skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where is our zero knowledge cloud?
Browser based public/private key encryption, for a true 'cloud' communication experience.

Public keys linked to web persona's (anonymous or not), so you can easily select recipients of the message (email, chat, file, photo gallery, etc). The message is encrypted twice, once as just a summary (because it's the cloud, we browse but don't download everything), and one with the actual data.

The server stores the messages, the recipients decrypt in the browser with a private key stored on one of their USB sticks and accessed through the HTML5 file system API.

Is it an idea who's time has come?
The biggest weakness is missing - it is not statically typed.
There are good guys and bad guys in every movie. They are all actors in a movie that gives the illusion that they are actually governing in people's interest. Read Chomsky's Manufactured Consent and see beyond the illusion.
It's just an incredible laptop. After being a Dell user all my life, I recently upgraded to a Retina 15" and I couldn't be happier. It's just an incredible user experience all round and you can see the amount of effort and consideration is put into every part of it's design to suit you. The example I always go with is the lid. It's designed to lift seamlessly up without any friction or movement from the base and it does exactly that. It's the little things that really make this laptop perfect.
There are some apps that are Mac only. Also you get access to the App Store with great Mac software.

Also it's got a good shell, etc. As far as I know, OSX is only licensed to run on Macs.
There's nothing interesting or unexpected about this statement at all.
I'm not sure that the author understands what a sysadmin is. Even a junior sysadmin could cripple most services based on their level of access.
(edit to above): I think the likelihood of severe negative consequences is low, but there is a nonzero likelihood of being targeted for a bad experience, for varying values of "bad experiences".
Yeah, he technically did something wrong, but Booz Allen should come into the spotlight, as they are profiting from this nastiness. Fuck them.
Strange Attractors and TCP/IP Sequence Number Analysis
Airbnb co-founder: 'We believe it's time for our invention'
I don't know if the real problem is that Congress has abdicated its power. I think the real, real problem is that many of the sensible people in congress realize they have many colleagues who are either excessively partisan or incompetent. They realize that delegation to within the agencies or executive branch means the fewer of such folks with access to information that they might feel tempted to leak for personal or political gain or just because of raw stupidity.
While the naming is vestigial, the concept is not. Hierarchies are still the best way to navigate and organize data and objects, and search is only one component of that.

It works on phones because phones have limited use cases. A computer needs to be general purpose.
Physics are against rules beased on point of origin. The government of the point of storage has all the power to take the data, the one of the point of origin has none.
I'll give you 10:

1. If you like the outdoors, there are plenty of wonderful places to run/hike/bike in the South Bay/Peninsula.
2. There are frequent sporting events at HP Pavilion.
3. Sunnyvale may not be Paris, but museums and art galleries do exist in the area.
4. The diversity and quality of Bay Area restaurants is unrivaled.
5. Nightlife can be found in San Jose.
6. For weekend getaways, Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay and Napa are all within reasonable driving distance.
7. Like most metropolitan areas, there are tons of gyms where you can stay in shape and meet people.
8. Meetups of all types abound in the Bay Area.
9. If you like shopping or window shopping, you could do a lot worse than Valley Fair Mall and Santana Row.
10. A lot of the downtowns in the area are great for grabbing a cup of coffee and people watching.
I'm just not sure there are easy answers in any direction here. Should they have the program at all? If they should, did they choose the right parameters? If the parameters are right, is the oversight adequate to both preventing misuse of these undeniably broad powers and making the rest of us feel like it is still, in the end, our government? Who should make each of those decisions? Given democratic uncertainty over whether all the forgoing are within spitting distance of 'correct' (whatever that means), what is any individual actor's responsibility -- even assuming he has full knowledge of the program -- to undermine most of those decisions when he feels it's wrong? How wrong would he have to feel it was, and on what axes?
There is a fundamental problem with being truly secure online. That flaw is that the sites and services we use are compromised. In order to me to write this comment, I'm relying on the free wifi at Starbucks to not log my actions. I'm relying on their ISP to not log the traffic to HN's servers. I'm relying on Google's Chrome browser to correctly recognize HN's certificate and encrypt my packets properly, and I'm relying on Entrust Certification Authority to correctly assert that I am actually sending my data to HN and not an intermediary. Then I'm relying on HN to receive my data and store it securely (well, as secure as I should expect a public forum to be, but the scenario applies just as well to banks and email providers). Finally, I'm relying on all software installed on my laptop (including the operating system) to respect my privacy by not logging keystrokes.

Any 3-letter agency that wanted to track my internet usage only needs to collude with one of these services to compromise my privacy. I think the solution to privacy is a combination between government transparency and accountability, and our own due diligence to carefully vet the programs and services we use.
ah OK. I know a friend who recently switched jobs and was given the choice, and he's enjoying the mac. I think some part of me is still clinging to the Windows/Mac war farce.

