skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "Constitution-Free Zone" extends 100 miles from the border or coast, not "HUNDREDS". I find it as abhorrent as you do, but there's no need to exaggerate or FUD.

https://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-libert...
At this point, it may well be impossible to shut down the NSA. I imagine every opposing politician gets visited by some agent at some point, showing him records of his own wrongdoings.

Imagine every politician ever be forced to choose between the end of his career and opposing the NSA. How can we get out of this mess?
The Mandelbrot set and other fractals calculated with SQL
This is especially relevant today given the current #1 story on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993968
Can you really quickly get a social security number?
Too late. The whole domain is gone.
>in the same way they help in Africa today -- economic support, little political involvement.

Ah, I think we know that kind of "help" from the past. Let local dictators have their way in exchange for exploiting a country's resources.
Using Kubuntu and wifi passwords appear to be stored in the kdewallet, not /etc/NetworkManager.
I have a theory that Mark Zuckerburg, fearing the demise of facebook, had his ninja assassins infiltrate SnapChat and compromised their security, hoping to drive teenagers back into the arms of facebook.

Why is my theory any less loony than yours?
By the way, I hear you can't really "wipe" data on SSD drives. I don't remember why exactly though. Probably some fault-tolerant mechanism. Or maybe it's what NSA has been asking HDD OEMs to make from the beginning.
The thing is, I don't think we have sacrificed anything. No one ever gave the NSA explicit authority to do the things it does. It's just that they did do them snyway.
> If you're playing anonymous, you surely would also use burner phones and not your main phone for that purpose.

We are talking about teenagers sending pictures to each other, not weed dealers in a prohibition state.
It seems extremely, extremely clear from the page you linked ... look at the sidebar: Education: BA 1974 from Stanford, Law Degree.

He is a lawyer, and did not even get a science-related degree when he took his bachelor's (BA = Bachelor of Arts).
Lol My Thesis: Summing up years of work in one sentence.
Credit and Debit Cards Are Junk
1. Apple won't release a new product category (like an iWatch). But they'll do just fine by having the best industrial design and hardware.

2. Bitcoin and other digital currencies will take the world by storm.

3. Google will make a major improvement in AI with Google Now.

4. There will be another SnapChat or Instagram like product that'll make communicating with phones fun in a new way.

5. The internet and social networks will continue to cause social upheaval in authoritarian nations.

6. Facebook will add auto-playing video commercials and people will hate them.

7. Low-end cameras will start dying off rapidly. There will only be phones and high-end professional cameras in the future.

8. As technology automates more and more things, it'll contribute to unemployment of people who are unprepared to be knowledge workers.

9. People will start taking MOOCs a lot more seriously as an alternative to higher education, especially in meritocratic fields. Not a big change in 2014, but it'll be more obvious.

10. TV will start feeling like print media in the face of the internet, it's inevitable.
Interesting, just tried out namehelp.

It told me my the fastest option for me was Dyn's servers, but those have unacceptable to me anti-spyware "safe mode" blockouts. #2 on its list was Google DNS which I was already using.

The graphs for HTTP performance said namehelp's choices were degrading my performance on average by 11ms.

Good app to add to the toolchest though. It'll be interesting to try it out when I travel.
thank you for taking the time to explain this.
Surely the money quote is:

572 MPH

In otherwords, way faster than a pickle has any business moving on its own!
Just to be clear, I don't think USGOV's continued campaign to obliterate privacy is good.

However, if you do want to implement a total surveillance policy this isn't completely stupid, because it helps fill in one of the NSA's blind spots.
Constraint is no less important than freedom.
Including those who make and enforce the laws.
If the ISP was being transparent about where they were going to source traffic I'm surprised that they ever got onto the affiliate program in the first place.
Only for the unregistered accounts IIRC. Can't you disable it after going thought the simple registration and claiming of IP address?
At the bottom of this article there's a link to a news piece over 3 months ago stating frequent steam plumes seen (mid-Sept).

