skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of the time I bought an old 1972 issue of Rolling Stone magazine on eBay to be able to cite the Spaceware article (also available online) [1] in my bachelor's thesis on Smalltalk as evindence that the culture at Xerox PARC was somewhat unorthodox in the seventies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719
There are many people for whom "lifestyle decision" isn't even a relevant concept here. These are people who instropsect and find themsleves indisputably one way, yet they look in the mirror and find that they are trapped in the wrong type of body.

Ethically, I don't think there is any choice except to be supportive of these people's "lifestyles", which I again put in quotes because the word makes it sound like a whimsical decision, when in fact to the person making the decision it is very much necessary.
+1

I transferred midway through my undergraduate degree, and was surprised to discover that Karnaugh maps weren't taught at my destination school - they are such an intuitive and straightforward mechanism for whittling down complex logic into its simplest form.
Since the distress is solely caused by the the culture being "less supportive of those lifestyles," I think that will do the opposite of help.

Also, we'd become less supportive of minority religions according to that rationale - and ignore racial discrimination as an impossible problem.
Probably the coolest part of that article was the realization that I could read some arbitrary magazine from 1982 on my browser within seconds. Archive.org really is an amazing organization, and I was also happy to find out that they're matching donations 3:1 due to anonymous generosity after their recent fire-y setback [1]. Do consider donating!

[1] http://archive.org/donate/
> It makes less open-minded people uncomfortable, to be around others who are not like them.

Perhaps more relevantly, it makes less open-minded people uncomfortable to be around others who don't fit their mental model of the world.
The Feds do outlaw it across state and national borders.

18 USC 2421+ (MANN ACT):
Whoever knowingly transports any individual in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or Possession of the United States, with intent that such individual engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

Sec. 2422. Coercion and enticement
(a) Whoever knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual to travel in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or Possession of the United States, to engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
(b) Whoever, using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual who has not attained the age of 18 years, to engage in prostitution or any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title and imprisoned not less than 10 years or for life.
I started using GPG seriously once the "easypg" integration landed in Emacs 23. When you open a .gpg file it prompts for your passphrase and decrypts transparently, and when saving a new .gpg file it prompts you with a list from which you can select recipients to encrypt to.

The integration with Emacs mail clients is fantastic too; just M-x mml-secure-sign or M-x mml-secure-encrypt when composing, and incoming messages with signatures are typically checked for you.

This totally changed the way I used GPG. (from "not at all" to "every day")
Fascinating stuff, can you point me to somewhere where I could get more info about all of it?
Oh it's simple really.

$conn = fsockopen ('whois.verisign-grs.com', 43, $errno, $errstr, 1);
fputs($conn, $domain."\r\n");
while(!feof($conn))
$output .= fgets($conn,128);
$registrar = reset(explode("\n",end(explode('Registrar:',$output))));
I don't know why people swipe debit cards. If that account get stolen, that's your hard cash that's going to be taken.

Imagine if someone steals your debit card number and you did not find out about it for a week. By then you could miss your next rent payment because you don't have available funds in your account.

At least with a credit card, you have a full statement period to clean things up.
This platform could be ridiculously valuable. Metrics are clearly pivotal to any startup, but it's often very hard to know how you stack up vs. the competition. Congrats Bjoern and team.
White House Stunned that NSA Spying Program Stopped Zero Terrorist Attacks
Don't really have a use for this but kudos!

When I jumped into my current project, I made a point of going with nginx 1.4+, for the websocket support, which really simplifies the stack. It just feels good to have less moving parts.
Now there is a true mathematician and technologist all rolled into one!
No! Don't stop there! Don't quit until you've refactored all of your conditionals to use NAND's! http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=442775
Oops. My mistake -- I admit, I only skimmed it, since I knew what I expected it to contain. Take a look at the Samsung Switch, which was leaked in Jan 2007: http://gizmodo.com/229579/google-switch-phone-by-google-and-...
Perhaps it's time for a new IETF default: No NSA employee should be chair of an encryption-related working group.

If the NSA wishes to change that rule in the future, it can publicly ask Congress to enact a law making it a federal felony for a government employee or contractor to try to subvert, compromise, or weaken public encryption standards. (That would still allow the NSA to subvert, compromise, or weaken proprietary Chinese or Russian military encryption standards, if it is capable of doing so.)

Until the NSA requests such a federal law -- and it's duly enacted -- it seems folly to encourage the participation of its employees in the IETF process, let alone granting them a position as chair of an encryption working group. Put another way, the NSA's signals intelligence mission has eclipsed its information assurance mission.

