skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't get what it is he's not getting. Could you explain?
I don't know, it's so completely complicated. I would think we'd have to move to a parliamentary system to really break the duopoly. The media demonizes and marginalizes any other political parties in America, and Americans want to be "winners" so some even vote for a party based only on the perception that they will be the triumphant side.

The problem is that it seems like for most people, choosing between a few options is preferable than to have to carefully examine and choose from a wider array.
I think that any chunk of running data has some probability of being intercepted, if this is the question.
In addition to feudalism, significant parts of the world were also de-facto ruled by European trading companies, who were stronger than the local governments, and not meaningfully restrained by their home governments. Stuff like the Dutch East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company.
Formally, ordinals start at zero too :-) [0]. We owe their latest definition to Von Neumann, but AFAIK, the former definitions were similar.

Regarding 5-ht, I quoted from memory, which was apparently fuzzy... But is is indeed fascinating.

--

[0] This is meta-meta-contrarianism.

- The layman counts from 1

- The uptight programmer counts from zero, because Dijkstra said so (or so he thinks).

- The meta-contrarian (I used to be one) says fuck it, ordinals start at one.

- The meta-meta-contrarian reads Wikipedia[1], realizes he was formally wrong, and goes one step further in pedanticity, back to zero [0].

That being said, my brain prefers 1-indexing programming languages like Lua, Julia, R and Matlab...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number

[0] Help! I'm stuck in a Boolean algebra[1][0]!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de...

[0] ... where xor is an addition that wraps around ...
I think I know who removed the Scroll Lock from our keyboards. Meet me by the service entrance to the 69th Regiment Armory, no questions asked. We'll trebuchet that little devil to Siam.
StubHub Hacked, User Data Lost
Just recieved this email. Might want to change passwords if you have an account. Could just be me, but I'll bet this is more widespread (my password was 26 characters long and not the same for any other site).

Dear Richard,
Your StubHub account appears to have been compromised, and someone used it to list tickets that you did not authorize. These sales have been cancelled. The account was not charged. You will not be held responsible for any unauthorized use made with this account. You do not need to worry about your credit card that is stored on file; it is not possible to view the full credit card number, even in your own account.
If you use this email and password combination for any other sites, we recommend that you change those passwords as well. It is not likely that those accounts are in danger in any way, but we feel prudence is the best course of action in this matter.
As a precaution your password has been reset. Please use the ?Forgot Password? link on the log-in page. This will send an email with instructions and a link on how to update your password on the account. Should you have further questions please feel free to contact Customer Service or email the Trust and Safety department directly at TrustandSafety@StubHub.com.
Also, if you received any suspicious looking emails that you believe may have triggered your account to be compromised, please forward them to safety@stubhub.com. We also advise to run a full virus scan on your computer to ensure there is no mal-ware installed, as this is one of the more common ways this type of information is compromised.
Sincerely,
StubHub Trust & Safety
What difference to the NSA intercept program does it make if the data comes from Google Apps or your own open-source platform?

Encryption
We already know the majority of his claims are not true, or are grossly misrepresented. The latest bit of noise is a congressman with no background on intelligence who misunderstood a briefing he received and just made an ass of himself in public. Just like all the other articles on this, we'll get corrections and clarifications over the next several days that basically amount to a retraction, but I expect that's not what you'll remember.
It doesn't matter. Even if you take a cynical attitude about petitions (as I usually do), this one in particular has value as a news item as does the fact that it will receive its 100k signatures rather quickly.
If for no other reason, it would reduce available windows, and offices with windows are high-rent items.

That said I have seen a few buildings with exterior "glass elevators" but it seems to be mostly a novelty.
Thanks for that correction. I updated the post.
I've been running my own web services for the last three years.

For email I use exim/dovecot/roundcube and am also experimentally using Bitmessage

For social networking I use Friendica, and eventually I'll be on the Red Matrix.

For dropbox type functionality I either just use plain old ssh or Owncloud. Owncloud also includes a lot of other stuff such as photos and calendar.

For blogging I use Flatpress. It just works.

From a security point of view conventional email remains a problem. It's not yet possible to function in the modern world without email, and trying to persuade even quite technical people to use PGP/GPG routinely has been very unsuccessful, since it's just too inconvenient for most people.

I've never used Google apps to any extent since I don't have much need to collaboratively edit documents. But if I did then there probably are open source systems out there which would do the job. Certainly if I was running a business then I wouldn't even contemplate using Google apps, especially after the recent NSA scandal.

