skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I understand correctly, Open Whisper servers are still needed for TextSecure/Signal applications to work, there are even some initial keys involved, and if these servers were actually malicious, everything would be compromised?

That would mean that checking the open sources they publish doesn't help as we don't know what they actually do on the server side.

Now I'd very much like to be proven wrong, so if anybody knows any independent work that claims that the protocols are made so that what's on the server doesn't matter, please post and I thank you in advance.

Also, does anybody know if the sources they publish are enough to make the fully independent infrastructure (run own servers)?
I'm not sure if you're joking but... it's a given.

Likewise with PHP and wordpress or Node.js and Ghost.
Good Eggs lays off 140 and shuts down 3 out of 4 markets
Yeah, I just tested myself: can I name any of the prominent taxi companies in Sydney (where I live)? Maybe; is Silver Service the name of one, or is it a type of taxi? I'm not sure, but it's the only one that comes to mind.
There is evidence of this all over the press if you want to search for it. Take for instance The 'non-profit' "People's Uber" in China. They guaranteed wages for drivers and capped rates at auto rickshaw prices. This spring in Guangzhou I was taking 20 minute rides and paying around $1.50. It was ridiculous. While they were trying to maintain a foothold in Germany as more than a legal taxi hailing service (which is what they are now, competing with apps like mytaxi) they were limiting prices to legal Mitfahrgelegenheit (private ride share) prices. What was normally a 70€ cab ride between Düsseldorf and Köln cost 12€ (Less than taking the regional train for 1 person though the driver was paid much more of course. This went on for months.

I'm sure they are making money in markets where the existing taxi service was truly dreadful and where they don't have to compete on price and have been able to raise their rates to on par or higher than taxi rates, but they are definitely paying a price for expansion.
Now, come on, this is just downright idiotic. I have a friend in Chicago who works 40 hours a week as a lube tech, makes about $28k a year, and is able to support his mother, own a modest house and 2 cars. Is this guy entitled to live in NY? Is anyone? What's wrong with Chicago, or Kansas City, or any other fine city in the US. Does every one HAVE to live in NY or LA or SF?

Also, I really get annoyed with the stereotypical evil landlord depictions. For instance, here is a story about a couple I personally know in LA. They are Mexican immigrants. They both worked hard their entire life. About 20 years ago they purchased a house in central LA. for the last 9 years they have been renting out a portion of their house to a woman and her daughter for $800/mo. Most of the time they would get rent late, and some months not at all. Now they want to retire and sell their house, take out the equity, and move to a cheeper area.

One problem though, they can't. The woman will not move out, and no one wants to buy the house with a current tenant. First she demanded a $19,000 relocation fee, which is required by the City of LA. But you have to remember, this is equivelant to her basically living in this place rent free for 2 years. But that's not all, she also said that she will not move out unless they can find her a little HOUSE (as in with backyard and all), in Santa Monica, where she can pay no more than $800/mo! Legally they can not evict her, and can not sell their house and retire. She is literally holding them hostage. Is that fair?

The point is, no one is entitled to live in NY, SF, or LA. And once you make the move, you might realize that their plenty of nice places out there in US.
Yes I believe this is the main reason for not picking it up, and for it lying around in the first place. However if there is a way to profit from it, that could mean the private sector can turn things around.
Yes, indeed. The eposure of the photo must have been set to make earth look as bright as we expect, and leaving the moon darker.
Uber is active pretty much everywhere. They're truly aiming to corner the entire global transport market. They're putting in $1B in India alone.

When the dust is settled, you're going to get a company that controls the private transport industry in an area that stretches from San Francisco to Kolkata

For an industry that was once dominated by small local players, this is truly mind blowing.

