skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humor is not allowed on HN. It's for our own protection - most of the people here are so autistic a simple ironic statement could lead to the end of the internet as the HN readers spaz out all at once.
How exactly bitcoin transactions are anonymous? Sure they don't have your name tagged on them but they are signed with your key. It won't be that hard to do some data analysis on the block chain to expose who's really behind each transaction, if bitcoin ever goes mainstream it will effectively mean that everyone's creditcard bill will become public...
Maybe you could answer a few questions? That'd be cool.

Is there much hope for strong privacy and anonymity using smartphones? Even with secure apps, there's the baseband, controlled by the cell provider. Can it be isolated?

What are the chances for open-source hardware?

What are the main pros and cons of iOS and Android?
Just wanted to +1 this. There are literally decades of convention built around patterns where you ship a standard config file which merges in system/user/instance-specific settings from a known location, command-line argument, environment, etc. The Debian world in particular has lead the community for decades with the use of debconf to store values such as a hostname or server role which can automatically be re-applied when otherwise unmodified files are modified upstream.

When I used this approach with a Django site years ago using RPM[1] we used the pattern vacri mentioned or the reverse one where you have an Apache virtualhost file which contains system-specific settings (hostname, SSL certs, log file name, etc.) and simply included the generic settings shipped in the RPM.

In either case the system-specific information can be set by hand (this was a .gov server…), managed with your favorite deployment / config tool, etc. and allows you to use the same signed, bit-for-bit identical package on testing, staging, and production with complete assurance that the only differences were intentional. This was really nice when you wanted to hand things off to a different group rather than having the dev team include the sysadmins.

1. http://chris.improbable.org/2009/10/16/deploying-django-site...
All true, but there is situational depression too, which isn't necessarily long term, as it goes way when the situation fades or dulls, but it is nonetheless painful and dangerous.
Great article, not paywalled.

Here's the thing that Moxie recognizes, that many other programs don't (in any domain):

He says he wants to build simple, “frictionless”
apps, adopting a Silicon Valley buzzword for
“easy to use.”
So, I'd suggest a few things.

First, stay the hell away from the web until you get some more projects under your belt. Especially nowadays, there's a huge number of opinions and frameworks out there, and a lot of bad information, and just generally a really bad place to start.

Second, stay the hell away from C++ and Java. They are, at best, intermediate level developer languages. They have a lot of power, they have a lot of moving parts, but they're complicated.

Third, build a simple game, in C. The language is small and well-supported everywhere. Use SDL to make a simple pong game. Use SDL to make a side scroller. The issues you run into will happen as you decide "Oh, I want to add jumping", or "Oh, I want to add an inventory". The language is low-level enough that you'll have built your abstractions from the start, and will have a good idea how more things fit in. Then, you can start learning how to build software better and organize your code.

Start simple and small, and grow. :)
>That's like saying that we should randomly start drilling holes in the ground because sometimes we will strike oil.

Unless you have better tools for locating the oil, that's not a bad strategy.
Here: http://equaldex.com/compare/china/japan
My argument is that people will desire valuable labor because well, we already do. We prefer being valuable to boredom.
Not that I really want to steal any of Moxie's thunder, but if you're reading this comment thread you might also be interested in SC4:

https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4

Strong encryption that runs in a browser. Recently completed its first security audit.
The Berlin Start Up Scene According to Mattermark Data
Funny, building -O3 actually flushed out some segfaults due to timing... everything was running too damn fast for my assumptions to hold!

It looks like Debian policy is to build at -O2 with exceptions for building at -O0 or -O3
Your dual core CPU is often the same quad core die with two of the cores disabled because one of the cores has a defect and is sold at a discount to increase yield.
For a sandboxed baseband check out the Neo900 project.
Great job Open Whisper Systems team!
Boats specifically because there's a higher turnaround time to replace failing hardware?
like I said, lock-in
Send Idle Words to Antarctica
They have better than usual performance on function calls, so feed it a poorly optimized Lisp and you'll probably get a large relative performance advantage. But I don't think that's what you're looking for.

Going through the most striking parts of the architecture:
- They can pipeline outer loops, even with function calls in them. I expect that will perform well on event loop patterns like you find in non-blocking IO server frameworks.
- They have cheap pipelining, vector operations, and (in the high-end models) lots of functional units. All the statistical languages like R and Julia should be able to get something out of that.
- If you have a lot of repeated pure loops (ie: map() calls), your compiler could optimize two loops into one to try to saturate the mill's functional units. Using their pick and smear operations, I think you can even get this to work on different-size loops (with less benefit the more their sizes differ, of course).
- They have novel memory protection stuff, but that's more OS than programming language.

I'm clearly not part of the Mill team though, so I could be wrong about any or all of those.
I briefly studied in South Dakota and Iowa without a car and it was a living nightmare.

Relying on friends and "taxis", I had to go through negative temperatures to get a simple can of soda.

After that, I could never complain about BART.
If you distribute your app for desktop, users will install it no matter what, but with installable webapps users won't install it until it's already part of their routine.

Of course, users are more likely to try out your app if they don't have to go through an installation process first, so it's a tradeoff.
Show HN: Swell Advantage -App for Fun and Social Boating
You mean something like http://fluidapp.com/ ?
We just commit our dependencies into our project repository in wheel format and install into a virtual env on prod from that directory eliminating PyPi. Though I don't know many other that do this. Do you?

Bitbucket and GitHub are reliable enough for how often we deploy that we aren't all that worried about downtime from those services. We could also pull from a dev's machine should the situation be that dire.

We have looked into Docker but that tool has a lot more growing before "I" would feel comfortable putting it into production. I would rather ship a packaged VM than Docker at this point, there are to many gotchas that we don't have time to figure out.
Solving multi-core Python
I tried installing TextSecure recently but it wouldn't work without the Google Play services.

I hadn't herd of their new app Signal. Has anyone tried it? I'm really interested in hearing anyone's experience using it.

BTW, I ended up installing Telegram ...and it may be mere co-incidence, but I started noticing some weird things happening that I've never seen before. I connect to the internet exclusively via tethering to my phone and while tethered I started seeing messages in Firefox from my desktop machine giving warnings that were something like "Could not establish secure connection because the server supports a higher version of TLS". My guess is that it was some sort of MITM attack... and I was possibly targeted due to the traffic to Telegram servers.

One other thing regarding Telegram: I really don't like that it reads my contact list and uploads it to their server to check if my contacts have a Telegram account. I've blocked the permission for now.
DVDFab Media Player 2 – Free Blu-Ray ISO Player
I can tell you from my own observation that these "tech bubble" articles are becoming more and more frequent. TechCrunch, Bloomberg, BI, others. Correlation, perhaps, but something to consider.

To your second point - on the surface these two "bubbles" would appear different, but dig deeper and they are fundamentally more similar. With the housing bubble it was fueled on the backend by foreign and institutional investors buying up MBS (mortgage backed securities) like mad, causing the frontend (banks and lenders) to issue credit to anyone with a pulse (and some without as I've heard dead people got approved also). Similarly with the tech bubble, hedge fund investors and others are jumping into the foray joining VCs and making deals at sky high valuations. To me, the willingness of investors to take smaller stakes in companies for more cash amounts to "cheap credit".

Bottom line, if there is a bubble, what will happen is funding will dry up, and any startups trying to raise capital will be out of luck. Even the so called unicorns will be under pressure to turn a profit once they realize they have nowhere to turn for more capital. The end result will be mass layoffs and a glut of out of work tech workers. Believe me this is the last thing I want, being a software engineer myself. But I already went through it once in 2001-2002, so I figure better be somewhat prepared than deny a bubble even exists.
What do you think about the options for baking key based reputation systems into next gen social software like Federated Wiki, Snow, etc?

I'm dreaming up a crypto currency where the scare resource is human creativity rather than CPU time. It is a little like key based identity taken through the looking glass. Quick read: http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cry...

I asked a similar question of vbuterin the other day. Thanks for any response: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ai4pm/the_humans...
This is why they say anyone in government or contractor work should get at job that will get them a clearance ASAP once they're out of school. Someone fresh out of school has a hell of a lot less history for the gov't to ask about and record than someone who's in their 40s.

So what if the red bastards get the file of someone who's 22yo and just out of school? Chances are it's 90% OSInt anyway.
There is not any evidence of encryption on WhatsApp, source code is closed so you can never be safe.
All empires end. The cycle of all empires from birth to death is explained in this book by Sir John Glubb who commanded the Arab Legion many decades ago.

http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...

(a) We do not learn from history because our studies are brief and prejudiced.
(b) In a surprising manner, 250 years emerges as the average length of national
greatness.
(c) This average has not varied for 3,000 years. Does it represent ten
generations?
(d) The stages of the rise and fall of great nations seem to be:
The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
The Age of Conquests
The Age of Commerce
The Age of Affluence
The Age of Intellect
The Age of Decadence.
(e) Decadence is marked by:
Defensiveness
Pessimism
Materialism
Frivolity
An influx of foreigners
The Welfare State
A weakening of religion.
(f) Decadence is due to:
Too long a period of wealth and power Selfishness
Love of money
The loss of a sense of duty.
(g) The life histories of great states are
amazingly similar, and are due to internal factors.
(h) Their falls are diverse, because they are largely the result of external
causes.
(i) History should be taught as the history of the human
race, though of course with emphasis on the history of the
student’s own country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284390
Given that we have the man himself onboard - can I urge you to ask the WSJ to remove the comment at the start of the article about WhatsApp implementing your encryption schema? Unless I've missed something, there's absolutely no way for an end-user to determine if their messages are being encrypted (with whatsapp). Or how they're being encrypted for that matter. I feel like WhatsApp latched onto your groundwork (potentially even with good intentions) - but never actually has opened up about the implementation, opened the code to audit, or been forthright about exactly who/how many users are covered.

I fear articles like this just make the average joe think "oh, whatsapp == secure" when recent events have proven that's far, far from the truth.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/intercepted-whats...
The 10 series Altera FPGAs are going to be a little like this, although it is more for SEUs and also IP segmentation/security. You will have lots of little islands, all which can detect configuration errors and report them, and even recover using partial reconfiguration. Maybe someday we can make it smart enough to replace and reroute around physically bad LEs automatically.
The Litetokens Protocol
Whisper the app is unrelated to Whisper Systems.
An Open Letter to Mayor Slay and Co. Executive Steve Stenger
This is what I hate about Slack. It feels like a webapp inside of a very thin wrapper.
How Doom got ported to NeXTSTEP (2013)
This guy is not part of the solution. He is part of the problem.
https://f-droid.org/posts/security-notice-textsecure/
>Also if you ask me, probability theory should just be squashed and the ideas reformulated with new more consistent syntax / symbols, because the entire thing is so damn inconsistent and disorganized at present.

How do you mean? Probability doesn't even have that much complicated symbolism... although I do wish we would teach in probability courses how to translate between random-variable "distributed according to" notation and actual density functions. As in, I wish I knew how to do that.
When I talked to somebody at Blue Waters (petascale supercomputer at UIUC), she told me that they had uncorrectable errors once or twice per day, even with ECC. Blue Waters has 22640 compute nodes that contain 16 cores each (we'll ignore the GPU nodes). So even if your typical home computer had 16 cores, you would expect 12 hours * 22640 = 31 years between uncorrectable errors.

Caveats: most computers don't have ECC, and I don't remember if Blue Waters was completely installed when I visited.
it actually has the same content, but it looks nicer
Correct. My team has two main use cases: private packages and guaranteed access to packages we've built with. It's extremely frustrating to come into a codebase after several months or years to find it using a library that no longer seems to exist on the public internet.
Hacking Team Software, contains code to insert child porn on a target's computer
Since I work in tech, I've been acting like one is inevitable. Saving a little more, spending less. Fixing up my house in case I have to sell it. Having my resume up to date and networking with recruiters instead of just blowing them off. You could also invest in funds that short the market, but I don't recommend that unless you know what you're doing.
I've had a ton of respect for Marlinspike ever since he published sslstrip, an incredibly simple defeat of HTTPS.[1]

It's a perfect demonstration of the fundamental insecurity of the web thus far. When an insecure communication mode (HTTP) is the default and perfectly ok most of the time, the browser has no idea when you are supposed to be operating on a secure channel (HTTPS) but have been tricked into downgrading by a man in the middle attack.

I can't prove it but I believe his work is a significant factor behind the shift towards deprecating HTTP in favor of HTTPS all the time. That is the only real solution.

[1] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/
It already supports CNAME. You can do example.com CNAME aaa<..>.key. SRV is on the todo list, not least because it also lets you look up the IP address and port in DNS as an alternative to the DHT.
Start with the linked reddit comment? https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/34ecja/the_heise_s...
Wife pointed out one. Hotmail. The glory days of internet. Sat on its ass. It's actually great now (outlook.com) and I prefer it over gmail now (bring out the flame throwers). But it took a long long time to get there.
Electromigration will move atoms on the interconnects between transistors and eventually cause an open.
This.
Why do you require Google Play services?
Why do you spy on contacts?
Maybe you use more esoteric features. The only thing I've done in the last 18 months is patch a bug that prevented uploads from Python 2.7.4-2.7.10. We just run it under circus with chaussette and front it with an elb.
For those interested in the rationale: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127#issu...
Mozie response in the comments of that awkward 2012 post seems sane and solution oriented. https://f-droid.org/posts/security-notice-textsecure/#commen...
Does constructReactInstance require node.js servers?
Wikipedia has the same definitions that are in your textbook, but often provides much more readable proofs as compared to the very short and "elegant" ones or unwieldy monstrosities in your usual textbooks. At least that's true for textbooks at the level of, say, Dummit&Foot's Abstract Algebra or Baby Rudin.
I strongly disagree: I'm under
no obligation to have
followed AWS for the past nine
years. Instead, in each field,
we should write in ways as self
contained, and make the minimum
assumptions, possible. In particular,
in technical writing, we should
not have undefined terms.

The research libraries are awash
with single texts that start
with meager prerequisites and
get to some quite advanced
and challenging material.
AWS can do so, also.

I've been in computing for a long
time, but there's no hope
for me to know all the jargon
of all parts of computing.
Mostly jargon is not conceptually
difficult, and the solution to the
challenge of jargon is simple --
just define it.

Parts of computing have long
enjoyed having a closed
priesthood that spoke in
three letter acronym gibberish.
IBM used to do this with
PCP, MFT, MVT, MVS, JCL,
DCB, IMS, DB2, CMS, SQL,
and many more. And there
were some four letter acronyms --
CICS, DASD, REXX.

The concepts
were mostly simple; the gibberish
was a secret language.
Once I gave a grad seminar
on computing and had a lot
of guests from industry.
IBM talked in their gibberish,
but none of the other vendors
did. The students caught on:
IBM wanted to intimidate people
and otherwise invite people
into their priesthood where they,
too, would understand the gibberish.
IBM was the least popular of
the vendors.
I use the Fluid SSB [1] for the latter. It sandboxes websites that I need to use but are not willing to allow access to my primary browser history/cookie store. It's a little clunky, but it gets the job mostly done.

[1] http://fluidapp.com
This is a double edged sword. Yes, web technologies are sprawling, but they are also constantly improving, which is not always true of the more tightly controlled platforms. You can build on iOS for example, where there are generally only a few ways to do things. But then you're waiting on Apple to release new stuff.

There will always be platforms that are the Wild West, build-your-own-adventure decentralized toolkits and others that have a narrow political agenda and are more stable. Neither is better, it's just a question of what kind of frustration hurts you less.
Chrome packaged apps do what your last paragraph is calling for
Four comments in as many minutes. You're on a roll!
a blog post from 3 years ago, complaining about a bug that was already fixed before he wrote the blog post?
Slack feels like it should be in the browser for me, as a pinned tab. So at my job that's how I use it.
Telegram isn't secure. There's been no public audit of their "secure" code and most messages aren't even sent via the secure channel unless you expressly tell it to do so.

It has a pretty UI though, so most people seem to think it's great.
If you guys want to learn more live and are based in SF, we're hosting our 2nd KongSF meetup [1] next week, along with the announcement of the v 0.4.

[1] http://www.meetup.com/The-Mashape-API-Developer-Community/ev...
> The Rust assembly to me just looks very unoptimized!

If you're not adding a flag like `-C opt-level=3` to the compiler invocation this is literally true. (For one, Rust's unoptimised code does more work than C's, e.g. arithmetic operations are checked for overflow in debug mode, which is the default when optimisations are off, but is disabled when optimisations are on.)

With optimisations on, Rust seems to do a better job, e.g. the loop in the max_array example is vectorised and unrolled by Rust, but not by gcc or clang.
This proposal is needlessly complicated. All Python has to do is put all interpreter state into a single struct to allow for completely independent interpreter instances. Then the GIL can be discarded altogether. And finally they have to change the C API to include a PythonInterpreter* as the first parameter rather than relying on the thread-local data hack.
> primarily aimed at existing AWS users.

Either that, that is, really
poor business thinking, or,
as I concluded, some poor technical
writing. I don't believe the first.
You would do excellent transporting nitroglycerin over washboard [1] [2]!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washboarding
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Fear . The protagonist drove a load of nitroglycerin over washboard by going fast enough to float over the bumps.
I use Vispy for a toy project (https://github.com/colour-science/colour-analysis) and I'm quite happy with it so far even though the project is still young. The development team is nice and doing a great job. The API offers different levels of abstraction, I'm mainly using the high level layer which is enough for my current needs and doesn't involve a single glsl line.
It's explained here: http://support.whispersystems.org/customer/portal/articles/1...
Leaked Hacking Team code to edit browser history?
> Banning snake oil is never a part of a free society.

The problem is parents forcing it on their kids. Set the minimum age to 22 or so (where most kids will be finished with college, since most kids are dependent on their parents for that now too), and it would be a lot more palatable.
No, the f-droid guy is the problem there. What a hysterical tanty he throws. It's embarrassing.
kasmith@bgsu.edu
People have sniffed the wire for the WhatApp client (on Android, towards another Android) and seen that it is encrypted.

But your point stands - there's no UI to indicate if it was secure or not and the code isn't open so you can't know for sure.