skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
JS-Git Needs Your Help
I think I'm missing the point - is this supposed to suggest that these people complaining have no right to do so unless they're also elite designers?
Nice work. Provisioning should be just this easy.
This is not the first time America has been at war with non-state actors.
Aspects were not the feature they touted as the reason to move. That would be decentralization. But the parent post said there were literally no features besides privacy, and I wanted to point out that that isn't strictly true.
A lot of Tor is filed deeply in 'Internet Black Magic™" for me, but my understanding of it is such that if someone who wants to identify you happens to have access to the exit node you are connected to, you can be identified.

That is about the best I can do.

I'm actually curious as to what others say about this as well though!
They don't in the slightest. Check out Sweden's FRA laws. They're even more invasive than PRISM.
Curious why there's a delta of level 4 & 5 under 6?
It's not being done in a particularly smart way; Web Crypto has more to do with enabling pure-web plugin-free streaming media than with enabling secure browser-based PGP.
Apple didn't innovate.

They are following the trends set by others (Microsoft and Google) and I think that is what is infuriating designers.
Hey, sorry about this. we figure that while we could do something about an XSS attack, this is something we'd leave. We did clean a lot of comments and chat messages which were extreme. Framebench is meant to be private, so while this may happen in a demo, it certainly won't when within an organization. Thanks for pointing it out though! :)
AFAIK, Sweden doesn't host gmail or facebook servers.
Draper University Accepts Bitcoins for Tuition
I don't know enough about what happened with Snowden to have an opinion about him one way or another; I'm just not of the opinion that leaks are by default heroic.
Looks interesting, definitely will give it a go.

Can anyone suggest other mail clients worth trying out? I'm tired of Mail.app these days.
Fascinating. What are some other websites like this? Are there any that were created right after the 1997 memorandum and then never updated?
I think it looks fine. The icons only need to be proportioned a little better with regards to the grid they used for the designs, and the translucency could be dialed down slightly.

Other than that, it looks great. It's amazing how nobody complains about the preschool look of Windows Phone 8, but when iOS icons have a slight disproportion to them, everybody loses their minds.
And then you get Slashdotted. Good luck paying the bills.
The problem Google has is that a huge number of their users -- those in foreign countries -- have (finally) realised what has been public knowledge for years: they have no legal protection at all from the US government examining data Google holds about them and that Google readily comply with such requests and aren't really in a position to do much else. 'Telling the truth' involves restating this truth in the full glare of worldwide publicity. The more they try to reassure americans that everything they did was 'legal'[1] and only targeted foreigners, the more foreigners they alienate.

So from a PR perspective I don't see how Google can fix this unless US law substantially changes (or they employ crypto on the users side but that undermines the economics of much of their business).

[1] I'm not convinced that it is legal under EU data protection law and Google does have a presence in the EU, but I'm no lawyer.
I'm not sure the Humble Bundle model works well for SaaS.
> It is a low view of the NSA to think that they do not have the ability to real-time decrypt SSL certs from every major SSL cert authority.

For most SSL certs this is probably true, but Google uses perfect forward secrecy which makes this very unlikely if not damn near impossible: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-...
Ask HN: how to verify users identity (background check)?
As I am building my marketplace startup, I would need to verify the identity of my user before I send them ACH for their payment.

I am curious to find out what and how you would use in term of verifying your user identity. I understand like airbnb is using offline identity (passport or driver license), taskrabbits are using background check (sterling info systems), I think Zaarly is also using some background check as well.

if using background check firms, who would you recommend that is startup friendly in term of integration and cost?

Thanks.
Some people who run corporate intranets have long used self-signed certs for this reason. You don't need quantum cryptography to do this.
I text, call, check email, and web all while driving and I bet at least 95% of people on HN do too.

If you want this to stop then invent a new way to communicate.
I think much of the controversy has been made far too abstract, allowing differences of semantics and emphasis to create unnecessary disagreement. Most of these debates are endlessly frustrating, and the only productive discussions I've seen have been very concrete about a specific product or decision.
What does it mean that it "concerns you"?
Unfortunately if they want to get the cushy lobbying or corporate job when they're out they're going to have to play ball during their last term.
'Financialization' as a Cause of Economic Malaise
Four Reasons Google Bought Waze
> It is a low view of the NSA to think that they do not
> have the ability to real-time decrypt SSL certs from
> every major SSL cert authority.

