skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you keep reading, the document later details that DPR contacted this "redandwhite" person, who he contracted to kill the other person, regarding false identifications. That seems to add some doubt to your hypothesis, or at least complicates things.
Why Lazy People Are The Most Innovative
15GB of free email service to 400+ million people costs a little bit of money to keep running. I'm going to go with the premise that advertising helps fund the cost of keeping this service up and running.
That's a nice thought but not a fact. Some who are held down search for what they were deprived, some don't. I would assume the many examples of this are all anecdotal since they make great stories. The flip side is not that uncommon and thus not celebrated and reported about.
AdBlock -> detected by PageFair
AdBlock -> detects PageFair and destroys it

Seems easy enough.
Bay Area Continues to Grow Its Share of VC Financings
Umm... that reply was posted TODAY, not back in October 2011.
You are, fortunately for the rest of us, not a representative sample. If nothing else, most people prefer to take the path of least resistance, and won't bother learning about, installing, and maintaining an ad blocker until they get really irritated; and even then, as I said, many will happily whitelist sites that reach out to AdBlock users and say "We promise our ads aren't annoying, please help us out!"

(This does not require PageFair's services, BTW. Every site I've seen that does it has a text message under their ad panel, so if the ad doesn't load you see the message. Simple.)

The problem now is that advertisers have poisoned the well. It's hard to get people to change--that means it's hard to get them to install AdBlock in the first place, but it's also hard to get them to use their whitelist after installing it. Inoffensive ad vendors and users have an uphill battle to regain the trust of their users.
JavaServer Pages? That's an interesting choice.. and will probably rule it out for a lot of people. I'm not running Java on my web server, sorry. Interesting that a PostgreSQL product licensed under PostgreSQL is using an Oracle technology. Edit - removed the MySQL reference.
"Objects" in Clojure: design choices for data and (polymorphic) operations
This is why you don't do an interview with Forbes and thumb your nose at the FBI when you're running an illegal operation. When I saw that interview, I knew his days were numbered.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-inte...
I'm not talking about "CREATE USER", I'm talking about /usr/sbin/createuser (or whatever it is installed in your system)

"A developer that chooses tools primarily based on familiarity "

Yes, let me waste time to learn how to use the latest fad on HN, sure (not talking about PostgreSQL here)

And PostgreSQL is made of unicorn blood and my projects will be 200% better if I use it instead of MySQL, sure.

It's a DB. There's a narrow range where it would make a difference to use it instead of scaling to more servers, for example. And you can "always" convert later. (Unless you're FB apparently)
‘Indie’ Games Shine at BostonFIG
Interesting. He apparently lived in San Francisco in the Mission and rented a room for $1000/month. For someone who should have had $80 million in profit, that seems a bit strange. I suppose cashing out $80 million in bitcoin and then laundering must be incredibly difficult.
Cloud storage company Nirvanix filed for bankruptcy
Author here; happy to answer any questions. Feedback and suggestions for improvement are very welcome as well.
Initial reports were that insurance.gov got 1M uniques before 8AM on launch day. One can imagine that California's exchange site was also slammed.

I'm not going to argue that this project's budget wasn't bloated, but it's pretty naive to think that your average low-rent startup team could handle it any better. Doing tens of millions of uniques on launch day is a challenge for any team. Most commercial websites with that much traffic have technology budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more.
shared_ptr may be slow (I don't know) but you actually make very little "garbage" in C++, so it's not a problem. You're simply forced by the language to have clear ownership of resources most of the time.
As I've said for the past few years, he essentially fucked himself.

1) using a low latency onion routing network, rather than a mixnet like an anonymous remailer or other 1990s blacknet, was a big problem. You could maybe get away with throwaway front end nodes as a web interface, stateless, to package up transactions, run by third parties, but for long running anonymity vs traffic analysis or server compromise, low latency bidirectional connections are impossible.

2) repeatedly sticking his dick into the hornet nest by provoking the FBI in the press

3) remaining in the USA while doing all of this

Acting in ways which make him a less sympathetic defendant (connection to assassinations? Really?) doesn't help
>The web site will allow users to explore key market metrics and trends based on aggregate analyses of tens of billions of records over the last year

I wish they had an API where fundamental data for each company could be accessed for all historical periods. If someone could offer this for free they might put a dent in Bloomberg's business. I know at least one start up is working on it. The name escapes me.
We are at a point where we need evidence that the NSA didn't help.

So we now have to prove a negative or the NSA did it? Logic has officially left the building.
I love this flavor... reading this article makes me wish I had a bag right now.
A fascinating read.

The traditional method of catching drug kingpins has been to flip the lower-levels of the organization until you can finally stick something on the leader. Here, the feds were able to go straight to the source.

I'd expect more prosecutions of SR's larger vendors as part of the fallout. If I were one of those vendors, I'd be ordering dust filter for my Hoover MaxExtract PressurePro model 60.

I think the pseudo-anonymity that Tor, Bitcoin, and computers in general can provide gave DPR too much confidence. But like every other ringleader who has been caught, a new one will take over and play the game smarter.
This is a wonderful article and I am glad that Slate published it. Wouldn't it be great if there were more people like Dr. Suskind working in all sectors of our world?! Her research and findings are definitely something I have seen firsthand, but I am glad to learn that we have research now that proves my observations.
In fact, I believe that people who work for an hourly wage and who work long hours to make ends meet, do not have the time/energy to cook for their families. Instead, with their low income, they look to find easy and quick ways to feed themselves and their families, sometimes resorting to fast food, if not always. In turn, the children in these families grow up thinking this is the way things are done and never learn to cook for themselves. All they have been taught is to eat what comes out of a can or box, instead of preparing themselves and egg and toast. Consequently you have generation after generation not learning to cook, to eat fast food, and this, to me, is the reason why we have been steadily becoming the most obese and disease plagued people in the world.
I hope that soon there will be solid research to show that my observation is correct, but more importantly that like developing good language skills, being healthy is something attainable by even those in low income households through simple discipline.
Of course the FBI have to be chauvinistic about it.
How do they check the workers' location? Some of that income could be considered decent lower-middle-class in certain parts of the world.
shared pointers? You must be joking!
Presumably we should let them spend enough to get competent counsel, though needing so much money for "competent counsel" is itself an issue.
What Should a Robot's Face Look Like?
This claim can be dis-proven by common sense. Lets look at families with more kids. Each kid should be smarter and smarter because the other kids talk and converse.

Kids who go to day care with other older, talking kids should be brilliant.

I am sure that there are many other no-brainier situations when kids hear more words and have more conversations and are not smarter as well.

Why do these big scientific articles like this always seem so trivially flawed and ridiculous? Is is just me?
I assume redandwhite is a Hells Angels reference, which makes assassinations for hire a bit more plausible.
Mailchimp. Didn't appear to have a problem with spam - each article was personalized, and included an unsubscribe link.

Could have made it into some folk's spam folders though. No data on that.
Just use fmt(1) or par(1).
The frequency of the perceived light coresponds roughly to color. The frequency of the perceived sound corresponds roughly to pitch. So I think that "quiet" to "loud" is analogous to "pale" to "bright", when it comes to visible light.

>>different human cultures divide up the electromagnetic spectrum in different ways ...
Yep, different human cultures divide up the sound spectrum in different ways too ... So what ?

Some people have absolute pitch perception, allowing them to reproduce a musical tone, that they had heard exactly, even without knowing its proper name, just like some people can distinguish between color hues, that other people lump together as generic "pink", "green", "blue" or "yellow".

Having a vocabulary of specific names may ease learning/training, but it seems to me, that no matter how many different words for colors you teach a child with daltonism, the child will still fail a color blindness test.
Silk Road forums still up, vendors and buyers panic
I wonder if the companies get to see the redacted part. If not, it's odd for them to be present
Incidentally, you don't need PageFair to communicate with AdBlock users. I've seen several sites that just have a text message behind their ad image, so you don't see it unless the ad doesn't load.

I guess PageFair additionally lets you collect statistics on how many users are blocking ads, which may be useful.
They want the big fish, not the little fishes that school around him. Is there a bigger fish in the Silk Road story than DPR?
Where do you see anything about MySQL?
I've read recently the book that the article references - Why Humans like Junk food - and it's a fascinating read - despite being poorly written.

Putting theories behind food appreciation, like Vanishing Caloric Density, the Umami flavor (MSG, garlic and Friends) and flavor familiarity (vanyloids are present in breast milk) - on the context of foods your familiar with, changes your perspective when you're tasting any kind of food, allowing you to deconstruct what are you experiencing: "Ho, I like this because it's greasy, and it salty, and it has loads of umami from the garlic".

It allowed me to deconstruct a common action, changing it from an immediate appreciation to a more rational, pondered thought process.
Or just not reinvent the wheel and use SOAP. Pretty much what this thing is with a little less cruft.
The Bonehead Mistake That Brought Down an Online Drug-Dealing Empire
>And a few post below someone says:
>> I'm interested Ross
>Spy film discretion here.

