skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I hope he is correct that the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence. That's an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence.

>... an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence,

Not.

"Normally ciphertexts decrypt to a single plaintext and hence once decrypted, the encryption user cannot claim that he encrypted a different message. Deniable encryption allows its users to decrypt the ciphertext to produce a different (innocuous but plausible) plaintext(s) and insist that it is what they encrypted. The holder of the ciphertext will not have the means to differentiate between the true plaintext, and the bogus-claim plaintext(s)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption

with:

"Secret sharing (also called secret splitting) refers to methods for distributing a secret amongst a group of participants, each of whom is allocated a share of the secret. The secret can be reconstructed only when a sufficient number, of possibly different types, of shares are combined together; individual shares are of no use on their own."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

Let the shared secret be deniable-crypto plaintexts. Threshold T sharers may release plaintext_1 while ignorant of a different sharer subset intersection may release a different plaintext_n, benign or otherwise, for example.

At another level of deniability, Snowden may also not even know the current identities or nos of secret sharers participating.
Thanks. I found a great suggestion to this problem over there:

"Maybe borrow a feature from Stack Overflow [or Get Satisfaction or Desk.com or Uservoice], which presents similar-sounding stories before posting? Some client-side JS which pulls the page, heuristically picks some "interesting" words, and runs them through search.yc?"

Here is the perfect and best of both worlds solution to prevent duplicates:

Step 1: (Algorithm) Automatically check the title (and maybe other metadata like keywords) of his submission against similar existing content on HN. Present these results to the user.

Step 2: (Human) Let the user's intelligence decide if his submission to HN looks like a duplicate of another user or not.
This was an interesting read: http://www.quora.com/Torture/Whats-the-best-thing-to-do-if-b...

> You'll break. Instantly. So spare yourself the agony. Just spill the beans.
Contradiction: Efficient process is automation.
Microsoft Asks Attorney General To Release Gag Order On NSA Spying
It's more error prone than GC and there aren't really enough advantages to RAII to make it worth it much of the time. Sometimes, sure, but GC is nicer and usually fits the bill.
Post Office photographs every letter you send
You couldn't be more wrong IMHO.

Instagram is actually looking to be quite a smart acquisition. Not only is it fending off Vine with its video integration but look what is happening in Kuwait. Businesses there are using to sell comics, sheep, makeup - anything which is photo dominated. Plenty of opportunities there to monetise without affecting your everyday user.

And as smartphone cameras become more sophisticated like we are seeing from Nokia and Sony it is likely that Instagram will takeover from Flickr as the primary photo service of the internet as well.
So or Microsoft or Swoden and its data are lying.
If i have to put a finger against one of them, i would choose microsoft.
I'd say a 200 person is still pretty small.
I think the "technical people make for bad managers" idea derives from:

Companies which have limited advancement opportunities within the technical realm force technical folks with no desire for management into management positions that they're unfit for, leading to the conclusion that technical people are bad managers.
Is there a cohesive idea or approach here? This just feels like a bunch of unrelated utility functions. And there's basically no documentation, right? The readme description of Q.getter is just "Q.getter - wrapper which makes any getter function smarter, using caching, waiting, throttling, without worrying about ", while the docstring for the method is 30 lines long and I still have no idea what it does or how to use it. It seems like you're doing some really heavy, serious work in this library with a ton of library-specific options, etc. If that's the route you're taking, I think you're going to need real documentation, tutorials, etc. if you expect this to get any uptake.
How is it more error prone than GC?
The instagram number was just a numerator on top of facebook's valuation. To say instagram was overpriced is just an indirect way of saying facebook was overpriced.
You've answered what you describe as a "lazy dismissal" with what appears to be one of your own.

The big difference is that most "large companies" people will work at are not Google and Facebook. Name any other enterprise who's motto is "move fast and break things". That is a rare culture. Even Google, who's engineers report that they're catching a bit of the dread corporate-itis is still different from your average enterprise.

More commonly, enterprise is known for being a place where fast moving is discouraged, individuality is stifled, pointless bureaucracy is the order of the day, mediocrity is indirectly rewarded, and productivity and common sense take a back seat to political demands.
That's a good recommendation. Maybe we'll call it the Qbix library. It's just that our entire large framework (which primarily runs on PHP and Node.js) is called Q, and what I published is just one file from the front-end SDK..
This may be right, but to me, as a doubter, I'm well aware of potential benefits, but my creepiness radar comes from the feeling that there is a point where recording becomes too intrusive. If I'm in a public bathroom and someone is snapping photos, that it's too intrusive. And the problem with glass is that you never know wether its just sitting on someone's head, or it is recording. I don't see the benefits of ubiquitous telepresence overcoming the creepiness of ubiquitous telepresence.
You are most likely right. I should explain instead that the md5 should be used to verify HMACs sent by a service. However, when sending passwords over the wire, the client should ideally hash it and the username/email + id of the provider should be used as the salt. That way different providers can't impersonate a user on each other's servers. This salt SHOULD be applied on the client side even if you are using https, or you are actually trusting the provider to not misuse or leak your password, e.g. in logs. See for example http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-prism-secure-ciphers
The main thing with discs is that they are less susceptible to crap getting in as the contact surface is away from the road.