I expect that readers here are more than capable of doing all the above, but sadly the average internet user is still going to remain stuck in the surveillance state with few other options to turn to.
Modify: things like the just-launched web editor will need to modify whatever data you originally uploaded. Distribute: git clone etc. Execute: scripts and so on, or even interpreting markup could be considered "using" a file in some contexts.
If you're e-mailing people on the public internet, you're leaking your contacts and patterns of correspondence anyway, even if you're using end-to-end encryption. Even if you're outside the US, it's near impossible to ensure your traffic won't cross through US controlled infrastructure at some point.

That said, Zimbra does all of what you're after, it's "freemium" open source (meaning that it's a commercial product with a free community edition) and it was fairly easy to deal with last time I set it up 4-5 years ago, presumably it's better now.
A lot of people in the gov't were happy to go along with that nuttiness.
> Why do they need to modify the data?

Maybe they want to store it in a compressed form

> distribute it

Making the code available for you or your collaborators is distributing it. How else would they do this?

Why not just email them with your concerns, if you actually really have some, and aren't just playing to the peanut gallery for karma.
Bill Maher has a vested interest in seeing Obama not be made a fool.
I don't know if it is particularly elegant, but I have a soft spot for Bresenham's line algorithm - it's not so much about lines as it is an algorithm to repeatedly add fractions to an accumulator using only addition and subtraction and without rounding errors (altough intermediate results are rounded to their nearest integer value).
It's possible for a company like Google or Yahoo to offer services without 1) requiring that we identify ourselves; 2) profiling us; 3) keeping detailed logs and data in a way that it can be mined and forklifted.

They just all choose not to.
Yeah, I'm also surprised to see people so upset about the idea of the feature mostly for the argument that it doesn't presently exist. As for the compile-time-extension, my main concern with that as a free software project is that we try to play nice with distro packaging and requiring users to compile their own sqlite would be setting them up for a bit of pain. But I suspect it doesn't matter: if the feature was coded with the aim of pushing it upstream, I'm suspecting there's a good chance upstream would accept it if of good quality.

Then again, I'm not upstream. :)
BSDCan 2013 FreeBSD Presentation Videos
w00
At Assembla, a project management tool that incorporates a repository service like github or bitbucket, we have a similar TOS as github:

"1. Assembla claims no copyright or other ownership rights in the Content you upload to the Service.
2. By uploading or otherwise providing Content to Assembla.com, You grant to Assembla a non-exclusive, royalty-free, paid-up right and license to use, reproduce, display and distribute such Content on Assembla.com in connection Assembla's provision of the Services to such persons as you may authorize.
3. You hereby represent and warrant that you have all intellectual property and other rights necessary concerning any Content posted by You on Assembla.com." https://www.assembla.com/terms_of_service

We do not want your data for our personal or corporate uses, we only want to display/reproduce/use your data with your expressed permission, i.e. you make your data public - the same as github.

The theory we have at Assembla is that the data is yours, always yours. We will never keep your data from you and we will never claim ownership over it.

We explicitly state that we do not own your IP because in today's world so many services are taking ownership over what you create. We feel it important to tell you right out that we do not claim ownership because if we do not, you will not know our stance.

Our stance is that we want you to feel comfortable using our service for both private and public projects for your data. We want you to be successful with a nice tool, we do not want to own your data.
I expect I've been following it much more closely than you, and for much longer, because I have professional experience with much of what's being covered. That's why I'm distinguishing between the headlines and the actual underlying stories, and taking note of the major corrections that follow every unbelievable headline.

Just for some context, here's some of comments on the subject on HN six months ago:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4979800

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4979641
COINTELPRO / MK ULTRA despite not being directly related is a good example of the fact that both the FBI and the CIA have failed to restrain themselves properly.
my 15-22 year-old selves would never forgive me for the types of music I occasionally enjoy to listen to, now.
In the US, I don't think anyone ever felt that BigCo was ever 'like you and me'. That's why the term "Big XXX" (for XXX = tobacco, pharma, and recently tech) is generally used to drum up fear and loathing about an industry.

Unlike Europe, the US also has a significant subpopulation that views the government suspiciously. This is not an opposing narrative - this group also tends to be suspicious of corporations, particularly the large corporations that collude with the government.
People seem very concerned about backdoors in Huawei equipment. Isn't it just as likely that there are backdoors in US manufactured equipment. If there is then there are two privacy solutions: end to end strong encryption, or become a hermit.
I don't think the goal is optimal performance. It think it's popularity and ease of use, and c# is popular, reasonably easy to use, and low level enough to make it possible to translate it easily to many languages.
If it makes you feel better, you're not the only one.
> You still need to actually home your servers somewhere, which means a colo or VPS that is subject to the exact same laws.

Nobody is going to dispute that a colo box is still vulnerable to targeted surveillance. But targeted surveillance is not really the issue of the day.

