skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Picked up an investment from Mark much along these lines. I had a product to show off, knew there was a chance he'd be interested, and rather spontaneously sent him an email. If he finds something about what you've said intriguing, he really does get back to you amazingly fast.

He doesn't beat around the bush, so if you email him, make sure you know what you're looking for. I made the mistake of not having a number in mind, and while it didn't ruin the process, it certainly could have. He also won't read everything in a long email, so don't waste his time or yours, definitely keep it short and to the point.

I've found he's a really great business partner. He makes himself available (by email) at all times, responds quickly, is always interested in finding new ways to promote your business (he networks his investments where he can), and he's a patient investor.
Here are some of their comments:

ibeatle

Большое спасибо, автор поста полностью прав. Со своей стороны хотим пояснить, что сделано это было из лучших побуждений: исправление плохого рандома на клиентах.
С настоящего момента в nonce всегда будет приходить ноль, и в следующем слое мы обязательно удалим это поле из схемы и поясним в документации.
Автор топика безусловно заслужил награды, просьба обратиться хабраюзера x7mz на email support@telegram.org для уточнения деталей.

Translation:

Thanks very much, the author is absolutely correct. Just wanted to explain that the intentions were good: to correct bad "random" on the client side.

From this point on nonce will always be set to 0, and next we will definitely remove it from our diagram and explanations in the docs.

The author definitely deserves a prize, please enquire at the following email for details.

W_K

Товарищ прав — похоже, сервер в принципе может с помощью манипуляции с nonce выполнить MiTM на DH между клиентами. Не знаю, кто именно внедрил этот nonce в такой форме, хотя и знаю, какое предъявлялось обоснование — он был нужен для того, чтобы защититься от слабого рандома на клиентах, которых в принципе может писать кто угодно. Очевидно, нужно сделать этот nonce нулём и написать, что клиенты впредь не должны принимать секретные чаты с ненулевым nonce.

Удивительно, что человек, называющий себя «чайником» в криптографии, нашёл действительно серьёзный недостаток протокола, в отличие от многих якобы «профессионалов», постоянно придирающихся не по существу.

Не знаю как насчёт 200k$ — расшифровать трафик это не поможет, а сервер не знает ключа от секретного чата, поскольку на нём нет такой закладки. Но мне очень не нравится, что в будущем такая закладка могла бы быть в принципе кем-нибудь добавлена.

Тем не менее, считаю, за это ценное наблюдение Вам положен ценный приз. Пусть и не такой большой.
Если Вы или кто-либо ещё найдёт какие-либо ещё потенциальные дыры в протоколе — сообщайте, будем награждать.

Translation:

He is correct, looks like the server can manipulate nonce and succeed at MiTM on DH between the clients. Not sure who's idea it was to introduce that nonce in this form, but I do understand the motivation, to protect against the "weak random" on the clients that can in theory be written by anyone. Obviously, we need to make nonce=0 and refuse secret chats with non-zero nonce.

It is quite amazing that the man who calls himself "a crypto noob" found a real vulnerability, as opposed to all those so-called professionals whose criticisms were largely unfounded.

Not sure about the $200k since this vulnerability won't really help to decipher the traffic and the server doesn't know the key from the secret chat, because it doesn't have any "bookmark". But I really don't like that in the future such a bookmark could be added.

However, I think this is a valuable observation and you do deserve a prize, even if not such a big one. If you, or anyone else, will find other potential vulnerabilities, please let us know, we will be rewarding.
How do you determine who owns the .com domain? When a domain is seized by the government does the com/piratebay domain respect the blockchain or the centralized DNS now updated signtaure? If it's the latter.. what's the point of using the blockchain version at all?

Expiry dates would be set to match those from today's DNS entries, so that addresses new owners.

As far as domain-seizures go, first it should be emphasized that this issue affects probably less than 1% of 1% of internet domains. However, to answer the question: if the domain was stolen from its owners prior to the expiry date, I personally see no reason to change the entry contents in the blockchain to match that of the stolen property. They can wait for it to expire and then register it like everyone else. :-p

Meanwhile, I doubt the piratebay would be using the .com (and we know that they can't today). They'd be using the .bit (or whatever else), because they'd be protected from such theft. ^_^
>Almost everyone carries a camera with them nowadays,

Yes but they don't point that camera directly at everyone they talk to, all the time.

>People don't like Glass because it looks clunky, nerdy, and distracting.

I think it looks kind of nice for what it is. It's still creepy though.

>What happens when we can put a chip in a contact lens? A phone in your brain? Your brain in a robot?

OK... those last two are just bad ideas all around. In any case though I personally am less concerned with the form factor or the technology as I am the premise that concerns about privacy are irrelevant because the surveillance gear is ever advancing in complexity.
Dogecoin confirms everything about Bitcoin, but the pious is the pious.

