skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The public reacts viscerally to terrorism and crime, out of proportion with natural causes that cause the same amount of damage. Accounting for that in public policy is keeping things in perspective.

Also, if you want to be hyper-rational about this: the NSA program probably has incredible bang-for-buck. If it costs $500 million a year, it only has to prevent a 9/11-scale event once or twice a century to justify itself.

Also, if we're "keeping things in perspective" why do you compare lives as if each one has equal value? One WTC worker was probably worth several times as much, in terms of GDP, as the average person who dies of heart disease. 3,000 people dying in Manhattan's financial district == 15,000 people dying in a Kansas City tornado... Obviously I'm being glib with this line of argument. You can't callously compare the two situations in the interest of "keeping things in perspective." So to can you not compare people dying in a terrorist attack to people dying of heart disease.
Battery on a mac pro? What for?
Stratasys in acquistion talks with MakerBot
I've tutored quite a few kids of varying ages over the years and in my experience, there's no harder group to teach than teenage girls - and it's doubly hard if the kid in question is fairly popular and active in other areas. There are just so many things competing for a kid's attention that it makes the most sense to (most of) them to quickly memorize a formula, get the best grade possible with minimal effort, and move on to more enjoyable things.

The best method I've found for tutoring teenage girls (and I'm saying this as a girl who hated math as a teenager in spite of a love of computers and economics) is to start off by finding out what they enjoy. Put the lessons aside, don't try to talk theory, and don't get all crazed trying to show her how awesome math is. Eyes will glaze over and you will have lost before you ever get started. You can't teach someone unless you first inspire an interest.

What does she want to do as a career? What are her hobbies? What kinds of things interest her? At that age, she's probably thought about a lot of different careers, and in pretty much any career, you can tie things back to math (especially junior high and early high school math).

If she enjoys cooking, you can talk about proportions and cross multiplication and show how you can use that to adjust the number of portions produced by a recipe. I know of one family where the parents had their daughter go on Pinterest and find recipes for a family meal, then scale them up to fit the size of their family.

If decor is her thing, you can talk about floor plans and usable area. Make a diagram and figure out how much space an 8' circular rug will leave for a bed and desk...the swing radius of a door is generally 1/4 of a circle, and you can't put most things in that space.

Mathalicious.com is a good source of more real world lessons.

Take the time to walk through the logic and show how things relate back to her lessons. It's not efficient, but in most cases, you don't have to do this for every single concept. The goal is to (a) create interest, and (b) show how math is relevant to her life.

Above all, be patient and understand that even with the best, most passionate instruction...she might still hate math. The world needs many different types of people, and not all of them have to have a deep understanding of math. She can still be happy and successful even if she never learns to like math.
X86 Device Support now in Firefox (Beta) for Android
Tech start-ups aim to collar US pets market
Yay! Now we're doing unfriendly things to our own citizens... that should make people feel better about us right?
Maps Comes To OS X Mavericks, Syncs With Your iPhone
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/wwdc-2013-live was one, but I've no idea if it'll be better for slow connections than http://www.ustream.tv/ltktv
Looks like a good time to join railscasts. Might have to look into Padrino now. Thanks for the info. From a quick search, I couldn't find anything more recent than 2 years old for Sinatra, so net tuts might have to do. Thanks again.
I remember, to my shame, voting Schwarznegger into office precisely on this premise. I've grown up since, fortunately. I'm sad that no one called me on it when I explained my reasoning to people back then.
Apple Updates Safari
The hassle of hosting your own stuff is really not the relevant barrier. That's merely a technical problem, and it could be solved by plucky startups or open source projects (like FreedomBox).

The real barrier is social. Nothing you do as an individual to host or encrypt your email, or IM, or social media presence, etc, is going to matter unless you can bring your friends and colleagues along with you.
It should say "2. Safeguard against tyrannical governments". I seem to be unable to update my comment to fix the typo.
Well, when they start shipping off your Jewish neighbors to ghettos, then it might be time to make your voice heard. I just don't think "they're spying on you!!" is a good cause to martyr myself. Because we already knew they were spying on us.
Client-side encryption can be very fast when done right. For your use case a filesystem stored in the cloud might be a better solution, that way only the data you are using is downloaded to each machine and the writes are done immediately. Give ObjectiveFS[1] a try, the free preview is available for a few more days, and see how fast client-side encryption can be.

[1] https://objectivefs.com
+1 Tails is an excellent and active project, it will install on a flash drive alongside an encrypted storage area that Tails will manage for you.
>Of course then most students will insist that 0.999⋯≠1 which shows how ineffective this method is to understanding what the real numbers are.

Okay, you got me. Why is 0.999... != 1 incorrect?
In addition to the direct costs you have to add risk: At the same time war spending was peaking, the financial crisis strained the nation's ability to respond to the limit. I am amazed the economy survived and some would say it is still at risk from this strange variant of "guns and butter." Doing both at the same time strikes me as recklessness on a monumental scale.
I think the Economist did a great job on this in their recent piece:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh...

