skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think all you should ask of them is honesty, if their track record has truly been this bad.

"Here is our secure product for all"
vs
"Help us make our product secure for all"

If someone is learning crypto for fun and enjoyment they should seek advice of experts no matter how much of a jerk the expert may be. This isnt really the same level of a random github project 'convert your old php into haskell with 1 click!' I don't think anyone has expectations of that being 100% accurate.

People on HN flipped out over Linode, they made a mistake, they fessed up. People just want honesty.

Also, everyone has any right to complain, at least until prism comes a knockin
Slashdot is focused on a particular audience, unlike Reddit, thus suggesting that comments may be more targeted and useful than the typical "OP is a fag" idiocy.

On the other hand, checkout http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub. That subreddit flags many of the deepest, most insightful comments on reddit and is a fascinating trove of information about all sorts of interesting subjects.

For example, here's a brilliant comment that compares and contracts Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and George Orwell's "1984" (both excellent books, I might add): http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1hhrpk/huxley_vs_orwe...

In a sense, Reddit can tend towards a Brave New World style of information by drowning us in so much information, much of which is false or inane, that we can lose sight of what's important, but as a source of entertainment, it's often terrific.
Here's some stuff vidinterest don't want you to know too.

http://i.imgur.com/iVf4EFr.png
How Clean is Your Cloud?
Will put that info in the new landingpage which should roll out any day now :)
apologies if I wasn't clear; there are plenty of laws "still on the statute book" which everyone breaks but which would never be prosecuted. e.g. copying music from CD to iPod before about 2010, or compulsory archery practise with the parish vicar on the village green on Sundays.

I was drawing the distinction between that type, which are simply archaic, and this type, which have been designed to incriminate everyone.
I absolutely do hear what you are saying, and I understand your point.

I think where we disagree is in our assessment of the developers. You think that they are incompetent and unqualified for the task. Whereas I think they are likely qualified for the task (I give them the benefit of the doubt) and the crypto community is overreacting in their criticisms of the issues, making minor mistakes seem much graver than they actually are.

I've seen cryptosystems written by brilliant people and thought solid for many years later to be shown to be vulnerable. We still today continue to find issues in critical crypto libraries used around the world. Should we just throw them all out? Declare the authors incompetent? Anybody can make mistakes. And I don't think this making of mistakes invalidates anyones right to fix their mistake and keep pushing forward, as you evidently do.
Terrorist is an arbitrary term used to stifle dissent and demonide an opposition. One could use the term "freedom fighter" in it place and suddenly it has a whole new moral meaning.

We Brits know this well, as we referred to the IRA terrorists, while many Americans and Irish called them freedom fighters, while funding them.

Perhaps consider this when Nelson Mandela dies. A man who for years was considered a terrorist, but is now almost universally considered a freedom fighter.

Note: I have mode no moral judgement about either the IRA or Nelson Mandela.

The falseness is this is in the application of morality labels. "Terrorist" implies something wrong and evil. Freedom Fighter implies nobility. Both are people using violence to achieve political aims. Much like the US does. Which means many world wide have every right to consider the US a terrorist state, since that terror is by a democratically elected government.
Yes I do. I am not sure why it is here though.
The Internship (2013), Watch Movies Online Free, Full Download
I am writing a book on how to find problems and turn them into SaaSes: http://howtofindsaasideas.com/ (yes, I know it's buggy - new landing page coming soon!)

Anyway, would be cool if I could interview you for the book? Can I email you? :)
Agree.

Well, maybe stating, that RNGs, hash functions (and XOR ;) are just building blocks and tools to build true functionality out of them, would help.
I see it quite similar to statistics. Yes I do know and understand mathematical operations, "numbers" and some statistical operations like average, median and maybe even variance but no way I'm capable to setup a proper statistical trial or analysis.

I tend to fall back to: describing what I'd like to achieve with what kind of properties of the result and let ppl really knowledgeable on the topic find the correct keywords, tools and in the end algorithms.

But boy is it tempting to just mash some hash functions together based on some actually quite naive understanding of their properties ;)
> They are truly the greatest country on the Earth.

The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child poverty, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use, incarceration rate, rate of assaults, rate of homicides, rate of firearm deaths, rate of accidental firearm deaths and injuries, income inequality, wealth inequality, and economic mobility.
Porsche 918 Spyder - Meet the Prototype
Two Porsche 918 Spyder prototypes have recently travelled through the Middle East. After visiting 6 countries in 52 days, the fascination of this sports car of the future is still hard to describe in words.
Steve's pages are very easy on the eyes.
The SketchPad demo is just amazing. Whenever I work with a crappy interface I think about SketchPad and wonder how we collectively haven't set higher standards for the way we interact with computers.
Minecraft meshing, Part 2 / 2
Meshing in a Minecraft Game (2012)
Ask HN: what problems do you have in your company?
I am writing a book on how to find business problems and turn them into SaaS applications.

