skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The small-scale proof-of-concept mentioned seems a little flawed to me...the surface area => volume ratio of a small rock can't be compared to a boulder. The ice collar formed inside a tupperware container is also very idealized compared to the ice layer that would form in nature. I guess if the ice collar were thick enough, maybe it's possible, but that's quite an ice build-up you would need. It doesn't seem too hard to get a large-scale experiment going to confirm some of this...Myth Busters needs to get on this.

Until then, my theory is that this phenomenon is brought to you by the same kind of people that make crop circles :P
Snowden's Chinese Fans
Saying Facebook is just a place for sharing photos and links is like saying Google.com is just a place for looking up links.

You can understate it as much as you want but at the end of the day Facebook connects PEOPLE. Technology, whether it be Google, Facebook, or Apple, is about people and it seems to me you haven't figured that out yet.
How would he know what are lies? He isn't on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the 15 people in Congress privileged enough to know the truth.
For showerst's comment, he's basically saying that the idea of e.g. having a hardware store refuse to stock a screwdriver just because it was invented by a nuclear weapons development lab is a pretty slippery slope ethically.

After that we won't stock screwdrivers invented by the government (incl. EPA).

Then we won't stock screwdrivers invented by $UNDESIRABLE_GROUP.

That line of reasoning is why both the FSF and DFSG explicitly say that Free software cannot have terms-of-use restrictions. If it's free for one to use it should be free for all to use, even those you hate.

Accumulo is a tool. It's a tool that happened to be useful for NSA, but NSA is not the only group that has "Big Data" problems and so it makes no sense for Apache to punish the rest of us because Accumulo has a source that you personally don't like.
a program which marks the bleakest moment yet in the history of the Internet

Writes someone from the other side of the Great Firewall.
Redbus is a fantastic company and a true example to Indian entrepreneurs. I remember being at a meeting with Phanindra Sama (the CEO) and when asked why he didn't ask bus operators to sign an exclusive agreement with him, he replied that even if he had that in hand, if he didn't provide value, things would break down. Imagine if craigslist was run this way!

He had also mentioned car rental and hotels as potential future markets 5-10 years down the line, and I hope this acquisition enables him to pursue those fragmented markets!
This makes some sense. On personal experience, alcohol can facilitate group discussions too. It's social, everyone talks open ideas, and can stretch a little more. But it's much worse for deep thinking. It's also worse for thinking 2nd or 3rd order effects. (Or consequences)

Coffee is great for productivity, but it's very much a "Stay on target... Stay on target..." type of drink for me.

This is somewhat consistant with the article.
Slightly off topic: China must be very happy about this revelation. We (US) have been criticizing their "great firewall" for so long, but now it's revealed that we have our own program with similar motivations, only a different execution. Rather than burying and censoring information, this surveils your usage of certain information and calls you a terror threat when you step outside the lines.
It's actually really easy to fix with publicly funded elections, or other campaign finance reform.
Is your computer waking up in the middle of the night a sign that it's being accessed? I've seen this with my laptop often, I have Windows 7, and I didn't think twice about it. Now I'm thinking twice...
As a regular user of Redbus.in at my small firm, I have been a huge fan of what they've managed to accomplish with what is essentially a chaotic delivery layer. Big ups to the team at Redbus. Keep on truckin' :)
The icing on the cake is that Senate staff are prohibited from reading any classified materials Snowden leaked that are published in the press.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/06/14/senate-st...

(Legislators rely on their staff for input, research, background and assistance in making decisions)
term limits do not address the problem of money in politics.

They just create a bigger incentive for a revolving door between industry and legislative office.
"Just three companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook
—generated most of the new ideas (at least the
mainstream ones) and most of the business momentum.
(If I had more room and time, I’d work Amazon into
the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks
well behind the other three.) "

I find this puzzling. What great new ideas have emerged from Facebook, exactly? It's just one of multiple very similar social networks that prevailed through better execution and marketing.

On the other hand, Amazon has built amazing cloud services - which is impressive, considering that it started as an online book shop. And placing Facebook in the same sentence with Google when mentioning innovation is nothing short of ludicrous.
Tempmail.eu Free temporary email addresses
If I'm China, I don't care about how expensive the targets are, I just care whether keeping my death-grip on the Internet is worth the price of the ammunition.
The dumbest script-bound teenagers will appear "sophisticated" to the Washington Post. How you know this attacker wasn't sophisticated: the Washington Post "detected" them.

Note: as was pointed out downthread, I'm being sloppy; CBS "detected" them.
"I wind up hearing about how much time they spend just jumping through hoops to avoid looking at information they aren't supposed to."

