skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am sorry, but this is just wrong.

a). For all the bundles, they are signed by the Tor developer who packages them. The signatures are clearly visible with the downloads.

b). Most importantly:

Tor is moving towards deterministic builds: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-o...

Different people build the Tor Browser Bundles on Gitian (look it up), and they will have the same hashes. So unless ALL of these people are lying, if their hashes match, you can be convinced that it is the same binary as you would get by compiling it.
I like what you are trying to do here. Pre-installed ubuntu isn't much of a value add for me, but I could see how it could be for some.

I wish the video focused more on the box itself, it looks really nice, but there isn't a lot of time to see it. I would love to see a device that caters a little more to the mainstream that runs linux out of the box. I wish your team the best of luck.
Model X? http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx
Turns out the comprehension is faster on my setup:

http://jsperf.com/don-t-use-coffeescript
> the compiler could turn safe code into malicious code

While I agree toolchain compromises are a concern, this particularly famous one of backdooring a compiler has a counter: http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/
Except Steve wasn't a designer and he knew that. We all know Jony Ive, his work, and have watched the videos that put the spotlight completely on him and his creations. Did Steve have a lot of input? Definitely. Was he spending weekends tweaking AutoCAD files and making prototypes? No (at least, not that I know of). Delegation is a huge part of good management, and it is a skill that Mayer has shown to lack on numerous occasions.
I am interested to see how this turns out. The amount of money a person donates each year is roughly fixed. Each non-profit is competing for a splice of that donation. So in some ways having multiple non-profits in the same batch is like funding multiple companies which are direct competitors with each other.
Developing A Secure Email/IM Replacement - Feedback Appreciated
Warning Websites For Sale On Flippa Fail To Get Return On Investment
This is ancient news, and it seemed to be sufficiently explained as really silly human error. However your comment reminded me of a Dilbert-

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/
Someone should bring proof of the alleged backdoors or just shut up. Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying.

Trust is a funny thing, isn't it? It doesn't respond to demands or browbeating.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that it's incredibly irksome to hear this argument over and over again.

I also think, though, that the question isn't completely over-the-top given recent revelations. For example, you state:

> Do you realize how much research goes into Tor and how many university researchers are associated with it (Cambridge, Waterloo)? Furthermore, can you really think someone like the Tor core developers (Dingledine and Mathweson) can sacrifice their entire reputation just for putting a backdoor?

You're right.

But how many university researchers and mathematicians vet the security standards at NIST? NIST doesn't just take the math at face-value from NSA.

I don't think that Tor is compromised, but I don't think it's beyond questioning, either.
A nonsensical parody of Lesswrong and the Bhagavad Gita
Legit question: what about a tree view do you not think is possible with HTML/CSS/JS?
Android will soon have 90 per cent of smartphone market
If you are willing to compromise on range a bit, Tesla could build an 4-series competitor. The already did the roadster that was lotus based.
Sentiment Analysis of a Twitter Hashtag #TakingSides
Fair enough. I use Sublime and write in python on Ubuntu. How might I go about incorporating Unicode?
Halmos, 'Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces'

Rudin, 'Real and Complex Analysis'
Move to Python, I'm sure the community can benefit from your skills. I see no future in PHP development. If the core is rotten ,you can have the best libs in the world (symfony,doctrine,...) in the end you still need to face PHP architectural problems. Or back to the JVM maybe.
I got my current job through Developer Auction, and think I ended up with better compensation than I would have negotiated by myself. I got six offers, but I'm in Boston, so that's probably lower than average. I've been programming (post-college) for ten years. I would recommend the site to other developers; I don't see that there's anything to lose.

(In case it needs saying, I have no ties to the company other than getting this job using their site.)
More on Nintendo and Handheld Gaming
I want something smaller than a Model S for now. Driving a Model S into SF, and dealing with parking/etc., looks like a pain -- I've driven a Crown Vic, 745i, etc., and I hated it there. I'll solve this by being in ruralish WA by the time I get my Model S AWD. (I also tend to dislike SUVs which aren't trucks.)
Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. This issue has been addressed on the tor-talk list many times. Please show one iota of proof.

