skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is attributed to a 1985 writing by the (obscure) author named in the post here in many other online copy-and-paste postings of this same story. By now, there should be some follow-up on this, including identifying who "Rick Briggs" really is (just an imaginary character in an urban legend, or a real person from decades ago?) and what further artificial intelligence research has found out about various human languages.

By coincidence, I was just looking up reviews of the excellent book Mathematics in India by Kim Plofker,

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691120676

which I read a few years ago, just before I saw this post. There has been a lot of new scholarship about ancient India both in India and around the world since this submitted article was supposedly originally written, and here on Hacker NEWS we should be looking at more up-to-date information, I think.
If you think AI stalled out in the 80s, you deserve a LOL right back. We didn't even have Bayesian nets in the eighties. AI has made huge progress since the eighties, look at Geoff Hinton's work, look at all Sebastian Thrun has done with automated cars - something many experts thought would take 50 years in the late nineties. AI is just now blossoming. It's a very exciting field at the moment.
By the looks of the icons: I like candy.
> The negative income tax reduces the incentive to move from one segment of the labor force to another

The negative income tax also removes the friction that prevents people from being able to move from one segment of the labor force to another, which is the need to continue working where you have the skills in order to survive, which reduces the opportunity to invest time and energy in learning new skills.

Which of these forces would be most dominant depends on details of implementation, but what is clear is that the effect isn't one sided.
Can some kind graphic designer or art historian pinpoint what the art style (including the colour scheme) of the new app icons is based on? (Most obviously Photos, Camera, Clock, Game Center and Newsstand, but you can add Music and iTunes and more subtly Maps too.) I know that it's a (probably) mid-late '60s colour-printing, cartoon-art or children's-book style (based on cut-outs or stencils?) but I can't identify it any more precisely than that.

(I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone say anything about this yet. I thought designers were attuned to and familiar with things like this? It's weird to see professionals not considering any influences on the iPhone's new style apart from other smartphone OSes and skins from the past 5 years.)

Regarding the OP, Camera is fairly consistent with the other icons as it's based on the same flavour of retro. The same is true of Game Center. You can see how the colours imitate the dodgy colour values from colour printing about the '60s.
> If we’ve learned anything in the past few days it’s that the NSA does precious little of its own spying, relying instead on companies like Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Do we actually know, or is the writer just assuming that because they use some outside contractors, outside contractors do most of the work?
What is the difference if you find a way to switch on the neurons that make you believe your neurochemistry has changed?
The target key was published on 5/20.

# gpg --list-packets /tmp/snowden.asc
:pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid 5B50940B79DEBE35
data: [4096 bits]
:encrypted data packet:
length: unknown
mdc_method: 2
gpg: encrypted with 4096-bit RSA key, ID 79DEBE35, created 2013-05-20
"Verax (Informed Democracy Front)"

(79DEBE35 can be found on the subkeys.pgp.net keyserver)
Why Corporations Choose Delaware
I think what happened is that it fell out of popular usage to call most AI applications "AI", and a lot of the more extreme claims about the near-term potential of AI died out, so there is something of a perception in some corners that the field had died out.
Wikipedia puts the development of Bayesian networks in the 1980's. As for Hinton: I didn't mean to say we had zero progress since the 1980's (though admittedly, that's what "stalled" technically means), but rather that after a flurry of rapid development we hit a point of diminishing pace of development, as all technologies do.

I don't know if AI is blossoming right now, but all the interesting things I've seen in the field (Watson, self-driving cars) are not theoretical breakthroughs, but rather new applications. I don't think the technology in self-driving cars gets us fundamentally closer to human-scale AI.
Snowden, just remember that Kevin Poulsen and Adrian Lamo helped the US Government in catching Bradley Manning.

EDIT: Also, a pretty safe way to carry an interview would be VPN + Tor + Bitmessage.

EDIT2: Users sneak and tlb claim Tor isn't safe because of timing attacks. Read below.
It's a gaming comic and Xbox is major in the conversation this week.

