skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What kind of access are you assuming the attacker has here? Modifying the ciphertext stored with Dropbox?

Evil Maid attacks that I've heard described before typically involved modifying (unencrypted and unauthenticated) bootloaders or kernels, rather than FDE ciphertext, although I realize that's not part of the definition of the attack.
Github is not your resume, no matter how many blogs tell you it is.
Just because things have worked out in the past doesn't mean they always will. Despair might actually be the correct response: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-th...
I know PHP isn't a favorite around here, but it still accounts for (what was recently) a majority of all web apps that use Facebook. We built a more modern implementation, using newer language features, and have big plans for it.
For comparison, wikipedia's list of causes of death ranked by frequency:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...
I got to play with these in Afghanistan. They were installed in our SUVs but they were so huge and unwieldy. I'd be interested in seeing what setup he had. Unless the traffic was very dense and slow, I'd imagine him just forcing calls to be dropped as he passed by which doesn't really seem helpful. Restaurants/theaters/anywhere-there-be-tweens, yeah bring it on in those locales!
Actually Ripple's consensus algorithm can be used for a variety of different applications, the ones you would think to build using Bitcoin's blockchain. Because Ripple solves the double-spending problem without the need of mining [1].

The main thing that Bitcoin adds is of course the democratic distribution of coins based on hashing power. But if you don't intend to use "blockchain technology" as a currency, then Ripple may very well serve your needs.

1. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7550/how-does-rip...
> The main feature that we can’t get anywhere else is Street View, something that nobody has come close to replicating.

Some people are working on it http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapillary ;)
(but yes right now not an alternative)
If a website loads the javascript facebook API on their site, and you're logged into facebook in general, they know who you are and what page you were on when the script was loaded whether you give the site permission or not.

When the http request is made to facebook, they get their domain cookie back which has your user info in it. On top of that, when their javascript runs they get full access to all the data of the window that made the request meaning they get the other site's cookie as well absolutely everything else.

If you don't want to be tracked by facebook online, you only have a few options. Disable cookies, disable javascript, or only login to facebook in an incognito window. Otherwise, they can track exactly who you are and where you go on any site that makes any request to facebook. Even still, if any request is made to facebook, they can still anonymously track you even if you aren't logged in.

As for apps, I don't think the facebook api would be able to find out the specific usage of the app unless the app purposefully gave it up, although they would know when you login.
But to succeed as a currency, it needs to encourage people to spend.
> I don't want to sign in with Facebook full stop. I really agree that you shouldn't force people to use a third party service to sign in.

You and parent are both thinking that it is Facebook's fault that third-party service providers are offering FB login.

Is it FB's fault that your favorite website is only accepting user comments unless you login with a FB account? No!

FB has done its good part. I am not here to argue with you or anyone about whether FB is respecting users' privacy and security demand. But now FB gives developers a new login option so that a site can allow users to do something like leaving a blog comment without revealing personal information such as name to the website. FB has done its good part as a platform.

If your website only offers facebook as the only option, that is not FB's fault. Should a website offer more login options? Why are services related to programming and source code usually come with a twitter or github login option instead of facebook? Because nowadays programmers tend to have a Github (or Bitbucket) account.

So why so much negativity around this new feature?
By providing you an alternative store of value that isn't controlled by a handful of people in government.

Look at Zimbabwe Dollars or the Weimar Republic. There's no reason that can't happen in any other country and Bitcoin provides an alternative to government issued currencies or any other currency.

Edit: downvote for ...?
This is an excellent summary of the Octane Fitness decision. I'll quote two bits of relevant language that lay out the standards the Supreme court has established.

"Under the standard announced today, a district court may award fees in the rare case in which a party's unreasonable conduct-while not necessarily independently sanctionable-is nonetheless so 'exceptional' as to justify an award of fees." (Slip. Op. at 5).

"Something less than 'bad faith,' we believe, suffices to mark a case as 'exceptional.'" (Slip. Op. at 6).

In other words, the court interpreted section 285 to allow fee-shifting in cases that are not so weak that the court would be justified in sanctioning the plaintiffs under Rule 11 for pursuing a frivolous claim, or in cases where plaintiffs use tactics that do not quite rise to the level that would be sanctionable for bad faith.

However, the Court did not give as much guidance to lower courts as one might have hoped. The Court stated that a case that is weak to a degree short of "sanctionable" may be the subject of fee shifting. It has not said how much stronger than "sanctionable" a case can be before awarding fees is an abuse of discretion on the part of the District Court. This is a question that will probably be raised to and resolved by the Federal Circuit in the coming years.
Two words: Mt Gox.

