skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wasn't there a story posted right here on HN like a week ago where some people notified snapchat of the vuln. and provided evidence, but Snapchat told them to basically f* off?

I'm not savvy enough to have the link at hand but I vividly remember that happening.
there is NO such thing as a "lost year for tech"

https://medium.com/p/fe1e46b8c02f
Entrepreneurs, not the government, will save Europe’s economy
Mickey is still trademarked, so unless I'm missing something you will not have the rights to do what you want with the 'Mickey' character, however you would have the right copy, translate, recreate in other mediums, the actual work which had fallen out of copyright, like for example 'Steamboat Willie' which Disney has repeatedly prevented from falling into public domain through lobbying for copyright extension.

Of course Disney's intense lobbying in extending the copyright of their works looks even worse when you consider that they've made a vast amount of their fortune by adapting classic public domain works like Snowwhite, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Beauty and the Beast, Alice in Wonderland, Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Jungle Book, the latter was released one year after Kipling's copyright had expired.
I have list of all US phone numbers:

000-000-0000
000-000-0001
...
I have ADD/ADHD so it's very difficult. Some things might seem extreme to some people.

GTD - Getting Things Done is an invaluable book/workflow/system. The GTD workflow map helps if you're familiar with the system: http://ideas2followup.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/gtd-workfl...

Objective--
One thing often overlooked, undervalued, and even stressful is knowing that your focus is correctly directed. (GTD helps) This is a lot harder than it sounds, and usually determined by the most unqualified and biased person for the job; yourself. Mitch Hedberg explains it best: "I play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision... because I didn't know how to play it, so I was a shitty teacher. I would never have went to me." Steve Jobs has an amazing technique to stay on top of this: “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

Environment--
Having literally nothing going on around me. No sounds, music, movies, TV, radio, people, moving objects, windows to stare out of, etc. Even voices in the next room that are basically inaudible distract me.
Silence any possible notifications/apps/programs that distract you, and be anal about it. Recreational email/social usage is a time suck, for business purposes 4 hour work week goes into a system for appearing responsive while not being distracted.

Health--
Diet and exercise matter.
Meditation is important.
Breaks are important. Most of the hardest problems I encounter are solved away from the computer.
Going outside is very important. Ironically under health, one reason I loved smoking was the excuse to go outside. Without that excuse I have to force myself to remember to go outside, and always find some excuse not to. Find your excuse and/or force yourself.
Wake up early.

Other stuff--
Multitasking is a killer. If you have to multi-task make sure you move on only once the current task is completely finished/solved, and that you only create tasks that are broken down correctly into solvable chunks that don't require other outside input/action. Tasks that involve using the web should be done with one tab open only, and I try to avoid the habit of creating more tabs like the plague. Once I open more than one tab without fail I suddenly have 10+ tabs open (related to a task), and don't want to shut them for completely illogical reasons. I tell myself "I'll get around to this tab once I'm done over here" which almost never happens.

Self-sabotage is a killer, and can undermine any potential efforts you make. Find out why you're sabotaging yourself. This is a road that most people avoid travelling because it requires finding/embracing your mental/emotional problems, and is therefore best done by an independent third party. ("What mental/emotional problems?" I can hear you asking yourself.) Everyone has them, and it's usually something they'll completely overlook such as fear.

Have barely touched on everything I wanted to, but may extend it to a blog post someday.
Excellent Randall - congrats!
Just a quick Google search: http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/snapchat-ignores-possible-hack...
Rogers (Canada's Comcast) does the same thing, but for warning you about your bandwidth usage.
Works for me, but if I held a gun to your head and told you to come up with the 10 rules, and if you got more than two wrong you're dead, I wouldn't be too worried if I were you.
I would imagine some of the people wanting to download the data are snapchat users who are trying to find out if they (or people they know) have data is in the file. No clue on the distribute part.
Is this a hoax? Has anyone attempted to verify the data with at least some spot checks?
Well, word to the wise, don't use BTC-e as a wallet.
Yes 6 days ago. The exploit was brought to snapchats attention since August and ignored and denied, so says the articles related to this.
"Honey I SWEAR that isn't me."
I recall reading that a lot of women wear sunglasses so that you can't make eye contact with them, as a lot of men use eye contact aggressively.
The vast majority of people using stack overflow are simply consuming questions/ answers they have arrived at via a Google search. These people won't care about points but it doesn't tell us anything about the motivations of those that are regularly answering questions.
Actually, where are all of these numbers coming from in the first place? I know I've heard a lot about the "credit card tax", but I can't seem to pull the numbers off the public data on these companies.