The only reason for the Glass diversion is Gabe got one this week as well and they are living with it.
I don't think was that easy to do all this virtualization stuff back in 2003. And even if it was, why would he invest resources to do this when the artists were willing to pay him?
I'm confused. I thought Palantir's product Prism is not the same thing that NSA calls PRISM. Has this been confirmed either way?
I remember TLS extensions support being backported to XP just to implement this. I wonder if it was backported to Win2000 too for Custom Support customers. It is funny that the patch was released August 2010, just after Win2000 went out of support.
I pulled their products API and put it all into a page:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22293/shirt.rendered.htm...
Readability[1] does a good job at cleaning up a page and leaving only the textual content.

[1]: http://readability.com
No, not undetectably. Someone would notice, trust me.
What's the normal procedure for making a call whose output depends on a file that must be kept secret? Is there a typical OS API pattern that's seen in the various programs like ssh, scp, and so on?
Using square brackets is silly because you won't be able to ever put API parameters in the URL.

By using semicolons (a la matrix parameters) or commas you could eliminate that.
What's important is that HE likes them. You don't have to agree :)
Inaccurate title. This isn't about Sanskrit, it's about certain schools of pre-modern Indian linguistics (which are very interesting and worthy subjects). Sanskrit is a beautiful language with an incredible literary canon, but there's nothing special about it that makes it stand apart from any other human language. Any other old Indo-European language possesses the same properties. Regrettably, Hindutva activists and their Western sycophants talk it up.
AFAIK, the current publicly-known record for breaking RSA keys is the factorization of RSA-768 in 2010: http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/006.pdf That paper says it took about 1500 CPU-years to break a 768-bit key, and that the difficulty increases 1000x for each additional 256 bits of key length.

For a back-of-the-envelope cost estimate, I'm going to assume that there have been no major theoretical breakthroughs in the last couple of years, and that the machines they used were roughly equivalent to an EC2 "medium" instance. That puts the cost of breaking a 768-bit key, using spot instances for cost-efficiency, at about US$200k.

That sounds small, but encryption/decryption are still reasonably efficient with larger keys, while factorization becomes vastly harder. Breaking a 2048-bit key would take something like 200 quadrillion dollars worth of CPU time. A 4096-bit key, like the one used for this message, would be vastly more secure than that.
Hey Ramond, cool site!

tiny bug in FF/Win7 on Get Started: http://i.imgur.com/cwSd78R.png

also if i have an old t-shirt that I want to restore it, is that legal? they no longer make it and it is _precious_ to me since highschool (10 years old!)

I kinda like the faded ink (/hipster), but the shirt it self is falling apart!
It appears to be the case that the attribution at the bottom of the page is accurate.

http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46...
If you want a realistic chance of not losing control of your private key the only real answers are hardware based - using a tamper resistant smart card, hardware security module, tpm or similar systems in which the signing is done inside the chip that contains your signing keys and no general purpose device ever sees the key at all.

Most people using software only solutions won't ever have their keys stolen, but that's because nobody tried to steal them. The compromise of a client os is inevitable if targeted by a competent actor, given enough time.

Smartcards and HSM's may not be infallible, but their rate of compromise appears to be negligable at best and an extremely rare capability for an offensive team to have access to.

Smartcards are surprisingly cheap and easy to work with, and due to their simplicity and long history are quite secure. The only real attack on them involves physical access and causes obvious physical damage that'd be impossible to miss.
The Snowden could use Tor to access the website.

Also, there's no other way to get the message to Snowden unless you give it publicity. If he browses the Internet for news, he will find there's a message from Wired for him.
Snowden called himself Verax[1]. Anyone who wants to send a message to Snowden* can just:

$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 79DEBE35
$ gpg --encrypt --sign --armor --recipient 79DEBE35

and post it publicly; perhaps on Pastebin.

[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/code-n...

