skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whether or not you have the reflex to let out the air, the complications are pretty severe, so it's worth covering either way!
The Smart Citizen: Kit for environmental monitoring
"...a secure OS."

And that would be ???
Sounds like impassioned idealistic rhetoric.

And what should happen with the Chinese higher ups who authorized hacking teams to infiltrate the U.S. and other Western targets?

Further, who gets to decide what should happen and why, exactly, that's what should happen?

No country is going to deport the people running its defense programs to countries those defense programs are being run against, unless it's surrendering unconditionally and that's one of the demands it must yield to.
Some rules for some, other rules for others.
It was pretty bad, not gonna lie.
Ask HN: The NSA is not interested in my startup. Does this mean we're failing?
My company is about 3 years old and has around 2M monthly actives. We're going pretty fast and gaining brand recognition. The NSA hasn't shown any interest in our data. The site uses SSL extensively, so they shouldn't be able to snoop easily.

Does this mean we're not doing well?
I've progressed from Liberal to Liberaltarian.
It's interesting to me that Apple's complaint is that anyone could get their crappy music into iTunes for $40 and that's a problem, but that free is fine.
They goofed, see the comments on their paper (http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v98/i9/e093901).

namely

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=169089650815815794...

and

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=274756171832259655...
I emailed the author of the paper. Hope he gets back to us, this is cool.
It is debatable; the point is that this is not abhorrent to a clear majority... and if they ARE against it, it's not necessarily for principled reasons.

The main example is a Pew Research Poll showing that objection/support is partisan or age-based (though all sub-groups still support it):
http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph...

Alternatively, Rasmussen says a majority do not approve. However, keep in mind the house effect of Rasmussen polling more republicans and the partisan divide may be driving this.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gene...
PRISM is Hiring through Booz Allen in Hawaii
Consider that In-Q-Tel, the VC firm whose sole purpose is keeping US intelligence agencies ahead of the game, [1] is one of the primary investors [2] into D-Wave, the first company to create a commercially viable quantum computer. [3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

[2] http://www.dwavesys.com/en/pressreleases.html#investment_201...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems
Please describe how these operating systems could be compromised "at any time"?
> they count a username AND a password as "two factor authentication"

I was so flabbergasted by that I had to look it up and it seems like you're wrong. This page[0] describes a feature called Advanced Access that sends a code to your phone whenever you do certain actions on the website.

[0] https://www.wellsfargo.com/privacy_security/online/advanceda...
I'm more optimistic because the norm for Americans through out history was for independence from government intrusions. The last decade has been an anomaly because of 9/11, when everyone decided to that safety trumped those concerns. The pendulum could very easily swing back the other way.
Not really.

You can verify it once and generate a secure hash from it. Then the second time you could just check the hash.

It wouldn't be too difficult to write a browser extension that did it automatically, or a javascript bookmarklet for it.
> Snowden is not a justice, an elected representative, or someone in general who we want deciding what we should and shouldn't know

You're going to trust the people in power to make the judgement calls over their own power....? "Hey guys we can blackmail anyone. Let's make sure that the proper checks and balances are placed on that, I hate unlimited knowledge and power."
Java is old enough that the current best practices recommend using the language and libraries differently than originally intended.

For new developers that want to do more than trivial things in Java, reading "Effective Java" will help you avoid many of the pitfalls in the language.

As an example, the current best practice around exceptions is that checked exceptions were a mistake. Don't use them in new code. For code that must deal with checked exceptions, you can create your own general exception class derived from RuntimeException, then use a try/catch block to throw your own runtime exception that wraps the checked exception. (But do this smartly; for cases like IOException with web stuff, it is sometimes easier to add "throws IOException" to all your related methods than to exhaustively catch and rethrow.)

As a second example, do not use the JDBC library directly. It is very poorly designed and direct usage can very easily lead to resource leaks. Use something like Spring's JDBC templates or roll your own. (I generally find Spring to be a bloated mess, but the JDBC template stuff is very useful.)

But perhaps the best bet is to use a more modern JVM-based language (of which my favorite is Clojure), though use of these alternatives on Android may be problematic.
Tell HN: Twitter's API v1 has been deprecated. Update your clients
Hello everybody.

I'm posting this to let you know that Twitter has retired API v1 just 3 days ago. Clients that rely on this API should be updated.

I'm seeing A LOT of broken implementations everywhere.

This applies to every use of Twitter's API, from tweet bots to full-blown apps.

More info here: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/api-v1-is-retired

Have a nice day ;)
>I am not worried about the government spying on me. I am very worried about these for-profit businesses spying on me and outing my information on the internet. Why isn't arstechnica writing stories about that instead?

