skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Military adventurism, overly harsh sentencing, and illegally spying on our own citizens are not simply wasting a day at the keyboard. They are actively harming all of us.

I'm not just talking about an issue that affects large organizations. I have never feared imprisonment from Apple, MSFT, or Amazon. I have never made involuntary payments to any of them. Steve Ballmer can't stop and frisk me for weapons on the street b/c he fears for his safety. Sure big companies have waste and inefficiency, but it's at a much lower level than the federal government.
> I'm trying to think of some <Foo> that doesn't work in the pattern of "<Foo> will prosper until governments or banks decide to crush it".

How about agriculture? Governments can't destroy that, because everyone would starve, then they wouldn't be a government any more.

Or the internet -- a government can't ban that, if they want to be richer than North Korea (which most do).
The problem with BTC is how long it takes to confirm a transaction. Paper-based transaction is instant, you hand bills over and you're done. Credit cards are the same.

BTCs take 4 or 5 block-chains before they're "confirmed", and you don't really know if your customer has "double-spent you" until the confirmation occurs. This makes BTC unacceptable to the vast majority of typical transactions.

Its fine for say... online shopping, because 30 minutes of confirmation time isn't that big of a deal. However, waiting 30, 40, or 50 minutes for confirmations is not the best way to buy coffee in the morning.
I'm sorry, I don't believe that. I mean, all this Internet and telecommunication surveillance is one thing - and a bad thing for sure, but spying drones is in another ballpark.

I'll just leave this here from Orwell's 1984:

In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs,
hovered for an instant like a bluebottle,
and darted away again with a curving flight.
It was the police patrol, snooping in people's windows.
You said: "for example you can dynamically select over a changing list of channels"

reflect.Select does exactly that.
Actually the challenge is drive-by injection not the site per-se. Chrome didn't flag it as such but if you spend time crawling the web you will notice that it is a not-unusual weapon in the arsenal to put up a <attractive to people we're looking for> web site, and have it inject visitors with a tracking cookie/script/trojan. Sort of a variation on honeypots.

Thus it helps to be alert when popping into such sites.
I can understand. I remember some time ago there was a Kickstarter campaign for plasma jet electric thrusters for spacecrafts [0]. I was as much sceptical about them as I'm about this campaign right now, but that time the project seemed to have turned out to be legitimate [1].

[0] - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2027072188/plasma-jet-el...

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726451
I haven't followed the Dropbox conference, but have they made any statement in regards to the whole PRISM "Dropbox coming soon" claim or anything else about user privacy?
Good summary. Fortunately you have the likes of Balanced to make life slightly easier. Outside the US we're screaming out for a similar service.
can someone post their login info here please?
Ask HN: Is there any way a non-American citizen can get antibiotics in NYC?
Hi folks,

Currently I am in NYC (Manhattan) and I happen to feel quite sick and knowing myself it will probably get worse and the only way it will go away is to take antibiotics. However, I am not an American citizen (I am from Eastern Europe) and hence I don't know how the health system works here. Could someone tell me if there's any way I could get a prescription from a doctor so I can buy antibiotics?

Any help would be much appreciated! Thank you in advance!
Governments have already begun to crack down on the use of cash.

Examples:

Italy http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/italys-cap-on-cash-paym...

Spain http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-11/spain-to-limit-cash...

USA (Louisiana) http://www.klfy.com/story/15717759/second-hand-dealer-law

There are more examples beyond this, but there may indeed be a trend emerging.

You also risk having cash stolen by border agents when crossing international borders. Many countries expect you to declare whether or not you are carrying more than a certain amount.
By the mean time, the rest of us, we can dig into Stuart A. Kauffman and Stuart Hameroff's ideas on Penrose's counciousness.

http://www.edge.org/memberbio/stuart_a_kauffman
http://www.edge.org/conversation/five-problems-in-the-philos...

An updated critic on this ideas by Göran Wendin:
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/qcontrol13/wendin/pdf/Wen...
I launched Planscope in February of 2012, and by the end of the first month, a little less than 30 people converted from a trial to a paid account, many of which are still around.

I credit a pretty aggressive campaign of relentlessly understanding my first batch of announcement customers businesses, their needs, and what was keeping them from having an über-consulting business with the lack of crickets on launch day. Then again, I really didn't make launch day that big of a deal, outside of it being the first day I flipped the switch on the marketing site.

I'd have a LOT more customers if I knew what I know today about why people buy / don't buy project management software, and I likely would have focused first on audience building over building a SaaS. But that's sort of the point, right? Get something out there that people pay for, figure out why people are buying and why (more) people aren't, and continuously improve on that. So it's not as much of a Eureka moment that suddenly made Planscope take off as it was a lot of shots fired in a dark room, and inching up the brightness with each subsequent shot.

