skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Dubois said that, in addition, his client may not be able to decrypt the laptop for any number of reasons. "If that's the case, then we'll report that fact to the court, and the law is fairly clear that people cannot be punished for failure to do things they are unable to do," he said.

So can everyone just claim they can't decrypt their drive because of <sort-of-plausible-excuse-here> ?
SPDY seems poised for widespread adoption. It's only a matter of time before Firefox enables it, and the combined share of Chrome and Firefox is now over 50%. That should spur server adoption, and once it starts affecting benchmark scores the other browsers will be scrambling to implement it.
Apparently Mac OS has a somewhat non-standard way to join networks with DHCP address assignment very fast. Otherwise, I agree.
How do you know if you've mastered the hammer?
Executable Redis example showing a Twitter clone
This is why everybody should study science for a while. ;) The tack to take is "we did this experiment, and we built the best thing we could, a thing that accomplished feats X and Y and Z, but the experiment didn't yield the results we hoped for."
This is an interesting case. From a civil liberties, card-carrying ACLU member standpoint, I'm all for the "anti" side of this - keep the gov't out.

On the other hand, there's a decent case made that establishing this kind of precedent would basically mean that if criminals are smart enough to use PGP, then that data can never be used against them. Since you can be compelled to turn over a physical key via due process, why can you not also be compelled to turn over a digital one?

Most of the privacy arguments vanish as well since they don't want the password (which could give them access to other things they're not supposed to have), but they just want the data.

I'll be watching this one closely.
Central Bark 
Central Bark is the premier provider of grooming and dog boarding in Seattle. We have the best doggy services at the most affordable prices!
The fact that you have truecrypt installed on your start menu is a dead giveaway.
"Non-Anglo-Saxon names will continue to be routinely flagged as fake"

Please read through Yonatan Zunger's comments on the original post - in particular "Our name check is therefore looking, not for things that don’t look like “your” name, but for things which don’t look like names, period. In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is “your” name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this."

There was a lot of research done to understand what names "look like" around the world and for many different cultures. There was also work to make sure that the human review process had both reviewers in place from the various cultures and that there was an effective process in place to make sure that reviews were routed appropriately.

"people who want a persistent identity unlinked to details that could expose them in real life be continue to be unable to use the service"

Google+ will no longer require you to provide your real or legal name. Just something that looks like a name. Were you asking for something more?
Moore's Law says absolutely nothing about performance, as this article repeatedly implies. Moore's Law says that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years, and that has fairly consistently held true and continues to do so.

For years, those transistors went into increasing CPU speed. Now, additional transistors go into building more CPU cores, or more execution units. Either way, Moore's Law still holds.
> -Megaupload never got to state their case

That usually happens at the trial. This is like saying that my life was disrupted when the police arrested me, because I should have had a chance to state my case before being arrested and indicted.

> -There was no trial (and probably will not matter
> because their site has already lost all its traffic
> and revenue)

The site was taken down because the servers were confiscated as part of a pending trial. I don't understand the 'no trial' business.

> -It is not a US based site

They had servers in the US, which established a US presence, and they are accused of massive copyright infringements against US companies who have all/most of their copyrights based in the US.

> -The majority of its traffic did not come from the US

Do you have numbers to back this up?

> -There is not much evidence that that they were doing
> anything illegal by US law. They had a system in place
> (such as youtube) to remove copyright infringing
> content if found.

The government plans to prosecute the employees and send them to jail. I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't be attempting this if they had little to no evidence. Not that I believe that the US government are saints, but they usually don't bring cases that have little chance of winning. The evidence will out itself at trial. Have you read any of the requisite legal documentation on this?

> I am pretty sure that if the media companies put as
> much effort into reporting copyright violating content
> on Megaupload as they do on youtube, it would have none.

If you read the court filings, you would have realized that MegaUpload limited the number of filings allow per day. The content companies were hitting that limit and requesting that it be increased/removed. If there are a million infringing files and you only get to take down 2500/day, it's going to take awhile, no? Especially considering that the number of infringing files/links would not be static.

The government is claiming that MegaUpload purposefully restricted the number of takedowns because they knew that they needed the infringing material to bolster their growth (and allowing all infringing files to be taken down would hurt them).
You're quite right that "Anglo-Saxon" doesn't quite cover it, there are definitely users with Anglo-Saxon names (ones made from words in the dictionary, usually) who've fallen afoul of the naming policy. In my far-from-comprehensive experience, people who've put their names in non-Latin scripts have a higher suspend rate. It's not really amenable to statistical evidence, I agree, but that's the crux of my racism claim. If you don't agree with my anecdotal observation, that's fine, but it's made in good faith.

