skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure what's going on with the title, but the matrix was released in 1999

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/

so I'm not sure just how an article from 1996 could reference the movie.

I guess I'm being too pedantic here:)
Imagine two identical, parallel wires that are infinitely long. The two wires are spaced one meter apart (still in parallel). When current is passed through the wires they would exert force on each other proportional to current.

The infinitely long part ensures the force is uniform through all parts of the wire.

Hope that helps.
> they continue to operate with imprudence.

While that may also be true, I suspect from context that what you meant to say was "impunity", not "imprudence". Very different meaning.
Well, with a habitat that reaches across Africa and Asia, and their ability to thrive in rain forests and grasslands, there are.... Oh. Ohhh. Never mind.
Is there a perfect moment for hackers to strike? Scientists say yes
And yet we have pursued no actions against Saudi Arabia... I wonder if they have something we really need that is stopping us from declaring faceless or outright war on them?
Ask a Tech Event Organizer
The question I always have when someone says "scripting language" is "to what aspect of the language are you referring?" Unfortunately, since AFAICT the term never seems to have been precisely defined (unlike "touchdown"), different people use it differently and loosely.

I never know what exactly the speaker is referring to:

- the language definition, or some feature of it such as the type system?

- one or more (popular) language implementations?

- the intended use (e.g. short throwaway programs, desktop apps, kernel code) and target audience (e.g. experienced programmers, casual programmers, non-programmers)?

- the actual use and target audience?

- some opinion of the speaker about the language/implementation/etc. in question?

(Of course, this is just in my experience. YMMV)

----

tl,dr; in the body of my discussions, "scripting language" is a free variable and I can't find its definition! I wish people would pass it as a parameter!

discuss_scripting_language(listener="matt", opinion="they suck/rock!!!1one", definition="...")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei
Unfortunately not.
For what it's worth, if I can't do it on a phone that I walked out of Verizon with and didn't touch again, then I consider it can't-do. Custom ROMs aren't mainstream enough yet to count (despite how awesome Cyanogenmod is), and as you correctly pointed out, Android removed it from KitKat. So, until Android natively supports it in a release, it doesn't exist.
So? If they don't provide the content you wish to see in a way that's convenient for you but is convenient for the mass of their market I fail to see the problem. If you want to see the content bad enough then you accept the requirements. Otherwise, it says more for you to not participate by not giving money. As more people do this, things will change.
Entirely different - but the first successful uterus transplant recently occurred. Unfortunately, she lost the baby at 8 weeks.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/12/worlds-first-successfu...

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/womb-transplant-patien...
Given the password is relatively simple - remember this is supposed to be one of the premier encryption cracking organizations in the world, GCHQ, here - I think there is a distinct lack of skill (or absence) by GCHQ. He's perhaps being jailed for showing them up.

Alternatively (and more likely I suspect), these is some gamesmanship being played to get shiny new additional super-snooping laws passed because it's needed to cope with all this uncrackable terrorist encryption. See, here's the proof it exists ! [edit: sorry, this did not make it clear I'm suggesting it was cracked but found to be irrelevant to the terrorism case. I've expanded in a reply below.]

The UK already has laws making it an offence to have 'have information' 'which may be of use to anyone planning a terrorist offence'. This is so broadly defined that railway enthusiast pictures of trains could fall into it (and have been questioned under it - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transpo...)

The UK's unwritten constitution is not worth the paper it's written on. Unfortunately the US written one seems to be about as useful in protecting peoples rights these days as the UK one. (See previous HN stories of your choice)
Earlier leaks from Snowden showed they are doing this to allied countries, too. Have we forgotten already how they hacked European telecoms? Brazilian oil companies? Bugged EU officials? The title itself mentions EU.

Yes, I'm sure NSA does some of that work, too - their original work - but the problem is they've surpassed their boundaries way too much, and much of what they're doing today is spying on everyone - including innocent citizens and on companies and allies, too. Let's not forget that so easily.

