skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>They have the authority to open your package at any time for any reason, with few exceptions. //

Contract law in USA is that weak? They have authority? As in the law authorises anyone to access anything just by virtue of being contracted to move it, not even ownership? Contractual obligation can't override that authorisation .. are you sure?

That would mean, for example, that your taxi-driver has the right to go through your bags by virtue of you asking them to put them in their car. Or that Starbucks have a _right_ to access your laptop if you left it in the store for any length of time. Or if you park in a private parking lot the owner could break in, hot wire and drive your car around.

Or are you saying that only certain possessions are treated as if you didn't own them and only certain companies contracts are treated as null?

tl;dr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels, but yes it's a tort.
But if it's a fundamental property, why is it so easy to turn it off by falling asleep, or with anesthesia? Your brain regulates your body just fine, and can even solve problems, while your "self" goes away somewhere, temporarily.
From 1913 to 2014, $0.02 cents inflated to $0.48 cents. At that rate, wouldn't it be over 100 years before reaching $10? In which case, in 2014 he'd have to share 20.83 opinions per session to justify the cost.
I wrote an entry about two years ago: http://www.rpscontest.com/entry/614005

The comment in the program is, of course, a joke. What I actually did was download every other bot on the site, pick out all the ones that made no calls to `random` and let a brute force search for a good constant run for a few days.

The trick is that random play wins about 50% of the time, and this hack, despite being totally deterministic, has play that is indistinguishable from random within the constraints of the contest unless specifically accounted for. For each other program that also has deterministic play, about half of all possible constants will win. Try enough constants and eventually you'll find one that wins against a moderate majority of the other entries.
> Warantless surveillance of US citizens (this is bad whether it's by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, or anyone).

Agreed very strongly.

> Infiltration of foreign companies in allied or neutral nations purely for economic or geopolitical insight, not for military purposes (Brazil's Petrobras oil company, all sorts of spying in Germany and Norway and other places).

See this is where the NSA really shines. We (The US) delayed Iran's nuclear program by THREE YEARS with Stuxnet! Three! And after they finally figured out it was sabotage the US and Israel had the director assassinated for further delays.

Having Merkle's cell phone? During the Eurozone crisis? It would have been awful (financially) for the United States not to have that information. It's fun to look back and read the confused reports during the time "European Union suffering considerably from Eurozone crisis; America sees only limited effects."

PETROBRAS? We won offshore oil drilling locations because we had that information. Energy security for the country going forward decades.

Unfortunately geopolitics are important and you can't just not participate. Hacking is (one important way) that modern espionage, surveillance and sabotage are done.
Doesn't that speak to his point? Either smaller memory and more nodes, or more memory and less nodes. Why not do apples to apples? (This feels like the benchmarketing going on in browsers, which, at this point, is largely meaningless.)

Edit: on the other hand, this is an endorsement of the current wave of "per node performance stinks, let's avoid rewriting software for an extra year or two by throwing SSDs at it." Great for hardware vendors!
As someone who is not a lawyer I wonder why the defense isn't allowed to simply amend their motion to insert language "claiming" the server in the manner the judge described.
The Empire Strikes Back Uncut (made by fans in 15 second pieces)
> Kudos to Groovy that release JDK8-optimized version pretty quickly!

Do note from the http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+2.3+release+notes that the "JDK 8 and its interface default methods introduced some incompatibilities with a few methods of the Groovy Development Kit, so we had to adapt to the situation, introducing minor breaking changes for the affected methods and their outcome."

Also note the "Breaking changes" list hidden at the bottom of that page, which probably only lists some of them.
Thanks for the response. Sorry for editing mine while you were writing yours.

> Oh I agree. Actually if you look back Clinton and first term Bush era they kept proclaiming that there was a cyber intelligence war but it never really caught on.

Interesting point. Now, in the 90s, wasn't the government trying to prevent encryption from being used by the public though?

> When it comes to hacking, the attacker always wins. Just playing defense is a losing game.

Still, there are a lot of defensive measures the public can take from hackers. For instance, using OTR, Tor/VPNs, and moving sites to HTTPS whenever possible.

Bruce Schneier has an interesting metaphor for this period in human evolution. He compares the information revolution to the industrial revolution. At first, people didn't realize how bad pollution could be, amongst other things like food safety. Books like "The Jungle" helped prompt people to stand up for themselves and demand better, and healthier ways of conduct. Overall, humanity evolved to handle the new technologies and their side effects. Snowden's revelations are like "The Jungle" of our time.
Isn't it rock paper scissors spock lizard?
I'm not saying it's retribution, I'm saying it's shortsighted to consider it damaging to themselves and be okay with the damage that was detailed in the leaks.

