skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone who argues that innovation has stagnated in the last 50 years is ignoring the thing that has changed the innovation process the most. Computers aren't just an innovation in themselves, but also provide a tool for the design of new things which is completely unparalleled in the past. Maybe we haven't seen the step-change of the internal combustion engine (at least in physical designs), but that doesn't mean that innovation is stagnant.

Pointing towards useless inventions as proof that we're not solving the big problems is utterly ridiculous. We may remember the 19th century for the industrial revolution, but the victorians were churning out countless useless inventions at the same time. Just as we don't remember the victorians for their moustache guards, it seems to me that this decade is far more likely to be remembered for the self driving car than the popcorn gun.
Why not use Keccak/SHA-3 instead, it was developed in an open competition run by NIST with some NSA involvement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3
Please fix the typo "a a full"...
Take a look at this comment of mine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850851
More details about the history of the animal covers: http://animals.oreilly.com/origin-of-species/
I'm really interested in how this plays out. I notice a couple of things:

1) From my vantage point as Not A Lawyer, it doesn't look to me like this guy is subject to military law like Manning is. That should be interesting.

2) Manning was a private in the army. It seems to me that the purpose of what they are doing to him is intended as a deterrent to his peers. I suspect there is a difference between the way Army privates might react to one of theirs being made an example and how Snowden's peers might react to whatever comes of this.

3) I have no idea if the NSA is a fun place to work, but I bet it's about to get a lot less fun, especially for anyone who's voiced support of the EFF.

4) Remember when Bruce Schneier said you should come forward if you know something? That.
A riot where you obey the authorities isn't much of a riot.
Taxation without representation.

Personally, I think that anyone against this should show a civil disobedience by refusing to pay taxes.
Testing it in the field without detection is quite easy to do in the Valley. It's not like being in SF or NYC, where you could always have someone peeking over your shoulder.
I looked up a few and it looks like they have no problem ignoring petitions that pass the response threshold :(
What China could hope to get in intelligence far outweighs PR. They laugh through PR controversies.

China has been engaged in massive cyber espionage themselves. Everyone knows it, but no one can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, so they keep denying it, and nothing of consequence happens.

They could whisk Snowden off to a secret interrogation site, and then blame the CIA and say the US government snatched him. Who is the media going to believe and who can prove otherwise?
I'd vote for a political party called The Culture, with policies to match, in an independent Scotland.
https://sslimgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png
>In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making,

Why does that follow? Can a government not have data about you and be transparent at the same time?
It depends on what you want to do. Vagrant's main use case is to automate setting up development environments, whereas I see Docker as more a way of distributing software and its dependencies to production systems.

A key distinction is that since Docker is built on Linux containers (lightweight Linux systems), it expects to share its host's kernel, and must thus be executed on a Linux system.
Pretty similar to a side project I built called BidKat (www.bidkat.com). I was focusing on making the selling process easier, didn't really think about this side of it. Very interesting.
Securely add an NSA backdoor to your Python w/ Flask apps
Tails: The Amnesic Ingcognito Live System
The data that the NSA is valuable precisely because it isn't anonymous. You can't make any worthwhile statistical discoveries with truly anonymous data because you don't really know what you are measuring. Any information that they don't strip before releasing it (which they won't) could be traced back to a certain person or organization that the metadata is about.

The Boston bombers weren't caught because of cellphone data. They were caught because they engaged the police in a gunfight; one of the brothers escaped, and he was caught because a man reported that his boat had a blood trail on it.
Ask HN: Disruptive crypto tools: Develop with true names, or "go Satoshi"?
In light of recent events, it is clear that the world needs better crypto tools that can be effectively used by laypeople to protect the privacy of their communications from powerful adversaries. I've been mulling over some ideas that I'd like to try, but I have one nagging concern to resolve before moving forward.

Is it a good idea to attach my real name to such new projects (or contributions to existing projects), or should I follow the lead of Satoshi Nakamoto and protect my activities with a pseudonym?

Psuedonymity pros:

- Even though I am not interested in doing anything illegal, even law-abiding individuals can be harassed and have their life complicated. (Nadim Kobeissi, developer of CryptoCat, is routinely delayed and questioned at airports.)

- Tools that are legal today could be illegal in the future.

- Pseudonymity could help shield from frivolous trademark and patent risks.

- You can always transition from pseudonymity to true names, but not the other way around.

True name pros:

- Less development friction.

