skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed! In my early childhood I had the great fortune that my parents' workplace was located next door to our family home, so I got to observe and bother them at work, as well as help out within my limited abilities (they ran a small engineering company, so e.g. folding blueprints and stuffing them into big paper envelopes). That taught me a lot of valuable lessons about life and work (perhaps not always in the moment, but it was at times useful to go back to those memories later in life, anyway), and it was great to feel a little in the loop, so it also taught me something about the value of communicating with your loved ones. If they had a rough week I would know first-hand and cut them a little slack for not having the spare capacity to deal with me being a brat :).
I do this a lot:

"Often I stoop to the level of caching my findings in a docstring/comment."

I am not ashamed of this. When my co-workers have to read what I wrote, this kind of information makes clear what the function does. If I don't do this, then they will eventually figure it out by running it at the REPL and examining the input and the output, but if I document that in the docstring, I have saved them a lot of time. I also make it possible for them to actually read the code -- otherwise they can't really read it, expect by repeating it at the REPL.
How can a book itself be "audio", anyway? And if books become audio by default someday, what will current books be called? "Written" books?

I propose: "I audio-read an audio-book".
I don't really have any idea what HumbleBundle's operating costs are or how much revenue it brings in from the developers...but the main difference between Groupon and Humble Bundle is that Groupon dealt with non-scalable physical quantities: food, wait staff, seating space. Not only were restaurants getting only 25% revenue on something that costs them the same to produce (the ingredients and staff to provide you the food), but such customers were pushing out normal-paying customers.

If a developer is handing over something that he/she can maintain with little change in operating costs, no matter how many customers there are, then the developer isn't being crushed by Humble Bundle's operations. Keep in mind that Groupon's internal financial operations aside, its business model would be fine if the suppliers (the restaurants, and so forth), were eager to participate.
I think they do have to contend with legitimate fraud, and their automated systems simply can't deal with a true FOSS project where the people donating know precisely what they're getting into, and the developers are obviously not some gang from Nigeria
They do work in the browser, but also do have some issues in Windows (especially XP). I provided bug information and offered any assistance possible, but got nowhere. We ended up rolling with a Qt WebView wrapper and I rewrote the USB calls. Haven't had any issues since.
I didn't feel odd for the act, I felt uncomfortable with the assumptions or speculation implied by the scrutiny. No one likes to be distrusted, regardless of the context.
Can someone boil this down and tell me the same thing from the technical side? I.e. what technical barriers have they managed to break (RSA, DSA, AES, etc.) ?
I definitely noticed that I could read faster with this. And the colors were super obnoxious, so grayscale was my choice. What I would really appreciate was if it could be done without taking it out of the page I was already on.

I would really appreciate some way for it to automatically do it and not take me to a new page, maybe something I could install into my browser?
I don't understand what the difference is between Paypal's handling of payments and remittance of funds, which are governed by its contracts, and the terms and conditions of the work we do, which are also under contracts.
Sony Cyber-shot QX100, QX10 cameras play nice with your smartphone
I would say this is for those that can get through 4-5+ books a month (like me and others I know). Not for everyone, but I know many that would find this better than having an actual monthly book budget. Libraries also have similar programs for ebooks (or at least mine does).
So at this rate are there any encryption methods that we're pretty sure that the NSA cannot crack?

By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has
surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed
to do in the open. Two decades ago, officials
grew concerned about the spread of strong
encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy,
or P.G.P., designed by a programmer named Phil
Zimmermann. The Clinton administration fought
back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which
would have effectively neutered digital
encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always
had the key.

Link to Paragraph w/ highlighting: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet...

Should I bother to read up on PGP?
I have a problem with encryption being breakable, regardless of who's doing the breaking. I want encryption to be mathematically solid with the only option being brute-force older-than-age-of-earth time. When we get to quantum computing, then I don't know what we'll do...
I feel like these kinds of articles are meant to induce a sense of hopelessness regarding the ability to push back against the NSA.

