skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Coders:Do you create your own graphics/icons, and how did you learn?
After a couple of decades coding, I've decided it's getting a little ridiculous now I still rely completely on things like Glyphicons, and HTML theme marketplaces. Now, I subscribe partly to the notion one should focus on their area of expertise, but I really would like to be able to whip up something at least clean and original, if not exactly hugely artistic. Enough, at least, to really appreciate what the real pros do.
So my question is, has anyone here been in the same position, and what tools/course/books did you use to get started?
Deterrence worked during the Cold War - I'm not arguing that each side didn't present a real threat to the other.

What I do take issue with is the crazy degree to which vast arsenals were constructed on both sides to a level that was much much more than that required to politically deter an attack.

The problem I have isn't that deterrence with nuclear weapons doesn't work - clearly it does. Rather that we have no good mechanism for limiting the size of arsenals.

Here is a question - are there any records of the Soviets having military leaders who advocated actually invading Western Europe (rather than just planning for it)? [NB I'm asking because I don't know, not because I'm trying to score points.]
Because of all the reasons parent mentioned.
just because it's "designed to" store yottabytes does not mean that it actually does right now. they're just designing the system for the future.
I perceive that certain countries will become super data havens. Something like Gibson noted in his book Count Zero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_haven#History_of_the_term

The Switzerland of data if you will. You need a durable and sizable connection to the internet, plenty of energy, strong human rights and stable governance. Iceland almost fits the bill, but their governance is not stable enough.

Actually, Switzerland is actually not a bad option. They understand the necessity of privacy and are extremely stable politically. The canton principals are an excellent political stabilizer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland
Who is to say they actually did it?

Assuming they were consuming 10 Tbit/sec of inbound data it will still take about 30,000 years to fill a yottabyte of storage.
Have we seen a news report yet about how Snowden traveled to Hong Kong? His choice of destination may have been dictated by where he could fly on a nonstop airline flight from Hawaii, where he was last based. His travel documents, because he was contracting for the NSA, may already have had restrictions on which destinations he could fly to. (Such restrictions have been routine for NSA employees for more than a generation. Airlines check travel documents before you board a plane on an international flight, because the airline is responsible for returning you at no charge to you if you are denied entry for lack of proper travel documents at the border of your destination.) He may simply have had no better choice when he had opportunity to leave work and leave home.
Mozilla Persona is federated, so the BrowserId service is provided by the email provider. Mozilla provide a fallback service, in case your email provider hasn't set one up. So just pick an email provider in the country of your choice.

There's another misunderstanding in the post:

> Then NSA would have access to basically 40% of a user's
> browsing history, including URLs, the email address used,
> and time of visit.

As I understand it, Persona doesn't 'phone home' each time authentication is required. It's intended that the browser authenticates you from its cache, and only refers back to the Persona server from time to time, and doesn't tell the Persona server anything about the sites you've been visiting etc.
The comments section below the article.
Social program spending goes up when unemployment goes up, because unemployed/underemployed people are the ones who need unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc. When you suddenly have a lot of unemployed/underemployed people, you'll have a spike in spending for those programs. But that doesn't mean any of those people are getting more than they used to.
I am baffled too, given that Ecuador offered Assange asylum wouldn't that be the most logical choice? I quick "vacation" down to Costa Rica and overland to Ecuador if you want to avoid raising suspicions and travel restrictions.
Interview with Rich Hickey creator of Clojure
I don't think small deformations of the brain do much, because they don't change the connectivity or electrical activity of the neurons. However, there are devices that induce currents inside the brain by applying magnetic fields, and this has profound effects.
And so it begins. People who care about a strong US tech industry need to oppose government snooping.
US doesn't have the resources to give every one of the hundreds of thousands of individuals interested in blowing up a chunk of Americans a full blown 8 month trial, 3 hots and a cot, and loving handjobs twice per week.

As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security". Luckily for you and most of the people in this thread, you get to benefit from the actions of people who have to make that call, while looking down on them from your moral high horse in your comfortably AC'ed parents' basement.
Live blogging at WWDC via Tumblr
surespot is a free and open source mobile messenger encrypting all messages end-to-end with 256 bit AES symmetric-key encryption using keys created with 521 bit ECDH shared secret derivation. www.surespot.me was built from the ground up to provide this exceptional security in an unobtrusive way, this is not a layer over something existing. surespot is like whatsapp but actually encrypted! group chat on the way.
Here's my (hopefully unique) take on this. A part of what makes analog watches beautiful is the number of hours (12) - hexagons (6 segments) and hexagon-like structures are aesthetically pleasing.

With SUT and its 10 hour system, clocks and watches would start looking / be reminiscent of car wheels (most car wheels are 5 symmetrical segments [1]).

