skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Developer, are you dangerous enough to your neighbours?
Media is almost always talking about "big issues" only (think "cyber espionage networks", for example), even when there would be seemingly "smaller, but important" stories to tell related to security. As a "solo developer" I often have to face the problem that some people try to disturb my thinking and hurt me emotionally - by trying to make lasting associations between irritating things in my surroundings (or nearby) and something that I think, touch or handle while developing. I guess they have their reasons, but they can't be honest.

My favorite development enviroment, Eclipse had started showing "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space" errors. I felt sure that I had "-XX:MaxPermSize" set to defaults, but for some reason it wasn't. It was lower. Now, the PermGen itself is "permanent generation of objects in the VM (Class names, internalized strings, objects that will never get garbage-collected". Notice the part "will never get garbage-collected".

Now, at the very same time I realized that something had changed in the file eclipse.ini I also realized that something had changed in my surroundings: somebody had kicked the trash can, which is normally attached to its place on the other side of the street (partially visible from my window). It was now laying on the asphalt. Somebody had also thrown a beer can on top of the bus stop shelter.

So, basically I had to choose between "make my own hands dirty" because of the trash (container and a single piece of trash) or "wait for somebody else to take care of the issue". The trash can itself was recently taken away by city's Environment services department and it seems that it didn't even have any real use - or then (normal) people just carry their empty water bottles etc. themselves.
Foreign Surveillance Post-9/11: A History of Privacy Erosion
I assume he also implies that fingerprints aren't any safer
Wikipedia bans your IP from editing if you run a Tor node. It definitely biases their content and discourages operation of Tor nodes.
> But the conquest of Cambodia put an end to one of the worst genocides since WW II.

You're referring to the 1978-79 invasion of Khmer-Rouge-governed "Democratic Kampuchea" by (the by-then unified) Vietnam, about which you're absolutely correct.

In contrast, I was referring to the 1970 North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, which led to the U.S. incursion there, which in turn touched off protests in the U.S., including the one at Kent State.

> [Referring to South Vietnam:] a military dictatorship that was only able to maintain power because we supported it really wasn't a legitimate government no matter how you slice it.

A lot of Vietnamese immigrants to the U.S. would strongly disagree with you. Drive around the Little Saigon area in Houston (or numerous other cities). You'll see plenty of South Vietnamese flags flying. This, even though it's been nearly 40 years since North Vietnam completed its conquest in April 1975.

There's a selection bias at work here, of course; the people who fled South Vietnam and came to the U.S. were, by and large, people who were aligned with, and benefited from, the South Vietnamese government.

Still, it speaks volumes that so many South Vietnamese fled -- by small boat, and who knows how many of them drowned at sea or were killed by pirates.

The North Vietnamese had heavy logistical support from the USSR and China. After Watergate and Nixon's 1974 resignation, the U.S. Congress -- controlled by the Democratic Party, whose base by then was heavily influenced by left-wing "peaceniks" -- cut off logistical support for the Saigon government. (Foreign policy wise, the Democratic Party of today is very, very different from that of the 1970s.) The cut-off of U.S. support was pretty much game over for South Vietnam.

Some argue that the quick collapse of the Saigon government suggests that the government didn't enjoy broad popular support among the South Vietnamese people. Another possible explanation is that the South Vietnamese were tired of war and saw no point in sacrificing their lives in the face of overwhelming military force.

I do think there's considerable room for argument that, after the Japanese surrender and evacuation from Vietnam in 1945, the U.S. should have backed Ho Chi Minh and his Vietnamese nationalists, instead of supporting a return of the French colonial rulers (who were booted out after losing the French-Indochina War 1950-1954). There's also no question that the Saigon government was far from ideal.

But I don't think there's any dispute that --- on the whole --- the (Communist) North Vietnamese government was far more systematically brutal than was the South. Indeed, systematic brutality seems to be a common and recurring theme among Communist governments. Which goes to my original point.
Glenn Greenwald keynote at Freedom to Connect 2013
The State Department has had a strong interest in enabling communications particularly from dissidents in various countries (China, Arabian states, possibly others). I'm aware of some projects they've backed or considered. I'm also aware that State is frequently a cover for intelligence operations. And that there's been a fair bit of cooperation between various intelligence organizations and Free Software projects (Salon's got a long piece on Hadoop up at the moment).
In case anyone is wondering what the hell this is:

The cache version saved by Google shows a single post in the tumblr blog. That post is with an image of a girl and you are asked to pay $3 to get a text file with the link to the girl's facebook page. Clearly spam.

