skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's a completely different proposition than giving away personally identifiable information.

That's just one hack or a terms-of-service change away from happening. Again, google being hacked at that level is unlikely (but they've had an instance of an engineer going rogue and accessing customer accounts for stalking purposes), and google changing their TOS in such a customer hostile way is also unlikely but I would never bet against either of those happening in the longer term.

> In the above scenario of them illegally selling my private communications to the highest bidder, I would want damages to 1) sufficiently compensate me for any violations of my privacy

You're going to have to define 'sufficiently'. What price would you put on your privacy? A few hundred bucks (the typical take in a class action suit is much smaller than that, except if you're a lawyer of course). A few thousand? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? For me it is high enough that I won't consider taking the risk. And if I did take the risk I'd have implicitly granted google the ability and possibly even the right to screw me over. Using the legal system to seek redress over something that I can avoid in a much simpler way seems to be the easy solution to me. Convenience has a price, but my privacy is worth a lot more than the value of convenience.

> Fortunately there are laws beyond T&C click-throughs.

Sure there are. But especially in the United States those laws regarding privacy are pretty weak. And these are all US companies we're talking about here.

> I support strengthening those laws in regards to any kind of of privacy bait and switches.

I would too, but right now bait-and-switch is perfectly legal, as long as you warn up front that you can change your terms you're in the clear.

> Call me naive if you like, but I prefer that response to taking an RMSesque one-man stand by simply not using the tools the rest of the world is adopting.

For me it isn't worth it, for you it is. If you look back in a few years with regret then you have to wonder what real grounds you have for a lawsuit, after all this is apparently something you are aware of, you can't use the law to fix such things after the fact. The loss of your privacy can not be undone.
Buying Nice Things
> make people think that anyone who owns a gun might just walk into a crowded place and start shooting.

That's exactly how a particular side of the debate wants to frame the issue.

It's a notion that "ordinary" people aren't capable of responsibly making life-or-death decisions. That guns have to be a monopoly of "extraordinary" people -- police and miliatry -- who are working for the state. (As if they aren't themselves "ordinary" people!)
Not if criminals use the data to avoid these houses. Then people might register in greater numbers. They might buy a gun just to get on the public list.
Nice. Stupid gun owners. Lets post the names of these violent people.
So a big trend will be being able to order services via your phone?

Now instead of calling a phone number I download an app and do the same thing?

Not quite seeing the huge win here.
Well, my fourth year of med school I did basically the same things, with the same responsibilities for the same number of hours as I did my first year of residency....and paid tuition for the privilege.

Residency (and the 4th year of med school?) is cheap labor for American hospitals, coupled with brutal working conditions - ACGME's 80 hour work week restrictions were winked at throughout my training, and I suspect still are a lot. Making decisions after being on your feet 30+ hours is pretty much like making decisions drunk - not sure that four years of that was optimal for anybody, particularly patients.

And yeah, we had "protected time" for didactics in residency - it was there that most of us developed the ability to fall asleep instantly.
"Law abiding citizens" follow the law, tautologically. But if you want more citizens to be law abiding, one of the best ways is to make the laws less objectionable and easier to abide.
The one thing I can see in all this is that instagram specifically states that they are '[It’s] a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your photos with friends and family.'

Their terms of service are in direct contradiction of that, but it will still take a lot of effort with likely nothing left for the members of the class to put the lie to that. After all, if their homepage says 'friends and family' and in their terms-of-service they state that they'll share your data with a whole pile of others, including advertisers then they're clearly not billing themselves right. But to translate that into a damage amount is going to be a tough and very uphill battle. After all, we all read the terms of service to all the services that we use, right?
DARPA is part of the US Department of Defense, so it makes sense that they award only Americans. On the other hand, I wish they made a special exception for Canadians...
There will be a few more of these filed by a few more of the usual firms, then the defendant will fight to get them consolidated into one case, then the various plaintiff's lawyers will fight over who gets to be lead plaintiff and how to divide the potential spoils, and then, if the case is going poorly or the defendant figures the endless discovery is just too much of a nuisance, the defendant will settle.

Over nine-tenths of the proceeds will go to the various lawyers, a couple grand will go to whatever plaintiff they managed to scrape up, and the rest will go to some ineffectual non-profit initiative everyone will forget about the moment after the lawyers are paid. Class action trolling at its finest.
sounds pretty good to me - a decent house in England anywhere except London will cost you at least £120,000, and developer salaries average out at £30,000.

[edit] oh, and my impression is that a decent sized house here is quite a bit smaller than in the States.
I think I'm squarely in your target market, but I didn't end up downloading the app because I couldn't tell from the web page what it does.

