skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I do understand the situation the law enforcement is dealing with, it is not an excuse to not allow us to have complete privacy and full encryption support on our digital devices. Nobody including governments has any rights to have any access to my personal data. If I don't share it with anybody, it's mine just as my personal thoughts in my head.

I agree with what Apple is doing and I want them to do more. There are still some remaining holes that need to be closed up and all users should be encouraged to enable 2FA with the mandated switch in a few years.
Do you know about Modern Portfolio Theory and Capital Asset Pricing Model?

Granted, they don't refer to "uncertainty" exactly, but rather about quantifiable risk in the form of volatility. Also, the key word is "returns" (not exactly profits, but roughly the ratio of total profits over the initial investment). Basically, while investors have different levels of risk tolerance, a rational investor requires higher expected returns for higher expected risks.

While a lot of researchers have been questioning the validity of MPT and CAPM (because these e.g. rely on a lot of questionable assumptions), empirically the answer to your question seems to be "yes". Small cap stocks historically have higher returns than large cap stocks, and tech stocks have higher returns than utilities.
That's not the original, of course: Carlos is a notoriously active sender of YouTube takedown requests.
I think you're being a little harsh. S/he was listing things that are not essential to a college education. The second point is referring to a different type of college education - one that obviously needs the internet since it would exist on the internet.

Also, Wifi != internet access. You can get to the internet without Wifi.
Really useful library and great visualizations. I'm having flashbacks to my CS algorithm analysis class.
Is this actually new in iOS 8? I thought this has been the design of iMessage from the beginning -- namely that Apple does not have the decryption keys.

What Apple does have is the directory of recipient public keys that your device should use to encrypt its messages. (Background: iMessage encrypts each message separately for every recipient device, which shows just how far Apple went to protect key security. Not only does Apple not have the keys, private keys never have to be exchanged among devices ever.)

But technically speaking -- I have no idea if they actually do this -- that gives them a way to insert a "wiretap" of sorts in the form of an additional, silent recipient that you don't know about. Think of it as adding another device to your iCloud account, only it's not yours. Still, this could at least be discovered by monitoring the size of the outgoing data to see if it matches the expected number of recipients.
The arguments in this article are hinged on one crucial premise: Apple stills owns your device even after selling it to you. This is different from gmail where your data is on servers owned by google. The analogy to this premise is that the producers of a safe that they sell to you must be able to provide the government a key to the safe. This clearly does not make sense, and neither does requiring Apple to always have a backdoor to your device.
I intentionally left it out because the important point is that the coverage was completely non-representative. I have other friends who have told me similar stories about other issues, sometimes even on opposite sides (in different cities or with different channels.) I don't want that point to get lost based on what any given HN'er thinks about the specific issue in question.

For the curious, the issue was nobegvba (rot13).
There is something awesome about a computer that when you turn it on it drops you into an development environment for creating software for that computer. Modern systems make it way too hard to get to a way to programmatically manipulate them.
No security fix for "arbitrary code execution" on iOS7. Why must users accept new functionality (and bugs) in iOS8 when this and other security bugs could have been fixed in iOS7? How long ago was Apple aware of this vulnerability - was release of the fix delayed until iOS8 in order to force everyone to upgrade?
I would rather let a few murderers go free than expand the government's power to store and retrieve private communications. You never know what benign things you might be doing today that will one day be dangerously illegal (or maybe just embarrassing enough to hurt you now that you have some kind of power).
Is tagSurf the best new way to surf the web?
www.tagsurf.co

What do you guys think?
The recursive visualization is really slow on even moderately complex graphs, otherwise it's a really neat tool
> judges act as rubber stamps now

Exactly. Our government is as overbearing and oppressive as it's been in a very long time. I read somewhere that judges approve something like 99% of the search warrants presented to them. They no longer serve as a check on law enforcement.

I'd love to hear otherwise, to hear how judges are doing a good job balancing the interests of people against the interests of law enforcement.
>apple looks up what the hard-wired nonce is for that specific device, and then crack the 4 digit pin.

Not quite. There are two nonces involved. One is (probably) easy for Apple to extract (the randomly generated, re-writable value in effaceable storage) and the other is (supposedly) very difficult to extract, because it's burned into the CPU hardware. If all works as intended, the only way to extract the second one is to decap the CPU and read it with a microscope.

Also, you can have arbitrarily long PINs, including alphanumeric.

If Apple's security PDF is correct, the only obvious way Apple can break the PIN is via brute force, which I believe they claim to provide when LEAs request it.
Very interesting to see the PDF which causes the code execution being built up inside mkCrash.py.
Very nice. If the author is the submitter or sees this, could you please provide some details on what kind of libraries and techniques have gone into creating this? A blog post or something would be great.
> How well it solves problems is not subjective.

