spent on silly military ventures? Manned surveillance satellites, nuclear artillery, boomer subs, ICBMs, MIRV, the Orion project etc. These particular projects led nowhere and had few useful side effects. It would be interesting to add up the man hours and compare it to the web economy.

Rhetoric is enjoyable to read, fun to write but in-depth analysis of our economic and technological progress is a hard problem.

As far as the web goes, more can be done on it even before we resort to poorly served enterprise/medicine/energy markets for new ideas. It's the same problem desktop software once had when that market was over-saturated with word processor or email client clones. It's only today that there are word processors with new features, like the no-distraction theme. That could have been done then, but there was a bad environment for new ideas.

Web people are chasing clone ideas because there's a bad environment for ideas again. There's too much feature overlap between various social network and communication tool attempts like conversate, qonversation, twitter, reddit, HN etc. Focus on execution over ideas might matter more for your personal success, but it's horrible for technological progress.

Also I don't expect the web culture of young hipsters and hackers getting excited about enterprise/medicine/energy. Such markets could be served indirectly, through some generic CMS/communication/portal/DB thing.
Oh, I absolutely agree that OO languages do gross things, too. If somebody gets me started on AbstractRequestProcessorFactoryFactory, or inappropriate use of instance_eval, I can keep going for hours. :-)

Overall, macros are a very useful tool. But there's a school of thought that sees them as the ultimate, universal abstraction. I'm no longer convinced by that argument.

However, I do agree with your remark, elsewhere in this discussion, that The Reasoned Schemer is an extraordinary fine example of what macros can be used for. It's one of my all-time favorite programming books.
Please don't do anything illegal. It's not good for you (obviously!), and it eliminate any legitimate moral ground in the debate. We're trying to do what's right + good here, not to be underhand + malicious.
Scala 2.9 and Parallel collections
But why travel miles to a remote rural village to send emails, when you could travel to a larger town that likely has more varied surfing habits, and many more people online?
Here's the HN link from 5 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2527140

I didn't say I agreed, I was just answering the question.
> why not just leave them open and don't spend any money on them?

A State Park with no State Employees? Think of the liability!
How To Always Know When A Program Needs To Be Updated
My home and property border Portola Redwood State Park which has been slated for closure. I wonder what this means for safety concerns like fires. Will these parks still be minimally staffed to prevent destruction of the facilities, preservation of the wildlife and prevention of illegal camping and the potential for fires?
Absolutely, I pointed out a type of cognitive behavioral therapy (behavioral activation) because it's easy advice that may help people.

The science is pretty clear that a combination of medication and professionally-guided CBT has the most effective rates for treating depression, and that some specific treatments specifically don't work at all for some people.
Yahoo Investors Are Angry Over Yahoo-Alibaba Fight
Stop and think about how absurd this is. Ten million people apply and we pick randomly, rather than take the cream.

Is this not plainly insane?
Because without park staff, people will destroy park infrastructure, potentially start forest fires camping, and do damage to the wildlife, maybe?
Don't be so sure that Apple knew about this. There is a school of though on doing patent research before developing a product. It says do no research. That way, if you are sued and loose, the infringement can not be views as willful - which would treble the damages.
Meanwhile, The San Francisco Public Library
Pretty cool, but you should put popular topics on the first page. Searching is not as interesting as browsing.
Sometimes, it's popular small-ticket items that are targeted, in what's called a "Washington Monument Maneuver", to mobilize opinions against cuts in general.
This brings up a question: is the time of the submission a random variable ? If yes - assuming the submitters did not have the prior knowledge - then I think the results should be random even if we were just to select X consecutive entries at some day ?
So that's what it's called. I've felt that way for a good portion of my life, and only since I've started getting help in the past year did I realize something was actually wrong that could be fixed (it took someone else's genuine caring for a change to occur).

I originally thought I was just different from everyone else, or that "they" were wasting their lives on pointless pursuits. Now I actually understand why it's so great having a niece to take to the park.
D3.js Interactive Visualiztions or Data-Driven Documents
You need to look even deeper. Waaaay deeper, beyond the science, more into the realm of philosophy. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is about the here and now, but when you go deeper, with more dimensions, then you're looking past that.

At that point, you're seeing the mechanics that makes the HUP work, the formulas that govern everything, the forumulas that make things un-formulable... Basically, beyond comprehension :)
Doesn't deduplication make them vulnerable to MAFIAA lawsuits?
In Defense of Hard
In what sense is Haskell's type system any more ad-hoc than ML's?

According to Mark P Jones, the author of "Typing Haskell in Haskell":

Haskell benefits from a sophisticated type system, but implementors, programmers, and researchers suffer because it has no formal description. http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/thih/

Haskell's type system was designed to make programming delightful. I vastly prefer it to some of the contortions of ML's type system, such as the separate + and +. operators. But by functional programming standards, I think that any type system without an official description can be fairly described as ad hoc.
Nobody can claim to sell you "better deliverability". It largely depends on 2 things, they are easy to understand:

1. Infrastructure. A lot goes into this, and you can Google what needs to be done, and do it yourself if you have the time.