This story seemed like a well planted one to NYT, where they mention the attacks but only to the "worst of the worst" countries, to make people like you believe that "hey, this is what they're supposed to be doing - so I guess everything is fine, then".

I think they've started improving their PR relations for this year. That article had way too many quotes from the NSA for a story about a "leak", and the responses seem well prepared, too.

This is a new year, and now we believe what NSA says about its activities? Read more carefully what the article says:

> The NSA said the technology has not been used in computers in the US.

The NSA! The NSA says. And yet I bet a lot of people read that as if the "leak says" or something along those lines, and they probably believed it.

> "NSA's activities are focused and specifically deployed against - and only against - valid foreign intelligence targets in response to intelligence requirements,'' Vanee Vines, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement to the Times.

Again, the NSA says. Come on people. Don't be fooled so easily. Oh, and by the way - this is not a Snowden leak, if you didn't figure that out already. It actually seems like a controlled leak by NSA that shows "they are doing their job". The article itself was half-press release for the NSA.
That sounds a bit disconcerting. I've discussed things like how to beat airport security, plant bombs to do the most damage, and in general ways to circumvent security measures. It's simply an intellectual curiosity, one even necessary to make things safe, and protect against those who think the same, but with intent of causing harm.

If the discussion alone is the damning part, with disregard to the intent... coupled with some prejudice, and add irrational fear.

Self censorship is what you get.
I'm thinking of Nest as "Home Cloud Compute". That little thermostat desperately wants to be the hub of everything we do - after all, energy is what we use in the home for anything we do, and heating and cooling is the majority of that energy usage.
Show HN: Meta Trails - Self assesment tool for learning to code
I've been a little disappointed to find out that aspects of this view are sometimes adopted at startups with a lot of VC funding, and not just enterprise companies.
>> This sounds a bit like a thought crime to a laymen like me and the verbiage flags my weasel alarm.

Conspiracy is a crime, though. A guy can be charged for saying something like, "Let's plan out how we're going to kill my wife. You go buy a gun..." The police don't have to wait until the guy actually kills his wife before arresting him.
Massive denial-of-service attacks pick up steam, new nefarious techniques
Or a technology already exists :)

"UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips..."

http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clip...
Ready For A New topcoder?
Then he wouldn't have gotten this additional sentence. This sentence was added only after it was revealed that he was, in fact, able to produce the password. It's perhaps not written as well as it could be in the article, but if you read carefully, it's clear this sentence was not given when he claimed to forget, but later when he reveal the password after having claimed to forget.
Just click bait article, when someone writes "It’s not just an acquisition — it’s an annexation." is because he wants visits to the page.
Eye shape is good in NIR images, otherwise in VL images it not as big a factor.
For me, it was Laurie Anderson's "O Superman":

http://www.absolutelyrics.com/lyrics/view/laurie_anderson/o_...
s/or/and/

Because this is either a dick thing to say, or prelude to a change.
Ah... That makes total sense now - thanks!
> The NSA calls the effort an "active defence"

Newspeak is real.

Even if the NSA is telling the truth about this only being deployed against foreign targets, the scale of this effort is impressive.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no point per se. I'm just amazed that someone has gone that route in this age of apathy. But I am assuming this extends beyond Sony products as many electronics are along the same lines in terms of locked environments.
So given the stories about the Target hack, which mentions "memory scrapers", how can this be done on an entire network of (Windows in this case, no idea what version) systems? I assume you would have to have discovered an escalation attack that gave you sufficient privileges to read another processes' memory. But even given that, how do you find what bytes are useful to scrape?
1) Buy prepaid card with data plan.

2) Access Internet (and VOIP) only via VPN or better yet TOR.

3) Only give out your VOIP number. No one must know your direct number, it’s only for emergencies.

