skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many seem to be missing the worst part of this:

Services are forever tainted. And services are the most interesting part of the puzzle.

Open source software that runs on the client is nice, but frankly I'm not as concerned about the NSA having access to my desktop. Logging, parsing, and analyzing client data of this sort opportunistically probably doesn't scale. And it's easier for me to set up a system in my house where I can audit all incoming and outgoing traffic (not that I'm going to do it, but I'm confident that I could). The one exception to this is encryption software... more on this later.

But it's hosted services where a lot of my interesting data lives, is structured in a way that makes opportunistic scanning much easier, and there is no way for me to audit it.

There's no way for me to know that GMail's servers don't have a backdoor. Or likewise for Dropbox or Facebook or Citi or my Amazon, etc...

This means I have to encrypt everything stored on any service (which is why my encryption software does need to be backdoor free). But most services store data about me where I don't control if its encrypted or not (it's not easy to encrypt voice calls from the end user perspective).

The end result is I already have fatigue, and I haven't even done any work yet!

I think most people are going to rely on an old story:

"Two guys are walking through the woods when they run across a hungry bear. At this point one of the men quickly ties his shoes. The other man says, 'Why are you tying your shoes -- you can't outrun this bear!' To which the other man says, 'I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.'"

Internet services are too valuable to not use. But it will be too much work for 99.9% of the population to preserve their privacy. The lack of privacy from the NSA will become the new normal. I have trouble seeing it playing out in any other way.
Not the same effect. setTimeout() will execute the callback after the main event loop has completed, potentially allowing the browser to reflow the page, etc. Doing that will slow things down considerably with lots of callbacks.
Yes, 8 years ago ... PDO and prepared statements is the quasi-standard since the release of PHP 5.1
Asana Yoga for Healthy Feet
oh! somebody forgot to uncomment all gwt "engines" before comitting :P
Is LINQ really fast/performant though? Wouldn't the above expression cause three sequential loops to run?

One of the biggest performance issues I've seen with modern .NET code is people abusing LINQ and lambdas. Chaining functions like this is most decidedly not fast. I once wrote a library that had do do some heavy signal processing on large data sets, and since I wanted to ship the first version as soon as possible, I just used LINQ in a lot of functions to save time. It wasn't very performant so later I rewrote most of the functions to use standard native code such as loops for iteration, hashmaps for caching and all sorts of improvements like that. I completely got rid of LINQ in that version and for many functions the runtime went down from something like 500ms-1000ms to microsecond area.

So sure, LINQ makes development fast and it's very nice to be able to write code such as .Skip(10).Take(50).Where(x => ...). On most web projects, it won't make a huge difference. I've seen Rails "developers" use ActiveRecord in such a way that they would create double and triple nested loops and then hit the database multiple times by using enumerable functions on ActiveRecord objects without realizing how this works, what's going on behind the curtains and so on. I've seen .NET devs do similar things using EntityFramework.

So yeah, it's convenient and all, but it can also be very dangerous when used by someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals behind these principles.
One of the current big US measles outbreaks is church-related: http://www.npr.org/2013/09/01/217746942/texas-megachurch-at-...

My anecdotal experience among anti-vaccination people I've known is that they're only weakly correlated with religion or politics--leaning slightly left but still all over the map.
Unless they have the NSA's budget, the NSA mathematicians, the NSA's history of accumulating the NSA's capabilities, they can't.

If you want to visualize this, think of the world's navies. Who else but the US navy can even operate globally? Who has naval aviation? You might come to think there is a qualitative difference in the ability to do spying.
Several videos I made using a GoPro camera and a modified egg timer
I meant that there weren't kids in my surrounding (consisting of a couple of thousand kids) with the kind of mental problems(symptoms) while growing up and having very strict immunization schedule.

Of course in the 80s in Eastern Europe some things were just considered being a kid that I suppose will give you today some diagnosis.

Was chicken pox or mumps the one that boils your testicles if you get is as an adult?
How to use Gmail as your customer support software (and not suck at it)
I have quite a few friends at Morgan Stanley and many of their quantitative people are top-notch. So this has nothing to do with them.