Even President Obama's NSA review group that came out with a report this week recommended that the agency "should not" weaken commercial encryption software. Why not a "must not?" p36: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2013-12-1...
>"It makes no difference that the conduct of pimps and johns is the immediate source of the harms suffered by prostitutes," McLachlin wrote.
>
>"The impugned laws deprive people engaged in a risky, but legal, activity of the means to protect themselves against those risks."

One of the things I've noticed reading newspaper articles and websites regarding legal rulings in Canada (the full depth of my research, admittedly), is that the reasoning seems to be governed by the judges' personal opinions of what would be fair ("we must protect the prostitutes from harm"), whereas American rulings seem to rely more upon the interpretation of texts such as their constitution. Is this an accurate characterization? If so is this a result of a differently structured legal system, or just a "cultural" difference?
True. Up there with the Udvar-Hazy Center outside of Washington, DC, and the USAF Museum in Ohio.
Let's assume we live in the ideal world where source code, raw data, analysis pipelines, and processed data are accessible with a paper. In practice, do you think that graduate students and professors will have time to review this information and reinterpret the data? When I read or peer review a paper from a lab that I know produces good quality research, I wouldn't dare waste my time reviewing such information. I know in principle, sharing everything sounds nice, but it would drastically slow down the progress of science.
FWIW I had nurse that I suspected was trans working for doctor that was gay, it didn't matter to me enough to even ask about it, I think things are getting better, chin-up.
Especially since it seems likely the advice is based on their prices and CAs health market.
There is no Russia. It’s only our dream
Using BitTorrent to Retrieve Objects Stored in Amazon S3
Right, as if Gmail would even exist without GNU.
Wait a minute, I want to toss my name into the hat too.

Thanks abeiz. Got me ready to run code; bro, can you commit some example documents for your customers so I can use it too, kk thx.

Seriously, kudos to you for making a public Github repo. Gl.
Hmmm, no. One of the elements of being a successful human being is being a convincing liar.

"Does my bum look big in this"?
"Hi, wow you look great...."

And so on.

Humans lie. If they didn't, they'd be in constant conflict.
"Insurance products sold by Vivek Shah, CA LICENSE #0I14828" the actor?
I'm in no way a cryptographer, so I don't understand the point of PAKE. The purpose is to build a secure channel between two entities, out of unsecure channels. But PAKE needs the reliable transmission of a secret information, so a secure channel has to be made before AND that secret needs to remain secret (duh)... What is the functional advantage over good ol' certificates (which still need the first, but are far less restrictive about the second) ?
Always go back to the K-maps.
That sounds expensive, not impossible in principle.

The past and current community standard is that is not absolutely necessary to share data, so people run projects for which it is prohibitively expensive to copy the data.

If we chose to weight sharing more highly, we could budget for sharing and/or scale project data to make it more sharable. We might decide that if the data are too expensive to share in practice, we don't fund the project. We choose. It's not impossible.
Except where writing negative conditionals are clearer. For example turning:

if(a) {
if(b) {
if (c) {
// Do something.
}
}
}

Into:

if(!a) {

} elseif(!b) {

} elseif(!c) {

} else {
// Do something.
}
Big Data Startups of 2013
This is a fun idea. If you do this match on the 25th it will actually be like receiving a timely gift. Looking forward to the post-exchange discussion.
Ya, we were very happy when nginx finally supported websockets, but we had the same stack deployed to multiple servers (which we did not own) so upgrading all our clients would have been crazy. But ya, I would definitely recommend using nginx 1.4 for a fresh install.
Treat them. Possibly put them on disability, since they have a health condition that put them out of work.

I'm not sure how else you would handle it.
This Is Your Brain on Gluten
I lived in Bend from '07 to '10. It's a great city and I miss it but I don't think it has any shot at being the next Boulder. The weather is better than Eugene but there's no university, its a fairly isolated city, and there's not much of a local startup/tech scene. I could never find a local developer to hire.

I'm in San Luis Obispo CA now and, while the 2 cities are pretty similar in size and other aspects, SLO has a much better tech/startup scene.
As far as I can tell the changes are purely cosmetic; the underlying switch hasn't changed at all. Still crap compared to any mechanical switch, but better than any other laptop.
Pinterest now Supports Google+ Signin on Mobile and Web • vlogg.com
There's quite a few of those. Here you are:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLABzhv4GLfjTaageSnR3U...
The argument is that you should be able to regenerate the data from scratch, assuming it is a simulation of some kind. This just requires source code and config files, which are still generally not shared.
> subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft

This is a great point. The mailing list and public nature of the standards process makes it very difficult to subvert, without very high risks of getting caught and breaking trust in the community. These agencies need to keep hiring good cryptographers and ideally keep bodies working on standards.