This severs all the important connections to make any use of that data, assuming you don’t have any leaks.
Is bitrot something the average hard drive user even needs to worry about? I know the hard drives themselves at the hardware level implement checksums. Is it really necessary to also have it at the filesystem level?

I am legitimately asking because I have a good 2TB of family photos on hard drives and spooky stories about random bits flipping freak me out.
Dissecting WebSocket's Overhead
The old-style meters didn't give the power company this data; they were read only monthly, not continually. The newer wireless ones do give full-time total watt-hour data.

However, the sole justifications for any of that is billing and planning of capacity. It is not necessary to those ends to have individual applicances report to any outside party (as the "smart home" fans keep enthusing about), and people can opt out of things like Nest thermostats and "smart" TVs.
On the topic of metric vs. otherwise, you may enjoy Matt Parker's "Guide to the Imperial Measurement System." [0] Matt Parker is an eminent stand-up mathematician, often featured on James May's excellent Number Hub series

0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk
They already have access to your banking data, they won't need your codes. They would probably be entitled to asking for your wallet password, yes.

Of course they can steal your stuff; it happens with physical evidence (fairly routinely, in many areas - do you really think all that sequestered ganja gets destroyed?), so it can happen with digital stuff too. There are laws and rules about this, but no physical impediment afaik.
I think the point the article is making is that Google has, in the past, made lots of "little" long-shot bets, (making up the $10+ billion/yr R&D you mention.) The Nest purchase is Google pushing a LOT of chips into consumer tech.
This was very interesting, thanks. Sorta-OT, I wonder if there's a modern equivalent of Vahalia's Unix Internals: The New Frontiers [1]?

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337378.UNIX_Internals
I remember the first time I installed m0n0wall on a p3 500Mhz in high school and being stunned how beautiful everything worked. Nowadays I mostly use PFSense or Vyatta.
Yeah, that is the one thing I would remove in this manifesto. References to "enterprise" as all sorts of companies are infected with this half-arsed agile mindset which is an insult to both agile and half-arses.
GCHQ giving the password is problematic when the case goes to court.

GCHQ have considerable computing power. That probably has weird costings. Thus the cost of 48 hours to run this task is possibly costed at some huge amount that police forces cannot afford unless they know it is a significant target with a spectacular result.
That is the logical implication.
As this story illustrates: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25745989
Its not the first time that this law has been used in the UK
My guess is many people on HN are happy with their ISP but you never hear from them :-)

I have 100/100 from xs4all.nl with no bandwidth cap whatsoever :-) (55€ / month and it includes spotify premium)
Ok so all wars are terrorism then? People getting shot or blown up or whatever is pretty terrifying IMO.

Seems to me like these guys were talking about guerrilla tactics against a military target. I don't think that's necessarily terrorism.
Be nice, polite, keen and humble.
"the key part is (trying) to create terror "

If people would just quit being afraid of this stuff, by definition, 'terror' wouldn't be created, would it?

Telling people the rapture will happen at 2:30pm tomorrow would in fact create terror in the minds/hearts of certain people. Are you a terrorist if you tell people that Jesus is coming back tomorrow afternoon?
Probably from the NSA itself, trying to do damage control through carefully controlled leaks that put them in a good light.

"New leak says NSA spies only on the bad guys".
Curious: Do these problems exist in other countries where even strong antibiotics are sold OTC?

I would guess not as bad, the culture in the US is to medicate immediately at first sign of illness. When I get sick, I try to just let it run it's course.
It's not about spying anymore, it's about actively working to diminish the security of the everybody to make their job easier.

* Would you accept that the US Government pays tech companies to install secret backdoors in operating systems, hardware, and apps? Windows, Android, iOS are all insecure by default -- and nothing is stopping foreign governments and private agents from taking advantage of these backdoors other than simple secrecy.

* Would you accept that the US Government infiltrates tech companies to install secret backdoors? Don't users (and the tech companies themselves) deserve to know that their hardware/software is being sabotaged? Nothing is stopping foreign governments and private agents from taking advantage of these backdoors other than simple secrecy.