Even if the situation is escalating, it's difficult to generate news audience interest something that was happening 3 months ago... not without real data, at least. Who is monitoring Fukushima right now? Just [lying] TEPCO? Where is/are the data?
Well, get over it and understand it...

Speaking personally, I sought to move away to a utf8-friendly language from php a few years back, and seriously considered Python back then. It came highly recommended on Stack Overflow.

Upon investigating the matter further, however, it became clear that the community suffered greatly from the divide introduced by Python 3. As if the core devs went in one direction while the community at large went in another.

It wasn't exactly a welcoming place for a newcomer. As if you needed to pick sides on day one. I ended up selecting another language and have never looked back.

If anything, I'm bemused that the debate still rages on years later. And I can readily picture seasoned Python users being put off by the same, and looking elsewhere for a saner ecosystem.

Case in point: As some have already hinted in the thread, the point is becoming moot nowadays, not so much because the community is slowly making the switch to Python 3, but because community members are moving en masse to Node, Go, Scala, Clojure, etc.
I guess I'm dating myself, but didn't we used to call that the phone book?
>Rob Pike wrote a blog post "Thank you Apple" (sarcasm) because of the problems he was having with his iMac and Apple's software.

Half of it it's about how it's Apple's fault that he didn't have a USB to boot off, so he tried to boot of a (camera) CF card (unsupported) and then an old Mac that wasn't up to running the latest OS version. Because Apple should consider what olders machines an OS supports not on hardware specs needed by the new OS, but on the needs of people upgrading their OS without a USB that want to use their older machine as a firewire devices (huh?). It's like the kind of complaints you read on Tripadvisor ("the bell boy didn't smile enough to me", "the bedsheets where not the exact Pantone blue they had on the hotel website" etc).

>http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chrom...

Yes, but he said a MBA just until then, of which he writes on his Google+ page. Also, if you read the article, what he solely likes about the Pixel is the screen resolution. And he dislikes its weight. He looks like a perfect candidate for the inevitable retina MBA.

>As for Miguel De Icaza, he's eating his own dog food, as he now makes his money selling an IDE for iOS development, so of course he's going to choose the Mac because that's where the toolchain is.*

Well, it's not just that. He also wrote a post about why he moved to OS X, and how he got dissillusioned with the Linux desktop prospects.
"I'm glad to let you know that you qualify for X healthcare coverage. Can I just have your social security number and we'll send over the confirmation documents?"

Yes, people fall for this kind of stuff all the time.
Why did you post this as a response to my comment? It has nothing to do with any point I was making (namely, correction of factual errors in rl3's comment).
Isn't that CFAA abuse on their side?
Thanks for sharing your experience and insights Sergio.

It takes balls to do that shrinking ego experience in public.

I'm sure something good will come out of it.
Self-inflicted sums it about nice. He didn't have a USB drive (needed for installation), so he tried a few offbeat methods which didn't work, and he didn't have a bootable backup image (so he had to mess with a lengthy copying process). The only legit thing in his complaints is that Time Machine wouldn't let him restore off his Time Machine backup. The other stuff is self-inflicted.
Order some armed body to take over all NSA sites and burn things to the ground. Reason being in the set of (libel|slander|extortion|treason).
Holy shit, congrats Randall! It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Great start to 2014 :-)
Most new SSD drives, e.g. Samsung's or Intel's, have transparent encryption (no matter if you set it up or not,) and you are able to "format" your drive by wiping the container with the encryption key, effectively making all data on the drive appear as random noise as long as the encryption algorithm, e.g. AES-256, isn't broken.
To all comments which are either criticizing or motivating, the most important thing to remember is this : "We are standing on the shoulder of giants".

The people have criticizing opinions needs to remember that similar criticism will be given to you by your preceding generation (it may be on any achievement).