My knee-jerk reaction is that I'm not willing to give up hundreds of years of watch face refinement for easy math conversions.

[1] https://www.google.ca/search?q=car+wheel&tbm=isch
Heading out on your own: establish an exercise routine
Apple's iRadio Plans Mean Apple Will Need to Sell Radio Ads
The average web page has almost doubled in size since 2010
And those of us in Chicago? What are we, chopped deep dish pizza?
Sometimes you need to compare and contrast to the worst to get an idea of what's really going on...

Can you get up in the morning, turn on your coffee maker, shower, eat, get in your car, drive to work, ... enjoy your free time, etc? Do you know how many safe things need to happen for any of those events to work? Think about it. From the electricity to the police force to the gas prices and 100 other things.

Or just compare it to Russia, China, UK, etc. A place with at least 100MM people...

We'll both still choose to live in the USA.
Ask HN: Any impact to your saas biz because of this NSA/PRISM scandal?
Have you seen any drop in new subscription or people quitting?
We do register with the government at birth.
Sounds exactly like Google's response
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. With that logic I could say my laptop is designed to store yottabytes of data, just because I think that maybe at some point in the future it could. Either you are incorrect or that wikipedia article is severely overstating the truth.
Edit: I do agree with you though that this seems highly implausible at best.
I'm not up on my history as much as I should be, but I think some of the influence there conceptually is from the "right to overthrow the government", and the idea that many of the new governments at the time were only lasting a short period of time and then would need revised.
You mean harm inflicted by the government, so it's the Mafia: join our club, or we extort you ... sound delightful.
I think I've tracked down this extraordinary claim to this 2007 DoD paper on the "Global Information Grid", where it states:

Key target GIG technologies include:
Very large scale data storage, delivery, and transmission technologies that support the need to index and retain streaming video and other information coming from the
expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks. The target GIG supports capacities exceeding exabytes (10^18 bytes) and possibly yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of data.

So someone had a vague plan for a storage centre and couldn't put a finger on how much it would store to within 6 orders of magnitude! I don't count this as evidence that the NSA has more storage capacity than everybody else on the planet put together.

http://www.msco.mil/documents/_7_GIG%20Architectural%20Visio...
You can always use a circle (as with current watches) and just add the number of hours per day (does not matter if it is 12 or 10).

You could probably quite easy relabel analog clocks to use SUT, btw...
Right. The problem is that there are two fundamental reasons for dealing with time across the globe, and their solutions are generally mutually exclusive.

Reason 1 is synchronization. Knowing if an event happens in place X at time T when that happens in place Y. This is what universal time simplifies.

But universal time messes up the other reason for dealing with time across the globe, which is knowing what part of the day it is in other places.

While timezone conversion pretty readily allows synchronization across the globe, universal time doesn't have a readily-available solution for knowing what's going on in New Zealand right now. (It's 2:30 AM there, so probably not a whole lot, but you knew that as soon as I said 2:30 AM, which is the whole point.) You are still going to need to have some way to say what the current time means in other places. This is automatic right now. Two in the morning means the same thing everywhere. A universal time doesn't. So you'd have to say something like, "It's currently time T, which in New Zealand is several hours before sunrise." So you're basically coming up with ad-hoc local times anyway.
Our emails certainly seem to be very funny. :)
check out www.surespot.me for a great example of elliptic curve cryptography. surespot is a free and open source mobile messenger encrypting all messages end-to-end with 256 bit AES symmetric-key encryption using keys created with 521 bit ECDH shared secret derivation. surespot was built from the ground up to provide this exceptional security in an unobtrusive way, this is not a layer over something existing. surespot is like whatsapp but actually encrypted! group chat on the way.
He was already retired when that article was written.
Maybe "designed to store" really just means "we have administrative structures and software that will be able to handle such amounts of storage when we get it".
I bet the White House wrote up a response for all companies to follow in light of the NSA leak.
I red somwhere that RSA signature verifcation (decryption with the pulic key) is significantly faster than with ECC. I didn't check it my self, but that is the reason. CryptoPP author told me the same thing.
Designing web applications with an "app" experience
Hi Gianluca,
What about when files/folders are shared?
Is encryption dropped so anybody with a link can have access?
Ah you're talking about the user comments under the article. Took me a few minutes to figure that out :)
>But why aren't Americans in the street already?

Because authoritarians secretly like it, and others are terrified that they will be put on a list (or many lists) and their lives will be ruined.

Same reasons people aren't constantly in the streets within every authoritarian country.
do you know how to get SUT support in PHP? ;-)
Why you should fake early content creation
Do I understand this correctly, that with the new NSA factility using Yottabyte-sized storage, we are now out of prefixes for sizing data?