From the FAQ, it looks like a way for surfers and kitesurfers to post wind and wave conditions to each other (i.e. an alternative to windguru.cz)

But the front page talks about snowboarders. I'm guessing that is to report what runs have been skied off. Not sure about that though.

Then it talks about "enhancing your social profile." Maybe that's a common phrase in the startup scene. Honestly, I have no idea what it means... It made me question my prior assumptions about what the app does.

I'm guessing others will also skip the download if it's hard to tell what the app does. So you might benefit from a clearer description.
This may be an effect, but while some criminals want to avoid a confrontation with a gun-wielding resident... others want to steal guns. By helping criminals self-sort to the right targets for the risks they prefer, the net effect on crime/safety could be negative, by shifting break-ins to where they are most likely to succeed.
What's more, this may well provide data for would-be gun thieves to use to acquire illegal weapons.

Now that they have a convenient list, they can stake out these locations, wait for the residents to leave, and break in to begin their search for guns they know will be inside.
First video to get 1 billion views
While your second point (colder climate) is correct, suggesting that UK residents are too 'poor' to afford air conditioning is way off the mark.
About the Network issues: something similar happened to me yesterday. I just moved to a new flat and my Internet connection went from 50MB/10MB to 10MB/1MB and if Backblaze starts a backup with the Automatic Throttle option on it just takes the whole upload bandwidth killing every other connection and rendering the connection unusable for the rest of the network.

I don't have any QoS set up on my home network, I found two fixes: running the backup manually before going to sleep (maybe I can create an Apple Script and just cron this) or turning the Automatic Throttle off and giving it the minimum available (for me) 20kbps.
This is a faulty analysis, I think. The Atom wasn't originally directly in competition with ARM, they were in different market segments. And it wasn't a case of the atom merely being iterated in design until it matched ARM efficiency levels, that's not what's happened. Instead, the Atom was originally just a low-power stand-alone processor and now Intel has developed a first generation Atom based system-on-a-chip. The fact that Intel's first SoC designs are so closely competitive to ARM's n-th generation designs should send alarm bells ringing throughout the ARM industry. Intel is good at improving design and they are even better at economies of scale.

It's easy to dismiss Intel's offerings as not being competitive with state-of-the-art ARM designs, but only a sucker would dismiss Intel and rest on their laurels. Intel's 2nd and 3rd generation chips are just going to be that much better, and ARM could be in serious trouble in as little as a year or two from now. Imagine, for example, an Intel based android powered tablet that can run stock Windows in a VM or emulate windows and can run most windows applications and perhaps even games, while also being able to run all android applications. And do so at a cost/performance/efficiency level equivalent to any ARM based system. That's the sort of thing that should send shivers down the back of Samsung or even Apple.
Like already mentioned, not new. I used to this to QA-test and bot Farmville-style flash games when I was working on that (~3-4 yrs ago).

It's particularly good for situations where you know what you're expecting to see, but you don't know when or where it will appear.
do any of you have the real story on AMD's 8080 clone?
Indeed. It would also be a serious error to assume that anyone will be on Intel's leading edge process any time soon. At some point there is a process node that only Intel can afford to develop, and ARM makers are going to just sit there on their old process, whic might be cheaper but isn't going to be as efficient.
I love books that go straight to the point. I appreciate terseness, and appreciate it orders of magnitude more when it comes with no loss in clarity. Its amazing what some authors can pull off with so few words.

You can guess K&R is one of my favorites.

I understand that C++ is a huge complicated language, Scott Meyers puts it very aptly by stating its a federation of languages, and this makes hard to write pithy pedagogic books. In spite of that, the ever too common 800+ page tomes have always worked against me.

Stroustrup's 3rd is probably a mighty fine book to learn from, its just not for me and its definitely no K&R.

I think my favorite is a little known book by Dirk Vermier http://books.google.com/books/about/Multi_Paradigm_Programmi...
It should definitely not be one's first programming book, perhaps not even one's first C++ book. A shade shy of 300 pages, it did serve me well with its terseness, correctness and clarity. The only thing is that its too pricey for its size, its a bit dated now because it covers c++98.

I think C++ is best understood from one pithy book that shows you the just the language to get started, and then a series of Scott Meyers, Andrei Alexandrescu, Herb Sutter style books to get good at it.
IMDB still has a common cast search feature, offering both "show me the actors common to these two movies" and "show me the movies common to these two actors":

http://www.imdb.com/search/common
Crockford: Your mom doesn’t know what JavaScript is or care.

My mom knows what Javascript is and does care about it.

Let's get out of the habit of this casual ageism and sexism, OK?
I had this problem when I tried installing dropbox on my VPS.
I wanted to use dropbox to get a small 1gb backup off of the server, as my puny ADSL would take days to do it, but for whatever reason, after it installed, I noticed on my current PC, 100's of "whatever.file has been deleted" notifications from my dropbox tray icon, and I was nearly dying, thankfully they have a restore option on their site, so I was able to "undelete" the files and save myself from losing so much data...