The people have motivating/amazement opinions needs to remember that "this seemingly amazing feet" is possible because of the exponential growth in technology and most importantly the exposure to it. If you had similar exposure to technology at your time, you could have achieved same thing.

So, lets appreciate the fact that this 15 year old is "utilizing" his exposure to technology and at the same time don't make him too proud of himself by using words like genius etc which inevitably leads more show-off than learning.
You might consider that the reason staff don't realize you can tap is that nobody uses it, because you can just swipe without a PIN for small purchases. I am not saying this is superior, just observing an example of how even changing consumer behavior is difficult when the value add is minor.
I still don't understand why you would turn down $3 billion. How will you ever make money with snapchat and how is it not a fad that will eventually die?
> I wonder, at what point would NSA start manufacturing threats.

The FBI have been doing that for years.[1,2] Sadly enough, to expect other agencies to refrain from similar activities would be a fallacy.

1: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/terror-factory-f...

2: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-in... (also linked from the heading of first article)
One does not need to possess a degree in order to be extraordinarily well educated in a particular field.

Conversely, possessing a degree in a particular field doesn't automatically make someone extraordinarily well educated in that particular endeavor.
What's the FDA supposed to do?

They should crawl back into their bureaucratic cave and carve some hieroglyphics into the walls with pieces of flint, or otherwise find some way to occupy themselves while the world goes on quite well without their unnecessary interventions.
I would have thought that this fairly obvious counterpoint would have been brought up by someone somewhere along the line before this decision was released, though.
I travel abroad a lot and am pretty sure I'm on a special NSA list at this point or will be soon. Besides all my anti-NSA tweets and emails, I've donated money to support Snowden, Lavabit, ACLU, EFF and Ron Paul. I guess it's time to pick up some cheap laptops that I'm okay losing to the border thieves.
Direct links still seem to work: http://allthingsd.com/20131231/you-say-goodbye-and-we-say-he...?
I assume the majority of people posting in this thread know this. From a functional point of view, it's still a 30$ half meter cable, and it is also sold as such (not as a transceiver chip/cable kit). It's an interesting technology, though.
They lost the content of their successful website and there is no guarantee that the completely new one will be successful.
For a website with "code" in its name, having the favicon still set to the default Wordpress one is a low priority.
In light of this, this warfarin sensitivity information that you've obtained from 23andMe is almost certainly a false positive, and if you were on a prescribed warfarin treatment, 23andMe would've likely resulted in a change in your behavior that would be strictly detrimental to your health.

I don't think there is any valid basis for that claim. A rational person (and I only mean "somewhat rational", I'm not talking about an Econ101 "perfectly rational actor" here) would get their 23andMe results, go "hmmm, this is interesting" and line up a visit to their primary care physician to talk about the results, and what it might mean for their treatment... at which point additional tests might be indicated, or the doctor could more fully explain the various tradeoffs, implications, etc.

There's no particular reason to assume that people are going to randomly adjust their medications based on 23andMe results alone.

And, even if they do, so be it - the price of personal freedom is individual responsibility for the outcome of your actions.
Programming career over time (in general)
Using your powers to acquire sensitive information in order to blackmail political opponents is certainly nothing new - just ask J. Edgar Hoover.
Which brings us to an interesting point: A typical workstation USV is about the size of the Mac Pro :)
Dual_EC_DRBG backdoor: a proof of concept
* There will be a major regulatory crackdown on Bitcoin in most countries due to money laundering concerns.

* It will become apparent that Apple's history is repeating itself. As mobile becomes commoditized, they will refuse to lower their prices and become a luxury niche player sliding slowly into irrelevance.

* Google will announce Go (golang) for Android.

* The U.S enonomy will grow fast at the start of the year and treasury yields will spike making the stock market and ultimately the economy crash. Next recession starting Q4 2014.
YIFY Is The Most Popular Search Term On Torrents
So, how many levels of indirection are allowed until a "link" becomes legal and not infringing?

