skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At a high level of abstraction: If one runs a nuclear power plant, one does not make a practice of tolerating small oil spills. Small oil spills are almost harmless. So are small quantities of sparks. The combination of small oil spills and small quantities of sparks, however, is a severe problem and gets worse in a hurry if it compounds with certain other usually benign properties of nuclear power plants.

Unfortunately, the sort of nuclear power plant operators which tolerate oil spills are often sufficiently not on their A game to tolerate sparks.

This is a very handwavy explanation. In particular, God doesn't hate nuclear powerplants and try to introduce sparks into them at inopportune moments just to see if they happen to find an oil spill, but The Adversary often can and will do this to your cryptosystem.
There seem to be a number of features in hacker news which presume longer threads tend more towards noise than signal. The threaded format as implemented, for one, makes it difficult to follow conversations in long threads, particularly in replies to the root post if you're linking from the latest comments page. The further into the nesting you get, the more crunched the text becomes. And, apparently, posts take longer to show up.

Also, there not being a 'notify' feature more or less ensures that anything not on the front page is almost certain to die, although hnnotify.com does a good job of filling this feature in, that the service exists to me suggests that it could be useful as an actual feature for the site. And I know it's been discussed and passed on, but still.

I also worry about how the effect of weighting votes based on karma will bias conversations (though that would kind of be the point I suppose.) I guess we'll be seeing a lot more crypto stories bubbling up in the future...
Nice article, I can certainly vouch for creating a visualization to clue you in that there may be a problem.

One of the things I built out of Java when I was hanging out on the cypherpunks list was a 'Noise Sphere' applet. Basically this is a way of testing a PRNG visually. It was fun to put various ideas through it to see how they panned out (most really sucked) One of the cool things was using the alpha emitter RNG from a smart card and finding out that it too was slightly biased in the presence of foil on one side (never did find out why that was, but it did stick out)
Singaporean 'net rules rile giants: Voices raised against Website licensing
> I'm guessing that there's nearly a 100% correlation between the people accusing prospective homeowners of having an "insane obsession" and people who live in apartments in SF.

Ha! It seems that statement is based on... nothing?

I'm pretty militant anti-home ownership. This is partly to combat the omnipresent, uniquely American, societally-negative idea that you really ought to dream of owning a home some day. It's also some sour grapes because of the insane tax treatment home owners get and the difficulty in renting good houses because of it. How is it in the government's interest to encourage that behavior?

I live in a cozy little apartment in Boston and don't really expect to own a home for a long time, if ever.

From a theoretical perspective you should expect home ownership to be about as economically beneficial as renting. There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch and it drives me crazy that people think lottery tickets pay off, multi-level marketing schemes are a good idea, and buying things "on sale" saves you money.

The only reason home ownership appears to be a better idea, is because people ALWAYS fail to look at it in the risk-adjusted sense.

There's very little special about real estate as an asset class over any other investment vehicle. And buying ANYTHING on so much debt that you're levered up 10x is insane. That implies a 10% depreciation wipes out ALL of your investment.

I have a degree in Economics from MIT and worked in finance for 2.5 years so I tend to see things in that light. But no one talks about home ownership that (correct) way, and it frustrates me that there's so much pressure on people with little financial knowledge to make this massive un-diversified bet without understanding of the implications.

If someone gave advice to an unsophisticated median american to go out and buy tons of stock options, or short sell stock on margin, they'd be rightly chastized. It's unethical. But no one seems to bat an eye when the exact same advice is given regarding real estate.

And that's why the real estate crash was such a disaster trapping so many people in crushing debt.

If America had a sane perspective, wealthy investors who can afford big bets on real estate while still being diversified would take the huge risk in buying a several hundred thousand dollar asset, and middle income earners would have a much easier time renting decent homes in good areas.

So, no, it's not about "fetishizing" homelessness or anything inane like that; it's about recognizing a terrible corrupting influence in America and doing our best to correct it.
You are dangerously fooling yourself by minimizing the importance of those bugs. Cryptography software is not like regular software. It is critical software, like the kind used to run planes or nuclear power plants: People's lives depends on it.

People with no programming experience should be literally banned by law from writing critical software. You should take those bugs way more seriously.

PS: I have seen a programmer's face fear when asked to write crypto software. They know enough to be shit scared. You need that kind of people.
Officially, the Special Collection Service doesn't exist (2012)
Hope they are able to grow their consumer service. I've found it tremendously useful. I used it when I proposed to my girlfriend, to hire talent. I also used it to pick up something very important from Jfk airport that I had left on my flight. If you use if for the right reasons, it's a magnificent tool.
If you are interested this webpage does some really neat stuff with visualizing PRNGs.