You have the right to a private conversation. You don't have the right to a secret existence. Directory information (like a phone number) is not that private because there's nothing anyone can really do with it besides call you. We don't really recognize a right not to be called. Your phone records, however, lead to information about your friends, lovers, and business dealings. Exposure of that information is a much bigger deal to most people than the mere fact that they exist.
Clickable: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/api-v1-is-retired
> the compiler kept complaining about unhandled exceptions (I know the URL is fine, it's a fixed string I can see, it's not going to throw MalformedURLException, I don't want to catch it, thank you. What? I can't compile without it?)

Checked exceptions bugged me as well when I was first introduced to Java. I honestly still don't like the fact that exception handling is enforced at the compiler level. It feels intrusive.

I did write a short blog post on the subject, which may be helpful. As a disclaimer, I'm not a full time Java dev.

http://tmblr.co/ZJpjTubrVmRw
Don't start a fringe group, do what the tea party did? Fight government spying, utilize the party that authored the Patriot Act? Not sure I follow your logic here.
Cool idea, it reminds of an IronKey but for Bitcoin; I'm frustrated that there isn't any solid or easily findable technical information about the device though!

When I click on "About Trezor" it takes me to...a brief overview? I would expect that link to be a much more thorough explanation of what Trezor is, how it works, and why I should buy it.

Why would Trezor be better than an IronKey? Is it a push button interface for sending bitcoins? Does it just store my wallet or is it running a bitcoin client? I read it works with most bitcoin clients, what does that mean? What are the buttons for?

If it's just storing my wallet what kind of encryption is the device using? Does the device have hardware-based tamper proofing (IronKeys will self-destruct after X number of failed passphrase entries, it will self-destruct if someone tries to physically tamper with it)?
Ask HN: Build you an app this weekend?
Greetings all! I've got some spare time over this weekend and I'm also trying to expand my portfolio of mobile apps, so I thought I'd see if there's not a way I can collide these two things into some kind of amusing MVP explosion*

If you fancy get a prototype/MVP iOS app put together over the weekend then give me a shout. I don't know what sort of price this is worth but let me know what you think is reasonable and if it's not for the purposes of evil, then we can get something put together!

I also do general web dev, so if you need a bit of a JSON API or whatever throwing together to show some stuff, I can do that too.

Email is in profile. Can show previous work. Offer not open to NSA.

* Your MVP will not explode.
I've been listening to the book Spycraft, and if there's one theme that keeps recurring, it's that things never end well for the agent informing against his country.

The handlers often turn the guy over once he's outlived his usefulness to his homeland, or eventually he gets gotten.

Snowden's play here seems to be that he assumes the U.S. is going to lock him up for life or worse, so he's throwing his lot in with China and showing up with, "Hey, here you go! Loads of free stuff!"

But he apparently doesn't know much about the Chinese, or the history of turncoats and how these things usually play out.

Nobody trusts a traitor, not even if he showed up with plentiful offerings. It's like having a gal cheat on her husband with you, then tell you she wants to divorce him and marry you. No chance of her doing the same thing to you now, right?
Last I checked Volvo is still building cars. The swedish Air Force most modern plane is JAS Gripen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen . The status on submarines is unknown to me though.
Yeah, it's not a big risk to production, but it just makes the development loop that much more frustrating. There's nothing more annoying than building, deploying, starting, before discovering that you mispelt a bean name...
uhm, no? But do you understand the thermodynamics of base pair mismatching in DNA/RNA duplexes and how to convert the kcal/mol into probabilities?
> Also Oracle is pretty strong in the corporate Java space and has some great products there.

And by great do you mean "fucking awful albeit reliable"? That's always how I saw Oracle products. A pain at every turn, but it works.

Last I heard, that's why Oracle developers earn more than most: No one wants to do it.
There's really an amazing lack of imagination here, both from a threat avoidance perspective and a potential awesomeness one.

The deployment model is this: one large webmail provider starts doing PGP by default via its webclient. Maybe it provides your with private keys, maybe it doesn't. Fact is that it doesn't much matter, because as soon as a large webmail provider starts doing PGP/PKI, the two biggest problems with adoption (namely, that there's no one to use it with, and it's kind of a pain to use anyhow) are basically solved. And as soon as this happens, there starts being a competitive market where providers can begin improving on each other's implementations. Any provider that doesn't give users their private keys won't have much of an ethical argument for doing so, and so it probably would, anyway. There will, as always happens, be a feature war, except with PGP involved some of that war will involve privacy/encryption/reliability concerns.

(PGP also makes spear phishing much harder).
I'll take the very unpopular opinion: I have a very strong feeling he is almost completely wrong in what he thinks he knows.