Visa has $10.4 billion in revenue off of processing $4.4 trillion in transactions; that seems to make the credit card tax a mere 0.2%, which is off by an order of magnitude from the conventional-wisdom "credit card tax". Where does this mis-match come from? Is the revenue hidden, and Visa is taking in a few hundred billion in revenue? Or is the revenue potential just much smaller than conventional wisdom says? (eg, the 2-3% and $X trillion come from different classes of transactions, and shouldn't be combined.)
"Also, there is no "revolution" here"

I tend to agree. Actually, I don't see much improvement over a book. I rather have a well-written book in my hand rather than having to go through so many videos.

For me, the main advantage is easy and free access. Also, they make it easier to pace oneself, which is one of the hard part with self-teaching.

"When 90% of your "students" fail to complete the courses, you have an epic failure on your hands. "

What is the percentage of dedicated students, that have the right background to understand the material, complete the course?

"MOOCs are not working."

If working is defined in term of completion rate, they are not. But it's not the right metric.
Interestingly, "The Anatomy of a Search Engine" was not on this list.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
With an extra digit in the middle for security? :)
Previous Discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6962329 (6 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6970036 (4 days ago)
The only way to win is not to play.

How about a nice game of chess?
So much fun, but why on new years?? I'd love to watch.
Ha, I remember seeing him talk at a conference in 1991 and it was hand-written transparencies on an overhead projector. Comic Sans is a relief. :-)

Also, to add what others have said, he is one of the best speakers I've ever been lucky enough to see in person: SPJ, Philip Wadler, Guy Steele... good company.
Yes, this is strange on all fronts. As far as I know names and land numbers are still published in phone books, and a phone number isn't generally a very interesting bit of information to have. And to the extent this information is sensitive, why be so eager to spread it (beyond being a teenager and getting a thrill)?
Hey Randall! I've heard of Vidpresso! Congrats on the hustle. Team Wediges is super excited for you.
Not just tax, but TRACK anything that you want to keep protected.

Many books, movies, photos, and other IP instances out there are difficult to track down solid ownership info for. Sometimes the contracts surrounding the IP are so complex as to make it impossible for even a trained IP lawyer to determine who owns what. In some cases even IP claimed by a particular company may not be valid [1].

If there were a national registry that listed who owned what rights to a particular property, and you had to pay to be included (maybe the initial copyright registration pays for the first X years, but after that you have to continue to pay to continue your protection), it could not only clarify who "owns" what, it could list those people who had specific sub-licenses to the property in question, and what the details of their licenses are.

To help combat orphan works, you can throw in one other important requirement: Even if we give them X years (30 or otherwise) for the initial registration requirement, they would also need to keep their contact information current at all times, on pain of losing their registration. If you try the forms of contact and get wrong numbers and returned letters, then you report that fact to the copyright registry, and if THEY can't contact the owners within, say, 60 days, then ALL the copyrights owned by that entity get released.

I know of some properties (old games in particular) that have such confused licensing surrounding them (with companies buying "rights" in large packages and then ignoring them, or the companies closing down with no clear record of who ended up purchasing those particular rights...) that they are languishing in limbo. No one can make a sequel, no one can republish them on new platforms... With a registry, you could look to see WHO is currently paying the upkeep fee, and with the "keep your contact info public" requirement, at least you'd be guaranteed that you'd be able to contact the current rights holder.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/nyregion/lawsuit-aims-to-s...
Torrent or not, I want to see if any of my less tech-savvy friends are on the list so I can warn them even though I don't use Snapchat myself. It's much easier to convince them there's a real problem if I can say "Look, I can get your phone number and username from the Internet just like that" rather than explaining theoretical reasons why they're vulnerable.
Congrats! How did you get CNN to work with you?
Agreed that in the long term Bitcoin will either add a few 0's, in terms of say USD/BTC price (and equiv gov fiat), or, it will go towards 0. But I think the 0 scenario will only happen if a massive exploitable flaw is found, or, if a clearly better replacement/successor (most likely another digital/crypto-currency) to Bitcoin comes along, and everybody clearly and can easily switchover to it.

I'm not sure if Bitcoin is perfect. But I do think it's like the Internet was to a lot of older tech, but with respect to money. That says a lot about its potential and its niches. I know that as an engineer it's been frustrating for years, if not decades, being aware that money is essentially just a score, just bits of information, a number, and that moving money around is just like incrementing/decrementing two money fields in a database, but somehow the government banking and paper monetary systems seemed to make it so much more complex and slower and bureaucratic that in needed to be. (Also taxation has been made ridiculously over-complex, partly by malicious intent, I think, and partly and innocently by the momentum of the less tech available in an earlier age, the age before electronics, computers and the Internet.)

