skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Coinbase or BitPay losing their customers' money would be an existential threat to Bitcoin. MtGox? Not really.

If MtGox was still the massively dominant exchange that it once was, I would say that it would be at least an equal existential threat to BTC. To this point, BTC has survived (even thrived) without much use as a payment currency (relatively speaking). It's been more about trading.

So, to the extent that a MtGox failure is survivable for BTC, it's because there are now other exchanges with significant market share to support liquidity and trading activity until its use for payments takes hold (if ever).
This would be because the app is your default messaging app (Android 4.4+). If you want to remove SMS fallback, you need to set another app to act as your default SMS app.

There is actually an issue on github open about this: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/639
This seems implausible just on the face of it: that's almost a tenth of all Bitcoins created. How could they have lost that much and continued functioning at all? How could no one have noticed the bleeding in the blockchain? etc
The problem is, who on earth would have thought of printing to terminal would have a big penalty?
You don't need a card slot. If your device supports USB-OTG you can get one of these: http://www.meenova.com/st/p/m3r.html

Mine works great with my Nexus 7 (no root required thanks to Nexus Media Importer).
This is from last May. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5704574 for discussion.
Counterintelligence people are still allowed to look at the leaked documents, and (through the proper channels) make statements about them. It's the rank-and-file people who aren't supposed to look at this stuff, and that's mainly to avoid two things:

1) Disclosing additional information, or inadvertently attesting to the validity of documents. (obvious attack: release two plausible contradictory "top secret" documents" which cover the whole space you care about; when people discredit one, you have strong evidence of the latter.)

2) Complicating later CI investigations -- if MAJ Snuffy has downloaded wikileaks docs onto his personal laptop, and a scan finds a bunch of TS/NOFORNicate documents on it (heh), it will be a false positive. If SSG Evil wants to exfiltrate documents, she can just fill a laptop with wikileaks stuff and her own documents and then, if caught, claim it was just wikileaks downloads.

But CI investigators are allowed to touch this stuff. Just like some FBI people see child porn all the time (which has to be one of the shittiest jobs in infosec).
try "sync"
Large parts of Manhattan are another example. Small apartments, in huge apartment blocks producing deep urban canyons that let little light reach the windows... and yet some of the most expensive real estate in the country.
I would rather eat a live wriggling cockroach than attend RSA or, for that matter, be in the same city as RSA.

I don't understand where you're even coming from regarding Hastings. He had a history of abusing drugs and alcohol. His car crashed. A bunch of Internet conspiracy theorists decided that crashed cars don't burst into flames the way video showed Hastings car had, even as other Internet people, including (here on HN) an EMT, pointed out that they actually do exactly that surprisingly often; some even presented videos. The LA Coroner released a report that pointed out Hastings had amphetamines and cannabis in his system when his car crashed.

From where, exactly, do you get the notion that he received a threatening phone call? Is there any evidence anywhere at all that that ever happened, or does it just make for a good story?
In this case TextSecure has end-to-end encryption, and supposedly even hides metadata when using the push service (which is hosted on Google Push Framework). Feel free to check the source yourself, or take Moxie's word on it, but I think their "track record" is a bit cleaner overall, regardless of the acquisition of WhisperSystems by Twitter.
‘Smart quotes’ are actually more typographically ‘correct’; that key on your keyboard is a prime symbol which is NOT the same as an apostrophe or a single quote mark. Apart from reducing ambiguity, they also look a lot nicer (in decent fonts), particularly at larger font sizes. I cringe when I see a prime (or ‘straight quote’) symbol being misused on TV or in print.
What was suspected about government abuse of power turns out to have been nothing compared to the scope of it.

Here are some of my suggestions in response:
1. Stand up on mass, digitally and in person, for what you believe in - don't shy from people sneering or judging that you are distrustful of the existing structures of powers.
2. Exclude the people who support this type of spookery, from investment bankers, to hawking politicians, from polite company. Whether you meet them at a party, or a plane, shun and shame them.
3. Crank up the noise. Write, make, do what you can to get more stuff out there.
4. Don't be singular. Be the complexity.
5. Never believe again. Demand evidence, oversight, & review processes. Demand transparency.
6. Commit to fixing what's broken. Fix the drug wars, fix the election system, fix the income inequalities, fix the racial divide. etc.
7. ? what else?

ps. Any obligatory comments about the obligatory NSA jokes?
What software did you use for those pretty charts?
Icahn hits out at Andreessen over eBay role
I am torn between wanting to up vote this comment in honor of Wilson and other associated Popes and wanting to down vote it because it contributes nothing and distracts from the various crimes highlighted in the article.

Have Karl Koch and a downvote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker)
Damn, I'll have to eat my words...

