skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I might be misunderstanding here, but going through the court transcript (p. 49–50), but it sounds like the gov't was entitled to installing a pen register[0] since (replace phone with email/internet):

"that because you knowingly expose phone numbers to the phone company when you dial them (you are voluntarily handing over the number so the phone company will connect you, and you know that the numbers you call may be monitored for billing purposes), the Fourth Amendment doesn't protect the privacy of those numbers against pen/trap surveillance by the government."

Since all of the network communication happens over SSL though, they are unable to read any of the data going into or out of the network without the encryption keys.

Shouldn't they only be able to access what's exposed to the outside network, or are they actually entitled to the unencrypted text, even if that's not available without being inside the connection? Forgive my lack of technical/legal understanding here.

[0] https://ssd.eff.org/wire/govt/pen-registers
> Honestly, I wish Apple would just get with the times and allow an appropriate degree of freedom on their devices

An appropriate degree of freedom is different for you and eight year old children or grandparents. The majority of iOS users have no use for the freedom jailbreakers desire and Apple is creating software for the majority of its customers.
Consider Silk Road compromised
Why not? I can't think of a serious reason to favor one over the other between any of Ruby, Perl, and Python.

A lot of people find Python's scope rules annoying.

I've heard Perl has the best unicode support.
Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.
Forty-six Recommendations for the NSA
pg. 42 - Levison asks to be paid $3500 to gather data himself and relay to FBI after 60 days

Govt declines b/c trap/trace is real-time and they find the amount requested to not be reasonable
Using Google Places to Discover 'Deserts' At Different Scales
I started with what Nathan Yau did at Flowing Data (http://flowingdata.com/2013/09/12/working-with-line-maps-the-google-places-api-and-r/) in creating a line graph of food deserts for the US. Then, I generalized it to work for any country and for any scale of geography, and used to to do a number of different runs over parts of Canada.
Oh, you're right. That argument makes much more sense!

Unfortunately though, I doubt we'll ever see Apple giving up control of its App Store. They'll patch this one and move on, like always, making future jailbreaks even more difficult to produce.

At least the major publicity around jailbreaks means Apple will take these vulnerabilities seriously and patch them quickly. Which is a very good thing for the security of regular users. Scary to think of how long 0-day vulns like these would stay alive if there weren't in such demand by tweakers.
This situation sort of reminds me about the xbox scene, which now seems to mostly be about piracy and profit now, which sort of sucks..
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if this were an accurate metaphor, wouldn't cancer incidence decrease with age, rather than increase?
> It's not possible to even remotely predict.

What? He's responding to your prediction.
The article reports, "Turner said a 'magic pill' that reverses ageing is several years away, partially due to the cost of the compound, which would be about $50,000 a day for a human."

That suggests several things. The clinical trials will be small in the beginning, and thus the small-n studies will not have much statistical power. There will be some kind of patent scramble related to any patentable technology that can reduce the cost of producing the chemical in a dosage form appropriate for human medicine. And (if and only if this preliminary finding in mice translates into a safe and effective human medicine) there will be immense political pressure for a public subsidy to make treatment like this available to more patients.

The HN participant who kindly submitted this interesting story found a news source with a nuanced headline, "Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice." That doesn't overpromise, and tells what stage the research is in. The news report mentions that the researchers have a peer-reviewed journal publication in Cell

http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213?cc=y

on their findings, and I suppose many scientists will be looking at that publication and thinking about their study findings. That too is better than the usual submission to HN. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.

The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more research is needed. All too often, preliminary findings don't lead to further useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[3] by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

[1] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

[2] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...

[3] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Payment was conditional on being first and being exclusive. You do not pay 1 million dollars to be second out the gate, particularly because you can simply copy the first guy's work.

Unless the evad3rs released first, they would not get paid. Or, more accurately, they would have to return money. I don't think they were excited by that prospect.

This evad3rs letter is, to use clapper-ism, "the least untruthful statement"
I expect there is a lot of MEMS value at the current size, but is there good reason to believe it will scale?
That's a great observation and it depends on how you define "exposed." Since it's technically feasible to capture the information, perhaps even retroactively, it's certainly been sent to a third party (Lavabit) for retention but they have just chosen to voluntarily put blinders on when it comes to that information.

