skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who's done a lot of non-crypto side channel stuff (particularly around signal modulation for exfil) I'm of the view that side channel stuff happens and it's not exclusive to crypto. State generally leaks. It's a matter of having something resilient enough for the use case not to matter.

I see where you're coming from with it but to take your point I can pull keys out of a memory dump, who cares which process it comes from? In this case does it mean we should all wait for a perfect OS that scrubs memory on everything properly and encrypts swap?

That's not to say you're wrong, I think you have some valid points but in every other domain it appears there's a good enough level and when I at least encounter UK government crypto we're told it's the same. The thing about the cryptocat thing is that there are questions about transparency that are valid (and I've seen your conversation on twitter and agree with some of your points), but I'm trying to avoid falling into that situation.
Personally I've always thought that it was number of details rather than pixels which counts - in that sense a 320p game where every pixel is hand-drawn with deliberate care would beat a modern game where all 1080 pixels are full of the same "generic explosive barrel" model copy/pasted 50 times :P

In my retroactively ideal world, Square would have had had the foresight to render FFVII at 1080p and downscale at runtime for the playstation - then even today, 15 years later, we could load the game up in an emulator and unlock enough detail to max out a modern HD display.
Like the concerned woman who reported him to the police?
Ask HN: Beyond Neo4j?
Hey everyone,

I'm at the beginning of a research cycle on graph databases, and am curious to get some suggestions of your favorite open source projects? Mostly interested in extremely scaleable applications, for large scale processing of entities and relationships. And no this is not a joke I do not work for the NSA! Ha
Actually, if you saw that posted, would you not consider whether to tell the police?

The proper thing to do - as said in the article - is for the police to investigate if he was serious. And you or I would - depending on lots of context on whether we thought it a remotely credible threat I guess - report it for them to investigate?

The problem seems to be on the police end, not the concerned citizen (of another country) end.
not sure what's substantially different from e.g. (2011) http://shapeshed.com/creating-a-basic-site-with-node-and-exp...
The typical purpose of a pseudonym is to prevent some set of people from connecting certain activities to your legal identity, while still permitting reputation to be accumulated.

It's quite possible for pseudonyms to remain completely disconnected from one's legal identity, even under scrutiny. For example, merchants on Silk Road use pseudonyms to manage buyer/seller trust, but still take care to avoid being arrested for drug possession.

The important thing is which entity is considered to be the "adversary". If a teenager just wants to hide angsty reddit posts from her classmates, that doesn't require retreating to a crypto-nerd darknet.

The author feels that he must abandon the open internet because it's being monitored by the NSA. This implies that he considers the NSA to be his adversary, in which case his choice to link identities has in one step undone all of his sacrifices. There's no point in using a pseudonym on a darknet if your opponent knows about the darknet and knows your pseudonym.
I liked it. Couple of notes.

The internet was more distributed and protocols were way more flexible. Needed something weird? Write your own protocol. Who cares? It's all just TCP/IP.

The beginnings of this problem was people started viewing websites as "locations". They are not. They are simply addressable computers that return html data. They're no more a location than the ether is a location.

An entire commerce system was built around rent-taking of folks as they showed up at your location. This means: game over. The internet is a content game played over http and you or somebody else pays for the content. The rest is just wiring. If you're not paying for the content, you're getting milked of every possible other piece of information you provide to the rent-takers.

Standardization is awesome, but the more we try to centralize and standardize all of the internet, the more really powerful interests are going to take advantage of us. Maybe in a nice way, and I'm sure they're really great folks and all, but I freaking don't want my entire life on display at 27 different spy agencies simply because I wanted to keep up with my high school friends on Facebook. A healthy amount of creative destruction and the ensuing chaos is desperately needed on the net. You want to know why startups are thriving off making iFart apps? Because standardization has killed true innovation and left us with the only thing to do is optimize the little stuff. In Henry Ford's words, all we're doing now is continuing to make a faster horse.

But I do take issue with the constant FB bashing, even though I consider their marketing and growth machine devilishly designed. Facebook is a symptom of the problem. It is not the problem.
This is confusing... Iax doesn't work over TCP and doesn't look like https. It does use a single UDP stream for both control and data, but that makes it really difficult to scale on server side and makes attended transfers tricky.
So, i'd like to get the full details of this seemingly outrageous situation. After somewhat extensively searching, I've never found what he actually said; only paraphrasing, etc.

That's the difference between an obvious joke and... something different. Not that it justifies the situation entirely (or maybe at all), but would perhaps explain the reaction. Consider a similar poster who did an AMA on reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1hl4gi/ive_been_raided...

After reading the actual transcript (http://pastebin.com/Ldtj6mhx), many Redditor's sided with the police.