The girl's facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/zlata.stefanova/photos (direct link to the photos because I know that is where you want to go :) (no, I did not pay $3, I just used google images)
For applications, that should be somewhat more acceptable than for standard web pages (and to a lesser extent apps) and it won't need to be updated particularly frequently either.
>They want the US to be actively preventing the next Boston Marathon bombing or 9/11. And are more than happy to give up a small amount of their own privacy in order to do so.

The thing is that these surveillance tools are never enough. They enhance them, and a terrorist act happens, and they start saying that they need more power to prevent something like that in the future. It's baloney.

The only way for them to prevent future crime is to turn the country into an Orwellian dystopia.
The thing is that we don't even know how effective these surveillance programs are, since the gov't doesn't release any data. Any time questions of efficacy rise, 'they' say that these programs help catch terrorists, but they don't give any concrete data.
A (de)motivational letter
I enjoy both javascript and scala.

For work and anything I would want to put on a web site it is more practical to write javascript and when I've had time for my own projects I've enjoyed scala.

For me this is a great direction. The idea that I'd suddenly replace my javascript is silly. But being able to pull in things I'm familiar with from both into the same prototype (and at the same layer) of something and debug it all in the debugger I'm most familiar with (and with correct code line references!) is awesome.

Similarly, for someone who is learning scala and doesn't have/want java+IDE experience, this could lead to learning scala as a language with much less overhead and/or while learning a more useful combination of debugger and editor.

I think the overly negative comments come from those who view javascript as the "problem" that every new way to integrate languages with it must have been designed to tackle. Since every language has trade-offs, there is always ample criticism available from that vantage point...
Speaking of BLINK... how about this? IIICTECH is getting trampled by both Google & Microsoft. So mutch for having a good idea & having a far shot at owning intellectual property... like a trademark.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/01/prweb10367324.htm
Banned entirely or just from editing? Perhaps websites (especially ones that value intellectual freedom such as Wikipedia and Hacker news) could allow certain IP addresses that announce they run exit nodes the capability to have certain accounts (those of users who have direct access to the network) whitelisted.
Programming languages: quality, popularity, and versatility
Well, there's now a key matching that ID on subkeys.pgp.net:

$ gpg --recv-key '0x5B50940B79DEBE35'
gpg: requesting key 79DEBE35 from hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
gpg: key 2BE0BC29: public key "Verax (Informed Democracy Front)" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)

Claims to have been created May 20, 2013, though it's only self-signed:

$ gpg --list-sigs 2BE0BC29
pub 4096R/2BE0BC29 2013-05-20
uid Verax (Informed Democracy Front)
sig 3 2BE0BC29 2013-05-20 Verax (Informed Democracy Front)
sub 4096R/79DEBE35 2013-05-20
sig 2BE0BC29 2013-05-20 Verax (Informed Democracy Front)
Exactly. That is exactly why I like Google's business model. It allows them to earn money, lots of it, while still being good, at least in theory.
It's basically the same thing. According to the BLINK Development Team videos, they openly admit zero change in functionality. How about you consider the BLINK naming confusion. BLINK is actually in current use by a startup in Dallas, IIICTECH. They're getting trampled by both Google & Microsoft... with little they can do about it. So much for having a good idea & having a far shot at owning intellectual property... like a trademark.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/01/prweb10367324.htm
Es würden Anwendungen der deutschen Firmen Utimaco,
Ipoque oder Trovicor genutzt, um möglichst tief in die
private Kommunikation einzudringen.

They use applications of the German companies Utimaco
Ipoque or Trovicor to penetrate as deeply as possible
into the private communications.

The linked PDF doesn't support this claim. It contains a question about the companies involved, but all it says is that the answer is not public.

If true it might be interesting
that former PGP lead developer Gerhard Eschelbeck is CTO of Sophos (owner of Utimaco).
FWIW you're not alone in feeling like this. Fortunately I deleted my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts years ago, but losing Google services is going to hurt. It also feels a little futile since my country, like yours, participates in Echelon so I'm not sure how much material difference it really makes. However I have absolutely no control over US policy, and the only thing I can do is hope to motivate Google to lobby for a sane internet by showing them that they are directly affected by the US administration's actions. That, and donate to the EFF.