One thing that has worked really well for me: Gaining a customer through something other than my SaaS. I sell books, workshops, host a newsletter and podcast, etc. All of these are focused on making some component of a consulting business better. Planscope also helps better a few select parts of a consulting business, but has considerably higher adoption friction than a book purchase (e.g. ditching your current PM software and convincing yourself, your team, and your clients to shift somewhere else is not an easy task.)

So after someone's "entered my ecosystem" and started getting value from me through information, there's a good chance they'll discover Planscope, and by then they'll be familiar with my consulting philosophy and have enough trust placed in me to adopt my SaaS (there's more than a good chance, actually — there are autoresponders in place to ensure it.)

And the proof is in the last few months of signups: more than 60% of all new accounts come from my newsletter or have read one or more of my books, and the overwhelming majority of support requests start with "Hey Brennan" :-)
VMware removed support for PC Speaker.

God says...
experts act oh_no it_was_nothing I_was_just_thinking a_flag_on_that_play
impossible flat China frown stoked I'm_bored look_buddy
I_had_a_crazy_dream why_is_it music the I_planned_that
nasty wanna_bet ba_ha honesty You_can_count_on_that maybe_I_didn't_make_it_clear
homo grumble I'll_get_right_on_it charged listen_buddy
game_over rockstar scum spunky I'm_gonna_smack_someone
sess_me nut_job geek special_case That's_gonna_leave_a_mark
you_owe_me chump_change big_fish good skills beam_me_up
what_would_Jesus_do but_of_course maybe_I_didn't_make_it_clear
Bam endeared virtue stoked do_it joker duck_the_shoe well_golly
umm you_think_you_could_do_better why_didn'_you_tell_me
who_are_you_to_judge sex I_pitty_the_fool I_didn't_see_that
whiner how_high but_of_course let_me_count_the_ways to_infinity_and_beyond
I'll_let_you_know you_talkin'_to_me you'll_see well_obviously
I'm_beginning_to_wonder if_anything_can_go_wrong flat
I'm_tired_of_this silly_human rose_colored_glasses fabulous
bad hype crash_and_burn ohh_thank_you Icarus freak astrophysics
look_out shist experts once_upon_a_time daunting Ramsay
I'll_get_right_on_it silly_human boss Tomorrow basically
choose_one astronomical don't_you_love_me rockstar do_you_have_a_problem
wanna_bet genius is_it_just_me_or liberal doh God_smack
air_head big_fish that's_much_better I_love_this what_a_nightmare
play What_are_you_doing_dave cheerful watch_it_buddy listen_buddy
it_was_nothing vice Varoom Burp jobs insane I_love_you
bastard
Paste.sh - client-side encrypted pastebin
Do not run JS or Flash on untrusted websites.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, also take a look at MenTaLguY's WebActors:

https://github.com/mental/webactors
How much is the Voynich Manuscript currently worth?
The last time I tried it I didn't find a broadly accepted server-side framework that automatically compiles ClojureScript assets, but I haven't looked in a while.
"low spec" now means "unimaginably fast and powerful" around 1995 and "Martian Supercomputer" in 1985.

At some point recently, we crossed a threshold from being hardware limited to being originality limited (or I did anyway).
Collection and analysis of mail records after suspicion may be a long-standing practice, but universal collection before suspicion is something else entirely. Further, you say it's a "known fact," but how many people on the street actually know this? I mean, if it was really a known fact, then it wouldn't work because criminals would use some other way to communicate, right?

After all, its all information that goes onto a caller-id, its all public information.

A typical person will not expect the information shown on their caller ID screen to be public information. There's a really, really huge difference between information entrusted to a limited set of third parties to handle to the minimum extent necessary to carry out a service, and information made public. The government's reasoning and position on this needs to change.
> Governments could lose money on each manipulated boom-bust cycle, and at the bottom of each cycle, Bitcoin would still be alive and ready for new uses.

Not only that, once people realised they could make money by buying when it's cheap and selling when it's expensive, new users would flock to the currency.

So I agree with you that this attack probably wouldn't work. What is much more likely is that if banks decided they wanted to destroy Bitcoin, they would bribe governments to do so. They would also spend money on a propaganda campaign linking Bitcoin with terrorists, pedophiles and drug dealers.
"Instead of considering HFCS as a food, and measuring how it works on your body, why not consider HFCS as a drug, and measure how it works on your brain?"

That does seem to be the major focus of this lab: Bart Hoebel is a psychology professor "who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction".
Cool stuff! A couple of days ago I listened to Rich Hickey talk more about core.async on the most recent ThinkRelevance podcast:

http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2013/07/10/rich-hickey-and-co...

I've written a few client side projects in ClojureScript, and I haven't been totally happy with the way I end up doing event handling. I'm excited to give this a try.