So - not to take the side of the incarceration, but I certainly find it odd that I can't find the actual FB threat / comments (yet?).
From the manual, a brief explanation of how AT&T uses it (or at least, did some years ago):

Hancock’s stream construct models data that can be viewed as a sequence of values in a fixed format. Typical examples include records of telephone calls on a long-distance network, session logs from an Internet service provider, and billing records from a credit card company. Hancock constructs make it easy to filter streams to remove unwanted records, to sort streams to improve access locality and hence performance, to detect user-defined events in streams, and to execute user-specified code in response to those events.

[...]

At AT&T Labs we have a suite of Hancock programs that run daily to calculate signatures or profiles of AT&T’s long-distance customers. These signatures are used for fraud detection and marketing. The programs process roughly nine gigabytes of stream data daily. The most complex application produces a Hancock map that stores values of 120 bytes for over 300 million active keys (from a space of 10 billion possible keys). These maps require roughly seven gigabytes of space on disk.
> The invasion force consisted of 746 marines, ill-equipped and only partially trained.

...

> The expedition was organized hastily and haphazardly. Much of the operational planning was conducted en route. The force was supplied with few maps, most of poor quality, with one of them having been drawn from memory. No one in the expedition was fully fluent in the Icelandic language.

...

> The British forces began their operations in Reykjavík by posting a guard at the post office and attaching a flier to the door. The flier explained in broken Icelandic that British forces were occupying the city and asked for cooperation in dealing with local Germans.

Are we sure this wasn't actually a plan for a war comedy film that somebody in the British hierarchy mistook for a serious proposal?
Prism What? This is what America is really about
Jesus break dancing? Maybe you like some Flying Spaghetti Monster? This is what 'Merica is really about, the freedom to post stupid pictures on the internet!
I would think the majority of IPs would be dynamic... If you're really worried about it, clone or spoof a new MAC address after powering off your modem. Then just power it on :p
This idea of preventing crime is like pre-emptive strike doctrine.
I believe the exact details are all here; he typed (in the fairly popular MMO `League of Legends`):

Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts.

lol

jk
To be specific, here are a list of constitutional issues being called into question:

> Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech

> Excessive bail shall not be required

> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial

Okay, so the speedy trial clause has been adapted de facto to mean six months, but maybe if he forms a law suite for free speech and excessive bail and wins he could be set for life.
Edward Snowden's father writes open letter to NSA whistleblower in Moscow
I was at the Denver protest. It was peaceful and without incident, with honking support from passing cars.

Now -- write and call your congress critters.
"These days, getting a Ph.D. is probably the last thing you want to do if you are out to revolutionize the world. If, however, what you propose is an idea, rather than a technology, it can still be a valuable asset to have."

Man, those newspapers' opening lines are getting worse and worse...
Why would JavaScript be less useful than any other language? At a minimum it at least opens up modern platforms.

It's probably a great idea to let the experts you know audit it.
"In any of the cases noted in the article, how would you have exposed people to those consequences without simply subjecting them to those consequences and leaving them to rot?"

Expose them to a fraction of the consequences, rather than all of them.

My point was not that one approach is good and another not. It's a trade-off (between adequate assistance and incentives to make good choices) and the trades are implicit in every act of assistance, whether at the family or government level.

The best approach is to make good trades that provide the most assistance without steering people too much towards bad decisions.

It's easier to do that in a localized (or better yet, personalized) way than using central planning on a 300M-person scale. The reason is that there are many more options to get people back on track when dealing with a problem at the local level. A government of 300M people can't do much more than throw money at the problem, which is not nearly as good of a trade-off.
I'd think one of his peers would know what 'lol' and 'jk' stand for, which a middle aged women might not.
What VPN provider(s) do you recommend?
Yeah, this article seems to be missing a lot. According to a piece on the Today show, he also said:

I think I’ma shoot up a kindergarten. And watch the blood of the innocent rain down. And eat the beating heart of one of them.

Hard to make a judgment about any of this without the full context. But being held without trial is definitely a heinous misstep of justice.

http://www.today.com/news/teen-charged-held-months-over-terr...
Because people's lives could/are at stake.

Learning to enjoy & build crypto? Awesome.
Trying to improve your product? Awesome.
Promoting your product as secure when the security experts say otherwise? Not awesome.
By the way, you can use (dotimes [i 100]) in place of (doseq [i (range 100)]).
Slightly tangential, but can people please stop naming their software "salt"? This is like the 4th or 5th relatively high profile project I've seen with that name recently :/

More on topic - does anyone have any good reference guides for how to not suck at cryptography, preferably more "API guide for programmers in a hurry" than "maths textbook for people who want to learn the inner details of algorithms for their own sake"?