I do find the financial industry's underplaying of risk, in general, to be pretty hilarious.

I remember when Goldman blamed a hedge-fund blow-up on three 25-sigma events happening in a week. That was in the summer of 2007. It elicited a good chuckle.

If you sample from a Gaussian distribution, 25-sigma is about 1-in-10^137. That's 457 bits of improbability-- if the distribution is Gaussian. Three in a row? That's 1371 bits-- comparable to drawing 65 spade royal-flushes in a row in five-card poker. The mortality risk of a 25-year-old per Planck-time (5*10^-44 sec) is a mere 179 bits.

Likely conclusion: financial events are not Gaussian, and existing models extrapolate poorly to new circumstances (sometimes this is out of an intentional desire to undercommunicate risks; more often, it comes from the business side's willingness to put more faith in simple models than the mathematicians that built them). Of course, this has been known for 30 years.
That's odd, since the bars below the 5-star rating claim no one has rated the headphones yet.
That's amazing, that's more than the population of the United States.
It's fairly common to silo national-security-sensitive information, to avoid revealing sources or methods for things deemed not important enough to be worth it. The NSA doesn't share its data with the IRS or even regular police departments, either.
Do you click them?

If not then google aren't making money.

If yes then you might have to feel guilty about robbing small businesses to make money for google.
English is gibberish
▶come, dome, home, rome

▶bind, blind, dined, mind, find, kind, whined, pined

▶end, bend, blend, fend, lend, pend, mend, tend, wend, Zend

▶bull, cull, dull, full, gull, hull, lull, mull, null, pull

▶boll, doll, droll, knoll, loll, moll, poll, quoll, roll, stroll, toll , troll

▶brum, bum, chum, clum, crum, crumb, cum, drum, dum, dumb, dumm, frum, glum, grum, gum, hum, krum, lum, lumb, mum, numb, plum, plumb, rhumb, rum, schrum, schum, scrum, scum, shrum, shum, slum, strum, stum, sum, swum, thrum, thum, thumb, um, yum

▶it, bit, fit, flit, grit, hit, kit, knit, lit, omit, pit, quit, sit, skit, slit, spit, split, tit, wit,

▶utter, butter, clutter, cutter, gutter, mutter, putter, shutter, sputter, stutter,

▶blubber lubber rubber scrubber

▶bite, byte, cite, kite, lite, mite, quite, rite, site, smite, spite, sprite, trite, white, write

▶alight, blight, bright, fight, flight, fright, height, knight, light, might, night, plight, right, sight, sleight, slight, tight

▶ore, adore, ashore, bore, chore, core, fore, gore, ignore, lore, more, pore, score, shore, snore, sore, spore, store, swore, tore, whore, wore, yore,

▶fettle, kettle, mettle, nettle, settle

▶dingle, jingle, mingle, shingle, single, tingle

▶awake, bake, brake, cake, drake, fake, flake, hake, lake, make, quake, rake, sake, shake, slake, snake, spake, stake, take, wake

▶cube, lube, rube, tube

▶bug, chug, drug, drug, dug, hug, jug, lug, mug, plug, rug, shrug, slug, smug, snug, thug, tug,

▶bump, chump, clump, dump, hump, jump, lump, plump, pump, rump, slump, stump, sump, thump, trump,

▶boot, coot, foot, hoot, loot, moot, root, scoot, shoot, snoot, toot,

▶but, butt, cut, gut, hut, mut, mutt, nut, put, shut, strut, tut,

Try to explain what is: effulgent (without dictionary)
80% of Americans own 7% of US Wealth
Shelling out for each piece of data is indeed not great.