I'm not okay with either, but being blind to others' "suffering" doesn't get my sympathy. In this order of events, your sympathy gets mine. In this case, you pointing the finger at others hacking innocents as a justification for hacking innocents makes me entirely unsympathetic to your "damage". See how that works?
This is cool as heck, thanks.
Really nice a clean Bootstrap Blog
I stopped using Dropbox because of this. I booted my system up one day and a ton of my files were deleted (locally). Luckily, this didn't affect the sync on my other systems.
> And "The lane widths in the analyses conducted were generally either not statistically significant or indicated that narrower lanes were associated with lower rather than higher crash frequencies."

And this is the problem. "Not statistically significant" means that the effect is very small. This is what you would expect if narrower lanes make driving more dangerous but then drivers compensate by being more careful; they approximately cancel each other out. The author is making much hay out of the possibility that drivers might be not only compensating but overcompensating for the reduction in safety, theoretically causing a (small) net increase in safety.

The fallacy of this is that intentional danger is not the only possible way to increase driver vigilance. As one example, we could promote self-driving cars. That allows us to capture a much larger safety increase because the increase doesn't have to be weighed down by the counterbalancing cost of having narrower lanes and less room to maneuver.
Wait, when was kiddie porn ever sold on SR?
Why even let the companies know? The NSA should just have very talented people working for those companies. It's not far fetched to think they'd find a great candidate that's patriotic, and help their career any way possible (perhaps even sabotage other employees, if needed). I'd imagine other governments would do the same thing, too. Looking on a decade+ timeframe, it shouldn't be hard to get a few people into key positions. Companies would have to really try hard to avoid this type of compromise. For instance, run multiple, independent build labs, with multiple people comparing outputs. And then, an engineer or pair of engineers in collusion could probably easily slip a difficult to notice security bug into some code somewhere.
This happens because of auto-pricing bots. My favorite is when the bots price it in the opposite direction and you get $100 books for 99 cents.
All large corporations weaken encryption for the government. Some articles. If you want more, I'm sure I can dig up a few.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...

http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0006231614.p...
Mou 1.0
Ramp metering has nothing to do with high speed versus low speed. It has everything to do with saturating a road to optimum capacity.
Oh yeah, I get that. And I agree - I really do wish we could all 'just get along'.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Would be awesome if we could just have secure and private computing and communication machines for the masses.
Why not have it that the court can use evidence that is presented to it. Those committing illegal searches should be prosecuted. Obviously the evidence of the illegal search means a conviction is highly likely. Ignoring evidence that points to the facts of a case seems futile if you wish to achieve justice.
Chasing Ice: Largest Glacier Calving Ever Filmed
It is indeed terrifying....and the worst part is they are being sincere.

Anonymity is a right we are going to have to fight for in the coming decades.

These people live in a world where they are the good guys fighting the evil guys. The good guys need to have special powers...but don't worry, they aren't going to abuse them..oh and don't worry about how they defined bad guys either.

"Imagine in the physical world if you were not able to open the trunk of a car if you had a suspicion that there were weapons or drugs inside... we would never accept this."

Policing should be difficult, if policing is not difficult you live in a police state.
Whoever peed in your Cheerios this morning clearly didn't know who they were messing with.
> Now, in the 90s, wasn't the government trying to prevent encryption from being used by the public though?

Oh yeah. They did before the 90s, during the 90s and are also doing it now. We won some serious ground in the 90s, allowing us to use stronger algorithms. But companies are still required to keep copies of all of your encryption keys at the ready if they want access to your data. If you haven't seen it the FOIA requested document from the CIA posted here a week or so ago has a pretty good history.

http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0006231614.p...

> Still, there are a lot of defensive measures the public can take from hackers. For instance, using OTR, Tor/VPNs, and moving sites to HTTPS whenever possible.

These things do help, but minimally. OTR is good if you want some privacy on your chats. Tor is good if you want a little anonymity. Some baseline level of encryption should be standard everywhere. If you look at the extensiveness of the backdoors though these don't really matter. For example take the FBI mass exploitation of Tor this year. In many instances (Apple iPhone/Microsoft Skydrive/etc with PRISM), copies of data are stored directy from a partner's product for inspection, whether it was originally encrypted during transit or no. And computer exploits that target operating systems are able to see everything on your computer that you see.

Re: Schneier:

I love his analogy to Digital Feudalism the most.
The Financial Disclosure Forms the NSA Said Would Threaten National Security
I guess as a cop, if my friend breaks into a known criminal's house. I can use anything my friend finds against the criminal. This makes things easier.
Another thing missing: What is the economic cost of slowing everyone down? Clearly if people spend 50% longer commuting because they're driving 20mph instead of 30mph, that has real consequences for both their economic output and quality of life (commute time has a surprisingly large impact on a person's overall happiness!). The author disregards this factor entirely.