Something deep down still makes me think that everyone running a Macbook is a smug hipster

upvoted for "wipe and put ubuntu on it"
The "I want to do something else!" button does nothing for me. I have many "MUST" todos and only 1 "WANT" while trying this button. The button just brings me to the same single "WANT" I have.
EXACTLY.

Not just this guy, but a contracting firm (BAH) in general? How did they get that bid?
He already has. He keeps making new accounts to continue his spamming.

I wish pg would implement an IP-hellban.
If your plan is to get acqui-hired, your goal is not to build something awesome for your users.

That's not the same thing as saying people who are acquired for their talent didn't try to build something awesome -- it's just that, if your GOAL is to get acquired, that's a different goal than building something people want or need.
Mozillux: A Nice Linux Distro With a Unique Software Set
Tracking startups JFDI’s Demo Day 2013
"Pardon the aggressiveness, but are you Asian?"

Why does that even matter?

"An underclass is not solely defined by income or education - an underclass is defined by how its members are treated in common society."

Wikipedia gives three common definitions of "underclass".

Asians don't qualify under any of them.

Sorry, they just don't.

Edit: to be specific, these are given as:

"Focus on economics". We've already disposed of this one.

"Focus on space and place" (i.e., forced to live in a ghetto). Nope.

"Focus on behavior", i.e. "street hustlers, welfare families, drug addicts, and former mental patients." Nope.

I think I already stipulated that there's still prejudice against Asians, so I'm not sure what that lengthy rant was about.
David Simon's Thoughts on the NSA Data Mining
it has a unix terminal built-in
ummm.... where will my money actually go?

The campaign is very light on details. I will not give them money just because they used his picture in a header. I will rather post the money to EFF
Tip of the Week: Blog More Efficiently on Tumblr
Update the Fourth Amendment for the 21st Century
I was a PC guy since 1985. I never considered switching to a Mac until they switched to Intel chips in 2006. At the time I was lugging around a heavy Acer laptop. The plastic latches had broken within 1 month of use.

I tried a friend's Macbook Pro. I couldn't believe how light it was, and the quality of the case + the display. I was sold. I bought one in 2007 and I've been using Macbooks ever since. Just a really well made machine.
Coming from a family that is/was heavily subscribed to making purchases from Dell, I get "being a Dell user".

I see how little things like the lid would do it, that's something I've never thought about, but have definitely been annoyed with (lifting the lid and having the whole computer move)...
Please delete that link! How are mainstream business magazines going to write glowing articles about this latest Silicon Valley innovation if everyone knows this didn't start in Silicon Valley?!?
Ask HN: Do open source authors have a responsibility to maintain their projects?
I would be interested to get some opinions on this one. Personally I get very frustrated when people open source projects then neglect them. I feel it may prevent others from moving into that space and doing a better job.
Just curious, how old are you?
Raspberry Pi gets new installation system
>In order to me to write this comment, I'm relying on the free wifi at Starbucks to not log my actions.

No, you aren't. Hacker News is HTTPS-exclusive.
You can already use vagrant with some cloud providers, like Rackspace.

https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-rackspace
I was reminded of this story while trying to explain to my 12 year old (again) the importance of knowing numbers and ways to play with them in your head. I was glad to find the story online, and I'm happy HN found it interesting enough to make the front page.

As elsewhere mentioned in the comments, if you enjoy this story you'll probably enjoy reading all of Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman.
Alright. The government was also keeping confidential the videos of the Baghdad and Granai airstrikes, the diplomatic cables and the Iraq & Afghanistan War logs. Do you think they care more about protecting the privacy of your data?
Have you worked on a startup before? That's not how it works. There's no such thing as "moderate amount of risk". People who just read Techcrunch may think that it's so easy to get acq-hired, they think "Hey I could have built that, I guess it's so easy to get acq-hired". But what they don't realize is there are tons of other--failed or ongoing--startups that did the same thing started by founders who may be much smarter than the one that got acq-hired, but it's all based on luck. There are many factors, for example if you got an investment from a prominent VC or angel investor it's much easier to get acq-hired compared to you doing it alone. Doing a startup for the sake of getting "acq-hired" is the stupidest thing one could ever do.
Can Mozilla Firefox OS Compete With Mobile Giants?
Having access to a PowerPoint about a system ("metadata") is not exactly the same as having access to the data itself.
One of the Darkest Periods in the History of American Prisons
The mobile Onion Browser, as disclosed on their website and not app store description, has secure security shortcomings that make it at best worthless at worst dangerous.
I've read Chomsky. I get the argument, but I reject it. It fails to address that I actually agree with a lot of things the Obama Administration has made progress on, especially regarding domestic policy. Health care, gay rights are some big ones.

I think a Republican administration would have would have been way worse on those issues, and not much different on civil liberties or privacy.
I lived in the area for years. I know what there is to do in the Bay Area in general. None of the stuff to do is in Sunnyvale. It's nice (sorta), but it's boring. That's sort of the point of the suburbs. The skatepark is pretty good, though.
We already had such a thing, in essence, except there were no takers. [1] Implemented by a bright HNer. [2]

[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/5ttt.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=petar
> He is the cheeriest major leaker one is likely to see.

I didn't get that impression at all. He seems to fully comprehend his situation and it comes through clearly in his interview.
Exolosions at nato hq at kabul airport
Linux source code for Rockchip RK3188 devices now available
Headline in Hong Kong's Mingpao newspaper -  美監控醜聞爆料人藏港酒店 .
I want many of those changes to happen, but I think you're being optimistic.

I think Apple will keep support for Conroe (Core 2 and its contemporary Xeon counterparts) for another OS release. Conroe was one of the biggest performance jumps between Intel processor generations in some time, and Apple used the NVIDIA 9400M IGP to give their Core 2 computers passable graphics performance.
My statement stands. If he/she was being tongue-in-cheek, then it doesn't apply. If it's the powers-that-be that do it, well, there you are.
Mastering Mobile Apps With Azure
Are you suggesting that the table of contents does not reflect the contents? I suppose that's possible.
There are only a few cancers which can be cured eventhough they have spread everywhere. One of these are testicular germ cell tumours (eg Lance Armstrong), as well as some rare types of gestational trophoblastic disease (essentially out of control placenta) and acute leukaemia and lymphoma. It's not big news because these tumours are quite rare, and treatment for leukaemia/lymphoma has always worked better than for solid tumours. There is also nothing to be gained from a public health persepctive by telling people that testicular cancer can be cured with multiple cycles of chemo, surgery and radiotherapy.

Some cases of advanced colon cancer can be cured if the disease has only spread to the liver, by cutting out the disease in the liver.

But your most common cancers eg breast, lung, colon for the most part, gastric,prostate... they aren't curable once widespread.
Regarding #1:

Why should the government have a say on this at all? The person is doing a favor for the citizens of the whole world which happens to backfire for the government which has things to hide. Just the sole fact that government might be pissed about something transparency advocating like this should be enough of a reason to support it.

It's the government which should be afraid of the people and not the people who should be afraid of the government!
Two motivations come to mind: he wants recognition and/or he's scared of what the U.S. will do to him.
They still know where to send my packets, and it's possible that they are proxying the SSL (although that requires a secondary breach in Chrome's CA list and/or Entrust).
So now lack of a degree means you cannot be trusted with sensitive data - wtf?

I understand the guy is emphasizing these things to make his point but still, wtf.

What about his morals? What about his courage? I would most definitely trust my data to a guy that was and is prepared to go to jail for his beliefs that my data should be treated with respect and within the law.
Java: Out of the spotlight, but still spry
The Constitution in the National Surveillance State (2008)
"... and did so by introducing something new. The touchscreen."

That's something that still annoys the crap out of me. Long before the iPhone, plenty of people were happily using PalmOS and Windows Mobile touchscreen devices and downloading apps for them. If he doesn't think the Palm Treos mattered, he wasn't paying attention.
So, David Simon (of The Wire/Treme fame) wrote this up:

http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

I think he makes some good points.
I didn't know he had a preferences page. Thank you.
Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
> It's far less controversial than the PRISM program, which is what is being discussed here.

Is it, though? The widespread Verizon metadata gathering is what I'm most concerned with right now. It, too, was whistleblown by Snowden.

> the US Supreme Court has already ruled on the legality

I understand this program to be ruled unconstitutional by the Foreign International Surveillance Court, albeit with the findings suppressed by the justice department for "national security" reasons.

I thought this was the stuff Senators Wyden and Udall were briefed on and aghast about, but unable to explain to the American people.

Do you understand this differently?
This whole post is unwarranted assumptions about the extent to which companies illegally violate their privacy policies. Their are plenty of disgruntled ex-SREs like Rachel who would love to blow the whistle if anything close to what you are suggesting ever happened.
You and I have the same idea of win and we share similar beliefs; I was trying to explain things from what I understand to be the mindset of someone who fully buys into Gandhi's belief system. I seem to be doing a bad job... and there is a chance I have got it all wrong anyway.
@7Figures2Commas sorry to say this but "45 minute drive to SF" would have been less boring that the 10 reasons you gave. Seriously, I think I would do the same if I were in Ben's shoes. If you're in your twenties and can't be in an exciting city (San Jose is large but I don't think it's comparable to SF), it's much wiser to work hard and improve skills than wasting time engaging in a mediocre entertainment like hanging out at a Sunnyvale museum. Maybe after 2 years when he's free to go, then he'll move to SF (and probably start another startup), and that's when he should enjoy his life.
Occasionally you come across tables in very old statistics textbooks for generating random numbers that are just lists. You close you eyes, stand up and drop a pen to select a number.
If people exposing malicious facts about those in power is considered to be enemies of those in power(The United States in this case), then I support them thoroughly in whichever way I can regardless of what anyone might think of it.