I am far unhappier writing "unconventional" (though users with unconventional names have been banned) because it reinforces the idea that the "convention" is Latin script. This is not the case for a huge portion of the world.

As for the accusations of sexism (and also homophobia, transphobia etc. that I didn't mention), the page I linked went into some detail about why members of some disadvantaged groups would be further disadvantaged by the name policy. Were there concrete rebuttals you wanted to make to them? I use "sexist" in the structural sense of disadvantaging (maybe indirectly) women on average more than men rather than imagining Gundotra and Horowitz waking up each morning thinking "how can we keep the wimminz down today?"
No, he has a plausible deniability plan.
You should check out their next project, http://VHX.tv -- be warned it's very addictive!
Sorting options (sort by name, price, rating, etc) are on the short list for me to implement. I actually have a lot of that data in my database right now, just no code to implement it yet client-side.

Upvoting is interesting though: do you mean voting on ThemeForest "through" ThemeSquirrel, or some kind of rating system that is local to my web-app?
>Everyone has cracked software, pirated movies, & torrents

That's a bit of a leap, really.

Also, Truecrypt's deniable encryption here doesn't seem like it would help, since they're talking at the computer level. Presumably, a power on or hard drive password. Assuming there's only one volume, you put that one in and the attacker has the keys to the kingdom.

Besides that, most averages joes wouldn't go through this kind of trouble. If you're running in opposition to a ruling power who might, say, launch a missile at you from 30,000 feet while you're in foreign territory (not naming any names here), then you probably already know to cover your ass.

On the other hand, an average joe thinking that they're cute by giving up the password to the concealed volume will only land a contempt charge when the file access times are checked.
...unless Chris Norstrom is your real name and they know how to use a search engine to find this post.
You could even get a MicroSD card, stick it in your phone, and carry it across that way.
It's an interesting situation: What you say to your doctor, lawyer, or spouse is protected, but what you say to yourself, is not.
> The problem here is what are they going to find that ISN'T Illegal?

This isn't really a problem. Cops can get a warrant to search your house, and I'm pretty sure they'll find some things that aren't illegal, but are very personal.

If you restrict evidence finding procedure to those in which only evidence (and nothing else) can be found, then I'm pretty sure you'll end up with no evidence.
Google kills "Urchin"
“I’m sorry, Your Honor. I have forgotten my password.”

If it’s good enough for Bob McFarlane and Alberto Gonzales, it’s good enough for regular Americans, too!
An even easier way to handle it is to simply make conference calls on rural lines not get paid.

If the call is not ultimately terminated at an actual human resident of the area then no termination fee shall be paid.
http://16s.us/TCHunt/index.php

Finds hidden TrueCrypt volumes... :(
As a hardware engineer myself, I must agree. We have only explored a tiny subset of all possible configurations with our computer designs, held back, perhaps, by the need to be binary-compatible with a hardware/software architecture that was obsolete in the mid 80's.

It's time to do better.
Ask HN: Where can I find a DSLR firmware engineer in Canada?
I'm looking for a DSLR firmware engineer in Canada, preferably with Nikon firmware experience, for a project involving RFIDs. Please PM me if you have any leads.
Great point! We've extended the deadline to include the weekend as well.
To me if you can competently build a product that you and others can maintain you have mastered a languadge. You may not be an expert in every facet of the language but you have demonstrated mastery of it to produce real products. Masters develop a style, and a system to produce results once you have a style and a system that consistently produces results you have mastered it. Lets take art for example and I will use a commonly known artist Salvador Dali who's style was Surrealism of which he is considered a master, he however may not have been good at Fauvism even though he mastered the same tools, but may have never been exposed to the techniques of that particular style. None the less it still leaves him as a master of painting even though he may not have mastered every aspect of painting.

Adapting that to technology one may build systems in say Java but never use particular built in classes, maybe they use the Apache classes instead. This is their style and so long as it produces quality results, it can be said that they are a master.
This sounds great but my question is are you a morning person normally? I'm definitely not, so perhaps I'm doomed to not be able to do this?
Check out cnc.js for a non-minified version.
Your point look valid until when you compare the price of a typical European house with that of a american house. In most cases the European house is priced more than the american one. So how can you say that a European spends less of his income on housing than an american?
I'm curious what the courts would say when told that it is possible to have a hidden inner volume that is impossible to detect and when I hand over my key it may just be the outer containers, not the hidden inner container that I have unlocked.
A common misconception:

Moore's law says nothing about the speed of a CPU!

It talks about how many transistors there are on a chip. So Moore's law is not ending and has not changed (so far).
"The subgroup of people who prefer pseudo-names is relatively small compared to the larger population"

Totally untrue. I have many regular people who have totally fake or semi-fake (i.e. false last name etc.) names on Facebook. None of these are hackers, just regular people who want their identity on facebook not traceable to their real life name.