It may very well solve the problem better for some people than others. Which is one definition of 'subjective'.

You can decide you want to target some types or groups of people and not others, for commercial or other reasons. Even "most people" is some people and not others, and is a choice.
It's wrong to talk about "American culture" as though it is a monolithic thing.

For example, more than 50% of NY households don't own a car[1]. It's easy to argue that NY is a special case, but with 8 million people it's a very large special case. The thing is, there are a lot of special cases[2] that aren't as extreme as NY but in aggregate add up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_in_New_York_City...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_h...
For a moment I thought I was reading a Xinhua article.
I think you've mistaken what Apple is saying here. Many of the little touches you mentioned are also part of iOS, and Apple receives much of the same information. The statements provided here clarify how Apple will use, or not use, that information.
It seems odd to me, assuming I'm reading the blue plots right, that the single most common number of contacts to have is one. I also wonder if it's just phone calls, or if texts are included, since it now seem to call far fewer people than I text, and probably in different ways.
I think the "simple" they were going for here is "performs one well-defined, unambiguous task in as direct a way as possible."
How is this allowed from a free trade perspective? Not to diminish the human rights portion, but even from a purely financial standpoint how does China get away with this?
You're speaking for an awful lot of people and an awful lot of different kinds of search warrants....
Telstra Foundation announces $2.4M in ‘tech for good’ partnerships
For most of us, Orin Kerr is on the opposite side of the privacy debate. He thinks that current online privacy laws go too far in the direction of protecting the accused. There is a summary of one of his talks at http://hlrecord.org/?p=10987%7COrin. (It's a shame there is no recording or transcript of that talk.)

I think the main difference between my opinions and his is that he places much more trust in government.
More rigorously, the explicit goal of sites like Reddit, Facebook etc is to present you with content that you like. In effect, they're doing a search over recent news stories to optimize for likability.

Journalism outlets, at least those operated in the traditional manner with a wall between business and copy, explicitly eschew this goal. The whole point of "church and state" separation in news outlets is to enable journalists to write about stories that readers probably wouldn't upvote, but is important for them to see. This sort of story will be given _much_ less exposure on sites that are single-mindedly optimizing for likability in general.

I think traditionally-operated news outlets serve a socially-useful function, and that the metamorphosis of these outlets into likability optimizers means everyone loses out. You may disagree, and that's your perogative!
For what it is worth, GCs are a major headache generally for system level code. The expense in terms of system behavior are far higher than the implied CPU time due to the scheduling issues. This has always been the challenge of GC-centric environments.

I think there are two big challenges for garbage collected environments with respect to core server systems level code. First, an acceptable pause needs to be reliably sub-millisecond or it breaks the userspace schedulers in a lot of high-performance server code. In the video presentation, they had a difficult time guaranteeing 10 milliseconds. They are working on it but this is a problem. Second, most high-performance server engines eliminate almost everything that looks like context-switching, mostly because it is very expensive on modern hardware. The idea that there may be hundreds or even thousands of threads running on real servers does not comport with the reality of a lot of server environments where context switching is severely restricted for good reason. The idea that it makes sense to have a lot of background processes cleaning up the memory allocation contradicts many well-conceived software architectures. These days, everything is explicitly scheduled and bounded if server performance matters.
It was once the most abundant bird in North America, comprising 1/4 of all birds:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

It appears that its peculiar communal mating and nesting behavior made it very easy to kill them en masse and that plus their utility lead to their demise.
> Because the victim isn’t alive to share his password, and the phone will have locked before the body was found, the government won’t be able to search the phone to find the messages. Apple’s policy will keep the police from finding the killer. That seems bad.

The problem with this argument is that it applies to all secure encryption. The purpose of encryption is to keep people not authorized to access private data from being able to access it. The fact that it may work as designed is hardly a sufficient excuse to backdoor everything.

Kerr's position seems to be that the government should be authorized to unlock everything in one way or another. The list of problems with that is long and well known. We can't actually trust anyone, including the government, with the keys to everything. Once they have the keys there is nothing to stop them from using them without a warrant.

And backdoors are security vulnerabilities. You intend for them only to be used by the government using constitutional process but they end up being used by criminals and foreign intelligence.

Meanwhile a required lack of security causes chilling effects. Politically unpopular groups will be afraid to communicate if their devices are compelled to spy on them and corrupt government officials can use that to harass and oppress them. Not to mention the small matter that it enables corrupt government officials to harass and oppress them.
Inside the NSA’s Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators
These are the fruits of the abuse of the fourth amendment.