(I know that knowing the internals will make you a better programmer, but it seems there are a lot of people who don't know the internals or externals of cryptography, and having a step-by-step cookbook which can be followed blindly would make this situation slightly less bad. Sure it might give people a false sense of security - but they already have a false sense of security from rolling their own crypto, so a cookbook couldn't be worse :P)
No, I would not consider it for one moment.
The secret court has no power to make judgments that affect individual rights and liabilities. The only one I am aware of, the FISA court, has only one power and that is granting or denying foreign surveillance warrants, a process that didn't require any sort of judicial involvement prior to FISA.
Interesting. Seems to me, the main thing is the pacing.

So what about, for example, video game development? It's infamous for development to be in continuous state of crunch time.
Why? Petabytes seems like a more likely order of magnitude than gigabytes, doesn't it?

eta: From the article: "capable of managing dozens of petaoctets of data, in other words dozens of millions of gigaoctets"
Or just negate two words ;)
>> Actually, if you saw that posted, would you not consider whether to tell the police?

No. Not at all. Have you not read what is commonly spouted on the internet? You have to be 100% illiterate to not understand that this was tasteless sarcasm.

This doesn't mean I think it is funny or that I agree with it, but calling the police over a joke is pointless and irresponsible.
In response to someone calling him "insane." In that context it's pretty clear this was a sarcastic response.
I've been spending some time with Jeff Atwood's Discourse* lately. Meaty new concepts and taught me a lot.

Ruby on Rails + Emberjs. Nice to see how they've integrated the two technologies and how some of the decisions they've are very different from the Ruby community at large (SQL queries over Active Record pattern, data serializers etc).

https://github.com/discourse/discourse
I guess I'm not communicating my point well. Thanks for providing the pexapnded verison of the quote. What I disagree with is this:

It's to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

That's true when advertisers lie to consumers, which is often the case. But there's lots of advertising that just consists of 'Our product has features XYZ, and does (whatever it is) really well. We think you'll love it, so please go to the store and buy it right now.'

Chomsky's not saying 'oh, you better take adverts with a big pinch of salt because advertisers often exaggerate or try to appeal to emotions like fear, lust and greed.' If he said that I'd agree with him, that's absolutely true and it's something I find offensive about a lot of adverts. But he's making a wild claim that all advertising functions that way, disregarding perfectly valid uses of advertising that are informative to the consumer.

I dunno, maybe Noam Chomsky thinks manufacturers (or whoever) should just submit their products to some institutional equivalent of Consumer Reports without comment, and then everyone could decide what to buy based on the findings of independent assessors. But as I tried to show above with my example of musicians, consumers' tastes are subjective to a large degree, and this is especially true for products that are not fungible.

So where it's true, I'm happy to agree with him. Take bottled water, for example - 99% of advertising claims made there are total bullshit, and you'd be better off buying a good shatterproof bottle and filling it from your tap or a filter jug than buying a bottle of water in a store. Some water, like Dasani, isn't even sold as spring water, it's just the water supplied to the same bottling plant where they make Coca-cola. They're selling it on the basis of having a nice-looking bottle and whatever pleasant bit of music they put into commercials showing attractive people having fun, in hopes that consumers will identify with that and pick Dasani next time they're thirsty for some water.

But that's not the entirety of advertising by a long shot. I work in the film industry, so I look at a lot of ads for things like cameras, pro audio gear and so on. Those communications have a lot of value for me, and while I may discount that value based on the style of the communication (are you showing me a camera, or trying to make me feel like this camera will turn me into a successful photographer?), it's not making me less informed. Nor is the monthly advertisement I get from the local supermarket chain telling me what new products they have on the shelves and why I might wish to buy them - they're on sale, or in season, or now available frozen or whatever. Chomsky treats all advertising as mendacious, ignoring the entirely legitimate purpose of merchants announcing the goods they have to sell.

BTW I don't work in adverts or marketing or anything related to that. I just have strong opinions about this topic because I was thinking through these issues for myself long before I ever heard of Noam Chomsky, and when I did come to read him I was disappointed at how frequently he set off my bullshit detectors.
Even if what you say is true(and others are disputing it)I don't see that it in any way contradicts my statement. Audit able and recount able is better than online. The fact that there were votes to argue in court about is still a step above "computer says Bush".
Thanks for the response :-)

I know a fair number of developers who find ops pretty crazy, considering that a good chunk of it can be automated. So I suppose the other side of tedium is the unnecessary risk in having to hand-perform things repeatedly.
Quick and easy Django app deployment with Docker
Extremely interesting. I suggest you to read the article at http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html

The author seems to be a well-established scientist, and the arguments are quite plausible, given that this level of hybridization actually could be possible. What I find amazing (based on the article) is that hybridization hasn't really been researched very well, and that hybrids aren't actually infertile, on the contrary to popular belief.