In April 2013, Mt Gox handled 70% of bitcoin trading [1] - they were a widely trusted, well known brand, operating in a stable legislative environment.

Coinbase today has what Mt Gox had a year ago.

Admittedly, coinbase also has some VC investors. If you believe, should they be hacked or robbed by an insider, that the VCs are going to throw good money after bad to compensate customers, you are much more optimistic than I am.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2013/11/mtgox/all/
It's also worth pointing out that you are probably incurring significant fees when converting from your native currency into bitcoin.

In addition, if you are holding bitcoins with the expectation that they will actually appreciate (i.e. the currency will deflate rather than inflate) you are effectively losing money by spending it, further discouraging you from engaging in the transaction.

Krugman has enjoyed making this point a few times:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/golden-cyberfett...
Every developer is a potential crypto designer. Alas, quite a few of them turn out to actually design crypto. Not everyone is reading HN. ;-)
This view is so childish it is only taken seriously by those who already agree with it.

> Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered

But not before many types of whale were nearly wiped out, and may yet go extinct.

> or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along,

What? Fertilizers have been known for centuries. Modern fertilizers are hardly a panacea. They come with costs of their own.

> or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.

This has nothing to do with any of the other arguments, and demand for copper is still high enough that people are stripping it out of vacant buildings via breaking and entering. Risking injury, jail time and even death.

> But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.

It's pretty obvious if you look objectively at the data that "much harm" has already been done.

This blog post is the epitome of biased garbage.
You think the geopolitical relationship between us and OPEC countries would be different if only we paid in Euros?

We invaded Iraq over that threat.
There's risk associated with every investment, and there are plenty of other arenas in which you can lose all of your money in an eyeblink (for example: a single-drug pharmaceutical company with a drug undergoing FDA approval; the outcome is almost binary).

I've been thankful to have experienced the highs and lows of bitcoin -- it's been a tumultuous introduction to the internal psychology of investing. The key to my bitcoin-related happiness was to never play with more than I could afford to lose. If the price goes to zero today, I'll still be thankful for the many lessons I've learned.
This is absolutely accurate.

"People were generally aware of the link between overuse of antibiotics and increased resistance. Only 8% of respondents did not agree that if antibiotics are taken too often they are less likely to work in the future. But many people (43%) incorrectly believed that antibiotics were effective in viral conditions."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1934431/
You have no idea what you're talking about. Bitcoin has value as a remittance network, especially internationally, your argument is trivially invalid.
Comet 209P/Linear – May 2014 – Meteor storm of the Century
Odd because one of the benefits of Bit Coin is lower transaction fees that what credit card companies charge.

One would think businesses would really like this and promote it.
The Promises/A+ assumption that you'd never want a Promise to return a Promise is really shortsighted.
You're still talking about insider trading, and not HFT. What, in the context of this discussion, would you ban?
It’s important to understand that the default price pressure of the bitcoin ecosystem is down.

Only if you assume demand is static. With a mathematically-fixed supply, expanding global population, and the supposed inherently inflationary nature of fiat currencies, the default price pressure should arguably be upward. Let's face it, a great number of the early adopters are digital goldbugs with a jaundiced view of central banking. Like many quasi-political demographics, I think they overestimated the popularity of their viewpoint.

I do agree about the significance of the blockchain as a technical innovation...up to a point. Last time I looked at the dogecoin blockchain it was some multi-gigabyte monsters that I need to move off my boot drive sooner rather than later.
While Venus' atmosphere is worth study, due to the theory that it underwent some sort of hyperactive climate change a few billion years ago, there are limits to the comparison:

- Venus is about 3/4 the distance from the Sun as Earth.

- Venus has slow, retrograde rotation that leaves a given portion of the surface exposed to the Sun for 56 Earth days at a time.

- Venus has no magnetic field, which causes the loss of water vapor and other light gases due to the solar wind
The device token solution doesn't allow logging into the same account from multiple devices. It is not equivalent.
I deleted to rewrite some point. See above.

Let me re-emphasize. That's the point you and parent are not trying to let go. FB has no part in saying sites must use us. It is a platform. If you don't want your site to offer FB login, then don't. People out there want to use it and appreciate every new bit of privacy added to fb login, great.
They're (cellular frequency jammers) down to the size of a cigarette pack, and can run off 12V aux power in your car. Range isn't terribly great (~100ft).

Examples: http://www.phonejammer.com/home.php?cat=249

Mods: I posted the link (which was the first google result for "cell phone jammer") just to show what the size and cost was. If it needs to be removed, please feel free to remove my comment in its entirety.
Only if you notice and report it, people get skimmed all the time and never notice.
> the worst case is that the antibiotic period breeds superbugs that are both more virulent and harder to kill than those that came before.

