skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are yo trying to imply that because the matter is not straightforward, it shouldn't be dealt with?

The whole act of "gathering foreign intelligence" seems very immoral to me. Saying that everybody does it is no justification, neither is saying that it is a requirement for national security, because national security threats, as I see it, in the US, are a consequence of US the invasive and offensive foreign politics and military presence. While I understand that there's an inherent need for national security, I fail to see how that justifies breaching the privacy of foreign/domestic targets if the same issue can be dealt with by changing the stance on foreign nations through foreign and military politics.

Just as it is immoral for me to probe around my neighbours house to see if he has plans to break into mine, it is immoral to breach foreign security measures even if they are digital. Things like this should not be just shrugged at, be the perpetrator US, Chinese, Russian or Middle-Eastern.
> NSA-proof encryption exists.

Yup. Except it's not that easy.

Let's say that you're using OTR to provide very strong end-to-end encryption for a conversation between yourself and a buddy, Bob. Maybe he's in a hostile area, and you're worried that if his government sniffs his traffic, that he could be executed for speaking to Americans.

Data in transit that is intercepted, if configured correctly, is almost certainly safe. No one will be able to immediately decrypt it because of the strong encryption.

So are you safe?

Probably not. The next step that government would take would be to raid your friend Bob's apartment, arrest him, and take his hard disk. His OTR key (and, if using Pidgin, account credentials in plaintext if stored) is plainly available on the disk. You now have the private key.

But what if he used Truecrypt or PGP full-disk encryption? His data would be safe from decryption then, right?

Sort of. If they're trying to break the actual encryption, they'd likely be unable to do so. Unfortunately, the weak point for Truecrypt disks or volumes isn't the crypto... it's the passphrase. The passphrase can be brute-forced significantly more easily than breaking the encryption itself. Furthermore, as xkcd so accurately pointed out, a hostile government will throw you in prison (or, worse, hit you repeatedly with a wrench) until you divulge your passphrase and data.

Encryption is great, and I encourage everyone to use reliably strong crypto. Will that keep your data safe from the criminals that stole your work laptop? Absolutely. Will it keep your data safe from the NSA? You're kidding yourself.
I wrote a simple service in Go that takes <11MB RAM and can handle 7500 requests/sec. That was a fast one-off when playing around. I've never had even a simple Sinatra app run half that fast.
Fair point. XSS likely wouldn't be a problem in the case of a desktop email client. But in the case of a Gmail or Outlook.com frontend, I can see how you would be concerned about something in the js served up by Google or MS capturing the private key and sending it to the server.

That said, couldn't this be mitigated by having a strong passphrase on the private key? How hard is the wrapper to attack?

Also, couldn't security researchers easily monitor the packets on this process and sound the alarm should they find that the js served up by Google or Microsoft suddenly starts sending private keys to the server?
And there are Biopython, Biohaskell etc., but from what I saw there this is more about bioinformatics (e.g., focus on gene sequencing). I don't know whether those are the problems the parent was talking about. From my experience (interviews) with labs it's more about the workflow (often pretty pre-computer) and quick&dirty software with terrible UI.
You latched onto rape specifically, presumably because it's the easiest one to claim skepticism about reporting rates (although I still find it very difficult to believe that men don't rape at least 10 times more than women). But what about murder? I suspect murder is much more accurately reported.
I don't doubt the price will drop as they become more popular (it's probably a few dollars worth of raw hardware), but right now it's a fairly niche product.

"a campaign where the cost per unit goes down as they reach certain sales goals."

That's an interesting idea. It gives purchasers an incentive to promote the campaign, as opposed to "early bird" specials which incentivises early purchasers, but almost disincentivises later purchasers.

This has been done on Kickstarter and software bundles like MacHeist in the form of "unlocking" additional rewards, but I don't think I've ever seen them actually lower the price if they hit certain goals.
> You are not smarter than 3.5 billions of life evolution

That makes a great bumper sticker, but I don't buy it.

Evolution isn't directed. Humans are the product of something that happened to survive in some very specific circumstances. Lots of other things did too: sloths, flies, sea sponges. I'd rather be me than a sea sponge. Maybe there's a potential X that would rather be an X than me.

There are no evolutionary pressures on "I'd rather be".
On the contrary, article says he rejected the Revel framework, used pat for his routes, and handwritten go for the rest.
I want one badly, but this is simply too expensive. $100 for that little device in plastic and $300 (3x more) for it in metal? Outrageous.
Why not simply make the cryptographically secure service opt-in?
Compiled, concurrency/parallelism-focused language is more performant than a dynamically typed, interpreted language in a micro benchmark. News at 11.

While it'd be great to get to the point where you need to worry a lot about performance, the reality is that most projects won't ever get there. Some of us will fail quite a few times before getting to the point of having to worry about Ruby-specific performance issues.

Don't get me wrong, I have really enjoyed playing with Go. I just think we have a tendency to geek out about "performance", when it's not nearly as important as productivity/maintainability for most of us.

Apologies for the rant, but these benchmarks are just short of useless, and I wish we would spend more time "benchmarking" ease of development, maintainability, and talent availability.
"we are loosing the narrative we need to remind them all to be scared"

Irony for the day: There is well-known term for someone who attempts to effect political change by making the general public fear the violent consequences of not acceding.
> But I don't think it's fair to call the Libertarian movement "an extreme right wing movement".

A good response to people who say that is to point out that there is nothing wrong with being "extreme." That word is just being used as an emotional smear tactic. "Extreme" basically means the same thing as "pure" or "principled," which are both potentially good things. (Ayn Rand has an essay that points all this out, it's not my idea.)

The guy may have a legitimate (to his view) objection, but it's that libertarians are extreme right, not extreme right. (Or, extreme anti-progressive if you want to reject the left-right terminology, which I pretty much agree with you on).
So a statically typed compiled language is quicker than Ruby... Not exactly shocking. Ruby's advantage isn't in its speed, but in how easy and quick it is to get things done.
>Yeah, so vastly superior that they can't even convince their enterprise customers to adopt their latest platforms (phones, tabets) and operating system (Windows 8).

If you have ever worked in a corporate world, you will realize the main motto is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Windows 8 doesn't add anymore to their value that what XP and Windows 7 does. Also, Windows 8 was built with consumer centric point of view.

>do you realize that the Kinect technology was developed outside of Microsoft?

The chip was but not most of the software. There has been a lot of work that went into it. As someone who is interested in Imaging Algorithms, what is the next best alternative? OpenCV? It hasn't moved a square peg in almost a decade and I am glad this stagnation is ending or changing because of Kinect.

Did you know Youtube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Driverless Car, heck even android was all built on top of already bought technologies? However, there was a lot of work put into them just like the Kinect and I am not going to belittle that.
I'm confused: couldn't this information be requested directly from the phone companies?
You can be killed by a 9V battery? How? Not from the charge I hope (not sarcastic).
Not so. Nothing stops Linux distros defaulting to mail and file systems that encrypt everything by default, but the reality is that most people can't be bothred. I certainly can't, and I don't feel like putting myself out to encrypt everything in order to make it popular. As has been pointed out, the metadata of who you email and phone, while not probative in the same fashion as the contents of calls and emails, are nevertheless a significant source of data, and encryption won't alter that without major changes to the architecture of mail.
Because the vast majority of people like privacy in theory but not enough to spend the hour it would take to learn how to encrypt their email and documents.

Seriously, how many HN users have spent hours complaining about privacy on here but still don't encrypt their own email? This isn't to excuse anything illegal the US gov't might be doing, but if it matters as much to people as they say you'd think they'd have at least taken some immediate action.
I'm not surprised given creepy sites like these out there:

http://couchbangs.wordpress.com
"You may request a waiver of fees. Under the FOIA fee waivers are limited to situations in which a requester can show that the disclosure of the requested information is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations and activities of the government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester."

Sounds like that applies to most everyone to me!
I don't think he can do too much damage brain wise - the effects of the noninvasive transcranial magnetic/direct current stimulation only last for a few hours anyway.

The bigger issue is potentially getting skin burns by not getting the circuitry hooked up correctly. Or maybe frying your electronic gadgets if you have a magnetic stim device. I guess maybe you could theoretically trigger seizures if you have epilepsy, but in that case you'd be seeing a doctor regularly anyway and wouldn't have to DIY these things.
This has come up in the past on HN. As I understand it the newspaper story is bull. As for advancements in technology the answer is likely no - producing that technology requires an entire toolchain/industry that the NSA is unlikely to replicate with its size. The only shot the NSA has at pulling ahead of us is with entirely mathematical things like crypto (which they did at least in the 70s with differential cryptanalysis). With math you can simply hire a bunch of smart people and throw them in a room together which is much less capital intensive than the massive, fundamental research needed to advance technology ahead of the industry.
Sure. A 128 bit key is 2^128 or 3.4e38.

Numbers about total world computing power (most of it probably stuck in GPUs doing windows animations and playing Call of Duty) bandied about are in the Ne18ish ops/sec range, age of the universe is in the 4e17 range.

And I have a great deal of margin by treating a 'decrypt and verify' operation as a 'basic operation' and using a completely preposterous time period like the age of the universe instead of say, 10,000 years. Nobody is brute-forcing 128 bit keys anytime soon, that's a pretty basic mathematical and physical given. But if you're particularly paranoid, you can just as easily use 256 bit keys - nobody is brute-forcing those until we hit the singularity and become a galaxy-encompassing brain. Even then it might give us a serious, millennia-long headache.
Why doesn't something like this affect the University of Michigan's tax exempt status? http://compliance.umich.edu/tax/tax.html
‘If Obama has nothing to hide he has nothing to fear,’ says Stockman

That is a soundbite I would love to hear repeated ad nauseum. Replacing Obama with every politician, CEO, and 3-letter agency head.
We already have wireheading, but the surgery is too invasive for it to be anything but an obscure curiosity.
HTML5 For Game Studios
For a little bit of fairness, shouldn't he at least be comparing Sinatra, not Rails? And where's the source code so we can compare the other part of this: developer effort.
had some good results with 99Designs http://99designs.com/
also do check http://dribbble.com/
This is sort of like saying we at zero risk of having Chinese nuclear missiles sent our way. It's true and it misses the point :-). Congress isn't going to cut the NSAs budget off, but they can. So they have some negotiating leverage with regard to the NSA's behavior. They have used that leverage in the past to achieve concessions from intelligence agencies on their activities and how they disclose their activities. The last bright-light scandal of this magnitude was the 'Iran-Contra' affair. It's useful to see how the CIA and Congress interacted prior to that scandal and after that scandal.
Their complete disinterest aside, are there seriously more of them than each of the two major parties? and will vote for the new party, which is committed to doing unpopular things?
If you genuinely do not understand why humans almost universally do this, I can offer some ideas. One is temporal proximity. The NSA leaks are very recent in time, while other arguably more important problems have been around forever. There's also physical proximity (people aren't dying of hunger much in the Western world), likelihood of affecting change (people may think that political action right now can help with the NSA issues, but probably gave up on protesting foreign policy or the drug war years ago), topicality (Jobs' death may not be more important than world hunger, but it's proportionally more directly relevant to this community), etc.
I'm surprised to see a Lib Dem signatory

So was I, until I recognised who it was. I don't understand exactly what Lord Carlile's position is or was in relation to government office and terrorism, but his publicly stated views seem to be about as authoritarian and illiberal as you could get.
And what has ignorance of basic logical fallacies like "appeal to authority" caused?

Chomsky is a legendary linguist, a rightly deserved reputation, but that doesn't give him automatic credibility outside of linguistics.
10x is not enough to justify. I really expected around 50-100x.
And they are fairly broad

http://www.sec.gov/foia/nfoia.htm
> . But I've seen some Pirates describe them as a "progressive" party, and I'm pretty skeptical of "progressives" and their policy positions.

I agree with you. They are a progressive party, they are anti-individual rights, and that's why they have "Pirate" (literally a thief) in their name.

The cause of liberty cannot be advanced by backing movements that do not base their ideas on a rational foundation.
From wikipedia: [.no] domain registrations are limited to organizations with a presence in Norway and registration at the Brønnøysund Register Centre.
According to the US treasury China held 1.265 trillions of dollars of securities [1]. I't not many trillions, but it is quite a large number and if you follow the link, you'll see that it is also the largest holder.

[1] http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/ti...
"The largest foreign holder of U.S. debt is China, which owns more about $1.2 trillion in bills, notes and bonds, according to the Treasury."
- http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/moneymatters/ss/How-Much-US-De...
Opposition parties are essential for clawing at the scandals of the other side. You can't count on them for "truth," but that doesn't make them useless.
> Is there literally no potential for artificial selection to outpace natural selection?

Of course there's potential and loopholes but the basic observation (dubbed 'Algernon's law' by some; I've written an entire essay on the topic: http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics ) seems sound for tDCS: it's such a trivial intervention that it shouldn't work, which suggests there must be some catch.

The catch may well be trivial from our modern perspective, in the same way that staying up late or using stimulants and so burning some more calories is a trivial catch from the modern perspective ("'oh no', said the fat American man, 'you mean X might cause me to burn some more calories? how awful'"), but until the catch has been identified, tDCS has not been fully understood.
The OP's contention was that government computational resources and the progress of technology itself make currently-available, robust encryption technology worthless. This is inaccurate.

The fact that someone can beat a key out of you is not what is usually meant by 'brute forcing' a key, in a cryptographic context.
Puma (http://puma.io/) is multithreaded, but only JRuby and Rubinius support concurrent execution - standard MRI/YARV have a global VM lock just like Python.
I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe
There's a link to the darwinawards site on the subreddit. Apparently it was a Navy service member that stuck the electrodes into his fingers and the current traveled through the bloodstream across his heart.

Sounds like an urban legend, but if you read the back and forth on it, it's rather interesting.
Weren't there cases of the government forcing people to give them their passphrase in the US already? Somehow I seem to remember something like this very vaguely.
I suppose you could potentially choke on it. Darwin was right you know.
> As I understand it the newspaper story is bull

Could you clarify what you mean by this?