*assuming you believe the key is authentic
A good bet would be all those places with a long history and tradition of authoritarianism, which have only recently become less authoritarian: Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, etc.
Thanks for the comment. I saw this story’s presence on HN as a complete waste of space until now.
If Edward Snowden does have a pgp key (I can't find one online), it hasn't been revealed in this message. It looks like the signing and encryption keys are the same:

gpg: armor: BEGIN PGP MESSAGE
gpg: armor header: Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.19 (Darwin)
gpg: armor header: Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org
:pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid 5B50940B79DEBE35
data: [4096 bits]
gpg: public key is 79DEBE35
:encrypted data packet:
length: unknown
mdc_method: 2
gpg: encrypted with RSA key, ID 79DEBE35
gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available

Of course, they could have used --hidden-encrypt-to, but I think it's more likely a publicity stunt.

Oh, and if you do find a key claiming to be for Edward Snowden online, verify that it's actually him, ideally through the web of trust, and that it isn't just a key that was created after the news was leaked. I'd be wary of any keys on keyservers claiming to be him that have been uploaded after he went public with this.
Show HN: Puu.sh random image generator
Only use your private key with Tinfoil Hat Linux on an offline air-gapped computer: http://tinfoilhat.shmoo.com/

I recommend disconnecting your monitor and only receiving output by having it blinked out at you through your capslock light on your keyboard. Bonus points if you can get your hands on some TEMPEST hardened hardware, and/or tamper-resistant hardware.

Anything less will leave you vulnerable to the black helicopters!

Note: I'm joking obviously, but this is something to take seriously.
I've reread his post 3 or so times, and I never came to the conclusion that he had this belief.

'People are so fucking obsessed with their little lives' is a dismissive statement, suggesting that the (imagined) concerns of others are too small to deserve the attention people give to them.

If you lead a busy life, you won't have time, motivation, or enough attention to consider outside affairs. Is that false?

Yes, I do think that's false. Being busy can crowd out all other considerations due to fatigue or necessity, but not necessarily so. To stick with the coffeeshop example, is it not just as possible that the busy barista spends her evening studying to be a civil rights lawyer or some other socially responsible task as she does mooning over a hypothetical boyfriend? People are quite adept at dividing their time, in my experience.
PRISM: Why you should care (Cory Doctorow)
I remember 768 bit asymetric keys in the mid 90's, and the paranoid had perhaps a 1024 bit key (I'm not very paranoid, and I got a 2048 bit key before 2000). A 768 bit RSA key was factored in 2009; the NSA could probably do it earlier. The default now is 2048 bits, and the key used by Wired is 4096 bits.

That's a lot of doublings of the difficulty to brute force a key. 2^3328 increase in difficulty.
I tried it out today and it worked great. They call it "Instacart Plus" and it shows up as one of the store options in the dropdown menu, along with Trader Joe's, Costco, etc. The delivery arrived at 1:00pm sharp for the 1-2pm scheduled delivery window.
An excellent question, for which I've added a comprehensive answer:

http://agavejs.org/#underscorejs

As you can see, Agave is very different from Underscore.
Don't assume that the NSA's primary goal is to collect factual information.
> Anyway, for my money, it's the Libertarian Party that represents the path forward

Time to shave your neckbeard.
That was the reaction I had years ago (2004), when I was interviewing at Georgia Tech for PhD positions, and had a meeting with Thad Starner (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/).

He's a really smart guy, and friendly, but his heads-up display came across as very distracting to me, mostly because of how it interfered with "intuitive" reading of eye gaze. When he was looking vaguely in my direction it was difficult to tell when he was looking "through" the heads-up display and focusing on me, and when he was focusing instead on the HUD. It made the whole conversation feel quite surreal.
> So your solution is to tell labor that they should turn into capital?

Progressive automation, it is at least arguable, makes that an essential part of any long-term solution. Labor as the key to income for the vast majority of the population may well not be a long-term viable option.