Think about the incentives to the _President_ (whoever that is) to NOT let an attack happen, no matter what the cost. As Daniel says, it's not about numerical risk or objective damage, it's perception. Obama would have done anything not to have an attack during his terms.

And that's the really sad part. Due to the political process, different interests, and so on, the terrorists WERE able to inflict grievous damage to us as a society.
Where are all the startups?
Didn't we discuss this 9 months ago, when it was new information?
Why we spy
Anki Debuts At WWDC With An AI Car Racing Game, Raises $50M
And cost of living there is ridiculous.
Show HN: StaTorsNet - A pseudonymous Tor-based microblog
Supreme Court remands raisin growers' case to the Ninth Circuit
Or Tor only link:

http://r5c2ch4h5rogigqi.onion/
Sure, guns protect life and provide a great equalizer to those who may not have physical strength.

IOW, give anyone who can legally sign a contract and wants one a gun, no matter where they live (notice, this also deals with mental instability). That provides a level playing field when it comes to physical force.

As to abortions, once they have a working brain stem, they kind of are human beings that can feel pain.
That link is choppy and looks crap but it is a lot better than crashing VLC every 5 fucking minutes. Thanks A TON! I expect better from apple.
I didn't check whether the paper was publicly available and not on gated publishers' websites, my apologies.
Previous coverage on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476048
If you are only interested in exporting your feeds (and no metadata) you can use this URL: https://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export?hl=en and skip Takeout.
Anki Drive Is Launched
Yeah, the definition of "murder" is tricky. Reading http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1111 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder it looks like the sticking point is "malice aforethought". I'm not remotely close enough to a lawyer, to be able to guess which way the court would fall on that in this hypothetical situation.
Well we made a law to protect whistleblowers, so we as a nation clearly understand that whistleblowers are quite important.

...Then the law was simply amended to exclude people who worked for the agencies that had the power to do the most damage.

So, unfortunately the answer is yes, we are the type of nation where you now have to seek asylum.
Anki Drive
Are there any concerns using the NSA's common SHA-2 hash functions?
No, he is one small part of the establishment that will be gone in < 4 years. There are senators who have been there decades, there are senior management at government agencies who have been there decades. The president isn't powerless but he is very temporary and fighting against large entrenched organizations. Consider how hard it would be to be the CEO of Microsoft or IBM if everyone under you knew you were going to be in charge for at most 8 years.
Really happy to see a tagging file system. Messing around with a hierarchical taxonomy has always been a waste of my time.

EDIT: oh crap flat UI
Load Balancing your Meteor App
Instead of comparing the US to obvious outliers, how about a comparison to some industrialized non-participant in the GWoT. Is their terror problem worse than ours? Do they benefit from greater freedom and less economic drag from war and a security state?
> To be fair, axiomatizing integer arithmetic has been attempted (unsuccessfully) by intellectual titans like Godel, Russel, and Whitehead, and is nowadays considered "too hard" by research mathematicians

That is just not true in any interesting sense. The Peano axioms[1] have been around since the 1880s. Gentzen showed in the 1930s how to prove their consistency given transfinite induction up to a sufficient height. There are certainly hard open problems in the areas of mathematics surrounding theories of arithmetic, but to say it's a problem that mathematicians have thrown up their hands and given up on is false.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_arithmetic
IEEE 802.11ac
They do this already in SF.

It's the worst. You're not demonstrating anything. You're just pissing off commuters.
An iCloud keychain? No thanks.
When I say a 'basic, one-page app' I just mean a controller serving static content (i.e. not even any models), which is the main topic of Hartl ch3. The point was really to try creating anything from scratch - starting with a newly generated rails project, creating the controller, setting up the routes, developing the page, all the way to actually deploying it on Heroku. It may not be pretty and it may be just a single page, but it was a fantastic feeling to actually build something of my own from nothing in Rails and see it live.
MacBook Air refreshed with all-day battery life, available today
The logic police never sleep.
PRISM kills the cloud
thanks! we will update the post to reflect that
I take engineering applied mathematics tuition part time for students in Mumbai.

Certain things i learned from the students (opinions of students) after discussing and inferring from their daily progress.

1. Maths is dry and we have to be in different plane of imagination to study it.

2. In lecture hall they are mostly pondering about how the end result has come into being.(instead of why it should come)

3. Look for tricks emphasis on remembering things/patterns.

4. When you think on how to solve a problem means solve the equation according to the pattern learned. It's like they have put some identifiers on the problems if they see something similar they will use the pattern.

5. The textbook is the ultimate authority if it says so don't ask why because -- "its printed there so it must work", trust issues are imminent.