2. Content quality. If your recipients keep flagging your mails as spam, nobody will help you - that's your responsibility not to spam people.

Myriads email sending services do #1. Mailgun, among many other things, does that too. Plus, we can give you a completely separated, dedicated setup where your reputation won't be affected by other senders (something SES can't promise you).

But in the end, you need to send something people want to read. Saying "email company X gives you automatic deliverability" is a bit like saying that "hosting company Y gives you automatic PageRank" :-) Yes, your emails will be 100% solid on protocol/format/rate level and the IP you're sending from is watched, but you'll be taken down if you're spamming.

Hope this helps. And if you need assistance regarding deliverability (on your own server, or with Mailgun) - shoot me an email at ev@mailgun.net BTW, this mailbox is hosted by Mailgun itself. see? we're eating our own dogfood here!
I would use it to source PR ideas, but not to have people I don't know contact journalists. That's just asking for trouble, and the game theory is all wrong.
Sure, "What if XYZ?" But that's not what happened. If the algorithm demonstrated a bias for or against a protected class (nationality, gender, etc.), then one could argue against honoring results. Otherwise, be fair to the people who "won." In most cases, I would argue that revoking visas that have already been awarded would cause an unacceptable amount of human suffering. The course of action with the least harm to applicants in specific and society in general is running a second lottery.
The limewire ceo has a lot of assets. Houses, cars, huge annuity accounts that were setup to try to keep the money from being taken, they have a lot to go after. Enough to cover the costs and get rid of Limewire.
Mobile web, it's the future...
Nice. But paying $3 trillion to kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis is cool.
Precisely which tax "loophole" can be closed to collect $33 million in state taxes from one or two individuals?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'm flagging this thread as politics.
I admire what Paul is doing with the site.

He launched it here on HN with a goal of adding substance to startup blogging. This post shows he's sticking with that mission.

It's much easier to get traffic by stirring controversy or talking about bubblegum issues like "5 ways Twitter is changing everything" posts. But substance posts like this are harder to pull off on a regular-basis.
lol....because E-Mail pipes are e-mail processing is "hard". I don't see a real need for this. Twilio is useful because interfacing phones is hard. E-Mail is just plain-text and is pretty simple to parse server-side.
> Encrypt with Truecrypt, share with Dropbox. Problem solved.

Not so fast. How big is the binary diff when you change a file within a Truecrypt volume? Ie, how much Dropbox bandwidth will you be using, even with a small change?

I performed the following experiment. Start with a 250M Truecrypt volume. Mount it. Create a 1M file from /dev/random. Unmount the volume.

Now, look at what blocks in the Truecrypt volume file have changed. Dropbox uses a 4M blocksize [1].

seq 0 63 | while read i; do
{ dd bs=4M skip=$i count=0; dd bs=4M count=1; } < truecrypt.bin.before | md5sum
done 2>/dev/null | sort > md5s.before

seq 0 63 | while read i; do
{ dd bs=4M skip=$i count=0; dd bs=4M count=1; } < truecrypt.bin.after | md5sum
done 2>/dev/null | sort > md5s.after

comm -13 md5s.before md5s.after | wc -l
8

Conclusion: in this case, Dropbox will transfer 32M (8x the normal 4M) because I added a 1M file to my Truecrypt volume. Note: I haven't tried adding bigger files, but suspect the number of blocks changed will go up linearly but steeply with the size of the added file.

It's not actually that surprising that TrueCrypt mixes file changes throughout the volume file.

Why bring this all up? Because something that does client side block encryption (tarsnap is an example) would only transfer the affected block. 4M, if that's the block size.

And you don't have to trust the cloud storage provider at all.

EDIT: My pipelines were wrong on the first go, suggesting a much larger number of differing blocks. Sorry about that.

[1] http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=17631
Yep, those salaries are obscene. Does the state pay $1 million bucks to the head coach of each of the UCs just so they can beat each other in football? That's an excellent place to start. No coach should be paid more than $60K a year.
We recently published a similar list of gem preferences at http://renderedtext.com/toolbox.
No, but if it isn't, then why even bother launching it?
That's because many clowns are, in fact, social media experts. Sheen, Trump, Lohan etc.
So, Who's pockets are being lined?

It's not the food service, their contract is really crappy. I'd be happy to cut it, but there are enough kids on free lunch that it's really important.
It's not the teachers, they keep getting cut.
It's not the administrators, there aren't that many of them, and they've been cutting right along with the teachers. And the administrative load doesn't get smaller, since there are an ever multiplying number of federal compliance issues.
It's not maintenance, as they don't have the resources they need to keep the aging infrastructure going. They could double their staff for a year and still not get through stuff.
It's not transportation, they're getting hit by fuel costs.
It's not the secretaries, they're getting hit too.
The text books, meh, most of them are pretty old.
Maybe it's technology, but that's a separate levy and a different pool of money.

We've got old buildings, one should have been closed years ago. That could save a teacher or two per year, but there's community pressure to keep it open.

Frankly, we spend less on education here per student per year than I would spend to send a kid to daycare for the same time. And they're expected to learn enough to compete in the modern world.