Of course, arguably, basic income / negative income tax is just an incredibly way of turning everyone into (at least, in part) capitalist living off what they own; what you own is a dividend-producing share of the commons. At a minimum, its a way of reducing the need to engage in wage labor to meet survival needs, and increasing the ability to direct efforts towards becoming a capitalist.
Apologies, but that's exactly the point: people who wouldn't otherwise think of themselves as different are now forced to go through the accessibility features, which inevitably carry some baggage. Would BMW ever force left-handed people to install a visibly different steering-wheel?
I can't help but see a graph without a Y-Axis and think they're trying to hide something. If you zoom in a bit on that second graph you can also see a bit of a dip at the end (it's actually downward trending after the big spike), but their drawn in trend line basically tries to overwrite that.

I guess what I'm saying here is that these graphs look pretty sketchy, and if the news was really that good they'd probably have real data to show off.
They're not shoplifting, they're buying...used:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/14/why-would-dr...
They answer their own question: with a retraining process that will leave their children behind as untrained bums.

They semi-accurately predict a future where employment is sufficiently fluid that nobody is securely enough situated at a job that they can train their children into it.
79DEBE35 is a key in the possession of Wired, I'm sure they'll enjoy passing your message on the the NSA via their parent media giant.

Edit: Also, it's not very hard to generate a different key with signature 79DEBE35, and put it on the key servers. gpg's displaying of such short abbreviations for keys is one the worst parts of its UI.
Very sensibly put. In fact, after the initial mob-mentality reaction has worn off, after the glee at seeing the high-and-mighty taken down a peg or two has subsided, I am starting to feel ... well, a bit conflicted about the whole thing.

One thing that I am pretty certain about: blame is not the appropriate response; particularly as far as the security services are concerned. Assuming there were no procedural abuses (a big assumption), one has a great deal of sympathy for the difficult position the security services were in: asked to solve an (almost if not actually) impossible problem, they reached for exactly the same tools and techniques that I would have done, were I in the same situation. Given the same task, and the same constraints, I cannot see how I would have reacted differently.

For me, the real question is whether they should have been given that task in the first place. Intuitively, the answer seems to be an obvious and resounding "No"; although I do acknowledge that the problem is a difficult and nuanced one. The temptation to blame Bush for the whole thing is quite strong, although as I mentioned; I am sure that the debate is difficult and nuanced, and we do not have all the facts (although the trust that we might use in place of the facts is in precious thin supply).
> I'm optimistic about the trends toward entrepreneurialism and ownership

What trends?
Good Job by the Apple Guys! Now just give us more features than Chrome's web inspector so I can get rid of Chrome.
In Brazil, Violence Erupts at Bus-Fare Protest
There's no way to tell when a key was uploaded to a keyserver without the keyserver's logs.
The problem is that labor is the only market you can enter into without already owning things to trade for it.
That's not safe at all, considering the organization tracking him.
Fight for every penny, san fran is a tough city
This seemed relevant from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo#Greenwald.2C_Lamo....):

Lamo's role in the Manning case drew the ire of Glenn Greenwald, of Salon Magazine. An ardent supporter of WikiLeaks, Greenwald has been a passionate critic of Lamo, suggesting that Lamo lied to Manning by turning him in, and also lied after the fact to cover up the circumstances of Manning's confessions. Greenwald places the incident in the context of what he calls "the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistle-blowers". Greenwald's critique of Wired Magazine has drawn a response from that magazine which suggests that Greenwald is writing disingenuously: "At his most reasonable, Greenwald impugns our motives, attacks the character of our staff and carefully selects his facts and sources to misrepresent the truth and generate outrage in his readership." In an article about the Bradley Manning case, Greenwald mentions Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen's 1994 felony conviction for computer hacking, suggesting that "over the years, Poulsen has served more or less as Lamo's personal media voice."