By the way, I love that this is the sort of thing you can do with just a _library_ in Clojure.
http://usehuman.com and http://mvpforum.com
Here are some details from Rob Walling's presentation:

http://www.it-engelhardt.de/rob-walling-how-to-10x-in-15-mon...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/19/us-usa-security-dr...
It can't just be "better"
Most merchants in practice accept transactions immediately as soon as they receive the unconfirmed notification. The security is not 100% perfect that way, but it's still way better than the risk of getting a chargeback with a more traditional system.
me likes.

if you added inbound.org
it would be a trifecta of hacker,hustler,designer news
Yes. And even at "the end of BTC's existence", archival copies of the blockchain will persist.

And, some subsequent attempts at an improved cryptocurrency are likely to try to include the past blockchain balances as an initial endowment (or balances as of a certain checkpoint).

Doing so would help lay claim to being Bitcoin's rightful heir, and attract the immediate financial interest of people who've already proven their interest in cryptocurrencies.
I made a brief timeline of Parastoo hacks when submitting the Cryptome.org article on this topic. The hacker(s) referenced VSATs and drone hijacking after hacking IHS Janes, pre-JFK drone incident. They then started to reference the JFK incident in further releases about hijacking US drones over US skies/assets:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038657
"Hapi?" Ironic, considering:
http://gawker.com/wal-mart-is-scared-of-these-true-stories-f...
Yeah I've seen this before though it doesn't really allow you to share arbitrary data as it relies on Web Workers (if you share data with a worker it will disappear from the sending process). I'd also be concerned about the performance of the implementation, core.async adopts C#'s approach which is pretty light weight.
I'll concede that perhaps the experience of being one with the network is somehow similar to the experience of being one with a car, or one with the scenery and characters in a good book, but my point still stands that politicians who don't experience that connection are ill equipped to make decisions affecting those who do.
The person does not claim that. Where did you draw this from?
What I want is a keyboard with two big keys below the space bar, each half the width of the space bar, that I could map to Escape (the left one) and 3rdLevelShift (the right one). With Ctrl left of A, and Backspace just above Enter (aka the Unix Layout), I would be able to type without having to resort to ridiculous contorsions.

Loads of bonus points if the keyboard has the same kind of keyswitches as the IBM 5100 computer. If you are familiar with modern keyboard switches and folding knives, the IBM 5100 switches are to Cherry blues what a Chris Reeve Sebenza is to a Walmart-bought Buck knife.
My phone is fast enough that the difference between 4KB of data and 80KB is not huge.
And here is the mailing list thread that the author refers to:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/29/366
The short study and the long study apparently disagree about whether 12hr or 24hr access to HFCS results in more weight gain. The 8 wk study shows 12hr HFCS leading to much larger weight gain than any of the other groups, and 24hr access not being significantly different from sucrose or chow alone. But then reading the 8 wk number off the weight chart from the 6 month study shows 24hr access being ahead of 12hr access.

You asked if these results have been replicated anywhere--it seems like the beginning of their long study didn't even replicate their short study. This makes me seriously skeptical about the differences they report between HFCS and sucrose.

The only conclusion I would feel very comfortable drawing from this data is that giving rats access to sugar water for 6 months makes them fatter (Fig. 1). Finer distinctions than that seem unwarranted.
SSDs
Maybe we should do what they do in china when speaking on such topics… idea sentries has a nice ring.
I like the idea (though I might limit disclosures of spying on a country $FOO to countries with a bilateral agreement not to spy back or to be similarly transparent).

I don't think it addresses the concern of capturing haystacks before we know which needles to look for but it would certainly help with transparency. Even more importantly, it ingrains in the mind of the analysts actually using these systems within the intelligence agencies, and the FISC itself, that there is that concern for eventual public disclosure. Therefore, they should be inherently suspicious of anyone trying to avoid adding a given FISA warrant to the public disclosure list, or otherwise trying to interfere with public disclosure (such as by going around FISA).

And as I've mentioned before it would be even better if this kind of thing were built-in to the systems themselves so that an analyst or their supervisor couldn't choose to 'forget' to do it.
Where you should go depends on severity of disease. If you are seriously ill, you should go to an emergency department at a hospital. (If you had a primary doctor in the US, they might be able to admit you directly without going through the ED if you were very ill.) If you are ill and need to be seen soon, urgent care centers exist and they should be able to see you quickly. If you are well enough to wait for a few days-to-weeks, then you can schedule an appointment with a doctor.

How it is paid for depends on insurance status. I don't know whether your home country has national insurance, how that works once you're in the US, or whether you personally have private insurance. If you are not insured in any way, then you could be liable for expenses.

Finally, it seems unlikely that a doctor would write you for antibiotics without seeing you first, but who knows.
It is immune to the inflation that plagues all fiat currencies

Funny thing is, most actual economists would say that the inflexibility of Bitcoin is a disadvantage.