Shows the importance of OSS in security and having people like Trevor Perrin keeping watch.

But at the same time - if the NSA was going to subvert encryption standards - I doubt they would subvert the process with someone who is known to work at the NSA. Intelligence agencies would operate covertly. Most likely by converting someone trusted in the community into an agent, or grooming their own agent straight out of high school/university and getting them to a point of influence in the community (over a long period of time) and only then having them damage crypto standards. < this is standard tradecraft.
Or

if (a && b && c) {
// Do something.
}
Right. Your example illustrates the stupidity of deflation. You got so tripped up in the terms and concepts, you didn't even get it right.

In a deflationary economy, people always buy LESS of your stuff and you have no idea if that's happening because your goods are less popular or because the currency is deflating or possibly both. In an inflationary system, if less people are buying my stuff, I know there's a problem with my goods.
I help with open source @ Facebook and wrote this article. AMA.
"The worst blind is the one who doesn't want to see"

In all the snowden leaks, there are documents to prove what they are saying; go to the guardian, or try to see if theres any attachment somewhere..

It would be very difficult to find something "in the cloud"; cause it would probably be under takedown (people could get into prison or even killed without notice just by porting some of those pen-drives or sd cards.. see David Miranda case in the UK for example)

The nefarious mix of government and corporations into one homogeneous body its pretty well know at least outside of US, and its the reason why governments who dont want to have that sort of relationship, are labeled as outliers ..

to be clear all governements do concessions to companies here and there, but in the US the thing its pretty scary; with the power of the lobby groups have into the politicians decisions

This is one of the greatest threat of the XXI century in the same way facist ideology movements were in the XX century..

If even the governement moves toward profits of its companies, what the future will bring to the population that do not fit in that plan? .. citizenship could be reduced to people being mere tools for profit..

Dystopic? yeah.. but just let the Koch brothers and people like them, take the power to see if this would not happen..
especially since it was posted yesterday with the exact same title : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936040
Your Virtual Reality Shortlist
I think the BI author got a tiny bit too excited over writing that article.
Been there, done that. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm (Thursday, 6 July, 2000)
> Why do you think John Gilmore is incompetent?

That is not what he said.
I've learned Monoid in Haskell, not maths. It's just so simple and easy that there's really no dumbing down necessary.

Monad is simple and hard, but Monoid is simple and easy.
UMD is hosting a secure-programming contest in January [Build It / Break It]
The default-installed package management system on emacs is fantastic. You generally have to include more sources to get a lot more packages (marmalade), but it's way better than Vundle/Pathogen.

Also, IMO the real driving force behind why emacs is the best browser is the rejection of modality that was the norm (of the time).

I think a lot of people would find it ridiculous if they entered their favorite IDE and were forced into a modal scheme for text entry.
This is David, the author of oterm.

Thanks for all the positive comments. I'm glad people are like it.

Actually oterm was designed as an advanced example of a use of the onion http library (agreed, not the best name, accepting suggestions).

Maybe I should make it a separate project.
I think lots of trans women who can't afford or otherwise don't get SRS would pretty strongly object to being referred to as "shemales".
At Least Two Moderators Of 'Silk Road 2.0' Drug Site Forums Arrested
Money comes with side effects and it also comes in various grades. At the extremes you'll find smart money and dumb money. The latter is the most dangerous.

Not all money is created equal.
It's been interesting watching the reactions to these revelations from the more skeptical folks. Tptacek, have there been any stories (besides this one I suppose) that have really surprised you and struck you as unreasonable overreach?
Sorry man. Couldn't help meself.
Online Marketing 2014
As an Inbound Marketer and an avid fanatic of data tracking, I often am wondering what is going to be the next big thing in web marketing.
Any chance someone has an original copy of this? I'm wondering how much it would fetch at an auction.
I think there's a useful discussion to be had about what private property looks like. Should a corporation be allowed to hold a monopoly over millions of acres of land over a span of hundreds of years, for instance? I think most folks, anarchists and extreme leftists included, would consider a home and a family garden a perfectly legitimate piece of "private property". But, somewhere, as the stakes get higher, and the abstractions for the entity that "owns" the property (and who is responsible for what happens on that property, such as pollution, violence, etc.) becomes more diffuse, there is useful discussion to be had about whether that is legitimate private property or not.

I believe it is a stretch to say that an entity as diffuse as the United States (or any nation state) should be able to prevent billions of people from traveling freely from Mexico to Canada.