Shelling out for batch-processing loads of data is on the other hand great.
It could actually result in people being sued in the US as well. There are many standards that require protection of user data (like PCI and HIPPA) that could be compromised by the NSA. Yet there is no simple defense since you can't point a finger at a secretive government agency. If you are legally required to demonstrate the data is protected, yet it appears to be available to any random contractor of the NSA, it might make it impossible to provide that guarantee.
Right, but my point is that the CA is the central point of failure for all of those scenarios.
Another good reason to avoid POSIX timestamps: they ignore leap-seconds. Thus, to determine how many (for example) days are between two timestamps, you need an up-to-date database of leap-second insertions. Maybe an error-bar of a few seconds doesn't sound like much, but if that error bar happens to straddle midnight and (like most code) you get a date-stamp by truncation, you could be off by a day. If that error-bar happens to straddle midnight on December 31st and you're truncating to month or year values, you could be out by a whole lot more.
Minor point: could the prevalence of ad-blocking on Linux be mostly because ad-blocking makes the Web significantly faster because Flash is dog-slow on Linux, rather than any particular philosophical objection to ads?
Honestly, how many times does the link between vaccines and autism have to be disproven before people get it?

On the other hand, there is a direct link between not being vaccinated and getting sick. Probably why they want to vaccinate against everything. Even chicken pox can cause more severe disease like shingles [1].

You wouldn't want your kids riding in a car with only the safety features that existed when you were a child. Why would you do the same for their health?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_zoster
It's a subtle difference, but I would call it "siphoning traffic."
One thing I did on my website was being quite lenient in what I accepted and then re-formulating what I understood to the user http://i.imgur.com/NiPtDEX.png
I'm still not sure it's a good idea since I've never seen it anywhere else.
Hell, it killed around as many people as WWII, including the Holocaust (wikipedia estimates for WWII being >60million, and estimates for the Spanish flu being 50-100million.)

Numbers that big become very difficult to actually fathom in a meaningful way.
I listed an example about the rotavirus in my subsequent comments, but
here's another one mentioned by Patrick_devine in the comments:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/09...

This illustrates that the precautionary principle[1] might sometimes be forgotten or be put on the background.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
Not really. For a passive attack the key would have to be stolen from a server rather then the CA, who never sees the private key, rather only the CSR (public key).
It is a conspiracy thing. Left or right wing conspiracy-minded people adopt it. Some people replace vaccines with "faith healing", others replace it with new-age shit.
As one example, at $work about a month ago I switched us from our $$$ Google maps implementation over to OSM + Mapquest Open. In some cases the geocoding isn't as good, but it's good enough for the important sites (AU based). And it won't cost us 5 figures a year anymore either.
Looks very interesting. I am intrigued by the idea of Ruby having type hinting and optimizations based on hints.
There are also Esri maps: https://developers.arcgis.com/en/features/mapping/
Check out Pencil (mockup app) http://pencil.evolus.vn/ for an example of multi-platform desktop app based on XULRunner.
Yes. But when you used to have a company culture that looked favourably on niche features, and you later start to remove niche feature after niche feature after niche feature, that you start make a lot of people a little disappointed in you.

In other words:

Lets say you remove 100 "niche features".

You have 100,000 users.

Every niche features was used by 0.05% of your users.

Now you have upset 100000 * 0.0005 * 100 = 5000 or 5% of what is likely among your most vocal users.
While you cannot view technology as some kind of force of nature, immune to ethics, blaming the misery of joblessness on technology is beside the point.

When is the last time the minimum wage was raised? The last time the work week shortened? Those laws are in place because of technology eliminating human labor. Those legal changes were the solution to a problem technology created. But they have not been updated while technology is galloping away. We blithely crush low-skill, entry level jobs because they are easy to crush.

Technologists have a responsibility to mitigate the impact of technology. But the answer isn't to restrain technology. The answer is to deliver benefits to society as a whole, and that comes from restructuring our economy to benefit workers.
Indeed. If you want talk to them with their terms, you might have better luck with "God helps those who help themselves", though I doubt that will work in practice either.
Here is one that is almost 'Ready to Go'... HTH

http://openoffice.apache.org/get-involved.html
When is the Right Time to Lose Your Virginity?
Mark Suster (VC): The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
...if only there were a practical Android app available.
Ask HN: How many browser bookmarks do you have on average?
Granted, but they revise the RFSs pretty frequently; I doubt they'd leave that up out of sheer negligence. So the questions remain: Does PG still feel that building a startup on top of Twitter to be a good strategy? What insights does PG have as to Twitter's dedication to helping startups?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora

Bacteria that aid in weight control don't just "eat your food," they actually help your body break down food correctly. That's why you take a pro-biotic after going through a round of anti-biotics - you need to re-grow your gut flora to aid in proper digestion.
Silly rabbit, there you go thinking again. Did I say they chose? No, I said social, meaning their homosexuality was caused by social pressures instead of biological imperatives. I am sure there are some that 'chose' to be that way, just the majority of them are that way because of imprinting or other social pressures.
Greenwald: I'm working on several new significant NSA stories.
finding more talent and keeping them in the YC family
Ha, never heard of anyone else doing this before.
We're assuming under the current circumstances that it's backdoored, basically. The NSA definitely doesn't want to have to go knock on doors to collect those private keys.
I am sure there are people there who do care about security and this is a victory, but it is a small one and not one that really saves their reputation.

The problem is that the NSA presumably gets access to the information before it is encrypted, so this does not limit what the NSA can get from Google. What it does do though is possibly cloud the traffic to some extent regarding cracking stuff, but then the NSA could probably just disregard the traffic between data centers.

The real victory is that other companies are more likely to follow Google and this may have an impact.
Germany has a five-digit postcode system yes, but it doesn't start at 10000.
Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville
I was wondering the same thing since that's also what apple recommends in situations like these. This is what I got on the same hardware:

strptime_l took 58.803 seconds

NSDateFormatter took 107.570 seconds

sqlite3 took 7.022 seconds

And with MishraAnurag's suggestion of using timegm instead of mktime:

strptime_l took 21.656 seconds

NSDateFormatter took 108.163 seconds

sqlite3 took 7.096 seconds
That was to make a fair comparison between the two approaches since NSDateFormatter's dateFromString gives an NSDate, while SQLite was handing back an integer.

But you are right. In production, it makes more sense to let SQLite handle the conversion and insertion in the same statement.
Ask HN: Are you working 1) on a startup, 2) for a startup, 3) in a non-startup?
I think it would be useful for all of us to have a quick understanding of the HN audience? Please up vote the comment that best describes your working condition. Thanks :)
Student Launches Pocket Tees Clothing Line
Part 1 & 2 of the series:

https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2013/08/26/the-state-of-tls...

https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2013/08/28/the-state-of-tls...
I feel like anybody with their ear even moderately to the ground knew the NSA had encryption breaking techniques... Why else would higher-level encryption be illegal?
1) on a startup (you are in the founding team of a startup)
I don't think there's any doubt to it.

There are folks that made their fortunes and earn their livelihoods on the net. These folks are going to defend what we built to their dying day. There are governments and corporations, which believe they absolutely must have whatever data they view as honorable (and this definition is surprisingly flexible) in order to continue to privide their services.

Then there's the general public, including most reporters, who suspects something is amiss but keeps hearing all kinds of contradictory opinions, including calling out the folks who warned about these as tinfoil hat types.

Yeah sure, there's lots of noise and confusion, but doubt? I don't think so.

Note: I'm not trying to weave a conspiracy theory here. My only point about existing players is that they're too emotionally wrapped up in things that took many years of hard work to see the situation objectively
So brave. Trust me, on hackernews you are not going against the popular opinion. Actually you'd be hard pressed to find any decent programmer community in 2013 that advocates PHP for beginners.
2) for a startup (you are employee #1 or #199 of a startup)
If you've ever moved country, and imported some data from the old country and mixed it with data from your new country, it quickly becomes obvious why preserving source timezone is a deeply useful attribute ("It's a beautifully sunny day! -- me, 04:17hrs").

Or at the very least, preserving the time offset.
3) in a non-startup (services company, freelancing, corporate, etc)
I've seen the last month of expiry happen before. Although annoying it might be a security for the seller. If you enter your card number on Sep 29th and for some reason the bank only transfers the money on Oct 1st, it might not work?
It's from the Lavabit mail.
Now I understand your reasoning. Stating there are two camps with no one in-between was maybe indeed too... extreme. I meant to say that there are a lot of people with strong opinions, and few with a balanced view acknowledging there are both risks and benefits.
Introduction to Context Aware Systems
Why not see what sqlite is doing and do something in C yourself that solves the actual problem. It's not surprising that a general purpose Obj-C (or any language) class isn't terribly fast at one specific thing.
First Public Blog Post Using Ghost
If we believe that chips and hardware have been compromised by the NSA (and I suppose the Chinese who make a lot of it), that encryption has been cracked by the same, and that it is spy open season at ISP level, then surely nothing that runs on or through such devices can be secure enough, Tor included?
Personal honor is what Edward Snowden showed. Getting caught for selling out your users and then endeavoring to do something about it is not honorable. It's manipulative and pathetic.
Where's that "40 percent less bloat" coming from?
Incidentally, written by the same author! Great stuff!
mmm.....can I see the code about NSDateFormatter? because I feel like you're using it wrong. You need to cache somewhere the NSDateFormatter allocation (it is really expensive), reusing the same instance to convert the string to NSDate*.
> the new mega-application in Android for OS updates

Without this fragmentation would continue to be a huge issue and make Android development much less palatable than the alternatives (iOS/maybe WP). What would you have Google do instead?
Show HN: Running, an extremely simple exercise tracking app.
Running is extremely minimal and hence supports very limited options. I am trying to understand the market from the perspective that "Should such minimal apps exists?"

Kindly check it out and let me know what you think about it? Would you use it? Or I am going completely in the wrong direction.

Feedbacks are welcome on usability, look and feel as well.

Website: http://hmpgr.com/apps/running
Invite Code: HN

Thanks a lot for reading.
That's interesting. I'm not sure of the significance of that year or how that relates to the algorithm in Meeus' book. This web page talks about the date algorithms in Meeus' book in some detail but the math is beyond me - http://mysite.verizon.net/aesir_research/date/jdimp.htm. The Julian day conversion algorithm here is the same one used by SQLite.
Gut Bacteria From Thin Humans Can Slim Mice Down
Yes, and that's the workload convdate is intended for: it batch-converts an entire column of a tab-delimited file. The larger crush-tools suite is intended for unix-style batch processing of tabular data, but fills in some functionality that the classic set of POSIX tools (cut, sort, paste, join, etc.) didn't cover.
This is an amazing idea, thanks.
It is also one of the best ways to check if you are being understood IRL - just ask your interlocutor to explain in his/her words what you just told.

I've seen something similar (well, now I know it's simmilar, it didn't occur to me until I saw your example) - though I assumed it would be unhandy.
It was a way to show your webshop cart as a text saying something like: You have bought X, We will send it to (Addres here). It should arrive @ (date). Will cost (some)$.
(it didn't look as awkward as my example though).
When you're talking about spying on communications over the wire I agree, but that's not the scandal here. The scandal here is that the USG's position is that "we can obtain from the service provider without a warrant the data of any user or corporation as long as they are foreign, even if that data is stored in a non-US datacenter".

Imagine the same kind of position in the physical world. A multinational storage company would be forced by the USG to open up a client's storage locker somewhere in Europe, copy all the documents in it and send them to the US.

If nothing else this is a very serious threat to the US as the global provider of tech services.
Care to expand on that a bit (without repeating items found in the "Fractal of Bad Design" article)?
burn them to dvd
I believe the biggest weakness with hidden services (besides the regular "endpoint" issues) is that they use 1024-bit RSA keys which, as of recently at least, have come under suspicion.

The keylength is a "known weakness" to the developers and, while the plan is to eventually shift to longer keylengths, I don't believe there is any goal or deadline for that to happen.
I think if your are building closed crypto products you need to be (1) not a US company (2) have multiple technical people in various different countries not likely to be politically compatible. Even better have no connections to the US at all other than selling products there. Then at least you have a chance to avoid the pressure to compromise.
I imagine that a foreign company not operating in the US doesn't give a damn about threats by the US, which is what I assume the OP meant. What do you mean?
> Chicks dig scars

Chicks? Really? Come on Linode, you should be better than this.
Much harder, I'm afraid.