skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are we really not getting anywhere? (Serious question, not something I know much about.) Is there anywhere that significant progress is being made in IPv6 usage? If so, is it isolated to particular kinds/parts of networks?
Scientific Python: the easy way
If Jobs had his way, we wouldn't be celebrating the App Store's 5th anniversary
What makes you think other, smaller companies aren't also subject to the laws of the US? If they aren't cooperating, then their hosting companies or datacenters or upstream bandwidth providers are.

Google and Microsoft are following laws that were created by Congress with the support of the American people. Our anger is not appropriately directed at PRISM or any of its participants, but at Congress and the American people's apathy.
Do they need to tip their hats, even when dealing with "high value" targets? Once you've found what you're looking for, you could easily find other damning information that could have plausibly come from somewhere else, no?
My main point about Microsoft vs. Google innovations is that Microsoft had reproducible products (obviously not reproducible business) but Google has irreproducible products: not in theory but in practice.
I've been using Opera Next (the preview version of Opera with Blink) for a few weeks now and I would say this is the first time in the history of browsers that I actually like a browser.

Chrome has always had a lot of annoying bugs for me (not all of which affect everybody, but in general I seem to attract all bugs in a software if it has any), like sometimes triggering a page load would not do anything for about a minute and then actually load and render in a second.

Considering that it's a beta the bug-freeness is pretty amazing, in fact I have only encountered one bug since I started using it - and that one is OS X (Keychain) specific.

Edit: Oh, I missed that the final release is out which fixes the bug!
My point being: choose Firefox, or Chromium, or whatever OS alternative.
Solar System Has a Tail, Just Like a Comet
Or perhaps, in place of this entirely irrelevant and fictitious shopping list you could just read the article where he says what he is going to try to do.
I can send them to Windows and Mac users. Even non-technical types seem to be able to open transcript volumes.
> Is there a consumer Windows laptop available at Best Buy or similar

You will not find good deals at Best Buy, on any product. Their business is selling low-value junk at hugely inflated prices, to customers who are unwilling or unable to purchase via the Internet.

> Most of them oppose Macs because they believe they'd
> be paying extra just for prestige

This may have been true ten years ago, but Apple's relentless optimization of their supply and manufacturing pipelines mean that their hardware is often less expensive than spec-equivalent competitors[1]. If you want a laptop as good as a Macbook, you'll be paying a price similar to a Macbook.

If you want a laptop with a decent screen and solid-state disk, there's a hard price floor imposed by the component manufacturing costs. Your best option if price is a strong constraint is to keep an eye on the manufacturers' sites for refurbished devices. See http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac or http://outlet.lenovo.com/ as examples.

[1] Excluding accessories such as RAM, which are often marked up by 200-300% compared to high-quality third party products.
Advances in Cryptographic Voting Systems (2006)
1) It would be slow.

2) The trust issue would be even greater and it would introduce a single point of failure.

3) Online RNGs do actually exist. http://Random.org for example.
This is just what I was looking for. Thanks!
If you have other sources of good entropy then there's absolutely no point in using RdRand at all.
Hey there. I work at ARIN. An explanation of why IPv4 won't scale any further: (Please note that any opinions expressed here are my own and not of my employer)

Of course, we have a currently limited amount of IP addresses that can be given out. When IANA/RIRs were formed, IANA gave allocations of /8's (the largest groups of IPv4 addresses) out to all of the RIRs, who then assigned them to organizations within their respective areas. (For example, APNIC - Asia Pacific, AFRINIC - Africa, ARIN - North America) The problem now is that we are simply running out of addresses with the current number of internet connected devices.

Now, we resolve this within our own homes by using routers that support NAT (Network Address Translation) which is fine for our own local sites. However, a large amount of ISPs want to enable something called CGN (Carrier-grade NAT) which will take what happens on your own local router and blanket it over their entire network. This is where a large group of customers (including you) would have one single (or a handful) of IPv4 addresses that represent you on the public internet, but each site/home/office would have its own internal IP address to that ISP's network. Most cell phone providers actually already do this (although I'm not sure if we can call it CGN) where your phone has a Class C IP address assigned to it when you connect to the network, but all traffic goes through a single IP address.

Now there are problems to this:

1. It is hard to track who is doing what. If a customer of an ISP performs some sort of illegal action (bomb threats, hacking, etc use your imagination here. ;) ) It is hard to track down who is exactly doing what without your ISP simply logging all requests that you make. Instead in the current form, your ISP can be simply asked "Hey, who had this IPv4 address at this time?" instead of "Hey, what sites was this person looking at?"

2. Let's say that you were a member of some sort of forum or new site (take HN or reddit for example) and someone sharing your IPv4 address did something that caused that IP address to be banned. Now, you cannot access the site. This allows your access to the internet to be dependent upon whoever else is using that same address. Of course, this can (and has happened) already by sites blocking entire subnets (a lot of IRC networks do this for overseas networks that usually harbor abuse.)

