skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd quibble with the idea that it's OK to (secretly) break military codes but not civilian ones as the analogy doesn't fully apply to 2013.

Nowadays, civilians and military are in many ways converging to the same exact types of technology. E.g. AES is civilian crypto and yet good enough for the most sensitive military secrets, so breaking a military cipher that happens to be used by civilians would still be militarily beneficial.

Likewise, the Navy would assuredly have eavesdropped on civilians in the Pacific, if civilians were out there on Japanese military frequencies. They would then have filtered the civilian crap out because it wasn't what they were going after, but the U.S., British, Germans, etc. would have eavesdropped on anything with an antenna if it gave them a wartime advantage and they wouldn't have thought twice about it.

And so that's what we're getting into, the Information Age equivalent to military forces using civilians as human shields, and the NSA continuing to chase after them regardless.

ProPublica is right that there is something scary about the idea of the government being able to decrypt at will, and I agree with ProPublica that there may even be reason to let the government use such an ability in carefully controlled circumstances, with appropriate safeguards, if they actually have that ability. So good on them for making it a point of discussion, and doing so responsibly. This is a great example of 'watchdog journalism' keeping the public alert and helping to keep the government honest.
For some reason the color gradients changed the intonation with which I read it--so the whole thing sounded, in my mind's ear, like an eighties valley girl, replete with uptalk, aka the "moronic interrogative."*

"BeeLine Reader is an exciting new technology? That helps people read faster? On computers?"

Maybe I'd get used to it. But if not, a 100x speed increase wouldn't be worth having that in my head. Like, all day?

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
I see the desire for whole foods as simple gastronomic conservatism: for better or worse, our species has done very well on foods like fish and leafy greens for millions of years. Given the clear consequences of poor diet, I make the choice to play it safe. Doesn't mean there needs to be any antagonism towards those who make a different choice.

I applaud the Soylent creator for experimenting with his body and his life. I just hope that those who take this lifestyle leap, or any other, don't become too certain of their choice, because it turns out that biology is really, really hard.
They mostly say they've solved the problem of how you and your friends will find each other at the concert, or how you're going to deal with the back breaking hassle of getting your mail, and these types of things. Not real problems, in other words.

Soylent proposes to replace the need for the human consumption of food. That's an extra level of chutzpah
-----------------------------

ROBOTICS SOFTWARE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT (SAN FRANCISCO / Bot & Dolly)

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

Bot & Dolly seeks a software developer with an interest in the physical world to help us advance the state-of-the-art in computational design workflows for robotics.

-------
Description
-------

This developer will:

- Extend an existing platform for motion control with features described by product visionaries

- Work closely with the engineering team to design stable, long-lasting system architecture

- Participate in end-to-end testing from design thru production with robotic work cells

- Document ferociously and iterate quickly

-------
Qualifications
-------

The ideal candidate meets the following qualifications:

- A strong foundation in computer science fundamentals

- Demonstrated experience with C# (ideally, though our technology stack is not Microsoft based), C++ or Java

- Experience developing software outside of an academic environment

- Experience with client/server applications, multi-threading, UI development

- Experience with fabrication technologies, geometric modeling, or robotics and their respective tools of the trade

-------
About Bot & Dolly
-------

We're a diverse team working in San Francisco amongst robots, shop tools, and film equipment, drawing upon a multitude of disciplines to build tools for motion. We're looking for people with a big appetite for technical problems, a deep toolset, and an active imagination.

This position may be structured as a short-term contract or a full-time staff position, depending on the interests and qualifications of the candidate.

For more information, please send a brief introduction, resume, and links to any relevant work to jobs@botndolly.com

www.botndolly.com

--
> it is an impressive showcase of what you can achieve with HTML.

That statement right there is the single biggest problem that web faces. You still have to qualify it with impressive for HTML. Because the bar for HTML is just so, sooooo low compared to native. On desktop it kind of works because performance really isn't a problem - you've got boatloads of CPU & RAM to just throw at it and nobody expects 60fps. On mobile it's the exact opposite.

Web isn't a viable platform for app development until people start saying "that's impressive" without the "for HTML" qualifier. And that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
version not behind a paywall?
1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself.

SKETCHY ADVICE. Tor might make targeted attacks on you personally take more work, but because Tor attempts to provide anonymity and not confidentiality or integrity, it may make you more susceptible to dragnet surveillance.

2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec.

Great advice. But prefer TLS to IPsec, which is largely the provenance of commercial systems and the product of much more vendor-centric standardization.

3) Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA – so it probably isn't.

Sure, I guess.

4) Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors.

Absolutely, great advice.

5) Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations.

This starts out great. This sentence is great. It continues:

Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography.