So the question is whether it requires actual exposure or exposure in the regular course of business.
A column in some old programming magazine— I think it might have been Dr. Dobbs'— had a similar ongoing contest. Some situations could cause a compiler's error-message generator to loop indefinitely, and some compilers would produce a fair amount of error text given a zero-length input, but ignoring these and only counting finite, nontrivial-input cases was still kinda fun.
> it was beyond reach of Joe User.

I would argue that this is not bricking, if it's beyond joe user that's just a job for experts.

Bricking to me is totally gone with no hope of recovery.
Yes, it is confusing, since there is no wider context given in the article at all. The conventional story I hear about ageing is that telomeres in replicating cells become shorter until the DNA no longer replicates and the cell either dies or seriously malfunctions. As a significant proportion of the cells in your body move into this state you "age".

So I'm struggling to relate this phenomena to the mitochondrial story described in the article - it's not clear to me whether these are independent aspects of ageing or somehow related?
'Is dropping out of a CS degree from a good college saying "I also want startup thrill" a good idea? Or a stupid idea?'

Instead of dropping out, you could simply take some time off from college. Pursue an idea or a skill for the duration of a semester instead of spending time in the classroom; you can go back to college at the end of your sabbatical. You may want to check with your college if you have to notify them of your temporary absence so they don't think you dropped out entirely (never done this before so just playing it safe). I wish I had done this. I would have taken sabbatical after my second or third year to build up skills that I enjoyed. It would have also helped for applying to internships or full-time jobs that require some level of experience. In addition, I would have used that time to work on other life skills like fitness.

As others have said, complete the degree to play it safe.
FYI the guy's name is actually Patrick Nielsen Hayden. He's an award-winning editor for Tor.

http://nielsenhayden.com/name.html
grails?
While Rakudo certainly crashes more than anyone wants, it doesn't crash anywhere near as often as you suggest. It's a good thing, as it is implemented in itself; you couldn't get to line one of your script without crashing if it crashed every couple of hundred lines.

Actually, I don't know when the last time I got a random crash in Rakudo was; it may have been years ago. Getting a crash because you ran out of memory, on the other hand, definitely can happen in bigger programs.
I was actually planning on writing a detailed blog post on the subject, due to the high volume of company looking for X super-duper developers, to help us change the world attitude that is common these days. Instead it came out as a comment... But here it goes a more detailed explanation.

What do we actually mean change the world. Although it's not clearly defined, I think we can all agree that when Steve Jobs wanted to change the world he meant to change the world for the better. In my view, better is what enables a society to become more civilized[1]. The iPhone, facebook or Microsoft Windows do NOT enable such behavior. They are tools. These tools can be used for good or bad purpose.

Ghandi, was able to free a country without lifting arms. I can not think of any one in history who achieved such a HUGE task. Ghandi showed that a man, can become a symbol and a symbol can bring an unexpected result by common sense. Also Ghandi showed that the end does NOT justify the means in an undisputed way. Ghandi changed the lives of Indian population for the better.

Mandella did the same. They changed the world for the better. If by changing the world Steve Jobs[2] meant creating the iPad, sky-rocketing Apple's stock, creating the first idiot-proof, 600 USD smart-phone, etc. I don't know. But he surely didn't change the world for the better in my view.

ps. In the Arab spring, twitter played a major role in communication. That's a good use of technology. But by no means twitter allowed the Arab sprint to take place. It was just a tool of communication with the outside world, nothing more nothing less, just a tool. If it was not for twitter, there would have been something else. Linus Torvalds (on of the few real pioneers imho among all the IT big names) said it best about the Linux (kernel): "If I haven't done it in 1992, some else would have done it in 1993, because the time was right for someone to create a kernel for the GNU".

[1] Civilized: bring (a place or people) to a stage of social development considered to be more advanced: a civilized society. (as adj.civilized) polite and good-mannered: such an affront to civilized behaviour will no longer be tolerated.

[2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2813-do-you-want-to-sell-suga...
More accurately, professional philosophers don't have any particular standing to discuss "serious philosophical issues." At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, "Well, what do the philosophers think?"

(I have nothing against philosophers, btw. I have a degree in philosophy.)
Sometimes you buy it because you like the hardware and know the software is coming down the line. I've done this twice.

- I bought an Android phone that had terrible reviews on Amazon come, knowing that there was a cyanogenmod ROM that'd solve everything.