And yeah, I should have been more clear in my original question; I was lumping mathematical advances under "technology".
The internal electrical resistance of your tissues is a lot lower than the resistance provided by your skin. If you puncture your skin with electrodes a 9V battery can generate enough current to stop your heart.
So there's already a tDCS helmet headed toward the consumer market sometime in the next couple of months, aimed at "gamers" because that doesn't really look as suspicious as making health claims.

http://foc.us
That is the most remarkably stupid statement I have read all day.
No. It's the services industry. At best you can call it software services industry. It's not software development industry.
Why iOS 7 Doesn’t Have Shadows
>Seriously, how many HN users have spent hours complaining about privacy on here but still don't encrypt their own email?

I would think that most HN users would be willing to encrypt their email, but know they can't convince their friends/family/etc to do so. Encryption takes two to tango.
>This has come up in the past on HN. As I understand it the newspaper story is bull.

Pretty much. The same effect that causes stars to twinkle limits the resolution of space-based spy satellites imagery of the ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_seeing
No, I'm suggesting samstave is a conspiracy theorist. If Noam Chomsky has articulated the same view (and yes, I see what you did there), then I'd call him a conspiracy theorist too. On politics he's a complete bullshit artist - and I say that because he's a leader in his academic field. He would never accept a paper from a student or another linguist that was as fallacious as the sort of political essays he writes; he clearly understands the concept of academic rigor, but declines to practice it in his political activities. Total hypocrite.
NAVY TO DROP ALL CAPS MESSAGING
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/12/navy-to-drop-all-caps-communications/
You're right, I was coming at it presuming they don't want to address this issue. But I think I have a good case for that. These programs pump a lot of money into the defense industry, which they are beholden to. I don't see that changing. I could be wrong about that, but they are a strong lobby.
To make it truly effective, you'd be sending your true message steganographically encoded in otherwise unexceptional text about business matters.
Microsoft Waits to Fix Your Software Bugs So the NSA Can Use Them First
These are openly available, highly reviewed algorithms - their adoption as standards, too, is done by a process of open competition. And it's probably safe to say that the amount of research and analysis being done on them in the open exceeds that done in secret by government agencies by a wide margin.
Al Qaeda on the Speed-Dial
Definitely. When you have a life sentence coming your way (like in Manning's case) anything goes. If this is a way for him to protect himself, then it is a decision we should respect, because this is the price to be paid for his other revelations.
Sorry for the late reply. I am just guessing that it was the shared fp, since that's what i thought the major shared resource was. The workloads were bog standard kind of stuff, so i assume mostly integer work, so it's absolutely possible that it wasn't the fp sharing but something else. I thought that the integer cores all had their own registers though? Never the less, I don't know enough about cpu internals to say - I was just assuming.
Huh? You don't typically have an array of primitives? Says who?

In Java, with the exception of String[], you would normally only use an array with primitives. If you're working with objects you would want to use a different data structure such as a linked list.
Dan Martell's story - from rehab to San Francisco [audio]
sorry for the late reply - that machine was using bulldozer cores, not piledriver. Also I was exaggerating for effect I guess, that thing has left a bad taste in my mouth. What I really mean is that when compared to a mainstream i7 it sucks - you can effectively put twice as much work on the i7, and it has the added bonus of being able to run a cpu hungry single threaded job basically twice as fast as the bulldozer when there isn't much/any cpu contention.
Browser plugins are good, but they do not solve the problem most people have complained about to me: that they cannot check their mail on their friend's computers, at the library, etc. Hushmail is snake oil, I would not recommend it to anyone and I doubt that it is even relevant to the problem at hand (how to communicate privately in a world of NSLs).
RPI announces $60M Institute for Data Exploration & Apps
I'd like to think that's true, but I doubt it. I bet tons of HN users run in the same circles as other HN users and communicate regularly, but never even consider encrypting their emails.
Yes. Their previous CEO, Joseph Nacchio, was in prison for not cooperating. Heard he's been moved to a halfway house? Not sure on that though.
Without wanting to be rude about anon1385 (who I'm sure does know his shit), I'm not sure he said anything particularly insightful. I'd have had pretty much the same ideas that he had (though wouldn't have articulated them so well), and while I do have a general interest in politics, I really don't do a good job staying up-to-date on current affairs, so for the most part my knowledge is reasonable but not at all detailed.

Perhaps if you yourself are not in the UK then that's why you ask, as I guess foreigners would need to more specifically try harder to keep up to date with our politics than we do here (even with my loose following of current afairs, the papers I read are written with a UK focus, the topical news quizzes I watch on TV are UK focused, etc.)