I mean just to give one obvious example I have friends I met traveling from nations with massive organized crime problems. If their real name is linked to their social networking presence and they say the wrong thing about the wrong person, they can be in physical danger. This is a theoretical threat to people in the US software industry but a real one to people living in many other countries.
Supply Chains: Apple and the American Economy
Economics of Messaging Software
TrueCrypt supports Hidden OS partitions much like its normal hidden containers and it asks for these passwords at boot.

You could enter one password and have it boot into a boring Windows XP environment while the true password would boot to your actual environment with all your secret files.
Yes, it's very reasonable. The main problem with the decision is just that it magnifies the other inequities of legal system.
Tenured Prof Departs Stanford, Hoping to Teach 500k Students at Startup
That is like saying that you are guilty but there is no way to prove it.
"While we all know and love JavaScript as a language ..."

I know it but I don't love it. It's basically the only game in town when it comes to client side scripting.

Also, the concurrency model of Node.js does not eliminate concurrency related bugs. It's entirely possible to have race conditions, for example, with single threaded code that uses asynchronous callbacks. I guess a lot of people don't realize that. A real solution is no shared state, like Erlang or Clojure.

My gut feeling is that the Node.js library model (no call is blocking) is eventually going to lead to a mess. As I understand it, any API that can potentially block has to take a callback function. What happens when you realize some API that used to not block now may block (due to some increased functionally, platform changes, etc)? Any code that uses that API, and worse, any non blocking API that uses that API, now has to grow a callback too.

It can be done. The Twisted library has done a similar thing for years already. I just don't think it's a very good model for a general purpose server side language.

All that said, Node.js will probably be successful. The fact that browsers are not entirely broken WRT DOM and Javascript means that there is going to be ever increasing amounts of Javascript code around. It makes sense to re-use that development effort on the server side.
"Computing is a basic skill on the same level as math and literacy"

Its actually not as basic of a skill as math and literacy. Proof of this is that it takes math and literacy as foundational skills to then program. I agree that programming is a good skill but please don't pitch coding as being at the same level as basic literacy. The difference between someone who is illiterate and someone who is illiterate at programming is vastly different.
How many Google execs that are formulating and implementing these policies spent their formative years on irc, usenet or on web boards being "ultim8haxor" or "l33tGOD"?

This is akin to Metallica's BS move regarding tapers after gaining their position because of tapers. You can't ever really trust people that forget where they come from.
Show HN:Semantic markup based bookmarking/dynamic form creation, worth pursuing?
I completely agree. I'd like to point out as well that even movies that aren't supposed to be in 3D are now in 3D. So really, these sites are the are the sole reason of increased revenues
No, it doesn't. This finds files suspected to be TrueCrypt volumes and it does so by looking for certain heuristics. If your file passes a chi-square distribution test it is likely to be a TrueCrypt volume. If I create a file with a bunch of random data TCHunt would also likely peg it as a potential TC volume.

However, it does not detect the existence of a hidden inner volume.
Two Quick Chef Gotchas
Remember, who we're talking about here. They're not exactly CSI agents.

If someone really wants to smuggle data or keep it secret they WILL find a way. They could just cram it all on a MicroSD and put it under their tongue, or between their butt crack, super glued behind their scrotum, lodged up into their vagina, buried in their rectum, etc.... The methods are endless.

This won't catch terrorists or pedophiles, it'll just catch innocent people like your mom who have some illegally downloaded songs on their laptop.
News Aggregator Wavii Wants to Bring Relevant Content To You
There's the file time problem, though. Okay, let's say you're Joe Randomguy and you keep two XP partitions. One that you actively use and might have all manner of contraband on it, and another "boring" one for showing any would-be snoopers.

It's Jan 2012. What do you think is going to happen when they see that the one you gave up the code to hasn't been touched since July 2011?

Does Truecrypt have an option to not record date/time stamps on volumes, or better yet, scramble them?
I think it is quite a leap to assume that anything more than a minority don't have things like that.
The USA has just 300 million people. The Earth has 7,000 million people. That the USA dominates the Earth is a myth.
Started off as a side project to broaden my horizons. I wanted to learn more about semantic markup while learning RoR and various javascript frameworks. I stuck with RoR & knockoutjs to produce this. I've grown pretty attached to it now but I'm wondering what others think.

