skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Widely unrecognized in the other discussions on HN is that:

"During an investigation into several Lavabit user accounts, the federal government demanded both unfettered access to all user communications and a copy of the Lavabit encryption keys used to secure web, instant message and email traffic."

Note that the initial court order although appearing to target the specific user demanded explicitly that Lavabit "shall furnish agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, forthwith, all information, facilities, and technical assistance necessary to accomplish the installation and use of the pen/trap device." (http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/801182/redacted-pleadi...)

Then defying the initial order was definitely not Lavabit protecting one (famous) person as some wanted to present this case, as the goal of FBI as stated in this announcement was unfettered "access to the Lavabit network without (Lavabit) being able to audit the information being collected."

For the first time in history the general public can actually see the most of the documents related to such kind of orders. Up to now the people receiving such orders weren't allow to tell anybody even that they received them.

This is unprecedented.
Maybe the product never fulfilled the promise of being "the other half of web search" (from a TechCrunch mention 3 years ago) and they realised it was never going to. Maybe they found that investors and potential buyers agreed. Maybe, more importantly, they found that customers agreed - we have no idea what their revenue numbers were. Maybe they found a buyer that would take over the project for a small sum, but required the founders/key staff to sign long employment contracts - which, in the face of the above realisation is a pretty unattractive prospect.

Recalling that the product had something going for it, a while ago, pre-pivot, and obviously not enough to make you a customer, is a rather weak foundation of the assertion that it's worth a non-trivial sum.

Keeping the thing running isn't free - there will always be something to attend to, if nothing else, applying security patches to the stack (which requires testing which takes time and effort). If you expect to run with paying customers, there will always be a minimum of customer service required when payments fail or there are chargebacks or whatever. All that for the benefit of not throwing "something" away? FWIW, 30 stacks of $100 bills is $300k - or about two cheap engineer-year salaries including overhead.
Someone posted a link to the Lavabit Court Orders in the comments.
http://cryptome.org/2013/10/lavabit-orders.pdf
Nope, I meant irony. The word has multiple definitions. In its most popular - "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect" - sarcasm is given as a synonym.
Just downloaded it in my PC.. wow.. awesome app!.. real magic!
If you’re going to quit your job, this is the way to do it
7500 rounds of sha256 :)

Anyone know how long it would take to crack a 8 character password on a laptop.
Possibly related: "Jimmy Wales launched an investigation to determine if any of the pseudonyms who edit the world's biggest encyclopedia belong to Edward Snowden."

http://www.examiner.com/article/jimmy-wales-breaks-wikipedia...
It sounds like if it's a matter of spending about $1mil to fight a troll in court and get the patent invalidated, the victims might do better by pooling the money they would have spent on settlement together on the first case to go to court and get the claims invalidated.
Hrrm OK... when was that? 2009 or earlier I suppose. I was using it in 2010 with few hiccups.
Ask HN: What have your learned from your failed startup?
> Let's rally for Lavabit to fight for the privacy rights of the American people.

I find that limitation to "American" (surely meaning US american) people an incredibly embarrassing and nationalist call to action and it alone made me instantly close the tab.
Like this? http://libvirt.org/

It seems the FreeBSD port originally failed due to deficiencies in kernel features[1] but is now available[2] at least partially, possibly only to manage workloads on remote systems (typically Linux).

[1] http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=100894

[2] http://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/devel/libvirt/
Why should kids learn how to code?
Michael Dell and Silver Lake secure stockholder approval to acquire dell
I assume by American you mean USAian? Either way, doesn't everyone else deserve privacy too?
Possession of the device and typing a PIN into the _same_ device does not qualify as 2FA.

It's not 2FA unless information flows between the user and the authenticator through two independent routes. For example, in Twitter's (and others') 2FA, information must flow between Twitter's servers and the user through the Twitter UI as well as through a GSM text message. That's 2FA.
Dead Drops offline P2P file sharing network goes global
Yep. And what's so bad about that?
The patent includes more than that. It also includes using the process against a pool of potential donors to choose the highest likelihood of a 'desirable' outcome in terms of the child's genetics. It's not quite Gattaca-style selection, but it is a way to 'design' your child with a high margin of error.
Password hashes, not passwords. "Note that password hashes do not reveal passwords in cleartext; if any third party successfully obtained a copy of the hashes, they would need to mount a brute force attack in order to obtain valid passwords from the hashes, which is most likely to be successful in the case of very simple, insecure passwords."
How to sell a GIF
Νέο Site Kleitsis.com Μηχανές Γραφείου -
The very first line of the link lists

user information (specifically, user email addresses,
password hashes, session tokens, and last login timestamp)

So .. yes. Of course.
> Much like how we like to pretend TOR is untouchable

Who are you talking about? Everywhere I look people are saying tor is certainly broken, the NSA is watching us, etc.
I believe it was `Geneshaft' [0], by Bandai. It mixes mecha with social dynamics of genetics and gender disparity.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneshaft
Have you secured your users data?
BlendMe.in : Browse thousands of Icons, Vectors directly from Photoshop
No, the "Internet Law" is that as an Internet discussion approaches a length of infinity, the likelihood that someone mentions the Nazis approaches 1.