This is just crazy.
The public has spoken: I'm building an Imperial March app
This is why I have a monthly recurring donation to the ACLU set up - they're constantly pushing back on stuff like this. If this kind of thing sickens you, consider doing the same. As a bonus, I believe it's tax deductible.
Snapchat Hacked – 4.6 Million Users Suffer the Consequences
I love reading reverse engineering and ancient game modding stories because it's like an extreme form of inheriting a messy, undocumented codebase.
"acquire, abandon, assassinate"?

But, if all acquihires are like this than that word should be enough, methinks.
Python is the Language of the Year
Sadly it looks like / is 301 to WSJ already.

This was posted last night and still available:

http://allthingsd.com/20131231/some-of-our-fave-d-conference...
They have FBI doing that for them, and ATF [1], and who knows who else. I think many of these agencies are starting to ask for funding specifically for these sort of "operations", where they not only try and convince people to commit crimes, but give them all the funding and resources they need to commit them, too.

We've gotten to the point where the government has to manufacture or invent crimes in order to arrest people. Even the War on Drugs isn't enough for them anymore. They need more. I'm actually really curious what will happen when the War on Drugs will end. Because that would leave a huge hole in their plan to criminalize just about everyone.

Will they start sending SWAT teams to people's homes for pirating movies? Will they start arrest people on the street for pissing them off somehow? I don't know, but I'm really curious what would happen. I certainly don't expect them to just lay back and ease up on the arrests, if the War on Drug is over.

[1] http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/atf-uses-ro...
I would argue that at least the current model actually is for a niche market, i.e. applications that use GPUs right now. By the time more non-gaming applications outside of media editing are using GPUs more extensively, the top end mobile graphics chips will have the power of this dual GPU setup.

It's a bold bet on a possible trend, which I like a lot, since it would mean that non-gamers would profit from the GPUs that would otherwise bore themselves to death on their machines. Also, it would give AMD a better position, maybe averting x86 being a complete Intel monopoly.
Were the raw data consistent? I can understand that the 3 companies were interpreting the raw data differently, but were the underlying snp frequencies consistent?

If they are not consistent, then the whole thing is pointless and they need to work on better kits. If they are consistent, it still doesn't say much.

Genome wide association studies (GWAS) are very hard to control. And most papers tend to ignore external factors when they conduct the analysis. Do these group of people have this phenotype because of particular snps or do they have it because they have similar diets, similar geographic area, similar age range?
If only most people where sufficiently rational to respond that way to things, we could do away with a whole lot of regulation of all kinds of things.
Hmm, I read it as justification of the policies. If you didn't mean it as that, I retract it.
By the end of 2014, very few people have a smart watch.

Bitcoin continues to become more popular. Many physical places begin supporting the currency.

The UK government will start pushing for the porn block to be enforced for existing subscribers (not just new ones, as is the case now).

Low-end cameras are replaced by smartphones.

Linux's marketshare increases but remains relatively low. Steam OS has varying degrees of success. It's lack of mainstream professional games hinders adoption.
NSA's Secret Toolbox: Unit Offers Spy Gadgets for Every Need
New Private Cloud era with cloud306.com
A Whole New Video Player for Windows 8
Professor is just a senior teaching title. It does not require a degree at all, even though it usually does. All it will tell you is that the school believes he is qualified to do the work he's doing for them.
For people fully devoted to studying, and with some sort of extrinsic incentive to complete the courses, I imagine that the completion rate would be significantly higher. When I was at MIT, some of the courses worked almost exactly like MOOCs do now, and just as many people completed those as the traditional courses.

With MOOCs, a ton of the takers are not full-time students. I've taken some MOOC courses and only completed one (probabilistic graphical models). The main reason is that I have much higher priorities now, and the courses are on a strict schedule. The first time there's a choice between getting a piece of code finished that I need for a business deal done and finishing a problem set, that problem set is not getting finished.
Is it that the court is basically applying the same border search exceptions that apply to boxes, paper notebooks, and film cameras to laptops and phones that you find outrageous? Or is it the border search exceptions themselves you find outrageous?
This comment is the perfect example of why the FDA needs to be involved with this. They gave you very important medical information. Did they a) make sure the information was accurate and b) explain it to you in a way that's understandable to a layperson?