If anything, antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria would generally be less fit in a world without antibiotics. E.g., sulfa drugs inhibit DHPS which is involved in producing what eventually becomes formic acid. Bacteria can resist sulfonamides by eliminating their dependence on DHPS, but then they depend on folic acid being present in their environment, and it won't always be available in human blood.
Good analysis. I like to think that it's a bit like investing in a vehicle that may or may not be a ponzi scheme. It's worked so far, but that doesn't mean you bet the house on it.
It's pretty easy to measure bounce rate though. If you see a correlation between increased signups and decreased bounce rate, that can tell you something. Also, you should be measuring newsletter signups from the pop-up and newsletter signups through other metrics. If the other metrics drop, you might not be getting users who are actually invested and will stay long-term.

Hopefully they measure unsubscribes as well and will see a lack of long-term engagement.

Edit: I got the pop-up when I was halfway through the article (or seemed like I was halfway through, I might have been almost done) when the pop-up covered the entire screen. It was so obnoxious that I closed it instantly. I don't even know what the end point of the article was or where they were going with it. One moment I was reading something about what data is in LinkedIn CSV files, and the next boom and the window was closed.
90%? Where do you get that statistic?
Yes, some people argue that your tests are more like a specification, so imagine that every feature would have tests. Some even argue for specifying things like constants, which runs contrary to what Martin says in this article.

Overkill, IMHO, but tests have their place.

I tend to look at it now as test stuff that's being used often or stuff that may break easily when I'm making changes. At a certain point, automation of key tests make sense if you're wasting too much time manually testing.
Only if you notice and report are you protected, many don't.

You're arguing against cash, cash doesn't need defending.
The larger population might also mean more smart people to make even more money.
Unfortunatly it killed my browser (Chrome latest) on my macbook, but nice project!
Python implementation of Stripe's description of their event processing system.
I watched Greg Brockman's talk about how Stripe used MongoDb for processing events [1] and thought the emphasis on clean syntax and flexibility was nice, so I tried to implement it myself.
Do you know if there are any effective forensic attacks in use against the TRESOR design?

(I was one of the authors of the cold boot paper at USENIX Security, but I haven't followed the subsequent history of attacks and defenses very consistently.)
Erm, isn't it getting a bit meta to have a post to respond to the comments on HN for a previous post of yours? Surely, that is exactly what the HN comments are for?
I watched Greg Brockman's talk about how Stripe used MongoDb for processing events [1] and thought the emphasis on clean syntax and flexibility was nice, so I tried to implement it myself.

I'm looking for feedback from anyone who has deployed something like this in the wild. There's only about 200 lines of code in the whole library, I'm wondering if this will actually do what I intend it to do, of if there are a million gotcha's waiting for me. Thanks in advance.

[1] http://www.mongodb.com/presentations/theres-monster-my-close...
Just Get On With It
Seriously, stop sitting on your ass all day and just get on with it already
Alexa Redesign
At the bottom of your posts (or whatever), have a blurb saying 'if you'd like to see more content like this, consider signing up to…' etc.

If I visit your site and I only get halfway through the first paragraph before something pops up blocking my view, then best case I close the pop-up without reading it, and typical case I close the window entirely and go read something else.

It's much faster for me to hit Cmd-W than it is for me to interact with your pop-up/lightbox at all.
"it would be nice to have cookbooks that were coordinated with each state's ..."

That sounds like a computationally difficult, yet possible, "hard" problem. Sounds very "start-uppy" to me.

We already have book-on-demand, more or less, we need content-on-demand, and it sounds like an interesting startup.

I want a "upper-midwest" "cost is not much of a concern" "paleo-ish" hypercustomized cookbook. So given my tags a hundred or so recipes his the B-O-D printer and its under my christmas tree. My sister in law on the other hand is Kale Krazy so her tags would be similar region of the country, and every recipe must contain Kale, and like my son she's medically allergic to soy so cross all of those out, and she likes Dancing with the Stars (well, there's no accounting for taste) so thats where the background art in the cookbook will come from. And a hypercustomized B-O-D printer squirts out a cookbook for her under the christmas tree.

If its a success, I could see major publishers getting "interested" in turning it into a division of their own as an exit strategy.

Sounds easy to screw up and difficult to get right. Got startup written all over it.
IPHONE saves "frequent locations".
It doesn't need to succeed as a currency to succeed.
This is what happens when users are screaming "I want my privacy back" and you are stuck between corporate goals of monetizing users and user experience.
>A blockchain is only useful if it is heavily secured by hashing power.

Ripple consensus keeps a distributed database in sync without requiring mining. And the network's security has no correlation to the amount of hashing power involved. (There's no 51% attack on Ripple)

I actually think PoW based systems, because of the 51% attack, present an extremely undesirable amount of systemic risk for broad adoption in the financial system.
New Pricing at Parse
This is indeed a problem. If there is an event which causes the extinction of humanity, then by definition we will not find a parallel event in the past to use for prediction. Yet to conclude that humanity will never go extinct is ridiculous. It's only going to happen once.

There's also another problem from the opposite direction. Resources have run out plenty of times. Entire civilizations have collapsed because they could no longer sustain themselves, because they used up something important and couldn't find more or come up with a substitute.

Yes, peak oil now could end up being like peak stone in the stone age, where there's plenty of it and we move on to better things well before we run out.

But peak oil now could also be like peak forest on Easter Island, which resulted in the collapse of civilization there.

I don't see anything in this article beyond naked hope for why peak oil must follow the former path rather than the latter. Yes, the history of resource exhaustion is extremely optimistic if you ignore all the times when it led to disaster, but that doesn't tell me anything.
If your specialty is getting things perfect (almost) every time, and you are competing in an arena where the other people only have to keep trying until they get it right once, then you are going to have a bad day.

The comparison with live and recorded performances is spot on. There's probably a reason the major "live" performances of popular musicians are pre-recorded.

There may be a lesson here for those who are spending years perfecting technical skills when your competition are taking three-month bootcamps.
Facebook is not trying to satisfy you. It is trying to satisfy its users.
I also have considered cancelling my account. The amount of SPAM, even setting every profile option to 'no email' is absurd sometimes.

That said, I had lost track of an old friend and he just pinged me to join his network. So, at least for now, there is some value.
Integrate phpunit with deploydo
Google Launches New iOS Apps for Google Docs and Sheets
> If someone gets access to your bitcoin wallet or whatever storage mechanism you are using fails, then that money is gone forever with no way to recover it.

Keep in mind that you're comparing two different markets in terms of maturity. One day, there may be a number I can call too when my bitcoin goes missing.

I'm sure people made similar arguments before e-commerce. Surely it had to seem easier to just buy a product in a physical store, with cash, with absolutely no risk of stolen credit card information on this new thing known as Internet. No issues with shipping and you can actually see the product in store. Things have changed and people are no longer as reluctant to shop online.

As interest in new areas grow, so do opportunities for business. You may not be an early adopter of Bitcoin in the way many weren't with e-commerce in the early days, but it doesn't mean it can't happen because one is easier today.
Is there any hard data as to the quality of Google Maps versus OSM?
Google has good lawyers, and their terms are both brief and written in plain English with no "fine print".

It doesn't matter how many lawyers they've got. For one thing, in most places in the West, if you're in a small claims court or the equivalent then professional lawyers probably won't be allowed. And if your case is large enough to be heard in full court, it's worth hiring your own lawyer, and they're going to drive a pretty obvious hole through any contract of adhesion where the terms are essentially "We can decide arbitrarily that you're in violation and thus refuse to hold up our end of the deal".

...none of them have invalidated the contract in a courtroom thus far AFAIK...

Are you familiar with the case of Aaron Greenspan?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bot...

The key facts as reported appear to be that he did take them to small claims court after they shut down his account and wouldn't explain why, and he won. They then appealed, and they won, but only after identifying two specific ways in which they considered one of his sites did violate their terms (at least one of which is explicitly identified in the wording they use today, though I don't know whether either or both was at the time) which is all he was asking for in the first place.

Net result: Google were probably out far more in time and money than he was, and got a healthy dose of bad press for their behaviour throughout. The lawyers might call it a win, but I bet neither the accountants nor the PR guys did.
Holding USD is the standard way people in emerging markets prevent savings from losing value.
Certainly a terrible idea on every level, but I can't help but sympathize with the intent.

Too much of the public simply aren't responsible about driving and there doesn't seem to be any good way to identify and prevent or penalize them for it.
Must man destroy everything?
46 Ways to Start a Business Without Money
Well, yeah, that is how you do science, actually.
Remember, if it was actually anonymous, you wouldn't need Facebook's help to implement it.

- Exactly and I don't even bother signing with Facebook account anymore with most of the apps, Facebook apps are way of the past.
Building 2048 Game of Thrones Edition
“Abdullah’s Sword”
My impression that the biggest domestic market for these is hotel operators, who secret them around the premises to force their customers to be gouged by the hotel phone.

EDIT: reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/business/07jamming.html?_r...

There is disagreement about whether this actually happens in the US; seems to be more evidence for it in the UK.