Isn't this exactly what someone would have said about the NSA spying on us even just a few months back? Did we learn from that AT ALL or just anytime we don't like a theory we will call that person a tin foil hat wearing nutcase?
Eh, I'm just finishing a summer of porting our Windows product to Mac, and a fair bit of the code is shared between the two platforms. A decent portion of the code is C++, which took very little massaging to work on both platforms. The other piece of the Windows product is written in C#, and I spent quite a bit of effort in getting things to work under Mono. Looking back I'm glad I didn't try to rewrite things in Objective-C. For one thing, nobody in our company has any Obj-C experience, and after looking at it, nobody had any interest in picking it up. C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, VB(A), javascript, php, various shells: sure, we all either know the language or are willing to learn. Obj-C? Blech.
But what happens when the LEOs are getting their data from the NSA? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/05...

TOR is not perfect. The NSA, or any other sufficiently large global passive adversary, can defeat it, with global timing correlation. However, a connection over TOR probably requires more resources to track down than a direct connection. On the downside, a connection over TOR may go through a foreign country, which removes any domestic safeguards the NSA does have in place, subjecting it to indiscriminate spying.

TOR is also insufficient on its own. You need to use strong crypto, and be careful of your privacy in other ways (cookies, caches, etc) on top of it.
Questioning is easy. Actually doing some damn cryptanalysis, of the type which would answer those questions - is hard. But you know, way more useful.
I took some of Purgathofer's courses as part of my bachelor's and they were all incredibly good. Apart from being a very engaging lecturer, he did not believe in simple "all or nothing" final exams (as sadly so many other teachers do), but gave us a range of little projects and exercises over the course of the semester, many of which, if the type of exercise warranted it, we could redo if we had made any errors on our first try. Thus we were able to actually learn from our mistakes!
You can easily do that in a statically typed language as well; you just have to do it explicitly. For instance, Haskell has the error function, of type "String -> a"; you can use it absolutely anywhere, no matter the expected type, give it an error message, and if the value it produces is ever actually used, it throws an exception with the specified message.
On a lot of setups, going by the graph there.

Firefox nightly produces an interesting test run: http://cl.ly/image/2s0p1Y3E2Z0C not really sure why that happens.
8,000 miles per year is about half the average annual miles per year driven by people ages 20-54, at least in the US: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
I doubt tor is backdoored, but it has it's own security issues. I wouldn't doubt for a second that three letter agencies are running a huge amount of nodes on the tor network and doing everything they can to correlate traffic and associate connections to individuals. At the end of the day, you can't rely on tor alone to keep you safe or anonymous on the internet.
Interesting - I found the lambda syntax of LINQ to be quite "Ruby like"

someList.FindAll(i => i < 2)
.Select(i => i * 2)
.GroupBy(i => (i % 2) == 0 ? "even" : "odd")

Is about as close to Ruby's Enumerable as I've found in a mainstream/enterprise language (unless you include Scala).
> I don't think that Tor is compromised, but I don't think it's beyond questioning, either.

No, definitely not. Science should never be above questioning, or be subject to fanboyism.

My point was -- people keep bringing this argument up time and again but do not bring any proof to the table. The code is out there. Don't you perhaps think that the professors at some of the most reputed universities in the world who research on Tor would perhaps eventually find some alleged backdoor, given the code goes through so much scrutiny? I maybe wrong of course but some proof of this would be good. Honestly. And I am not being sarcastic, I have donated money and if I ever found out that something remotely like this is happening, do you think that people like me or the organizations who fund Tor will give it any more money?
"The Internet was made by DARPA. Let's stop using it."