* Would you accept that the US Government infiltrates security standards organizations to install secret backdoors? These security standards are implemented and accepted as high-quality and reasonably free of defects, and they're utilized for all forms of communication on the planet -- but they're rendered insecure for the convenience of the US Government. Nothing is stopping foreign governments and private agents from taking advantage of these insecurities other than simple secrecy.

The US Government is destroying the padlocks on everybody's doors, paying padlock companies to manufacture shitty locks, and infiltrating padlock companies to make sure only shitty locks get manufactured. This isn't just spying, it's malicious.

It's not purely 'gov on gov' anymore -- spying on your adversaries' population gives great insight into the internal political structure of their government. Economic espionage is the norm now, and the US Government is using every advantage it can get now (regardless of the legality).
Running ZFS for many years has shown, yes, this happens, and will continue to get worse as density goes up.
Single (yes, single) branch git workflow - how we do it
Because with a pendrive you can't even prove that the paper is there. It could literally be random data, and the police could be insisting that you give them a password.

If you did a full wipe of a pendrive with random data,and didn't create a filesystem, you would now have a device that could be used to incriminate you, even thought it really, really isn't encrypted. But you can't prove that.

So I guess that if I were to use your analogy, the police would look through your cabinet, find a few pieces of paper,and then demand that you tell them how to read that invisible ink that you used on the paper. What ink? - you might ask. But it's irrelevant, you can still go to jail for not telling, even though there really is no ink.
Ah, you're looking for Hacksaw News.

So… would a dialect of Ruby without side effects be called Corundum?
No. When you're managing someone, there is a status asymmetry that makes it okay. If on the other hand, a "mere" developer verified his manager's work, it would be perceived as rude.

In the case of countries, any such asymmetry is meant with resentment. It is fine that the US spies on, say, Iran? Then it means Iran has lower status than the US. Then it means that an Irani citizen (denizen?) is worth less than an American citizen. While we're at it, why don't we show what we're made up of? Knocking down a building or two should teach them a lesson…

It doesn't really matter that it is right or wrong to spy on another country. But it sure is dangerous, should you ever get caught.
>And yet they have very little to show for it

You mean they "possibly" have very little to show for. This article is about bugging other nations, not terrorists. There is a lot of value to the NSA if they can claim they thwarted a terrorist attack. However there is no value to the NSA to declare that they are actively monitoring, in theory, advancements in Chinese stealth research just to prove to the citizens the tax dollars are well spent.

Without knowing more about how the information was leaked and what was leaked there is no way to determine if this particular NSA activity was "worth it" or not.
The linked article was published last year, although the entire article body is copied from a 1996 NYT article titled "The Artificial Womb Is Born". Case closed...
Better design, but what are the security implications?
Does it also peeve you that the decimal system is based on the number of fingers we have? I can only assume you're being facetious -- I can't see any practical reason for wanting a system of measurements that isn't designed around the world we all live in.
F2FS sounds like a bit of a hack. It's basically a way to get performance out of the storage-provided flash translation layer that pretends the underlying storage isn't flash. It also doesn't have the fancy ZFS/btrfs features. I wonder if the COW that these do can be tuned to work well with flash devices.
Perhaps GCHQ had cracked it, got any info they could (in this case, nothing terrorist related), and then returned it feigning they couldn't crack it. That's what I'd do.
Not yet! :)
In the U.S. you can, under the threat of contempt of court, be forced to hand over keys to storage lockers, access to financial accounts, and things of that nature. Passwords are an unsettled issue in the U.S. On one hand, it's like furnishing the keys to a lockbox, which the police can compel you to do. On the other hand, it arguably involves testimonial actions, which the police cannot compel you to do.
Google Tweaks Guidance On Link Schemes
If you are really concerned about bitrot, and raid is apparently "not the solution", generate your own parity files for important stuff: http://parchive.sourceforge.net/#clients
I didn't claim they are smart in all things. I claimed they are smart in their own industry that they control.

But if you want to skip the rest of the response by claiming straw men without defending your claim then that's fine. Especially since you did it yourself with your "very few people are intelligent in all areas" comment. I was directly responding to your statements so I fail to see how the straw man fallacy applies. I did not present a distorted version of your position, I directly responded to it. But, who cares, it's only a discussion between strangers on the Internet. We're not creating world peace here.
I remember that there is a problem with a better definition of a kilogram: unlike metre and second that are defined through measurable physical constants, we use metallic prototype for kg. There were some attempts to define it as the mass of the precisely cut silicon sphere, but we still use the prototype.

Now the question to someone more knowledgeable in physics than me: if the described effort pans out, does that mean we can define kilogram as the mass that would accelerate at 1 m/s^2 if we apply the same force that affects two infinite wires one meter apart, with 1 ampere flowing through them?
Minimum hardware requirements: "This version (any platform) requires at least 128 MB RAM and a disk/CF size of 32 MB or more."

It's a shame this isn't portable to ARM systems, where $50-100 buys you much more than that. Buying a small, low power x86 system in quantity 1 raises the overall price significantly.
I could totally get behind calling something like this "coach".
SimpleScreenSharing: Easily integrate Screen Sharing into your website
I was worried that this would have to do with Doge....
In many ways this is actually good news: GCHQ couldn't crack the drive. As Snowden said, cryptography still works: trust the math. As long as you can bear the consequences (i.e. up to 2 years in jail if the Police thinks you're up to no good), you can safely save data that nobody else will ever read.
Or the fraud was to provide funds for terrorism as has been the case in a number of UK terrorist trials. Other UK based terrorists (PIRA and the UDA) are known to engage in criminal activities to fund themselves.
Yeah, I agree they shouldn't be tapping Angela Merkel's phone calls, and they shouldn't be using the national security apparatus to try to gain an advantage in EU trade negotiations or what have you.

But you better believe Russia, China, Iran, etc. are actively hacking (or attempting to hack) US assets.

And yes, I think this story is way too positive toward the NSA. The NYT is part of the mainstream establishment and generally kowtows to Washington.
I love this comment. Right on
The UK has had some really troubling miscarriages of justice related to terrorism. These were so bad they resulted in reform of the law and additional safeguards for suspects being questioned by police.

Police routinely misuse anti-terrorist laws to harass photographers, and this still happens despite the Met poloce issuing guidance to their officers about not harassing photographers.

People, especially terrorists, need due process of law.
I read a story (or a post?) a while back of how a guy used TaskRabbit.com (I guess you could get a group of your friends to do the same) to go to local flea markets and scope it out.

If you find it, you might be able to either buy it back or contact the police if you had it registered.

EDIT: https://www.taskrabbit.com/oakland-sf-bay-area/t/hit-east-ba...
I get 1/4 as the optimal value for f. Given a 500/500 win lose, then final money = (1-f)^500*(1+2f)^500 = (-2f^2+f+1)^500. To find the maximum, the ^500 is irrelevant. Differentiating and finding a gradient of 0 gives: -4f+1=0 or f=1/4. Just by checking values, it seems I need to lose more than 555 times before I finish with less then 1 billion. I'm not sure how to calculate the probability of that, your formula doesn't seem to work. In any case, the problem seems to be purely mathematical rather than requiring code to be written.
Lifestyles of the Young, Rich, and Homeless
The difference is Wikimedia doesn't pay for this benefit, the telcos are doing it because they support Wikimedia's mission. Any company with a similar mission and better execution has a chance of talking the telcos into a similar deal.

The argument is that the paid types of mobile partnerships add another cost onto the already high barrier to entry into the market. This supports monopolistic practices by these companies, and reduces competition in the industry. That's the problem with removing Net Neutrality.