The technology required to break SSL is sufficiently advanced that any organization possessing it would probably have easier ways to collect data, all of which would grossly outmatch all known security precautions. There would be no need for any of these sneaking-around stuff because breaking SSL is an instant win condition.
A FAQ. Those are the people currently at that level.
Yes, but last I heard the population was not considered healthy either (something about a facial cancer that can be passed from animal to animal)...so give is a few months and the statement might be correct.
Thanks a lot for this oneye! You're right we've had people sign up for our enterprise plans more than we'd expected. But we felt that this is the rift price point today because we want to make this available to every creator whos collaborating.

We go after the high net worth users with our enterprise plans that offer a higher degree of customization and integration.
Bloodconnection.tk review and feedback.
In africa like the rest of the world,People die daily due to loss of blood and not getting a donor in time.During my enquiry,I was told that patients who needs blood have to look for donor themselves.Having experienced this first hand,I came up with a website named bloodconnection.tk that connects blood donor to patients(you can check it out) in Africa.I will like to have some feedback on the site(bloodconnection.tk).
When is Mozilla going to make a Thunderbird addon for Firefox?
A voluntary registry, but point still taken.
> you're doing it not in some hypothetical utopian future

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I really hope it is.
FYI all of the things in the bundle are for new users only. I just tried to use the Twilio credit but they said trial accounts only. Refresh the page and notice that under every company it now says new users only. I was just hoping for a steep discount on many of the services I use. Teaches me to read the fine print I guess.
shutdown -h now?
> However, all new guns are (since 1968) purchased from a licensed dealer, so there is always the beginning of a paper trail.

My understanding is that there is technically an exception to this where you can manufacture your own firearms so long as you stay under the yearly limit and do not manufacture them with the intent of distributing them. Once you have done so, you can then distribute them as a private citizen.

That reads weird because the legality of distributing it depends on if you can assert that distribution was not your intent when you made it. This means this is probably not a very practical exception, as it potentially involves you arguing something rather nebulous in court.
Presumably all it would take would be Google, Apple, or even Mozilla to do something more real on their own. I'd probably bet on the Chrome doing it more than anyone else.
That book documents so much eye opening failure. Google book search for the phrase "ultra-discreet surveillance".
SoftBank Raises Bid for Sprint to $21.6 Billion
They are almost gone (down to an estimated 10K) but they were almost wiped out by disease once before and the population bounced back.
You can have an opinion as a random moron posting on the Internet. Don't expect anyone to give a damn about it.
Download George Orwell 1984 Audiobook and PDF For Free
I thought these links would be relevant for anyone who hasn't read the book.

AudioBook:
http://archive.org/details/George-Orwell-1984-Audio-book

PDF:
http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/1984.pdf
From http://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/06/10/good-luck-with-that/

The publicly available tools for making yourself anonymous and free from surveillance are woefully ineffective when faced with a nationstate adversary. We don’t even know how flawed our mental model is, let alone what our counter-surveillance actions actually achieve. As an example, the Tor network has only 3000 nodes, of which 1000 are exit nodes. Over a 24hr time period a connection will use approximately 10% of those exit nodes (under the default settings). If I were a gambling man, I’d wager money that there are at least 100 malicious Tor exit nodes doing passive monitoring. A nation state could double the number of Tor exit nodes for less than the cost of a smart bomb. A nation state can compromise enough ISPs to have monitoring capability over the majority of Tor entrance and exit nodes.

Other solutions are just as fragile, if not more so.

Basically, all I am trying to say is that the surveillance capability of the adversary (if you pick a nationstate for an adversary) exceeds the evasion capability of the existing public tools. And we don’t even know what we should be doing to evade their surveillance.
Show HN: node module for backing up node.js files and recovering them
IIRC that condition has been around a few years now. The devil may not be in great shape, but I don't think demise is imminent.
What kind of comment is that? What do you think it means?

I'll give you a hint and tell you one of the things it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean "surprises me".
You do have a point there! We kept it to be a good starting point of low resistance.
I can't think of any single topic more important to the health of the Internet as we know it then this, right now. Sorry to be harsh, but dismissing these discussions as merely "politics" is short-sighted and naive.
This is something that really, desperately confuses me. Apple is supposedly the king of intuitive design, and yet here, you have literally the first interface people will see on the phone, with an interaction model which is completely impossible to intuit, and only works for people who are already trained in how to complete the action.

I get the desire to eliminate depth, but that little slide gutter and right-pointing arrow tell you exactly what you need to know. The iOS7 UI instructs you to do the wrong thing!
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
I think if you are going to throw out criticism like this and you yourself are a designer then you should provide some samples of your own work for critique; in an ideal world each would provide their own 'superior' iOS design, or at the minimum a design for a particular feature (icons, use of color, etc).
I'm implementing git in JavaScript to bring more independence to developers on more devices. This will enable more apps to have distributed data that works fully offline and doesn't require cloud services to work.