The big disadvantages to me is that they get hot which causes the pads to degrade quickly, they weigh more, they're a crap load more expensive and if anything goes snap, hacking it on the road is hard.

From a non-technical point of view, I think discs lock up easier and are the force applied versus the braking force isn't as linear meaning less control.
If it's prediction time, here's mine: The time of hyper-multitasking, constant broadcasting of minute details to even the most distant acquaintances is over; the big luxury will be being able to spend uninterrupted time on a single, meaningful thing, without being constantly interrupted by emails/tweets/fb messages/chats etc. People rent cabins in the forest to get things done - and they got those things done and might serve as inspirational role models for others.

Even Hackernews could be considered as support for this view, as it tends to encourage people to use the long, well-thought form instead of the quick snip. The most useful posts that I read here must have taken its writers more than an hour (admittedly, this is not one of those brilliant posts).

If Google Glass succeeds - and it is possible that it does, then it will most certainly not be based on the immediate exchange of images with others a long way away. If a picture is worth taking and worth sending, it is worth getting out the smartphone or camera. At least in my generation very few people have time and the wish to constantly interrupt their work or play to check yet another sunset in NY/Shanghai/Rio.

But maybe that is truly a generational thing.
The typical alternative to a blanket + top sheet is not just a blanket, but a duvet with a duvet cover, that is just as washable and not much different from "just a sheet". And the bonus is you don't need to do anything to prevent it from bunching.
This approach starts getting brittle when you get into objects that aren't procedure-scoped; for instance, a global session table in a web application, or a request token tracker in an RPC system. These are also the kinds of object lifecycles that tend to be behind leaks and corruption in programs that don't use RAII.

People use shared pointers to mitigate that problem, but shared pointers are (a) a reference counting scheme with all the attendant problems and (b) not compatible with code that holds references but doesn't speak the same shared pointer scheme.

(It's been a bunch of years for me since I wrote C++ professionally; that may show here.)
Lets just post this every few months for karma - yeah, good plan.
Yep, agree. The courts have so far ruled that you have no "right to privacy" to data that isn't yours to begin with thus email headers and phone records can be collected by law enforcement en masse without a warrant.

But compare this with the Supreme Court ruling in 1958 blocking the Alabama government from obtaining the NAACP's membership lists as a condition to doing business in the state. The lists belong to the NAACP and not the individuals on those lists, but the Supreme Court still held that people had a right to "pursue their lawful private interests privately". [1]

"Immunity from state scrutiny of petitioner's membership lists is here so related to the right of petitioner's members to pursue their lawful private interests privately and to associate freely with others in doing so as to come within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_for_the_Ad...
If Snowden lied or exaggerated, the USG would ensure that every media outlet shouted about if from the mountain tops until no one couldn't know.

That would not necessarily be good opsec. The government might consider that it's better to have the general public believe it's omniscient while being more realistic with diplomats; or it might simply decide that correcting specific inaccuracies would give too much information away.

Additionally, government is based on lies, lying is what government does.

Well, no bias there then.
> quite a few experienced national leaders with very different constituencies to represent agree that there is more harm in Snowden being on the loose

Or, more plausibly, these leaders also have something to hide from their ostensibly democratic constituencies and would find it beneficial for any more potential Snowdens of their own to think twice.

The recent articles about UK, France, etc. surveillance and data gathering bear this out.

Manwhile, leaders in more authoritarian governments or in weak sham/corrupt democracies are less concerned with Snowdens (people already corrupt or cowed), and more interested in taking US's tiresome high handedness down a peg.
Are you asking what kinds of errors RAII-style C++ programs make that you can't make in Golang (an easy question), or what kinds of errors you can make in Rust that you can't make in Golang (harder)?
I hope you don't mind if I rephrase that last bit, I felt it was overly specific:

"-Do you want to a) protect your computer from being stolen? b) improve the privacy of your files? c) protect your online credentials?"
> My perception, which may not be accurate, is that Twitter doesn't do that.

Twitter employee here: Always surprised at the amount of ridiculously talented people I work with. :)
I thought it was strangely higher-tech than the suggested alternatives.
>I've always thought the EFF was driven by tin-foiled paranoia

Somehow this surprises me. Is it just me, or have EFF always been the Good Guys?
The SSL errors could freak a few people out who don't know what's going on:

status.newrelic.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is only valid for the following names:
*.statuspage.io , statuspage.io
The point of the article is to say everyone should have experience working at a large company to get perspective. The same thing can be said for small startups. The debate over which is better is endless and childish.
And if such laws do get passed, the people who wrote and supported them would be open to voter backlash, which is why they were done using secretive "guidelines."
Looks amazing guys, public metrics looks like a really killer feature. Hope to be able to afford to spend $80/month on this in the future!
The title is wrong.

No they don't photograph every letter, they photograph every envelope/package you send.

Which makes sense, considering you want mail to be sorted automatically. It's the storage of this information, as well as meta data about it, that is arguably problematic.
From the perspective of an attacker it doesn't really matter if the malicious code contains deprecated things or lacks elegance or is generally ugly.
The 1958 Supreme Court ruling struck down a law that required groups to provide their membership lists to the State of Alabama. They don't have to "prevent" people from being able to assemble, but building lists of which groups people belongs to still violates their "right to pursue their private interests privately". So in large part, the right to assemble also includes the right to be part of any group (even communists!) without the government needing to know.
> and they are often more focused on delivering.

that nailed it.
Is There Any More Privacy in the World? VICE Podcast 010
You don't have to give the real identity of the person whose sample you're supplying, you're entirely free to give someone else cash to make the purchase on your behalf.
It can be said in general:
If there is a lack of technical expertise or value for any company, expect much frustration.
The biggest difference that appears to me is the lifetime and size of applications. I work on applications that have existed for a decade (and that's short, among our various application teams). Many of our applications are hodge-podged mixes of legacy and more modern technology.

Whenever we "rewrite" an application that has outlived any possibility of keeping it alive, we can't start from scratch: we have to continue meeting all existing customer needs. So even from day one designs are often bloated and frustrating. There is no "MVP".

Meanwhile at a startup you can "move fast and break things", and when an application starts to get stale either it can go away, or you can switch to another startup and begin fresh.
Why are you limited to using the 2023 version of the kernel? Are they going to erase the 2013 version of the kernel in 2018?
I have an almost uncontrollable urge to punch anyone I see wearing Google Glass in the face.

I think what enrages me so much is the fact that I wish people would be more present. It's bad enough that people are bumbling around smashing into things (with their bodies or cars) while tapping away on their phones 24/7. It's somehow more important to know what your second cousin once removed had for breakfast yesterday than what is happening three fucking feet in front of you. The entire first world is filled with people who are always somewhere else, not here and now.

Google Glass takes this to the next level, even though it has already gone several levels too far. At some point you really have to take a step back and realize that it's not useful, it's just technological masturbation.
Yeah like the article states, you get to look at the complete picture and can make your own - multitude of conclusions can be narrowed to a certain subset when running a company and have a decision to make.
Without techies to recommend it to friends, family and coworkers, Ubuntu will never reach the masses. Non-techies are not independently evaluating Ubuntu.
I'm time-pressed in a very different way to you: I get just a few hours a week in when my family is asleep and my chores are complete. That's why I'm excited about this new stuff: it looks like it will increase the percentage of my limited studio time I can spend actually playing and singing.

The thing I'm most looking forward to? The iPad app. TouchOSC is great, but this looks like I'll be able to load new instruments and create new tracks! Perfect: I can sit on my big comfy chair far from my screen, guitar in my hands, ipad on the arm, and muck about like I used to with a Portastudio. I might even break my iron-clad "No Apple dot-zero version" rule.
So much of this impression is shaped by the narrative that the techblogs are choosing to cover on any particular week. In reality, all these companies have some level of attrition, and people leave one job for another for new challenges. Dropbox has 315 employees[1]. That constraint alone means that the number of slots to fill will be very small.

(I also personally wouldn't really label Dropbox as "bigco" label like Google and Facebook, if only because you can still fit everyone in one medium-large room. I guess it's not a startup anymore, but I don't think anyone would consider it a lumbering corporate behemoth).

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/about
Which is why they drive to work in a Model T and rely on an IBM 7090 for their backroom stuff, correct?

This is a goofy analogy. Whining that BigCo, Inc. won't shift their embedded "way of doing things" is like whining when it's not easy to up and move the Empire State Building... there's a ton of architectural complexities and in the end the building is still making money and housing people.

Not that I'm advocating the status quo just "because", but the reality is that big companies work via risk models that determine it's often better to stay with the SQ than move "forward".

