skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One way to look at the "nothing to hide" argument is that it is always told by people who wear clothes, from there the paradoxical arguments will carry on.

"I have nothing illegal to hide" is what they really meant to say. But laws change and what was illegal today could be legal tomorrow and vice versa.

You can also view this as a variation of schrodinger cat, in that your data is inside a box and the question is are you a terroist with the answear being you are both a terroist and not a terroist until that box is opened. With that the NSA or whoever will not know if you are or not until they look.

Tough issue and one that is about as easily answered as knowing the life signs of a cat in a box without opening or interacting with the box.
I don't care what you think the preferable apartheid to live under would be, much like I don't care if you'd rather be a Roman or an American slave. The morality of the political structures at play here does not depend on winning a "shittiest conditions" competition.

I disagree that we are redefining apartheid.
I have not owned an iOS device since the original iPhone, so take my opinion with a huge grain of salt. Since that time, this redesign is the first that has actually caught my eye. So I completely agree, the new design is refreshing and they deserve a great deal of credit.
Wireless bio-absorbable circuits could kill bacteria
Hmm...

If these things are Thunderbolt 2 devices... it really does open up some different possibilities for you.

I know that everyone doesn't need it... but connecting a few of these together via TB 2 would be kind of interesting for me. I mean being able to see one machine with even as few as 24 or 36 cores.

A Xeon here a GPU there... pretty soon you're talking about real capability. Again, it's not for everyone... but there are a lot of areas where you get some real benefits.

Thinking about buying 4 and just writing the software myself if it's not supported. But I'm pretty sure it probably is. Probably just tcp/ip though :(

Oh well... that'd be enough.

Anyway... not many other devices you can do things like that with and still keep good bandwidth between devices. It is thinking a bit outside the box. I can't think of another machine that would let me conveniently do that, and still take up 1/2 the volume of the current mac pro???

Can you???

(Not snark. Genuinely interested. I'm in the market, and would be willing to write the connecting software myself).
HK != China. How many times should we do this?
Well, HN has told me that the NSA is all-powerful, so I'll take that with a grain of cyber-salt. /s

Edit: Non-sarcastically, but what about the metadata about the keys?
Somewhat relevant(IRC for gmail): https://github.com/progrium/irc-for-gmail

Also, it sucks that this AES plugin for gmail uses greasemonkey. There are a bunch of exploits abusing greasemonkey really.
Designers, do you prefer tools others than pen and paper?
Am I the only designer who prefers pen and paper as my main tools of creation?
Its hard to imagine the negative effects of terrorism are greater than those of disease. After all, many more people die of disease than die of terrorism. Its pretty easy for people to move away from terror zones. I could just move to the country if I was afraid of terrorism. When people spread out, terrorism becomes more difficult. Except very few people do this.

On the other hand, if there was a magical place where all diseases would be cured, I imagine there would be a mad scramble to get in.

I also made a crude estimate for economic impact of disease in another comment of ~$250 trillion per year.
Right, it's a beautiful theorem, not so much a beautiful equation.

Euler's identity is a beautiful equation, because it ties together several of the most fundamental objects of mathematics, with one occurrence of each, with no wasted boilerplate. The notation is part of the beauty. It looks darn good, on the surface in addition to the beyond the ideas behind the surface.
McKinsey identifies 12 disruptive technologies that could be big
I will be interested in seeing how well this works, given what a pig's breakfast the old .Mac keychain syncing was.
Looks like the cards concept was inspired by Palm OS.
Petition to Support a Right to Privacy Amendment
Apple OsX Maverick
You could build something much more powerful for cheaper, and still be able to upgrade/change out individual internal components. I've bumped the RAM capacity/speed twice since I built this machine three years ago. Upgraded the video card once, and CPU once. When I decide to do a more thorough re-vamp, I can re-use the power supply, the case, the video card, and a bunch of other components.