From the NSA's perspective, the expected value of obtaining your data is very small, but they'll bother doing it anyway when the cost is even smaller. Big centralized providers are very cost-effective targets. A sea of tiny servers operated by hundreds of different data centers, hosting heterogeneous applications, monitored by hundreds of different individuals and organizations are really not cost effective to surveil in bulk.

(I agree with the rest of your post -- doing it yourself is a major pain, and no side-project is going to do a great job.)
Does it do garbage collecting in all the target languages? The question is mainly about C, cause I can imagine it can rely on native garbage collector when targeting Java, Perl, etc.
Colored coins paint sophisticated future for Bitcoin
Feudal lords subjugated the many through threats of violence, not "economic bonds". "Economic bonds" is just another term for "made the best offer" - that's very far from what feudal lords did.
Google said 7 days for active exploits; critical vulnerabilities that are not being actively exploited are given 60 days.

I agree that the responses from the company in the linked thread are awful.
For me, it is a matter of moving in the right direction. I can't run on all free software. For example, I had to dig my old Windows laptop out of my junk closet today to do a homework assignment (without warning, the last assignment for the Cousera Data Science class requires Windows :-( )

Also, I prefer Android (not free software, but at least more open) but the are a few apps on my iPad I really like so I am not giving away my iPad anytime soon.
On the same note, in the last century brick buildings were limited in height by the thickness of the walls. If you went much beyond 20 stories, the ground floor walls filled the entire floor, making a sort of pedestal. So further height got zero further floor space.
Steel buildings got around this. Hanging each floor from a steel skeleton means the walls don't get thicker at all.

As you calculate, elevators are the new brick. The number needed to serve higher floors increase to the point the ground floor is nothing but elevators. So further height is pointless.

Its exacerbated by the need to fill/empty the building in bursts - people want to work regular hours, and everybody works the same hours. So you need enough elevators to essentially evacuate the building in under an hour.

Ways to work around this? Well, a pyramid structure would help I imagine. Elevators to server higher levels could be distributed evenly about the ground level, more in the center and fewer around the lower edges. That also increases windows-per-volume.

And of course if people lived and worked in the building and rarely left it, then the need to 'evacuate' from the ground floor goes away.

I imagine an arcology where people live, work and entertain in alternating levels. Fire and services can be located internally in strategic volumes. Air can be drafted up through the building using thermal gradients instead of fans.

Need to write a storey involving this kind of structure sometime I guess.
Sigh. I'm glad I didn't give them any billing information (monthly invoice paid each time via Paypal). It's not clear to me how/why root passwords are compromised by this exploit; anyone care to elaborate?
> There is no such thing as security without a tradeoff

The original implementation of Skype was convenient and secure.
>The real cherry on top is that all the three different colo/VPS providers I've used were hacked at one point or another, causing disclosure of my personal data and significant outages of my ability to communicate.

Google have been hacked too, which I'm sure you aware of since you work for Google on security.
The first thing to think about is most "great" programmers wouldn't call themselves so, they always feel like they can get better.

I feel that I'm good but nowhere near great, I have a comfortable job in a Sydney based startup and the times where I make the biggest leaps in skill is while I'm chatting to more senior devs in our office. They always have something to talk about and give me something to strive towards.

Hope that helps, if even in the slightest.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned that using software full disk encryption on an SSD is a really bad idea. It increases wear dramatically, completely invalidates TRIM and works against the controller every step of the way. LVM has an option that supposedly passes TRIM through but in my case I'm pretty sure it didn't do anything.
Spying on the home front. (2007)
The "yottabyte" estimate is absurd, but individual scientific computing centers have about half an exabyte of storage, so the NSA wouldn't have the slightest trouble storing a few exabytes (some GBs per person per year).

In contrast, total IP traffic is in the tens of exabytes per month [1], but much of it is re-transmission of content such as movies, that the NSA is not interested in storing. I wonder what sort of steganography detection they have in place.

[1] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/...
Less tracked, sure: I don't think they have the ability to see inside your mail just yet.
Yes, let's compare RSS and Javascript to international diplomacy and totalitarian government surveillance, they have a lot in common. Look at all those people killed by ambiguous standard specifications! People are starving! GIVE ME YOUR F*ING MONEY!

... why do people keep reading Dave Winer, again? Is it something about age, some sort of rite of passage when you're 21 and naive? "Oh yeah, back then I survived on ramen and read Dave Winer. I know, crazy, right?"
>Any system like this will be abused.

Exactly, it happens every time.
Stupidity, or appalling ignorance on the part of the SolusVM developers.
See also discussion on Reddit [1] and a particularly interesting comment [2].