- I bought the new Kindle Fire HDX because I love the hardware design and knew a hack would show up for it eventually. Sure enough, the "put_user" kernel memory write exploit was found and now I have root on it. I'm sure cyanogenmod ROMs will be coming later on. Until then, I don't even use the HDX. Why didn't I just wait until the root showed up first before purchasing? Because updates to firmware might seal the exploit. So, just like I did with Sony PSP, it's best to get the hardware with early firmware and just never bring the device online for any updates. Just wait for the hack. My HDX still hasn't been exposed to the interwebz. That won't happen until Cyanogenmod is flashed on it. Until then, I'm still using my firstgen Kindle Fire.

I bet some people bought an iPhone fully expecting that one day a jailbreak would show up.
Rovio Stars: Development idea/game pitch submission
Is there a good plugin for wordpress that just deletes any post coming in with URL fields? I don't have interface for the URL field in my blog, so any comment submitting one is always coming from a spam script.
AAA or dozen other road-side assistance?
So I actually set a soft time to expire as a value for the key. My daemon reads all objects < this time, and deletes those keys itself. The hard time to expire is set to a time much further than this to prevent the scenario of the daemon exiting for some reason, and memory overflowing.
They must have some special version of it. NAD can be gotten online for considerably less http://www.herbspro.com/co-e1-nadh-tab-76057.html
> offensive to use a wheelchair as a jab at Ruby on Rails

Fortress on Freeway, Clojure on clouds.
OK interesting, but the larger scale problem exists now where most 75 year old women are infertile. That could be "fixed" by yet another medical breakthru.
That looks great. Thanks for the heads up!
Yep, see gasman's JSModPlayer:
http://jsspeccy.zxdemo.org/jsmodplayer/
Can anyone who uses enlightenment tell me what it provides, and doesn't provide, in comparision to say gnome? Is there a good reason to switch?
Because sometimes it's simpler to get what you want by subtraction rather than by addition.

More formally, my ideal device is x. The iPhone (4s) is at x + δ and all the other smartphones are at x - δn (where δ > 0 and n is a really big number)†.

I like the App Store but I don't like the restriction against installing non-approved apps (including my own).

I love Safari/Webkit but I don't like the restriction against using other rendering engines.

I like the the default apps (mail and maps are fine) but I don't like the restriction against changing those defaults.

I like tethering and don't even mind paying a little extra for the bandwidth, but I do not like the fact that my carrier can preempt that ability at the OS layer rather than the network layer.

On the other hand, I do acknowledge that buying and owning an iPhone basically supports eco-system that I despise, and for that reason, my next phone will probably be a Nexus or MotoX.
No. There have been various test and development implementations over the years but regardless of bugs they're all so slow as to be of questionable utility for any real work. It remains safe to ignore Perl 6 for the time being.
Online radio dedicated to demoscene music:
https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/
Sort of, but they didn't smell the smoke signal, just look at it. It's cool that we can automate it too.
It isn't working because (...) is just matching 3 characters. What your regex is saying, is basically:
Match any 3 characters, then any character 0 or more times, then any 3 characters.

You're reusing the regex and not the match. Back referencing essentially means that you'll match whatever is matched the first time, rather than reusing the regex pattern.

I hope that made a little sense. Grouping, capturing, matching and backreferences is part of what makes regex tricky and very powerful. You might want to use some of the online tools, which can help explain the regex visually.
Amazing to see what a disadvantage citizens are facing when going up against the government. Just reading the transcript you can imagine how anyone without a very experienced (and expensive) attorney would be overwhelmed and not understand what's happening since they're not in their element. Levinson seems to do better than most but it's a rigged game.
NAD is an interesting chemical anyway for its electrical properties. I had an idle thought once upon a time that you might be able to make some kind of liquid binary computer with it, given how readily you can “toggle” it between NAD+ and NADH. I don’t know nearly enough about it, though.
There's a classic A Softer World comic that's been turned into a t-shirt that says "I would rather die screaming than live forever." There are downsides to the kind of extreme prudence that planning to be around for centuries would imply.

Also, there's a fantastic novel from Bruce Sterling called Holy Fire that is devoted to exploring the tension between living to continue living and living in the moment.
The 2 program samples in Cobol and Html shown together made me realize just how verbose Html really is, which makes me think we will still be using Html in 30 yrs time.
Even though the name and email of the suspect are redacted, it says that the suspect is being investigated for 18 U.S.C. §§ 641, 793d-e, and 798(a)(3). This is exactly what Edward Snowden was charged under[0].