What you're really paying for is a very expensive and moderately beefy machine that can run OS X legally. Or you need Final Cut Pro in some serious capacity. Oh, and it has an Apple logo on it.
Rules for living in the total surveillance state
Imagine a smoke detector that could note the presence of conditions known to lead the fire and pre-alert the fire department to be ready to respond quickly...
Still waiting for Google to implement OTR and ZRTP in Hangouts by default...especially now after all this.
How to decide what business to start
Thanks. That was my vague suspicion--that the 12-core option would be an E5.

Presumably the specs they announced are the top-end specs. Perhaps the lower tiers would use E3s.
How do we know they aren't holding our private key in escrow?
Oh cool, I am on stage 3 of the Matasano challenge which covers this. I am learning something useful. :)
Not thrilled with "all the expansion is external". I wonder how clean it will look with external storage, external PCI cases, etc.

They didn't talk much, but hopefully the RAM is easy to upgrade. I have the sinking feeling the GPU won't be, and the onboard SSD will be...pricey.
^ A 16-lane PCI-E supports 31.51 GB/s of bandwidth. Thunderbolt 2 supports 20Gbps of bandwidth, or 2.5GB/s. So it's actually only 1/12th of the bandwidth.
kind of surprised to see an update, i genuinely thought it was getting scrapped. however..

case aesthetic appears to be a regression. the previous one was almost perfect.

no 16 core ivy-bridge option. i assume haswell might be an option later.

no expandable internal storage.

no pci-e slots (?) is beyond ridiculous.

i'll reserve final judgement for when i actually see one, but right now, but things aren't looking good right now..
CSS Stacking with display:table
Here is a demonstration of how they are equal.

x = .99999...
10x = 9.99999...
10x - x = 9.999999... - .9999999...
9x = 9
x = 1
It's short-sighted to assume that fighting terror is the only goal these governments have. One of the main benefits of a surveillance society is self-censorship and other "panopticon" effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#The_panopticon_as_me...). Fighting terrorism is, in my opinion, actually just a pretext.
Agree with the almost-amateurish feel to those icons. Many of those icons seem ill-proportioned to me, especially the icons for Messages.
Yes, in layers. The problem currently is that if you want to tweak something you have to basically replicate the entire stack. That sucks - see Yehuda's article linked elsewhere in the comments for better examples. ps, if you want to play with jquery-like selector plugins to prollyfill a proposed feature, check out hitchjs.com
Have her play DragonBox. http://www.dragonboxapp.com/

I've played through it, and it's a really fun way to learn algebra.
Looks good but I wasn't sure what was being "launched". Is it software or the book?
Thank you. I will read through this.

Let me take the opportunity to also thank you for writing up your email best practices. I hope to implement them or something similar for myself.

One of the challenges for me in all this is keeping up including with the implementation details. It feels akin to swimming upstream, with the current outpacing me.
iOS 7 is a lesson in beauty and in simplicity.
And that's a Good Thing TM.
> If you are not able to manage your keys, which includes a simple unencrypted key-backup, you are doomed, even with a pretty interface.

Too many hackers equate "good user experience" with "pretty interface". It's a mistake.

A good user experience really would abstract the complexity out of key management, without compromising security. This is one of the most important outstanding problems you could solve: find a way to leverage people's existing meatspace notions of trust in a concrete way to build a robust PKI.

If you can make the whole process by the side-effect of a game, so much the better.

And give them keys that are physical things -- they know how to protect valuable physical things, and they know who they can trust with a backup copy.

None of this is easy, but it's vitally important.
Its's real. You can try the benchmark yourself here, and learn how it is different from other JS benchmarks <http://jsbench.cs.purdue.edu/>.
> You can also view this as a variation of schrodinger cat

Meh... that's really stretching for an analogy.
I think its hard and maybe a little disingenuous to sell people on practical everyday math while we shove trig, calculus, etc down their throats.

"Okay you like the pizza anecdote, lets talk derivatives."

