skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much weight does the claim that the Touch ID not being stored on Apple's servers really matter?

They claim it is stored on the A7 chip itself. Is that secure enough for us to believe that the NSA can't get access to it?

I am genuinely asking about the security implications.

If all the fingerprints were on iCloud, then all the Feds have to do is force Apple to give them access to their servers.

Having the fingerprint pushed down to each individual device, that seems to be more secure.

But am I just being naive or is that truly more secure?
The calculus for what plants make sense in space is entirely different than what plants make sense on earth. Cereals provide the bulk of earth calories because they optimize things like warm days, long term storage, transportation, water consumption, etc. The critical resources in space are things like 3D space, waste, preparation requirements, or even smell, so it would make no sense to choose space crops based on what stacks best in a grain silo.
Good for the schools that rank high and students that go there. It's a reinforcing cycle. (As opposed to being static, "You're ranked high based on an old reputation)

Certainly one can take a step back and say that employers should look for the most talented people, not the highest ranked school, but that's another story.
Yeah, I think you're missing the point that it's not using Javascript at all but only CSS.
Let me guess - you're Canadian
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Funny how them pointing out the failures of the product make it seem cooler (since it seems more real).
Good, so don't give them ideas.
The key here is really complementary use of ‘what humans are good at’ and ‘what machines are good at’.

In this case, it’s fair to say the machine, by analyzing pixels, can’t figure out perspective very well. The human can do that just fine, given an interface mechanism.

The machine is good at detecting edges and seeing similarity between pixels. Given hints from the human that ‘this point is within an object’ and here is the perspective, the machine can infer the limits of the object based on edges/colors and project it into 3 dimensions. Amazing.
If you (or anyone else reading) haven't already, go read Steven Levy's Hackers. This is sort of the theme of the latter half of the book.
You don't need to use javascript to hide/show matching elements. He also mentions something about it being faster than just an indexOf(), but gives no real benchmarks, so take that with a grain of salt.
The five cognitive distortions of people who get things done
I wasn't very clear, but that was my point, that the marketing angle seems to be that it is an option for more budget-conscious first-time smartphone buyers. And yet, there are negligible actual savings compared to the 5s, since the major part of switching to smartphone is the cost of a two-year service agreement.

The marketing angle is not cynical on the scale of, say, BlueHippo[1][2], or pay day loans, but it is different for Apple to be creating bad value proposition that will have to be dismissed as the customers' fault for not doing their research.

And sure, it actually is customers' fault, but I don't think Apple customers have had to watch out for being tricked by Apple as much in the past.

While, it is simple to say: you can use this phone for two years for $2500, or this phone for two years for $2400, and it will be obvious that you'd only choose the plastic one with half as powerful a CPU if you really like the colors, I don't think salespeople will be saying this in stores to potential customers.

The idea of a "budget" iPhone that looks like it starts at half the price, but actually only represents a 4% discount on the TCO, just seems like a departure from their past, and towards becoming a slimier company. (again, unless you just really like the colors)

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-05-20/the-poverty-b... OR
http://web.archive.org/web/20070811233934/http://www.busines...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/us/14scam.html
Salesforce.com CEO: Apple Execs Need To Stop Imitating Steve Jobs
I think this verifies a lot of what we have been hearing in terms of keys.
This is also a common UNIXism: programs that behave differently depending on what they're called as. Another example is gzip (gunzip = gzip -d, gzcat = gzip -dc).
> it allows you to learn electronics using a virtual Arduino board and breadboard without blowing up capacitors or burning yourself with solder on your work table.

With autodesk prices, i can probably buy enough caps and pay someone to solder for me.
I am skeptical, although I remain hopeful that my skepticism is misplaced. The "software" somehow seems to know what pattern of colors should exist on the other side of the object. Can someone explain to us how this aspect of the software works?
Now you're making a suggestion that somehow people simply "want to believe it," as if we're wandering around with tinfoil hats muttering on street corners.