I can easily see a layperson reading that, and thinking "warfarin sensitivity"? As in "food sensitivity", meaning "this is something that isn't good for me, and I should avoid it?" Wait, isn't that the stuff that gave my grandmother a stroke? Holy shit, they killed my grandmother by giving her too much of a medicine that she's sensitive to!"

All warfarin sensitivity actually means, though, as far as I understand it, is that you're likely to need a lower dose than the average patient. If your grandmother had a stroke, it's unlikely that she was overdosed, though - in fact, it's quite likely that she received too low a dose.

If someone has a stroke under warfarin treatment, there are two likely causes: Either their warfarin dose was too low, or they had an artery-to-artery embolic stroke instead of the cardioembolic stroke the warfarin was supposed to prevent. (There are of course other, more rare cases of stroke, but those are the two big ones.)

Do you see how there's a huge potential for misunderstandings here? I'm not saying you suffered this particular misunderstanding, or that laypeople should be stopped from getting this information. I'm just saying, if you're going to put something like that out there and claim it's a diagnostic tool, it needs to be accurate and it needs to be explained, and that's where the FDA needs to come in.
Servers for the New Year: Thank You
Thanks for helping us get here but, uhh, well we got bought so fuck off now.
Ask HN: How can I compete for an internship? 
I'm currently a sophomore studying software development, and I'm currently in the market for an internship. What steps or where is a decent place to start looking? I've taken a few programming courses and have been working on a few small projects of my own when I have time.
Assassinimilated?
Wish4[0]: 40 Days. 40 News Items. 40 Creative Responses.
Acquisition announcement blog post from September 16, 2013:

http://blog.bu.mp/post/61411611006/bump-google

"Bump and Flock will continue to work as they always have for now; stay tuned for future updates."

3 and a half months later the discontinuation announcement. In retrospect the statement "stay tuned for future updates" sounds quite sinister. The casual wording makes it sound like things will work out but in actuality it is far from the truth.

If you read any product acquisition announcement and it does not state any explicit plans to keep the product around then be fully prepared that it will be shut down.
not a genetics prof - a law prof.

http://www.law.stanford.edu/profile/hank-greely
I'm implying that no real hacker sees such information as "off limits", especially when it's in such a readily, publicly available form.
The CPAN Report 2013
Hi, I just synchronized with the blockchain. Thank you for your donation! You just gave me my first Bitcoins ever! You truly represent what's good in the world. Thank you again.
Are services shuting down at greater rates that in the past decade?

As far as I can tell, the "we're out of money and are shutting down" has become "we got acqui-hired and are shutting down". Same result for the users.
Heh, interesting. I did some work for those guys when I lived in Innsbruck. Interesting example of how an IT company can be pretty much anywhere.
Ask HN: In 20 years, will we still use digital computers for most of the tasks?
Keeping in mind that both analog and quantum computing are far too young in the research stage?
Getting started with PSHDL (Plain Simple Hardware Description Language)
look at what this drug did to my grandma

And this is exactly the sort of crazy nonsense that happens when you give medical information to laypeople without explaining it properly. Warfarin doesn't cause strokes, or if it does, it does so as a crazy and crazy unlikely side-effect in a vanishingly small number of patients. The common, dangerous, life-threatening side effect of Warfarin, the one you need to be worried about with a Warfarin sensitivity, is bleeding. Of course, Warfarin, when administed in a careful, low dosage to people with the sensitivity, may fail to prevent a stroke, but Warfarin almost certainly did not give the previous commenter's grandma a stroke, and it's driving me slightly crazy that this thread is causing people to think that it's some sort of common side effect.