3. It simply becomes confusing security-wise. Take into consideration that you had a VPS or server with a provider like Digital Ocean or Linode. You set up a firewall on that server to allow only your IP address in. Now, you've allowed everyone else sharing that same IP address to access your server if they knew the credentials.

With IPv6, we have more addresses than there are grains of sand on Earth (as the saying goes.) We also said that we'd never run out of IP addresses with IPv4, but the growth of the Internet was seriously underestimated!

Some ISPs will run dual-stack (I believe Comcast does now) where all users now have IPv4 and IPv6 addresses!
But, few congressmen had any idea of the true extent of this; and Clapper has already admitted to being untruthful to them.

Which leaves the president. You can't believe that providing 1 bit of information every four years is sufficient to maintain a democracy, can you?

While there are allowed exceptions, a Republic operates on a default assumption of public access and transparency in government, and the liberty and privacy of the individual. The converse system, where there is a presumption of secrecy in government, and transparency of the individual, is a tyranny, as government, the people's servant, has become their master.
Opera 15 is out
I don't think we're on opposing sides of the argument. I agree with a lot of your points.

Note that some of your proposals are actually asking for more regulation. For example, employer provided insurance is "subsidized" from your paycheck. It's part of the total cost of your employment. I completely agree with you though. If employers just paid you an extra $20k/year (conservative estimate of group health insurance for a single employee with a wife and a kid) and let you shop around for insurance, it would lead to cheaper health care costs. However, you would have to interfere with the labor market to achieve it by introducing laws that prevented employers from offering group health insurance plans as a fringe benefit. If you did this, who says they would then pass the savings on to their employees as a raise unless you also included that requirement in the new regulations.

The point of all this being that free markets are unicorns. It's really all a balancing act and there are so many ripple effects from anything we change about the system, there is no way to predict the outcome beforehand.
I still need tab overflow. Which so far none of the Chromium provides.
Convert the bulk of your Google Reader feeds to Twitter followings
I felt most the analogies lacking, so here goes. I'd tell my grandma, "the PCA for a loaf of bread is actually listed right on the back, cleverly labeled 'Ingredients'."

If I took some sort of microscope to a loaf of bread and saw exactly how many atoms of each element were in that loaf, the ingredients would be the eigenvectors and the ratios of ingredients would be the eigenvalues. (Each ingredient has a very specific and unique combination of elements, leaving a certain signature)

It all depends on the data, though, because that's how you frame reality. Maybe I look through the microscope a hundred times for a hundred different loaves, and maybe each ingredient-list might start to look like a datapoint. So now the patterns change. Here's where it gets interesting, because the very notion of what the eigenvectors are gets blurry.

What used to be distinct (flour and sugar) now basically show up everywhere together. They blend into the walls. Every loaf is going to be on average the same. Now there's 1 main pattern, the average-loaf-of-bread, and several trailing patterns, like extra-raisins or extra-sunflower-seeds. But remember the one thing special about eigenvectors: in the model, they're mathematically independent. So if two things are dependent, they will be globbed by the same eigenvector. The pattern extra-raisins might come up in a loaf full of cranberries (as long they are chemically similar).

If grandma is still listening, I'd wrap up: PCA reduces complex but uniform data to mathematically independent patterns or ingredients. The eigenvectors are the patterns and the eigenvalues are the ratios.
To be convicted of anti-trust laws, you have to satisfy two conditions a) you have a monopoly of a large market b) you use your monopoly power to reduce competition. Many companies are 'benevolent monopolies' that never get broken up.

source: I worked at msft when it was convicted of antitrust violations.
The low-fat/high-fat argument is entirely dominated by pseudo-science.

Eat less. Be more active. Period.
How I Used Metadata to Track a Craigslist Theft & Assault Suspect
Japan had a huge national initiative for IPv6, but in retrospect I don't see how they benefited from it. Same with the US government.
I wouldn't call saying "sure, we would save hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, but not much beyond that would change" to be shitting on the persons point that we should stop corn subsidies.
> Facebook also lets you deny specific permissions to apps on their platform

Which, of course, is ironic given that every update to the facebook app on Android asks for more and more permissions, to the point where it can do almost anything now.
I would have loved to see some of these points compared to the traditional chrome alternative - Firefox. There are many browsers out there that aren't produced by google. Is the assumption that I want a browser that's using blink as its rendering engine?
As Dropbox Transforms From Utility To Platform, The Bulls And Bears Emerge
Has it? Examples? (I'm not saying it hasn't; I don't know)

I don't deny that some people do actually have paranoid delusions. But there's a big difference between a paranoid delusion and a (conspiracy) theory. The point I'm trying to make is that in light of recent conspiracies, we have to cut the conspiracy theorists some slack.
And the irony is that Euler was a really poor mathematician by Dijkstra's standards...
Ten Reasons Why Top Ten Lists Are To Be Avoided
By recent events I'm assuming you are referring to the NSA. Note: What the NSA has been doing is well known and has been outlined in detail in the press all the way back to 2008. The country just hasn't cared enough to pay attention until the current exciting manhunt underway.
Can we please stop repeating the provably wrong statement that Firefox is too slow to use? Tom's Hardware has recently shown Firefox beating the performance of both Chrome and Opera. No benchmark is absolute, but you can just use it and see for yourself. Also, it still has better extensions.