This action is a prime example of why (ethics and liberties aside) getting carried away with surveillance and warrentless snooping was ultimately a bad idea even for those who were doing it.

There are reasons for fair treatment of citizens that stem directly from practicality. But lack of foresight and hubris seem all too common with government officials as of late.
The very first sentence starts with a faulty premise: "Apple has announced that it has designed its new operating system, iOS8, to thwart lawful search warrants"

Why couldn't Apple have designed it to remove itself from the burden of having to play fisherman? While it's true that there may have been moral drivers in this design decision, it makes sound business sense as well.

You can't betray what you don't know. Which is the ultimate position to take in order to be competitive in a privacy conscious world. Besides, warrants are rubber stamps now (as pointed out here and many places elsewhere) and are by no means the carefully measured moderator of state influence they may have once been.
I did not downvote you, but there's a perfectly good explanation for why 99% of warrants would be approved.

Consider that the police know what warrants a judge is likely to approve and which he's likely to turn down. Over time, police departments will learn to submit the warrants they can get approved and not bother wasting a judge's time with warrants that won't be approved.

So very high approval rates do not necessarily signal the loss of the judge's ability or willingness to check police power. Just that everybody involved is doing their jobs as professionals in their domain.
And Skate or Die!.. so many others :)
The Interview Process: What a Company Wants
True, but that isn't a scenario I have to deal with. My development machines are both OSX. If I need an emacs editor on a linux box, I fire up mg. I just haven't needed to provision emacs on a non-OSX machine for years now.

If cross-platform package support is a requirement, then this project is definitely not sufficient.

But as every development tool I use is already managed by Homebrew, this is the more natural extension for me — not ELPA.
Orin Kerr is clearly a lawyer. He argues not for what is right but for what is permissible given the existing body of law. Where the existing body of law is wrong, his writings have no sympathy for the damage inflicted on its victims nor any sense that resisting such wrongs is noble.

If the government never abused its authority, I would be much more sympathetic to Kerr's position. Given the facts of prosecutorial abuse, vague and conflicting laws, the ongoing gutting / suspension of habeas corpus, "three felonies a day" -- http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.asp... -- and many more reasons not to rest moral authority on our body of law, I find his insistence that we revere lawfulness to be foolish at best. It's important to stand up to unjust laws.

Leaving aside warrants which are merely held to be lawful (where the true facts, might we know them, show the opposite), it's not just lawful warrants that this technology protects against. Law-abiding citizens may be compelled to reveal private information via totally unjust mechanisms such as National Security Letters. Consider Nick Merrill's experience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Merrill#Challenging_th...

Also http://techpresident.com/news/24272/nick-merrill-fought-fbi-...

Let's not even get into protecting yourself from the NSA. Any tools which help us resist such tyranny, even at the risk and expense of civil disobedience, are to be applauded. Reserve your condemnation for the John Yoo of the tech world.
Tough way to go
With all due respect, being somewhat of a privacy and security freak (although I use social networks etc.), all I can read while going through the article is a crybaby whining about how it is harder than before to get user data.

The article makes an assumption that the warrants and the snooping is only done in legal and genuine cases, which has been continuously been proved wrong lately. Not to mention all the secret courts, FISA orders etc
Not really, create a new text file, rename to .html and add <script>. Windows ships with Powershell & VBScript. OS X and Linux both ship with Python. What has changed is that there are so many other opportunities that distract us now.
>Prove that it's impossible.

The abominable snowman exists. Prove that it doesn't or shut up.
This seems likely to be more than a little related to the recent warrant canary discovery. My expectation is that Apple was recently forced to do something they considered unlawful and the iOS8 changes will prevent that issue in the future.
The thing about comparative advantage is that it makes sense in the long run. But often that doesn't help those people made unemployed in the medium term.

The dislocation caused by switching "making stuff" between two places means that people will be made unemployed and die in poverty.
>In the video presentation, they had a difficult time guaranteeing 10 milliseconds.

In fairness, the estimate was 10 milliseconds for 100 GB heaps. Not everything (especially, I'd guess, programs that benefit from pauseless GC) deals with that much memory.
You could say the same thing about many aspects of the law (e.g. pursuing prosecution) but none have a 99% success rate.
this sculpture shows why QWERTY is such a bad keyboard, the most frequent letters such as E and T aren't below your stronger fingers, and they aren't in the home row... do your wrists a favor and make the effort to change to another keyboard layout such as Colemak or Dvorak.
Is the bug fixed in iOS 8? I didn't see where the page said that...

The author has a reliable exploit for iOS 7.1.x, but that doesn't mean the bug was fixed (maybe other things moved around so the shellcode doesn't work?).