It's a shame, because there's a lot I really like about Google as a company, and I really think that they're trying to push the bar when it comes to privacy (elliptic cryptography etc) and I love things like Project Loon. But at the end of the day they're screwed for me by the jurisdiction they operate under.
But they also do so much more than that.
My first thought as well :) ... I believed it only because we're nowhere near April :P
Speaking of BLINK, Dallas based IIICTECH has been using BLINK for years. They're getting trampled by both Google & Microsoft. So mutch for having a good idea & having a far shot at owning intellectual property... like a trademark. (www.ismorethan.com)

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/01/prweb10367324.htm
Roll your Debian | …slowly
There are so many things wrong with your comment, I don't even know where to start. I think you might either be 8 years old, or simply trolling. Based on that, I don't see any reason to invest any time and energy into replying factually. Instead, I'll resort to just shaking my head, rolling my eyes and moving on, trusting that nature will take care of itself.

Yeah, I'm cool like that.
No, I'm actually ambitious and optimistic about the scope of this.

Massive automation absolutely does not imply massive involuntary unemployment. We've actually been through this before. We used to require 90% of the population to grow food. Now it's less than 1%. The rest didn't end up unemployed -- they ended up involved in entire industries and economies that didn't even exist before.

Most of us have jobs that would sound completely fanciful to a farmer circa 1800. He couldn't have remotely guessed how most people would spend their time and earn a living in 2013. The same is true now for us -- I doubt anyone here could explain what most people in 2050 will be doing with their time.

But the existence proof for there being useful work to do is the fact that not everyone has everything they could possibly want. So long as there are unmet needs and wants, there are necessarily opportunities for people to work together toward satisfying those needs.

Either the poor can afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they will have a high standard of living, or the poor can't afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they constitute a large market in which the robots are not competitive, not relevant, and unable to put people out of work.
You have no idea what you are talking about. I live in a developing country (bangladesh) which is mostly poor. About 80-90% of internet users are wireless internet users, and every year its getting more dominating.

Wired connection is extremely expensive to deploy and very time consuming too, wireless, not so much. As a matter of fact there is no "nation-wide" wired internet service here, only local providers. New wireless providers are popping up almost every year...
Louis Vuitton Purses Outlet Online Store
CNN's news report is pretty good, with coverage of MS' and Google's responses. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/15/politics/data-tech-giants/
Though it doesn't address concerns of NSA snooping, this[1] article has a lot of relevant information (and will probably be of a lot more interest to Hacker News readers as it addresses issues such as when the camera can be on while the light is off, discusses ethics and dangers of technology, and is more than just a knee-jerk reaction to the possibility of NSA using our webcams to snoop on us now)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5354362
Android has a userland made of unprivileged code running in a VM. To the extent it is different from a desktop Linux, it should have fewer userland components that could subvert system security. So, it's the same or perhaps easier to audit Android.

I'd be more worried about peripherals.

Telephones are hard to secure. That's why I mentioned open firmware. I'm not an expert on hardware-level security, but the combination of SoC architecture and lots of programmable cores in peripherals makes me think you would find ways of extracting information from a device that way. And the mobile baseband controls some of the audio paths in a handset.

It will be interesting to see if there are any revelations about device-makers and security that come out of the heightened interest in this topic.
Most of the anger at PRISM is that it apparently involves collecting data about everyone.

Carnivore was supposedly designed to be deployed against people who are suspects for a particular reason already. While some of the ECHELON satellite intercept hardware and the existence of the UKUSA agreement is known, exactly what is intercepted does not appear to have been ever leaked, and so the public have never had any reason based on mainstream media reports that they personally are being spied on.

Many people might be happy for a scheme that involves criminals being monitored, because they never think it will apply to them. But those same people will be angry when they hear definitive proof that a government is filing away data on them even though they didn't do anything wrong.
The "less than one percent" claim is based on the total number of GLOBAL users and the total number of requests made by U.S. officials. It is misleading.
One Year Later: Review of PyCharm 2.7 from a Vim User’s Perspective
If any technology that was formed in AT&T labs that threaten AT&T's very survival or business model, they will certainly or did squash it.
5 Quick Hacks to Wean Yourself Off Facebook Addiction
There is one way to fix that, but it involves you having to explain why your IP address has been accessing CP honeypots.
CIA - Caller Identification App
Thanks! The slideshow there gives little taste of it, too: http://www.theage.com.au/photogallery/world/lost-civilizatio...
This is an awful lot of effort to catch a "liar/criminal" (one precludes the other).

I think it's time for a "truth and reconciliation" committee where we remove every sitting congress-person, the Obama Administration at large, and at least the top-level of bureaucrats involved.