I wonder if all this talk of no one but STEM majors taking advanced math really is a problem. Not sure why someone who wants to get an English Lit degree really needs to worry about anything past a practical level.
i do a lot of audio recording. having a machine that is near silent even at full load is incredibly useful.
Sorry for being snarky.

Let me rephrase.

What is different about the story this year, that makes people and the news all the sudden pay attention?
I'm not a fan of the icons at all :( The gradients and bright colours make it look too cartoony and childish, and some of the icons themselves (eg phone, safari) look strange.

I quite like the typography and new design style for apps though, so overall I think it's pretty good. The messaging app definitely looks inspired by Windows Phone, but I haven't really got a problem with that.
Right, I recognize that my use case is particular (driving a pile of projectors from one machine). We looked at adding additional video cards to, say, an iMac, but so far as I know, nobody is selling Thunderbolt graphics cards, and none of the Thunderbolt enclosures support adding graphics cards to OS X. Maybe that's changed, but I don't think so.

Editing to add: and more broadly, part of the virtue of the old pro was that if you wanted to do something weird, you could open it up and shove in whatever you wanted, unlike every other product in the Apple line. It's a shame (though not unexpected) that this new iteration sacrifices as least some of that in the name of size, something I don't think most pro users really care about.
This would definitely be the level of security that falls under this statement from Snowden:

Q: Is it possible to put security in place to protect against state surveillance?

A: "You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place."

(from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblowe...)
Apple Challenges Google Docs, Microsoft With iWork iCloud
It doesn't matter because you still have to have someone deny his asylum application, something which there is no protocol for at the moment in HK.
You're not, though the safari controls (especially in the bookmarks screen) shocked me more, the blue-on-white is very odd-looking. I'll have to see the actual result, but I'm really wary on that (though I like the new style overall, even if it might take people time to get used to it)
Agreed; the design of the OS is quite good but the icons seem disproportionate. The Safari icon seems quite odd, and the iTunes and App Store icon "circles" are too far out on the edge of the icon.

Overall though, it's a remarkable effort by Apple. Let's see how good it is to develop for, though.
Probably a dumb question, what is the benefit from using Cloudflare? If I naively set up a page like this I would have just done S3 directly, right?
I mostly agree. Now this may be a bit difficult to explain, but all the logic in the points above sort of align towards the intent of achieving mass adoption. But I am afraid that mass adoption is not going to happen just like that. And it is certainly not going to depend on the fact that everyone uses email.

Let's look at an ordinary user first. An ordinary user doesn't half understand the subject of privacy. He/she is rather more interested in sharing his/her best looking picture on Facebook. Or worried about landing a good job with a nice new email with all the strengths. Which is the cool app, what is the next device he can show off etc.

Why would Persona matter to such a user? A type that is majority and we've counted them all in the statement 'everyone on the 'Net has one'. So this is more like opening an end of a small pipe to the atmosphere thinking that all the air will pass through it.

- Most everyone on the 'Net has one.

Yes. But it doesn't provide any motivation for people to go and sign-up for Persona. Hence email registration only adds to friction.

- Most everyone remembers their email address (but they might not remember what usernames they used for which websites).

This one is real. Since Persona is about, well, persona it is more likely to remain etched in the memory of early adopters (ignore mass adoption for a later stage) provided it is done right, kept right etc. Mozilla is an amazing and capable organization so it should experiment more given that the project itself is an ambitious experiment.

- Email addresses are unique, so when a user signs up for Persona, they don't have to go through that time-wasting "this username is taken, try this one instead" process.

Dumb users are dumb enough to try signing up with the same email id again. I am not very sure about Persona's positioning w.r.t same person having multiple email ids?

- Email addresses make it easy to recover forgotten passwords.

Agreed. However, Hacker News is a great example of why both email id and password recovery are immaterial for a product to be successful (Kudos PG!). I do agree with the simplicity of recovering forgotten password through email, but this is certainly not a show-stopper at this stage.
Is there more of a the back story that is not in the article? The way the article reads the case was "jeopardized" by the officer's lack of credibility on the stand and the fact that the defense attorney was familiar with her from a previous case:

But that case, like this one, was dropped because of evidence problems.