At this point, the overwhelming evidence is that we are being spied upon at a scale never seen before in history. Legal checks and balances such as search warrants are consider inconveniences to be routed around with border confiscations.

I would begin to believe things are changing when I see officials on both sides of the Canada-US border going to jail--yes, jail--for things like spying on their ex-spouses or for routing around search warrants.
For this to work, you'd have to let your users opt-in to making their profiles public. Nothing stops a search engine crawler at this stage from caching everything, and most dating site users want their privacy. I don't think this would work.
Sonos Play:1 FCC Filing Hints At Bookshelf Speaker
Inconvenience and slavery are two different things. H1B isn't very convenient to the employees and it could certainly get better but calling it slavery is going too far.
Looks like they just reverse the front.
Mercedes-Benz TV: Autonomous long-distance drive [video]
This is cool. But, am I missing something? I can already do this with CTRL+F.
The future: Old Detroit or Delta City?
Looks like the flip whatever is on the visible side. If you look at the underside of the telescope, it's just a repeated pattern of what was originally visible.
With all due respect, howling "snark" is at least as annoying and creating at least as much noise. Think about that for a while. There are up and down arrows for expressing your discontent. Everything else--including this--is noise, not signal.
I've actually gained several very valuable contacts from this method, not just one ;) So it's actually worked out for me several times in the past, which is why I still do it.

In either case there's no harm in sending the email. Of course your conversion rate is going to be low. But if you can send 10 well written emails and get 1 valuable response, that certainly seems worth it to me!
Imagine that you're a man who has to pee really badly. Not every issue tips in men's favor.
The 3 Things You Should Understand about Quantum Computing
Indeed he is, nice guy too ;)
> This isn't just about performance.

Yes, but let's not forget you made it about performance.

There are plenty of reasons to choose to use OpenGL. Lots of freebies come with it. But you can still do 2D games without the GPU. That's the point. You can't just keep moving the goal posts however you want.
That's a great example. I just hope that at least the changes they made to maximize Rwanda's ranking on the ease-of-doing-business index were genuinely beneficial rather than merely cosmetic.
(Rereading again..) The JS claim is silly. He is saying that because we are dynamically creating a single style, that show/hide logic will be faster. I disagree with this, since adding a CSS selector to the page means the page needs to rematch that new selector against every element of the page and re-render each matching element, same as if we had just changed the matching elements with javascript.

EDIT: thinking on this some more, it actually should be a bit faster for huge collections, since javascript has to update items individually, whereas the browser has probably optimized this code path.
> during the heyday of the Macbook, it was split into a premium aluminum and a cheaper polycarbonate model.

The MacBook line wasn’t split. The MacBook Pro is the Intel powered successor to the PowerBook. The MacBook is the Intel powered successor to the iBook.

hey·day: the period of one's greatest popularity, vigor, or prosperity

When the MacBook was introduced, it was way less popular than it is now. Apple sells 2,5 times as many computers than it did back in 2006.
Does the UK not have anything similar to the 5th Amendment in the US? Could they ask you "Did you still a hot dog from that hotdog stand"? And force you to confess, or be faced with charges of lying to an officer?
This is the single most impressive example of image processing I've seen to date.
Why should it drain battery? Shouldn't NFC be activated only when user interacts with some payment UX on phone?
May I ask, what do you gain by setting it to +1 cores?
CC processing isn't a play for profits, it's a play for power. Air cover for everything else they do.
Ask HN: I'm a dev and want to collect money from a website. Any tips?
I've written tons of webapps, professionally and for fun, and know all about the software side of it. I'm more curious about what I should do from a... business?... point of view. Do I want or need an LLC? Is there anything I should to to protect myself? What sort of pages should I put on my site (privacy policy, length of data retention without active subscription, etc)?

The answer generally is "lawyer up" but I am not really looking for legal advice. Hoping for more of a bulleted list of "here are the steps to follow to make sure you're doing things correctly." I'm fine if that list includes a "lawyer up" bullet point but it can't possibly just be that.

Thanks for any help!

edit I've an idea for a web app that might actually be useful enough that people would want to pay me for the privilege of using it. I've never charged for any of my webapps before and, though technically know how to do this, don't know about the non-technical aspects.
I've been following this story for a while. I admire the hustle and drive this guy shows. He's obviously committed to making something cool.

The fact that this, and similar stories about this same guy and website have been making the rounds for a couple months is pretty neat. I don't think he planned on his story becoming viral when he was sleeping in a church parking lot, but I think that is a pretty cool, if unintended tertiary benefit.

The story makes a great headline, and that has generated some buzz for the company. Good for them. I hope it works out. I signed up for the beta.
Also awesome is that it handles the background replacement so well. This could also be used to just remove an ugly lamp post, telephone pole, etc from an otherwise good photo. (assuming you can remove objects and resave the image)

Edit: I am aware that Photoshop has some of this available. I've not played with it so I don't know how they compare.
It’s really not that complicated
Look HN is not a US-only site.

For those of us in the other 200 odd countries it really is boring as hell to have to wade through your pointless, unsubstantiated paranoia.
Maybe, if they are able to work the security angle. Industrial embedded folk love to not know about security. Industrial equipment are also usually despised by IT folk. If Intel can give OEMs a standard dirt-simple to configure solution that electricians and HVAC techs can install without screwing up, they might have a horse to race.

>Presumably embedded systems security will be a bigger issue as we approach the future Internet of Things.)

Embedded systems security, or the lack of it, is a big issue now.
The home search server would just be a cache, presumably the authoritative mailbox would be on an encrypted cloud service. Disaster recovery would consist of replacing the appliance and reauthenticating it.
Back to cave men, I'm sure
The paper is not out yet, but you can read the abstract here:

http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/site/3Sweep.asp
Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about "disown".
IPhone 5C, it’s colorful with rich features
If you are using WPA2, the only thing they're going to be collecting is a long/lat -> SSID map. This is very useful for assisting in geo-location, so I don't know why you'd want to turn it off.

If you have SSID broadcasting enabled, it's public, and it helps other people detect your network, including those outside your home, easily.

I don't see how knowing your SSID/location is any worse than geo-IP, either way, your location can be identified a good majority of the time.

The real purpose of this system is to enable location API on the client without waiting for satellites. It's only going to get worse with BlueTooth LE beacons, which will soon be showing up everywhere and pinning your location down to the nearest meter indoors.
It's obviously not an either-or. I reserve the right to distrust CSIS/NSA and distrust Apple :-)
This is amazing. My first thought is this could allow F1 teams to get a much better idea of what new packages their competitors are bringing to races early on just by looking at photos and video footage and modelling the new parts.
How would fingerprint technology benefit iPhone 5S users?
Yes, there are other projects that do things like insert a synthetic object into a scene, with natural in-context lighting that is inferred from the light gradients on other objects in scene.
Sidenote: I find expressions of religious faith particularly offensive and harmful to children. We should ban any faith related apps from tech conferences.
How the iPhone 5S Fingerprint Scanner Works — And What It Means For You
My short experience is the following:

- offshore or no offshore, scattered teams will have a lot more communication problems (= waste of time, requirements not fulfilled, etc)

- if you outsource a product, you will eventually get something that looks like what you asked. As soon as you throw it to prod, publish or whatever applies, you will find many unexpected problems. These problems usually are identified much earlier if you develop in-house. Possible explanations: Quick questions could have flagged those issues, but because teams are in different timezones, probably those questions got lost in a "todo.txt" somewhere.