In short, Bitcoin is one particular way of letting money be as simple as a shared distributed scoreboard, as just bits in a database. It's not perfect. But it's much closer to what money fundamentally is at its heart.
It's more a matter of how high up the decision was made--as far as I know, they're doing hunch-based searches at all borders (or close enough to make it seem that way). This is only the first step of the inevitable appeals. If memory serves, and it has been a long time since I studied court procedure, the next step is the district court of appeals, then perhaps an en banc review, then the Supreme Court. I'm going on memory here, though, so corrections/clarification from actual lawyers would be welcome.
Small logical problem there, common in pro-gun circles. The reason mass shooting happen in "gun free zones" is because those are the places where people are concentrated. The idea that mass murderers are afraid of armed self-defense is utter nonsense - after all, they know they will be engaged with the police quickly enough.
Do you have the list of all US phone numbers tied to Snapchat usernames? If not this is entirely irrelevant.
could someone please post a torrent of this spreading the information as much as possible it will become less important and more known
Do you agree that many people are more public online behind the anonymity of a username, compared with their name as listed in public phone books?
Possibly they shouldn't have pissed on the people who notified them of the vulnerability, and on the journalists who broke the story?

(aside from not being vulnerable to this in the first place, but that actually is a lot to ask. I still can't believe anyone relied on the Snapchat model of security more so than any other app, although from an ease of use, non-security perspective, sure, it's reasonable.)
I would have found it quite amusing/scary to suddenly see some huge balance on my account. BTC-e.com sends emails for any account activity and I haven't seen anything I didn't cause. Also, BTC-e.com is just too convenient not to use for now. It's the quickest way for me to get litecoin until coinbase.com supports it.
When 90% of your "students" fail to complete the courses, you have an epic failure on your hands. MOOCs are not working.

I completed every course I signed up for when I was going to university. Completion percentage was important because I was, and still am, paying to be there. As a result, I enrolled in very little that I was simply curious about. Virtually every class I took was a step toward a degree.

Since graduating, I've enrolled in a handful of MOOCs. I've finished less than half of these courses, but they have satisfied my curiosity and have given me something new and different to learn. I most certainly would not have paid for the experience, but I feel I'm better off because of it. I'd say this is working and far from an epic failure.
1. You can remove your phone number from phone books.

2. Cell numbers aren't published in those books, which this affects.

2. Land lines these days are somewhat separate from our lives. It's relatively easy to ignore. Getting phishing texts (say, faking our banks, since some -- including myself -- have some bank alerts texted to us) to our cellphones could be quite harmful. If you send a million texts pretending to be Chase, and say 50% of the numbers are legit cell phone numbers, and 20% of people have chase accounts, and 0.1% of people fall for the phishing attempt, then you get 1/10,000 people getting phished. That's 100 people out of a million affected monetarily, and 500,000 people getting annoyed by the spam.

Obviously this is back of the envelope, but this is one reason it could matter.

edit: a comment thread below mentions that the bottom two digits are hidden at this moment but will be revealed for interested parties. That really smells like the numbers will be sold to spam/phishing operations.
I think the criticism to be read in that is that there really isn't that much economy in bitcoin, and it needs that to survive. The value of bitcoin currently is almost fully speculative, and all articles about it focus on the speculative aspect.

We need a "foreign country" (or something vaguely like it) to actually use bitcoin. Of course it has the problems of all other byzantine protocols : it's not fast, which would be an impediment, and it requires global connectivity. Also, I think the tracking is a mistake. It allows people to see the obvious problems with the distribution of bitcoin.

Imho, bitcoin is a large step forward, and it's close. Very close. But it's centralized dependencies mean it can't resist governments.
> Your anecdote is as good as mine.

Agreed, but as long as anecdotes like mine abound (see also: other comments in this thread, or on any Linux thread anywhere in general), I think Linux on the PC will go nowhere. As others have mentioned, this is often the fault of vendors and drivers that Linux can do little about, but that's not going to excuse it for most users.

> Chromebooks are eating the desktop metaphor for lunch.

I think it's too early to call that right now, especially based on some really questionable statistics. There is some potential for Chromebooks, but in the long run tablets will probably prevail in that space.
Dig into it by googling around. MP3 is probably a lot harder than other audio formats though - look into encoding a format that is widely usable such as WAV or anything you can open in iTunes and Windows Media Player etc. The downloadable content part is part of recent JS additions, google around.
For the record we don't know about SnapchatDB.

But it was a matter of time until this happened, the exploit still works with minor modifications, you just have to be smart about it.
If you agree that "time is money" then you can consider a MOOC completion rate equivalent to an SAAS conversion rate, in which case 4% would be pretty good[1].

I find it odd MOOC's are being held to such a high standard, when the status quo alternative is failing so hard [2].

1. https://www.quora.com/Business/What-is-a-typical-conversion-...
2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/30/p...
http://store.apple.com/us/reviews/MC747LL/A/apple-45w-magsaf...

EDIT: rsynnott, below, has an excellent point.
yes me to
This report is unclear: did they ask Abidor for the password to his laptop (if it was password-protected)?