One other thought I had is, was the H1-B thing in the immigration act a "payoff" to the same tech CEOs selling the world out? A cynical thought, but a cynical time indeed.
AI, Skepticism and solipsism
This is true. The average Facebook user is unlikely to be affected, but that's not true for everyone. And you don't have to be a "terror suspect" or easily mistaken for one: if you have reason to worry about industrial espionage or Watergate tactics from the US government then your odds are likely to be a lot shorter too.
It's not logic. There are women all over the country doing "pole dancing" classes and men and women who frequent "pole dancing" establishments and so it's really just a smear of a young woman for guilt by association.

That's how shitty the "elites" are, they will go after anyone and everyone in their mad scramble to protect their golden gooses.
If you are interested in what you ask about, Jappix is such an alternative I discovered a while ago when curious about distributed social networks other than Diaspora.
I first tried PyCharm when I had to do a project for the Boxee platform , it was my first time doing anything in python and it helped greatly. Even back then the autocomplete was great, debugging just worked and for a complete noob it was perfect. Since then I switched to the full blown IntelliJ IDE and never again will I use anything else.
Motorola Moto X leaked, HD display and dual-core processor inside
The US government has been fighting hard to stop a proper adversarial determination on whether it is legal; it is hard to challenge the legality of a secret system without even having all the facts about the system, and an ex parte hearing (i.e. where the only party putting forward arguments is the US government, to a secret court) isn't likely to fully explore the legality.

As I understand it (IANAL, I am not an American), the US government is only supposed to spy on people with a warrant, but in this case they got essentially a 'blank cheque' warrant that let them spy on everyone. Such a broad warrant is not due process, because the court is not able to consider the specifics of each case data might be used for before data is collected.
I'm looking for any algorithms among those you listed that is considered weak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES#Security - ok, that has chosen plaintext weaknesses.

I don't see much information on CAST5 aka CAST128, can someone chime in with its current status?

I suppose you could encrypt an image using ECB. Would PGP allow this kind of broken configuration? http://pthree.org/2012/02/17/ecb-vs-cbc-encryption/
We need a cheaper way to move freight between the Earth and the Moon first. I believe here is what Filligree is talking about if anyone else is curious.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3

> Materials on the Moon's surface contain helium-3 at concentrations on the order of between 1.4 and 15 ppb in sunlit areas, and may contain concentrations as much as 50 ppb in permanently shadowed regions. A number of people, starting with Gerald Kulcinski in 1986, have proposed to explore the moon, mine lunar regolith and use the helium-3 for fusion. Recently, companies as Planetary Resources have also stated to be interested in mining helium-3 on the moon. Because of the low concentrations of helium-3, any mining equipment would need to process extremely large amounts of regolith (over 150 million tonnes of regolith to obtain one ton of helium 3), and some proposals have suggested that helium-3 extraction be piggybacked onto a larger mining and development operation.

(removed citation notes for readability)
.7z is a format too, and 7-zip supports that and other common formats like zip and rar.
The most important sentence is this:

"Eine starke Verschlüsselung mit PGP gilt als sicher, wenn es Angreifern nicht gelingt, den privaten geheimen Schlüssel, den nur der Empfänger besitzt, und sein Kennwort zu stehlen."

A strong encryption with PGP can be considered as secure, if attackers do not succeed in stealing the private secret key that only the recipient holds.

Basically, as long as they can't get your secret key and brute-force it because of a stupid password, you'll be fine.

Edit: fixed numerus
He recently announced support for sourcemaps, so yes. Yay!
Product lessons learned at Heroku
Iain Banks Final Interview
Its the classic News Corp style founder control non-capitalism stock market listing. Other shareholders are not owners, just along for the ride. Illegal in most countries other than the US, where shareholders actually have to own a public company...
Over privacy concerns, really. Some of my important clients are not confortable anymore... Outlook.com is therefore not a option.
iOS 7 Parallax Background in JS
Thanks, but Zoho is based in the US.
You're posing a false dichotomy. Skill is capital. And its worth relative to other forms of capital (cash, land) continues to rise.

Consider what's required to start a new business today. You need less cash than ever before. The limiting factor is most definitely skill. Not just obvious specialist skills, but the basic mindset that takes you from "just punching the clock" to "seeking opportunities to help".

One reason wealth is concentrating is that the vast majority of people are woefully unskilled in the areas that matter now. This creates big pools of labor that have no leverage, which are naturally easy to exploit.

So the existence of growing wealth inequality is not proof that education doesn't matter. It's just as plausible that most people are mis-educated. And when you look at the original intent of our education systems, they were deliberately designed to produce obedient factory workers who could reliably follow simple directions. Which is now an anti-skill.
good luck with that, if they gained any traction they would be tapped, discredited, marked as terrorists, a danger to all that's good and decent and the American Way(tm) and eventually destroyed.
http://www.copify.com