I drew these insights because they recurred during tests, discussions, question and answer sessions. Most of the time students would tell the problems if someone asks them.

What i found difficult was to pin point the problems from the symptoms. Some of the faults are with the books and others with the teaching system in India. Students i found, are always eager to work hard if they feel they are appreciated over minuscule achievements, so can't really blame them for developing these conceptions.
Ask HN: Apple finally bringing MapKit to Mac?
Watching the WWDC keynotet, they showed a lot of maps things on Mac and said there is an SDK. Does that mean they will finally provide MapKit on Mac and not just iOS?
SSL/X.509 and that whole ecosystem can use ECDSA based certificates and ECDH as key exchange, because it is explicitly designed to allow multiple variants of encryption algorithms.

There are relatively many widely deployed systems that use ECC because of resource constrains (short signatures, mainly). For example both Microsoft's product keys and FlexLM use something that is at least described in marketing materials as ECDSA.
Since the story broke last week, I've been thinking about a PKI-based message program (think email, but not actually email) built on top of Freenet, to remove the need of any central server. I think I have a reasonable idea of how it would work, but I'm not convinced it would help anything.

Tools already exist to securely send messages. Someone who truly cares about their security will learn how to use them. People who don't care about security won't bother. Hell, people already put all of their information on the Internet for effectively everybody to view.

What would an easy-to-use, secure crypto app help with? I don't know.
The purfuit of happineff?
Apple Updates MacBook Air With Haswell CPU, Claims All-Day Battery Life
I agree somewhat, but I think I've become somewhat institutionalised by the hierarchical approach! However, here you can blend the two and get the best of both worlds. :)
Good question. Why revisit the software that runs things like the segway, the space station, the pace maker, the artificial kidney, and a DVR? Maybe if you want to build a new one, maybe for "security", or maybe you just want to write some code. I like old software much better than updated software, because the latter is pretend and really unknown.
Finally -- tabbed windows in the Finder. I am so so happy about this! It is a simple feature, so I'm happy to see it finally arrive.

The other window and dock management changes also look like big wins for me. :)
WWII Dornier bomber raised from English Channel
> but it's naive to think (as was the primary lesson in "The Wire") that the power they have will lead them astray...

Is this what you meant to say? I must admit, I had expected

"but it's naive to think (as was the primary lesson in "The Wire") that the power they have will not lead them astray..."
He (linked article) tries a bit too hard to paint Obama as a sympathetic figure who 'must' spy on everybody or else he won't be reelected so he can right all the social wrongs in America. His handling of prosecution of whistleblowers doesn't really show him as 'reluctant' to me.
I'm not sure how to parse your comment.

> how he becomes a valueable asset for any given intelligence

How who becomes a valuable asset? Unless I am misreading this somehow, I don't even know what you're trying to say.

> without any given payment may not even attract people like me

If you're saying that you have no interest in answering questions because there's no pay involved, then I can understand that position. But a huge part of what the Crypto SE lacks is a study influx of quality questions. And the flip side of not being paid to answer is that you don't have to pay to ask.

I suppose if you are a cryptographer, you have little incentive to spend time roaming the site, true. However, other Stack Exchange sites have a bunch of experts on them too (ignoring the Big Three, the Math SE is one such place, as well as essentially all of the other graduated sites) and they don't seem to mind not being paid. I agree it's not for everyone, though.
I know this is frowned upon, but I wanted to commend you on crafting such an eloquent rebuttal.
Same from Canada.
Apple teases New, Redesigned Mac Pros
Porting the site would be a pretty crazy plan. Substantially crazier than writing your own VM for PHP, which is pretty WTF already.

However, i am really surprised that there doesn't seem to be a plan to gradually migrate off PHP and on to something decent.

This would involve creating a viable new platform of some sort (Sinatra on JRuby, Scalatra, Node.js, whatever's cool now), working out how to do the interoperation with PHP that was necessary (decoding PHP cookies or whatever), building or porting some minimal feature onto it, getting it into production, and getting it stable. Further features could then be developed on it or ported onto it one by one. Establishing this platform should be much less effort than writing a high-performance PHP VM.

There would remain effort in actually porting bits of the site, but that can be applied incrementally. New features could be developed on the new platform at no extra cost.

The new platform would probably be based on the JVM (unless it's Node), and i would expect it to be faster than HHVM. I would confidently expect it to require less maintenance. Given that the old platform is PHP, i would also expect it to be more secure, and to afford better quality code.

My company (a tiny operation in financial services that you've never heard of) is currently going through something a bit like this. We have a monolithic legacy app written in Java on a homebrew platform made of servlets, XSLT, and cheap gin. All our substantial new features are being developed in Scala on the Play framework. Whilst i'm not certain Scala/Play was the right choice, the plan is working: we are shipping, we are moving faster when developing the new features, and we are crying less.
SpiderOak cofounder here.