It doesn't necessarily mean the mention was unwarranted or inappropriate.
Offer HN: Free SEO For Your Startup/Company
I did this some months ago, with really great success. I met some really cool entrepreneurs that managed to grow their SEO traffic substantially, so I'll repeat the offer :)

The deal:

I will do SEO for your startup and/or company for free. The number of hours? As many as it takes, whilst it's still fun to do. It usually takes 5-10 hours to do the basic stuff (strategy and on-site optimization), and then another 10-50 to initiate the harder stuff (developing content and building backlinks).

I will examine your site or product, develop a complete SEO strategy, give you tips and clues on what needs to be corrected on your site, do keyword research and develop content for your site - eventually starting the grind job of building backlinks.

Who am I?

I'm a SEO professional making $170K a year doing SEO work. SEO is one of my main passions in life. I love logical link hierarchies, finding new sources of backlinks, explaining the importance of digital distribution of content to newbies, doing technical SEO and seeing Google gradually index a site. I also own 10-20 sites with Pagerank ranging from 4 to 6. My own sites attract 150-200.000 visitors per week, largely because of SEO. I earn $14.000 USD in Adsense per month, again largely because of SEO.

Why the deal?

I like to meet fellow entrepreneurs around the world. Bonus if you live in the US, as I'm moving there - to either SF or NYC.

Who are you?

You're someone in tech, leading a startup or a company. You're great at what you do and you understand the importance of SEO; but you're no master at it. You are willing to put at least (!) 5 hours into doing what I instruct you; like creating some content pages or fixing your link hierarchy.

If you are interested, please email me at eric@listnerd.com introducing yourself and your project. Thanks, and good luck to all fellow entrepreneurs.
I bet. All the more reason for the implementation to provide it for you - possibly transparently.
The projected economy of Silk Road
Soviet surveillance directly and/or indirectly involved the murder of millions of innocent people though.
It's something usual, and It's always by a supposed DDoS.
The transit data listed for Cambridge, MA also includes data for another city a little south of Cambridge. It has a funny name - spelled Boston but I think it is pronounced like Bahstin.
Not sure why an SSL link would add any benefit in this situation anyway...
The I in API is for interface - 1 and 2 are just about having a great web service :)
He's only received $50,000 so far, which seems pretty low to me for such an important case like this. If you can't/won't participate in protests against the mass surveillance and privacy abuses of the government, then at least consider supporting those that fight for our 1st Amendment, 4th Amendment, and human right to privacy, like Ladar Levinson does:

https://rally.org/lavabit
some one in r/silkroad posted a block chain transaction link that seemed like the payment you are talking about.. around 1670BTC. i went there but the silkroad subreddit is made private not..

but luckily i found the blockchain link in my history..

http://blockchain.info/en/tx/4a0a5b6036c0da84c3eb9c2a884b6ad...
As a European I do indeed find this troubling. I know that "everyone does this", and "this is how it's always been", but morally speaking whether a person is a citizen of one country or another has no impact on whether it is justified to spy on them. As a collective society humanity has to grow up and leave this stuff behind.

Fundamentally these problems trace back to the nation state, which itself is an inherently discriminatory instrument. It assigns special privileges to people based on where they were born. If we as a species believe that everyone should have access to equal rights and equal opportunities, then there can be no international borders arbitarily cutting up the landscape of rights and opportunities. The nation state was a tool that was useful in humanity's adolescence, but we have to leave it behind if we ever want to grow up.

Not that any of that is easy, but just because something is hard doesn't mean it isn't necessary.
And I am trying to push my edits to my team repo... worst timing ever
I am really sick of Getting HN posts which say, Github is down, Gmail is Down , Service X is down .
Nothing unexpected from this announcement. It was heavily implied that he was asked to provide the encryption keys to decrypt the communications of all users.

I'm surprised that some academic lawyers aren't helping take on this case for no cost, due to the precedent it may set and the exposure it will get.
So they applied statistics to information about genes and received patent on it? I can get someone else than 23andMe analyze my genes, and he can do similar analysis.

I really like 23andMe's product, although I dont like the idea of my genetic information being stored outside my country (different than US).

I hope the patent itself isn't as broad as they are painting it, statistical methods (algorithms) should never be a part of patent - they are too generic and based on mathematics.
Atlantis is pretty widely known to be either a honeypot or a scam.

Black Market Reloaded is the odds-on favorite to be the new Silk Road.