- Accrual of non-pseudonymous reputation to further establish my real-world credentials as a serious software developer. This is a somewhat self-serving point, but we all have to put food on the table, and established reputation could provide more opportunities for pursuing my passion. (As well as perhaps allowing me to justify spending more time on such projects.)

Any thoughts?
Who's going to have root access to the machines but the sysadmins?
It's not enough that the law is clean, it must also appear clean.

I'm glad you specifically pointed that out.

Lessig makes a similar argument in Republic, Lost[1] where he urges people to change how they ask questions about seemingly illogical congressional decisions. Specifically

Not: Did the contributions and lobbying buy this apparently inconsistent result?

Instead: Do the contributions and lobbying make it harder to believe that this is a principled or consistent or sensible result?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic%2C_Lost
Should submit it with many public figures public email address: zuck@fb.com etc...
Most of Javascript feels like a kludge and my keyboard's 'T','H','I','S' keys need to be replaced every week or two. I always ponder, what if instead of JavaScript we had Java?
About a Month at Yahoo
I've been thinking about this lately. Keeping software leak-free is pretty easy compared to hardware. They have shields on the product that limit the viewing angle of the display. Also, only certain employees will have access to the final build, so if any of them leaked screenshots or what have you, it could be easily traced back to the leaker.
I don't think that scales very well...
A VC Firm Dedicated To Serving Intelligence Community
People will increasingly censor themselves. Not everyone, maybe, but those with non-mainstream views will increasingly learn they need to guard what they say on the internet.

And slowly, the greatest meeting place we've ever had will lose its potential.

... that's my biggest fear, anyway.

On a straw poll amongst my friends many of us are already self censoring to some degree. And we don't have extreme views, either, we're just cautious about how things that we thought might be anonymous no longer are, how jokes might be taken out of context in the future or links made between accounts that are meant to be separate.

We are essentially moving towards the Panopticon Internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

> the essential elements of Bentham's design were not only that the custodians should be able to view the prisoners at all times (including times when they were in their cells), but also that the prisoners should be unable to see the custodians, and so could never be sure whether they were under surveillance or not.
Senators are not one person, which I suppose is why you're getting confused as to the contradiction. There are those like Obama who were for things like this, and those like Rand Paul who are against.
One thing we know is that Apple's test units have narrow field of view overlays to make sneaking a peek harder.
I agree. Manning's case is totally different.
It is a remarkable shame the author did not read the ack manpage to discover the '-g' option.
The kid is going to well. He's smart and eloquent, to important traits in software development.

However dreaming in code. Thats nothing new, I challenge you to find a developer who hasn't woken up with solution to a problem.
Indeed, this was exactly why I tipped my hat to him when the leak was first made public here, as it was almost the polar opposite of what Manning did. Perhaps Snowden's "careful evaluation" will finally drive the point home here on HN (one can hope) that such leaks should themselves be carefully evaluated.

But I'm even more impressed he's unveiled himself, which takes incredible bravery even if you assume every protection of due process is available to you.
I plan to run a startup too, and frankly having to wonder whether some types of pro-civil-liberties speech are "safe" is a good indicator of how far off the track the USA has gone.
Alas, the NSA can afford a million dollar cluster to crack your password...
Booz Allen is majority owned by CIA Director Bush' Carlyle Group
> a woman who has been recently released from prison comes into a society that is not prepared structurally or emotionally to welcome her back

To me, this was the most important statement in the article (although I think this issue affects all prisoners more-or-less equally, regardless of gender).

I was reading a story recently about a Wells Fargo employee who was fired after seven years on the job, when his employer discovered that he once put a fake dime in a washing machine nearly fifty years ago.

If we as a society decide, through our laws and legal system, that someone is not sufficiently dangerous that they need to stay in jail (or be executed), we should make every effort to be sure that person becomes a productive, functioning member of society again. That outcome is in the best interests of everyone (well, maybe not private prison operators, but that issue's another discussion entirely).

But if people are refused jobs, education, passports, government assistance, etc. due to a criminal record, how are they supposed to recover their lives? How are they supposed to feed themselves or their families?

We need to be more forgiving of people's past. I think this will be inevitable as people become more searchable due to the Internet and social media -- not everyone has a criminal record, but everyone makes mistakes, and as a greater fraction of the population has a greater fraction of their past in public view, more and more of those mistakes will become visible, until it won't be possible to find anyone who's "perfect."
Right... Gandhi's approach is 'guaranteed' to work in limited circumstances. It does not work if your numbers are too few, if the opposition has a greater capacity for violence than you anticipate (this isn't about the world being violent, only the subset that oppose you need to be sufficiently violent. Relying on somebody else using violence against your murderers in the outraged aftermath of your slaughter is just shifting the responsibility to those other people.)

Gandhi's methods have been tested outside of India, perhaps most famously during the civil rights era in the US (if we write off the influence of those who were not wed to nonviolence and noncompliance). In that case they had the benefit of an interested party that consisted of a double-digit percentage of the population (and a far greater percentage in areas with particularly egregious issues.)

The problem with advocating noncompliance and nonviolence is that if you miscalculate the breadth of your support or your oppositions capacity for violence, then not only will you have accomplished nothing but you will have actually damaged your cause by removing yourself from it.
A warrant that says "allow us to get all the data on everyone in the country, with no specific targets".

That's not much of a warrant that respects the 4th amendment.
Useful: http://www.cracked.com/article_20118_5-things-nobody-tells-y...
Crashes safari on my iPhone 4
Indeed, but he later gained that diploma via extra credits from community college - which he latter dropped out of. Which is why I stated him being a college drop out rather than a high school drop out.

Or does your education system not work this way? ie once you've dropped out of high school, you're permanently branded a "drop out" even if you later complete your high school diploma?

My country's high schools operate very differently, so the confusion here might be cultural. But in higher education you can leave college / university and later return to complete the course and not be considered a "drop out"
"No, Apple did not invent the touchscreen. But the iPhone... It was the first touchscreen device that mattered."

There you go.
The way apps can interoperate in Android is definitely an advantage over iOS for developers, but it's a security/sandbox issue not a lack of capability in the OS. iOS hugely trails Android in malware... Coincidence?

App Store allows programming languages and even VMs. It doesn't allow running externally sourced code.
Very brave and honest act. What's sad about is that he's probably right in his concerns. Most will just ignore this issue and move along as if nothing wrong is going on. After all if people got so insensitive with giving up their privacy on Facebook and etc., why would they worry about global surveillance?

Anyway, let's hope what Edward Snowden did can still shake some people up and make them realize the extent of this problem.
NSA Whistleblower Identity Revealed
> Not really. 90% of Mac users don't care or know what Unix is.

This is exactly why it is brilliant. The average user is NOT a unix user, but the average developer is. The reason OS X is doing so well the same reason Facebook Home bombed. Developers are actually using the systems they are writing code for.
Or use Bitcoin exclusively instead of the USD.
> Nothing abnormally secret again.

What do you mean by this? You listed the things that we do know, then said nothing about those things are abnormally secret.
300k? Is the clearance that hard to get? Or is it just a sign of how flush the contractors are?
+1 for newer opengl. 3.2 is from 2009 :(
You must be thinking of a different "tea party faction" than the one I know. Because the one I know has been doing its damnedest to to elect "social conservatives" who support "traditional family values".

But yeah, they're pretty libertarian with respect to the liberties they like. Everything else can go.
The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight it (March 2013)
Yeah I know ... for some reason I thought the NSA machines would somehow be ... more special than that, somehow.
300,000 manuscripts were saved from rebels in Timbuktu, now in danger of rot
Based on Cook's statements during the last earnings report, we're not going to see a new category of hardware before Q4, but opening AppleTV for third party development, announcing broader content for AppleTV, and announcing a beefier AppleTV would be huge — I think the living room is Apple's to lose.

Imagine an AppleTV with sufficient grunt for games that uses iOS devices as remotes.
A brave soul who deserves support.
I'm not sure this is "How well do you know HTML" so much as "how well do you know browser quirks and edge cases involving CSS, DOM, and HTML."

I did horribly. I actually did better just guessing at random in some sections. On the other hand, I can't ever think of a time in 19 years of coding HTML where I ever structured anything like the code examples in the quiz.
Some stuff I'd like to see introduced with iOS 7 (or 8)
I haven't really thought through what I would do with this if it actually took off. That would be a good idea, though.
The 'civil' in 'civil disobedience' refers to disobeying the civil government, not disobeying politely.
There are no implications for an average netizen, since an average netizen doesn't use strong end-to-end crypto nor does he/she avoid cloud-like-storage/services (it doesn't matter which).

Average individuals aren't opposing her/his government or committing a felony.

They simply can't anymore because they would provide their own evidence/leverage against them or simply because there is nothing left to hide anymore.
If you want results, riot in the streets. Civil disobeience. Historical actions and movements that achieve some measure of peace.

Do you have any backups for that? I mean, any historical proof that rioting will make change?

You know, Tunisia went on a relatively peaceful revolution and now we have less freedom and more problems/unemployment. It's even worse for countries where the revolution is violent.

Having lived that experience, I'll be against rioting/civil disobedience any time and for any cause.

Want to make change? Educate people. nothing else.
This isn't a strong argument on its own... liver and kidneys "sift through garbage" constantly but how many people are allergic to chicken or cow liver or kidney?
Go pseudonym, for the reasons you listed. The U.S. government has a habit of harassing people doing legal things that they don't like, especially regarding cryptography and the like.
The FBI has been referring to left-wing activists as 'domestic terrorists' for a while now, specifically the animal rights / global justice / anti-nuke / anti-capitalist / green flavors.
>a Scottish bank holiday

I see what you did there.
A million dollar cluster won't make a dent in cracking an AES key of a proper size. Not unless the NSA have managed to solve some pretty baffling math problems and keep it secret.
I did for tickets: BoxRowSeat.com

Sells a few thousand $$ of tickets per month. People seem to like it. Especially hockey fans.
I find this article particularly disappointing (though sadly not at all surprising) given the recent ad campaign Microsoft have launched in the UK, which features the tag line: Your Privacy is Our Priority

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bt51M...
Java would be even worse. Javascript is full of warts but at least you have lexically scoped functions and anonymous object literals instead of tons of named classes for everything.
"A warrant that says 'allow us to get all the data on everyone in the country, with no specific targets'."

So far, no evidence has been produced to support your assertion. In fact, all evidence in the leaked documents, official statements, etc. suggest the exact opposite: warrants are served that allow investigators to make specific searches, with oversight processes to try to reduce the number of US citizens' data included in the search.

In other words: prove your claim. Cite something other than a Reddit or HN comment from a tinfoil hat-fitting specialist.
The supposed obligation of a prosecutor is to seek justice, not to put people in jail. When the incentives favor injustice, they should be adjusted; public campaigns personally shaming overzealous prosecutors are one possible disincentive that could be added.
Why on earth would one keep a pig to eat refuse when you aren't going to eat the pig? You can't milk 'em, they don't lay eggs, and they generate a lot of additional waste.
A trial would be FAR better for everyone, at least if it happened openly (which it wouldn't)

Imagine the US Government having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this disclosure caused "exceptionally grave damage to US national security."
Thank you for mentioning the movie. I'm a big Feynman fan.
If you like neat pictures of random bits take a look at page 6 of Playing Hide and Seek with Stored Keys by Shamir et al[1]

In this paper we consider the problem of efficiently locating
cryptographic keys hidden in gigabytes of data, such as the
complete file system of a typical PC. We describe efficient
algebraic attacks which can locate secret RSA keys in long
bit strings, and more general statistical attacks which
can find arbitrary cryptographic keys embedded in large
programs. These techniques can be used to apply lunchtime
attacks on signature keys used by financial institutes, or
to defeat authenticode type mechanisms in software packages.

Keywords: Cryptanalysis, lunchtime attacks, RSA, authenticode, key hiding.

[1 http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~astubble/600.412/s-c-papers/keys2.pdf
You do realize that it is not true, right? That British had plenty of appetite for violence. Where do people get this idea that British were compassionate to Indian cause?

Just look for the hero Churchill's view of Indians on the web.
Selective bias. People got what they paid for. They paid little for the cheap stuff and complained about the poor quality.
Revolution in France in 1789. We don't learn history in school for nothing I hope.
Out of genuine curiosity, what touchscreen device would you say then was actually the first one that mattered?

I assume by "mattered" Gruber meant mass market popularity, which IMO was mostly because Apple did get many things right in their touchscreen. (I owned a bunch of touchscreen devices before my first iPhone and they all sucked from a user experience perspective - missed taps, sluggish response, lack of multitouch, requirement for a special stylus etc).
Sounds like you've got a great idea for an app. There's got to be enough people driving in the L.A. area to be make it worth it, right?
The appropriate ring tone for your cell phone by They Might Be Giants
Haskell and VMs are not against the App Store rules at all, you just cannot JIT anything. The ban against non-C languages was only in place long enough to scare Adobe away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unre...
Yeah. That's one of the most absurd things about America: we force our public officials to lie, and then complain about it when they do.