It's not really about the encryption directly; it's about the way the database design has to change to support zero knowledge (the server can no longer do the database work.) Things like garbage collection have to happen client side. Described in detail here: https://spideroak.com/blog/20091026143000-why-and-how-spider...

FYI, when SpiderOak first starts running, like any backup software, it has to scan your filesystem to see what may have changed while it was shutdown, and that can take a lot of IO and CPU if you have many folders and/or many small files (hundreds of thousands). (SpiderOak works with any folders you like, including externa/network drives, not just one folder like Dropbox.)

In a profile, basically none of this CPU time is spent in the crypto module, just mostly for unserializing the per-folder journal to compare state. SpiderOak does some optimizations with directory hashing to avoid having to open the journal to scan for specific changes in unchanged folders, but there are some situations where that optimization is defeated (such as if you remount a file system with changed gids, inode IDs, timestamps, etc.)

Anyway, once it's running, it uses the operating system facilities on Linux/Mac/Windows to notice changes automatically so rescanning the whole backup selection after startup is not usually necessary.

In any case, thanks for your interest in SpiderOak. :)
Hopefully they got rid of whatever "Safari Web Content" was doing. That is the primary reason I don't use Safari.
There's hardly any way to do an apples:apples comparison though.

Even if America went to great lengths to offend nobody and make everyone happy, they'd always be the one with the target painted on their back.
The lawsuit he helped inspire is still in the courts, and the EFF is still fighting the governments assertions that such lawsuits cannot be brought because of state secrets

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/government-seeks-...
Show HN: Add badges into php projects via poser
For the record, I don't think that the U.S. response to the GWoT is justified, largely because the cost of the various wars vastly outweighs their security value. That's not my point. My point is that you have to appreciate that one life lost in a terrorist attack has a much greater impact on the social fabric than one life lost to heart disease.
You're using the lack of an attack as proof that the system works, but it's proof of nothing. If I start using a special scented soap while travelling in India, can I come back and state that the use of the soap prevents tiger attacks because I was attacked 0 times while I was there? What about a shark repellent spray? I've been to the ocean many times and never been attacked by a shark because of my special spray!

| it's very easy to create a lot of destruction and
| disruption and fear with very mundane items

| If it's so easy to accomplish, why doesn't it happen more?
| Either terrorism is genuinely not a serious threat or our
| security organizations are very good at what they do using
| the tools they have at their disposal.

Prior to the powers given to the executive branch post-9/11, anyone could have executed the Boston Marathon Bombing, but it didn't happen. Timothy McVeigh could have launched his attack in the 1960's (provided he was alive then), but no one made such an attack. We didn't have:

| Bombs going off every week in a major shopping mall or
| in an airliner or in a bus

either.

| I would be in favor of our security apparatuses 'taking a break'
| or scaling back spying operations

You're treating this as a all-or-nothing approach. Either we have all-knowing spy agencies that can spy on anyone anywhere without any oversight, or we have spy agencies that are effectively shuttered.
What would be some examples? Low-level (sax-style?) access to the HTML parser is something I looked for years ago and never found. Would we be able to extend native CSS selectors, kind of like how you can do with jQuery selectors now? It sounds really promising.
I love TTRSS :). Have bean using it for two years now, it has not disappointed me.
People learn in different ways. Keep trying different ways until you find the one that she gets.
This is not about porn and cat pictures.

Let's say in a few years a corrupt politician manages to get himself elected president. For convenience, let's call him Dick Cheney. President Cheney expands the powers of the office, rewards his corporate friends who bought it for him and generally makes a mess of things. It doesn't look like he'll get a second term until there's another big terrorist attack. He makes his opponents look weak on security, further expands his power, starts three wars and gets re-elected easily. In his second term, he gets presidential term limits repealed, doubles the national debt and starts making journalists who ask too many questions "disappear".

People start to get fed up. They realize the terrorist threat is overblown. They realize President Cheney is more of a threat to the country than any outside entity. A challenger emerges. He persuasively argues for solutions all the experts agree are wonderful. He's well-spoken, good-looking, charismatic, entirely electable. He promises to restore civil liberties, release political prisoners and end intrusive surveillance. He's expected to win in a landslide. There's just one problem: he likes Thai ladyboys. Thanks to PRISM, Cheney knows, and ensures that a friend at Fox News finds irrefutable proof. Cheney wins a third term. The opposition candidate is later found with his throat slit outside a brothel in Bangkok.
Thanks for the kind words!
I would love to know if/where you will be using it?
If you like you could comment on the article and tell me there, would be much appreciated! :)
Did Paul Revere gather intelligence concerning both sides, and release everything he had to both sides, so that he would help his enemies as much as he helped his friends, and hurt his friends as much as he hurt his enemies?

If no, then the long line Revere is the first in does not include Manning.
Apple Updates The Mac Pro