Drugs are bad, mm'kay?
Was just wondering... is this unusual? I guess the answer is, "kinda."

For once though, the problems I'm experiencing aren't my fault. Nice!
Github.com unavailable due to a large DDoS attack
He's somebody of no consequence.
Sources are denying any connection to the US Government shutdown, but some suspect its NSA contractors entertaining themselves during the government downtime.
AGPL is questionably enforceable and still only requires contributions back in a very specific case.
No it isn't. The government isn't entitled to jack shit. They can demand whatever they want, and they may be able to take it through force, or threat of force

Your claim here appears to be that the government has only power, not authority (i.e. power + some sort of legitimacy or moral right to use that power). Is that your position? If so, under what, if any conditions do you believe the use of power against other people is legitimate?
Yeah, the decision to apply myself to learn programming was a couple of days in plastic factory. I never wanted to do that work again. Yes sometimes programmers complain like spoiled brats. But I've heard a couple of complaints and have had a couple myself that aren't in the spoiled territory. (and I admit I've complained like a spoiled brat myself a couple times also.)
More like a simple way to narrow down your future job prospects.
The services you mention are often crucial to the infrastructure of many startups.

So I think this is a good place to discuss, when, how and why such services go down. And what the impact is on your startup. And what you can do to keep your service or shop running during such outages.
I feel sick when I see people taking analogies as equations, because I like doing analogies myself. Analogies are intentionally exaggerated (but still being logically valid) to make the point stand out. I thought Hacker News readers were better than that.
I think you are reading too much into the statement. It's likely to be a figure of speech so that regular folks i.e. not child pornographers, drug smugglers, terrorists or other ne'er do wells, can feel good about using the service.
Or a future viral media consultant...
Again...

personally I can't see why anyone would want to DDoS github unless they are just being an asshat.
sorry for the meta discussion: really wondering about the quality of the hacker news front page posts recently. Yesterday, there was a spam post about a fictitious iOS Hackathon from Google. Today this ... It's not even news, already old, and a very stupid way to quit your job ...
It's pure self-promotion (I would not hire her for any job, if I saw the video ... ok,ok working for academia).
I would argue that actively avoiding to mention a horrible event will cause it to be forgotten and wouldn't help prevent a similar event from happening again.
There are approximately fifty zillion "what exactly gets cut off in a government shutdown" articles floating around, meaning it's not terribly hard to actually find out what's still operating and what isn't. Plus, anything that was going on before the shutdown doesn't get magically back-in-time-un-happened by it.
The second in two days, github is getting increasingly unreliable - https://status.github.com/messages.

Also, I'd be interested to know how complete lack of service is 'mitigating a DDOS attack' - to me it sounds like 'successful DDOS attack'.
She dances a lot better than I'd expect and this is a good video. But don't do this. Just state the reason you're leaving in the most non-insulting way you can. In the world of the never-forgetting interwebz, these things can come back to haunt you at the worse & most unexpected times; you won't even believe it. When it happens, you'll feel like the whole world is against you because it'll happen in a way that seems entirely improbable; the chain of events that leads you to the consequences will make you feel like you're in a book and the author wants your character to suffer. You'll be thinking "How the ?@$&!# did they find out about that?" as you watch some amazing opportunity slip right through your fingers. If you didn't believe in karma before, you'll start to wonder afterwards.

EDIT: http://gawker.com/next-media-animation-responds-to-the-quit-...

After reading the NWA-exec's comments, now I'm pretty sure this was a mistake on her part.
I'll answer this based on my experiences:

0. Having a team where everyone is committed is ideal. It's very difficult to run a company by yourself (beyond a very small operation). Finding a co-founder should not be driven by YC, VCs, etc. A co-founder is about the success of your company. Is it absolutely necessary, no. Does having a good partner greatly increase your chances of success, yes.

1. Should you settle for a sub-optimal co-founder? No. Starting a company with someone is a long-term commitment. It's like marriage in so many ways, so you should take your time and find the right match to grow your business. On the other hand, don't set your standards so high that you're stuck doing everything on your own forever. Basically, know what characteristics you need in your co-founder so that the company's success is maximized.

Also, put in effort to find the right co-founder. Get out there, talk to people, let people know you're in the market. And don't be afraid to date before marriage. There are many ways to start working together. You can start with a consulting arrangement, then grow to co-founder after verifying that everyone can really work well together.

2. Should you share equity with someone who joins late?
The work you put in before finding a co-founder or getting an investment is not highly relevant. First, think of this as if you're the 2nd co-founder. Would you be ok taking a smaller stake for the next 2, 4, 10 years just because the other person did a few months work before you joined?

Building a company is about the future. That's what everyone is rewarded for. If a late joining co-founder helps grow the startup from a pre-revenue company into a company with millions in monthly revenue then they do deserve to be richly rewarded for their contribution.