The fact that transparency is an issue for those who hold power is alone a huge reason to support people like Snowden who reveal the true nature of affairs which are being kept secret by not being transparent in the first place.
It's really strange to read the pro-government people here and elsewhere claim on one hand that Snowden was incredibly naive to be surprised that the CIA railroaded foreign bankers into informing by manipulating the legal system, and then turn around and claim that any talk of the NSA "arranging" Nacchio's sentencing is some kind of conspiracy theory. The logical discord is hard to understand.

I'm not convinced Nacchio was railroaded (I don't know enough about it yet), but it's definitely the modus operandi of powerhouse intelligence services around the world. So it's entirely possible Nacchio was set up, or at the least, that the some member of the US intelligence community was behind the prosecution.
What is it now? "Possibly no" or "clearly no"? I want a source or reading Googles statement for myself.
That's a very good explanation. I would add that a 'cancer' takes 15 - 20 years to develop from one original cellular derangement to a clinically obvious tumour. we arrive in the last 12 months of the process and try to affect cure on this diverse, evolved cellular civilisation. No wonder we fail.

Harnessing the immune system however - now that could be more promising as an approach that the cancer can't evolve away from as easily eg announced just last week: http://www.ascopost.com/ViewNews.aspx?nid=4189
The criteria is loyalty to government, not country.
Do you have any screenshots or samples of the fractals? Just curious.
This. Donate to the EFF. There was a post recently that they lived off a $5-million dollar budget. It needs to be bigger.
Why Startups Need a Well Articulated Strategy
The fact that money is trickling into this campaign, while campaigns such as one to send a heckled school bus driver on vacation explode with hundreds of thousands of dollars, shows our society's ignorance. This man is a hero, and is likely to be cannon fodder for the US Justice system.

John Mccain went on CNN this morning and said that this whole thing isn't a big issue in the minds of most Americans and there won't be much if any political fallout. I am sure he is saying that with polling numbers in hand. Mark Udall, who has been trying to warn Americans about this for years, also appeared and was made to look like an overaggressive alarmist. They may as well have superimposed a tinfoil hat on him.

This whole thing gives us a very scary glimpse into how pliable the populace is. Many assumed that the NSA was doing this, but not so obvious until this incident was the depth of ambivalence Americans have toward their rights. The stage is now set for a remakably dark future, and by the time the populace finally has enough, they will no longer have the power to stop it.
employees of BAH and other companies like them run the day to day operations of a very significant portion of the government and have for quite some time.
Do newspapers 'deserve' to die? Not so fast
And so it begins, the assault on Snowden, his character, his qualifications, etc.
Is this a joke? Much of the Top Secret work performed for the government is done by private companies under contract with full clearances.

i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works
Is Insider Trading Really a Crime?
Agreed. Why isn't anyone talking about the contractor?
Sorry for the derail but: How ... how do you get killed by contact with hot tap water? Is that like unexpectedly boiling water coming out on babies, the elderly, and the very frail?
Why would you need totalitarianism? The government which gave Turing the choice between imprisonment and hormonal treatment using injections for the crime of "indecency" wasn't totalitarian. Developed countries - and the US in particular - violate basic human rights regularly. You don't need to imagine hypothetical scenarios.

That said, I believe this is all irrelevant. Privacy is an end in itself, it doesn't need to be justified.
No. They are people working for free on their spare time. They have no obligation whatsoever to anyone.

If you feel an open source project you like and use is being neglected by its original author, why don't you step forward and assume its ownership?

That's what open source is about: to give everyone the freedom to do whatever they want and need. Open source is not about forcing developers to work for free forever to support your needs.

Open source developers are real people, with real jobs, real families, and who needs to eat, sleep, and pay rent.
A Proposal for Private Spaces on the Web
But it wasn't remanded back to a district court, they retried in front of the 10th circuit court.

Regardless, he was never rightfully convicted by a jury. The trial in which he was found guilty by a jury was found to have denied him a proper defense (by an appeals court).
This makes sense to me. It's highly illegal, to the point of treason and violating national security, to even acknowledge the existence of a FISA request, PRISM or otherwise. No one involved in the entire FISA request would be able to reveal that to even a coworker, let alone the public, under penalty of 20 years to life in prison.

Furthermore, the NSA strictly forbid employees who complied with FISA requests to even speak of it to high ranking chief executives. In other words, it's highly likely even the CEOs didn't know a great extent of the FISA requests flowing through their networks.
NSA security guidelines (1994)