If they didn't collect so much, it'd be easier to avoid the info they shouldn't be looking at.
Sprint and Verizon still don't except in 4G phones, and while IIRC t-mobile always did, AT&T/Cingular switched to them later on, and in 2004 still had a significant 1G network.
It seems that rather than attracting the best of the best to lead this country we managed to arrive at a process that reliably picks the most self serving crooks this country has to offer and allow them to run this country.

With a few exceptions nobody in congress seems to actually care even a bit about the people, but only how to drive the personal agenda forward.

It's the same in Europe. Apparently representatives are actually paid by attendance, so what they do is, they come to the session, sign in their names, and then leave.
Then how do we know that Clapper is lying? We're not on the Intel Committee either, are we? At least Sen. Paul gets invited to these things, we have no access at all, so Sen. Paul is still in a much better situation to call out Clapper on what we are all so convinced are a constant stream of lies.
Show HN: Filmgrain, a realtime movie + Twitter app
better solution: comprehensive campaign financing reform (e.g. all donations must be done by an individual, strict limits on the amount of financing, limits on the amount of advertising and type that candidates are allowed to do, public disclosure of donors, amounts, and campaign spending etc...)
Has no one ever noticed how poorly the leadership of our democracies are treated?

It's understood in the commercial sector that you have to pay (both on benefits, quality of work/life balance, pay, etc.) to attract and retain the best and brightest talent.

How can we all take that very important lesson and completely throw it away when considering the leadership of an entire nation?

I'm not sure I'd take Pres. Obama or Rep. Boehner's jobs for a million bucks, so how are we supposed to get the "best of the best" leading the country, when they're off leading the Fortune 500?

EDIT: People, there are reasons I mentioned things other than actual cash compensation when I referred to pay and benefits. You can almost literally watch the President of the United States age in front of your very eyes nowadays.... so I'm not saying the job of public service doesn't pay enough, I'm saying the job is so stressful that it's not possible to pay enough, as money quickly loses its motivational appeal once you make enough to live comfortably.
Where by "economically free" we include such freedoms as "ability to deploy child labor", "ability to pay workers below subsistence", "ability to create the equivalent of company towns", "ability to dump toxic waste into rivers", "ability to blot out the sun with airborne waste", and "availability of vast pool of rural poor workers". And by "free" we specifically ignore "can be imprisoned indefinitely for belonging to the wrong religion", and "police officers can arrest and sentence you to a year in prison without the involvement of a court or even a prosecutor".

Every time someone says something like "China is [or will soon be] freer than the US", what they're really saying is "I don't read, but I'm happy to divide the whole world into two sides: whoever supports my current biases, and whoever doesn't".
Shame it's hosted on Verizon.
mpyne - thanks for clarifying: I see it now. I've never been a fan of "slippery slope" arguments because once you start on them, you never know where they finish.

I know why FSF takes the line it does, I'm just saying it is a line that has taken us to a strange place where open source advocates are simultaneously supplying the NSA with services to carry out surveillance, defending the practice, but complaining about the surveillance.

And as for "Accumulo is a tool". That's kind of a "guns don't kill people" argument. Would you apply the same argument to private companies supplying authoritarian regimes with deep packet inspection software? I see little difference in the cases.
Slightly unrelated: this post seemed eerily familiar, so I googled the first sentence and realized why: it was posted on Medium, too. (https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f7fcb3b786b1)

This is, I think, the chief issue with services like Posthaven, Medium, and Svbtle: by buying into the centralized platform, it means that you're putting your valuable content on some other service instead of using it to further your personal/corporate brand. The simple solution is to repost it, but that leads to the same issues GameFAQs faced with popular titles released on multiple platforms: when the network is split, the network effect weakens and the discourse suffers.
And the US do not waterboard people it interrogated right?
What an insightful contribution.
Python, Scala, Haskell consistently good
Windows Update is, I believe, scheduled for 3am by default. If connected to AC, it can wake up your computer to install updates. You can look into this more with the powercfg command (from an Admin console).

powercfg -lastwake

"Computer waking up" is meaningless without controlling for updates and other factors, including dog/cat/mouse bumping into a mouse cable.
Are there good grounds for thinking it was ever much more "by the people for the people" than it is now?

Teddy Roosevelt's national parks.
a lot of the features mentioned in the post are available in vim plugins. not only that, but
How to fix "errno:13 Permission denied" in MongoDB
Regarding the direct tapping into the fiber cables, does using SSL have any effect on it?

(in case it's not obvious, I'm a cryptography n00b)
RIP Twitter API 1.0
Xinhua is the official news outlet of China; they're China's Pravda. They aren't doing Snowden any favors in the US by writing this, but, of course, that's not the point.
Because it doesn't affect you or any other person or organization that doesn't have legitimate access to classified information.