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...
> 2 + 4 is 4
True

I sure hope not.
(I think you meant 2 + 2 is 4)
Dear Daily Mail. Sincerely, Amanda Palmer
Benchmarks are not everything. Firefox feels sluggish and less responsibe when scrolling, switching between tabs, on startup and just in general.

This might not be the case one every machine, I don't know, but it's been consistently true for my usage, it just doesn't feel right.

Unlike the new Opera I might add, it provides a really great experience. The fact that you can now install chrome plugins did it for me as I was a vimium addict. I think the move to blink was the right move for them.
> Can the student become engaged with the class of which the teacher is a part?

It's certainly hard. I love to teach & help, but most students don't view other students' input as collaborative or helpful. I've frequently experienced cases where a student asked a question and it was obvious (to me anyway) what that student was missing or misunderstanding. Then, it becomes obvious that the teacher doesn't understand the miscommunication. But if I step in to synchronize, such that neither party is speaking past each other, then the student views me as a know-it-all trying to show off and the teacher views me as trying to undermine his authority.

Ultimately, I gave up trying to help unless I know both the teacher and the student personally.
How is DDG not an advertising company already? One of the top hit on every search I do on DDG is an ad (actually in my testing I found if I do an informational search like "Barack Obama" I get an ad on DDG and none on Google). If advertising itself is the problem, DDG has already doomed itself.
How do you think the move to IPv6 will affect the VPN market?
The American system of healthcare may not be free-market but it is as pure a form of capitalism as you can get. That people equate competition with capitalism is merely wishful thinking. Monopoly, lack of transparency and a stranglehold over supply is the way to maximise profits.
Especially considering that Debian/kFreeBSD and Debian/HURD are closer to interesting experiments than systems used for real work, holding back the init system solely for the non-Linux Debian variants doesn't seem justified. So this roadmap seems pretty sane.
It's still used directly in Linux: https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-J... Furthermore, if RdRand is insecure but not recognized as such it's a potential risk due to people building supposedly secure software using the instruction.
One would think that burden of evidence would be on the side of the accusers of backdooring. So far all I have seen is inaccurate speculation.
Even worse is the second part of their sentence. They say, "Unfortunately, Firefox is too slow and far behind the Chrome." Far behind in what exactly?
This is the first I'm hearing of it, and I imagine the first a lot of other people are hearing of it. Two things:

1. Just because it's old news, doesn't mean it isn't news for a lot of people.

2. My point still stands: some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true (do a search for "conspiracy theories that were proven true"), so wholesale calling conspiracy theorists nut jobs, or saying they are "tinfoil hat" wearers is unbelievably shortsighted.
Sounds like North Korea
I believe that is fallacious.

For example, I don't trust Microsoft. We now know that they have some kind of backdoor in Skype. They are able to give the contents of my conversations to law enforcement or intelligence agencies. If I'm targeted, they can just flip a switch and record anything they want. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to have secure conversations if you use a Microsoft OS. It's unlikely that there is an actual remote admin backdoor in Windows itself, and even if it was, you'd have to be targeted, your PC identified, and the backdoor has to be activated before someone can siphon off data. And if you have a decently secure network, and use secure, open source software that doesn't route your traffic over microsoft's servers, it's much much harder to identify, let alone eavesdrop on you.

The existence of one highly specific access vector does not imply that the whole platform is compromised. Conversely, just because there is the theoretical possibility that the platform may be compromized on a low level, one should not forego additional security measures.

Just because the NSA might install a camera above my keyboard, I shouldn't stop encrypting my emails. Just because Intel might subvert my CPU in multiple ways doesn't mean I shouldn't be wary of them introduce specific potential security weaknesses.

*) Let's look at a potental tinfoil-hat attack mode. Intel might have some entity in their processors that detects whether I'm a potential target for surveillance and then weakens the hardware crypto. It would have to be pretty clever to find out from the CPU instructions that I'm doing something suspicious, or that I'm visiting a website containing a secret "enable weak crypto" byte sequence. While we're at it, it might also rewrite instructions to weaken 'software' crypto too, or even inject instructions to phone home. While theoretically possible, I believe this is highly unlikely. It is much, much more likely that they'd introduce a subtle weakness in the RNG that would let them crack keys a bit easier.

