skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no rule that it would have to be "equally."
Techies aren't ruining burning man, techies made burning man. Without the techie demographic, burning man would be overrun with hippies and it'd be indistinguishable from any old Rainbow Gathering. Yes, people spend a lot of money on burning man. An obscene amount, even. However, I'd bet that a majority of that money is on art projects and legit theme camps, and only a sliver is spent on the 'turn-key camps' that people get their knickers in a twist about.
oh geez... then why is gay rights making progress? or MJ legalization? what was their mechanism for "fizzling-out" Occupy?
>>clearly exaggerated ?

read the article again. Why is there no way the NSA would do such a thing ? There is no silver bullet in the crypto world. If somewhere 10% or 5% or even 1% of someone uses that encryption because it is 'standardized' you have a turn key solution without wasting any time. It makes perfect sense that they would push it in there.
Isn't valuation is based on not only current revenue and business model but also forecasts and potential?

Square has a bit of a different opportunity than BrainTree as they are focusing on simplifying a real-world payments platform vs online and mobile payments. There seems to be less competition and a larger market for Square vs. Braintree I think.
Didn't Dick Cheney buy land in Uruguay? That might be a decent indicator.
As Schneier says, the difference is that the NSA guys get all the breakthroughs in the public sphere PLUS all the breakthroughs they have privately, so they will ALWAYS be at least as far as the public, and most likely further.

Also, they might not have the most brilliant mathematicians, but private companies don't have the interest in using their math expertise to break encryption. There are more lucrative ways to exploit great math ability.

Universities may have more of an interest in advancing cryptography research, but they can't match the budget nor focus of the NSA.
"you need capable programmers in order to not fuck it up, because it contains every paradigm ever invented."

My team has just the opposite experience. Scala offers a lot of structure and discipline that you can take advantage of without being an expert, and it is a short time to ramp up to idiomatic usage relative to other languages. In fact, this is one of its benefits. By following some fairly simple guidelines, you can avoid making a mess. This has not been my observation with imperative programmers picking up a new imperative language.

Because of the easy-to-achieve discipline, Scala is ideal for teams in my opinion.
I don't 'get it': For public key
cryptography, the basic math is
well known. Then what's needed
is some code. The core code for
just the en/decryption is quite
short. So, just write the core
code yourself, directly from the
math and/or open source code --
be 100% sure understand each
statement of code do write.

Then
turn the en/decryption code into
just a simple command line program
that reads a file and writes a
file -- no opportunity for the
spooks to corrupt that code either.

Then call it done. So, for e-mail,
type some text into a simple file, wash it through
own command line encryption software,
get out the file of simple text of the base
64 of the encryption, pull that
text into the e-mail program, and
send it.

I'm not 'getting it' on just where
the security vulnerability is here.

Again, the crucial point is that the
core en/decryption code is darned
short, quite close to the well
known math, and can be checked
against some open source code.

Then, if everyone writes their own
code in this way and discovers that
they are 'interoperable', then
everyone knows that they did good
work even if they never actually
share code.

I'm not getting why this can't work?
But how you make money? Whatever they believe is patentable, I don't see it holds in the court. Good luck patenting colors of text. Further, the major places where you would see this going major: schools, libraries, law school, law field, etc, most of those places are extremely reluctant to new technologies. To them its not a matter of doing it better, its a matter of doing it the way we know how to do it and been doing for years. Lots of libraries still use typehead machines because those in charge are very old and don't trust/hate technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8ZETOz5Fbs
That question cannot be answered, sorry. Cryptographically it is sound today. But that point is entirely moot if the NSA has the CA private key, or has access to your computer.

Do you think it's easier to discover attacks on AES or court order CA's?

You need to trust your OS, Chrome cryptography implementation, AES and RSA, and the end point, its OS and its possible role as a mute puppet, oh and don't forget everyones hardware!.
There's an existing, broadly used method for solving the line transition errors - you background color every two lines in an alternating set of colors. There used to be ribbon-feed printer paper pre-colored with this for certain applications that involve reading across lines a lot (like database output.) Seems like that is a more practical solution.

Here's what I mean: http://www.stationerytrade.com/upfile/images/big/20122221112...

What about using eye tracking? A device could just detect you're at the end of a line, and put a small marker at the start of the next line.
Is there a backdoor in Safari 6.1? (Version 6.1 (8537.59))
With all this NSA spying going around, pardon me if I'm a little paranoid.

I'm a registered Apple developer and was encouraged to download Safari 6.1 for testing. Here's what I saw when I clicked on the Privacy pane in Safari's preferences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frz0M41Bhv4

If you pause the video at the 5 second mark, it shows a dialog that auto-dismisses. Something about a "PluginProcess.app" attempting to connect to Safari.