Seems dropbox really does believe if a file isn't there, it's been deleted.
I don't know anything about this test specifically but I cannot imagine that people were happier with lower frame rates.
This will be really helpful for those that want to steal and resell guns on the black market.

Hopefully the newspaper will follow up with a list of the addresses of those with costly jewelry, and narcotic pain medication prescriptions, along with schedules of the times they are at work.

And yes, perfect example of the dangers of registration.
> Apparently you've never heard of incremental backup?

Oh, please.

> Dropbox may not be a backup but there are many services that backup via the internet. Assuming you don't change backup systems every month, 100 days for the initial sync is perfectly acceptable.

Oh, please. Again.

If you don't have local backup, for a third of a year you have no backup whatsoever. Even after that, depending on the nature of your work, even incremental backups could have you unprepared for failure for days.

Not saying at all that remote backup is a bad idea. Not at all.

Remote backup BY ITSELF, without local high-speed backup that you control is a very bad idea.

The best pattern is to have single or redundant backup under your control (yup, use that "incremental" thing I didn't know about) and remote backup. Don't expect anyone backup destination to be 100% reliable, not even local backup. If your data is important you need multiple redundant backup, local and remote. Then you can sleep at night.
We have those in the US too -- but if you're trying to cool an entire house, you'd use a central air conditioner to get better efficiency.

These are placed in the yard away from the house. Here's a picture: http://www.getgreenair.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/home_h...
Dude, not every country in Africa is Somalia. Kenya is a moderately wealthy and largely-stable country. Paved roads are common and gas stations are plentiful, for christ sakes.
I don't think the author intended to offend, but I do think he was rather thoughtless. He might as well accuse Facebook of being Jewy with their data, called their policies "gay", or accused them of Indian giving our privacy. It's very inappropriate and unnecessary, regardless of how "common" it is. I don't care in general when people horse around with such things, but it has no place in serious analysis. When used in a serious discussion versus a colloquial debate it causes that much more edification of the stereotype and offense.

Far be it from me to be the PC police - I have a pretty thick skin with this stuff. I'm surprised others find this acceptable.
totally... it's irrelevant now. The company has really changed and besides can we really say that they were that bad now? Is Microsoft Windows really such a bad product? I personally don't think so.
Interestingly, "C++ For Dummies" is absent. I wonder if he just missed it, or really thinks it's not that bad. I learned C++ from it, and I think it did a decent job.
Does Windows RT offer anything other than ARM compatibility for better size/battery life? Is the whole confusing Windows RT / Windows 8 split something that could've been avoided if MS had known Intel would have these chips ready?
That was a particularly uninteresting collection of identical-looking things.
"There are way too many people in Silicon Valley who have a lottery mentality, and way too many people who won the lottery who shouldn’t have. I hope that they take their good fortune and use it for good".

I can't agree with this more.
> my impression is that a decent sized house here is quite a bit smaller than in the States

A decent-sized house in America is 2000-3000 sqft (185-275 sq meters). You will usually get two floors and a two car garage. And if you pay a little extra, a finished basement as well.

And of course, the entire house, top to bottom, back to front, has central air-conditioning and heating, controlled from a single point. If you get fiber-glass insulation in the attic, properly insulated walls, and double-paned windows, you can easily survive a Midwestern summer (during which the number of days the temperature is above 40C can easily be a dozen or more) without ever opening a window or breaking a sweat, and you won't break the bank doing it.

Not being able to do that in Europe is probably the biggest reason why I would never able to live there (or in places like Seattle, where central air isn't common). Even if it only gets hot occasionally, having to essentially "condemn" most of the house to the outside temperature and just sit inside one room the whole day is not a lifestyle I could tolerate.
True assault rifles are some of the most difficult things to get your hands on. All automatic (which include burst fire) weapons count as machine guns under the National Firearms Act, and are highly regulated. No machinegun made and registered after 1986 can be legally transferred between civilians. Amongst other difficulties and regulation, that restriction means automatic weapons typically sell for enormous amounts.

The term you're looking for is 'assault weapon' which is a generally poorly defined term. Under the terms of the previous federal assault weapon ban, an assault weapon (rifle) is any weapon that has in addition to detachable magazines (a "clip" in popular culture), has at least two of the following features: a folding or telescoping stock, pistol grip, bayonet mount, flash suppressor, and/or muzzle mounted grenade launcher, as well as AR-15s, TEC-9s, Uzis, and AK-47s - those models being specifically named and banned.