The key words here are "unclassified government systems". There are rules and procedures to make sure that the classified stuff stays on the classified systems, and one of those, very sensibly, is that classified stuff shouldn't be on the unclassified systems.
Zuckerberged: What the Winklevoss Twins Can Teach You About Copyright & IP
Good copyright & intellectual property read for startups.
If you're too foolish to do some vetting of what you take, you shouldn't compound that foolishness by stripping away others' right to take novel drugs that might, say, cure their cancer, etc.
It takes an enormous amount of rationalizing to compare a system of overt and pervasive government censorship of the Internet --- a system run by the government that blocks access to things the government doesn't want its citizens to read --- to even the most egregiously editorialized assumptions Glenn Greenwald has come up with.
Beer, IMO. Sometimes you need to forget the status quo and dream....
I'm not a super big fan of slippery slope arguments either. Then you get people opposing programs not on their own merits, but what might happen if that program were in the hands of the "other party", and then later in the hands of some dystopian totalitarian state.

Either way, I'm not sure why you say open source developers are supplying the NSA with Accumulo. You have it completely the wrong way around; NSA supplied us with Accumulo.
The only thing more terrifying than the great firewall is a construct with the same purpose that doesn't block internet access, but silently lets the government know when youre likely to be the kind of person who steps out of line.
Having researched China for 27 years, 北京大学等等 -

I thought the official Xinhua editorial would be interesting to an HN audience.

Actually, this New Yorker article is better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5885327

Evan Osnos, a top journalist in Beijing.
You can't take seriously any kind of propaganda no matter what political extreme it comes from.
While I agree it was a bit odd to read this coming from someone in China (given the state of their own internet), I'm as surprised as you are to have read this.

However, you have to read between the lines:

> How do we make sense of the fact that the market and the state colluded in the abuse of private information via what represents the backbone of many modern day infrastructures? [...] How do we understand the one-sided cyber attack accusations the U.S. has poured upon China in the past few months?

After I read those two questions, I realized, there was a difference. People in China know about the firewall. Sure, they have no choice, but the government isn't going behind their backs or allowing them unrestricted internet access and penalizing those who access "disallowed" content.

And I do, for one, agree with that last question; I hardly could believe that the US was just taking cyberattacks from China for years without at least attempting to get some revenge (and indeed, I know the US has the resources to fight back).

That being said, I admit I did laugh a bit to myself at this part:

> this force is acting in an unconstitutional manner and entirely contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

And that's when I started reading in-between the lines, because half of it's the truth, and half of it's probably state-ordered propaganda. The only difference this time is that this propaganda has some truth to it.
Agreed. Especially since Prism just sounds like integration/viewing software.
Break Microsoft up and divide any MSR ideas among the companies. No that's innovation, but currently MS doesn't want to rock the Win /Office boat.
That is a fair point.

To that I would say the members of congress are exempt from insider trading laws (why?), and it turns out that many members of congress make the majority of the wealth from stock trades after they join congress. (now, that might be hear-say. I read this somewhere, and I have no good way to verify this).
Here's the launch blog post, too, if you're so incline. http://blog.filmgrainapp.com/2013/06/15/filmgrain-is-live/
This is a political approach--"I don't like one aspect of what an organization does, so I will harass anyone who associates with them in any way."

It's pointless in this case because the NSA is not subject to such grassroots political pressure. Their sigintel teams do not give a shit if you use Accumulo or if Apache hosts it. Harassing Apache will have zero effect on Prism and related programs, but will harm Apache, which is a known-good organization.

If you want to change things at the NSA, the political pressure points are in Congress and the White House. Not Apache.
In a normal scandal story, the appropriate committee would grant immunity to Snowden, have him testify, then bring up Clapper, have him testify, and compare notes. Preferably publicly.

Here they bring in one side of the story for a secret Powerpoint presentation, no doubt with a high degree of spin to it, and publicly call Snowden a traitor. Then they complain that nobody shows up.

This isn't a bake sale or a dog and pony show, it's supposed to be the workings of the U.S. Senate. This sounds much more like an effort to CYA from the committee chair and NSA than it does an actual investigation or anything useful. Not going to make much progress continuing to operate in this fashion.

It IS interesting, however, that both sides here feel that, if only the other side knew more about what was actually going on, they would agree with them. But then the government insists on keeping it all secret. Meh.
How can you detect what commands were run on a laptop by someone months ago?

If you assume the OS is Windows, is it normal to even log those?
If you believe SSL is cryptographically secure against the party trying to access your data. It also only encrypts the payload. If I'm tapping your connection at a minimum I still see who you exchange data with, at what time, and how much. Metadata is very powerful.
Acne best treatment
acne best treatment
Open speculation about intelligence programs is a little bit like numerology. If you start looking for patterns to fit narratives to, you'll find them.
crypto adj. Secret; covert.
gon suff. A figure having a specified kind or number of angles.