Some MLM-minded peeps know you have to be at the top, so they start their own half-assed thing and prod the overly self-loving crowd of rabidly anti-fiat currency Ron Paul lovers and a few naive shiny thing followers to pump and dump the hot new thing. Cryptocurrency.

Make millions in the comfort of your own home working only a couple hours a week. You could live this lifestyle and so much more. You could probably become an Herbalife distributor!! The first to accept only cryptocurrency.
They are not redundant. Any string of one or more exes is going to constrain a substring of exes of length 2^n (consider n=0 for a trivial proof), so you do need those anchors!
Common Lisp can do the same thing, and people typically prefer returning a product type because capturing multiple return values invariably introduces some extra syntax.

Forth functions (or words, if you insist) can return multiple values as easily as they can return a single value, but the stack metaphor makes this a lot more natural. This is also true of Joy and RPL and other languages which are conceptually organized around mutating a (notional) stack. Multiple return values only become unnatural when you choose an abstraction other than the stack.
From June 2012, more information at: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-June/...
This is one of the most insightful things I have read. If doge turns into the defacto "tipping" or "internets" coin, then it truly will be something useful ;)
Hey that's pretty cool, and would probably make OpenCL usable by mere mortals. One improvement that I see you could borrow from vector is getting rid of this explicit copying business. Take a look at the array implementation in our runtime library.

https://github.com/vectorlang/vector/blob/master/rtlib/vecto...

Basically, the VectorArray class contains both the host array pointer and the device array pointer. There are also two boolean flags, h_dirty and d_dirty. When you modify array elements on the host, h_dirty is set to one. Then, when you run a kernel, the data is copied to the device if h_dirty is set, h_dirty is cleared, and d_dirty is set. When you try to read an array element again on the CPU, the data is copied from device to host if d_dirty is set, and d_dirty is then cleared.
> That's a semantic difference.

It certainly is. The syntax of the Australian Constitution sits firmly within British conventions of monarchical behaviour, buttressed by the Acts of Westminster and the Australia Acts.

We are an independent nation in custom and law. If Her Majesty tried to do anything, she would be ignored. If she sued, the High Court would politely explain that her role is entirely ceremonial and that Parliament is the supreme source of executive and legal power in Australia.

The principle that Parliament is supreme over Crown was established in British law before Australia was colonised. It's pretty well-accepted at this point that the royals have no power.
That's absolutely true, but I think the reason this seems so devastating for Telegram is not necessarily because there was a vulnerability, but because they were so dismissive of the feedback they got and so willing to immediately make such strong claims.

The way I hope TextSecure can be different from Telegram is not by having an absolutely perfect security record forever (although that'd be great), but by publicly talking about the protocol choices we've made, employing constructions with proofs where possible, and actively soliciting feedback. Thanks for being involved!
The leadership of the Los Zetas Cartel, the largest and most powerful cartel in Mexico, comes almost exclusively from special forces and intelligence backgrounds.

According to a number of leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel that have been charged in US courts, the CIA has been providing material support and training to The Sinaloas since 2008 in an attempt to offset explosive growth of the Zetas.
Ask a question or offer a critique of my twisted logic and I'll respond to it.
There is no way to stop people from having multiple accounts.
Without morality, ANY social system, not just a market economy, will have problems, since many moral constructs directly lead to social stability. Some basic examples:

1) Thou shalt not steal, cheat, murder, etc...
2) Notions of karma -- i.e. everything you do unto others will come back to you.
RIP Telegram (2013-2013).

omg made me lol super hard
The problem with the new plans is the same as the problem with the old plans: there's no free market. People don't have any "choices" except what's forced onto them in a "market" where everything is all sewn up vertically. The insurance companies are writing the legislation. They were writing it before Obamacare, and they're writing it now. The only difference is, now they are writing more of it.
...or have a small power outage or internet outage lasting a few hours.
At vBSDCon Scott Long announced they'd been tracking -CURRENT for over a month, so assume they're already on 10-STABLE in a lot of places.

Some good details on the OCA
http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/Netflix-BSDCan-20130515.pd...
"Health API"

I'd be interested to see one of these companies break out. If they can improve the healthcare system, then it's a huge win at little/no cost to society.

However, there don't seem to be any real standouts yet, it seems like there's a bunch of companies doing the same thing with no clear, unique, value.
Show HN: Bitcoin notifications with rules scripted in JavaScript
i will preface this by saying i'm a C programmer at heart,

CUDA and OpenCL demand a depth of understanding of both C, and how your code is executed on many core processors. but i wouldn't call either of them terrible.

i would however, very much like to see a widespread higher level API for doing compute on GPUs, if only to encourage people to understand the lower level details.
> 1) Every process in Erlang manages its own memory and has its own GC. This means that GC'ing one process will not stop the world.

Most processes are so short lived, and with message passing, that the GC often might not have to do anything. You just free all memory allocated by processes.

> It is built with concurrency in mind

Like Go on crack. Processes are cheap and are used the same wether they exist on the same machine or a different one. And it has pattern matching.
# cat /etc/fstab

...defaults,noatime,discard,barrier=0,commit=600

Linux consumers...
Did your previous notebook had an SSD drive?
> When you start demanding that morality, for all its subjectivity and relativity, be involved with economics, you invite troubles. The next step is for morality to be mandated through regulations.

That logic is the problem -- particularly on the part of the people who actually want to implement it. Legislating morality is a disease that encourages people to believe they only need to act morally when the law forces them to.

The thing about markets is that they don't want anything in particular. It isn't "markets" that want poor people to remain poor, it's a collection of specific instances of non-poor people who choose to value something else over improving the lot of the poor. A market is just a collection of people doing whatever it is they think is best. It doesn't have a conscience outside of the individuals that make it up, but its results do reflect the collective choices of the participants.
C is no where near as low level as you can get. C-- is closer. LLVM-IR is even closer. but really, the lowest level you can get is the assembly of the architecture you're running on.

at the time of the creation, the general consensus was that C was too high level, that it abstracted away the actual workings of the code.

we've been introduced to high level languages that have made us re-evaluate what it means to be low or high level. but make no mistake, C is.. at least medium-level..!
I'm not sure why everyone is assuming it's just the US government that's after him. This actually sounds pretty sloppy. I'd be surprised if the NSA haven't already used one of their zero-day exploits to install key-loggers on his computers and phones.
I agree but I am not moralizing, which I believe are different things. If there is an immoral action or event recurrently happening it is because the structure of society is allowing it to happen. It will not be solved through shaming anyone.

It makes no more sense to shame poor people who are desperate for welfare than it does to shame wall street bankers. Both are products of the same system, and both groups can be given the space to change themselves through modifying the way things work rather than who is working in them.
Good point. The entire value of NMC blockchain is to remove reliance on the current DNS system which this would kind of nullify.

Another related topic is that a judges ruling is meaningless in regards to NMC, so for example, if someone were to steal google.com by stealing the private key, google.com would have no recourse besides paying a ransom. They cannot get a judge to force the address to be given back. Their domain name would be hijacked forever. In the case of bitcoin, it's great that you can't revert a transaction. In the case of domains on NMC blockchain, I'm not so sure.
I wonder if there may be a perception cliff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6947928
Considering the alternative in the Java ecosystem where none of the IDE tooling is reusable, it seems okay to me. The basic stdout-oriented nature of it means virtually any language/editor/stack can make use of it.

That it's a command-line application also means it's "start up and throw away" which is easier to get working for most users than daemon based stuff. Typically once it's configured you don't touch it again. This allows people to build on each other's work which can lead to higher levels of abstraction and more human-oriented tooling.

The alternative is everybody having to write Haskell parsers and analysis tools over and over again before getting to the parts that actually make their editor/IDE different. The Clojure community has a similar ethos of tool sharing and reuse.

End users do not generally invoke these command line tools themselves, their editors/IDEs integrate them and offer the native trimmings the users would expect.

Why are you being so hostile? You're not making me want to share anything I know. I'm talking about the kinds of ecosystems that let people like you (that work on live-editing environments) focus on the parts that matter to you and you're behaving like a prick.
Progress should continue despite the negative events around you!! With technology you have the potential to not just help your country, but also change the world. Keep working hard man and inspire the world. I wait for the day when I see Syria making headlines for the work of its entrepreneurs.
Yes. But it's only used in industry for building what would best be described as systems or lower-level applications: Operating systems, desktop applications, compilers, game engines, some web backend services, etc.
Hey there - I'm a software engineer and web developer based in California. I write web apps and infrastructure for a living, and I teach basic web programming concepts at a local hacker space.