Would like to hear what kinds of problems HNers are facing in their companies.
Installing Nginx With PHP5 (PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support (LEMP) On Ubuntu 13.04
Kinetic.js is missing. Good work though. :)
US State Department spent $690,000 to 'buy' Facebook 'likes'
> Like I said, the developers seem to be earnestly trying to improve their product based on the feedback they are getting.

Cryptographic software isn't something that you can improve by a process of gradual refinement.

Crypto can have small, subtle, bugs. Those bugs could mean that the product is worthless.

A skilled, knowledgeable researcher could audit the code closely, and report any bugs they find. Cryptocat could fix all of those bugs. Does that mean it's secure? No - because crypto is hard.

> What more can you ask of them?

I ask that they make the disclaimers much bolder and bigger. I ask that they emphasise the experimental, untested, unscrutinised nature of Cryptocat.

> "You there. Stop. You shouldn't be building this because we the superior internet community think you're a terrible person who will never learn anything, so we're putting our foot down."

That's a mischaracterisation of the criticism they've got.

"You there. Stop! Cryptography is very hard. Don't roll your own; or do but don't release it as a product for end users."

followed by

"You there. Stop! We suggested that you didn't release it for end users, but you did. Well, here's a list of bugs. Don't just fix these and think everything is good, there are probably other bugs and the whole thing is based on weird wrong ideas."

followed by

"You there. Stop! No, really, just stop. Here's a list of bugs. These are not subtle hard to find bugs. These are obvious bugs that anyone doing crypto really should have been aware of. The presence of these bugs demonstrates lack-of-clue. Please, stop hyping the product as secure, stop distributing as a tool for end users to use."

People get exasperated. It doesn't help that some of the responses from the developers were defensive and aggressive and dismissive.

tl;dr have fun with crypto and building stuff. Just don't think it's secure, and especially don't release it as secure. Especially don't release it as a browser plugin ready for naive end users.
It isn't and it won't be. "The West" is "inoculated" against Naziism having had it once already. What emerges here will be something perhaps similar but ultimately different enough to once again sneak up on the sensibilities of the common man.

Its far from clear if it will be as serious sickness or merely an unpleasant bout with the flu. What is true is that like the Germans of the 30's, ultimately our apathy will decide.
The question is, why haven't [DELETED] been thrown in prison for many years? Especially after those gamers got long sentences for posting a "jk" comment in a chat room.
<sarcasm> Yes , and the planet earth is in the middle of the universe </sarcasm>

What do you think those countries will say ? ... oh yeah, we force the plane to land and denied it our airspace, unless they allow us to check if Snowden is onboard ! I guess , we shall see this disinformation campaign more and more as time goes...
And this is a shill account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davcj

And here are vidinterestcom's other accounts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nirajan

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=garbagegigo

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bibek_p
The idea is that they should, instead of continuing to write that software and endanger the public, go and study crypto in deep detail. Just how you don't build a production-ready nuclear reactor by "learning while doing", and instead go and study many fields of engineering first and actively run prototype designs by many peers before publishing, should the cryptocat dev have done the same.
That was the Callsign code. Well, at least it was working for me back then.
Good. That means we're doing it right.
I think that should be lawful, yes.

We already have laws to prosecute people who misuse credit card numbers for gain. Either attack the edge (ppl who use the cc nums for fraud) or the root (the people who posted them on the public web).
Hello sir,
I am Bishwanath Mandal ,studying in Bengal Engineering & Science University, Shibpur from the department of Computer Science & Technology in final year(B.Tech).
Biggest failure : I did not take IIT JEE seriously when I should have. I don't know if I could have cleared it , but atleast I should have tried. For me failure is not to try.
Biggest Achievement : But now I am confident about myself that given a task I will try with my full commitment.I have been selected for Summer Research Fellowship Program at IIT Delhi. I was a school topper in my class 10 examinations and currently I am in top 3 students of my Computer Science batch.
email : mandal.bishu91@gmail.com
Straw man: Gmail has authentication, this web service did not.
Worse, the advertisers have made their own browser and it's pretty popular.

"Not signed in to Chrome (You're missing out -- sign in)"

Now they don't even need tracking cookies anymore.
The point is that writing software that uses cryptography is unlike writing software that, say, uses a Twitter API library. In the latter case you can detect errors quite easily because functionality will be compromised if you make a mistake. This is not so in programs that use cryptography; they tend to work without noticeable problems, but they may be shooting themselves in the foot.

It's all about preventing known mistakes. For example, say a developer uses a One Time Pad encryption scheme in their application and calls it "secure". Surely if we've had any contact with cryptography we know that a OTP with a reused pad is broken and leaks key bytes, and vulnerable to many other types of attack.