IANAL, but it makes me wonder if it is sufficient protection to have a password protected/encrypted device.
DIY Arduino Automated Nursery
ARIENGGO
A possible explanation is that libtommath has a slow division algorithm. You could check what happens if you disable the final division.
You can't remove your phone number from already published phone books. You can only omit yourself from later editions.
Does anybody know what they're looking for? Border Patrol/TSA/Homeland Security agents aren't the sharpest tools in the shed and I can't imagine they're very computer literate. Are they just poking around the filesystem? Do they have automated tools that search for stuff?
I have recently deleted my SO account. Hallellujah! I've gone as far as putting in -site:stackoverflow.com when I need to google something because most of the answers are just white noise.
is this a result of an actual hack, or just someone who used the snapchat username->phone number to get 4.6?
Cool... Someone else has a database of phone numbers associated with their snapchat usernames, previously assumed to be private, which is what this story is actually about.
Congrats Randall. Very cool. Here's to a great 2014.
1. People hate Apple for whatever they do.
2. Those who said Mac Pro makes no sense have absolutely zero understanding in GFX market.
3. People who cries about Money Vs what you get to buy and build have absolutely zero understanding about engineering trade off. ( Which I expect HNers to have even from a software engineering perspective )
Ask HN: Was the Adobe account dump cracked?
On Christmas I received a notification from Humble Bundle that my e-mail address was changed to a ".ru" account. I instantly realized that I'd missed that account when I changed all my passwords after the Adobe breach. That account was using the same e-mail/password combination which I used with Adobe. Given that this was a fairly long and non-obvious password, I have to conclude that the encryption key was either stolen along with all of the passwords, or that it was cracked. Is this a false conclusion? Has anyone seen any other evidence that the key has been cracked/leaked?

As an aside, I got the account back. After Humble Bundle failed to respond to my support requests, I googled the e-mail address and the only result was a list of cracked e-mail accounts and their passwords. I tried the password. I was able to log in, successfully reset my password, and reset my account's e-mail address back to my own. I was briefly tempted to seek revenge, but I have a feeling this account is in no way associated with the original attacker. Instead I believe it was just mined for its goodies (I see a bunch of password reset messages), and then used as a burner.
It's actually pretty funny. You know those contests that kind of seem pointless and cost like $200 to enter? When we first launched, we entered one of those contests. We didn't win, but someone who produced Anderson Cooper's ill-fated daytime talk show was a judge, and passed us along to his team. After Anderson's daytime show was cancelled, CNN wanted an extremely simple system to show tweets on-air for a show they were launching.

Anyway, our peg is simplicity. If you read that whole blog post it'll make more sense, but yeah.
They're looking for a file on your desktop named "location_of_smuggled_drugs.txt".

In all seriousness, I don't think there's anything in particular they're looking for. They're just looking for anything that gives them suspicion, which gives them an excuse to question and investigate you further.
So what options do I have without rooting my phone?

Would it be worth stashing my phone in my underwear in my luggage in my trunk, then handing them a dumb old flip phone when they ask for my phone? They probably won't search all of my stuff and find the other phone, right?

I don't have anything on my phone that would get myself or others arrested, but I nevertheless want privacy. Would it be best to just give up on bringing a phone with access to any of my real data across the border?
What about pair programming in lieu of code review? Still a red flag?
Any ideas on connecting Vim to this?
Is anyone out there thinking that perhaps a larger social network might have had some hand in this?

The first thing that came to mind was "oh boy, I'll bet this made Zuck's new years eve!"
has anyone fully download the list yet
Why Target's Breach Included PIN Data
Does anybody know how they tend to react when they are greeted by nothing but a getty on a tty? Should I install GNOME to make border guards feel comfortable?

I haven't crossed the border in the past decade, but may need to semi-frequently in the near future.
I had this same idea a few years ago after fighting with vizRT about something or other. Chyron was just as bad. Good job for doing it!
The trouble with reviews on that sort of product is that almost nobody has any reason to ever write a good one, because everyone writing one is buying the thing because their old one broke. Unless you have a product that _never ever fails_, reviews on spare parts are always going to be pretty awful.
Did the snapchatdb.info guys change the donation address?
Its now reporting as 1M7rREovDkdEh4mZrYNgcj1FECRknFLuRz

They have already got $1USD for this.
https://blockchain.info/address/1M7rREovDkdEh4mZrYNgcj1FECRk...

When i first read your post smtddr i got worried we had a collision!
Ive found the quality of blockchain auditing in 2013 highly inaccurate. I recently bring attention to the case recently on reddit where someone 'chased' the SMP thief through a tumbler and found... the 96k wallet allegedly owned by btc-e.
Its a shame if a non published address of yours has been tainted in someones inaccurate blockchain analysis.