skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're launching a new group, Triangle Crypto / Cypherpunks, to help people engage in learning / teaching / promotion / advocacy around the tools we all need to protect ourselves from snooping, whether it's the NSA or whoever. I'm talking Tor, I2P, Bitcoin, SSL, TLS, SSH, GPG, TrueCrypt, and the like.

We'll be doing classes and educational sessions on these topics and more, as well as generally trying to raise awareness of the importance of digital rights and privacy, here in the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill area of North Carolina.
500ms is a long time for an HFT algorithm, from what I understand. If my algo takes the Reuters feed as input (which I imagine to be a good leading indicator for trading) and I have a 500ms lead, it could be the one that bought the stock right before yours did (and enough shares to drive up the price adequately to slurp up all the margin).
IE6 was released 11 years ago, which is beyond forever for a browser version to be supported. No other vendor that I'm aware of provides support for browsers from that era.
8 Bizarre Social Networks You Won't Believe Exist
Contrary to popular belief, the American government does not actually represent its people. It represents special interest groups, which is a euphemism for "those who have money." Once your mind makes that paradigm shift, everything becomes incredibly easy to understand.

The fact of the matter is that the seeming irrationality and inefficiency of American government is a feature, rather than a bug. The inefficiency and general waste in government affairs actually serve to obfuscate the real functions and purpose of the state and makes reform vastly more complex and costly than it otherwise would be. The example I like to give is the tax code. The income tax started out as a tax on wealth and it used to be that only a very small percentage of households paid anything. Over time though, the burden of taxation shifted downward onto the middle class, while the elite simultaneously found alternative means of storing their wealth to avoid taxation almost completely. The problem is that the tax code is so complex now that most people cannot even comprehend the amount of loopholes in it. The only people who can are tax attorneys working for corporations and the ultra-rich. This is what I mean by the inefficiency and general waste serves to obfuscate the issue.

And the funny thing is, this is all working exactly as intended. The wealthy tightly control the system and the rest of the population is too distracted fighting for the crumbs to actually organize, form meaningful alliances and fight to change the status quo. What they do instead is share news articles and memes on Facebook and sign silly petitions on the Internet to be able to pat themselves in the back for fighting the good fight. They just want to feel good about themselves.

At the end of the day, this is because the vast majority of people don't actually care about the events that happen around them. They care about their self-perceived role in those events and their own feelings. You can actually see this type of behavior in many different cases outside politics. Take something as simple as exercise. A lot of people sign up for personal trainers, not because they actually want to exercise correctly and lose weight, but because the act of making superficial effort (such as paying a small amount of money) towards a goal is sufficient to make them feel good. And if they fail at weight loss, they can tell themselves that, well, they at least tried. Which is what the signers of this petition are going to tell themselves when it accomplishes nothing.
> Isn't that an ends justify the means sort of argument?

Well, no, its an outcomes justify the means arguments. Ends are the goals worked toward, and aren't the sum total of the outcomes of an action; "ends justify the means" is a frequently problematic approach to evaluating the a proposed course of action because it ignores the potential outcomes of the action aside from the intended goal.
Clearly they do not yet have a yottabyte worth of data. It would be silly to build a warehousing site like that and have it be full-up with data the day it first opens for business.

I expect these sizing claims (which presumably come from some sort of government statements about the facility) are based on a timeline on the order of ten years or more. A YB in 2024 is going to take a lot less physical space than a YB in 2014.
> Why? Why the proprietary rar format?

They want all the assurances that come from software with a corporate face attached to it. They wouldn't subject their users to software made by amateur hobbyists.
Most corporations block torrents. I would get roasted alive if I installed bittorrent at work.
That's a very good point, and explains why gamers care more about reselling Xbox games more than they care about reselling Steam games.
For programming questions, I almost always append site:stackoverflow.com to my search term... generally the anser is on SO, but I prefer the search engine's results over SO's search... on DDG and Google.
This is most likely that Google has more user behavior data than DDG. If enough people use DDG and click on the StackExchange link for that query (or similar queries), DDG will be able to get that to the top.

On the other hand, did DDG just use Bing API, and only Blekko crawls the web? Or do I get my search engines mixed up?
This irritated me, as it makes me somewhat skeptical of the "we don't track" claim.

However, I noticed that if you use their HTML version (i.e., use duckduckgo.com/html/<query> instead), that they don't do the click-tracking. The only downside I've noticed is that there's no infinite-scrolling mode, you have to hit "next".

Whether they're still tracking the search queries, though, I have no idea...
This is completely incorrect.

In most states it is not required to have ID on you. Most US citizens do not carry proof of citizenship (passport or birth certificate), and a Drivers License is not proof of citizenship.