If it turns out one way functions actually don't exist, I'll give in and learn to love big brother. Withstanding that, I'll continue considering communications freedom (and all that it implies) as our manifest right and view these types of breaks as implementation errors.
So, NSA has solved P vs NP and they're just not telling us?
I think you are trying to use full width of the browser. On my 27" iMac it looks a lot more spread out than it should. I would suggest using a limited width.
Congrats to the team! Well deserved.
New York: 200 years later (interactive map)
Two colors can contrast while not clashing aesthetically.
Especially the following quote about halfway down in the infographic:

"Engines get hot - the cooling system of a car going down the freeway dissipates enough heat to keep two average-sized homes warm!"

Think about that for a while. ICE's just have a thermal efficiency of about 30%, the rest becomes heat.
People who intend to enter a middle school and kill kids can hide their plans and communications using 256-bit encryption.

Edit: Devil's advocate.
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Brute force is only required if there isn't a vulnerability (either in the algorithm or that the NSA has a key).

> Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

> N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.
Down the street from where I lived in Stuttgart someone owned a NSU Ro 80.

I also remember seeing a few Mazda rotary pickups in my early years in the US - very cool but apparently not very reliable and very inefficient.
Ask HN: Recommendations for server colocation in the SF Bay/SJ region?
I'm looking for server colocation in the SF Bay/SJ region. Anyone have good recommendations?
So, what you really mean is, people should not attend PAX if they have a problem with PAX, and they should urge people not to attend PAX if they feel the need, but they should make sure that their urging conforms to a set of standards you have about what is and isn't a valid argument.
If they solved P vs NP... well. Yeah. That would be interesting.
swap on ssd is (pseudo and slower) increased ram on big needs.

Example: $5 digital ocean droplet (comes without swap, but it's over SSD, so you can create a swap file, and is less painful than mechanical swap).
$4 billion Motorola patent demand was breach of contract, jury rules
PyPI is down
FYI, the parent commenter had never read Penny Arcade either, hence we were interacting from a position of presumably equal information regarding it.

> Penny Arcade is massively popular within the gaming community (because it's a comic strip about computer gamers), and the decisions to showcase your indie game (or not) at one of their conferences has a direct impact on sales.

Exactly. What his critics are essentially saying is, "We want him to stop making certain kinds of comic strips, but we also want to use his platform to sell our games." For an artist, that is ridiculous.
Snowden claimed a while back that encryption itself was not broken by the NSA, but that the endpoint security usually was (no surprise there): http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-...
I think you have to assume the answer is: all.
Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back doors in.

And we can't even be that angry at the (e.g.) Microsoft execs that authorise the back doors- they potentially face jail time if they resist NSA requests. All the while presumably not able to talk about the requests publicly.

EDIT: and the really fun part - did you know the former head of the NSA serves on the board of directors for Motorola Solutions? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general)
Over 6 years and 100,000's of thousands of computers infected, my guess is a lot.
I feel your argument against just using Scala was weak, but you guys are obviously smart and feel building Schema was the right choice. So could you elaborate a bit on the decision to stick with Clojure when your problem domain lends itself to types?
It might be but it is highly dubious. However, they MIGHT have put some effort into "plugging" each implementation and planting a subtle bug in them. You never can tell.

It is not somuch the protocol what matters but the implementations.

Imagine they "rig" all those beatiful hardware RNG. Could you tell the difference?

Are you sure renowned developer X van Y is not an NSA mole?
If I were to drop $700 on a new display I would rather buy 2x $350 2650x1440 monitors that can run at 120hz at that resolution. They've been on the market at that price for quite a while now.

May I ask, which monitor are you referring to? A $350 monitor that can do 2650x1440 and run at 120hz? I need a monitor like that for my graphics research.
Starter kit for making ambitious web apps
These are good points all, I basically agree. However, if one understood the culture of Open Source and crowdfunding, it would be relatively easy to see that Mailpile is a pretty low risk for outright disappearance and chargebacks. Also, a project like MP has serious PR risk for Paypal being such dicks.

I suspect someone in-the-know at Paypal made this argument, and to their credit they backed down quickly in the face of potential Twitter disaster.
It always seemed likely to me that governments can generate fake trusted certs for browser TLS traffic and then man in the middle the traffic, but what are the likely modes of attack otherwise? I don't really see what they are from this article - do they have a database of keys they have acquired nefariously?
SSL relies on a chain of trust, and it's prudent to assume that the NSA has the private keys necessary to produce valid certificates that will be accepted by the certificates that ship with Windows, OS X, Firefox, etc out of the box.

So man-in-the-middle attacks are certainly within their capability and fairly hard to detect. As to whether the NSA can passively intercept and decrypt SSL traffic, I don't know, but they may not need to.
I like the idea of a totally independent 3rd party monitoring system. For that we use pingdom, and its job is basically to tell us if our public services are up from to the outside world.

Basically it is an additional perspective and a redundant level of monitoring. But I view it mostly as an up/down layer of monitoring. Extremely important, but simple and not really meant to give insight into the complexity of our system.
EBay  —  The World’s Worst Marketplace
I tried their test and had no improvement in reading speed. I also use my mouse to read on a desktop (highlight end of one line and start of the next) as I go, so I think this product is just not made for me.
Not Sharing the Opportunity to Learn is a Cardinal Sin
Yes - apparently it'll be 2020 before we see a summer like this again, though.
I have been gob-smacked by how, as a buyer, Ebay[1] took my side so readily in a dispute. It seemed they were ready to believe anything I said. I would hate to be on the other side of that.

[1] I know Ebay isn't exactly the same as PayPal, but one owns the other.
Or they could be loners or they could meet and communicate face to face.
The testing methodology is quite flawed (at least for the reading speed test on the site). It asks you to read a passage with BeeReader to start out. When you're done, you're presented with questions about the passage before reading a non-BeeReader passage.

The catch is, you will almost certainly read the second passage slower than the first, since you're now looking to retain information for the questions!

The colored passages _feel_ faster, but I'm not sure that counts for much.
It is used to aid in the creation and distribution of child pornography, so the analogy is exact - unless of course you don't view the molestation of those middle schoolers to be an attack on them (as the downvotes seem to indicate).
I completely agree. I tried the test in dark and then grayscale, neither time was an improvement over black text.
Cryptography is a house of cards - 1997
I definitely noted that he made an awfully long string of assertions to not have presented any kind of backing evidence. He presented an entire history of education ... but it could just as easily be a revisionist version as a fact-based one. It strikes me much more as a soapbox than a factual summary.
With a byline from our very own "thejefflarson" (on HN). That's a lovely thing to see.
> I have no problem with the NSA being able to break encryption, that's in fact part of their job.

Their "breaking" of encryption is a combination of purposefully introducing vulnerabilities into standards, surreptitiously altering software and hardware to give the NSA a backdoor, hacking into private systems and stealing keys, etc etc.

I'm cool with an NSA super computer trying to brute force my VPN traffic to YouTube, I'm not cool with the NSA planting an engineer at a chip fab and changing designs to add a backdoor (a backdoor that could also be exploited by other actors).
Another difference: You don't need a gun to perform the most basic of functions securely.

They occupy exactly opposite quadrants on the useful/dangerous axis.
A 2010 CDC study:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335603

Far be it from me to say that this is conclusive evidence or anything, but CDC data is generally accepted as quite reliable, and I can see why people would trust their data.
Part of the confusion about this is that the CDC's definition of rape does not included "made to penetrate" (though their data does separate it out). Most people reasonably include this in their definition of rape, since all the arguments against doing so are the same rape-apologia nonsense you hear all the time, like "well clearly his [or her] body was responding, so while it sucks, I don't think you can call it rape".

Also, the fact that rape in correctional facilities skews heavily towards men and is generally not included in statistics like this.
I'd agree with that. I've often been wondering if where we're headed is a some kind of reform compromise. Not that I think it's ideal or right, but for example I could see the NSA having a Chinese wall around data for Americans, such that FBI and other investigators could not use data collected by the NSA, but could open their own collections with a warrant.

I'm quite opposed to what the NSA has done - but I don't see anything happening that will change it. If the recent revelations haven't done anything to stir Congress to action I don't know what will. Additionally, until and/or unless the NSA ever uses data collected this way against an American citizen in a judicial/criminal way, the courts are quite likely to find that petitioners lack any standing.
I am not really concerned about this encryption business...but have they managed to solve P=NP in the process of cracking crypto algos??
StarterSquad launches Technical Feasibility Scan for Startups
media goblin + cheap hosting + yearly domain fee = your own flickr/picasa/youtube/vimeo/etc

No more have your videos removed without explanation because you had some radio barely audible in the background or some other idiotic issues
I don't keep anything but text files in my dotfile repo, so I haven't had to deal with this.
Looks amazing. I think its perfect. I could not find any flaw. Bookmarked. I will definitely be coming back to it.
I would assume the NSA has evaluated every plausible attack, and implemented them based on what they want to get out of it, and that they have global reach into chips, peripherals, and software.

If you are a foreign government, hostile or friendly, I don't see much of a case to made for "Naw, they wouldn't..." They would, they probably can, and the probably already did.

If you are a consumer, the main problem is the creepiness factor. Who wants to use incrementally more technology if along with it you get incrementally more surveillance?
I could see a person wanting to use as a "Discovery" tool, that's a big reason I subscribe to Spotify.

However, Amazon offers samples of eBooks (most of them I believe) and they offer that service for free.
It's just an alternate syntax, trading verbosity for readability. Debating whenever it's necessary or not is bikeshedding.
> but they should make sure that their urging conforms to a set of standards you have

Not at all. I'm not saying they should do anything. I'm merely commenting that expecting an artist to stop drawing something you don't like because you go to his convention to sell something is a little ridiculous. But hey, if that's your thing, feel free to erupt in unqualified outrage :)
Anyone used one of these touch screen laptops for Linux? How useful is the touch display with say the latest Ubuntu distribution?
I'm sure I'll never get sick of hearing about this line of "reasoning". Please explain again how you justify your purchases. Let me know how your time is important and valuable, and only the best tools will allow you to be productive at the level of a true professional.
Probably half of my childhood friends were homeschooled for religious reasons. Their education did include creationism, which I consider flat-out wrong. Nevertheless they are some of the most well adjusted and smart people I know. It shouldn't be an either-or proposition, but if someone gets a better education in math, reading and history but also gets creationism, they are still better off than a student getting a shitty education in every subject including a science curriculum that includes evolution.
LinkedIn: Endorsed for Financial Acumen
Encryption is still useful. The NSA can read your messages - but not everyone. Encryption will still protect your bank transactions and wikipedia reading. No encryption will protect you from a goverment turned Evil, and I hope you realise this. If the US government is good or evil is all a matter of perspective. War is peace, Mr O wrote, and surely there has been a lot of that going on in US foreign policy the last few decades.
Wow, It feels like the first time I tried glasses. It completely removes any chances of me missing a line. I have a low dyslexia and this just works. Thank you !!
I can see the possibility for confusion here.

You can certainly use Nash equilibrium when you have figured out the strategies your opponents are using. This is what Bryce Paradis is talking about. It can have practical value when playing Heads Up.

But If we are talking game theory and "solving poker", there is no single winning strategy that works against all other strategies and you can't calculate single Nash equilibrium that would be optimal in actual game against specific strategies.
> The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted.

I wonder which computer viruses belong to the NSA.
Actually, that link proves my point. For example, this comment chain: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1lruai/lsd_could_be...

That's the #2 comment, and it's a link to work cited in the article. And the top reply to that comment is from a psychiatrist who gives a thorough (and thoroughly skeptical) breakdown of the science behind the cited work. I'd say that's a grade-A analysis.
The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back