In short, I think "private property" is a good and useful fiction that we can probably all agree on, when we are speaking of individual humans who live and work on a piece of property. When you begin to make up fictional entities to "own" the property, I am less confident of the rightness of the theory.
Presumably when you publish the new owner list you won't make everyones email address public?
Glenn Greenwald's new media company is a bespoke firm
Except that it doesn't sound strange and abstract, because it's a word that everyone is familiar with. My point is about accessibility, not theoretical correctness.
Sorry, but I just don't see what was unclear about the original conditional. Anyone with a basic grasp of logic could parse it instantly.

As for the refactoring, that might be a good choice (I myself prefer positive boolean methods) but it's not a logic lesson.
I'm happy to submit my raw data. Where I get concerned is where do we define the raw data?

For my thesis, I measured the Paterson function for a series of colloids. I can imagine other scientists finding this useful and I'd be happy to submit it. However, it's not the raw data. What I actually measured is the polarization of a neutron beam, which I then mathematically converted into the Patterson function. So I should probably submit the neutron polarization I measured, so that other scientists can check my transformation. Except that I can't directly measure the polarization - all I really measure are neutron counts versus wavelength for two different spin states, so that must be my raw data. But those counts versus wavelengths are really a histogram of time coded neutron events. And those time coded neutron events are really just voltage spikes out of a signal amplifier and a high speed clock.

If a colleague sent me her voltage spikes, I'd I'd assume she was an idiot and never talk to her again. Yet, I've also see experiments fail because of problems on each of these abstraction layers. The discriminator windows were set improperly, so the voltage spikes didn't correspond to real neutron events. The detector's position had changed, so the time coded neutron events didn't correspond to the neutron wavelengths in the histogram. A magnetic field was pointed in the wrong direction, so the neutron histograms didn't give the real polarization. There was a flaw in the polarization analyzer, so the neutron polarization didn't give the true Patterson function. And all of this is assuming that my samples were prepared properly.

I've seen all of these problems occur and worked my way around them. However, I could only work my way around the problem because I had enough context to knew what was going wrong. The deeper you head down the raw data chain, the more context you lose and the easier it becomes to make the wrong assumptions. I know that I have one data set that provides pretty damn clear evidence that we violated the conservation of energy. Obviously we didn't, but looking at the data won't tell you that unless you have information on the capacitance of the electrical interconnects in our power supplies on that particular day.

Research should be verifiable and reproducible. However, an order of magnitude in verifiability isn't as useful as an incremental increase in reproducibility. I'd be happy to let every person on earth examine every layer of my data procedure to see if I've made any mistakes, but even I won't fully trust my results until someone repeats the experiment.
I'm curious, my purchase history with my CC was generally local stores, groceries, gas, restaurants. Large purchases were rare, and then I finally bought some computer hardware (~1k purchase for the whole kit, all at once). BoA called me and confirmed it wasn't fraudulent, things went on. Then I moved and hadn't spent much in the new area (I use cash most of the time), when I finally decided to upgrade from my 13" CRT. Go into Best Buy, pay with the CC, again BoA called me and once the call was through the transaction cleared and I had my new TV.

Does your CC company not call to confirm things? Were the purchases clearly out of line with your previous purchase history (by location, type or amount)?
Seems very very very broken. The regex "[a]" apparently matches "crenel"
A crowdfunded cafe in Chicago's most notoriously troubled neighborhood
The typical usage I've seen is one entity controlling both ends of the communication (e.g. an IP camera and a server). The secret being provisioned at the installation of the system.

I've never seen it used by humans, but there are contexts were the secure channel to establish the secret exists, e.g. most banks still have large brick and mortars infrastructures, so do tax authorities...

SRP used to authenticate sites and users would make phishing as we know it obsolete, but it would have to be implemented very carefully in the browser so there is no way whatsoever for a website to mimic its password entry UI...

But given the abysmal security record of the PKI model (were a few bad apple really ruin it for everyone else), the world could use a lot more SRP deployment...
So... What's the best way to find out if your card was caught up in the breach?
Please do not spread FUD. From what I see there are some extreme corner cases in Dart->Js behavior and they are well known. Dart team promises to support modern Browsers, period.
A Very Penguin Christmas
Top 5 Digital Health Buzzwords of 2013
For NoSQL data stores, there's a significant amount of debate over using HBase vs Cassandra. Many HBase advocates point to the fact that HBase is used at Fb over cassandra. Can you comment on HBase in FB's architecture and which features you prioritized the most, leading FB to use it?