Since we are looking at New York specifically, then the following apply. Rifles and shotguns ("long guns") do not require a state permit for purchase, nor registration, nor a license. Handguns require all three. There are additional restrictions on handguns that will typically limit their licensees to using and carrying them for sport. New York has an assault weapon ban in place, effectively continuing the expired Federal ban.
This is definitely a huge problem in many areas. I've known around a dozen people whose houses were robbed while they were at a funeral. Last funeral I went to, recently, the funeral director told the family members they needed to arrange for people to housesit during the services. They did and two of them were then faced with burglars trying to break in.

There are organized crime gangs that read obituaries and make it their business to take your stuff.

If you are flying out of state to bury your spouse or parent, the risk is greater. In two cases I know of, a moving truck arrived as soon as they left for the airport and took absolutely everything.
If you took that introduction so deeply personally that you stopped reading out of offense, I think you have deeper issues to deal with than the fact that you're not taking advantage of this open source library. This is very much your issue, not the author who has just built a library and then organized documentation just to offer it all for free. I believe he should include whatever sense of humor he wishes.

I really hope that open source authors continue to include their character in their projects. It makes the world a more interesting place.
def encrypt(salt, password, data):
^^^^^^

You're the crypto library. Don't ask the user to choose the salt, they won't do it right.

key = _expand_key(salt, password)

Most crypto people would advise you to generate two separate keys for encryption and MAC.

hmac = data[-HMAC_HASH.digest_size:]
hmac2 = HMAC.new(key, data[:-HMAC_HASH.digest_size], HMAC_HASH).digest()
if hmac != hmac2:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Possible timing attack. Consider doing another HMAC of each HMAC and comparing those instead. See https://www.isecpartners.com/news-events/news/2011/february/...

offset = getrandbits(AES.block_size*8)
Counter.new(AES.block_size*8, initial_value=offset, allow_wraparound=True)

I don't like that you allow wraparound counters, in fact, I'd go so far as to call it broken. This is not allowed by NIST-specified CTR mode.

Bad Things^TM will happen if multiple messages (or different parts of a single message) are ever encrypted with the same key. Seriously, screwups like this have shortened wars.

return prefix + encrypted + hmac

Put some type of magic constant in front of this. You'll be glad you did later when you have to change the format or simply the PBKDF2 count.

HMAC_HASH = SHA256

but later...
def _expand_key(salt, password):
...
return PBKDF2(....)

I don't see where you're telling PBKDF2 what hash to use for its HMAC. It's probably defaulting to something like SHA-1.
The new atom processors really only cost 50 bucks? So does that mean there is pretty much no reason at all for the 150-300 dollar premium on atom based that we are currently seeing?
This would likely have been around 10 years ago. Perhaps longer. Today's Kenya is less violent but according to the New York Times corruption index, its still one of the most corrupt nations on earth.

The point is that throwing your Alien-Ware in the back of your Volvo to go to a lan party across town is a ridiculous (to the point of being non sequitur) comparison.
From what I've gathered from various friends and acquaintances working in law enforcement and criminal justice, the vast majority of criminals are really not the kind of intelligent folks who would do such research. That's why they're criminals. The sophisticated type you see in television is very rare.
Read the article and the citation inside if you want to know what it was tested for
whoa. thanks. about to go to bed(!) but will address that (dual hmacs) tomorrow am. thanks again!

edit: on the wraparound counters, i can replace it with a nonce (prefix) and smaller counter (and no wraparound). i thought they were equivalent, but people do seem to prefer a prefix (my reasoning was that if you combine nonce and counter with addition rather than concatenation then you need wraparound since you may start at the end of the counter).

edit2: so what's a reliable way of providing salt? i can't think of one that's context-independent except for simply generating some random junk and appending it to the message. is that ok? (i guess so)

ps, also, while here, i will drop this link which so far has no replies http://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/19910/simple-c...
That's always fun. You just have to know your tools. That's why I tend to be very verbose and explicit in some aspects of my FPGA work. I rather not-so-gently guide the tools towards what I want them to infer vs. what they sometimes think I want them to infer.

Circuit inference is one aspect of HDL that sets it apart from writing software. To begin with, you are describing hardware and have to be aware of and live within the constraints it imposes. Then there's this inference thing that I've come to call my "secret contract" with the compiler: I say X and we agree that it is going to implement X12345 and we are all happy.
If anything the country was more peaceful ten years ago, not less.
As someone else mentioned, this was for an outdoor unit that cools the entire house through the central air and heat system.

My time in Israel was rather cold and required a jacket most times :)
It seems incredible that anyone would believe stem cells to be so magical that they could heal psychiatric disorder, even less psychological ones.
Are there any studies -even shoddy ones- that would even suggest that?

I'm not surprised that people who are desperate for a treatment would cling at anything for a bit of hope, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.
How the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition