skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> but it's not like Iran asked our permission before they launched their nuclear program

Why should they? Who died and made us the "World Police" ?
I think it's unfair to "tech" to label Silicon Valley's unique tech culture as merely "tech-centric". Just because tech is a big part of it doesn't mean that all of the rest of the cultural encrustations of the SV frat-house environment are non-existent or unimportant. There are, and have been, many "tech-centric" urban areas that are still incredibly different from silicon valley.
Unless the someone invented state-of-the-art anti hacking hardware and couldn't think of any better use of it then protecting the secrecy of hdd firmware, then that is just a lie (or knowledge gained by reverse engineering the firmware is not considered "public" information). If you are interested, here is a story of someone modifing hdd firmware [1].

[1] http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack
He didn't say that it's easy, just that it isn't so hard that you need nation-state backing to do it. Judging purely from their capabilities, Equation Group could be a small group of college graduates who make a living with hacking and don't settle for the low-hanging fruit.

Of course the other evidence strongly suggests that this group is NSA-employed, but the real reason why their malware is so much more sophisticated than anything else out there isn't that nation states have staggering amounts of resources, it's simply that normal malware doesn't need to be sophisticated.
I'm curious about the statement:
"For example, more often than not we see blog posts by people claiming to have beaten the CAP Theorem. A mathematical theorem…"

I've never seen any actual mathematical proof of CAP - only a great deal of ( mostly well founded ) engineering conjecture.

Has anyone actually produced any mathematical proof of CAP?
I feel like this is just "best of all worlds" thinking rather than an actual love of physical limitation. If it were the latter, why wouldn't we just start cutting off limbs and really get some interesting limitations?
Oh, and another thing. I just remembered that videogame console hack where a manipulated USB descriptor led to a jailbreak.

Who says one can not use bugs in e.g. SMART or other (S)ATA protocol implementations in order to spread malware by disk?

And... isn't data transfer of HDDs usually handled by DMA? Is there a way for a malicious HDD to compromise a system? Everyone locked down their FireWire port, but is eSATA vulnerable?
Marco famously tweeted "Shit." when Apple introduced an Instapaper clone into iOS/Safari. He kinda re-uses it whenever a big company does something to squash smaller ones/individuals.

It's tongue-in-cheek.
I took a bunch of high-school students to the MLH Launch hack in London and they had an amazing time, and were really inspired by everything that was going on around them.

Unfortunately although MLH were very supportive of under 18s attending the hackathons, the venues weren't so accomodating, and it doesn't look like were going to get to go to another one.

It would be nice to see more under 18 hackathons being organised to help inspire and engage teenagers. We have YRS in the UK and it's fantastic, but it only comes around once a year.
Review my startup – Nurtur.it
"...30-40 years of solid productivity..."

Even less, many people choose family.

Also if longevity is achieved there will be plenty of disruption on the way, since there is no "magic pill", but rather a lot of breakthroughs combined.
CAs are not magic decryption boxes. If you compromise a CA, you can generate a false certificate, but this certificate is non-repudiable: it is a sequence of bytes which you must present to the system you are attacking, and which is conclusive, independently-verifiable evidence that the CA has been compromised. While the NSA almost certainly could do something like this, they would run a very high risk of detection every time they did it.
>> By the way, there are innocent machines in the US infected with this thing, at this very moment.

Nobody is innocent. The government has enemies both internal and external.
Kaspersky Lab have discovered government-created spyware in hard drives
How we built the new BBC Homepage
The Learn to Code Movement in 2015
International relations is not as simple as your girlfriend cheating on you.
OS X Yosemite: Search Faster for Files by Name
Statistically, major wars have become increasingly less common and dying in a war has been an increasingly less likely cause of death. That can be difficult to see because war still exists and is still gruesome and in the 21st century it gets in your face in a way that is hard to ignore, but war is still growing less common.
The market is probably flooded with counterfeit rhino horn already...

It's essentially just keratin, which can be reclaimed from hair and nail clippings.

Most people don't buy entire horns, as the price is really high ($50k-100k/kg according to google).

Keratin powder, or keratin pressed into chunks, would probably fool most people, and there's effectively no way for consumers to verify authenticity.

So, fake rhino horn is easier than fake drugs, fake gemstones, fake currency etc.
Some aspects of this in the culture are disturbingly binary and the world has WAY too many people who don't know the engineering application of A* so they just make something up. Knowing that it exists and has certain (detailed) characteristics is probably 95% of the use. Why didn't you use B* (rhetorical question, whats important is you have an answer not what it is) Folks who don't know path algos probably think I'm making up B* but it really exists and was invented just before I started programming and I have a memory for "new" stuff vs old.

Its useful to have a steel beam and know how to apply it to construction. Knowing how its made and the metallurgy and how that impacts the application levels you up. Then there's a whole sea of lower level construction vocational laborers who don't know steel beams exist and they'll just bodge something together with stuff from the junk yard and when it collapses, well, there's no guarantees in life and it was cheap and the academics never know anything anyway so stop complaining, and last but not least the social butterflies who heard the Jones's next door, who are billionaires, built their wall out of recycled plastic so we'll use that to hold up the roof instead of proletarian wood or even this steel beam stuff.
I agree, but that attitude makes sense from a certain perspective (shared by much of the government, and parts of the media and corporate leadership).

It's more like _your girlfriend_ getting mad at your friend for telling you she was cheating.

Or "We would have gotten away with it if not for that meddling kid."
This is not my subfield of neuroscience, but here are some people I know who do spiking neural network simulation to understand how brains work:

http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bdoiron/

http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~larry/

http://www.cns.nyu.edu/wanglab/

http://alleninstitute.org/our-research/modeling-analysis-the... (modeling group)

http://www.nada.kth.se/~ala/

There are also some companies that are led by people with academic experience doing spiking neural network simulation and seem to be trying to commercialize it:

http://www.braincorporation.com/

http://www.evolvedmachines.com/
Loved this story. I can completely sympathize. I had been programming in school and for fun a little before my first hackathon, however I had not yet made any "real" apps. I attended my first hackathon a few years ago (pretty sure Jon was there). Like Jon, I joined a team of people with much more experienced than myself. They taught me a lot, helped me get started, and got me hooked on hackathons. After this hackathon, I started learning about web development, meeting others in the community, and of course attending more hackathons.

If you are at all interested in programming or learning how to program, I encourage you to attend a hackathon. Check out some great ones here: http://mlh.io/events/
U.S. craft beers tend to over-represent heavily hopped styles such as the IPA. Just as sweet and sour mixers can cover up low quality spirits used in a cocktail, excessive use of hops can cover up flaws in a poorly crafted brew. There are exceptions, but they're still comparatively rare. For example, how many doppelbock's are made in the U.S.? Even less hoppy styles of beer, such as stouts, tend to be massively hopped by U.S. craft brewers.

The craft brew scene has exploded only in the last couple of decades and most microbrewers are comparatively new to the craft. Hopefully a broader variety of styles will become better represented as brewers gain experience and try to differentiate themselves from the overly hopped masses.

At present, the lion's share of my favorite North American microbrews are from Quebec. I don't know why, but the brewers of that province are hitting it out of the park right now.
A new class of attack via LinkedIn Skills
http://theroadchoseme.com

If you're interested in traveling like that, checkout http://wikioverland.org
They do physically intercept some hardware, so that's one vector:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwald...

Alternatively could they use software exploits in an OS to execute arbitrary code and rewrite the firmware?
IETF's new archive tool full of spam
The sky is falling down!
SHINE rebuilds Reddit with an app-like interface
Potential clients can only assume that if you are sloppy with simple things like spelling and grammar that your work is as bad if not worse.

Consider this scenario: You take your car to a mechanic to get fixed. When you get the car back, there are oily finger prints on the hood and fender. The steering wheel is sticky and there is dust on the dashboard. Most people will have concerns about the quality of the work done.

It's the same with all professions. Your potential client probably knows little about the technical aspects of your work, so they will judge you on the basis of things that they can observe and understand.
Wow that's awesome. What websites or other resources did you use to find those apartments? My lease ends this year and I was considering moving to Gramercy/Flatiron.
No, that's no the case in all countries, and probably shouldn't be the case in any country, but UK is pretty weird like that, so I don't know about UK.

But in US, the law says companies must provide the data unecrypted ONLY IF THEY CAN DO THAT. So if they're using strong end-to-end encryption, the law should be on their side, since they can't decrypt the data themselves. Only the users can.

That's why the FBI was making such a big deal about Apple encryting the data with the user's key in the press. Because they knew they can't do anything about it, and the best they could hope for is to make it a big enough scandal that Congress will pass a law against such encryption.

And the reason I said this is how it should work in all countries is because it's common sense. If companies can't do something, then they can't be forced to do it. But as I said, in UK you could go to prison even if you forgot your password, and they ask your for your drive's password. That's an illogical law, but I guess that's what UK citizens get for not having a Constitution: illogical and abusive laws from the government that trample people's rights.
I did it all for the lulz.
I would agree with that as well. Perhaps the reduction in conventional warfare due to nuclear weapons might be a short-lived phase. Given that Iran has as much capability to produce nuclear weapons now as the US did in 1945, and North Korea already has a nuclear stockpile, and many other countries have the technology to begin building nuclear weapons with a lead time of at most a year or two, one can't help but be concerned.
Project Earendel: Open Source Rocket
Why use software exploits? Just use an ordinary privilege escalation and act like the firmware upgrade tool of the manufacturer.
I guess writing a new hard drive firmware from scratch, without inside knowledge, would be close to impossible.

But why start from scratch if you can just modify the existing firmware? And that seems to be perfectly possible:
http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

I'd say the most difficult and resource consuming part is to make versions which work on as many brands, models and revisions as possible, and make them all robust enough so they won't be detected because of random malfunctions.

But I don't know anything about hard disk firmwares: Perhaps they are not too diverse and once you know how to modify one drive, the others will follow easily?
Is there an antivirus company with NSA ties to report on Russian viruses ?
Does it use pgrouting ?
>The author would have done much better if, rather than poking sticks at those who wish to forbid gotos, and posting vague and generic quotes about memes and cargo-cults, they had provided several examples of code wherein the use of gotos was a decided improvement, in terms of speed and clarity, over the best that could be done without it.

He would have only done better by doing that if his goal was to merely educate people that goto can be good too.

Which is very far from being his goal.
There's a discussion of this over in the other thread. The general consensus there is that this capability is not that remarkable, and individual hackers have done similar things on a smaller scale.
Large corporations "restructure" all the time. Most often this consists of a periodic pruning of exactly these jobs, which really are worthless. The company continues on, wholly unharmed by the cuts.
Show HN: NotLooking.io - Keep recruiters at bay. Until you need them.
A dumpload of companies and media outlets immediately blaming NK for the Sony hacks. It's not Russia, but close enough.
why is that "too bad"?

How does talking about the messenger change the message?
I am from germany and I hope most of americans don't have this point of view.

1. give up freedom for some stupid terrorist attacks? why should we? We've lost the keystone of freedom when we do this and they have already won.

2. Do you really think these extensive intelligences do stop terror? (maybe they do sometimes, but terrorists will find new ways)

3. IS and others are the result of the Iraq war which was a offensive war from the US justified by a lie (Sadam had no weapon of mass destruction). Do you still think that America is the world police? The reputation of the US has gone rapidly down in the last decade. For the most here in germany the US are not the good ones any more. Other countries have their own way of life. America has to accept that.
He means it like "Shit, this could be bad" instead of "this is shit"
Hi, I'm italian.
I had a "good" chance with an italian startupper based in SF, I worked from home in Italy while waiting for my visa. Never seen it.
I had a contract for 4.2k$/month plus stock options but he said that he could not send more than 3k$/month in italy to avoid IRS checks, so I agreed to get 1.2k$/month in sign in bonuses when I'd have been in San Francisco.
My salary began to be late after may (I billed June in November), my visa was never ready... and in November I broke up.
I just said him to fk off losing my 28k$ credit just because this "good person" said me that I WAS A ROBBERY because I did not give him an algorithm.
The fact was simple: he did not payed for that algorithm, it should have been done in December. I did a lot of other works till that moment, like: tutoring juniors, managing comunication with frontend team and backend development with SF resources (during italian night), I did releases and saved his ass when some SF guy did some mistakes!
So by the end, he payed a Senior Software Engineer the great amount of 18k$/year.
I was getting mad, so better say a "fk u" than going crazy.
He proposed to pay me a small amount of money to get an agreement where I declared to never speak bad about him... he was a fool! I'll never agree with that.
My idea is simple now: MONEY NOW! WORDS LATER!
Don't get fooled by these people. Shares are not going to make you rich in the 99.8% of the cases!
I passed a year listening to stories about our successful future, about milionaire investments that he never got and about how beautiful would have become my life in silicon valley... this kind of people is made by great liars... trust them only if they give you warranties and expirations to refund you (I bet nobody will never give that to you because "it's a startup")!
I got no contracts, I got no money, my ceo was a "good italian" entrepreneur in silicon valley, the same "good italian" as our politicians: they speak good, they act bad... I will never trust someone like him again.
I will just start a procedure for an international fraud just to do my citizen duty.
Take care and be warned!
You mean like how some in the U.S. said we shouldn't have to repay France for their help in the American Revolution because that was a gift from the French monarchy, but then the U.S. decided to enter WWI & WWII on their behalf after deciding it was a gift from the French people?
Detecting an infected hard drive in software would be the usual malware arms race: you find some characteristic of it, they improve the firmware.

But if we start to systematically check for it, it should be easy to discover via hardware debugging. Find the JTAG interface on the hard disk controller (or whatever debugging interface the specific processor uses), dump the firmware and compare it to firmware dumps from other hard drives of the same model. I don't see how they could fool that process (given that you have a clean machine to read out the firmware).

Of course to be thorough you would have to check pretty much the firmware of every component of the computer.
OOOOO! The Opposite of Betterridge!

Did XXX spy on you illegally?

Always answer yes.
Maybe one can see religion as simply a rational response to the absurdity of life as described in the article. Life is patently absurd and yet we are rational. Why is that? We don't need to be. The answer for many is that there must be something more. For others the something more is itself absurd. But it doesn't mean that it is an irrational response. Its quite the opposite. It's an attempt to make sense of something that, from a broad perspective, is an assault to our rationality
I believe that Maxwell was occasionally asked what real-world improvements his work would make in peoples' lives.
PHP Code for signing session ids to mitigate DDOS attacks
Save us Musk!
Nope. The frontend JS is reasonably agnostic and talks to three third-party backends: OSRM, GraphHopper and MapQuest Open. If anyone would like to set up a reliable worldwide instance of pgrouting I'm sure we'd be interested in using it.
Check out bannanaglee. Backdoors in Juniper and Cisco gear. Yes, already having an impact.
"their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good"

And what is economically good for India? You say that as if you have the correct answer. You're also assuming that the people there voted for the system that they have, and due to their ignorance, they ended up with a system that is causing their problems. I doubt that the present state of India can be attributed to something so simple.
It is not clear how the NSA may have obtained the hard drives' source code.

Probably just a nicely worded letter:

To whom it may concern,

Under the authority of Executive Order 12333 and
pursuant to Title 18 USC Section 2709, you are hereby
compelled to provide the NSA with the source code of the
firmware of your company's line of hard-drive products.
Noob question: Is it reasonable to think that the spyware on these hard drives is targeted for specific OS's?

I have a Seagate HDD and I run Linux (Ubuntu), so I'm wondering if I'd be immune to the spyware.
CEOs: How do you know if you're doing your job?
"How do you know when you're doing the job only you can do?" There's not really a manual for CEO; every one is different, and every company has different needs. So, how do you know when you're doing it wrong? How do you know when you're doing it right?
Type Providers and Error Reflection in Idris
Next Time a Recruiter Pings You, Ask What You're Worth
I imagine you can do that. Some 512-byte sequence that triggers boot sector overwriting with whatever comes next.
Honestly, I think people just never really liked using feed readers. I saw in my own data that RSS usage seemed to top out in the late 2000s.

I'm not really sure why it never expanded beyond the "early adopter" crowd. Maybe the readers were too hard to use or the benefits weren't explained clearly. Part of me kinda hopes it's because publishers started caring a lot more about the design of their sites and people actually preferred the experience of reading on the original site instead of a "stripped down" version in an RSS reader.
I myself am more on the 'communications' side of the house, but recommend simply going out and socialising. You'll pick things up (ie reading basic social cues, emotions, etc) the fastest by putting yourself smack-bang in the middle of a conversation or two.

This guy talks a bit about "Social Skills Hacks": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eOKwU0LLTE

Or, take a que from the people who do it best - talk show hosts!
Also IBM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Yup. Supply and demand is the name of the game, "useful" doesn't have anything to do with it.
I think if you start with the assumption that it would be unacceptable for the US government to do nothing about protecting the American people from terrorist attack, the kinds of targeted cyber-espionage described in the article sound pretty reasonable.

They're better than launching entire wars that kill hundreds of thousands of people, cost unfathomable amounts of money, and last for over a decade, without really achieving the objective of making the country safer.

They're better than torturing people.

They're better than mass surveillance of the entire population of the country - if not the world.

Of all the things the government could be and should be doing, spying on people that in high likelihood are a threat to the US sounds like the one I'm OK with them continuing. You have to admit, slowing down another country's nuclear weapons program with a computer virus is vastly preferable to pretty much any other option on the table - even including "peaceful" sanctions which end up having a human cost.
This is why we can't have nice things. Fuck you AT&T.

So, has there been any written accounts/guides for folks that started/wanted to start their own local ISP? In some places, Houston for example, you can lease fiber along powerlines and such from the power companies.
It's in wikipedia under "software rot".

The problem is, firmware is pretty small. You can't fit much function there.

Or it was; I imagine modern hard drives might have many megabytes of firmware which allows for pretty sophisticated hacks.
>Having
everyone together in an open space
increases communication

That it does, but often at the price of productivity. There is a line dividing productive communication and pointless distraction and the more people you put in one room the more often you cross it.
Essentially this is a GIGO issue. If you ask for a route between any two places in the UK, or Germany, or France, or any other country with a strong OSM community, OSM will do fine - in fact, by bike or on foot, you'll get a better route than Google would give you.

We don't have as strong a community in the US. In SF, NYC etc. the data's pretty good. In rural Nevada it... isn't. It's still raw untouched TIGER (US census data) in most places.

So: hell yes, poke around and fix it. We would love OSM to be as good in the US as it is in Europe. And if anything isn't clear, pop in here or on IRC and ask. We're a friendly community.