That post was made today.
30 million words fewer in 3 years?? That's 27397 words per day... at 12 waking hours per day for a child it's about 38 words per minute - I find it hard to believe.
Ha, didn't know that! Cool.
But so much of what we depend on every day, servers, supercomputers, infrastructure, compilers, etc..., relies on FSF software. Stuff like GCC, Make, Glib, Emacs, to implementations of various standard languages, and this of course doesn't count the FSF's influence, which is much broader than the packages they offer...

Whether or not Android and iOS use FSF software, they do use software that was inspired by what the FSF pioneered...
The thing about the Dread Pirate Roberts is, it's the name that inspires the necessary fear.

So he probably has a successor and/or is a decoy.
Denying them bail on assumption they'd flee seems like a solid way to keep them inside the justice system.

Certainly you're not suggesting that seizure is a valid response before they've been tried and found guilty and penalties are assessed?
It does. Thanks!
The agent is discussing source code he inspected likely after acquiring an image of the server. The vulnerability you described isn't how they got their information.

I'm reading through it now, but it's still not 100% clarified how they originally determined the true IP and provider of the server. There are a myriad of different ways, though.
Bitcoin Falls 15% Following FBI’s Silk Road Seizure
This article read like a commercial.
It's justified to murder people for threatening to publish secret information that might get people into trouble?

And I thought the journalist that got his laptop seized at an airport was harshly treated...
Fuck no, fuck you and fuck off.
Your advice says to enforce embargoes, but the screenshot shows a reporter publishing news early.

Did you not enforce it, and this is a "lesson learned"?

Otherwise, how would a new service know which reporters honor embargoes and which ones don't?
Facebook Permanently Disabled My Account While I was Sleeping, NO WARNINGS.
I woke up this morning to not being able to view my facebook. OR log into Spotify for my daily route to school.

I never post inappropriate or otherwise content on my facebook, or really anything other than some photos and jokes, not even a re-blogged copyright info.

I'm a pretty mellow facebook user lately, and just use it to talk to friends and family.

I emailed them after getting:

"Disabled - Ineligible

Your account was disabled because we determined that you are ineligible to use Facebook. For more information about our policies, please review the Facebook Terms. If you think your account was disabled by mistake, please contact us. "

When trying to log in.

I emailed them concerned as to why, what, how, and if possible to at least get a download of my facebook for all of the photo's, conversations, and memories I kept on facebook with my loved ones, and they responded with:

"Hello,

Upon investigation, we have determined that you are ineligible to use Facebook. You can view our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities at the following address:

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Unfortunately, for safety and security reasons, we cannot provide additional information as to why your account was disabled. This decision is final.

Thanks for your understanding

The Facebook team"

I don't know if I was hacked and they posted some bad stuff, or what. But does anyone else have any experience or know how to deal with this?

It doesn't appear that facebook had a number to call. And have not seem to have broken any of their rules or regulations.

Thank you!
I honestly didn't expect much from this. The part that scares me about all of this is this: if the government can't read our emails, listen to our phone calls, or see our web traffic but they have the ability to... what stops them from outsourcing the work to another country, where there is no constitutional restraint. we outsource everything else, why not our domestic spying?
Maybe the victims of the tens of thousands of paramilitary police assaults that occur each year in this country? Do you think that those soldiers are just going to let their targets walk free?

We have the world's largest prison population for a reason: we imprison large numbers of people each year.
Each peer has to determine a price per Bitcoin when opening the order. Then we match the orders that have the same price using a P2P discovery system. So there isn't a global price but rather each user has to choose a price.
Interview with Ross Ulbricht (alleged Silk Road owner) (2012)
reads like a syndicated article
I have no sympathies for the real "Dread Pirate Roberts". He was running an enterprise whose primary purpose was to facilitate criminal activity, and he profited handsomely from it.
Do you have a cite for them seizing bitcoins? It'd be most hilariously pitiful if a large amount of SR's money was in /root/wallet.dat with no passphrase or the passphrase in /tmp/unlock.php.
Not allowed to profit from one's own criminal story, I'm afraid.
I'd imagine the NSA has crawlers that can parse LinkedIn profiles enough to make good guesses on who is likely to be involved in hacking, criminal entrepreneurship, etc., and to pull out relevant dates and other indications of ideological shifts or large secret projects. Cross-reference with banking records to show when someone is unemployed for a long time and yet still has unexplained funds... DPR was probably on a reasonably short list.
No! No payment has been made yet, because at that point the transference is not valid
Thank you Donny.
Actually, the core of the counter argument is that the executive can declare anything classified.