I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint and I think the entire reporting by The Guardian/Greenwald has been shit. Greenwald does not appear technically competent in the slightest and there's no mention in the reporting I've seen of anyone with any technical knowledge being involved and so we simply have no idea what is in the 'thousands' of documents that Snowden has taken. And neither does Greenwald.
Private Message. Secure communication, anyone, any device; NSA free.
Last weekend when the NSA news was a big deal, I was angry, I wanted my privacy back. I use all the standard stuff (like opt-out, Ghostery, etc). Using https for my emails with Google is great, unless they just send my plain text data to the NSA on request. So I looked around for a safe way to email. OMG was it hard. I had to install all kinds of stuff, find out how it works, and alot of them required the receiver of the message to also have said software. Yeah, if its that hard, no thanks. So I made this in one weekend. Alas I didn't have SSL (encryption) on my domain. And it took a week to change servers, get a dedicated IP and install the SSL. Anyway here it is. Create your message, send your friend the link to your message however you normally would, and they (only them) can see the message. No Google saving your data, and once your message has been viewed its deleted. Nothing for the NSA to even ask for. I realise the message creator is geared towards web developers, version two would ideally contain a more friendly text editor.
So true. It's frustrating to see people spend hundreds of hours to advance some "fringe" web technologies that don't really affect much in the end, while stuff that we use every day, everywhere continues to have the same (solvable) issues year after year.
My NSA Records - Submit a FOIA Request or Motion to Quash
I'd put good money that this was a black flag article pushed by the USA.

It seems out of character to go from "I'm not trying to get anyone hurt/in trouble, just showing the public what's wrong." to "Here's some info about China WHAT NOW USA!?"
You think cars have changed? Trains? Most things have not changed much.
PR would be great (I struggle to see FPTP as really democratic to be honest- it systematically supports entrenched interests), but if you aren't actively working on changing the system, then you have to work with the system.

The partial saving grace of the existing system is that even though niche parties will never get elected, their aims can still be achieved-- enough votes to a 3rd party can scare the main players into changing their policies. No one ever won an election for women's suffrage, but the policies still got adopted.
Can't contribute to open source? here is how you can.
If this becomes popular (easy-to-use bundled software is a must), knowledge about whenever one uses Tor or I2P would be as useful as knowledge that the person in question uses the Internet.
I think that's what's known as a representative democracy...
Nonetheless, it's significance increases in the light of the current NSA revelations.

After all, previously one could justify Microsoft's actions by claiming they were notifying the NSA of flaws in Windows so that the NSA could patch their systems ASAP. Now we would likely infer a more sinister justification.
SubToMe is now an AngularJS app and localized
I'm sorry, what are you basing this on?
Provably? In what sense?

Given how underreported rape is in all cases, i'm curious what conclusions you think can be proved.

Looking at a bunch of journal studies from the past 10 years:

Rape by males of females is underreported by 50-90%, depending on who you believe

Rape by males of males is underreported by 95-99%, depending on who you believe

Rape by females of females is underreported by 95-99% depending on who you believe

Rape by females of males is underreported by 95-99% depending on who you believe.

I'm only suggesting your statement that the odds are provably lower, is false, because i don't think you have enough reliable data to prove anything.

It may in fact, be that rape by females is lower, but i have a lot of trouble seeing that we have enough statistical data to prove it.
I can't imagine they will ever take stuff off the list.

The funnier thing to do would be for people who are likely on the list to begin using language the way the political class do.
So does "successfully completes maiden test flight" mean "the aircraft passed all of the tests we put it through" or "the aircraft didn't fall out of the sky"?
> in France, there is almost nothing in computer sciences

What about INRIA?

"Inria is a public research body dedicated to digital science and technology"
- http://www.inria.fr/en/‎
I certainly don't think every foot soldier should be deciding what needs to be secret or not.

The definition of power is making these decisions. Those in power legitimately deserve some latitude to excercise that power. "Those in power" is now Snowden because he took that power illegitimately. There is a time and a place for that, and some of these leaks may be that. Some of this is definitely borderline.
IOS 7 icons with pure CSS
What happens when it breaks, gets lost, etc?

A paper wallet (copied to several secure locations) seems safer, if less convenient: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet

EDIT: Thanks to rplnt[1] for the Bitcointalk forum post link[2]. According to one of the apparent Trezor creators, "No need for periodic backups, writing down the seed to paper during the device initialization will be enough forever"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5880849

[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122438.0
Wonderful.

That helps me sell Debian + PostgreSQL over Windows + SQL Server.
While I am completely against PRISM and what has occurred, I might be more against the necro-stories that are surfacing trying to paint the complicit companies in a more harsh light.

Stop muddying the waters and let's focus on fixing today.
First time in a long while that I wholeheartedly support the Republicans.
The Skills It Takes To Be A Great Active Investor
A great example for me was Boxcryptor, a solution to encrypt files in your Dropbox with encFS.