...

"Her testimony on this was horrible, it was all contradictory," defense attorney Warren A. Brown said yesterday, referring to the Forrest case. He ticked off a list of what he said were conflicting statements, including the number of times McKissick discharged her weapon.

Brown represented the 2005 suspect as well as the 45-year-old Forrest and says both cases involved inconsistent statements by McKissick.
Conversely, what would a huge epidemic do? Unlike terrorist nukes, we've already encountered massive global flu epidemics.
When other companies update a mobile OS, it gives the phone new features, not just a new font and icons.
Turn Your Mailbox into Free, Unlimited Cloud Storage
Seems like they took the best design of both stock Android and Windows Phone.

Really slick. They've also added a few of the great features from Android and Chrome too, catching up a bit.

I think people will be happy with this.
The average non-technical user is going to be far better off with that than the current state of "password1!" used on every site across the internet.
You are not the only designer who prefers pen and paper. While I am more of a programmer than anything else, I know my way around photoshop. I am also a fair hack with a pen(customavatars.reddempire.com), and prefer a pen and paper when starting a sketch rather than drawing with a tablet for example.
I like the color scheme. It's positive and fresh, I think Windows Phone 8 looks drab, bland, and very boring in comparison.

Android's Holo is still one of the best color schemes for a mobile device, IMHO.
The Mac Pro wasn't ATX, but it followed the same general principles of being a large tower case with a lot more expansion slots than anyone needed, and not enough space between the slots for a GPU to have good cooling, and expansion slots that were several inches longer than any PCB that ever needed to be put in there.
Back in real life, we're taking about wasting 400 villagers in the hope of killing 1 Taleban, not the other way round. Try again.
Yes. Though considering the volume reduction you can probably get more storage in an external enclosure without going above the footprint of the old Pro.
Don't like the icons either and the typography and
"simple" design looks like Android 4.0... hmmm

It was a necessary change though, after so many years.
US based password/identity management is now dead.
I wouldn't be surprised if you turn out to be right, but wouldn't be surprised if you're wrong either.
Thanks for posting. Looks promising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty

"Liberty is the value of individuals to have agency (control over their own actions)"

Privacy is not a liberty. It's a restriction on the action of others.

TSA and no fly lists are restrictions on liberty.
It's pretty precious, yeah.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, you could already blow this thing away at its price point by building your own. It wouldn't be as pretty looking, but you could do better (if specs are the primary concern).
There's a ton of new features. Not sure what you're talking about.
No need. Israel is already part of the US surveillance apparatus. Every single phone bill in the country gets shipped to an Israeli site for pre-processing..
Blazr, the 1st medical marijuana geosocial network begins private beta.
basically rich guys rule?
Silicon Valley Doesn't Just Help the Surveillance State—It Built It
Apple Announces iTunes Radio
Yeah - I think the subsidy of the high end from the low and middle end of the market is coming to an end.
I said the negative effects of a death due to crime or terrorism is greater than that of a death due to disease.

Look at e.g. Chicago. 500 or so murders a year, dwarfed by the number of deaths from heart disease, etc, and people freak out. But that reaction has an economic cost--it's harder to get middle class people to move into and stay in the city when they fear crime.

Maybe people shouldn't be so unnerved by crime and terrorism, but they are. 1,000 traffic deaths a year in Illinois does absolutely nothing to curb car culture. 1,000 terrorism deaths a year in Illinois would gut the economy of the state as people fled to saver environs.
Nothing to hide, everything to lose.

IIRC, there's supposed to be a good counter-argument to "nothing to hide" that involves something about privacy being an integral component of maintaining the power balance in a society (ostensibly-)organized around individual freedoms and protections/checks against its government and inevitable government bullying.