In an earlier hn post, I actually suggested that if you use a name that's common enough, like David Fricken Jones, the US would never have the guts to flag it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240983

But here we are. David Jones... Not a lot of people affected by that, huh.
Do note that those emails were all talk. Other than the failed attempt to expose the "leadership" of Anonymous, none of Barr's big plans were even tried, let alone successfully carried out. His own employees (all two of them) mocked him and refused to participate. Aaron Barr was one guy, dealing with a failed marriage and a failing company, and he just lost the plot there for a bit.
Assuming for a moment the leak is accurate, the document could be a memo from an organization like the bitcoin Foundation that has been leaked from within Mt Gox. I didn't get the impression that MG management were necessarily the authors of the document.
Ruining someone's reputation is not something only a government could do. Companies with enough money and a few (black-hat) SEO experts might be able to pull a large-scale reputation-kill to anyone who is an upcoming competitor or a pain-in-the-ass person. Small-scale reputation hacks happen all the time. What the heck, there is an industry where you can pump your own reputation up legally.

So the question is: how can we protect ourselves from any of these efforts (may or may not be coming from a government)?
I'm talking about from MY or YOUR perspective. Let's first set up the stage:

-Snowden hands you paper/digital files, possibly with no trail that you can verify (besides govt. acknowledgment of any specific document)

- You (likely) immediately make (many) digital copies, this is a trail others can verify later - like with an md5 sum or something (not my forte, obviously).

- Before you assist with releasing the whole cache and risk another wikileaks-style attack for not being more sensitive to the content in each document, you start the long process of reviewing each document.

- You find acceptable publications

- You publish the documents from step 2 (which have a digital trail to verify they were handed to GG from Snowden at the time they say they were)

That last step hasn't happened as far as I know, we're getting pictures of documents...
This is most likely an attempt to manipulate the market. Not only are they suggesting Mt Gox is insolvent, but Bitcoin's existence is threatened.
I just meant he might have been driving even worse than usual due to (founded or unfounded paranoia). Or meth. Or both.

(I recall reading somewhere that he was convinced someone was monitoring him. But I suspect occam's razor in this case was being used to cut up lines.)
Intel tempts IoT hackers with free Galileo SBCs, prizes
There are terminals that do word wrapping?

Well, I shouldn't be surprised... There are people who try to code with a proportional font too, so I guess anything is possible, though it may not make sense to me.
If you RTFA, calling out someone was a tin foil hatter is one of their techniques.
No, which is why they have separate keys on my keyboard, unlike smartquotes, so I can always easily specify exactly which I want.

Also nobody magically switches my parentheses around out from under me.
Once again, let's not go overboard.

This is real, but so is companies just having people online who naturally do these things. God knows you can't poke Google around too much without a Googler making an impassioned plea for them. Same goes for Facebook, or any of the other large SV employers.

And then there's just fans. Seems like I remember Amazon coming to the conclusion, after digging through spurious bad reviews of products, that many of them were just from people who had other brands and didn't like that one. So they made up fake reviews. That's not some mysterious spy agency; that's the guy who runs the garage down the street.

And that's why these things are so effective -- they blend into the noise that is the crap that is the internet at large.

I'm concerned about this in general, but I need more information about how this is being used as part of an extra-judicial punishment before I start bouncing off the walls.
Wolfram started a startup and put his name on the door and it has been incredibly successful. No story about Wolfram appears on HN without someone complaining about his ego. Perhaps he is the Mohammed Ali of programming.
How many people in the 1950s could really comprehend what 128 GB is? You'd have to resort to terrible Library of Congresses or Volkswagen full of core memory analogies.
> At EFF, we’re often asked the question: Why should anyone care about surveillance in other countries?

> Here’s answer #645: The contractor that secretly sells electronic surveillance products in one country may also be secretly and illegally influencing elections in yours.

Foreign banana dealers could also be secretly and illegally influencing elections in my country. Does this mean that I should start caring about foreign banana markets?

Or is the EFF tacitly saying that secret and illegal foreign influence on elections in my country is only a concern if the people doing them are not nice?
All the advances in CNC machining systems are published on the internet. And there is some degree of self replicating capability in them (basically you can machine the parts yourself, and fine-tune the design by hand to get a machine of better capability than the previous one).
A rendering thread can stop for ms once a second.
I suppose if it happened over a long enough time and Gox's accounting system was truly terrible they could have just thought they were experiencing a bank run.

But yeah, I'm very skeptical.
JamSheets: Thin Interfaces with Tunable Stiffness Enabled by Layer Jamming
The Mt. Gox alleged insolvency document has been posted
From what Schneier and others have published, the documents are being handled in an offline "data room" way. You do have to trust both Snowden and some subset of {Greenwald, Poitras, Unindicted co-conspirators in Berlin}, but I don't see any particular reason not to do so in this case.
The Hate and Vitriol of WordPress
Sadly this article doesn't mention the early ARM-based desktop computers Acorn produced: the Archimedes series (ARM 2, 3, StrongARM) and the RISC PC (ARM 600/700). They were instrumental in shaping me to be the developer I am today.
Value is relative.

I mean, would you like some Browlcoin for only $75? That's about 30% less than what BTC is going for on Mt Gox, so I think you'd be mad not to cash on this opportunity. Available for a limited time only, email me for more details :-)
Your Engineers Can't Save You
So, you've spent enough effort studying the details of the Michael Hastings case that you can actually conclude the conspiracy angle is so outlandish that it can even be used as a reliable indicator of a broken general reasoning process? That is a mighty strong claim, and I'm surprised that the quality of evidence is high enough to support it and that you were so interested in it.

I haven't, and don't really have feelings on the case either way - it seems inactionable and thus uninteresting. But it seems to me that the reasonable uninvolved opinion should be to treat views on Michael Hastings's death as unindicative of much else at all.
The question one day may devolve to: how can we use these techniques in reverse?
According to this logic, is asking whether this is a java problem also off topic, because it's not a java problem? So you have to know the answer to know if the question is on topic. Great rules.
There is no source or link to the actual slides. They might be authentic but this site might also be doing the very thing they claim the agencies are doing. Its essentially a blog with some slides with "top secret" written all over it with damning information.

No source, no link, nothing.
If I'm dreaming, the ideal outcome of this would be that Springer and IEEE decide to actually apply some kind of scrutiny to the conferences whose proceedings they publish under their names. It's a pretty poorly kept secret that, while they publish some stuff that's top work in several fields, they also publish some total crap that is so bad it's inconceivable someone actually competent has spent even 20 minutes vetting it. But they seem not to care a lot. They (especially the IEEE) are coasting on a name produced through some good work over the years. Much of that reputation is well deserved, but you can only shove so much junk into IEEE Xplore before it loses the cachet it built up in previous years. If they don't shape up, it will reduce the attractiveness of IEEE and Springer for people publishing actually good work as well. Why affiliate your legitimate conference with publishers who have no quality control? The IEEE in particular is a nonprofit organization which is supposed to have a mission to advance engineering, so it's particularly problematic that it wouldn't be doing a better job.
US Proxy not working?
This is quite the deja vu: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/

As I remembered it, their "fake" (automatically generated) paper was accepted into a conference. They then tried to submit a second paper that was also auto-generated, and that's when they got caught. I may be confusing the two stories, though.

In any case, it's very easy to generate your own postmodern gibberish papers - every time you visit this page, it refreshes with a new one: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
You were working on an SF2 clone with.. Rob something? The guy who made Fluff... right? Lethal Moves or something? (sorry 19 years ago)
This reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head
Here is a reason one might ethically believe Greenwald should be thwarted: because they believe that Greenwald is deeply dishonest, making up details about stories in order to fill in the gaps of his narrative and reporting them as if they were facts, so that half the Internet now believes that Google, the one big Internet company known to have actually invested real resources in opposing dragnet surveillance, is instead in league with the NSA, and instead of using Google Mail we should all support incompetent kooks like Ladar Levison.

Now, some important caveats:

(1) It is obviously possible to unethically thwart any writer's agenda. Publishing things you know to be untrue, even in the service of what you believe is a higher truth, is unethical; it's exactly what someone might accuse Greenwald of having done. For that matter, invading Greenwald's privacy by, I don't know, stealing his bank records would also be deeply unethical. But Palantir hasn't been accused of either of these, or, for that matter, anything else unethical w/r/t Greenwald. Feel free to enlighten me here.

(2) If you can't tell, I'm not a major Greenwald fan. Having said that, I also believe the best antidote for bad speech is good speech, so orchestrating a campaign to suppress him doesn't seem like a good strategy to me. It apparently sounded like a good idea to one of Palantir's SEs, which ended up getting the guy fired.
Or maybe perl backend examples?
Since the source document is from GCHQ (Britain's NSA, if you like) it seems valid to ask whether similar workarounds by internationalisation are in place for disinfo (which this manifestly is about, right?) as seem to be in place for collection.

Which is to say that US netizens are quite likely among the prime targets here.

The practices alluded to - a battery of psychological techniques designed to influence group dynamics of, and disrupt the sharing of information by, online communities - seem at least as suitable for controlling dissent as for action against overtly illegal activities. How does destroying the reputation of a company help with the latter, for example?

I'll tell you what though, fascinating though this is, I wish we had got the 'real poop' - materials which must surely exist for the training alluded to, fleshing out the practical details, with illustrative examples!
"Update on Mt. Gox: This document appears to be authentic"

http://two-bit-idiot.tumblr.com/post/77760399932/update-on-m...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S...
Well played.