These mistakes can be avoided by having proper education in cryptography. I understand cryptocat's developers urge to write it in the same way they've written software the rest of their lives, through trial and error. And that is okay for most software, but not cryptography.
Can't wait for a Firefox release!
A multiple is a benchmark instrument, not a valuation methodology. A business needs to be valued via DCF, using a multiple to value a business is a big mistake.

Let me clarify, e.g. An EBITDA multiple of 8x all it means is that the company's Enterprise Value is 8x the company's (either FY0 or preferably FY+1) EBITDA. But the important number here is not the multiple, it's the Enterprise Value! The multiple is the by-product of the valuation (Enterprise Value/EBITDA = Multiple), and not vice-versa. By using a multiple you are potentially omitting the company's future growth, capital structure, increase in profitability/margins, etc. That is why the smart way of valuing a business is via DCF. By using a DCF you are able to critically test if the operational metrics, implied growth, revenues, costs, profitability, etc assumptions are realistic and achievable. And in the case of a tech companies, one makes sure that growth (where a big chunk of value is) is factored/priced in.
Also I learned that it means nothing when I hear "it is open source and peer reviewed".

I get his point, but I take exactly the other conclusion from this; perhaps ironically, because Steve Thomas has ripped it to pieces and gone to town on the code, as long as the flaws he found are fixed, I now have greater faith in it because it's open source and peer reviewed - Steve Thomas' own peer review is a big part of that.

Perhaps we should take open source and peer reviewed as meaning it can be peer reviewed; it's still on us to check who's done those reviews and, if needs be, do it ourselves and give something back.
So basically they're just including existing open source software?
So you guys will make cold calls for me?
http://www.mailvelope.com/ is chrome-release, firefox-alpha – slightly less useless?
> I understand your point.

No, you don't, because you continue to make worthless tautological statements like "anyone can make mistakes".

I've designed an airplane. I have no experience in doing so. I have no more than a layman's understanding of aerodynamics. I know nothing of materials science. I've hardly even looked inside any kind of engine. I have heard some fancy words before, though, and I'm sure my quick read of various Wikipedia articles has prepared me.

I'm going to start building these planes and selling them to the public as a great way to travel.

Do you think it is overreacting for an aviation engineer to tell people that my plane is dangerous, just because Boeing sometimes makes mistakes?

If you don't, then you shouldn't have a problem with the public being told that Cryptocat is dangerous.

If you do think it's overreacting, well, as it happens I'm no more competent to deal with insanity than with aeronautics.
>> Cryptography is hard.

>> Smart people and many eyes make mistakes

These things are true BUT the article says this - "They seem to not understand simple programming concepts such as a byte vs a decimal digit character"
There seem to be some serious problems with the aptitude of the developers if that really is the case.
even though I've got a traffic spike after the articles, I wasn't seeing that in the sales... There was no difference. I like the idea of offering the app for free, to see if there's any traction. Thanks!
1) If I ever make a mistake of that magnitude, I will accept any level of criticism, in any way shape or form.

2) I will never implement a crypto system that lives depend on without fully understanding it.
I think the question should be in first instance, why did those gamers got long sentences for posting a "jk" comment in a chat room?
> ... unless the site in question used certificate pinning (almost no sites do, currently.)

Is there any semi-standard way to do pinning? That is/will be supported by at least the next (preferably current) version of the major browsers?

Or do you mean "manual" pinning (eg: convergence et al)?

I'm no aware of anything a site administrator can do to unilaterally enable/force certificate pinning?

The best I could find was:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Certificate_and_Public_Key_Pinning

but as far as I can see (skimming) -- there's nothing there about standard software doing pinning -- it's all about when you're deploying (part of) the client as well?
(we actually do support MIPS)
Internally at Apple the iPad was in development before the iPhone. The iPad is considerably closer to the Dynabook as a concept than the iPhone is.
solve problems, create more than you consume

PS: I think you're using TL;DR wrong ;)
ريال مدريد
http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=14806
ريال مدريد ريال مدريد ريال مدريد ريال مدريد
ريال مدريد ريال مدريد ريال مدريد ريال مدريد
http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=14806
It's a bit ambiguous what it means to erase an abstract entity like "data". Usually, I would accept it to mean that there are no physical copies of the plain text remaining -- e.g. no copies in terms of bits on a hard disk or strokes of ink on paper. If you've overwritten the sole copy of the original plain text with the ciphertext on a hard disk, then I think it's fair to accept that as erasure of the original data.