- if you have to outsource, I recommend that you have people in your main office actually working with the remote team (doing the same tasks - e.g. coding). This way you know the quality of the product from the inside, how good are the people developing it, how extensible it is, etc.
If you're just removing part of the image after cutting around it with a tool like this, having the object interpreted as 3D isn't really going to be of any benefit.

The impressive thing here, imho, is the seemingly effortless and seamless transition and replacement. The background is fixed and the surface texture is stretched in what seems like real time.
New iPhones put more polish on Apple’s restrictions
Is there a reason many of these crazy image processing technologies never seem to have actual demos or releases? The only exception I can think of it the "smart erase" idea, which has been implemented in Photoshop as well as Gimp.
It looks like you guys built a solid product that's clearly useful, as well as a website that makes the value proposition immediately obvious. I would guess that this had more to do with your funding success than your cold email strategy.
I think they patchmatch algorithm they use to fill the background is cooler, to be honest. Check out their video: https://vimeo.com/5024379#at=0
To riff of of AznHisoka, is the eat24 delivery man a new archetype for these sites?

Seriously though well done on their part identifying the opportunity and I hope it works out well for them in the future.
I think there is a lot of value to blowing up your Arduino for reals. When you blow up a couple of Arduinos, you'll tend to force yourself to learn very quickly why it is happening and how to avoid it.

What is so bad about "blowing up a capacitor" or "burning yourself with a soldering iron"? Capacitors are a few cents, each. Buy them in bulk and never worry about needing one again. Soldering iron burns are easy to avoid if you have spent any time in a kitchen.

I feel like this is missing a big point. Arduino is the safe, easy entry point to learn electronics. The danger is miniscule, and whatever danger that is there, is part of the learning process. You need this as much as you need a rice-cooker simulator.
ThoughtLobster, a Word Puzzle Site with Built-In Community, is Up For Sale
Will the iPhone 5C Have a Halo, Too?
It is my fingerprint. Why shouldn't I trust it?
How We Found All Of Optimizely's Clients
My real worry is malware and fraud from private actors-- not governments. Criminals seem to be willing to go to amazing technical lengths to steal.

Looking at the personal computer software ecosystem and home computers, which are often bristling with malware, and extrapolating to phones, which will certainly have a larger install-base than personal computers, doesn't seem delusional at all. That's a ripe target for criminals.
Out of curiosity what would you say Googles innovative product was recently? In my opinion they're like Apple, they iterate well on existing concepts.
Arduino is already the easy point of entry for learning this stuff. Stop talking about it and just do it.
i usually click those links, see the stuff and roll up my eyes. nothing learned, but upvote so more people learn about them anyway.

this time, the very first one `man ascii` got me. Genius. Never though about looking for that in man before. But in my defense, this was added in 1999 :)
Thanks ohazi, appreciated! We still have a long way to go :)
> Sadly, for most users (read: people who don't program, or read HN, and even those who do), "Read the code and find bugs in it" is probably an impractical defense, although it is the logically correct one from the cryptographic point of view.

Actually, what gives me the warm fuzzies is that I can hire someone who knows what they are doing to read the code. So could a purely non-tech person. This can't occur with closed source software.
26% of ALL developers live in California and New York, or close enough. Hell, 18% of the entire US population is in California and New York. So the H1-B median shouldn't be skewed too widely from the overall market median.
If you have lots of data, you can offload your searching to something like swiftype.
The Best VPNs Of 2013
Which makes me wonder, aren't one's finger prints all over your iPhone exterior anyway. If someone steals one's phone wouldn't it be easier to dust it for prints than crack the security on the digital copy?

Ding ding ding! We have a winner.