A lot of companies probably should, or at least severely limit its use.
I've been on Digital Ocean since the beginning of this year, and I have been very happy with it. I switched my main site over to them about 6 months ago, and haven't had any issues, and 0 (or very close to 0) downtime so far.
The better solution would (IMO) to have been to out-Top-Gear Top-Gear in some fashion, and use that exposure to also cover your point of contention.

I think a suitable segment to parody would be the (rocket assisted) Mini Cooper Ski-Jump[1] from the Top Gear Winter Olympics Special[2].

For the low low price of a single Model S, a Merlin engine, and some quality time bodging one onto the other[3], he'd have a guaranteed viral hit in which to make his appeal to the public, as well as, almost certainly, the credibility of producing either a much better jump, or a much larger fireball.

As the saying (sorta) goes: "Never get into a rocket fight with a rocket scientist who owns his own rocket making company."

[1] http://www.bbcamerica.com/top-gear/videos/mini-ski-jump/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_Winter_Olympics

[3] plus somewhere with a ski-jump they don't really like that much, and whose authorities don't have a problem with a mostly-horizontal rocket flight-plan, which might be tricky.
Having done this both with Clojure and Erlang, I find the unversioned, dynamic mode of achieving this is fraught with trouble. It's really easy to end up in complex atypical states during upgrade which can at best be hard to debug and worst corrupt other, longer term state.
I have your medal here, just waiting for an address to send it to.
The NSA spying was just theory until proof was presented. Proof is the only thing that differentiates tin-foil wearing conjecture and fact. And until we have just such evidence for a backdoor in Tor (maybe another leak?) all we have is just idle speculation of what if this and that etc...

This story is neither helpful nor enlightening in that regard as it has no evidence. Just mere speculation and insinuation.
1Password and the Crypto Wars
Gmane has NNTP feeds for all their mail list archives: http://gmane.org/features.php
NASA LADEE mission launching  11:27pm EDT
Actually I thought it was going the other way: "Old school" is that server hardware should be reliable so it doesn't go down, and "New school" is that hardware should be cheap and there should be a lot of it so that if one server goes down we don't care.
No, this is not correct.

Your talking statutes, not the constitution. Obviously the constitution trumps both statute and executive readings. Reasonable is per the constitution, an it is plastic in case law. That's why the questions are important, fundamentally. In any event, its worth keeping in mind the right level of abstraction.
I am interested in knowing if this is mainly a American epidemic?

If its worldwide then we would be in serious trouble.
Our apologies for not being able to respond or answer since 7 PM EDT on this thread. We’ve been getting this message: “You’re submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.” whenever we try to submit anything on Hacker News.

We will keep trying to reply to any comments on Hacker News as soon as possible. If this becomes hard to do, hopefully we can answer the questions as updates/comments on the Indiegogo campaign itself.
A sufficiently advanced compiler is indistinguishable from an adversary.
NYC residents -- NASA is launching the first Minotaur V rocket from Virginia and it will be easily visible for the entire city in exactly 30 minutes!
I don't think his comment is as extreme as calling people nutcases. Have recent events encouraged us to distrust other entities? Yes. But, as the parent alludes, it's important to temper distrust with investigation and facts and not just blindly run away from everything. Otherwise even more damage will be done.
I will never forgive PHP for all kinds of shit.
Putin: Russia will help Syria in case of foreign military assault
I like CoffeeScript and will continue to use it where appropriate.

But I do wonder why we're stuck with all the cruft to let ECMAScript be backwards compatible. Couldn't we just one time introduce a few breaking changes to clean up the mistakes in the language's design?

And if you're really opposed to that, how about the same strict versus transitional semantics we use for HTML? I'd be happy to be writing code in a clean strict subset of JavaScript.
The Crying of Lot 49 is also good to start with because it's only 150 pages or so.

His collection of short stories, Slow Learner, has some gems in it. I really liked the second story, Low-lands, the last time I read it.