I don't think there is a single startup that is as obsessed with aggressive growth as Uber
I find this easy-to-overlook and mostly-off-the-main-topic passage quite deep and sadly truthful:

There may also be political impediments. Even if we know how to educate tomorrow’s professional programmer, it is not certain that the society we are living in will allow us to do so.
The first effect of teaching a methodology —rather than disseminating knowledge— is that of enhancing the capacities of the already capable, thus magnifying the difference in intelligence.
In a society in which the educational system is used as an instrument for the establishment of a homogenized culture, in which the cream is prevented from rising to the top, the education of competent programmers could be politically impalatable.

...and the funny thing is that these "political" impediments have been driven by nothing else than plain old month to month business objectives: by striving for "replaceable programmers", or "reproducible performance" or "reducing the buss factor" etc. we trowed away the most promising "programmer brainpower amplifiers", prevented "the cream" from rising too high by drowning it in endless debugging and optimizations tasks that "needed to be done" because "legacy", and we got a [C, C++ and Java] main-languages-combo instead of a [some-low-level-ML, Lisp and Smalltalk] one.

But if you know that you can always fire your top programmer and still survive as a business, it was worth the cost of x-times programming productivity reduction, right? (Plus the more global thing: anyone with less money and training than you have, like some bunch of unknown 3rd world country programmers, is very unlikely to overtake your business if most of the true brainpower-amplifiers are thoroughly crippled, and you also have the "network effects" part turned against them - read below)

And the awesome part was that by doing this industry-wise, any competitive advantage that could be had by the party-line-breakers choosing the x-times tech was lost because of the network-effect-induced-handicaps: if they need to take a week to rewrite that library in their smarter language/stack and another week for the other one etc., that x-times advantage goes away pretty fast ...except for a few that were really smart and made all the right micro-decision at all the right levels (and had some pretty strong place and time advantages too - like simply being in SV around '95), like PG with Viaweb and a few others.

...it's really sad to read and write this, seeing that despite someone really smart like Dijkstra saw this a few decades earlier, it still went this way.
It's reassuring to think that there'll soon be a growing population of smart systems and artificial intelligences that hate Internet Explorer too.
Not just funny, but true. When you invite a lawyer into a discussion, what is most straightforward way for them to show they are contributing? More clauses.

My firm's done negotiations with banks, and they all do the same vanilla business. Some have lawyers very close to the process, and some keep them at a distance. Of course there's always more back-and-forth when the lawyers are there, even though the business is the same for everyone. They try to sneak in ridiculous clauses and fight you on everything.
sure beats being White House Press Secretary
Autonomous, Connected Cars Fuel Next-Gen Cartography Race
I am not sure how much of an edge one can gain by doing demand prediction through algorithms. In large markets the patterns are fairly trivial (big game ended, everybody goes home; it's 5 pm in financial district, people are leaving work; busy time at the airport, bunch of flights arriving at once) and known to all participants.
Japan arrests Mt. Gox Bitcoin head over missing $387m
Also to keep drivers more motivated than they'd otherwise be. I'd say that they're trading VC money with drivers in order to have a dominant position by the time the drivers are no longer required.
Mean Stack – MongoDB: NodeOnFire (PostreSQL)
As a Londoner, I'm apparently based on the West Coast.
Cool that California is so clearly visible.

Too bad you can see the multiple exposures, one for each of red, green, and blue, on the hi-res image. Otherwise it is quite the perfect picture.
I'm curious what you all have to say about this up and coming framework, personally I have been a bit put off by MongoDB in MEAN, but this looks amazing for building full stack javascript apps.
> With testing I can show that my program performs a certain set of functions as I want it to, with a certain set of inputs.

No you can't. You can show that it has worked a finite number of times in tssting. With testing alone you can't show that it won't produce arbitrary crap the next time you run it.

This is obviously formally true in the general case. For example my program might contain code that makes it run exactly n times then self-destruct.

But worse than that it's often true for real non-silly programs. Race conditions are a famous, common and awful example of test-resistant bugs.
Also, on 64 bit machines SHA-512/256 is generally faster than SHA-256.
The main site makes it look like the language is about a year old.