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gfve8/how_not_...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gfve8/how_not_...
Because freedom has a cost, and not all software is equally important.
Great then ...though even C#-- (ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C--) would be better than using a non-English character/accent
Also a clear case of how not to write software, I mean the architecture is just designed for insecurity. Always been very suspicious of the whole class of "control panel" software from a security angle.
If only. No, we are all spied on.

Americans get, please don't laugh, protection from their own government. The rest of us are at the mercy of their whims.

The trouble is, in the old days they, well, we all spied on people we had good reason to spy on. "Suspects", if you will. Now they spy on every one they can, in the hope of finding suspects.... to spy more on.

If anything, these revelation prove that our default status to the authorities is "suspect". And we remain a suspect until we die.

And don't go away with the notion that this is all evil America. They just have the resources to do what every other government wants to do, which is why most of them, that can, are doing deals with the US.

Here in the UK, our government (right), like our last government(left), are lapping it up and only to willing to get in to bed with this. They use the same scare tactics, and the evil language of the con man. Nothing to hide? And so on. Before we have a go at the Americans, we need to make it perfectly clear that this is unacceptable in our country, stop it here, and end the endorsement and participation in what the US government is up to. Only then do we have any right to point fingers at the US. Wont happen. Most people simply dont care. Even the satire lot seem happy with it. Yeah, even the comedians are on board.

Honestly, I no longer want part of this world society we are sleep walking in to. Its a disgusting disgrace.
7 Ways to Stop Treating Your Business Like a Hobby
The Curse Of The Network Effect
[Developer Story] Numberama 2
A few words about the main idea of the game: Numberama is a game from our childhood.
Show HN: HTML templates for iOS 7 apps
This is part of a series. I haven't read Solve It but there is another one that I worked through several years ago before returning to school, How to Prove It, that really cleared up how to do proofs for me. It is all based around set theory and some of the later proofs are quite deep:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521675995/
One solution is to host your own NAS.
Synology e.g. provide for their NAS multiple services that might replace some Google Apps: Mail server (Gmail), CalDAV support (Google Calendar), Cloud Station (Google Drive/Dropbox), Photo Station (Picasa), Audio Station (Google Play),… all these with VPN connections.
And you can easily install some productivity tools like CRM, wiki, Wordpress, Zafara…
I definitely know, because I was drafted onto the team that handled the incident. I also know that the incident didn't result in the compromise of user data or the degradation of services. Moreover, it was a catalyst for a massive focus on security at Google that has made our services some of the most secure I've seen in 15 years working in the security and intelligence fields.
The "point" of FSM. Watch RMS's talks. Sure they're a bit ranty, but if you're going to claim to "use as much free software" as possible then actually do it.

That means gNewSense (or whatever else is FSF approved) and no proprietary drivers.

If you're going to umm and ahh about this then don't be misleading, just say you're moving to open source, not free software.
...unless you have no idea what "acute" means or you've never seen it in your life, because you haven't been exposed to French or English musical notation before (which applies for, I'd bet, over 80% of programmers worldwide :) )
What about, it's observed when its wave function collapses :-P
In my experience, the vast majority of developers completely ignore/misunderstand licensing most/all of the time.

The common excuse is that the intent by publishing source code online is that you clearly are allowing everybody to use it freely as they wish. I have no doubt the licenses on Bitbucket are not followed correctly more often than not.

Atlassian, if you've followed them, have always been a very transparent, developer-centric company, the behaviour of neither the founders, nor the company has ever suggested they are in the slightest bit interested in being arseholes in the manner being suggested here.

Yet somehow there's a switch from 'intent' to being licensing experts when it suits.
"Moving towards" implies transit. If you're in transit, you're not yet at your destination.
عيد الأب
عيد الأب - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=12374
عيد الأم - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=12374
عيد الأب - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=12374
عيد الحب - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=12374
I considered switching to Fast Mail a while ago, but never got around to it. It's owned by Opera Software, and hosted in Australia.

I'd prefer if it was hosted in Norway (Opera is a Norwegian software company), but Australia feels like a better choice than the US (too me anyway, perhaps others can chime in).

https://www.fastmail.fm/
The other response to your question cites the case where the capability leaked. The other reason to think this capability is in phones is that the source code for firmware for mobile baseband processors is a closely guarded secret. Also, the audio paths for voice calls is controlled by the firmware in this processor. So if your phone is a bug, this is where that would be implemented.

If you search for words "mobile baseband fuzzing" you will find that many people have sought to satisfy their curiosity about this part of a phone.
You're right, I was misremembering.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-...

Thanks for correcting - it was much worse than I remembered.
Summer project: Build a radio telescope at home