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/oldtcp/
Jon Matonis appointed as Executive Director
Here is a clickable link for people who are as lazy as I am:

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/07/cameras_c...
I guess my attitude here would depend on my pipeline. $20k of freelance work doesn't sound like chicken feed. I'd probably put up with a certain amount of bullshit if they pay in time.
IEC 8859-1 (Latin1) vs IEC 8859-15 (Latin9) is the main bugbear: whenever you see ¤ instead of €, this is the cause, and there's an awful lot of data in and software expecting Latin1 still out there.
Don't forget Pikmin 3. A lot of people (including me) have been holding off buying a WiiU until that game comes out.

I've been waiting nine years to accidentally kill me some more Pikmins!!

/fanboy
You are welcome! :)
Looks like an awesome project, really.

I would love to use it.

Please let us know when installation is less of a kluge.

I followed your full install directions to a T and I'm getting "YouCompleteMe unavailable: ycm_core too old, PLEASE RECOMPILE ycm_core" on Vim start-up. This doesn't appear to be a Python version issue (everything is showing 2.7) and I downloaded the Clang binaries as directed.
> Also, if your work doesn't tie you to a region and you've purchased a house, and rents are high, you can always rent out your house instead of selling it.

That's a couple of big ifs, but even so, unless you have purchased a house as an investment with the intention of renting it out, this is another one of the rationalizations that prospective home buyers use to convince themselves that they're making a smart decision.

As I noted in one of my other comments, many home buyers know very little about the local market they've bought in to. Professional investors and major institutions have purchased hundreds of thousands of homes across the country that they are planning/trying to stabilize and rent out. To my knowledge, Blackstone owns more than 26,000, American Homes 4 Rent owns around 14,000 and Silver Bay Realty Trust owns more than 5,000. These are just a few of the major players. There are countless other smaller players, some of them foreign, doing the same thing on a smaller scale.

It's quite sensible to question the impact this will have on rents in the areas where this activity is most prevalent as the homes are stabilized and rental inventory increases. And one should not ignore the impact these purchases have had on housing prices in these areas.

Net-net: assuming you're comfortable being a landlord, which can be a trying job with even a single property, market conditions and trends vary so significantly that it's simply not credible to state "you can always rent out your house instead of selling it." Heck, as a lot of people found out not too long ago, at times it can be impossible to do either.
Commit From Last Night
> You mean companies that comply with US law? So your advice is to work outside of the US?

What makes you think you don't have to comply with US law if you work outside of the US?

If you're a US citizen living and working abroad, it will quickly become painfully clear exactly how much work you have to do to comply with US law (and how severe the penalties are if you don't). And US citizen or not, you might be surprised at how many non-US companies elect to comply with various aspects of US law for business reasons.
Multiple statements in angular expression
Your theoretical mature view would hopefully be able to better account for the privacy concerns this gizmo raises.
If people promote a lot of bad comments, we'll take away their ability to promote them.
I can mostly grok the scope of the error and the theory behind it...what's more interesting to me is to hear, preferably from the Cryptocat developers, what led to this error? An accidental regression? A deliberate decision? Cryptocat and what it aims to do is respectable, but I think what concerns people outside of the project is the prospect of unknown unknowns in the rest of the code: are the recent bug revelations indicative of endemic blind spots?
There's a nice article "Cryptography is a science, not engineering" [0] that gives an overview of cryptography that might help with your question as well.

The essence is that in modern cryptography you're creating a provably secure system. One of those proofs is that your prng outputs a uniform distribution.

[0] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2013-06-17-crypto-science-no...
Communication comment prompts memory of 1999 Korean Air crash
Startup encouragement
Pretty shitty why? Because it's marginally inconvenient for a large multinational to make it's developer information available freely? Oh, the humanity.
I do mostly engineering, and by that I mean I may do anything from backing up someones data to assembling Ikea furniture at an office in Midtown. I bring in sometimes $600 extra a month for meeting cool people and doing shit I generally like doing anyway.

EDIT: I'm learning Rails right now and doing Tasks to bring money in while I learn... It would be so rad to work for them as a Rails dev one day. Circle of life, man.
Seeking input on next Framework Benchmarks test type; proposed first cache test
But what's the benefit or rationale for having a new symbol? As far as I can tell, it seems to mostly consist of thinly veiled nationalism: "all the big countries have one, so we need one too". See for example this:

Now India wants something that no global economic powerhouse should be without: an international symbol for its currency. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7923825.stm

And it's not as if the existing "Rs", "TL", "KSh" etc don't work. So by introducing a new symbol, the country creates a lot of real problems (not just in IT, but for everybody who needs to enter or display the new symbol; where's the " ₹" button on your keyboard?), just for a vague sense of nationalist pride and prestige.
if i already have linux installed i can carry fat binaries and a kernel for chroot'ing an environment. all in a tar file... I think this is just new way kids does common things of yesterday. or maybe linux containers kicks chroot a in performance?
This seems to be getting farcical.