I've seen this pattern in a number of "unintuitive and seemingly clever" traffic engineering tricks proposed in recent years. For example, it has been shown that removing all traffic signs can in fact improve safety -- again by slowing everyone down.

Another similar point (mentioned in the article) is that expanding freeways doesn't reduce congestion, because the new lanes are filled quickly. The argument is, apparently, that we therefore should not bother expanding freeways. The argument ignores the fact that the expanded freeway is serving many more people, creating immense value even if the speed of traffic hasn't improved.

(For the trolls: I personally take the train rather than drive whenever possible.)
Fascinating.

I'm off to create a few phony shell corporations to get some free NSA money and get paid to surf the web!
Flipboard's Approach to Automatic Summarization
See Hear Party
Something like awesomenessreminders.com?
We use OAuth2 client-side flow. Many pure client-side apps use the same technique - pigshell is not blazing any new trails here.

Only the code you run that's hosted on pigshell.com has access. The permissions are tied to the app-id which is embedded in the code. The access token is persisted in your browser either as a cookie or explicitly in localStorage.

We don't and won't support OAuth 1 (Twitter, Flickr etc), which lacks a pure client-side flow, just to avoid the issue of users having to trust the pigshell.com server to generate (and not leak or misuse) the access tokens.

Here is a rough guide to local setup:

- Check out the git sources, run "make" (some more details here, but reading the Makefile should help)

- set up apache to serve the virtual host pigshell.com (if you want to use Dropbox, you need to create a self-signed SSL certificate and set up https as well)

- modify /etc/hosts and set 127.0.0.1 to point to pigshell.com

This way, static assets as well as redirect URLs from the OAuth2 server will hit your local server rather than pigshell.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u4xd1PNvMc
Let me try my hand at simply explaining this.

Atoms are composed to two sections:

A positively charged center -- the nucleus.

A negatively charged outside -- the electron cloud.

When several atoms get together, they do so because their electron clouds start intermingling. This sharing of their electrons is fundamentally what a bond is.

A bond is strong when both of the atoms really want their electrons to intermingle. Conversely, a weak bond is when the atoms are "forced" to be next to each other and intermingle. Strong bond = opposite poles of a magnet next to each other. Weak bond = similar poles of a magnet next to each other.

Somewhat counterintuitively, it's not the fact that the bond's want to separate from each other that makes something really explosive/reactive.

To really understand what's going on, you have to take a look at the energetics (thermodynamics) of how a reaction proceeds. The tendency of the physical world is always towards disorder (entropy). Rather than becoming more ordered, every single atom in the universe wants to be more comfortable.

Think back to our magnet analogy. Magnets with the same pole facing each other really don't want to be next to each other. In fact, they'd LOVE to find another magnet with the opposite pole facing them. The magnets which have a weak bond find it really, really easy to separate. In fact, almost anything will split the connection. However, those magnets, once separated, must find another (opposite) partner for them to pair up with. The amount of energy that they release when they find their perfect mate is evidenced by the fact that the magnets will literally hop across short distances and smack together in a satisfying *crack.

What we also know in thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created, nor destroyed. Thus the net energy in any reaction must be equal on both sides. We know a couple of things:

The energy required to split the weak bond is really, really little.

The energy released when a strong bond is formed is a lot (in fact, you hear the release of energy in the form of heat and sound!).

Atoms prefer strong bonds to weak ones (entropy).

Putting everything together, when you have an molecule with extremely weak bonds (HOOOH), it takes almost no effort for those bonds to come apart. However, when those oxygens go find other molecules to bond with, that releases some energy. Thus NET ENERGY is heavily favored in the exothermic (release of energy) direction. When enough of those super weak bonds are broken, and when enough of the strong bonds are formed rapidly, you have a simultaneous release of a huge amount of heat --- an explosion.

Sorry if that's a little long, but I tried to explain your questions. (Which was a fundamentally very interesting question!)
No, "everybody" doesn't do it.

It is on the face of it ridiculous to say "everybody has a blue-water navy." It is equally ridiculous to say "everybody runs surveillance comparable to the NSA."
This is really thoughtfully done. I like it. :)
Old, but a pretty neat way to relight (and then read) the writing on the Antikythera mechanism: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/antikythera_mechanism/
I believe uxp's point is that one would only have a civil remedy for breach-of-contract, and evidence would be admissible in a criminal court if a private carrier provided the information to the authorities with or without their consent.

But most likely, the contract with UPS/FedEx/etc would afford broad abilities to inspect and search packages for "safety and quality control" reasons, or whatever else.
Enjoyable game
There's a huge market with governments for selling 0day vulnerabilities.