3. Think past YC, past funding.
Make decisions that will optimize the value and growth of your company. YC is a 3 month program. You'll be done with it before you know it. Funding is an event. When it's done it's done. Imagine you're now done with YC and you've been funded. What type of co-founder do you need to grow your idea into a large company?
I'm taking offense to the subject matter being patentable at all.
Hackers do that to show next potential client how good their service is.
I'll be the first to point out the obvious: if I refuse to hire her based on this video, she clearly doesn't want to work with me either way.
Password Hashing is a pointless term whenever password leaks occur. Non-technical users will have no idea what it means, and technical people will ask, "It's not MD5, SHA-bleh, CRC32, right? Also it's salted (assuming the hashing function does not generate it's own salt) right?"
Yeap, adjusting my life to my VCS tool is perfectly reasonable ;)
> The company never pursued the concepts discussed in the patent beyond our Family Traits Inheritance Calculator, nor do we have any plans to do so.

Isn't this a direct violation of the principles of patents? A patent gives you protection to work on an invention, so that you have a monopoly to sell that invention and thus cover the costs of developing it. But here they have the patent, thus preventing anyone else selling the invention, but they are not selling the invention themselves.

I'm interested about law. (Not saying this is relevant to 23&me.) Can you patent a process for an illegal action? So, a business process that enables tax evasion (not avoidance)?
I can't even load their status page, times out like the live site.
Ever since I learned about Tau, I no longer get a nerd kick out of Pi - instead it's a reminder that not even pure mathematics is safe from human idiosyncrasy. Tau is so clearly and obviously correct and consistent (you use a constant defined by diameter in equations using radius yet insist that all those factors of 2 are natural? Preposterous!), yet for hundreds of years nobody even thought to question Pi! And even now, now that someone has finally seen the elephant in the room, there's no inertia to fix it. It looks plausible that the pedagogical disaster that is Pi may persist for another century or more.
Many would just do it as a challenge, Yes they are being a asshat, but they just don't realise that.
Beware, this PDF is more than 16MB.
Here's the other criminal complaint against him: https://ia601904.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.238...

It's shorter, and it has details on a second murder-for-hire plot.
Creating a copy of the working tree is not cheap at all.
For a large DDOS attack there aren't any easy ways to only drop the DDOS traffic - especially if it's hard to identify the DDOS traffic in the first place. If they're getting more 'bad' incoming traffic than their connections can handle I don't know how they'd drop that stuff - they have to receive the packets before they can filter them. Maybe their bandwidth provider has tricks for this...
Don't link to them then! Link to the status page: https://status.github.com/

Flagged.
Benchmarking your Java agent against real world cases
I thought I would read some ideas to plan your way out, but I get this. What to say? The fact that you hated/hate your job is a very bad signal for new potential employers and, in general, people around you. If you do change or want to change your job, do find a good story and stay away from pure complaining.
GitHub DDoS attack
If you're going to provide zero value-add to other people's content on YouTube, this is the way to do it.
Lavabit is operating under the US law and Ladar's fight is with the US government. The focus on American people and US constitution is a single viable path to constructively battle the unlawful demands.

If it is ruled that Lavabit can not be extorted for private data of its users, it's a win for any user out there.

On a side note, I feel saddened that this event does not attract more attention. More so, you happen to see people scrutinize Lavabit and pick on various details of this case.

But think about it. Lavabit is, to my knowledge, the only company that took an open stand for its users and went so far as to shut down its service to protect users private data.

Somehow, it's not exciting enough for many. Instead, the recent news of the "Google Ad Designer" got almost 1k points and spent more than a day on the front page. Same company who sold its users quietly, without a single word. Who could have also taken a stand and even shut down GMail, if they had enough guts and moral integrity. Imagine the social impact of this move. It could have very well turn the tide. Yet, the only action they took is one press release to deny any allegations and one motion to allow for full FISA orders statistics be published. A minor, but very laud public stunt.

It seems like the greatest fear of Snowden is coming to live. People forget and move on.

Those who fight for our rights become outcasts. Those who exploit them become our heroes.
This is the companies response - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ukGrwL4ky4
Yes, use a hash algorithm which the whole bitcoin community races to come up with ever faster ASICs. Brilliant. scrypt/bcrypt anyone?
I bet they DDoS GitHub with use of tools obtained from GitHub
oh thank fuck, I was getting annoyed that it was me, who was screwing up my homebrew install. For once it's not my fault!
If I would keep screen off, turn off any updates and receive no calls I'm pretty sure I will get a week with out any special roms or apps. But what's the point to have a smartphone then?
Is this real?

If it's is, it's pretty stupid - I'd never hire her for anything that entails responsibility after seeing this.
You're right, we need the best from among us to build the brave new world.