It makes me think of a potential (already done?) headline by the Onion: NSA Deemed To Be A Threat To National Security. And up after the break: Schrodinger's Cat - Denied FOIA Response Confirms State Without Opening The Box, Details at 11:00.
Switched to DuckDuckGo a couple weeks ago. It's surprisingly pleasant to use.
PrismaCode
You could have just written "I'm not as entitled as those bigger brats so NUH UH"
I help write microcontroller code for pressure equipment management. If something goes sufficiently wrong in heating/fails to properly vent, an explosion can occur, endangering everyone in the area.

Even unrelated code is heavily audited to make sure that it can't somehow impact the main control loop and cause an invalid state.

Cryptography software should be much the same.
VotePence Android App for MLB All-Star Voting
Especially when after going through the full installation process, YCM crashes on start-up...
if my merits laid on highlighting my gender, i'd be worried as well :)

I'm pretty sure i'm the first native american to do something of relevance, but I will be dammed if I write/let this be the opening paragraph of my Bio.
The Laws You Can’t See
Yup that, Eclipse, vi, Apache, MySQL and Oracle are my bread and butter. Never used nginx or Redis.
Seconded. Especially because the "quality content with a focus on technology, startups and frankly anything that appeals to the inquisitive mind" is pretty close to what that Monocle is doing :)
I think there is more to it than a buzzword though, the HTML5 way of doing web ie, paving the cow paths is radically different to the methodologies of XHTML, such that the range of technologies to be born/adopted out of that paradigm shift could be thought of as HTML5 era technologies.
Seems like at a minimum, if you are doing your own random number generator, you should have a test harness that runs the chi squared test and compare against a known good random number source. I wonder how many other automated tests one could stack up against a crypto codebase to do that kind of basic checking.
Securities feeds are, I suspect, more write-dominant and have a much lower fanout rate. They also don't have the outlier-retweeting-outlier or outlier-tweeting-@-outlier problems.
> people who've only used languages with 'and' and 'or' will only take a few minutes to get up to speed

No. Cognitive overhead. You pay for it every time you parse these words in your brain. You pay for it by reducing the number of nested/combined clauses that you can parse on the fly.

(This is far from the only readability issue with Go, by the way, and you're right in that it's among the more superficial ones. The language is designed so well in all ways except the one that matters the most, it hurts.)
I was wondering the other way. If you just open Chrome in incognito mode and search Google without logging in, is it very much different from DDG? Except for the results quality, of course.

Is the big difference being your IP tracked with the searches by Google?
> What happens when you take a slice of a string?

What happens when you slice a unicode string in Go is that it cuts multi-byte characters right in half, unless you get the byte boundaries just right. I know real programmers keep the byte boundaries for all the chars in all their strings in their head at all times, but for people like me this basically makes string slicing unusable for non-ASCII text.

Python somehow magically slices unicode strings without chopping characters in half.

In Python:

s = "нєℓℓσ"
s[1:4] # "єℓℓ"

In Go:

s[1:4] // "�є"
Very awesome for Sf Giants fans!
The Article that Created the Internet
Completely agree on all points.

Also, community. My wife was sick in bed for 3 months, our neighbors came and watched our kids every morning from 8:00am-12:00pm so I could work and continue to support my family. You only get that from a neighborhood of homeowners.
Maybe at some point a project exhausts whatever potential goodwill/snarklessness is available and just becomes an object of snark - and at that point and beyond, perhaps the benefits of the project having a reputation of being a snarkmagnet outweigh negatives of the inevitable snark it generates.

Makes it a lousy, toxic topic for message boards but that seems a comparatively small price for a defense against the notion that Cryptocat is (or likely, ever will be) secure.
> Google may have been able to comply with the letter of the law without giving up user data by using e2e cryptography.

Only at the cost of not providing the service that users want, which includes such things as fast, full-text email search, recovering accounts after passwords (and other security tokens, if any) have been lost. Once Google can extract the unencrypted email for any purpose, the practical consequences of their legal obligations make all cryptography Google provides useless against this sort of attack.

Yes, Google has a choice. But let's be clear on what that choice is: They can choose whether or not to offer a mass-market email service. Once they've decided to offer that service, the practical consequences are inevitable, given the current, relevant legal framework.
Nothing "wouldn't exist." They'd just cost X% more or run Y% slower, which at our scale runs to $large-number, and I personally think that's valuable.

I do get your point though, and I do wish sometimes I worked on something that wouldn't exist without me.
Why not a tragedy of the commons with "rational agent" cars that are attempting to minimize parking fees. A neat idea but I think if driverless cars did this then cities would adopt traffic jam fees to realign their cost/benefit strategy in the "driving" game.
Yes, specifically people with wives and children like me. This is what's driving the property market in cities like Austin and Boulder. Talent is moving there because they can work for a startup and still have a healthy family life, work/life balance, and non-insane commute.
This seems like a classic "Apple did that so why don't we?" approach, which doesn't have to be bad but people shouldn't copy Apple for the sake of it; they should copy them because what they did makes sense and actually works.