As the article points out, this indeed sounds as ridiculous as Darwin's proposal that humans descend from apes.
Yes - I think many religious taboos have their basis in sensible food hygiene and incest avoidance. But that's not how it's pitched; often the claim is that "pigs are unclean".

Which is why it'd be funny.
Postgres can make a pretty nice "nosql" solution too. Either via hstore, json, or bytea. That said, nothing frees you from a schema. Not having it explicit in the database just means you have it encoded into your application code.
I think he just answered his own question ;)
Bullshit. You said Bush v Gore had made recounts, plural, moot. I pointed out that this was not the case. So you're saying it made that one moot. Not the same thing, and you know it.

Probably because I don't pay attention congressional elections because I don't live in Florida?

That didn't stop you knowing about the Florida recount in Bush v Gore, did it? I've never even been to Florida, I just read newspapers and use the internet and pay attention to the makeup of Congress.

If I can have some of your Kool Aid

And I thought you wanted to have a serious conversation. Oh well, more fool me.
Ask HN: What web development communities are out there?
I only know of HN, which isn't really geared around web development, sitepoint, and r/webdev. Are there any good web development communities geared towards professionals? Like HN but strictly web? Or programming for that matter.
Long copy essentially equates to "The more facts you tell, the more you sell." It's been tested extensively, more than a hundred years, in all kinds of advertising campaigns, from direct-mail to television (see an informercial and hear their super long copy). Direct response advertising shows in A/B tests that long copy always sells more than short copy.

Effectively, this is because an advertisement's chance for success increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases. You reel them in with the headline and the picture, and then the body copy sells the product. Long copy assumes that you've got a half-sold prospect, with little to no time however, so you pack in your promise in there.

The caveat is that if you want your long copy to be read, you must write it well. You won't hold many readers with those mushy statements of the obvious and vague promises. (This is it...You step back and think...) The worst sin here is that the copy has no contrast, no one wants to read white text on a light background. It's just tiring on the eyes.

It's not that long copy isn't back (it always has and always will be), but that Apple really executed this terribly.
C# 5.0 is changing the behavior of the loop variable to be logically inside the loop [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477629
This site runs pump.io, the high-performance Open Source social engine
Can chimp-pig hybridization be reproduced in a labratory? (Would it be ethical to attempt?)
It's possible it's changed, but at one point VoIP was specifically against the terms of service for Verizon wireless data plans (playing games too).
All the reasons why this is a terrible idea are outlined here: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/
make sure to find a company that values engineering when you graduate. People like you won't be happy when stuck under 200 levels of management.
Anyone who has ever played video games even pseudo seriously knows that comment is just scraping the bottom of the barrel. So much worse shit is said daily in games like WoW/CS/League/anything competitive. It's mind boggling that someone took his comment this seriously.

I hope he sues whoever he has to sue and lives out the rest of his life in absolute comfort.

I'd be paranoid forever online because of this. Spending this much time in jail at such a young age for such a mundane comment is... I don't even know.
And no one would be the wiser if an Estonian election was rigged by the sysadmin.
Total numbers, out of a nation of 320,000,000: Less than 10,000 (and that's being extremely generous).

Since the "national organizers" raised ~$100k, has anyone asked them about being transparent?

Hint: this is not how it gets done (although, that would be repeating myself). Since I was so lambasted in the last thread when I attempted to point out the reality based community P.O.V. I won't repeat it.

Please, you can "down vote" this, however this was an extreme non-event. Hint: if you'd like an example of how a real, multi-week protest with >30k+ protestors each day is being ignored by the media, look to Bulgaria. And their total population is only ~7 million, which places the statistical % at a magnitude far higher than this.

Happy 4th of July, America!

p.s. We have noted the "Reddit Moderators" and their ambitions. Quite the 'motley crew' of under 20 activists! Wise the fuck up.
You still see it everywhere in advertising, think of informercials for example, or high quality ads in magazines.
I think if you are a "programmer in a hurry" you should stay away from crypto.
I started running few years back, but I couldn't run more than two miles, I used to get pain in my ankle. I know this is due to my snicker shoe. So, I bought 5-finger shoe, after that I can't stop running. Now I run around 6 miles, but I get bored beyond that, I think can do more than that.
On the contrary - http://showinghn.com/
The first two comments I made were "down voted" within seconds.

Your argument is invalid.

p.s. Today's analysis of the "protests" and even the flaccid NSA "approval" of them on their website shows you exactly where this movement came from. Spoiler: I told you that HN / Reddit were far more gamma- than Advanced Publications let on, didn't I?