Discussions of Bitcoin are dominated by people for whom certain rules about money (such as: "it must be a forever fixed amount") are basically articles of faith. Outside of this comparatively small population, people primarily care about other things, such as good economic growth, full employment, social equity in the sense of equality, and all sorts of things.

Having a forever fixed supply of money tends to be detrimental for those things.
Sure, but I don't see how expecting that the illiterate would vote in a reasonable way when the literate do not (given the Bill of Rights example) is actually much less discriminatory.
Prior two Edward Snowden's whistle blowing I think you could perceive the maintainer as paranoid around leaving the project (see linked thread) however now I think you can't discount what, if any, cooperation technology companies have been providing to the NSA.
Yes, this is pretty routine here. Go to a doctor's office which accepts walk-ins (most of them do -- in a pinch, every hospital will let you wait briefly for the emergency room, or you can Google for "acute care center" or "urgent care center"). They'll ask for your insurance information. Tell them that you have none and will be self-paying. You'll fill out a brief form, be seen by the doctor, likely get a prescription written, and get presented with a bill. It will likely be somewhat larger than what you're used to paying to see the doctor. You can take the prescription to any pharmacy, and pay there for the antibiotics. They will likely be more expensive than you are used to.

American doctors, by law and near universal custom, treat patients without regards to citizenship.
You know, I feel the same way. They may be our enemies and want to destroy us, but being able to see their side of things is refreshing. We can't continue to act like we're the perfect country and everyone else is 100% evil. It's not that simple.
From Adam Langley, who works at Google on their SSL stack, on his post "How to botch TLS forward secrecy":

In the case of multiplicative Diffie-Hellman (i.e. DHE), servers are free to choose their own, arbitrary DH groups. <snip> ... it's still the case that some servers use 512-bit DH groups, meaning that the connection can be broken open with relatively little effort.

Full article of his at https://www.imperialviolet.org/
Renewed Investment in the 2nd Screen Industry
Well, cool things are pretty much inherently outliers ^^;
I wish the world would stop and think about this.

This truth is incredibly important and it isn't being said loud enough. It's being discussed in forums such as this, but not nearly enough by the media.

Anyone out there who can amplify and repeat this statement should do so.
This theoretical problem isn't that big in practice. Ensuring your malicious second-spend 'wins' the confirmation race requires a lot more effort than an ill-gotten morning cup of coffee is worth.

If it actually started happening -- burning merchants who accept 0-confirmation transactions -- a bunch of cheap countermeasures could be adopted. For example, only accepting 0-confirmation transactions from certain origins with a traceable reputation, performance bond at trusted third party, or subject to other recourse/debt-collection. Or, having a consortium of major pools commit (for a tiny fee) that they haven't seen a competing transaction and will prefer the one presented first, by the merchant.
It's not enough to get you a visit from the feds or anything, but it's almost certain that any competent intelligence agency is storing anything that touches that website. Whoever posted it likely has links in their social graph to very high value targets.

It makes me wonder, if one were to inject an 0x0 iframe with this site on a decently trafficked page (a couple hundred visitors per day) that tends to attract a niche, one could potentially create more noise?
I disagree with your assessment (and so does the majority of people on that pull request, it seems).

It's always better to use a CDN because:

1. It has a chance to be already cached (specially if you use Google's CDN).

2. All browsers nowadays do 6 parallel requests per host. So using DNS prefetching with `rel=dns-prefetch` will be faster.

3. If you bundle jQuery with your site's JS files, every time you change a single JS file of your own, your users will be forced to re-download your bundled jQuery. Seems pretty inefficient to me.
So let me give you a hint.

I am/was the guy who made AjaxWhois back in the days (a similar site, one of the first). It was hugely popular and I was making thousands a month (totally passive) with it until it got acquired and went to shit.

I tested a bunch of things, ads in the sidebar, different registrars, etc, but the only thing that ever worked was GoDaddy, right in the search results. Ads in the sidebars are a waste of your time so don't even bother.

I know how technical people feel about GD (I feel the same) but the truth is, their crazy upselling techniques work and you get paid commission on those, not so much on the domain name itself. I was often making north of $100 per customer I referred to them. Not sure if they still pay the same but needless to say, that was pretty awesome

I also had coupon codes that gave my users a discount AND made me a lot of money. If you can get that, it's the holy grail. It just made no sense for my users not to click on the ad.

Good luck!
For those that aren't aware, the security of a rand number generator is very important: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack
Ask HN: Why does the emergency alert system require OS updates from carriers?
Is there a network-related reason that carriers such as AT&T and Verizon needed to (preemtively) update iOS and other smartphone operating systems in order to be able to issue emergency alerts (i.e. amber alerts, weather alerts, and presidential alerts)?

It seems to me that alerts can be sent as SMS messages and they could have simply added an option to their online account management system that would allow suscribers to opt out of receiving the alerts (except for presidential alerts apparently).