Also: are you seriously telling me you haven't read Robert Anton Wilson? You seem like, I don't know, the type.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...
Ask HN: Dream job emails back shortly after accepting "very good" job. Thoughts?
In October of last year, I applied to a handful of companies, one of them was something of a stretch (Game dev, where my background is systems coding/sysadmin work), but would involve working on a project I'm both professionally and personally crazy about. Over the last 5 months I sent 2-3 queries as to the status of my application, I got through their round 1 within a week of my initial app, but then complete radio silence. There was a time sensitive offer from another company (pick your favorite Google/Facebook/MS style bigCO) which I chose to accept (legitimately an interesting position, and certainly be a positive career move); I signed my paperwork, have begun talking to my team, and accepted my signing bonus.

Within the last few days,(a month after accepting ), I heard back from the "dream job", saying they wanted me to have a formal interview. I had, on accepting the bigCo offer, sent an email announcing this to the other companies I had been pursuing, but apparently this went into the same black hole as the other emails.

This puts me in something of a strange position. I feel in some ways compelled to continue at bigCo; call it my personal programming to finish something I set myself to full stop. That being said, I worry that I may be turning down something I could be passionate about for pragmatism. (And how do I even know, passion or not, that it would be a good fit? after all, 5 months completely incommunicado doesn't bode well.)

There's also the option of taking the interview to "test the water" and be better prepared for future such positions, (and for the one in a million chance that they throw me an offer I can't refuse...), but I worry that I'd wasting their time for what is frankly a long shot (given bigCo).

Far past rambling at this point, thanks for bearing with me, any thoughts would be welcome on how to handle this professionally.
Good points.

Another issue which I hadn't considered until talking with a 50-ish homeless guy recently was language. His first (and only) language is English and while he was picking up work at a temp agency (and sleeping on their front doorstep) not being able to speak Spanish and communicate with co-workers in the class of work he was going for (hotel cleaning, dishwashing, landscaping, demolition, etc.) prevented him from getting/keeping a lot of jobs...
There are many wonderful characters that don't have their own individual keys on your keyboard. Heck, there are a lot of characters that require at least one meta key to be pressed in combination with another key, and single quote marks are accessible in exactly that way on my keyboard too (Mac, YMMV).

And, yes, autocorrect can be a PITA, especially when it's not actually getting things correct, but that's a different, albeit related, issue. We should really refer to quote marks, or apostrophe (which are often rendered as curly, and are the characters that autocorrect switches to), and the prime symbol (which is the unadulterated character that you get with the non-meta-pressed key on your keyboard), rather than using the term 'smart quotes'.
Many individuals grew suddenly rich. A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and, one after the other, they rushed to the tulip marts, like flies around a honey-pot. Every one imagined that the passion for tulips would last for ever, and that the wealthy from every part of the world would send to Holland, and pay whatever prices were asked for them. The riches of Europe would be concentrated on the shores of the Zuyder Zee, and poverty banished from the favoured clime of Holland. Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, seamen, footmen, maidservants, even chimney sweeps and old clotheswomen, dabbled in tulips.

- Charles Mackay, Extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds
Also complimentary for Gigabyte U2442s with 128gb and their xHDDs, since 14" Gigabytes have dual air venting systems with GPUs able to play Titanfall decently.
The Stasi has done the exact same thing, it's called "Zersetzung". http://www.ddr-wissen.de/wiki/ddr.pl?MfS-Richtlinie_1-76
Paul Graham Keynote at Launch
I enjoy the proposed April 1st date of relaunch...

Should be noted that at the time of this document release, all trading on MtGox is shutdown.
Mobile security threat trends report reveals explosive growth in android malware
Which programming language?
The actual PDF mentioned in the article has now been posted here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S...
That's as much as I have on my retina.
Since this appears to be the basis of the notion that Palantir is a branch of the NSA: the one Palantir person known to have been involved was a 27 year old sales engineer who was subsequently terminated from the company and rehired after the legal investigation Palantir launched on itself for coming within a mile of Aaron Barr cleared him. (This is based on reporting of what happened, not any kind of firsthand knowledge about Palantir, of which I have none).
As a contrasting anecdote: I've got an otherwise satisfactory shared living setup right now, but the fact that I can hear everything -- and hear everything well, especially conversation in the kitchen, footfalls on the main staircase adjacent to one wall, and footfalls in the room above mine -- essentially means I'm unable to sleep when and for as long as I choose (and often not getting as much sleep as I need). It's pretty common for +30db impulses to find their way through my walls and ceiling.

My options for fixing this problem seem to be moving, invest in soundproofing for a property I don't own, or somehow get a significant behavior modification program to take sustained root among 9 other people (some under 8 years of age).

All of them suck, but I'm leaning toward the first one.
Here's How Facebook Employees *Really* Feel About The WhatsApp Acquisition