I am genuinely curious though -- I haven't upgraded and don't intend to until a couple of point releases are out, but something like this could prompt me to act sooner.
99% is not "just" "optimized" police departments. Something else is up, statistically it does not make sense.
They don't let minors drive cars either.
It's something that's occurring elsewhere in the world on the basis of a) a population wanting to consume a thirsty crop such as rice, which requires water they don't have; and, b) not wanting to give up its food security and rely on traditional imports.

I don't know that this is something the US has done but the motivators noted above still stand.
A lot of fans of Microsoft/C# (Myself included) would love to see some sort of acquisition happen. They definitely have some sort of relationship already. What I do find really interesting is that Microsoft seems to be pursuing Cordova (aka PhoneGap) as well.

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/explore/cordova-vs.aspx
Did they seriously write an article about the Moog synth without mentioning Daft Punk ?
Politburo – The Ruby Dev's (Babushka-wielding) DevOps Weapon of Mass Creation
I wouldn't go so far as to say "no setup."

I just tested it and what if I want to install magit? As it isn't included in the default repo, I'll have to add MELPA. At this point is there much difference between adding MELPA to package-archives and `$ brew tap edavis/emacs`?

And, for me, I already use Homebrew for just about everything else. Using ELPA to manage Emacs and Homebrew to manage everything else is doable — but just not what I'm looking for.

I'd love for one day to be able to run `$ brew upgrade` and have python, redis, org-mode, and magit all upgraded in one shot. The project isn't there yet but I'd love to see it get there.
Storing .git folders in dropbox doesn't seem like the best idea. You could keep a git repository in a different location and have a small build script like this https://github.com/minhajuddin/notes.minhajuddin.com/blob/ma... which builds your website and copies it to a dropbox folder. With this approach you could even use something like http://middlemanapp.com/.
Does anyone have experience with using the microservices style for development, but deploying them bundled into a larger unit (e.g., a single Docker image or virtual machine)?
You can not say that about pursuing prosecution, as that is at least intended to be an adversarial process, anomalously high conviction rates do indicate to me a corruption of justice proceedings. Acquittals in China are quite rare, for instance. The reason is that the CPC considers itself the source of justice and sees no issue with doing away with impartiality in matters of political importance.
I'd posit that they are blissfully ignorant that it existed somewhere else first and did no further research.
Kerr's argument sounds silly when you use analogies with conventional devices. Nobody would argue that a highly secure safe should have a backdoor that can be used by the manufacturer to open it.
So is IBM, with their Worklight platform:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/mobileblo...

Weird.
Because the world moves on.

Let me quickly check if Microsoft still releases security fixes for DOS 1.0 ...
You're going to have to explain the statistics involved if you want to make an argument from them.
8 = device number (disk drive). If you had multiple drives (up to 4) you would use, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

the ,1 meant load this file to it's defined start address, which was held in the first 2 bytes of the file. It could be omitted in most cases.
The same way the US flouts free trade agreements: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/01/17/263101422/why-u-s-...

When you're big enough, the laws don't apply to you.
Test-Driven Web Development with Python, the Book
I worked for Novell/Xamarin for almost 7 years and this was a large part of why I eventually parted ways with them. I spent a couple of years on Windows Forms, a couple years on Mono Tools for Visual Studio, and a couple of years on Mono for Android. In all that time I never really felt proud of something we released. I always felt more like I was apologizing for our releases than proudly showing them off.

Having said that, I gave Mono for Android a try as a hobby again this year and it was light years better than when I left. (Congrats guys!) However there were definitely still bugs that were mildly annoying as a hobbyist that I can see would be infuriating if I had to rely on it for my job.
His book "The Volatility Machine" was one of the best I have ever read on global macro. Perhaps due to publication timing, it's managed to stay under the radar.
Author starts by saying that this is not about labeling the unborn (or Jews, kulaks, or whoever we are exterminating at any particular time) as less than persons. Then immediately proceeds to declare that the unborn (or Jews, kulaks, or whoever) are indeed less than persons.
Part of the reason to use Xamarin is in order to take advantage of C# and F#. Using JavaScript throws away or inhibits a lot of useful stuff like static type checking, automatic completion and refactoring, and code browsing. Besides, they’re invested now; switching to another language may be too costly at this point.
I think it's hard for a lawyer, who has to say things like "If I understand how it works" before speaking about a topic, to understand that it is infeasible to create a system which is both secure in general, and insecure when the government wants something. These changes are likely in response not only to public distrust in institutions like NSA, but also to existing general threats to the security model of previous iOS releases, which like any system with a backdoor, have the potential for the backdoor to be used nefariously.
A look at third-party keyboards on iOS 8: type any way you want