When they can, states prefer to use public exploits, phishing emails and other leverage to break into targets - mostly because 0days are expensive.
While I have never been on the site I'd seen it mentioned as being one of the things that was trafficked, and the wikipedia article lists it. Looking into it, that might just be articles using sensationalism, though. Looking into the ref. in the wikipedia article, one of the links used as a citation for the child pornography claim actually stated the opposite - that they didn't allow it, so I think I was probably misinformed there.
Hahahha. Had the same thought.
No it doesn't. The old record used 2100 nodes so the entire data actually fit in memory. There shouldn't be much seek happening even in the MR 2100 case. In Spark's case, the data actually doesn't fit in memory.

Also this was primary network bound. The old record had 2100 nodes with 10Gbps network.
It can get much more extreme than $16,000!

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854
You should really read the article before you say anything about it.
> DoTA games definitely stall...

That's been in flux recently! Patch 6.81, which was active from April 2014 until a few weeks ago, devolved into a "deathball" meta which tended to end games early. (This was responsible for the rather anticlimactic conclusion of The International this past July.) Patch 6.82 introduced some new "comeback" mechanics, which generally enhance the ability of a team that's playing from behind to recover after taking a teamfight, or finding high-value pickoffs. The details are still being tweaked, but so far the result does seem to have been less one-sided games, both in amateur and pro games.

And yes, "team stealth" is referring to Smoke of Deceit. A really interesting item, available in limited quantities, which allows a group of players to become temporarily invisible and sneak around the map -- even under sentry wards, which usually reveal invisible heroes! -- until they close in on enemy heroes or towers.
What It’s Like to Carry Your Nobel Prize Through Airport Security
No one yet has mentioned an approach that I had a lot of fun with. It was a 15~20 liner one-off in Python that earned quite a few wins for one of these RPS competitions. I lost the code with the laptop to a disk crash.

All it did was keep around compressed concatenation of the opponents plays, and a compressed concatenation of opponent and my plays interleaved. When it was my turn to play, I would extend the strings with the three possible one turn plays, i.e. extend by 'r', 'p', 's' and re-compress, whichever gave the shortest compression was my guess of what the opponent would play next. Then I would play whatever defeated opponent's guessed play.

The whole thing was 15~20 lines but of course I was standing on shoulder of giants and the std library. The prediction part was entirely abstracted / co-opted out to the compressor. Better compressors would yield better results. Lempel-Ziv worked well enough as long as there were enough rounds.

The theory for this can run quite deep. There are algorithms that will do the best possible if the opponent is using a finite state m/c, which computers are anyway. The performance of these are determined by the state space of the FSM. If one wants to go deeper then one would land in the territory of Kolomogorov complexity.
Why not implement a "theme-less" viewing mode? If the surfer prefers to see everything looking the same, it's simple to offer such a mode.
How old is this issue? The release notes don't spell out clearly if this bug was fixed in the past 2-3 updates (using v2.10.30 on Win 7)

https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes
Having Merkle's cell phone? During the Eurozone crisis? It would have been awful (financially) for the United States not to have that information.

The cost of this sort of machiavellian policy is of course the opprobrium of former allies and friends, and a loss of moral standing.

The US loses a lot of soft power if it chooses this route, and the consequences will be felt for decades in mistrust and distance from her allies. A dangerous course both for the US and for the world.
You're right, everyone loves to wear exactly the same clothes in real life. It only makes sense that they'd want to wear the same "clothes" to express their online identity. It's obvious in retrospect. Silly MySpace!
Tough and simple as well, the developer must be cool
My first thought was Core Wars. :-)
I think that is in fact the simplest and most accessible evidence that it's an illusion. All I can say is that under sleep or anaesthesia there can be different degrees of awareness all the way down to just autonomic body response and life maintaining functions.
Why do you prefer "the enforced look of Facebook"?
AFAIK the "deathball" strategy recently became really dominant leading up to The International. The most recent balance patch after The International included a lot of measures to swing it back the other direction.
Tech's Meritocracy Problem
This just made my day. And seriously, I like their frankness more than the pretentious style most food critics have. Judging by their reactions at least half of the course was nice.
Page 123 of the documents released in Glenn Greenwald's "No Place To Hide" lists at least 37 countries (that the United States has cyber partnerships with).

http://cryptome.org/2014/05/npth-docs-compare.pdf

(on page 16 of the link)
When was the last time you saw a philosopher give evidence?
have a look at mongodb. It has excellent documentation, community support. www.mongodb.org/
Deciphering Zero Knowledge Protocol
It is a shame that they don't offer the unlimited packrat option anymore. It's still not backup, but at the very least people would be able to recover files in such cases.

Also, if I understand correctly, Google Drive has a better policy here: removed files are just placed in the trash until you remove them from the trash. Of course, trash takes space up as well, but it protects better against such cases.

I guess Dropbox is trying to maximize its profits with its 'remove after 30 days' policy.
There have been lots of mail loss and other bugs in Gmail over the years. Here's an example:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-confirms-missi...

And privacy/government implications wise, Google is hardly any better than Rice...