I have no doubt that they can make the parsing stage faster, as they won't be parsing the same headers over and over again. This is often a bottleneck in C++, but much less often in C. (I've seen 10+MB C++ files after preprocessing).
Private monopolies are in some theoretical circumstances unproblematic because according to extremist free-market ideologues they are destroyed by more effective competitors. In reality they are broken up by governments, regulated into the ground, or destroy a nation/society, and they manage to make a society/market a whole lot worse before this long-term and extreme regulatory action obliterates them and fixes the problem.
There used to be government restrictions in the US regarding how many minutes per hour broadcasters could show commercials, since TV stations were using "the public airwaves", and in most places you only had three or four channels.

But with the advent of 150+ channel cable services they decided the rationale for that kind of regulation had been undermined.
You can do that via API, so it's pretty trivial to set up using an integrator like Zapier or tray.io.
Dang, just saw your reply which was better than mine.
Better Commit Messages with a .gitmessage Template
>> controls the private transport industry

But is their money buying control of anything? They are not buying control over a resource, like "all the tin mines in China" or something. Is it just spend on market creation that a fast follower can piggy back on for free?
My problem with flash is the same as with all plugins: scroll doesnt work, mouse-gesture dont work, shortcuts dont work, no control of content. Its like opening an enterly other program in browser without any integration.
Not only $5/mo, but $5/mo/user which is surprisingly expensive.
I think that Steve Jobs nailed it. People are willing to pay a lot for the experience. Right now bittorrent gives the best TV viewing experience at all. You click, you download, you watch. No logins, no DRM, no bullshit.

Until TV can beat the quality of that experience - they are doomed.
Designing Jibo for developers
I'm in a similar position. Also 24, and didn't finish college. I haven't had trouble getting jobs, but I still have to answer the "So why didn't you finish school" question no matter where I apply. I ended up just leaving my education off my resume but I still seem to get asked often.
You noticed I said in theory - what you have raised is the practice :)

Personally I think a lot of Uber business model is hidden cost shifting onto the driver and society. Drivers are underestimating the true cost of being a Uber driver and society is losing out via inadequate insurance and tax avoidance. The drivers are not taking out the correct insurance and a lot of them are not declaring their income or collecting sales tax. I guess as long as it is all done on an app then it must be cool and OK.
What it'll be in practice: the Underhanded C Contest http://www.underhanded-c.org/ but as applied to whatever language is used in the system in question.
There are a few quite large sub-fields, but there are classic textbooks covering most of these. Here are some:

For classical enumerative combinatorics, there is Richard Stanley's 'Enumerative Combinatorics'.

For graph theory, Diestel's book 'Graph Theory' is popular for introductory courses, and Bollobas' 'Modern Graph Theory' is more advanced and (as the title says) modern.

And there is Laszlo Lovasz's fantastic 'Combinatorial Problems and Exercises', which is a collection of problems and answers, and is a great way to get a feel for the subject.
Watch Fifth Grader Ari Get Fitted for a New 3D-Printed Hand
We have a SHA-3 core by Bernd Paysan written in Verilog in the Cryptech repo.
http://wiki.cryptech.is/browser/core/hash/sha3
Some decades ago, during discussion about test bans, the people who had experience from blowing up 1,000+ nuclear bombs were asked if it was possible to design a nuclear bomb that could be used by future generations that would be sure to work without additional testing, and bearing in mind changes in technology. Their answer was "yes".

(I think my knowledge comes from one of Freeman Dyson's accounts.)

I have not heard a clear explanation of why those earlier weapons designers were wrong, only concerns about how they might have been wrong. That more nebulous caution sounds identical to the sorts of statements someone might make as a justification for designing new weapons - for some people designing nuclear weapons and watching them go BOOM is a lot of fun.

In my very limited understanding of the topic, the largest unknown is the changes to the plutonium-gallium alloy of the core. Some worry that it has degraded. Others say "most plutonium pits have a credible lifetime of at least 100 years". Even if it's a problem, one solution is to re-smelt the cores, though currently we do not have the facilities for that. However, we could make those facilities without testing new weapons.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Replacement_Warhead and http://depletedcranium.com/do-our-nuclear-weapons-work/ for some of the discussion. Also bear in mind the annoying calculus of game theory. A higher inability to use a nuclear weapon may make it less likely to be used.
Show HN: ShareCounter this gem allow to count shares on social networks
Arbitrage opportunities disappear when people exploit them. The markets are `anti-inductive'.
Yelp now lets you see how long the wait will be at the hospital's ER
So US and UK should have been more aggressive over Russian involvement in Ukraine?
It seems it would have sense to change the link to point to the NASA's article. Moderators?
What I reacted to was the suggestion that

> it also has the side effect of diminishing job prospects

is a good or desirable thing.
Where can I find more info about this?
(Note: “Sic” doesn’t mean what you think it means.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic
Socialized content discovery app which helps you to discover interesting content
Show HN: Command Line Interface to GoDaddy.com
Yes, that is a problem. 'Hardened' configurations cannot be checked. But there are a lot of non-hardened configuration. Actually there are more that returns there version than not.
We're not doing anything too fancy. Basically, we spawn a container to build a statically linked binary and do a regular Dockerfile-based build inside that container. The result is an image which contains only a single binary (any maybe some static assets like config files or images).

We're planning to open source our build script shortly.
> When the dust is settled, you're going to get a company that controls the private transport industry in an area that stretches from San Francisco to Kolkata

Yay! Disintermediation! Smashing monopolies!

Oh, wait.
TL;DR: university gave to me (and to my friends who have degrees) wider interest field, with skills to absorb information about new topics. In my own experience usually drop-outs and people who've did not attend college, have shallower and narrower interest fields.

IMHO, college/university degree is worth it (coming from Europe where education is way cheaper than in US), in regards you will also broaden your skill-set while attending school. Though, if you seek academical career 'real life' skill-set is somewhat less important.

Maybe it's just me and my social circles, but usually I can find out if someone has attended college or not (or just skimmed through classes), just by talking with them.

For reference, I had few colleagues who did their job well, though where completely clueless out of their job requirements range. They have not attended college, or dropped out very early. They had narrower and way shallower interest fields than people I know with degrees.

I want to stress that it's experience from my own social circles and I am not talking about exceptional cases (there are geniuses drop outs and geniuses with PhDs)
This is admittedly definitely the kind of thing I'd love to see a "making of" about.

Actual real devices?! I would really like to get a bit of a behind-the-scenes on how they managed that. :P
Thanks for these I will give it a listen.

Even "on to something" is a click-bait title which HN guidelines say should be neutered. IMHO you don't need to force it, just be classy and straight-forward e.g. "YC Startup School Radio Ep. 3 - Optimizely & Lawn Love" or something.
When We Will End the Domestic Terrorism?
I dont think Uber is going anywhere soon. It has such a strong brand. Everyone I know trusts uber a lot more than there local cab companies.

They seem to be following the same pattern as large supermarkets:

- Move into an unserved area

- Offer goods/services at rock-bottom prices

- As competition reduces, increase prices and squeeze suppliers

- Profit, profit, profit!

An interesting example of this is Tesco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco), who at one point were receiving one pound in seven spent in the UK. According to the wiki, that's now widened to one in every ten pounds.

The other interesting angle is that Tesco have been hugely profitable until this year, when they reported a loss of nearly six billion pounds. We'll have to see what happens next.
In Egypt, specifically Cairo, it is more complicated than that. There is an entire pre-modern recycling system where a sizable group of the Christian minority who are lower class or below the poverty line live in neighborhood known as Muqattam (or to Egyptians, Mu'attam مقطم). They take piles of garbage, feed garbage to the pigs, and sort anything, and I mean anything, recyclable for reuse and for profit selling it off.