Being afraid about the former surely is paranoia, being afraid about the latter is rational distrust in a black box, IMHO.
You can see how well that worked out in practice here (video lectures by Dijkstra, not from any course though):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCAFcAbSTg

and here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nHv5MUw7Nc
JGC had an article on pronounceable IPv6 addresses somewhere but I can't find it now. Maybe you'll have better luck with google than I did (or he'll probably read this and link it).
Ah, thanks. Tack isn't a replacement for (or comparable to) Convergence, as the latter also tells you that you can trust a site, since its key has been the same for X months, even if you've never seen it before.

Unfortunately, Convergence has the disadvantage of relying on central servers, which have to be maintained by someone.
Harvest (time tracking/invoicing): $12

Basecamp (project management): $20

Linode (hosting): $20

Google Music: $8

--------------------------------------

Total: too much ($60/m)

I'm thinking of canceling Basecamp because I'm generally the only one who's on the account and not using the $20 a month to it's full extent. Oh, and I'm from southern California.
It is. That doesn't mean we have to marginalize people who have theories, even if they don't have any evidence to back them up. My approach is to entertain all possibilities until they are proven to me to be false. In that way I attempt to avoid tunnel vision.
while the second one is much worse

It may be "worse" in a variety of senses, like political tenability, but the solution is simple: bring data given to third parties under the 4th Amendment, which is the entire underpinning of companies being able to give your packets to the government willy-nilly. Well, not willy-nilly, the government pays for the privilege.

The problems with passing a privacy law that attaches to data given to third parties, like is done in many countries with higher standards of living than the US, are not the citizens' problems. Political tenability is a problem for politicians, but that is of zero consequence. If the populace wants (for some measurable quantity of want) this to happen, politicians will either make it happen or lose their careers or lose their heads to pikes (as has happened throughout history). However, politicians are counting on people having low self-esteem and taking "no" for an answer. It's not the citizen's duty to be cowed by their laziness and bad hearts, though.
from my first post:

> and possibly being disingenuous to your audience here

honestly i don't believe this awe-shucks bullshit for a second, especially from someone who built a $10 million company in 2 years.
But you can't say that you won't use some other language just because "it has no extra features".

Sure you can! The cost of switching languages may outweigh the expected value of the extra features, especially if they're only marginally more useful or not useful at all.

* ... the benefits of a good and clean Smalltak-flavored object system like Ruby's.*

I'm unconvinced. Ruby's hacky metaprogramming is hacky because you just don't get the Smalltalk browser without an image-based environment. You can make huge messes in Smalltalk if you monkeypatch hither and yon, but you also get better tools to help avoid the situation and to extricate yourself from it.
Libertarianism can't fail - it can only be failed.
Allowing a user to suspend their subscription may cause them to not full on cancel. Then you can ping them in a few months to remind them you exist. Possibly offer a discount for a month or two as a reward for reactivating.
Are you ready to test all the 2^128 possible multiplications your CPU can do?
In the case of mutiny, it is in the leaders interest to engage with his fellow student. In the case of the good student, he's competing with his fellow student, so it's in his best interest not to help them succeed.
Interesting you should say that - do you have some supporting evidence? Could you point us at the material from which you draw that conclusion?
Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years
JFTR, that quote is from Matt Mackall.

(OT: Eugen Leitl simply forwards posts from one mailing list to another, almost always without any reason for doing so, commentary, explanation, "value add", etc. He's in my kill file for that reason.)
And who is likely to have that access on an air-gapped machine in a faraday cage, exactly?
What happens when you lose the private key? Lost dns?
I disagree. They are bound to the same burden of proof everyone else is.
Drugs usually have about 7 years on their patents before generics can hit the market. Since it costs sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D for one drug to hit the market, the patent period is extremely important.

Particularly since the drug must clear the FDA and there is potential for recall.
_delirium is saying Debian on {kFreeBSD,HURD} are near-experimental, not that Debian itself is.
First off awesome little util.

One Issue: I get an "invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII) (SyntaxError)" on a pretty standard OSX install. May want to think about looking for support for char and replacing with something like "-" for the lines. Once I changed that in source.rb everything worked great.
are we still all just forgetting the fact that DDG is just an aggregator of other search engines. Specifically Bing.
Why do we celebrate this theme of Professor as omnipotent, benevolent dictator of the classroom? My last year in school the combined cost of tuition, books, and room and board hit $40,000. At what point do you become not just a student, but also a fee for service consumer, with an appropriate set of expectations for some level of responsiveness and customer service?
I never thought to check that! Thanks, I may adjust my rate.
We need a definitive answer on whether PFS is truly perfect. If ssl->vpn->https->anon-dns->tor->tls2->no-logging-search is safe then our searches for weird porn might be private.