[0] http://news.rapgenius.com/Hon-john-f-anderson-united-states-...
I love stuff like this. I wrote an Android game[0] that has terrain that's procedurally generated using a very simple algorithm. Discovering other content-generation algorithms which give nice, random but realistic-looking results gets me buzzed as hell.

[0] https://github.com/bitwize/rboots-android/
LightSwitch is going web-only, as far as I can tell, so this may simply be splitting off and rebranding the Win 8 side of things.
Keep in mind in any sizeable group of people those things happen. I was a healthy 25 year old male with no issues what so ever. I'm now a 26 year old male who doesn't a have a thyroid and takes a pill every day. In between was an unexplained baseball sized growth on my thyroid that had nothing to do with anything and was thankfully not cancerous.

Shit happens and we don't always know why.
What is open for all vs open for some will always come down to the definition of the word "open".

If we are talking about open as in permission to use, modify and distribute, then both licenses are equally "open".

If we are talking about open as in permission to close down the permission for others to modify or distribute newer version, and sue anyone who acts different - Then we do have one license that is more "open".

One could also argue that a standard business model of today rely on being able to threaten users with lawsuit if they modify or share the software. The "openness" to use such model is only available for one kind of licenses and not by others.

I might not go as far as calling it more open, but then I have a distinct opinion on the word open.
If you want to learn more, this formatting is called "spintax" and is supported by a lot of the blackhat SEO tools.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning
haha I love it! RIP Winamp
How about you become smart enough to form your own opinions?
what would the benefit of this instead of rolling out your own REST api on Flask?
Sorry I should have explained myself better:

I am referring to the C-standards, and I don't consider K&R to be one of them. I tried compiling the source with:

gcc file -std=c89 -Wall -o out

&&

gcc file -std=c99 -Wall -o out

I get a score of errors thrown at me.

Not one of them mentioned a void* or char, they don't appear in the code. The float which holds the data is located within the struct itself.

The first nine errors were all practically identical:

error: unknown type name 'LL_Element'

I don't know much c99, but when it comes to c89 whenever an instance of a struct some_type* is declared the keyword struct also has to precede the type: ie. struct some_type some_instance;. The only way I am aware of that overcomes this is the use of typedef in the original declaration.

I'll have to check whether it is mentioned in the 1988 edition of The C programming language or another text, but if I recall correctly the term tag is used to refer to struct declarations.

Also the original code had the headers <cstdlib> && <cstdio>. I think these headers have all their functions declared as inline, a non-existent keyword with regards to c89. I had to change the headers to the traditional .h style header in order to have a chance of getting the code to fit through the slot, so to speak.

I don't have a CS degree, I teach myself, so if I have missed something or made a faux pas, please say so.
I think it's worth exploring non-standard means of establishing networks no matter how ostensibly silly as they can come in extremely useful when e.g. governments try to restrict internet access in oppressive countries or natural disasters occur, etc.

Though I'm not sure if this particular example is of much use ;-)
I agree. I think he handled it very well all by himself, especially the hearing about the trap/trace that was NOT about the encryption keys where the govt wished to make it all about the keys.
The cryptome link works. http://cryptome.org/2013/12/lavabit-027.pdf
Disruptions: Betting on Bitcoin
You should live in france.
If you sample it sparsely enough, though, you might as well use rand. There wouldn't really be any gain from using a noise function in this application, however.

I think it was worth pointing out in the context of this post, though, as he took the time to directly address the part of his audience who apparently seems to think all "procedural" content should descend from a noise function, which is probably common with beginners. Often a simple random number generator will do just fine.
Just plain old article spinning; format looks like its meant for Scrapebox.

This is some pretty noobish stuff. A more effective way to decrease moderation is to make comments talking about how you enjoyed the article and linked to their blog. You then setup a script on your site to detect referral traffic from /wp-admin, etc., pull the rss feed for their site and then inject their latest blog post in the page content/side bar (e.g. Recommended Reading!). Drop an evercookie so it shows up if they come back.
god, it is really getting old ...
Decentralise id generation
can you tell us about the reasons for their skepticism?
You may also enjoy reading http://procworld.blogspot.fr/ for some interesting posts about procedural terrain, vegetation and architecture generation. I found the visual results are quite impressive.