A little sleuthing shows that this is located at the following path:
/System/Library/StagedFrameworks/Safari/WebKit2.framework/PluginProcess.app/Contents/MacOS/PluginProcess

If I change the permissions to non-executable, the dialog goes away.

I was hoping someone more technically-oriented could look into this.
When will Docker support distros other than Ubuntu?
Straw man? You think these examples are not literally true?

Not sure if you have a clue what Microsoft actually did more than 15 years ago, but if you think it was worse than using children as slave labor, destroying swathes of the environment or killing people then I have pity on your soul....
Well, now all we need is an open source Parse-compatible server.
Smalltalk? meets very few of those points, whilst it has inspired a number of languages it's not a real-world choice itself for developing complex web apps. Dart's closest language is JavaScript (which it also transpiles to) of which it presents a compelling option and holds a number of advantages over - esp. for maintaining large web apps.

I've also used a number of languages in the last 15 years, and I've personally found Dart to be overall be the most productive which has become my go-to language whenever I need to something quick done. It's missing an ecosystem of mature libs which popularity helps most with - but Google has a ton of investment behind Dart which is developing the entire platform (language/libs/toolchain) giving it its best chance to succeed - if it fails to gain any traction it wont be for technical reasons. It looks like it will take over and be the preferred to succeed GWT and Closure Library, with internal usage it should see continued investment for years to come.
The Iodine Clock Reaction
Clearly we must curtail this dangerous "face-to-face" communication that cannot be monitored at will by our benevolent government.
If he was actually a capital-t Traitor, the government would not have to release any relevant documents. This is to say that the government's arguments would persist in their strength towards maintaining secrecy, but the fact that these events are transpiring tells me that there is no actual legal support for a treason charge (pace Dianne Feinstein). Otherwise, the NSA itself would be acting against the interests of the nation by doing this, thus themselves be traitors.
FSF has a rather lengthy text regarding using MPL with GPL at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#MPL-2.0

I would agree with the above statement that MPL can be licensed as GPL, but not the other way around. However, I would follow the FSF advice in keeping MPL code MPL through dual licensing.
The One Thing Microsoft Should Do Next
What are the first and second derivatives of those numbers with respect to time?
Valuation is based on growth and expected future profit more than current revenue or processing volume. If two companies both process $10bn, but one makes 3% and is growing 25% YoY while the other makes 1% and is growing 5%, they should have radically different valuations.
Why would they shred the information? They (the ubiquitous "they", meaning "someone with access") are much more likely to "take it with them" to some other organization or for private/personal use. The data is too valuable (to someone) to shred even years after collection.
I do most of my reading on mass transit, so carrying 100 books in my shirt pocket means I always have something to read.

I initially read on a Kindle 3rd Generation eReader, but they were pretty fragile (I had three break on me in 18-months time), so I got used to using my iPod Touch. I'm so used to it now, I've lost interest in reading physical books.
King Missile wrote what I consider to be the theme song for Burning Man[1], and is relevant here.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351wGhomUNI
The subheading of the article tells us, "This Man Moved to a Desert Island in Order to Vanish. Here's What Happened." Assuming that the point of the article is to tell us what happened, then the writing style is extraneous, regardless of whether the man in question acts similarly. If the article said, "Here's what it's like to talk to Dave," then the writing style would be more appropriate. As it is, it gets in the way of finding out "what happened." Note that, say, A Beautiful Mind was not written in the form of a schizophrenic's paranoid ramblings, no matter how much that would reflect John Nash's personality during segments of the book.
Is PGP included as an insecure standard as you mention? It used a combination, so is it safe?
Agreed. One advantage the NSA has is it can pay some of the best mathematicians to be full-time pure mathematicians. There are very few mathematicians that have the opportunity to do something like that -- even professors have to teach a few classes. I imagine it's a powerful draw to top talent and gives them the ability to spend more time on a problem than most others.
trying to debate this guy on the merits is absurd - he's not some misguided IQ guy but, as you'll see if you look at his other comments, a hardcore racist. blocking is the only productive thing you can do here
GoSun Stove: Portable, High Efficiency Solar Cooker
The Science Behind Conspiracy Theories
> I'm against idiots teaching kids poorly. This is the dilemma we have.

Unless it's at a national and systematic level. Then it's kosher.
I think you missed the "[/sarcasm]"!
ARGH NO ARGH. First, conventional DLP systems also have suspect parameters.

Which parameters are those? For a classic DH run, there are just two parameters: a prime p, and a generator g. Normally you generate these yourself. Any safe prime is good as a p, and g is usually 2 or 5.

Contrast this to ECC where generation of parameters (the "curve") is so complex that you never do this yourself. You use one of the published curves, for example the ones specified by NIST.