Governments, Corporations and Media are out of control.

These prominent components of our society are increasingly driven by hypocrisy, corruption and greed. They have never been more powerful than they are today, and their ability to shape the outcome of events goes mostly unnoticed by the public at large.

The Cryptogon refers to the hidden structure underlying and interconnecting the political, economic and perception management systems currently in operation on this planet. When John Ralston Saul states that, “In reality, we are today in the midst of a theology of pure power—power born of structure, not of dynasty or arms,” the “structure” he is referring to is what I am calling the Cryptogon.

http://www.cryptogon.com/?page_id=2
Why you can't get someone to build your app for free
IIRC, they can store it ssl-ed and wait for the encryption to be broken. If Google can store everything in their servers, NSA, CIA et al with virtually unlimited budgets and some of the best mathematicians in the world surely can do the same.
I love Voyager. It's my favourite.
I didn't like the original series and I dislike the "new" films even more, but at least they have nice visual effects.
Define application routes out of app.js file in Express.js framework
Could servers be put on these, too? Like that drone idea the PirateBay had?
A couple months ago I turned VNC on quickly, without a password, just to test out an app that turns my iPad into a trackpad for my computer. Of course, forgot to turn off VNC after learning the iPad trackpad wasn't a great solution for me.

A couple days later as I was working, my cursor kept getting pulled away from me and I figured there must be some tracking issue with the mouse, not giving it a second thought.

I started reading something at my desk and looked up - a tab had been opened in Chrome to some .ru domain name and someone was clicking a 'Pay with PayPal' link on the page.

With my PayPal password auto-filled, they would have had easy work of getting into my account to pay a large, arbitrary amount to themselves.

Luckily, I caught it just in time. They were so good at keeping control of the mouse that I had to run to unplug my router.

Point is, VNC is a really easy vector to gain access to a computer and there are apparently people or bot constantly port scanning everything to find what's unsecured.

Was definitely a wake up call for me and I wouldn't be surprised if this is a similar case.
Lewis Black on Google Glass
What you are saying is that the option would be fine if it was in a fonts menu but it’s offensive because it is in accessibility. That is not right.

You are absolutely free to think the font choice is poor and that the existence of that option proves it, but you should not use the accessibility menu as your rationalization excuse.
I think this looks nice - looking forward to seeing this in iOS7. It's a small bit of visual candy that will hopefully add usability by replacing the dimensionality lost to removing drop shadows.
Elevator Pitch: Ethan Kurzweil of Bessemer Ventures
The title should really indicate that you need to open in on an iPhone.

But -- so simple, yet such a pleasant, subtle effect, and it seems to be perfectly calibrated. I'd hate to see this get overused, but it's been a very long time since I remember seeing a brand-new "tool" for a graphic designer's toolbox.

Obviously this is more suited to games, or interfaces that already include a strong 3D or motion element. But it's a remarkably natural feeling.
I am curious why this information appears now. Is this in reference to Microsoft given exploits to the government?

If that is the case, could this problem be solve by installing linux? I am not a linux fan, but the point of the source code being open and review by millions of people starts making me feeling more secure.
This is finally starting to make sense to the "media". A large part of the story was the unfiltered taps, PRISM seems effective at pinpointing the important bits in what used to be an overwhelming stream.

e.g. Get FISA request on someone, gather the data, tap into the big pipes to see what else they are doing.

Does anyone remember this from 2005 ? They retrofitted a submarine (USS Jimmy Carter) to the tune of 1 billion to cable tap under the ocean, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html . If they are trying to do that thousands of feet under water ( 7 years ago) imagine what they have on land now.
Cost to store all US phonecalls made in a year in cloud storage
mpyne. I expressed it badly - I did not mean to say that open source developers are supplying the NSA with Accumulo, just that Apache is supplying the NSA with a useful service by hosting Accumulo as a project (and that for some reason open source developers are OK with this in a way that they would not be for private corporations selling closed source software to the NSA).

The general picture seems to be what antics says in the first comment: NSA adapted Big Data technologies to suit their own access control and other requirements, and then decided that the best way forward was collaborative. A group of employees set up sqrrl to provide a commercial distribution. But it's an ecosystem that the NSA gains from, all the same, and the broad membership of Apache seems like it makes for a place where people may have leverage.
The writer is an official (propaganda) editorial writer.

It's important to understand Xinhua and CCTV are official mouthpieces of the CCP.
"forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and [removal] of data. This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion."

Doesn't sound so dumb to me. Specifically removing data and then covering up traces of being there - sounds a little more than a 'script-bound teenager'.

And now, in light of NSA/PRISM - we have a good suspect is in a case like this. At the very least, there is grounds here to issue a suponea to the NSA since they should have plenty of data about her internet connection that could help in determining the responsible party.