US citizens travel abroad, and it would be illegal for the government to intercept communications between a US citizen and someone else, regardless of location of either party, regardless of the location of the communications intercept.

Furthermore, based on your logic, the government could intercept all emails where someone's passport was not scanned and attached...
The NSA probably thinks that collecting everything and analyzing it later was "a neat idea." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North#Iran.E2.80.93Cont...
If it's physical you should be able to swap or sell it on. If its digital it should be cheaper and tied to an account. That's it.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2011/08/users-treat-criticism...
Everyone, including The Guardian, now agrees that Google had "plausible grounds" to "categorize access as indirect", because that's exactly what their access was.
I really think they ought to tell you how many GB of storage they offer!
I do too, especially since I work with mRNA's and cDNA's on an almost daily basis.
Priests threatened at gunpoint in Newry robbery
People also often forget that a lot of code doesn't survive the week, which is common in an agile setting. Documenting code is something you do when you know it can live for awhile.

Also, if the focus is on maintainability, the person documenting the code shouldn't be the same person who wrote it, who already has biases on what is obvious or not. Rather, it should be someone with access to the author(s) who can ask questions and document what they didn't get right away.
No you cannot. They relaxed the EULA to allow virtualization of Mac OS from a Mac OS host, however. You can also use the same licensed copy that acts as the host.

The EULA revision came along with 10.8. Prior to that you could virtualize 10.7 Server, but once again, only with Mac OS as the host, and only with another licensed copy.
I think you'll be proud to tell your grandchildren that you were on the list of subversives.
...which is funny, since I remember a lot of commentary about how the point of paying for cable TV when you can get broadcast TV for free is that by paying for the content you don't have to watch ads. I wonder why that never happened...
If you have an hour to kill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFol6IMbZ7Y
...except that a book is an original work - your genome is derivative of your parents, and very similar to your relatives, and still somewhat similar to people of your ancestry.
Yeah, as soon as I saw the headline I sighed. Of course I see the article noted as much! "...offering an endorsement that the Obama administration is probably not thrilled to receive"
I've sat in Aeron chairs and never been that impressed with them. I got my ideal chair for $170 or so at Ikea and i'm incredibly happy with it. I have one at home and one in the office now.

I'm not sure if there's a better desk ideal than the GeekDesk with the motorized height adjustment.
The truth very rarely gets in the way of perception and appearances.
If you're working with small documents, it's possible you're experiencing a performance bottleneck other than protobuf serialization. Could you provide some more info on the queries you're running and an example document on our Google Group so the rest of the team can weigh in? (http://groups.google.com/group/rethinkdb)
> The problem is that people are terrible for blueprinting sotfware that does not yet exist.

I agree, in addition the people who usually are doing the blueprinting usually don't really know much about the nuts and bolts of actually building software (or haven't built any in a very long time).
...if you tell people "don't hash secrets" the natural interpretation is "send them in the clear"

What? When you see a sign by the pool that says "Don't Run" do you get down on your belly and start crawling? Some assumptions are safe to make -- e.g. most people who care enough to read this know not to send secrets in the clear.
Huge win for Apple at the patent office
But a redirect would change the status bar, right? So presumably it would still be pretty noticeable.
I think it's already been claimed that the "least untruthful" statement about monitoring hinges on the definition of "collect."
In case you were curious it was a super vague proguard error that turned out to be the issue. Adding

-keepclassmembers class * extends com.actionbarsherlock.ActionBarSherlock {
<init>(android.app.Activity, int);
}

fixed it. Ugh :/
> The fact Xbox tosses ads in your face on every single home screen except settings is also extremely distasteful

I actually liked the ad for the Pizza Hut XBox app. I thought it was hilarious.

I think that if the ads were actually useful, and showed off products/services that I actually would buy, then it's perfectly fine to show ads there.
Well, if you re-read my original post you'd find I'm essentially agreeing with you. You can always point to someone who's "copying" someone else because nobody innovates in a vacuum. So why bother pointing it out?
I suspect this is just Putin trolling (needling) Obama and the US. He knows very well that "approval" from Russia will not sit well with many Americans.
> I hope that ISPs do not release personal identity or billing data to arbitrary third parties.

My ISP, Time Warner/RoadRunner, claims that they will do so. It's kind of ambiguous because their declaration combines several services and kinds of data covered by different laws. I think the applicable part for their cable ISP service is:

In the course of providing Time Warner Cable Services
to you, we may disclose your personally identifiable
information to [...] consumer and market research firms,
credit reporting agencies and authorized representatives
of governmental bodies.

Selling their DHCP logs and customer records to a commercial data aggregator (who could then sell it to anyone) appears to be compliant with their privacy policy.

http://help.twcable.com/twc_privacy_notice.html
if you're using DDG just prepend your query with !so. Using bang notation is like having every search engine in your search bar at once.

...and of course, I had no idea if !so would work before I tried it. The obvious one always seems to work:)
Most? I agree with you there will always be some but it definitely won't be the majority. I doubt the average lifetime of use for a car would be more than 10/15 years?
Yes. It would be 10x better to play the game at a friends house without needing to bring the discs in your backpack, which is what this enables.
You'd need a 2-3 order of magnitude increase in storage density to get anywhere near reasonable. I suspect that's not going to happen in 10 years but I don't know the current and projected rates of storage density increases.
Yes, sorry I meant patentable. This ruling specifically says that merely identifying the location of a gene and isolating it is not a patentable transformation. PCR is not transformative because the dsDNA molecule exists in nature. I think in this context isolation is similar in nature to discovery, which is not a patentable activity.
I'm pretty sure they are sourced from the same VM's.

The only notable difference is that ievms converts (or did when I tried it last) from the VirtualPC copy - MS is now allowing these for download in other formats (Parallels/VMWare/Virtualbox) without needing to convert.
> Once I had the basic classes drawn out, and realized how diverse the kinds of classes we had were

You'd think there'd be a tool you could point at your repository and have it spit out appropriate UML. As a set of description diagramming techniques UML can be useful.
Because I am running GNU/Linux.
And cable providers are some of the most hated companies that people live with. Have you ever met even a single person who's a fan of their cable company?

The difference here is while cable has (for now) an iron grasp on content and monopoly in their coverage areas, gaming has competition.
"Exactly?" Not at all. I don't mean to nitpick, but I think you're exaggerating.

Steam sales are a way of increasing profits by price discriminating to capture the long tail of the demand curve. Used games have nothing to do with earning the developers more money. Maybe they're similar from a consumer perspective, but that doesn't mean they're similar.
Amazon launches 3D Printer store
Which just reinforces the point that you are not the product and paying at the same time.
There were three images that didn't like to regenerate host keys on their own when they were missing on the initial boot and we've update them today so it should all be cleared up now.

Thanks!
gosh , it's a killer trick!
Whenever I think about DDG, I think "Oh, you think Gabriel Weinberg suddenly cares about your privacy after he sold a truckload of user information to Classmates.com?"
I expect you're probably right. I bet Putin is getting a huge kick out of all this.
Somehow, I imagine they are not hosting these off FAT32 filesystems.

Maybe it's IIS that isn't very good with partial HTTP requests... ;-)
An open letter to my friend, the NSA
It turns out that if you block all the trackers and 3rd part widgets, the website continues to function as the use desires, and nothing of value is lost.
Which is why the cable cutting movement is so popular.
No. Star Wars kid, for example.
The only safe thing to do would be to compile Firefox or Chromium yourself.
Can Google Glass help doctors make crucial calls faster?
There is a difference. Having a request or application context that encapsulates state is one thing, an architectural decision that simplifies multi-tenancy and makes many uses of Flask more performant. These are "simple", in that they are an obvious and easily-explained solution to a technical problem that exists by necessity.

Global proxies to local state are another beast entirely. They are "easy" in that they remove the need to pass application and request objects through every called function, but they are not "simple" -- they rely on intimate details and peculiarities of Python's module and import system, and its capacity for thread-local state, not to mention Python's robust context unwinding features in the case of exceptions. Overuse of context-proxies leads to the same software engineering challenges as overuse of globals, in that it becomes difficult to reason about the calling semantics of functions which rely on context state being present, or mutate context state through proxies. For example, in order to test a view function, you will at a minimum need to set up an application context, but also need to set up any custom context your app relies on. It's not always obvious how to do this, leading to documentation [1] that I notice has already been confusing people on the mailing list.

So I wouldn't conflate the two mechanisms. Application- and request-local context is a pre-requisite for multi-tenant applications and a conceptual simplification. Module-level proxies are a cute trick that makes programmers' lives easier, but undoubtedly creates more convoluted semantics and internal operation.

[1]: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/testing/#faking-resources-and-co...
That should be trivial, if you had a large sample and money for sequencing. The consensus in the listservs I'm on is that cDNA patentability will fall next because of these and other inconsistencies (cDNA existing in nature, being a non-natural transformation).
Difference: if XBoxOne servers are ever shut down, single-player XBoxOne experience will be destroyed due to stupid DRM.
His post was (largely) free of any supposed inside knowledge. It seemed like it was just an attempt at a possible justifications of the choices made for the Xbox one. It really doesn't make much of a difference whether he is a Microsoft engineer or just a canny outsider playing devil's advocate to all the (seemingly) blind rage flowing around consoles these days (and most days...).
DDG just claims they don't store your history. Presumably they could use redirected clicks as quality signal, without tying it to your browser cookies.
This impression must partially be due to how you write your queries, and the quality of the natural language parsing in DDG/Bing (your query leaning heavily on that). I searched "ruby element in array", Rails not being a programming language, and I get the Ruby Array docs with the first result (which is what I would want) and the StackOverflow result for the third. On Google, the StackOverflow item is first and the Array docs are third for the same query.

In this case you and I think that our respective search engines are providing the better result.
Its been all over the net for a few weeks now. XBone is the height of Microsoft Stupidity.
For some sites, yes. Space.com and Business Insider are two that I've noticed tend not to work if some of their trackers are blocked.
Yep. Using any of these locks you into Windows.

Sharepoint kind of sucks, but it sucks less than most proprietary corporate intranets. It's an out-of-the-box intranet server app and it's pretty good for small-medium enterprises. Beats Lotus Notes anyway.
There's also a difference between Valve and Microsoft (or any other "platform" owners) that they still have to deal with retailers to push distribution of the console itself...
3 improvements that could be made to 3d printers
Advertisements are not the reason they're in decline. People don't sign up for Netflix because it's ad-free, they sign-up for convenience.
True story: A few years ago, Google had screens in their lobbies showing real-time Google user searches as they came in over the wire. (I don't know if they still have this, since I haven't been there in about 2 years.) I was walking through the lobby with Sergey Brin (it's a long story), and I spotted these screens and asked him if he wasn't afraid that a bunch of porn searches would come up on the screen from doing this.

"No", he said. "We have filters for that."

Just then, the word "bukkake" scrolled by.

"I think your filters should learn Japanese," I suggested :)
One of the problems is that there's an awful lot in the way of "Architecture Astronauts" who sit down for a few days and build (in UML) a brilliant and complex system design that has no grounding in reality.

I remember vaguely one argument with an EA who had built a very nice looking system blueprint in UML, who didn't understand that several of the ways various components needed to interact either required very large amounts of computing power or an algorithm that didn't exist. "But I carefully looked at that in the sequence diagrams here and here!"

In the usual best case, when the implementation starts to diverge away from the UML (as it usually does), it becomes nightmarish to keep the UML synched to the codebase. It's usually just easier to wait for the code to freeze, then go in and document what's there...which of course is not really the point of UML.
Anyone going to say it? DuckDuckGo searches are still really low quality. I WANT them to be a legitimate competitor in the space (in fact, I've been having similar hopes for Bing for years) but it's just not there yet.
>What were you paying for Chrome Frame?

With the virtual currency of trust towards Google as a competent solutions vendor.
That's exactly the point - sometimes it is about being cool and not about being really useful to a ton of people, evidenced by Facebook's early days.
Why do people treat this sentence as if it is absolute proof of "direct access" to the company's servers and data?

It's easy to see how this sentence, in light of the entire "dropbox" thing, means that NSA grabs data directly from the "dropbox" set up and operated by the company.

There is ambiguity and room for interpretation in almost all language, especially the vagueness of a Powerpoint presentation.
That is all well and good, anonymous MS guy can claim that the games will be cheaper in the long run, citing steam as the model that works and drives prices down.

Not in Australia.

In Australia we pay 89.95 / 99.95 for a AAA game released on Steam, versus the USD price of 39.95 / 49.95 / whatever. It must be the shipping of the bits over the pacific that jacks the price up right?

Yes, eventually the prices drop, and you can buy a game that originally retailed for almost $100 for under $20, but that takes a long time. I just gave up on buying big studio games on steam. I only buy indie stuff now.

I was really excited about the xbone (day one owner of original xbox and 360), then the official word came out about it, and I decided I would buy the ps4 instead.
Why bother spending money to pay a developer to patch it for offline play? They already have your money.
>Will Microsoft continue providing baseline support for IE6 indefinitely? I doubt it.

Doesn't matter, they already have supported it for centuries in tech years.
Right, which is why major hedge funds heavily optimize their code, use C instead of Java to avoid GC delays, and colocate their boxes on the exchange to minimize speed-of-light delays. We already know the premium for executing trades faster via solid IT: it's a lot.
This article is right for the case of using HMACs for two parties checking the authenticity of a message passed between them (assuming they have a shared secret).

But it's wrong about the database password storage. These days the real threat there is the monstrous computing power available to compute tons of hashes simultaneously. To combat that, you want a hashing function specifically designed to be slow. And not just slow, but to have a tunable parameter so you can require more and more work as GPUs get faster and cheaper. PBKDF2 is such a function, and is used by Django as of a year or two ago. bcrypt is another.
wow this looks remarkably good...at last somebody "gets" why incessant mousing around and piling through menus is a bad way to do things.
This comment assumes I know what core.logic does.