skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One question: What's keeping you from developing a desktop client, so i can login without needing my phone around? From what i can see on your website, Clef simply uses a key stored on the phone to generate a password† that is then sent to the website to be logged in behind the scene. There shouldn't be anything stopping a user from using a program for this on any os, as long as it has the ability to obtain the nonce‡ from the website and the user-unique key.

† password used here in the loose sense of being a user identificator including both the identity of the user and a secret unique to the user

‡ which is even more simple than a QR, as it's simply a barcode, albeit an animated one (the animation doesn't factor into the value at all, right?)
Let's not dance around on this.

That warrant was different because it was for Edward Snowden.

Lavabit clearly feels he is a legitimate whistleblower. There is a reasonable argument that protecting a whistleblower from surveillance is morally valid (especially when his opposition to surveillance is the core of ).

Whether or not one thinks Lavabit should have done this probably depends on one's views on what Snowden did.
We have a prototype bitcoin donation form at rally.org, but we're still waiting on legal to approve it, hopefully we'll be able to add support soon.
Given the glacial speed of reform in the U.S. (something like these new exchanges have been in the works since Nixon proposed a similar system), I would put that fairly far down the list of risks a small startup should worry about. A much bigger risk imo is just whether the value-add of their tools over the official state websites will be enough to gain traction.
If you accepted money to kill yourself, the onus would be on the prosecutor to prove a crime was committed. A reasonable defense would be that you feared that if you didn't pretend to carry out the murder, the buyer (who knew your identity) would find an actual hitman.
Taken to the logical extreme, it would seem that no electronics should be allowed on the plane.

There is a reasonable line here. In a year 90% of us will think the current one was idiotic. Seriously - I can't read a kindle on takeoff/landing?

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for eliminating risk - but it would have taken very little effort to add WiFi/Eletronic transmitter detectors to planes - the fact that they didn't, means that it was never a real risk.
General idea yes, but takes on new implications & scope when operating at NSA levels of universal surveillance exceeding police work by orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude.
You sound awfully authoritarian. Just because its lawful doesn't mean it's morally right and that it should be blindly followed no questions asked.

In Nazi Germany it was lawful and mandatory to report on Jews, communists and minorities and the inability to do so or aiding them in any way would often end in the death of the person involved.

You can't throw out common sense and basic decency just because something is "the law".
Good news for humanity, bad news for the print industry. For the last few years, the only time my wife and I bought magazines was at the airport before a flight so we had something to read for the departure and arrival when we had to "shut off all the devices with an on/off switch"
Batman Is A Growth Hacker
Why wasn't the request similar to requests that Lavabit had received previously? They appear to have no problem turning over the data stored for a specific user: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Maryland_District_Court/1-...
"Moral Mazes" seems to have become a cultural signifier, meant to evoke a whole series of positions and beliefs about the trustworthiness of large organizations. When someone drops "moral mazes" in a conversation, I read that as a shorthand; a more intellectually credible way of saying "the whole system is out of order!"

Generally: I think that when the core promise of your business is that you'll do everything you can to resist incursions on user privacy, then yes, it should be pretty common for those promises to be scrutinized.
”Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.“ - Lyndon B. Johnson

But even professions that have confidentiality baked into their core (clergy, shrinks, doctors)* can be compelled to provide info to law enforcement. In some cases, they are legally required to report illegal conduct.

*EDIT: not attorneys (for the most part)
>That's terrible, I can't believe you would suggest that.

Yeah, FSM forbid we actually think arguments through to their logical conclusions. How dare I!

I am pointing out the absurdity and irrelevance of your argument with respect to the discussion at hand. You offered the laser-sharp insight that hey, people can ignore the rule of law, so don't say they can't! It's a semantic distinction and I am taking it to the extreme where while it is still valid, it is ridiculous. Anyone can put out a hit on Federal agents, there are no physical laws to prevent one from doing so. However anyone who values continued survival within civilized society functionally cannot.

I'm not sure if you're being dense as a rhetorical device or what, but I can't believe I'm having to spell this out. On HN of all places. I'd expect this level of discourse from /r/eli5 or similar, not here.
Amiga Hardware Programming Video Tutorial Series (by Photon/Scoopex)
Why not hand in the characters in 4pt on a single page each? Make it double sided to make it a little more feasible. 233 characters per page is just about nothing at that size, I don't get why they decided to stop at 11 pages.
I'm not sure of the others, but it should work fine in OpenVPN. The configuration for it documented, if a little bit of work to get going. I've been using it for many years, having switched from Hamachi back in 2007 or so.
Germany…

…isn't quite single-payer, more like a "public option".

…has far more labor-business-government cooperation than the US.

…has the oldest tradition of social insurance, but still their current system was the result of gradual expansions over many years.

…runs lots of government services better than the US.

…is only half the area of Texas, but that area is as population-dense as Maryland (our 5th densest state).

Why can't any 300 million people in Africa just adopt US-levels of public services by willpower and legal fiat? Why can't the US make our 50-million-member Medicare as efficient as the German system? These structural, historical, cultural, and political path-dependencies matter.

"Make it work because I don't understand how it couldn't" isn't a good basis for the largest nationalization experiment ever.
Infographic: Percent of Workers Furloughed by Federal Agency
Warrants in cases under investigation are often sealed because if they weren't the targets would be immediately alerted by services like Lexis/Nexis that their names have popped up in a court record.

(I will remember for the future that "throwaway" users have invalid opinions but "numberwang" is a source of erudition and, apparently, productivity.)
The hardest bit by far is getting traction.
Because they are like clothes: People like different styles. Even if it may be clothes that are not visible to you.

And I think you're unnecessarily pessimistic - even if you end up having more than one running now and again, there's little reason why end users would need to notice. E.g. Wayland at least can target X - I don't know if Mir can, but there's no good reason why it couldn't be made to run on top of X. Both Wayland and Mir will have ways of running X apps. At least the Mir guys have indicated that making a layer to make code that targets Wayland run directly against Mir would be possible (after all one of the stated technical reasons for Mir is to have a core that is independent of a specific client protocol/APIs as well as indpendent of specific targets). There are X servers that will run on X for that matter.

In other words: Until the dust settles, you might occasionally find that apps written for one or the other will fire up some version of one of the the others that targets whichever system owns your display, but chances are you won't even know it is happening unless you specifically look for it.
Australia, UK, New Zealand, Canada, and the US are all part of the 5-eyes, which have a broad agreement on sharing intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

While they may not share information with say - China - they will share it with one of the other eyes, who could also lend a helping hand in domestic spying.
My favourite ftp.microsoft.com file of all time: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/SPEAK.EXE

A windows driver to turn the speaker that beeps when your PC turns on into a very limited sound output device.

Helpful if you didn't have one of those Soundblaster thingies ;)
It appears that the FBI's original request was narrowly targeted to Snowden and completely above board, warrant and all. It didn't give them the keys to the Kingdom.

When lavabit refused to comply,the FBI got more aggressive. Which seems like exactly what would happen. Think about it. What if the FBI subpoenaed financial records from a Bank who refuses to open the safe they were in. Well, the US Marshals are going to show up at the bank with a court order,break open the vault, and get access to all the records and take the one they want. It's not an unreasonable search provided there are checks that they only get the one record they are looking. In fact, arguably the Bank breached it's duty to it's customers by forcing the US Marshals to go through all their records rather than the Bank doing it self.

Obviously, it's not so clear in this case since Lavabit apparently finally did offer to hand over some data, but it is along those lines.
Well now they cannot say that they have never had one catch fire. Which is probably great news for T-haters but only modestly interesting for the rest of us :-)

Would love to see a dump of the onboard diagnostics for that event.
5870 has a theoretical peak of 2.7 tflops, a GTX680 has a theoretical peak of 3.1 tflops. even a 7970 has a peak of 3.8 tflops.

you can argue (successfully) that it's much easier to achieve a high proportion of peak on GCN cards, but CL code tuned for a 5870s isn't going to be exactly sluggish.
Care to name 5?
This would also explain why he mentioned the previous hit, which I imagine would not be the type of information one offers unsolicited.
When you put it that way, maybe they could unfreeze enough assets to let the defendant get up to 1:1.
Nothing is stopping us from a technical standpoint. Multiple devices is something we plan on adding, but we're being really careful about it because it increases complexity and introduces more vectors of attack. We also think that a phone is tied to a user's identity more than a computer or a tablet, so that's what we're really focusing on. Give the flow a shot and let me know what you think.
A breakthrough API can also come through finding a simpler representation/model for some subset of the problem space.
The NSA is older than most voters. When talking about the Stasi there is no meaningful difference between the Republicans and Democrats, Labour and Conservatives, etc. They're all politicians and they're all the same.
So you're saying that complying with a pen register order in a federal case is the same as reporting jews to the ss? I ask because there's another guy in this thread who equated pen registers with anti-interracial marriage laws. You guys should get together.
Fun with D3 and Web Visualizations
i love the site's design
Or perhaps Ubuntu users have higher expectations of being able to "just buy random hardware" or include more non-technical users.

I can't really tell, as I'm not in either group, nor have ever experienced any of the dreaded Pulse Audio problems. I'm not saying I like it - but only because it "just works" for me, enough that I have not bothered to learn enough about it to have any reasons to like or dislike it. Which I suppose means I really ought to like it given how troublesome audio on Linux has been at various times over the years.
Yes. It's interesting that the feds didn't just apply their surely sufficient technical skill to decode it and type it in. Even manually with a magnifying glass one could do it in a day or two of work. Hardly significant in the context of the wider investigation they were engaged in. It makes it seem to me like they'd basically decided at that point to make it a point of principle - they demand not just compliance but proper complete submission to their authority.
After publishing the first picture, you might have to throw away the camera... You never know how much unique is the fingerprint of the camera. Might be very useful to crawl profiles to map photos and screen names.
Not working on my HP Chromebook, sadly.
Not sure having worked on the Facebook and Twitter apps is a selling point - at least not the Android versions!
I'd argue the ACA will enhance the market for SimplyInsured. Yes, for an individual who wants a basic policy, Covered CA will probably be sufficient and they won't need more help than that. But there are dozens if not hundreds of edge cases.

Some examples off the top of my head:

- A healthy 24 year old software engineer is making $75,000. This means he doesn't qualify for any of the tax subsidies by buying insurance on the exchange. He wants to avoid the $2,500 penalty for being uninsured, but every plan on the Covered CA will cost more than that over 12 months. Perhaps his best option is to buy an individual policy for catastrophic coverage only.

- A small business isn't sure whether it's optimal to insure their employees, or just give them a cash "bonus" and tell them to buy their own policy on Covered CA (similar to what Trader Joe's announced they're going to do with their part-time employees).

- Purchasing insurance on Covered CA is limited only to certain enrollment periods (this is perhaps the biggest misunderstanding, as I've seen various media personalities ask "why wouldn't healthy people just wait until their sick, and then get insurance?" countless times). However, there are exceptions for a life-changing event. Thus, a person who is laid off (thus counting as one of those life-changing events) would like information on whether their best option is to pay for COBRA or buy a policy on Covered CA.

Basically the ACA is complex, but it does turn health insurance into a much more structured and transparent market, which lends itself well to applications like SimplyInsured. Otherwise, what could any sort of system do for my third scenario, for example? All anyone could advise to have them stay on COBRA because they'd probably get screwed by letting it lapse and then trying to get an individual policy.
I agree, it's easy to bust a sloppy pile of garbage that won't hold up load. It's hard to build a robust well engineered solution for millions. Good post, no matter when it was written.
> Which is why almost every country outside of the US has a lower standard of care than we do.

You just like to make up shit I see. Every country that provides public healthcare has a higher standard of care than we do because for 10's of millions of American's there is no care at all beyond emergency care. People die daily for lack of health care in this country, to call that a higher standard than countries with public healthcare is beyond absurd. Our system has a fantastic standard of care for those with money, it has shit for care for the rest.
> The US is 5-10x larger in population than the other single-payer-ish systems usually cited.

Which doesn't explain the vastly higher per capita (and even per GDP) costs.

> Also, we in the US tend to have bigger problems running giant federal bureaucracies

That doesn't explain why the US costs (again, per capita or per GDP) are still higher than the total costs in many countries providing universal coverage even if you exclude the slightly-less-than-half of US spending that is public spending.

> Our existing single-payer-ish health bureacracies, like Medicare

Medicare isn't single-payer-ish, as for decades there has been policy to move from traditional single-payer-ish "Original Medicare" to (usually partially, with a personal premium as well) publicly subsidized private insurance "Medicare Advantage" plans.

> These smaller systems also benefit as free-riders from positive externalities thrown off by the United States' eccentric overexpenditures - like drug and new-treatment beta-testing.

Er, a lot of drugs and new treatments are tested and accepted overseas before they are in the US.
> Following the whole Kim Dotcom debacle I'd like to see how this seriously loaded ($90MM) guy progresses through the justice system.

He has been living in the Mission for $1000/month with roommates. I doubt he's liquid.

Cashing out that many bitcoins is hard, doing it anonymously is harder and then laundering it so that you can deposit it a bank account harder still. I can't even imagine what kind of scheme is necessary to do that. You can't just claim your local business somehow made $40 million in cash this year.
What conclusion did you expect I'd draw, had I compared those two? I have zero experience with Oracle, and copious amounts with both PostgreSQL and MS SQL, so I was focusing on things I actually knew about.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu
Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial
I think that there's definitely room for improvement in this space as well as a lot of money to be made because the public exchanges so far are kind of terrible in their usability and access. They will probably improve, but with the lock-in they currently have, there is only incentive to improve enough that the complaints slow down. They get no additional profit for actually making things any better than "possible".

Some previous colleagues of mine just raised 2.6M a couple of weeks ago [1] for a very similar sounding idea [2]. This is a hot space right now with all of the attention on health care because of the ACA and all of the failings of the public exchanges in the press.

[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/blog/in_private/2013/0...
[2] http://www.gravie.com/
I see no suggestion of equivalency in either post, unless you think such examples represent the lower-bound of how out of line the law must be before you can reject it. Surely you don't think that...