I looked around a little bit. Heck if I could find what comes after "yotta"
Go back reading the middle part where I explain the problem is in the business, not in the tech.

But hey, I am sure you guys can keep producing consumer apps till you will see a nice margin drop due to market saturation. Zinga teaches us all.
If you think that the US is the only country with overreaching intelligence bodies then you're deluded.
It's powered by the Tent protocol (https://tent.io) so by definition, yes. The library is also open for anyone who wants to implement their own alternative, compatible apps, and alternative compatible libraries could be implemented since it's all just specific (documented) types of Tent posts.
My suggestion would be to go with Sinatra over Rails initially. You could potentially go with Node/Express instead, but picking up async javascript simultaneously may be a bit of a burden. Actually if you know Python, Flask may be the best place to start.

Picking up a heavyweight framework like Rails while simultaneously trying to understand web development is probably going to be very overwhelming. I'd only recommend jumping straight to Rails if you have significant experience with another similar Web Framework and understand at least the basics of Ruby.
What are two years compared to a gigantic pollution of products that will stay dangerous for 300 years?

What a pro-nuclear disinformation article!
That's a shame but so classic of general disinformation on this subject. Costs, dangers, reality of contamination, waste dangers, ... just listen to real independent scientists and concerned actors.
The writer and its commissioners don't live in contaminated areas, and they probably don't care about future of these populations.
Listen to real people there, for example search for "Women of Fukushima" videos : www.women-of-fukushima.com

A few simple facts :
27 years after Tchernobyl, 3 children out of 4 are ill in Bielarus.
2 years after Fukushima, twelve children of Fukushima have confirmed thyroid cancer et 15 are suspected.

Shame!
But you hardly provide tissue samples as you age. Your point has little to do with my argument :/.

Registration at birth is a choice we made because of the social values of planning. It's unlikely that those same people, as adults, would consent to yearly tissue exchange or other undignified spying apparati.
So let's check the sources:
[2] A journalist 'Estimates', probably based on the Wired article
[3] Contains the word 'yotta', but says 'handle', not store (which makes sense, considering it's a lot easier/cheaper to process something then to store it). This actually references a DoD report.
[4] Does not contain the word 'yotta'

Maybe NSA is doing something undiscovered, but this feels more like sensationalism then realism. I'm sure they have a lot of storage and can probably rival google on data storage, but I doubt they have some sort of magic god-like storage and search facility
Considering this is a developer conference, and you need to have a Mac to develop iPhone or OS X apps, it seems somewhat fair to expect someone wanting to watch to be on a Mac.
‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production'

Michel Foucault
Node.js / express.js - How does app.router work?
> Mozilla Persona is federated, so the BrowserId service is provided by the email provider. Mozilla provide a fallback service, in case your email provider hasn't set one up. So just pick an email provider in the country of your choice.

The way it currently works is that when you want to log in, a pop-up window from persona.org is opened. This would make Persona able to collect data (which I don't think they're doing, but NSA could force them to).

> As I understand it, Persona doesn't 'phone home' each time authentication is required

I'm not an expert on the inner workings of Persona, but with the way Persona currently works it actually does fetch JS from the Persona servers on each page load. Try logging in on http://personaexamples.workhere.io/ and reload the page a couple of times while checking in Firebug / Chrome Developer Tools which JS files are loaded.
The Wired article they cite says:

> as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data.

Sounds like the yottabyte is a global/total capacity or a figure they aim to be able to handle in the future instead of a figure that they're currently hitting.
The fact that the stream is live for apple users suggests that they are the targeted audience.
Someone at the DoD did not think this one through...
If you are interested in this event running Safari is no great hardship.
Lets move off the NSA chat for 5 minutes?
Oh yeah, I'm aware of that.

I'm just making the point that a lot of programmers are thinking of code when they're not directly working on it. It's the nature of what we do.
I found an article that claims a new technology could allow 10TB/in^2. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121010083826.ht...

With that, it would only require 1.639*10^6 cubic meters.
19:00 in Madrid, Spain.
He wasn't an NSA employee he was a contractor. They don't even know how many contrators they have working for them.
Quick, coin it! I suggest Xottabyte. As a fallback tough we can always say Octilion Bytes.
I hate to use the slippery slope argument but once you allow police to enter a residence with evidence as simple as something they might have heard through the door then there's no need to ever worry over warrants at all. How do you even prove what they heard or if they heard something in the first place?

If the officer witnesses someone break into the residence then sure, but just hearing something? That doesn't pass the smell test to me, regardless of whether it was about drugs or not.