Greenwald is skeptical of an earlier story written by Poulsen about Lamo's institutionalization on psychiatric grounds, writing: "Lamo claimed he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a somewhat fashionable autism diagnosis which many stars in the computer world have also claimed." In his response, Poulsen accused Greenwald of "name-calling, bizarre conspiracy theories and ad hominem attacks".
In some ways yes, but if you mean intellectual property then no.
RSA factoring does not increase with keysize increases like you might expect. Factoring, while still very hard, is much better than brute-force and continues to see improvements.
Well... the problem won't go away... I think people will just get more paranoid.

Basically... society will just be a bit uneasy [around people wearing glass]. Then, the first divorce case, or "loss of employment because of mistimed comment about ... say ... hispanics ... while at a bar" case will happen. At which point most people are going to start being VERY careful about who they talk to and where.
>79DEBE35 is a key in the possession of Wired

How do you know this?
I think the bikeshed should be blue, and have less of a gradient along the roof.
Well yes, giving the proletariat ownership of the means of production would obviously solve the problem. How exactly do you expect that to happen, short of a nasty and probably quite bloody revolution?
My advice, is wait at least 2 weeks, then start reading the news on this saga. That is what i am doing, all i hear is snippets on tv, now i hear that the Guardian is walking back many of their statements, Mark Andreessen just said that he was holding judgement as well until everything becomes clearer. Everybody else on HN are having emotional and knee jerk reactions, when we get a solid longform peace of journalism in a few weeks, then we will get a clearer picture. Until then i just ignore all the links here on the topic and focus on tech.
I live down the road from that Lowes. Let me tell you, it is pretty convenient. In fact, that entire area (much more than just a Lowes and parking lot) is the old Hitachi hard drive plant - it is now being converted into a massive number of homes and shops[1], which South San Jose needs.

[1] http://www.sjdistrict2.com/index.php?option=com_content&view...
Merging Adjacent Polygons
Yeah, I hate this. Can we all agree on just notifying the user of the existence of the localized version of the page in these cases, without explicitly and automatically forcing the localized version on them? I'm pretty sure this can be done elegantly from an UX point of view, and Internet would be a much better place if everyone did this.
This is cool. Anyone know what type of license this has? I can't find it on github or the site.
The first item to sell on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83
Or Chaplin:
https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin

I honestly don't think either of them do a good job of promoting their absolutely awesome work. I tell everyone I can about them, but they really need some presence at conferences or some big companies releasing case studies.
Animate.CSS has more animations than magic.css and in my opinion is better.
One of the aims of dynamic icons is to avoid having to actually tap on them, if the required information is simple enough to be displayable in the icon itself (e.g. weather, stock). Apps that want to encourage launch could modify just half the icon, or a quarter, or none.
You must have not heard of the "roving bug".

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2006/12/can_you_hear_m...
If cocaine were legal, most people would tend to use it in milder forms, as they have done in the past. (eg, the recipe for coca-cola used to include cocaine).

With heroin, the physical harm is almost ENTIRELY due to illegality - when a heroin addict can get the drug cheaply and in a known dosage and use it safely, they don't really have a problem. Our moral puritanism says being addicted is JUST BAD so we pass laws that CAUSE most of the harm we attribute to the drug.

Cocaine isn't quite like that. If you take a lot of cocaine it can cause nasty psychological symptoms - paranoia during use, depression between uses. On the other hand, cocaine is quite a lot like caffeine (and other stimulants) in this regard. Too much of any psychoactive drug is bad, but in moderation it's safe enough and has often been used by truck drivers who need to stay awake. Or people who need to be extra creative (eg: Robin Williams)

Even for this drug, the net harm of illegality almost certainly exceeds the net benefit. One could imagine a world in which making cocaine illegal stopped anyone from doing cocaine, but that's not the world we actually live in. The world we actually live in, it's generally accepted that our last two presidents used cocaine in school - it's not really fair to throw people in jail and take away their kids and their stuff because they were poor and used cocaine while people who are rich and use cocaine just get away with it. Which is what the current regime seems to amount to.
Both valid points; I have no way to verify that's an authentic key.