These examples establish that there is a limit to blindly pinning morality and the law. These examples to not make statements about where that limit is, nor do these examples serve to equate any of the governments' actions.
Ask HN: How do you defend yourself preemptively against patent trolls?
I'm about to submit an app on Google Play/the iOS app store, and it occurred to me that if $PATENT_TROLL goes after me, there's no way I could afford legal defense. Of course I think I'm not infringing, but the possible downside is so large that a 1% chance seems too big.
If it was a 'clean' hit, why would there be record of a homicide? From what I've read, it sounds like a clean hit could/would be made to look like an accident.
Google buys Flutter to beef up its gesture recognition skills
We don't know how many characters per line there were. A page contains about 130 lines at 4 point font.
I know there is probably an actual definition of the 80/20 rule somewhere, but here's my interpretation, which I think gels with the article. 80% of the work is done quickly , which is the absolute core stuff, with 0 polish and full of edge-case data and interface bugs. Then the last 20% of the work takes roughly equal to the first 80%. The percentages have nothing to do with actual work completed or time spent, rather how complete it looks to the client/your boss/someone with no details of the technical implementation.

And that's only to get to 1.0. Some of these features would be unnecessary for launch but should be added post-launch, e.g., the editor imo.

EDIT: Looking it up there is an 80-20 rule that I think is in a similar vein but if applied properly to this situation would say that 80% of the work exists in 20% of the features.

Which may even be true sometimes.
Ask HN: Domain Searching
What do you use for searching and keeping track of domain ideas? I use whois.cc and domai.nr for domain name checking, but I am not aware of any tool for keeping track of domain searches by project.
Google did not help, so I am reaching to the community for possible solutions.
Here is my concept of ideal solution:
http://cl.ly/image/0z0H3s3i2c15/Image%202013-10-02%20at%204.44.27%20PM.png
Clickable: http://cl.ly/image/0z0H3s3i2c15/Image%202013-10-02%20at%204....
Some years ago I wrote a comment on Slashdot[1] where I researched what GNU software isn't copyleft. Copying it here because it took me almost 20 minutes to find it again, and I want the info to gain some Google juice so I can find it next time I need it (maybe in 6 years?):

[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225606&cid=18272276

>>> NOTE: This was true as of 2007

These are all the GNU packages not under a copyleft license I have been able to verify. I have tried to err on the side of caution, which means all the packages listed here are GNU and not copyleft, but there might be some non-copyleft GNU packages that I have failed to list:

Kawa [fsf.org]: licensed under the Kawa License [gnu.org], which is an X-11/MIT style license. Kawa is a Scheme/Emacs Lisp environment that runs on Java, in case you were wondering.
GNU less [fsf.org]: the page says it is licensed under a SimplePermissiveNowarranty, but if you download the latest less tarball from ftp.gnu.org [gnu.org], you will find it is GPLd. However, older versions of less were non-copyleft [gnu.org], and they still are, as you can still download them.
Ncurses [gnu.org], which is distributed under an X11-style license.
Proto [fsf.org], which is is a tool for finding C and C++ function prototypes (someone please explain to me what that means), in the Public Domain. This one is not downloadable from the GNU ftp, but I guess that, if they list it as a GNU project, it must be.
Quexo [fsf.org], xquery implementation using Kawa to compile to java bytecode. Under the Kawa license, which means an X11-style license.
Speex [fsf.org], an audio compression codec for voice, under the Xiph.org license (a modified BSD)

At least one other non-GNU programs is listed as being GNU on the directory, like Slib [fsf.org], a portable scheme library, which under a simple permissive non-warranty license.
If you want some more context, I think that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501 was the inspiration for the blog post, in part because I have a rant attached to that comment.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1237/
Grandparent specifically said installing Ubuntu onto production servers makes him cringe.
I have rerun the benchmarks now after optimizing the C++ version the best "I" could:

https://kidoman.com/programming/go-getter-part-2.html
Im reasonably sure they are saying he is heroic for standing up to warrantless surveillance, not refusing to hand over data pursuant to a legitimate and specific warrant that he objected to. He's certainly made it sound like that. So first, I'd say he is being very dishonest (if the article is accurate)

Second, a critical point in arguing against warrantless surveillance is that there are legitimate legal channels through which to get the necessary information when it's really needed and that those same channels make the NSA's conduct completely and totally illegal. Failing to abide by those mechanisms makes it hard to make that argument.

It's like having the EFF sticker that says "come back with a warrant" and then a "Fuck the police" sticker next to it.
>>Meh. I can't get too upset about overconservative flight safety regulations.

No. No no no no.

Logic like this is often used by the government to justify the existence of things like the TSA. "We need to be overconservative to prevent terrorist attacks." Except it doesn't work when the measures are of questionable benefit whereas the costs are astronomical.