I'm not a designer/copywriter so please excuse the noobishness in those departments but feel free to give whatever feedback you want.
related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693599

'TrueCrypt User Held in Contempt of Court (truecrypt.org) "
I wonder by what means they will make their hands type. Can they be taser-ed into submission, like the guy who couldn't stand up in the college library?
Michael Birch Interview - The Process of Selling your Startup
Differences:

1) They at least originally had very limited time/lengths allowed which instantly ruled out tv shows and videos unless someone wanted to chop them up into 10 minute segments

2) When a video gets significant momentum it's not kept a secret so studios etc can see it and demand its removal

3) Google doesn't go to significant extents to make you pay to watch video (MegaVideo) or download files (MegaUpload).. not sure if they actually let you download files at all although I've seen stuff that will do it

4) There are no sites dedicated to indexing pirated content on YouTube and being paid affiliate fees by YouTube for the traffic they send

There is the similarity that there's tons of pirated content but at this point ... the only pirated content I even see there is live performances, anything official is legit these days. There's also significant measures in place to prevent or limit infringing content.
Ask HN: how would you turn this idea into a business?
Hi HN,

I have a thoroughly validated concept/idea and I'm looking for advice on how to really develop a business out of it.

"Thoroughly validated" means I have 3 years of history where 10 close friends/family members have been on board as customers. Over that time, the revenue model has proven to be absolute.

The revenue model is basically a financial service. Revenue is generated for clients based on a few transactions per week (without going into transaction specifics, just know it is legit). Each client grosses ~$90/month, I usually take 50% for about 10 minutes of my time. This revenue rate has proven to be fixed over time.

New client requirements:
- the biggie is a power of attorney (giving just the proper permissions to make the transactions on client's behalf)
- also $200 is needed to fund a couple of accounts; I am willing to subsidize this and be paid back through future earnings
- generally need to open two accounts with specific US financial institutions

I'd like to scale this up to 50-100 clients and see how things go. However, I'm not sure how to market this to people outside my "first ten." The POA and low client upside certainly makes it a tough sale and generally I don't know how to talk about it without people assuming it's some kind of get rich quick junk or a scam of some type. How would you get more clients?

Thanks!
I agree. However, having the capability to have an undetectable hidden innner volume feels like it makes a lot of this moot.

That is, as long as the inner volumes remain truly undetectable.
Did Wikipedia's Anti SOPA black out accomplish its goal?
As of 12 a.m. ET Thursday — after 24 hours of darkness — Wikipedia is back online.

According to the site, 162 million web users saw its protest against the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

“You said no,” the company said on its thank you page. “You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.
Standard practice is to use the one you don't care about for things you don't care about (which for most people, will be most things. Web browsing, gaming, emailing the aunt, whatever).

Timestamps are going to be at the FS layer or higher, not much Truecrypt can realistically do about that..
It would depend on how plausible what you say is - ie, whether a judge believes you.
It is, and tarsnap does it really, REALLY well. I'm backing up what is, on disk, umm... (checks emails) about 15GiB, and I'm currently spending about 8 cents a day. Now if he'd just implement de-dupe across machines on a given account... :)
The year was 1986, and I was on my first Disney World trip. After a couple of days of traveling up and down Florida visiting the various theme parks, my parents decided to stop at a local electronics shop.

Now, back at home we didn't have many fancy electronics stores, so this huge emporium of transistors was pretty amazing for all of us.

My mother hinted that they were going to buy us a Nintendo (NES), and I was ecstatic. I had never heard of such thing, but seeing Super Mario Bros. on the display machine was pretty mind blowing for an eight year old.

But, my oldest brother (who was a bigger nerd than me) did not want the NES. Crap. I was furious, and really disappointed.
Instead, he wanted some stupid computer. It was big, bulky, ugly (light brown with black function keys!), and required a huge monitor to be of any use. It also required a disk drive (a 1541 model).

Yes, my brother wanted a Commodore C64.

So, my parents decided against the NES (oh the humanity!), and purchased the C64 with a 13-inch (I think) color monitor, a 1541 disk drive, and a color dot matrix Okidata printer. They must have spent like a million dollars. An amazing feat, because we were barely middle class.

After learning how to turn it on, writing to the diskette, printing demo images, playing Ultima, I started to code some BASIC. Nobody taught me, I just picked the manual and started coding.

My first programs were something along the line of:

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
30 END

Now, for an 8 year old kid who was teaching himself how to use the damn thing it was pretty awesome to pull such simple programs.

Then at age 9 I bought my first "computer", a Tandy PC-7 at the local Radio Shack (after saving my lunch money for months).

Now, as a hacker/programmer/software engineer/whatchamacallit I look back at those days and appreciate what my parents and brother did.

Such experience has led me to teach my nine year old niece how to "program" in HTML. She enjoys it very much, and even asked me to put Ubuntu on her desktop. My daughter will also learn how to code, even though I don't expect her to follow in my footsteps.

tl;dr: Teach your kids how to code. They might go on to become hackers themselves.
How do you know if you've mastered the hammer?

When you learn when not to use it.