Philosophically, of course, all strings of data that will ever be written exist in some abstract mathematical sense -- I can write a program that will eventually generate every single combination of bits that can be ever be stored on a given computer (should you care to wait long enough) including novels that don't exist yet (in the conventional sense that a human author hasn't put pen to paper), and the plaintext that was overwritten by the cryptography program.
Not affecting Play Store apps so it's really irrelevant.
If you try to download an app without paying or knowing the source of it you probably deserve a virus. ;)
It's like if you get some knock off drug off the internet and gives you more trouble than gain... would you blame the pharma company?
I think I do understand what you're saying Dan, but do you really believe that cryptographic software isn't something you can gradually improve on?

How do you explain the fact that the majority/all of the crypto libraries we rely on today have been gradually improved over time, fixed as bugs have been found, etc?

I think you've severely mischaracterised the way crypto software is developed.

You fix the bugs and you move on. That's the only way to progress, and that's exactly what the developers have been doing. I can't fault them for that.
I wouldn't want a project to write its own SSL library no, but I would not start a new project in C, and if I had an existing C codebase I would seriously think about migrating it to a safer language (unless it needed particular C features. Crypto code does, because it needs to resist timing attacks, but that's a very rare case).
Building your product is much more fun if you have a waiting queue of clients
It allows for a man-in-the-middle attack when downloading new- or updating existing applications, for example using a Wi-Fi honeypot or compromised public access point.
Please stop spamming this comment around. We get it, it's a cool app but that doesn't give you free reign to spam it.
Yes, because the registry is terrible. If the registry were any good, IIS configuration would use it, and you'd be able to programmatically reconfigure IIS, or any other program, in a standard registry-based way.
I don't know Vidinterest is, but here's the Youtube link referenced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfQqh7iCcOU

The site referred to is: http://makeymakey.com
Now: A Concept Whose Time Has Come And Gone?
Fortunately there are a few projects out there that will let you wrap up a pretty decent radius+WPA2-enterprise setup -- but even with that ease-of-use -- the things that can go wrong to take down the network sky-rockets, and few coffee shops etc will be deploying it (too much hassle/too much time/too little awareness).

I believe there is ample opportunity to sell a "secure wifi box" with some kind of fanless linux/*bsd-box with a (more) secure access point in it than what most ISPs currently deliver. Throw in a caching, ad-blocking proxy... (Alternative business plan: give the boxes away, sell ads based on location -- (re)placing ads in web content...).
When someone important to the community dies, a thin black bar is added to the top of HN as a mark of respect. (As I type this (4th July 2013) it is present as a mark of respect to Doug Engelbart.)

This invariably confuses new users.

I suggest the thin black bar be the height of a line of text, and it contain the text “R.I.P. Doug Engelbart”. This text could link to an official announcement of the death, or to a HN page discussing such a link. The text should probably be a light shade of grey.

Alternatively, without expanding the thin black bar, the text could appear in the orange header bar, and be coloured black. In this case it should probably be centred between the “submit” link on the left and the username / “login” link on the right.
Revelations about the French Big Brother
How To Be Excellent at Something
Heh. In February 2012, Canadian Public Safety Minister Vic Toews actually defended a bill for an unconstitutional warrantless spying program by saying its opponents "can either stand with us or with the child pornographers." You can't make this stuff up.
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/video-gamer-arrested-...
Sounds similar to the McDonald's theory:

"I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!"

from: https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/9216e1c9da7d
Mind maps with proper version control
I found this article to be very thought provoking with regards to Engelbart's work, but I can't help but read Bret's own worries in it. As if he himself fears being presented/remembered purely based on his inventions (Bret Victor, the inventor of the iPad interface) and not his goal (intends to invent the medium and representations in which the scientists, engineers, and artists of the next century will understand and create systems.)

As a side note: why can't we, the general public, appreciate people like Engelbart with the same fierceness before they are gone? I'm sure they'd like to know their life was incredibly meaningful.
Honestly, it does not matter whether YOU accept that level of criticism. It is not about the perpetrator, it is about the environment.

I am not complaining for myself, really.

And, on the other hand, I would suggest not being so sure about the future.
bower search via your terminal

Don't use a search term
Microsoft's Xbox One reputation system is built to make trolls play with trolls
I just graduated. It gets better.

"Everything in moderation, especially moderation itself." - Not sure of source.

If all you do is program and study every day you're going to burn yourself out. It's great to be devoted, but make sure you're also doing things you enjoy that are different as well. Talking to people and socializing are a key element of life. Humans are social animals.

I suggest traveling, exercising, and socializing as a key part of every life. Get out there and play some basketball at the university courts, it doesn't matter how bad you are, you'll get better (I should know, I was terrible at the beginning of this summer but after playing a lot with my friends I'm a lot better). Programming is an art, but living is also an art. Make sure to spend some time perfecting that art as well.
Break the routine. Pick a city, or a part of a city, you have never been to and spend some time there,even if it's just a day. Find galleries, or something out of your comfort zone. Perhaps go hiking or camping or sailing. It doesn't matter. Get out of your routine and meet new people.
You make it sound so easy!