Almost as silly as not using a biometric logic because "what if they use a backdoor to get a photo of my face?"
Week 23: Changes
I disagree. The iPhone 4 had (and still has) the perfect dimension of any phones for holding in to adult average human hand and carrying it around in average sized pant pockets or strapping it on arms while jogging/hiking. The iPhone 5 ruined it a bit in trying to copy competition and not knowing that it actually had it better. I see people using large android brick sized phones all the time uncomfortably carrying it around in their relatively tiny hands and unable to hold anything else even when they are not using it because it's too big to put in pocket. I know Jobs had obsessed over iPhone dimensions a lot and arrived at the best compromise for a device you can actually live with without being felt lugging it around.
Is anybody else stricken by the fact that the email seems to be too much like a boilerplate support email, providing little useful information and offering no real information about the next steps? Even in the context of this hypothetical exercise, the email could be made better:

- "we'll be contacting you soon" is vague. The client might wonder if it is minutes, hours, days? When should he be expected to reach back to Support if the problem is not resolved? "I'll be contacting you in the next X minutes/hours" would tell the client exactly when he can expect the next step to take place.

- the support representative could have added "call me at (XXX) XXX-XXXX if you wish to talk to me directly" to make it clear he wants to go above and beyond his job duties to provide fantastic support.

- the mail could be made more personal by using more "I", as in "I attempted to check with the members of my team, etc" instead of "the members of my team [...] aren't available".
Oh, I see the source at the earlier Hacker News discussion also lists Russia as a high-ranked country for people moving out. That was my curiosity about the issue: this town is full of immigrants from Russia.

From that article:

Top emigration countries

MEXICO 11,859,236

INDIA 11,360,823

RUSSIAN FED. 11,034,681

CHINA 8,344,726

UKRAINE 6,525,145

BANGLADESH 5,384,875

PAKISTAN 4,678,730

So, yes, I was speaking of NET immigration, for which the United States still seems easily to be the top-ranked country. The point in another reply is correct that laws about immigration limit freedom of movement to some extent, but that is also revelatory about what people desire. The United States doesn't have to do anything to keep people already here in, but its government has been called on by some domestic voters to make it hard for just anyone to come in from outside.
Creating YouTube like top progress bar using jQuery
Bitcoin Ecosystem
The Touch ID is really exciting for accessibility as it enables visually impaired users to access their phone without having to fiddle around with a lock screen, which may reveal their password to those around them.

http://www.accessibleresources.com/2013/09/10/apple-announce...
My statement implies a non-positive outlook for AAPL. Short selling implies a negative outlook. See the difference?

PS: No need to lecture me on basic finance, unless you've also been on the management team of a $16bn equity fund.
It doesn't even need to be straight-up porn: while lots of 4chan is porn, a lot of it isn't, and they've had a hard time finding enough advertisers to keep the lights on.
Also interesting, Andrei Alexandrescu's thoughts on why C++ is not for beginners: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1m1izv/goingnat...

The entire thread is worth reading.
The perspective analysis is done pretty darn well by the machine in these examples.
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Given that C++ originated as a superset of C, it is perhaps not that surprising to see this quirk as a remnant.

C++ has a whole bunch of other issues, however. The inundation of poor educational resources on it and the fact that many treat it as "C with Classes" rather than its own language doesn't help matters much.
Unless you have to also swipe a card in which case the fingerprint might be stored on the card. That how it's done where I live since you can't store peoples fingerprints without a good reason.
Well, they only do it once a year. I have to wonder just how much it would really cost to move production up a couple of weeks, or move the release down a couple of weeks. Most of the time they're fine waiting for inventory to come over the slow way.
You're all assuming the finger is still attached to the rest of the body.
Not the OP, but think a about it this way: your fingerprint is now in a central database backed-up by lots of processing power so someone can match it pretty quickly and, all of a sudden, you realize you can no longer commit anything "bad", ever, because "they" may catch you based on the data they have about you.

And to someone who may ask me "why would you want the freedom to do something bad?" I'll answer that three of the biggest monotheistic religions are based on a guy a girl who were allowed to do bad things (Adam and Eve). I'm agnostic myself but I find it pretty self-explanatory nevertheless , you just can't impose the lack of free-will on people.
Phonebloks