So, I can't judge if ECC was "tweaked" by the NSA or not, but the original statement is true that ECC contains more "magic numbers" than DH, which contains none.
Don't know where you are... but in the US, visa/mc/etc all protect their customers from fraud. In fact, in US law, consumers are not liable for more than $50 of a fraudulent charge on a credit card (and most banks reduce that to $0). So first, the consumer WILL get their money back because they have a contract that says they will in the case of fraud.

Your bank recoups that money from PayPal/indiegogos processor, and that processor will recoup the money from Indigogo, and indiegogo recoups it from the project. Whoever can't recover their money in that chain, is where it ends. That company is out of luck.

Saying, 'Oops.. we let one of our customers commit fraud, too bad for you'... isn't a permitted excuse.

And this applies to PayPal as well.. since consumers get their money into a PayPal account using a credit card or bank transfer. So PayPal is no different than any other processor in this case.
So you funded mailpile, and you want them to have your money. Seems cut and dry... but it's not.

If it's a credit card, you might not pay your debt. That's a risk borne by Visa and MC.

If it turns out to be a stolen card, all parties on the receiving end might be obligated to return the money. If Mailpile is honest, they will comply, but if Mailpile is responsible for the fraudulent payment, they just successfully laundered some stolen credit into their bank account.

Maybe they can't get the whole $100k in cash, so it's not realistic since AML says they can't have more than 10k at a time. I would be very suspicious if I was mailpile's bank and they came in to close the account tomorrow. But, I don't think that's how AML works.
http://sqwiggle.com/
Getting started with libgdx
Digital fortress anyone?
This acquisition culture is almost always bad for customers. Imagine what PayPal would do to Braintree if they acquired them. PayPal can't even manage their own risk without pissing customers off. I can only imagine they'd slowly turn Braintree into a braindead company that's nothing but a shell of its former self.

I sincerely hope Braintree finds a way to keep its independence and continues standing on its own. We need a degree of competition and fragmentation in all industries so these companies keep up the pace of innovation.

Every time I hear of a company being acquired, it feels like it's only a matter of time before the company is gutted or killed. It seems rare that everyone has their happy ending when it comes to acquisitions.
Or perhaps people don't like being annoyed by things they read, regardless of what the reason may be for the annoyance.
Since we're talking robo-manual transmissions, I think you guys would appreciate Koenigsegg's clever design. They use a wet clutch (as a brake) on the input shaft of their transaxle to quickly match the speed required by the next gear. End result is a lighter weight single clutch transaxle that shifts just as quickly as the DSG/PDK dual clutch designs. Let's just ignore the 1.5M price tag.
Quite. The actual trend in the US is towards greater freedom, on the whole (women in states with restrictive abortion laws may justifiably disagree). I find it ironic that Snowden has sought political asylum in a country where you can (as of very recently) be prosecuted for saying it's cool or natural to be gay.
What evidence do you have that the general population cares much at all about these revelations?

As rayiner pointed out, President Obama could end any of these programs with a phone call, but even though he hasn't, his supporters overwhelmingly still support him.
It hasn't been updated in a while (and isn't as pretty), but I have an open-source shop for selling a digital good with Stripe:

https://github.com/2tablespoons/thylacine
If you're a brilliant mathematician who has made a breakthrough in breaking cryptography, wouldn't you want to make a deal with the NSA? Reveal breakthrough in return for more knowledge.
Helping You Maintain the Integrity of Your Data
Yes, but instead of just lying and introducing it without a mandate, he sought a mandate.
I cannot understand why it would slow you down, why do you think it might?

Anyway, my experience from this is that it was much easier to differentiate, parse, and scan with the ugly colours (43% faster apparently). However, my natural slowness in reading is in both understanding and committing to memory. I get the feeling that this did not help much with regard to this..
You don't even need to ask if the NSA broke the encryption to answer the question "Is this standard effectively compromised and not suitable for use?"

Based on what we already know, keeping in mind the goal of encryption in the first place, the answer is "yes."

But it is also a decent assumption to think that it is precisely the NSA that has broken the standard in light of the recent reporting by the NYT.
Does the DSCAM gene (Down Syndrome Cell Adhesion Molecule) fit into this picture at all? This gene is very unusual, as it gets spliced 38,000 different ways with different variants in different neurons, allowing the brain to get wired up correctly. (It's like being able to give neurons in the developing brain labels to keep track of where they go.) Since this gene is in the part of chromosome 21 that causes Down Syndrome, it seems to have an important role in Down Syndrome. But I don't see any connection between it and the current paper.

Any experts who can explain more? When I read about this gene a few years ago, it seemed like a key to explaining how the brain is formed, but I haven't seen much about it since then.
Album 21862
Classifying News Articles with Clojure
Does anyone know of any research surrounding the usage of meshnets (security wise)? I know they are springing up in places like chicago (I'm following the forum[0] so I can at least be conscious of the technical aspects and their implementations when I can do something like that where I live), but somehow they remain disconnected from general conversation (on HN) surrounding passive surveillance.

[0] http://cmn-forum.karmanebula.com/
It is impossible to develop a system that satisfies all the Arrow criteria. In practice you compromise. Australia's system is a sophisticated series of compromises that has evolved partly from a local reformist streak in our politics and partly because our Constitutional starting point was after the US civil war.
So, it's six years later. Is Dual_EC_DRBG in use in any commercial products?
Is this encryption standard used in any real life applications? It sounds like people had a ton of problems with it even just right as it was released. They may have forced the standard, but it didn't look like it was adopted.
I know we're not supposed to make these kinds of comments in HN, but yours made me laugh.

Welcome to September, where the NSA can keep any data it accidentally collected about US persons for five years if its plaintext. And if that data is encrypted, it can keep data on US persons forever.
You are required to give the name and location of the person authorising political comment.

The blogs I host, for example, place authorisation on their lead authors.

eg: http://larvatusprodeo.net/about-larvatus-prodeo/electoral-co...
Datacenter Management with Mesos
Well, if my attitude is unfounded and my cynicism easy, what can you do about it?

The general consensus seems to be that the solution will have to be political, not technical. Makes sense to me.

So it comes down to this: do you honestly still believe in democracy?

Edit: downvoted by some anonymous coward for daring to suggest that there might not be a solution. Don't bother to prove me wrong, just click the downvote arrow! That will really show me. Faith in humanity: restored. lol
I think you mean 'maybe("/")'?
Nokia ultimately own the brand. They could potentially enter the market again in their own terms in 2016.
Kind of stupid for Microsoft to invest too heavily on the brand.
I think they should buy Jolla and have another crack at it in 2016!
I've worked with C++ going back to the mid 90s, and program Scala full-time in addition to managing a team of programmers. Such a comparison has never occurred to me. Scala is arguably a simple language in its core design. It enables quite feature-rich libraries, and you could argue those make the language seem complex in practice. But to me, it just shows the language is powerful.
Would love to see an update to this with some context. So this became a government standard...but was it widely adopted in the industry (outside of government)? It had already been under suspicion of this fatal flaw before its release and Schneier says it was "also three orders of magnitude slower than its peers"...even if the security flaw didn't deter users, I would think a performance drop of three magnitudes would make it unpopular for use in anywhere but the government [insert joke about government inefficiency here].
Why do you think that would be the case? That did not happen with Payflow and PayPal mgmt is quite a bit better now (the CEO mainly).
The Stasi shredded it because they knew it was incriminating and, realistically, there was no way to smuggle out a copy or hide it. They were under siege (literally). The organization was finished and they knew it.

Perhaps digital records will be easier for enterprising individuals to smuggle out or hide, but even if that happens it seems likely that an effort will once again be made to keep the data out of the hands of the public.

When a spy agency is in its death throes, that data stops being valuable and becomes a liability to the surviving individuals that will no longer enjoy the protection of the agency. It becomes evidence.

During the chaotic storming of the Stasi headquarters, there were incidents of Stasi officers hiding among the crowds so that they could destroy even more documents even as the public seized them. The headquarters were being sacked, there was really no remaining chain of command that could realistically make them do that, but they did anyway.

Maybe Nicolae Ceaușescu, executed less than three weeks earlier, was in the back of their minds.
Fortunately, not everything or everyone needs this level of security.
when i read that fast i dont have time to think about what i read. thus the colors just disturb me as well.
On the other hand your work is secret and you will never be recognized for what you do.
Is that a reference to the laughably inaccurate Dan Brown thriller?
The typical voter is a churchgoing middle aged woman. I'm going to paint with a broad brush, but what about the American government do you think is inconsistent with that fact? NSA surveillance? The drug war? The war on terror?
The NYT piece today had different redactions than the Guardian, showing the NSA may have done this with commercial VPN ASICs.

The Times includes "Complete enabling for [XXXXXXX] encryption chips used in Virtual Private Network and Web encryption devices."
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-r...

(compare to http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/05/sig... )
It definitely has its flaws, but I think it is still one of the better places to get a good answer to a random science question on the internet. The community is huge, very active, heavily moderated, and it has some really great answers.
Wow, seriously loved this book. takes me back.
Thanks.
Not to mention that if you "learn" regular expressions with this library, you'll become an expert at this library and useless with "regular expressions", which is just one more example of things that can result in your inability to learn and use other languages effectively.

Regular expressions are a pain, but I strongly believe that you shouldn't use abstractions unless you have at least a functional understanding of what you're abstracting.
I was wondering about AES myself. When you look at the wikipedia entry for AES it says it was "approved" by the NSA, which doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence. I don't think they would approve something that they haven't already cracked or backdoored.
Isn't supposed to be easy to move the card details from the vault to other provider?