Dead on, absolutely. Number-theoretic public-key crypto is terrifying. But then:

Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.

ARGH NO ARGH. First, conventional DLP systems also have suspect parameters. Second, the best ECC systems have parameters of well-known provenance. Third, ECC systems are known to be stronger than DLP systems. In fact, the most likely source of any claim about an NSA cryptographic breakthrough is that NSA has a viable attack on RSA-1024 (an IFP system, but six of one).

If you were going to change one thing about the way you decrypted in the wake of today's "new information", make it be that you abandon RSA.
Where are the original documents (primary sources)?
I wonder if RHEL and Ubuntu distros have NSA/FBI root kit backdoors in their kernel binaries and/or subscription services.
I always found it strange that for a food product with a wildly successful kickstarter that "The Team" didn't have one person onboard with a nutrition or food sciences background.
Your statement reveals a real lack of understanding of opensource. Hint; it's open to all, all includes world-class cryptographers. Each contributes their ability for the greater good of all. WCC may not spend their time coding or packaging or whatever. Others will.
Seriously? Then why bother with the whole thing at all?
I like this article because, unlike the other two articles now high on HN's front page (one from the Guardian and one from the NYT), Schneier actually mentions other countries besides the US and UK:

The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure his proposed solution is doable:

We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything.

As he notes, this hasn't worked well in the past:

We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior

As has every other international forum that tries to do "governance" (the United Nations itself being a prime example). The only international bodies that have worked reasonably well are the ones that develop standards, without making any political statements about how to use them: "mechanism, not policy". The IETF, which Schneier mentions, is such a body, and can certainly help on the technical side, but I don't see much hope on the political side if it has to be international. (For one thing, why would the governments of China, Russia, Iran, and others care what some international "governance" body says, any more than they care what the UN says?)
There are a couple of other issues, even if one agreed with your view:

1. They obviously can't keep their own secrets, so it's unlikely that they will do any better than keeping yours. Eventually, your data will leak out to non-NSA people.

2. By adding backdoors, they weaken the encryption. This implies that anyone with sufficient skill who goes looking for backdoors may be able to exploit the hole that the NSA opened up. This is a big deal, especially if you have secrets that you need to protect.
Also nobody used it because it's a CSPRNG that requires bignum multiplication.
Can we please put the science back into computer science?
> Anyone who wants a stop gap though, should check this out: https://github.com/pwnall/chromeview

A stop gap that adds at least 30mb to your application is a really shitty solution.
Well... that logic would have told all the "micro brewers" of recent years to just pack it up because Bud Light is already at the store.
The entire food science industry is a long, sordid history of hubris in thinking that science has solved every aspect of human nutrition.

- Vitamin supplements don't have nearly the efficacy as getting those vitamins from natural sources.

- Baby formula is universally accepted to be inferior in many ways to mother's milk, in ways that food science readily admits aren't completely known.

- Junk science like the lipid hypothesis are still regularly spouted, despite very little evidence that dietary fat has a direct correlation to bodily fat.

There's a world of difference between believing that food has some mystical power that transcends physics, and that we don't fully comprehend nutrition. Conflating the two isn't arguing in good faith.

Even the example of pet food is bunk - pets survive longer when domesticated because nearly all of the hazards they would face in the wild aren't present, not because their diet is better. There's plenty of evidence that pets benefit from raw meat diets far more than the carbohydrate-heavy diets that pet foods provide.
If we are going to vilify encryption, then we should just stop teaching math. That's all encryption is.
Not worth the trade-off, if you ask me. I would never publish something that looks like this. It is very distracting to me.
I fully sympathize with Rob's frustration. Conventional wisdom can take an incredibly long amount of time to dislodge, especially when it is mixed with tradition. A big part of our culture revolves around food, its preparation and consumption. So naturally there is going to be a lot of resistance to the claim that we don't actually need it, and can instead consume this gooey substance that is even better.

I have never tried Soylent myself, but I find the concept intriguing. I hope it takes off.
In a sense, yes. In fact, it is good that they put the effort into breaking these systems, and good that Snowden let us know about it. Now we know that the vulnerabilities exist, we can go about fixing it.
Lesson: traditional brokerage selling houses turns out to be just as profitable as they were.
From my read of the code it appears to be written mostly in JavaScript. There is one NaCl module, not sure what it does though.
Now we know why Congress thought it was a realistic risk - they were already doing it to China.
What? Which documents confirm backdoors in TPM chips?
Ah maybe I'm not familiar with the current capabilities of AppleTV. With Plex I get to have cover art, libraries, and a nicely organized interface to my media library which I can navigate with my remote alone.
Can you point me to a food manufacturer or anyone that says you should consume their product to the exclusion of all other nutrients?
Version Control Weekly - Issue 13
Did you even read the article?