Around 20 years ago, when I was in college, I collected as much of his non-book stuff as I could and put it on a web page. Oddly, it seems it has survived: http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/index.html

My favorite piece there is the article for Aerospace Safety, from when Pynchon worked at Boeing: http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/together.html
> Isn't this exactly what someone would have said about the NSA spying on us even just a few months back? Did we learn from that AT ALL or just anytime we don't like a theory we will call that person a tin foil hat wearing nutcase?

The NSA is a different case. We do not know anything about it, except from the leaks. But we do know things about Tor.

a). Actively developed, follows the best principles possible. Open discussions in IRC, active mailing list, developers who respond to queries.

b). Highly researched by some of the best universities in the world. Cambridge and Waterloo come to mind instantly.

c). There has not been a single case of mistrust on their part that should make someone suspicious about them.

The day Tor does something like this, not only they lose their funding, they lose users and they become a dead project. With so much reputation at stake -- and they are respected people in the community -- Dingledine and Mathewson doing something like this? I don't think so.
Except scala has achieved traction and clojure is hot on its tail
fwiw, I love coffeescript. I write a game a few weeks ago in it, but I've never shown it to anyone before. Have a look here if you're interested http://quietcode.com/vectroid

I've made no attempts at all at performance tuning yet it runs very nicely in webkit browsers and not too bad in firefox.
From the video[1]:

(while driving around the track, cornering) "This car then really was shaping up to something wonderful. But then..."

(cut to Jeremy in the Roadster, a musical cue cutting off the soundtrack, signalling a problem. Jeremy pumps his foot, looks down at his foot and back up with a perplexed look on his face, and says "Oh", with backround noise of the Tesla decelerating.

Jump to outside view of the Roadster rolling to a stop in the middle of the track, with Jeremy narrating "Although Tesla say it will do two hundred miles, we worked out that on our track it would run out after just 55 miles." During this the scene changes to men pushing the Roadster in a hanger.

More narration from Jeremy, "And if it does run out, it's not a quick job to charge it up again."

Make of that what you will, I don't think words do it justice, which is why I included the video[0]. The narration is accurate, but the portrayal clearly implies something more than the narration, making it very to misconstrue what the facts are. The facts are, by the way, that the Roadster never ran out of power, they ran it for a few hours, decided they didn't want to wait for it to run out, and staged that portion.

Now, Top Gear is clearly an entertainment and comedy program, but to act like that's the end of it is also clearly ignoring the reality of the situation. Top Gear is less like SNL than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. Viewers expect it to not be too serious, but right or wrong, they also expect to be able to get some information from the show, knowing that they'll need to sort through the context to determine whether it was a joke or not.

Keeping all that in mind, to me Top Gear seems to have overstepped slightly here. Then Tesla overreacted with a lawsuit. That's why I said neither seems to have come off well.

[1]: http://www.topgear.com/uk/videos/electric-shocker, start at 4:17 for the relevant scene.
I was going to say... I thought one of the major selling points of CoffeeScript was that it outputs JavaScript that is highly optimized for JS interpreters.
Exactly. This pattern of reporting is tinfoil FUD. I would like to see these stories not hit on HN because of the low-signal fearmongering.

'pg: Find a way to make it stop or I will use HN less and less.
Last time I upgraded my desktop, I ended up building it myself, not for cost savings, but so I could pick out components that worked well with Linux. A prebuilt machine like @benjamincburns mentioned that has been well-tested would be an interesting idea, especially if it was closer to middle of the road spec wise.
No company that makes it's money gathering and making money off of your personal information should be trusted when it comes to privacy.
Yes. :) The prototype shown in the video is indeed built off a barebones device similar to the one you link to (not the exact same model).

So it is indeed not hard at all - most HN readers will be able to assemble a device similar to our campaign themselves.

But I want to clarify we are not running this to as a money-making campaign! We are doing this for two primary reasons:
1. Ignite pre-installed Ubuntu/Linux among PC makers by showing there is demand for it.
2. Try to put out a device at a lower price point than most Ubuntu vendors today and be price-competitive with the low-end models for Windows makers.
Publish Blog Post Using MS Word
Guys,Yu Can Publish Your Blog Post From Microsoft Word.ITs Very Easy To Do SO.
Sometimes what is good is difficult to attain. Otherwise everyone would.