It used to be software. You buy it for $50 or whatever and use it. Now they are transitioning to a service model where you pay $40/year/user forever.

Their reasoning was transparent: they aren't selling enough perpetual licenses. I get that, but it's annoying to me
I am not sure how much Fick's law has any influence.
Most "mixing" inside and outside the bubble will be done by convection rather than by diffusion. Diffusion should have little to no influence on the whole problem. Assuming that you want to take into account mass transport through the phases (Air<->Water), you would have to apply Henry's Law.
There is such a thing as a peaceful revolution. Although I feel such a revolution in the US is less likely than in almost everywhere else.
Pirate Party's Rick Falkvinge: online activism is 'not enough'
How would it be easily detectable?
You missed the biggest reason why it probably isn't: Tor is Open Source. The chance of any deliberate Trojan Horse being added in such a high profile project is virtually nil.
Audacity of this action made me laugh.
We switched our Rails Infra from Heroku to EC2
The H-1B: An iOS Developer's Journey from Honduras to Silicon Valley
Please show me where the hints about Tor being a trojan horse. That is not a challenge, I am really interested. If these allegations are true they represent a serious reputation risk to the EFF.
http://happybearsoftware.com/you-are-dangerously-bad-at-cryp...
What? Europe is literally world's first industrial power. Take any phone, laptop, car, etc. and trace back where the machines that made the machines that made the machines .... that made the parts of the device come from and most of the time you will end in UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland ...
The Sickening Snowden Backlash
Here's a short (30min) talk from Bitcoin 2013 conference http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t18a-wXBnw

And a bitcointalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122438.0

Hopefully they'll add something to the product site itself.
I want to be a developer
It's pretty clear this was his plan from the get-go.

Now we know why the U.S. was looking for him so hard. Revealing that the country is tracking its citizens is one thing. Revealing covert cyber espionage secrets to a country the U.S. has a lot of tension with is something else.

It appears the delay in releasing this information was to let him build up a good guy and hero image in the Western press first. "Hero selflessly outs nefarious government plot for the common good!"

Then he goes and tells China about the U.S. infiltrating its systems, so that China will protect him.

So much for the whole hero thing.

The NSA didn't even have to roll out a tar-and-feather campaign. Snowden took care of it all by himself.
I disagree. Having one of the most powerful legislative bodies elected by the state governments further concentrates power in the hands of a few.

The 17th amendment made this country more democratic, not less, and it hasn't hade too many ill effects on the Senate itself.
> as far as I know this isn't National Security News, it's Hacker News

For many of us, data information and national security stories inspired our early devops years. For example, The Cuckoo's Egg:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg

This NSA story and all the discussions around its implications go to the heart of thinking around access to the world's information and how all humans relate to it, our work, and each other as global citizens.

I can think of nothing of more compelling interest than who has custody of our future, whether as info entrepreneurs, devops hackers, or "end users" growing up in this apprehensive new world.
> I'm more optimistic because the norm for Americans through out history was for independence from government intrusions. The last decade has been an anomaly because of 9/11

Sure, just like the decade before that was an "anomaly" because of the threat of terrorism that became a concern with the first Gulf War made safety trump those concerns, and the 5 decades prior to that were an "anomaly" because of the threats associated, first, the second World War, and immediately following that Second Red Scare the Cold War, made safety trump those concerns.

And just a couple decades before that there was the "anomaly" produced by the First Red Scare. (The increasing intrusion of which, based on safety concerns, wasn't actually reversed when the immediate impetus faded, just as the vast majority of the increasing intrusion motivated by the Cold War, the First Gulf War, or 9/11 wasn't -- as well as some of that motivated by the Second World War, though some of the biggest intrusions motivated by the Second World War were, and you can probably view the continuation of the rest as a 'silent reenactment' motivated by the Cold War.)

Or, maybe the intrusion-ratcheting-upward thing isn't a temporary anomaly, but the norm.
I tend to (mostly) agree with this. I think that actually being as outspoken and public as possible are a better shield against being bothered by the NSA and their kind, than trying to hide in the shadows. After all, the shadowy fringe is where agencies like the NSA live, it's what they specialize in, and what they know. Why give them "home field advantage" by trying to play their game? F%!# that, make them play your game instead. Be public, be loud, be visible and be transparent. They hate that shit.
I tried duckduckgo and it did not work as well as google, yet.

I especially dislike its name, it's odd and too long to type, and again, duck 'walks' slowly, not a good sign.

can this be renamed to something better, and shorter? sometimes name does matter.
Kind of, but not really. In a representative democracy, you are voting a professional politician into office, who's sole existence is to stay in office. They are beholden to money, and outside interests. With a liquid democracy, it is essentially a direct democracy, without all the headaches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy