skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
we've all read Jeff Atwood's article on it.

I haven't. Stop implying that people are merely regurgitating popular opinions on this topic. I speak from experience.

To the public, with no technical background, it is very reasonable to question someone's opinion in a domain they have no certifiable expertise or experience in.

This is mistaken because a degree in system administration isn't going to give him any depth of knowledge that would let him interpret the slides in a more informed way.
Imagine success for today's startups 20 years out
Any recommendations? I have read both Animal Farm and 1984 but I thought the rest of his work wasn't really noteworthy.
Same thing here, but with a lot more flexibility: https://zrh.cloudsigma.com/ui/#/trynow
This is awesome and inspirational. My sincere respect to Lim Cheng Soon. Doing this with 12 companies must have been tough.
VERY tough considering he lives in Malaysia. Lesson for those outside of the US and complaining about it. It really doesn't matter where you live as long as you are hustling. Lim Cheng Soon, take my bow!
While we're talking books and education... tptacek, could you share any resources that you are acquainted with, specifically on the topic of SSL/TLS? I feel a need to really ramp up my knowledge in this space, and would be glad to hear any recommendations you might have.

Note that I'm looking at this from a deployment / administration POV, not programming. I don't want to implement TLS from scratch, just understand the various issues and implications involved in rolling out TLS.

If you have some suggestions, they are much appreciated.
The difference is that the random mutations are random across the genome while the GM wheat is universally altered in the same way. So, while you might not be harmed by the millions of random mutations in the non-GM slice of bread you eat, it's conceivable that if you eat a GM slice of bread where ever single cell has the same mutation your body might not react so favorably.
That doesn't make the edited version, or the name, any less unconscionable for an organization that wanted to find the truth. To quote Stephen Colbert, it was "emotional manipulation". If they wanted to address a point they should have put out the 39 minute version as is or release to to a news organization. Instead they decided to selectively highlight things, give it an inflammatory name and try to drum up some donations from it. That makes it suspect in my eyes and hopefully the eyes of reasonable people everywhere.

Doesn't mean that I think what happened was right or than I'm trying to defend those soldiers (we can have that argument elsewhere), but that as a reasonable person the editing and name should raise a giant red flag that makes me ask further questions.

I feel the same about this situation. The dramatic talk ("they might render me") and the fact that we're looking at this in a very narrow, uninformed context means we should question everything, including his credibility.
You'll get a redemption key page after purchasing. You can then redeem the services (selectively).
Wow, looks like it might be sold out. When I selected the early bird package( $1000) it wouldn't let me enroll for the course anymore.

Congratulations if you are indeed sold out.
IOS-7 looks like WP8
"It's completely unbelievable."

Entirely believable. Without access to the security apparatus, and without being able to make sense of what little has been revealed, what else are the news media going to chatter on about?

The question is whether it truly matters that Snowden has grand delusions and a sketchy resume. I think he's harming his professed cause by putting himself in front of the story, because all parties with an interest in not being embarassed over this -- and these are some big players -- are going to distance themselves from him. And that means somehow justifying his employment while at the same time suggesting he had to leave because he was incompetent.

I find this an interesting side story, and it will always be the problem in protecting secrets: People can't be trusted.

What to do? More machines, of course. And this is exactly where the NSA programs are heading. And this is exactly what we should be debating: If impersonal data crunching machines are doing 99.99999% of the work and ignoring virtually everything, is it an invasion of privacy? Snowden is just a reminder to the minders that they still have work to do to guard against rats, or patriots, depending on your view.

But, for now, Snowden's grandstanding is the distraction that the media can happily cover and that the average Facebook user can understand.

So there's no conspiracy here, just the usual incompetence on all sides. Only it's traitorous to open the the trillion dollar curtain and offer a glimpse at the wizards behind the US security theater.
> The age of swapping out parts is coming to a close, I fear.

Wat? TigerDirect, NewEgg, Amazon, and many others have something to say about that. This stuff is cheaper than it EVER has been. Want a bunch of RAM? Get it for under $100. Want a decent 500 GB hard drive? Under $100. Decent processor? Under $100. Decent motherboard? Under $100.

Or are you talking about swapping parts out of pre-assembled computers?
I encourage people who are concerned about this to voice their opinion. I am not greatly concerned myself, however...

I am more concerned about the Bigger Issue. If Congress obliterated the FISA court, it would not matter. The NSA would eventually find means to convince large corporations to "voluntarily" offer selected bits of their corporate-owned data for gov't inspection. We have no legal standing to complain about such things, because corporate-owned data is not ours, even if it happens to reveal everything about our habits and activities.

The NSA is playing catch up here. The coming wave of corporate controlled data mining is going to blow away the value of a simple Call Detail Records database.

What we need to do is spell out our privacy rights, in a manner that is understandable and enforceable in the modern age. Any less is just a band-aid.
Reread the, what, 4 slides? That's my point. We don't have nearly enough information to make any sort of judgement here. We should be asking questions.
> if Waze will become irrelevant if Google happens to productize self-driving cars

How far off is widespread adoption of self-driving cars vs lifespan of a company / product? Waze may be obsolete before self-driving cars make the core function obsolete.

I used Waze for the first time last week on a long drive across the mid-South. With self-driving cars on a long haul I can see the social function becoming the primary function.

At least when one is _driving_ one has something to keep one's mind occupied. Passengers on a long-haul only have books, music, games, sing-alongs, naps, and other tomfoolery to keep themselves entertained.
Exactly.

This is why my activism site experiments with combining the two: seeking positive change by making symbolic donations to charity. The dollar amount of the donations made in a task's favor might actually help convey the weight of support. For example: http://btf.io/382 ("Pardon Edward Snowden")
His lack of education is relevant because when you have at least some understanding of the depth of complex systems, it becomes very hard to imagine that a self-taught person has enough knowledge to speak competently about multiple such systems.

I think you have to admit, if you've dealt with enough such people, that they are the exception -- the mean and floor of that population's technical capacity is lower than of the educated population, in my experience.

This is not my experience, and let me tell you why I think it's so.

First up - I was self-taught up to the time I went to (a humble) college, and proceeded to learn little, and instead wrote compilers and won programming competitions in my spare time; college was just a means to a piece of paper. I ended up working on the Delphi compiler at Borland before the tools division got sold; and am currently working for a financial software startup. Why did I go to a humble college? Because I had difficulties in what you might call high school, because all I was interested in was CS, and that was not a subject available to study.

Second, my experience is that all the best developers I've worked with got started in programming outside an academic context.

Thirdly, a hypothesis about selection; all the developers I've worked with who didn't have a formal CS education were very good, and one in particular was outstanding. I believe that having succeeded despite the lack of a certificate from an authority, they must have been better than the average drone. And they often had soft skills that made them yet more effective that semi-autistic logicians.

Now, I don't know where you're coming from, but the gist I'm getting from what you write is that you have a lot of ego wrapped up in credentials, for some reason. Maybe you were a grad student, maybe you still are. My industry experience is in contradiction to your own.
Barnes & Noble Kills Mac And PC Dedicated Nook Apps
Ask HN: Where is the consumer-grade encryption?
Let's say my mother was reading about the NSA spying on everyone, and email my aunt the family cake recipe without exposing it. She knows enough about computers to know that there's some way to keep things secret, and maybe even knows what "encrypted" means in a broad sense. So she calls me up and asks what she can use to encrypt her cake recipe.

I'm not sure I could ever explain asymmetric encryption to my mother, but it's not too difficult to imagine how one might simplify existing encryption software to work with symmetric encryption -- everyone who uses a computer understands what a password is.

So why has no standard emerged for this? I've seen various versions of it, from encrypted RAR files to the buried-in-properties file encryption offered by Windows Vista Pro and up, but nothing has ever "caught on."

The simplest workflow I can imagine is the user opening a program, selecting a file, entering a passphrase, and receiving an encrypted file. The user emails the file as an attachment to someone with advance knowledge of the passphrase, and they use the same program to decrypt the document and enjoy delicious cake. I'm sure this exists, but I have no idea where it is or what it's called.
Failing the course would entail not doing scoring well on exams (read: not finding good bugs). You can retake the course in following runs, but I don't have a discount planned at this point. If you keep up with the course work and ask questions if/when you get into the weeds, everyone should be able to keep up with this, even as intensive as it is.
I would attribute dropping out of HS/college more to laziness, apathy, or not wanting to be part of the traditional system, not anything related to intelligence. Its not because I know a lot of intelligent HS dropouts, but because I know TON of stupid people with college degrees. I mean like people working minimum wage crap jobs and not trying to change their life, despite having a bachelors degree.
Student discount?
It's rather similar to mobile development:

http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/PlayStation+Vita/news.as...

I haven't personally done it (though I'm considering trying it for a small-ish project) so I can't speak to how many hassles there are.
"You do bring up a good point that a MITM attack could change the bitcoin address and trick people to donate there. This really doesn't have anything to do with bitcoin though."

That is not my point. My point was that a person might attempt to send money to the correct address, but that a MITM attacker might be able to compute a new, related transaction -- perhaps one that deposits money in the attacker's wallet. That is the point about malleability.

Throwing hashes and signatures around does not necessarily imply non-malleability. As a simple example, imagine a malleable public key encryption system. Simply signing messages before encrypting them would not create a non-malleable system, because the attacker could potentially maul the message in a way that replaces the original signature with his own signature (on a related plaintext). Non-malleable PKE is not an easy problem to solve; it took a lot of work to create such systems (hashes are often involved in the solution, but it takes more than just a hash function to "get it right").

In the case of multiparty computation, non-malleability is even harder and carries numerous subtleties. The attacker might desynchronize messages between the parties as part of the attack. The attacker might be able to observe multiple simultaneous interactions among different parties, which can be used in the attack. Maybe a Bitcoin attacker needs to observe a hundred transactions all involving some target party before they can compute related messages. The fact that there is no known attack does not mean that no such attack is possible. It may not be a trivial attack, but non-trivial attacks are still problematic for a system that is supposed to protect enormous amounts of money (as Bitcoin is).

"I think you are vastly underestimating just how solid it is"

I think it is hard to even estimate Bitcoin's security, since there is no well-defined concept of "security" for Bitcoin. That aside, there is already a known polynomial-time attack on Bitcoin (the so-called "51% attack," though even with less computing power there is a high probability of success), so I think you are overestimating the security of Bitcoin.

My point about who designed Bitcoin was not meant to be some kind of insult, it is just an observation I have made. People seem to obsess over who Satoshi might be, and for some reason people keep looking at experts in cryptography, math, or related fields. My point is that experts in those fields would almost certainly be aware of work that has been done in multiparty computation and would not have simply ignored things like malleability, the "51% attack," concurrent security, etc. It is possible for amateurs to design secure systems; I just do not think Bitcoin is really an example of that.
Dan Boneh's crypto course is starting in 5 days on Coursera. Syllabus is not same as the OP's course but is very good and useful nonetheless.

https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto
Jefferson: Bind the Government in the Chains of the Constitution
"He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods."

Wow, the mental contortions that were undertaken to produce this sentence are just astounding.
Looks like the early bird package is indeed sold out, though two tickets are currently pending payment, so someone might just be sitting on them. I'll update if I find otherwise.
Yes, re-read the 4 slides. If we don't have enough information, then you shouldn't speculate that $20M refers to the total cost of the operation any more than I should speculate that it doesn't.
Indeed. See eg. http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/18/prison-small-business-ent-m... and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/prison-labor_n_2272...

Money quote: "Oddo also said that workers were provided enough water, but the prisoners didn't sip it slowly enough."

Also for a sense of scope http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoner... including this irrelevant but salacious detail: 'In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace "Made in Honduras" labels on garments with "Made in the USA."'
Chomksy's book, Manufacturing Consent, goes a long way to explaining how U.S. mainstream politics works in conjunction with the media, even though it was written over 2 decades ago.

20 word summary:

Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do.

So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable.

If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?
Given that this is the discounted price (for the first run), I'm not planning a student discount for this iteration. Future runs may have one though.
Looks like a nice place to test out what happens when you type 'sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root' on an ec2 instance :)
IMO only when this is treated like DUI will it be taken more seriously. It sounds radical, but the activity is easily avoidable, seriously diminishes your focus and can have horrible consequences.
I'm glad somebody did the reading...
You are unorthodox. Eurasia has always been at war with East Asia.
The title alone is editorializing and arguable the editing decisions and the lack of any context (Rules of Engagement, etc) really make the piece pretty politicized.
Columbia Law Professor Says Americans Should Quit Facebook And Google
If your machine isn't already rendering that page flawlessly, I would argue that you weren't the website's target audience. IMO, the site caters those looking for a high end performance machine; those who likely already own and are using a MBP or even an Air and want that extra performance boost.

I personally went through slide by slide just to read the specs. The transitions aren't the fastest given they overrode scroll events in favor of framing and animation, but it was done so intentionally as a form of presentation.
This is Adam Langley's blog:

http://www.imperialviolet.org/

I might start with this post:

http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.ht...
Cars are typically much more expensive than guns and we equate car thievery today to cattle thievery of yesterday - we take it quite personally.

Registering a car is simply an excuse for the government to charge you money to use your vehicle. Really, it doesn't reduce vehicle crime, although it does make stealing cars tougher. But you wouldn't need to charge a registration fee for that.

Also, guns have serial numbers like cars. If yours is stolen, hopefully you wrote down the serial so that if the cops ever find it it will be returned to you (unless used in a violent crime, and then I think you are just SOL).

A gun registry wouldn't reduce crime because criminals don't use their guns, they are either stolen or straw purchases. Otherwise, with violent crimes of passion that utilize guns it's very clear cut where the weapon comes from.
Buggy is not nearly strong enough - supporting lots of mixed environments has given me ragequit levels of stress, precisely because Apple dropped samba and decided to write their own.
This is what I term "Professional Paranoia" and as long as you can be unemotional about it, it can be an exceptionally useful mindset. I have internalized the Moscow Rules[1] and I constantly remind myself of what Bruce Lee said, "Be like water".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_rules
Thanks!

Actually it's not tough. You could get a lot done using email ALONE. And, living in Malaysia gives me unlimited runway to keep shipping and experimenting. :)
haha thanks :)
I downloaded a couple small files with wget and got 10MB/s, so just point it at a large file, maybe even loop the command.
why do you assume that someone is exerting pressure? NPR and NYT are very much "establishment" media outlets that have deep dependence on the government unilaterally from their side.

But the more important point is: the snowden revelations are dangerous to their status quo (if only marginally so). It takes incredible willpower and self-discipline to fight the natural reaction to do anything but think about whatever is threatening to upend the reality that you are comfortable with. This is often true even if the new reality stands to your benefit.

There's no need for the government to exert pressure for this to be happening.
Yea, Apple would have paid for a lot of users that they would immediately screw over (anyone not using iOS, Apple could not cope having a popular Android app). I imagine the Waze team wouldn't have been cool with that either since they weren't even willing to relocate.
"Welcome to Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong"

I was thinking this after the NSA thing. People could end up in 150 person (Dunbar number) sized LLCs like the city-states in the novel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_crash
As far as I know, the Oculus Rift isn't really a competitor in that it's not a console. It's not stand-alone. Doesn't it require a gaming PC to actually power the display? In that sense, it's not the Oculus Rift that's a new competitor, it's that the old competitor (PC gaming) has just gotten a new innovation.
Poll: Would You Trust a Self-Driving Car?
Specifically, under which conditions, and why?
I wouldn't trust it at all.
I would only trust it at speeds significantly slower than the speed limit.
I would trust it as much as a human driver at comparable speeds.
I would trust it, but not as much as a human driver at comparable speeds.
I trust it even driving at significantly higher speeds than the speed limit.
Did npongratz ninja-edit or did you and the other reply not actually read the comment? The post you are replying to specifically says that it's not talking about "chattel slavery" when it refers to the current system as slavery.
(disclosure: I work with Alex and he showed this to me before)

I think the page doesn't emphasize enough the easy customization of these buttons: you can set the class names and base colors in one file and Sass will create the CSS for what you want. "Base" colors because the gradients, highlights and glows are then derived from only one color.

See this file in particular: https://github.com/alexwolfe/Buttons/blob/master/scss/_optio...

The defaults look pretty yummy but the customization is key for your own use IMO.
A possible response for djim:

"We gave law enforcement everything they asked for, and they abused their power. You know how when you give your teenager the keys to your car, and they abuse that by going somewhere they weren't supposed to go? And you take the keys away? Well, that's what we're doing... we're taking the keys away, since they have shown that they can't be trusted with those keys."
It'll be interesting to see what happens to those global (US-based) cloud providers whose business strategy of poor profit margins in exchange for reduced costs of sale fair after this PR catastrophe. When it comes to the economics of this, the US is going to lose a huge amount of business due to this and potentially could in theory cause several businesses to go bankrupt. Since, government's are naturally fiscally motivated, I suspect the real way for Americans to complain is "with their wallets". In other words there is definitely an argument to be had for "We can't compete in the world's technology game because they don't trust our security. We can no longer innovate because of the government's haphazardness. Fix this US government." At least then when another terrorist attack happens in the US, the government can say "Well, you wanted your economics, so we gave it to you, but now you lack security. Pick one or the other."

This is going to be great for EU-based providers. They've been struggling for awhile to compete with Amazon, Rackspace, etc. I'd bet my money today on private, country-based cloud providers in EU. It will be nearly impossible for the US to dig itself out of this one.
Ask HN: Which jurisdictions are safest for hosting etc?
Given the obvious risks to data security that have come to light over the last week from US-based cloud providers, I'm wondering which jurisdictions offer the greatest protections to cloud-based services such as hosting and email, and are least likely to cave in if faced by legal and other pressures from the prying eyes of US intelligence?

Close partners to the US like the UK and Australia seem to be out of the question. What about Iceland?

Sadly, I feel the need to say at this point: my reason for asking is simply that I value my privacy!