(It's a good thing a dear friend is an immigration atty.)
Absolutely. But do remember that Dell and other vendors pre-install commercial operating systems (hint, hint!) on all their devices, and you are filling coffers for an anti-Linux company even if you overwrite it fully with Linux. There aren't really that many vendors selling pure Ubuntu/Linux machines out there.

Having said that, we're not aiming to become one such vendor. We are just trying what we can to ignite the pre-installed Linux computer market, not eke a profit out of this.
Harvard offers no degrees that can be earned 100% online. But I think the Extension School has some that you can do mostly online and a semester of "residency."
It's not a matter of some backdoor.

It's a question of whether the idea is fundamentally sound.

You're routing your data through several strangers, who are all volunteers and may be individuals who support anonymity or governments who are trying to break it, relying on them discarding logs in order to preserve your anonymity. Since the data is encrypted, and routed between several nodes, you do have some redundancy in place in case one of the middle nodes is an attacker.

However, there are several problems. The data coming out of the exit nodes is unencrypted. Now, everyone advises you to always encrypt anything that will pass through an exit node, but that's not always possible. Some protocols just don't have widely available encrypted versions (like DNS), or even with encryption, where you are connecting to is leaked, as well as some information in things like the TLS handshake that may be de-anonymizing.

There are also lots of ways that data can leak at your endpoint. For instance, many programs may make DNS queries that don't go through Tor, so what you are looking up may be leaked.

Furthermore, Tor doesn't sent data at a constant bitrate. Someone who can monitor traffic on a large portion of the network can correlate it across points.

Finally, due to the nature of routing traffic between several points, a fairly limited number of exit nodes, and the encryption, Tor is fairly slow. So most people won't really be able to use it on a day to day basis, making mere use of it somewhat suspicious, and likely to subject you to more scrutiny.

None of these are fatal flaws, but they are some fundamental weaknesses, and many of them can't really be fully fixed.

I think that focusing on widespread, end-to-end encryption, rather than anonymity service like Tor, would be more valuable. Yes, you will still be vulnerable to metadata monitoring, which is a problem, but it would help a lot more with the content of your communications.
Thanks for the feedback and support! :) (Sorry for the late reply, looks like HN was throttling us for posting too many replies.)

Yeah, we really want to do a low-cost netbook or a full-fledged ultrabook with Ubuntu, but this is not within our capability at the moment.

But we have built this desktop you see in the video, and if we show enough demand, might be able to convince a manufacturer to work with us to do a low-cost netbook with Ubuntu pre-installed. But let's see how it goes! :)

At least we'll be able to show there is interest in having Ubuntu or Linux pre-installed on machines, and a larger manufacturer can take the ball and run with it.
It mentions fingerprinting as a threat, but doesn't do anything specific against it. Probably because no one is quite sure how to stop it. From the FAQ:

How does Epic protect against browser fingerprinting?

There is no agreed-upon way to prevent browser fingerprinting or device fingerprinting at this point. There are many fingerprinting techniques which a solution would need to protect against. While we are working on a more thorough solution [...]

I imagine it could send the default plugin/header/user agent of IE/Chrome/Firefox, or random stuff each time...
Two obligatory links.

1. Debian dev on the openssl mailing list if he can remove the code causing errors in Valgrind: http://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114651085826293&w=2

2. Developer with a @openssl.org email address giving him the green light: http://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114652287210110&w=2

Source: http://lwn.net/Articles/282038/
They broke 31 out of 32 rounds.

In cryptography, if you break 1 bit, you've broken it. No excuse.
We know about the laws that allowed this.
Actually that is one of the novelties. If you've got a lot of experience you know all the 'moves' but you lose some of the 'fun' of figuring things out.