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

Also notes there is a church of stunning beauty inside this community. Almost all hipster study abroads, yours truly included, visit this once in their time in Egypt.

samaanchurch.com/en/miracle_en.php

They are frequently the focus of Western NGO work, specifically the children, and at one time a documentary and NGO project was initiated to teach them modern recycling techniques to implement abroad.

http://garbagedreams.com/

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

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

And a general note. And I do mean, general, not just to brc. I see a lot of comments, and I still, as an American of an overly privileged upbringing, that people have trouble with their cultural lense. It is incredibly easy to see "there's always a lot of rubbish sitting around, and also a lot of people sitting around," when in fact the situation is more complicated. These people have been doing recycling in a very dangerous way (to their health) and making a meager living long before such practices, in more sanitary ways, took off in the West.

From Egypt, I still miss the smell of burning garbage, as awful as it sounds, when I ride the ring road between a major suburb to downtown Cairo to get to school. It creates strong nostalgia in me, so I had to say something, as unrelated as this comment is.
> (Really want a dark thought? You realize that we've dug up and used all of the easily-available oil, right? When Some Later Generation Gets Its Act Together, they aren't going to have a convenient, cheap source of energy.)

Plenty of nuclear fuel still around, on earth (uranium, thorium, hydrogen) and in the sun (solar power, wind, etc).
Perhaps Dylan might an electron-microscope?
Will do. Thanks for pointing out the right way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli
"He also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is renowned in the Italian language."

It makes a lot of sense that The Prince was an over the top dark comedy.
Fashion Womens Dresses, Cheap Designer Gowns Online
the 20 lines thing... :P

it was a challenge to write, bash has nothing that looks like a recursive data structure. it's not really meant to be useful ^^
Is there an advantage to this over say a more modern and safe language like Rust? It seems to be just reducing the complexity of the language, but doesn't look like it will reduce memory related bugs.
> * A git-powered version of Rake, which runs only those tests that need to be run based on the git history since the last run.

I think you mean "magic".

That is, this is not possible :) Not that I wouldn't like it to be.
> You could, for instance, immediately buy out any serious competition before it becomes dangerous.

That's great. So your are writing free puts to my startups' equity?

Ie after you buy me out, I can go and start a new company, threatening to compete again.
I think it would be a truly viable startup idea to connect app developers with "naive" people - soccer moms who simply haven't got the time to learn tech properly, 70-year-olds who've never used a smartphone, 3 year olds, etc.

Being able to get your website or app (or even good ol' desktop program!) tested by people who have <specific metric> exposure to <granular list of options> wrt. technology would be invaluable, I think.

I consider it sad that this either doesn't exist, or isn't yet a standard part of the common consciousness/culture.
Pineapple Graphics for OpenTTD
Ask HN: What software do you use to run your RESTful API?
Tomcat? Node?
That's just nonsense (and unsubstantiated). Read the People's Daily--they have an English version online--for a while and then read the Washington Post, NY Times, etc. The American media routinely criticize the government: Fox -> Democrats; NY Times -> Republicans. I'd be surprised if you can make it a week reading the People's Daily, it's so full of right thinking that it'll make a NY Times article on Obama look condemning...
Google Tried to Buy a Veggie-Burger Startup for $300MM
" VMware is by far, not even remotely close, the most widely deployed hypervisor in the mid to large enterprise market segment"

Citation? Depending on how you count AWS, I'd say Xen is much larger than VMware.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/maintenance-2015-03/
Diet Coke Exposed: What Happens One Hour After Drinking Diet Coke
Perhaps. But at any given level of consumption of Coke + Pepsi, consumers would benefit from lower prices.
Well, honesty hour: why didn't you?

My reason (maybe for inspiration?)... If someone expects me to read a book and apply concepts from it, I'm going to have a terrible time. Not because I can't read, but because I won't. I don't learn by reading a book. I learn by doing.

Georgetown was first — more traditional school. That didn't last long. Thought that somewhere more "in my niche" would do things differently.

Nope.