The argument for publishing from the companies is that this information is not classified, but it's not their decision, it's (basically) the President's.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/RS21900.pdf

>The Supreme Court has never directly addressed the extent to which Congress may constrain the
executive branch’s power in this area. Citing the President’s constitutional role as Commander-inChief,4
the Supreme Court has repeatedly stated in dicta that “[the President’s] authority to
classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from
this Constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit
congressional grant.”5

The President decide's what's classified, the Supreme Court agrees that the President has the constitutional authority to declare things classified. End of story (at least for this case).

I think in general, it's important to note that the Courts have always ruled in degrees. Nothing is absolute (which is why people can get thrown into jail for hate speech), and the courts are the ones that decide up to where the line gets to be drawn, balancing between rule of law and freedom. The discussions about surveillance (and nat. sec. associated) are relevant.
All scientific theories require proof that comes from repeatable objective experimentation.

Nut? If this conversation continues you would probably also call me a nazi, this is a classic for lack of arguments.

I know, you don't need arguments because et contact is so silly that it doesn't need arguments.

Grow up.
The internet is full of smart individuals with an eye for detail.

Lesson learned, if trying to stay anonymous only use cat photos as profile pictures found on google images.
The English language has an order of magnitude or so more words than other languages.
Actually that's what I thought, but it's not always the case. Sometimes a good chunk of the TEXT type column is saved in the row itself (~768 characters), and when the length exceeds that, the remainder is stored in the blob area of the table store. (http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/04/07/innodb-row-si...)

This depends on your row format, an obscure technical issue most never have to deal with, but it can be a problem.
I saw some job postings on HN earlier that didn't talk about what the company does. This is key!
Is Massive Open Online Research the Next Frontier for Education?
Ah, I see. I personally thought that it was LaTeX converted to HTML with Sweave et al, in which case I would have enjoyed seeing all the code. Nonetheless, thank you for the link (and some of the other articles too, which I readily enjoyed).
Weird that the title includes a quote that isn't actually contained in the article.
I think he's just trying to make the Java->Oracle->MySQL connection. I don't see how using Java is in any way a vote of confidence for MySQL though, so the point seems moot.
TL;DR: Don't open your company in America. You can target Americas markets from any other part of the world.
It is definitely enough to have CBP flag any packages crossing the border that are associated with that name, for which no warrant is required. After that, well, I'm no lawyer, but I think intercepting a package full of fake IDs is enough to justify a broader criminal investigation.
DPR's responses to the murder are silly and obviously load him up on charges he doesn't need. But putting murder charge risks side, it's not a terrible negotiation tactic is it? The original guy wanted $500K, and DPR paid significantly less, while perhaps making it seem like he'd go to any lengths to stop someone.
Libertarian ideals don't include shutting down the police.
Straight talk's data isn't really unlimited. It's throttled to EDGE after 2.5Gb. Minutes on the other hand work out well.
Screensharing for Linux
Denying reality isn't healthy:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...
"This brings the performance of reference counting on par with that of a well tuned mark-sweep collector."

I'm not really convinced. How well does it stack up when the competition is a copying generational collector?
But a non-trivial proportion of people unfamiliar with cookies and what you can do with a combination of additional windows and google buy LinkedIn subscriptions...
TL;DR "Basically he made a simple mistake and we were able to find him."

I wonder what it was...
25 cents per hour is roughly 45 $ a month. (8 h/day, 22 working days/month) I guess someone who would work for that wage lives in a rough country. As we all know from the news and documentaries, those countries often have horrible working conditions, like 60 hours or more a week and physically hard work. Isn't a mTurk job better than that? Also don't forget the lower prices in such regions.

The thing is this: NGOs and friends are trying since decades to solve humanitarian problems. Unfortunately they suck incredibly at what they are doing. The countries stay poor, the working conditions stay bad, war and crime continue.

I strongly believe that economical prosperity automatically leads to better living and working conditions. Just look at the African countries the Chinese got their hands in.

BTW, don't forget that there is not only competition between the workers but also between those submitting jobs. I.e. many mTurk users => more competition on the income side. Even better: competition with same working standards. You don't even have that in the U.S.!
Even though I eat a generally healthy diet, even I can't resist the pull of the Dorito... There's just something about salty, savoury, crispy, fatty and sometimes spicy treats that is so appealing.
said every secret police since the beginning of time
Well since compacting means the expensive task of moving managed memory blocks around to free larger sections that solution certainly comes with a big penalty of it's own.

Better to avoid heap fragmentation to such extents by applying a better allocation strategy imo.
I'll note that the U.S. justification is essentially the same justification made by the "metadata is data" piece by der Spiegel a couple of months ago; if you have enough data about something, it doesn't matter that you don't disclose the contents of that data directly, the harm is already done.

Oddly enough, this time it's the tech companies arguing the opposite (that disclosing specific metadata only is OK and not hazardous).

Weird world we live in, sometimes...