I just can't seem to find any recent evidence of people remembering this from the recent articles/comments/etc.
Don't bet against it. There are supposedly 50 participants. Expect a continuing drop of revelations.
kjh the author of this link has a greatintroduction to emacs:

http://kieranhealy.org/resources/emacs-starter-kit.html

He also has a lot of good reference material on latex/org-mode/pandoc. Definitely a good resource to have handy if you ever have a less-techie friend who wants to get away from MS word and its ilk.
That's not true at all. He just needed to go somewhere that both a) would resist the US's judicial attempts at extradition and b) would resist the US's extrajudicial attempts at extradition. HK is probably one of the few places that satisfy both.
Why alter the current pattern? I imagine they like it.
How To Stop The NSA From Spying (Email, Web, Voice, Instant Messaging)
Just a book. Software soon. I wanted to start with something small that I could do relatively quickly, so I'm writing a book. Then I will convert readers of my book into customers for my software.
Apple Inc.: How does Apple keep secrets so well?
It's always hard to create a flat design version of something created non-flat before. I really thought that Apple will do it's best to preserve the functionality of it's own designs and I think it really did it at 99.9%. Those icons aren't the best they could do, but it will change in time for sure!
Apple Unveils iTunes Radio
>but I've always rejected this argument, and here's why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception.

Isn't that exactly what the article and the argument is getting at?
How can you engage irrational fears with rational argument?
Google Chrome Team: "Ah snap, and we just dropped WebKit!"

Edit: It's a joke, guys. :/
So much advice here, and yet not a mention of psychology!

Where are the answers? How can learning behavior be quantified and understood?

I want nuts and bolts. I want hard answers to the problem of learning. I'm a self-taught professional, I know for a fact different people learn in unique ways. I'm heading back to school to learn the one thing that kept me out of academia, how to learn.
With $5.4M, Ayla Networks builds an Internet of things platform
Some of the wireframing tools aren't bad. Google some of them if you are wondering what your missing.
Ask HN: Facebook only marketing campaigns?
We're a small 2 person startup catering to a very specific niche market. About 6 months ago, we hired a marketing firm to get us some exposure on Facebook and so far, it's been going well. Almost 2000 page likes, we have a high interaction rate with the page and it has generated over 500 new users on the website.

My problem with this marketing firm as of late, is they only target Facebook. No Twitter, no Google+, nothing.

I've questioned this multiple times, even citing articles on how people in our demographic are using Twitter more; that its a good idea to have a Google+ account for SEO rank, etc... and I'm continually being shot down by this firm as their a waste of time / money.

Finally, this weekend, I told my partner, if their not willing to do Twitter, Google+, let me do it and let's see what happens. He said yes, and I began making some changes. Integrating Twitter's API into our blog posts to automatically link to new articles, Google+ button at the top of the page, etc...

Today, this marketing company questions the Google+ button I put in the header and rudely suggested I burry it.

Every time I bring up the other networks we're not active on, I get shot down by them.

Are they a waste of time and money? Should we pursue them? Is this guy an a?

-- frustrated
Yeah, i call them x-ray icons. Really awful.
Do you have any stats from your analytics you could share? It would be great to see the business side effect.
> Even if America went to great lengths to offend nobody and make everyone happy, they'd always be the one with the target painted on their back.

Worth a try, anyway?
I wonder if the Finder will finally be able to auto-adjust its font for best-fit-for-content style views. Its the 21st Century, it should be doing this by now, grr ..
Though, in a general sense, thorough education might change your own opinion.
Highly doubtful it's going to be upgradeable.
There's a paper by Panneton and l'Ecuyer (linked from the Wikipedia article about Xorshift) that seems to indicate that simple Xorshift generators fail some statistical tests very badly. (Not the ones in Marsaglia's Diehard suite -- he tested them with those -- but others.)

I think a better approach is another recommended by Marsaglia: take a few different RNGs working on different principles, and just combine them by (say) adding them up.

Or, of course, just use something like the Mersenne Twister, which is more complicated than (e.g.) Marsaglia's KISS but there are enough good implementations out there that it doesn't really matter.