One benefit of this as mentioned in the fundraiser text is to build developer environments for kids.

But another benefit that's less obvious and very relevant to this week's news is it moves power back into the hands of the users of software. Much of software has been moving to the cloud in recent years and most new devices can only work with cloud data. You can't even log into a chromebook, surface, android tablet, or iPad without registering with some online service and giving them your personal details.

If you want to write some software on these devices you have to use the device like a thin-client and be at the mercy of your internet connection and some cloud service (like online IDEs). The platforms, for the most part, don't allow much local work to be done.

They do all allow JavaScript and have some form of network connection and persistent storage. By implementing git in pure javascript we'll be able to build tools that work completely offline, peer-to-peer or, if desired, with cloud based systems. I believe the owner of the hardware and software, the author of the code, should decide how and where it gets distributed.

But I need funding to complete this project. I have a house, a wife and 3 kids to take care of. I've quit my paying work so that I can make time to finish js-git. It's getting close, but I need just a little more time to finish it to be something useful.

If you care about giving control back to the user or believe in enabling kids and think this is a useful way to accomplish this, please back me and/or spread the word.
iOS7 design is weak, with reason. This page is just quoting tweets, but there many in-depth criticism on the many obvious flaws everywhere on the blogosphere.

From the objective to the subjective:

- Complete redesign makes it too different from iOS 6 and OS X, throws away all learnability

- Icons have no consistency whatsoever

- Toolbar icons are so abstract as to be useless

- Legibility suffers from Helvetica Light on bright white, everywhere

- Got rid of affordances, you don't know what is a button anymore (same mistake as WP and some Google apps)

- Control panel is a mess

- Color palette is poor and tacky. You have a true to life display to work with, but limit yourself to primary and secondary, over-saturated hues... just stupid

To be fair, usability increased in many places as in multi-tasking and better use of gesture, although that's hardly innovation - they are just copying tried and true interactions from software both on iOS platform (e.g. Gmail for iOS, Mailbox) and others (webOS, Android).

Overall the UI looks like designed by someone who designs print media and has no clue what they are doing.

This article wraps it up: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/275a56688510
Related: I take it there is no maintained open source SMB server that isn't GPL3 these days? Sucks since apple abandoned samba2. How stupid would it be to use apple's old samba2 for an appliance? (guess: very?)
I get ads from Taco Bell on my Waze.
Facebook does have servers in Sweden: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/31/facebook_swedish_dat...
Tiny Cortex-A8 COM runs Linux and Android, goes for $27
Woah, thanks a lot! Would really appreciate if you tell your friends about it. Thanks again!
What about Google Voice or a localized alternative for a virtual phone number? Worst case - burner phone.

Another thing to keep in mind: even if you "delete" your profile, given the situation there's zero guarantee that all copies of the data will be destroyed.
I agree with most you say. For me the question was more "could the NSA gain access at Google?" instead of "would the NSA gain access at Google?". If the Chinese could gain access to version control from the outside, then the NSA being on the "inside" shouldn't face a lot more problems. Else they could always try it from the outside.

A lot of confusion seems to stem from "direct access" and "collected directly from the server" anyway. I personally don't believe the NSA would ever install a backdoor at Google. There are probably other ways that don't involve direct access that are more in compliance with the law (which should be the main focus).
InternMatch raises $4M to bring big data to the college job search
Care to provide a citation for that?

You're painting the people involved as dishonest, which may or may not be true. But to assess that, the source of alternative information to be considered. And "elsewhere" is not a good source.
Loupe: Etsy's New Monitoring Stack
Why risk giving data to Russia/China when we have duckduckgo?
Just curious, is there anywhere in the constitution that it says it only applies to US citizens?
Proposed anti-surveillance symbol:
Airdrop didn't work for me last night (to a new Macbook Pro) BUT I haven't installed the latest OS X update so maybe that was it. Weather app (built in) crashed on me. And the wife says eBay's app crashes on her.
Definitely. I was using Waze just the other day on a trip with my wife down to Los Angeles. Fortunately, I was the passenger and guiding my wife through traffic. Two things struck me about Waze:

1) It requires a lot of attention to use.
2) It's not that accurate. I mean, I figured it would be collecting data from Waze users and marking the roads with heavy traffic. But, that wasn't really the case. It DID mark some roads with traffic, but it wasn't accurate at all. Most of the accuracy came from people self reporting traffic data, and that was a cumbersome task. I don't recommend people doing it while driving.
Moving structured and unstructured data (Oracle, SQLServer, Hadoop, etc..)
Turns out it's more than that. They really really care about this tagline:

http://www.apple.com/designed-by-apple/
The movement that limits individual liberty in the service of the greater good also creates a system that could provide turnkey tyranny. Today is different than the 1930's and '40s, but human nature hasn't changed one bit. Is it worth the risk?
why not configure your own zsh?
Sparsebundles aren't diffed in Time Machine (what would they diff against?); and backups are only done in whole-file increments, not at a block level.
I work in information security for a large international corporation, and I can add another anecdote to back up yours. We've discussed the news informally as a curiosity, but there's no business drive to really do anything about it. We're not trying to hide our business operations from the government, we're trying to hide them from our competitors. You're absolutely correct that businesses care about security from civilians more than security from governments.

With that, the push won't happen unless our customers start demanding our cloud-based solutions are free from government snooping. In my employer's industry, I doubt that would happen. However, we have gained compliance with many industry standards that we don't necessarily need to be complaint with just because our customers demanded it. It's not the big businesses that will be demanding a change, it's the customers of those businesses. If enough customers care, things will change. If the customers don't care, then nothing will be done.
Ask HN: Review my startup, planza.com
Maxwell's Demon in action - the Vortex Tube separates hot and cold air.
It's a great idea - is there any word as to whether it's patented/patentable, or might we see this on other OSes?
I wonder if they are doing anything to further reduce SSD usage in the OS that will help. Many of the tips people use to reduce wear and tear on their SSDs (noatime, journaling, sleep image, etc.) seemingly would have further benefit to saving on power.
This is one of the reason we favour hosted services as much as possible. If the rest of the team has account on the service, you can likely solve your problems without relying on a single person.
Ask HN: AOL owns a domain name I could really use. How to get it?
To be honest, the domain is worth more than I can afford. Can anyone offer any sort of strategy suggestion as to how to approach this?

They are not using the domain.
Preach all you want. Pass all the laws you want. People will do this because they can and they want to. The only real way to mitigate it is through innovation. Not by telling adults on the internet what they can and cannot do or by passing draconian laws telling people when they are allowed to communicate.
You're right, it is very unclear. My concern (and what seems to be Snowden's concern as well) is that business is going to keep going on as usual and everyone will let this slide.

I don't think its your duty to do something more unless you really want to change things. That being said, doing something to really stand out, like boycotting those PRISM companies until they change their policies, wouldn't be in the fiduciary interests of your investors.

It's a tough position to be in I think, and that's why I think it's bitter sweet. Mo money, mo problems.
Well, they can judge the icons by screenshots. I personally sometimes think that I am on acid when I look at the icons in IOS 7. Other than that no objections on the changes to "how things work" whatsoever.
I'm really glad someone mentioned this. I think by getting away from skeuomorphism Apple will be able to really innovate new design concepts and functionality for iOS7 and future iOS versions.
Recursively deleting everything.
Who gets my vote come election time.
The OP isn't a Silent Circle employee.

There are a couple of us who are HN regulars, but we avoid submitting links to our own site (we figure if it's of interest, it'll get submitted... if it's not, we should fix that...)

To your point about open source... We still have a little ways to go (it's not updated as often as we'd like), but much of our code is available.

https://github.com/SilentCircle
when has this not been the case? heck, iOS was just a less-useful PalmOS clone at the start (with better default apps and hardware).
"With the new funding, the seven-person company plans to build out its engineering team, with the goal of using big data to help students and employers find potential matches."

Sounds like the InternMatch team is orchestrating two great plays in one - a shifting focus to early employment (beyond just internships) and a matching algorithm (better matches/placement).

It'll be interesting to watch how this unfolds in the bigger job-market space. Huge market, huge value, and some strong competition. Best of luck to the IM team.
Senator Biden On NSA Database (2006) [video]
What if your car had a slot into which you were required to insert your phone in order to operate the vehicle.
NRO has some Flash games. There's also ATF for kids, CIA for kids, US Marshals Service for kids ...
Transcript: http://votesmart.org/public-statement/295064/cbs-early-show-...

MR. SMITH: Well, the president, though, said yesterday, we're not listening to the phone calls; we're just looking for patterns.

SEN. BIDEN: Harry, I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to; I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.

---

Mind blown. I think history just went into an infinite loop because it EXACTLY repeated itself in just seven years.
..it already is.
E.g. german companies with a data protection comissioners/officers usually don't store data outside EU coutries, since the data protection level is considered to be to low.

§4b Abs.2 S.2 Bundesdatenschutzgesetz prohibits conveyance of personal data outside EU borders if the interest of persons concerned outweighs it (mostly it does).

This PRISM-surveillance substantiates those concerns.