There's something about the whole pirate thing that doesn't sit well with me, isn't it almost synonymous with rogue? People don't like rogues. People want someone who's principled and stands for something, which is not the case for pirates.

Pirates are the kind of people who will do anything to get where they want to be, which if you romanticize it sounds like a really positive thing, but it can lead to situations where you don't always judge in favor of customers but rather in favor of your own self-interest; which if you thought things through should be in favor of customers since that will ultimately make your business more successful.

I like the term "free radical" more, it doesn't have the negative connotation to it that pirate does.
If you use vim, the syntastic[1] plugin has go support and gives you this sort of feedback directly in the editor (for any go code, not just app-engine -- and many other languages) every time you save.

[1] https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic
Needs more emphasis that the left column is the one to avoid.
On the Glass device, there is a small button around the user's temple. Simply holding it down for <1 second will begin recording.

It's a lot easier to turn on video on Glass.
The point here is that Twitter really is one of the cases where vertical scaling is not, on the balance of non-functional requirements to engineering overhead, the right decision. They really do need to pay the complexity piper.
> and the in case

Never knew I had dyslexia before!
Cryptocat's hacktivist credibility was cemented in 2012 when
its Canadian developer, Nadim Kobeissi, was stopped at the
US border and interviewed about his Cryptocat-related
programming activities.

s/was/claimed to be/. This software clearly is not Ft. Knox, and its becoming less and less believable that US intelligence would ever feel the need to interrogate the author of an open source project, and with such brittle security, about the cryptography techniques used therein.

I find it far more believable that the young developer with a penchant for dramatics and a reply for everything has a talent for PR. And a shallow understanding of the grave consequences of faulty crypto software.
I wouldn't say they're bad at programming - everyone makes mistakes. I think the issue is more a weakness in (or lack of) tests and oversight. The fact the code is open source at least gives it some accountability and the error did get spotted eventually.
ha! that's wolf creek road in eugene. an awesome road for cycling. I live in san francisco but I visit my friends in eugene in july. luckily, in july, the weather in eugene is typically superb.

I think it'd be pretty tough for me to handle all the grey during the rest of the year.

the bay area has a lot of paradise weather - I grew up in marin - and when I went to the east coast for school I had trouble with the grey and interminable springs. it just sucked in comparison.
Several of these suggestions seem somewhat disingenuous - e.g. many of them to be about free software more than actual concerns about tracking, as reflected in the labels "Proprietary" and "Free alternatives". In particular:

- None of the proprietary browsers will track you - well, beyond what's specified in the privacy policy. Two of the alternatives are Tor applications, but the other two are Firefox (which provides no additional protection) and GNUzilla IceCat (which has little reason to exist other than free software politics).

- Most of the browser add-ons are mostly about third-party tracking; these could be subject to PRISM, but the notes suggest that the concern is more about the third-party tracking itself and non-free software (in the case of Ghostery).

- Ditto with the notes in cloud storage, which discount three storage systems with client-side encryption (i.e. equal protection) because they are proprietary.

- The media publishing section promotes third-party blog publishing services for "privacy and security", even though most blogs are public and thus have no need for either.

- Ditto above with Icedove vs. Thunderbird in the email desktop clients section.

- iOS is advised against with a misleading claim that "iOS devices contain hardware tracking" due to an long-patched bug. The claim about it being impossible to verify whether an iOS app was compiled from the original source is disingenuous, as this is rarely done on any platform, but would certainly be possible to do on iOS if the developer cared.

- OS X and Windows won't track you. (Chrome OS won't either, but it strongly encourages using cloud services which will, so I'll concede that.)

In the claims that proprietary software won't track you, I am assuming that the NSA will not compel (or has not compelled) these companies to modify their software to include secret tracking. This claim is made explicitly under the operating system section: "Apple, Google, and Microsoft are a part of PRISM. Their proprietary operating systems cannot be trusted to safeguard your personal information from the NSA." But even considering all that we have heard about the NSA, this seems absurd, far beyond what they are willing to do, and even if it were true, using free software would not necessarily prevent the US-based host of the download from being similarly compelled. Moreover, someone would probably notice (unless it were an intentionally introduced but otherwise unremarkable security bug, but it's sure easy enough to find real zero-days in software, free or not, without having to resort to that! - not that that should necessarily make you feel better.)
> Panama gave up their last bit of secrecy after the US helped the last president get elected by spying on his competitors.

Any reference to back that up? I read some of the leaks from Bradley Manning related to Panama and the U.S. clearly stated that it didn't favor Martinelli (current president).