What are the sounds of a house being burglarized anyway? The homeowner could just be moving stuff around in the living room when the cops bust down the door without knocking. That's property damage that the homeowner is likely stuck with and in some cases it ends badly with someone getting shot.

This whole no-knock attitude that's been in place for decades is a sad joke.
You could also develop liver cancer and die, regardless of your cloud data usage!
How many non-Apple customers are going to watch the WWDC live streaming. I suspect it's pretty near zero.
Back then having to bear arms against your government was a much more likely scenario than it is now. Of course it would lead to something like the civil war. The democratic system is supposed to prevent that anyways.

However in modern times we've moved quite a bit away from the possibility of armed rebellions. It's something that happens in less developed countries like Iraq.
>> To say "Israel has apartheid" really cheapens the struggle of Black South Africans.

Is this something a Black South African who suffered under apartheid and is intimately familiar with the current occupied Palestine told you, or are you the Black South African yourself?
I could definitely be wrong, but I believe neither have support for HTTP Live Streaming, which is Apple's preferred way of streaming video.
Well, I do not object to your decision.

However, I really do think one has a moral obligation to put oneself at personal risk to expose something you don't morally support, provided there is a reasonable gravity.

That means: it depends on your (conscience) valuation of both risk & moral gravity. Schneier is stating his view: the defense of the Rule of Law in this case is grave enough to put yourself (and even your family) at risk.

There are many people who have done this (and in the States there are quite a few).

But as with moral decisions, I shall not judge you.

However, I also am with Bruce in this. The Rule of Law is more important than you & your family.

When you think of the USSR, you may get to shocking conclusions.
Thanks for the snarky comment, but the fact that there are countries with overreaching intelligence agencies doesn't mean that every country is like that.

In most countries a warrant will get you access to private data - but what the NSA is doing here goes far beyond that.
(Post above mentions that LaCie is owned by the American Corporation Seagate.)
Once you're protected, there's no more need for denying.
>These people don't represent all people, listen to what they say closely, but are rather prioritizing their own interests so far above others that they maintain a right to threaten and kill people they disagree with.

Are you talking about our government?
You still have to negotiate when one's available. I.e. ask and tell time values - there's no other way of figuring out others' schedules.

And this is easier when you don't have to do any calculations on those values. This is the part which SUT (and alike) solves.
Who doesn't serve up quicktime video? After all mp4 is based on quicktime.
Russian meteor blast was the largest ever recorded
There were groups who have protested who had no serious arrests to report. There were some groups that had a heavy amount of arrests. If one were to look at all the groups protesting recently with an objective eye I'm sure examples can be found that show why one group had such results.
A degree is like a signalling device. It is a brief way to signal to others some minimum level of sophistication. There are many more ways to signal your abilities nowadays. Having built an independent project makes up for a lack of a CS degree. Some of my friends got lucrative propositions because they were identified as productive contributors to open source projects.
This is much cooler than Joseph Franklin's Metric Leisure Week proposal.
GPG is the classic solution to encrypted email, but it has some challenges that make it less likely to enter common usage. The primary interface is command line and confusing, though there are a few good GUIs for it, including GPGTools for OS X. GPGTools also interfaces elegantly with Mail.app.

The bigger challenge is secure key exchange. You either need to exchange your public keys in person, or use a difficult to manipulate approach to verifying them, e.g. exchanging keys via unencrypted email and then calling each other to verify each other's key fingerprint over voice communication to ensure the keys were not MITMed in transit.

If I could, I'd encrypt everything, just as a matter of principle. Even if it doesn't technically matter if it gets intercepted, encrypting all your communications is a good way to regain the privacy the government is saying we no longer have any right to. In practice, I'm not going to be able to encrypt everything, because few people are willing to use GPG yet, and that limits my ability to use it as well. But I'll do so when I can, and encourage others to use it.
An overview of apache mpms and php server apis
Looks awesome! This has some major potential.
This is a great idea. The French tried this after the Revolution. They also came up with a "metric" calendar: 12 months of 3 weeks of 10 days, with the extra 5 days per year (6 on leap years) being a holiday. The holiday was taken at the end of the year. Sort of like between Christmas and New Years now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
Europe calls for greater Internet data protection
You do have something to hide
But the encrypted parts would be safe from eavesdropping even if hosted in Sweden, no? If that's the case, hosting it in Finland makes zero difference apart from political pressure.
VLC also can play it. File->Open Network Stream, paste link. Don't know the CLI command to open it in VLC.
Migrate a Mercurial repo to Git
Key word there being "only". Still a pretty damn large and expensive facility. The fact that they most likely will have some sort of redundancy notwithstanding.
It seems the French have more than just good wine to offer!