The leaked documents confirm that this is exactly what happened.
... and government surveillance.
I thought my point is rather clear. You said you are angry at Rob because he "[has] the balls to promote his product with not an iota of attention being paid to the scientific method or any type of rigor."

What I am telling you that, if that is the case, then you need to be angry at pretty much every food manufacturer ever. Because they also do not use scientific method or any type of rigor when they make claims about their products.
Also check out http://www.spreeder.com

A different approach but also bookmarklet
This is cool, and I hope there's a lot more in this space. I get the feeling that home automation is going to grow over the next few years.

I started something similar a while back with Go -- a simple RESTful interface to various bits and bobs in my home. Go was a good fit due to its speed -- it's _fast_ on the RPi, and cross-compiling for ARM is straightforward. Coupled with the LimitlessLED bulbs (cheap!), it currently runs my alarm clock, and makes the lighting in my room react to various situations.

I never finished it, or made a proper interface (I just consumed the services from some Python scripts elsewhere in my network); I should probably pick it up again.
Good. Any commercial I would see/hear about the Nokia Lumia 1020 Microsoft Windows Phone powered by Verizon Wireless LTE, it drove me crazy. Cell phone names are getting out of hand. Granted I love my Apple products, and appreciate their ads: iPhone 5--bam I know what I'm getting--fairly sure most ads don't even have to say "Apple". Why other vendors haven't followed suit, I have no idea. "Samsung Galaxy S III with Android on an LTE network" is a mouthful, and I have to think that your average person doesn't really hear anything there.
> something along the lines of what Perl 6 is trying to do (if only someone could implement it)

What, like, perl6?

grammar URL {
rule TOP { <proto> '://' <domain> '/' }

token proto { 'http' 's'? }
token subdom { \w+ }
rule domain { <.subdom> [ '.' <.domain> ]? }
}

say URL.parse('http://lelf.lu/');

Betty:hacks lelf$ perl6 gr.p6
｢http://lelf.lu/｣
proto => ｢http｣
domain => ｢lelf.lu｣
That's right. Internet utopians need to come to terms with the idea that the world is and always will be a cruel jungle. There is emphatically no fix for this. All of human history is testament to this cold, sad fact.
Nitpick: they changed DES's S-boxes. DSA doesn't have S-boxes. Skepticism about NSA's involvement in any crypto standard (a decade ago!) led NIST to document precisely the mechanism used to generate DSA's parameters.

I think maybe it's the fact that I started in the industry during the era of Clipper that stuff like this doesn't faze me much.
People sometimes mock the idea of "rockstar" developers, but this is one of the things that separates the merely good from the great.

A developer who can jump up or down four levels in the technology stack with ease is an entirely different species, when compared with someone who lives at one level.

All abstractions leak.
Some out-of-the-box parsing can be done with NLTK and OpenNLP. Just be mindful of the fact that the quality of the parsing is fairly dependent on whether the corpora you provide are sufficiently similar to the corpora that the models (part-of-speech, parsing, chunking, etc.) were trained on.
Spying on your own citizens codenamed as civil war. How nice.

Nowhere in the article does it state that these methods can be used against US persons separate from other protections against surveillance on US persons, nor does it give the impression that this is special to US persons:

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant.

Let's keep in mind the fact that an intelligence agency is built to gather intelligence on other governments/organizations and that often involves breaking other jurisdiction's rules.
Hideous, but I'll be damned if it didn't allow me to read that page extremely fast. Wonder where this could be used...
I am not sure that correcting "the US government betrayed us" to "the American people betrayed us" is quite fair. For instance, the last time the American people elected a new president they elected a candidate who promised the most open government ever, who defended the need for whistleblowers, and who criticized his predecessor for warrantless wiretapping. The elected representatives of the American people held hearings in which they asked the head of the NSA whether his agency was engaging in certain activities and he said, on record, that they were not. (He lied.)

Perhaps the will of the people actually IS being subverted.
This has been my experience also, even as I'm simultaneously learning clojure and building my own webapp.
There isn't a brand in the whole world with such negative aura than microsoft.
I tend to think -- and I believe lots of HN people agree with me -- that sticking a Microsoft on anything "solid" but an XBox has been quite a failure. Good luck, Redmond!
Microsoft has been desperately trying to consolidate their product line branding for the last few years. it's not a surprise that they would bring in a new device acquisition under their existing Surface brand.
This is a salient point. Think about how writing software for one platform (much less highly optimizing it for that platform) doesn't guarantee cross compatibility. Soylent might work for a group of 20 something white males in California, but what about folks from other walks of life?
so says the guy who's blamed HTML5 for the Facebook Mobile app sluggishness.
This is pure speculation on the part of the author. I have no idea how this even made it to the front page.

It makes sense for MS to buy Nokia. They've had pretty good success with their products:

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Nokia-Lumia-520-owns-27-of-Wi...

"According to the latest data from AdDuplex's mobile advertising network, the entry level Nokia Lumia 520 handset currently accounts for 27% of all Windows Phone 8 models being used. Throw all Windows Phone models into the equation and the Nokia Lumia 520 still accounts for a rather hefty 18% of Windows Phone units in use today. In India, the Lumia 520 owns a whopping 36% of the Windows Phone market while the high end Nokia Lumia 920 has just 4%. Low-end Windows Phone models remain the majority of the phones outstanding. 57% of Windows Phone 8 models currently in users' pockets sport only 512MB of RAM."

I'm hoping they keep the Nokia engineers. They're the ones who made the Lumia phones as good as they are right now.
Give them time to shred! After all, who is to say what the finders of the data will eventually end up doing with it. Those documents are proof of wrongdoing, but they are also a source of possible future wrongdoing.
Even without naming the companies involved, it's very hard to imagine they are inserting backdoors in less-valued products while somehow missing the crown jewels of Windows and TPM.
Lots of hate will come at me I'm sure, I think this is a good move for Microsoft. We need a more unified Microsoft branding push. What we don't need however, is more confusing unification (Surface RT will now become the Surface in the next generation apparently).

I think it will be interesting to see if Microsoft goes with a one size fits all model (ala Surface) or go with the lots of different form factors and sizes that Nokia currently produces. Another interesting concern is how Microsoft will attempt to leverage cell phone carriers. The Lumia 1020 is ATT only with Elop saying they "are very happy with their current relationship with ATT" and that the 1020 will not go to other carriers.

The cellphone market in the US is a weird one. With 2 out 4 carriers being CDMA, and VoLTE reasonably being several years out from ubiquity... I'm not sure how Microsoft will be able to force a carrier's hand like Apple did.

I'm looking forward to more thoughts on this. What does the rest of HN think?
Speaking as an American, it's not a problem that the capability to break encryption exists and the NSA has it. It really does make national security stronger if your intelligence people can read enemy communications.

The problem is that the NSA apparently used those capabilities on basically everyone, millions of innocent Americans whose activities should be of no interest to intelligence agencies, not just the handful of genuine spooks and terrorists our intelligence agencies are supposed to protect us from. (To international people: Cosmically speaking, you're not less important than we are, but the NSA's first responsibility is to protect and serve the USA, so them spying on innocent Americans is at least as bad as them spying on innocent foreigners.)

And it has been shown that the NSA provided information to ordinary criminal investigations with no links to terrorism or foreign intelligence, having police say "it's a lucky traffic stop," where the government actually knew the drugs were in that car ahead of time due to a decrypted phone call. This makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment because, when prosecutors/police lie to the courts about the origin of evidence, the courts cannot properly answer the question of whether their methods of gathering evidence violate the defendant's Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

In short, this is coming out -- which, as the article said, will weaken those capabilities -- because the NSA went too far outside their mission scope. If they hadn't done those two things, I'd be willing to bet Snowden wouldn't have leaked this data.
> In practice, it's closer to a plutocracy and has been for some time.

You mean since the founding of the republic? http://www.businessinsider.com/american-presidents-republica.... George Washington was worth an estimated $500 million. Adams was a pauper at only $20 million. Jefferson was $200m+ before he went broke. Madison was $100m+.

The average net worth of senators is skewed up by a few wealthy businessmen. The median is around $2.5 million, which is actually not even top 1%. The top 5% mark is at $1.8m. And don't forget: Senators skew married, skew older, skew white, skew educated relative to overall households, and all of those characteristics are correlated with higher income and net worth. The median senator might not even crack the top 5% if you look only at households with white married 60-year olds who all have college degrees and 60% of whom have a JD or MD.

$2.5 million net worth is rich, but it's not "plutocracy" rich. It's "two Google engineers marrying and buying a house and putting money into their 401ks for 30 years" rich.
> but not so far that our adversaries can.

Please clarify what you mean by "our".

Please clarify what you mean by "adversaries".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMwCfTBjLaw
Anecdotal, but I also got started to get a headache reading that page. Had to close it.
Have anyone viewed the generated DOM tree? It looks like every single letter has a tag around it, which will make it painfully slow on older computers if you have a pretty long blog post.
The Five Stages Of Reading An iPhone 5C, 5S Rumor
You should really disable the submit button and textarea once the form is submitted.

Wasn't sure it worked so I clicked it more than once lol