It's really inspiring to see this happening. I'd be more than happy to donate my time over the weekend of Feb 22nd-23rd, as a remote engineer, for any/all of the teams taking part in this event. Drop me an email at dan@situnayake.com if you think I could be useful!
how may we connect? I have an idea for ya!
you beatbox?
Yes! I even gave the developer a small donation; introducing git extensions stemmed a mutiny on my team: they wanted to switch from git to TFS
I like that they're addressing this issue and think this is a good way to do it. My only concern is a semantic one: currently "d/" is the prefix for domains, "a/" for alias information (basically a global address book), etc... It doesn't make sense to create another prefix for domains (actually, many more prefixes for domains, since I imagine this won't just apply to com). I think instead they should consider something like "d/com/*" or something long those lines. It keeps DNS information all under the same prefix, and still conveys that the information is for the "legacy" com tld.
Offering the contest was shady and stupid enough. Not paying just proves they're chiselers that never intended to pay in the first place. This wins the runner-up award for second most botched PR disaster ever. The consolation prize is a lump of coal.
Almost as wonderful as the level of appreciation for detail from the team that made the film is the level of work and detail that went into these two posts. I love the amount of evidence and the discussion of core concepts for cinematography -- this is the kind of stuff that I would wish to see if I were being taught in school.
I don't see a good explanation of how Namecoin works and how exactly it fixes DNS issues. (The biggest one is squatters. I would rank centralization as #2.) Is there a quality document free from marketing hype that describes that?
Spoiler: the answer is no. To see the actual rationale, check out the blog post this guy is loudly reacting to:

https://plus.google.com/+WilliamChanPanda/posts/FKot8mghkok
How do we reconcile the fact that base-load generation (e.g. coal, nuclear) is hard to throttle, yet PV is increasingly sapping the profits from peak generation hours (i.e. mid-day) resulting in economic disruptions and perhaps ultimately in off-peak electricity disruptions as base-load generators become increasingly expensive to operate?

I personally think that that's the reason the brakes are being put on PV, and not the populist "robber baron" explanation offered by the article.
> I do not think that the experience suggests that more capitalism is the way to go

The point is if you're looking at The Real World, there's no evidence -- pro or con -- for or against a free market system. We've never experienced one. Regulated markets aren't in any sense comparable to an actual free market.

Even the smallest regulation in a free market system makes it an entirely different beast. For example if you decide to impose a tariff on a single industry in an economy, that alone will result in massive inefficiency -- and as a result, wealth disparity -- such that the system can't meaningfully be called a 'free market'. At all. It's just a regulated market economy, like we currently have.

Hence you can't take mixed economies with varying degrees of 'free-marketness' and infer from those how actual free markets will work.

There's the question of whether implementing free markets is even possible. It would certainly take a lot of barricading of human behavior from the market -- is that achievable? I don't know.

But the point is we've never tried it, so why not try it before we shoot it down?

>contrary to experience

The only experience we have is of regulated markets. There's no "contrary to experience" to ascribe to free markets, because we've never experienced free markets.

We've theorized free markets. Again, models we've built say free markets would likely be extremely efficient and beneficial for all of us.

But we've never seen, empirically, free market anything. As stated above, a mixed economy -- even one that's, like, 99% 'free' or whatever -- isn't at all comparable to a true free market. The smallest of tamperings with a true free market turns it into a completely different beast, when we're looking at things whole-economy scale.

>So the OP's argument seems to be, if we just deregulate even more, then - contrary to experience - we get a better system

In sum, OP's argument isn't that we should 'deregulate even more'. It's that we've never seen a free market, but should try one. Trying a true free market isn't a matter of 'deregulating more', it's a matter of deregulating entirely. Blank slate, start again.
When oil isn't priced in USD what do you think it will be priced in? And what do you think CIA will be able to do about it?
I don't know exactly how Namecoin works, but I assume it's pretty similar to Bitcoin in that all clients must agree on which transactions are valid or invalid, otherwise they risk forking the blockchain and disagreeing on which transactions are included.

The problem I see with this proposal is each client needs to check the DNS record independently to ensure a transaction is valid. What happens if the DNS server happens to be unreachable or the owner accidentally or maliciously removes the signature in a DNS record after their transaction has been included in a block?

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding things and Namecoin works differently?
When you go out in public you quite often have cameras pointed at you. You just don't care because out-of-sight, out-of-mind. If those same public cameras were extracted from ceilings and placed on extremely conspicuous tripods sitting on the ground, I bet people would feel less comfortable, despite little having changed.

Reminds me of the guy who got kicked out of the Seattle restaurant a few weeks ago for refusing to remove Glass. The restaurant said it didn't want to open its customers up to the possibility of being recorded without their consent. Of course, on the restaurant's very own Facebook page were numerous shots of customers dining, many of which were obtained without any knowledge or consent. The hypocrisy was lost on them, unfortunately.

People underemphasize form and overemphasize function.

When it comes down to it, most of us are being photographed all the time. Exponentially more-so today than anyone was 100 years ago. And with the rise of smartphones, substantially more-so today than anyone was even 10 years ago. Smart glasses are merely another rung on the ladder. Every argument you make could have been made for smartphones as well.
I believe you that many people wouldn't want this; but I'm curious about something like that. It'd be fun to try.

I don't need to keep it a secret that I'm eating a burger, for example. It's pretty fun and liberating to have as few secrets as possible. Less things to worry about keeping secret, less work (and I'm lazy).