In comparison, hopping around with tech in a startup is like packing up the RV and shuffling somewhere else... it's lightweight and easy to do so.
While I agree that some of Snowden's actions are a bit hard to read, my take has been that he's doing a difficult thing, is under a lot of stress, and is following largely uncharted territory.
Unless you're a tester, then you get to wear lots of hats, too.
The biggest big company problem is the lack of focus slows everything down. The ability to execute is there, but the focus is not. Start ups will attempt to manage 20 products and services at once, and that feels like too much, where big companies attempt to launch 200 new products, 80 new services, 40 special partnerships, 750 pet projects, 380 special events, 30 broad initiatives, plus the CEO mandate of the week ... all while maintaining support for 3100 legacy products and acquisitions ... the result is everyone is very busy yet unfocused. Too much context switching at all levels, too many works in progress get blocked on waiting for other teams to contribute their part.

Second challenge of big companies: trying to keep up with all of the latest project code names which change on a weekly basis.
Anonymous exposes private prisons
One of my pet peeves is that I think Linux users are disproportionately obsessed with the command line. A well designed GUI can actually be really powerful, but it seems like we compare well-designed CLIs to badly designed GUIs, decide that CLIs are amazing and keep not bothering to write good GUI apps.

That's not to say that CLIs aren't powerful - I have a terminal open all the time, and for many things it's the quickest option. But I think we underestimate how useful GUIs can be.
Use a general-purpose OS, like Android. Use whatever apps you prefer to watch videos: VLC, YouTube, Chrome, Hulu, etc.
Actually, there would be little to no downside to eradicating mosquitoes:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html
Comment of the year :)
Affiliate Commissions - Know your customer LTV if you want to get them right
Greenwald and Snowden have a 100% accuracy rate regarding these leaks

You seem like the sort of fellow who ought to own a bridge.
Incorrect. The appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is "confined within such limits as Congress sees fit to describe." The Francis Wright, 105 U.S. 381 (1881), at 386.
Of all the internet companies Dropbox looks the most precarious to me.

The fact is that the core product kind of sucks. It is slow to upload, very CPU intensive and incredibly slow to receive new features. And its focus on API data syncing as a growth area seems fraught with danger given iCloud and likely similar services from Microsoft, Ubuntu, Google etc.

It also has no stickiness associated to it. I could easily transition to a competitor's product with no loss of data or productivity. And if it wasn't the best of a pretty sad bunch then I would have years ago.
The Decline In Male Fertility
You also get mosquito bitten in the Outer Banks in a 20 mph wind off the ocean. Not sure about this NYT piece.
It’s Up to You, Entrepreneurs
I think for physical books it's much easier to make money with a copyleft license, so it does weaken the argument for allowing closed source books.

I would still personally choose a permissive CC equivalent of a BSD license though (CC BY 3.0), if only because I want other people writing books with permissive CC licenses to be able to incorporate my material. Also, for a closed textbook, a publisher might want to take a couple chapters out of my book, or 10 of the images, and I'm not okay with limiting the amount of quoting.
The article says that agile is a big-enough tent to encompass waterfall development with standup scrum meetings.

No way. No way. You can put lipstick on a pig, but at the end of the evening, you are still dating a pig. I lived through the waterfall era, where upwards of 90% of large projects were seriously over budget, seriously behind schedule, or outright cancelled. A colleague at the time told me he had worked on a $10M projects that ended up $1B over budget. No that wasnt a typo. Fortunately, I wasnt a party to any of that nonsense.
The State of SQL Education
Firebase is used in the example on the front page of the official AngularJS site.
Once again, I feel that I'm the only one who knows it's possible to run non-Unity UIs on Ubuntu.

Window Maker. It works. I run it. Have for years. I can't be the only one, because it's still right there in the repos.
Gittip at Khan Academy
Microsoft: We do not give the NSA keys to bypass email or Skype encryption
Compared to OMGPOP, which was a one hit wonder bought for $200 million and shut down after a year?
He was actually at tenexer in between the two.
This is one reason why you write for the JVM. I have Mac users for software that I've never personally used on a Mac.
Actually, I do hear a lot of people who reflexively disbelieve anything Obama says; also, you're making a terribly flawed analogy. A more appropriate one would be to say you didn't trust anything Obama said on the subject of drug policy because he used cocaine etc.
NSA Joke: US Military Intervene over Facebook Event
What do you mean? To my understanding, the ads are removed from the HTML before/during rendering. Unless that ads are on an external server and a request hasn't been made before the ad is removed from the page, a request should be registered and an ad subsequently served.
Signal or Noise? NEA's Experience With Signaling Risk in Seed Investing
It's likely. Verizon provides landline services for the entire Washington DC area.