skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason why we can't have nice things is because some people are so willing to give up on certain ideas solely out of fear that people like Glenn Beck will criticize them.

You seem to think that this will be a disaster and fail because of some crackpot lunatic association Glenn Beck will make, not because of the actual merits or dis-merits of the actual system. Do we give up on ideas that easily now? If so, then that is the reason we can't have nice things.
Why is the federal government's involvement necessary? We have a (mostly) workable PKI system for SSL certificates. Why does a consumer-focused PKI require government coordination?

I think the lack of a widely deployed PKI for authenticating consumer's identities is an indicator that a novel approach is required, but what can the federal government do that an independent (perhaps multi-national) organization could not?
Bruce Schneier wrote an excellent article on PKI risks (http://www.schneier.com/paper-pki-ft.txt). Should be interesting to see how many of those are addressed as this scheme comes to fruition. It has the potential to become a highly useful backdoor intelligence gathering mechanism. This is a honeypot that the three letter agencies won't be able to resist.
This is great... I can actually use this more than the google alternative!
I'm sure this is not a trivial technical solution to a problem but have you actually talked to anyone and confirmed they'd pay for this service?

Landing page seems nice though, easy on the eyes.
wow, I couldn't believe it either. A scare quote headline with a full suicide note republished. I did notice no one at the Huffington Post would attach their name to this trash.
In other news, 29% of students are under-educated about IT.

Seriously though, I think it's clear, at least in CS, that if you only do your coursework you'll be left far behind your peers and what employers expect from you. It has to be something you can be passionate about on your own. Getting A's in all your classes but never doing anything outside of them isn't good enough.
Snubbed by Google, Goldman Sachs Manages to Friend Facebook
Underhanded? I agree, most likely not. Created by busybodies though? Highly likely.

EDIT: And I say this because I was reading something about this (can't find the link now) where it said something like the rate of on-line retail is growing and is now a 30 billion dollar business (I might be misremembering the numbers). And we must do something about this to protect it, protect it from fraud and a bunch of other "problems" that were presented like . If things like fraud were real threats to the rate of growth and our dependence on on-line transactions, would we be seeing the rates of growth we're seeing? Wouldn't vendors be scaling back their sales (being more picky about who they sell to, or going out of business due to fraud) and consumers not choosing to buy online because things like identity theft were more prevalent.

From the OP:

Under the new program, consumers would sign in just once and be able to move among other websites, eliminating the inconvenience that causes consumers to drop many transactions.

Are the number of transactions being dropped really a threat, especially considering the growth?

I'm all for making things actually more secure, but doing so under the guise that the current status-quo, which is on a growth curve, is under attack is disingenuous.

These are contrived reasons. Contrived by someone who wants to push this because they perceive a problem (legitimately or just because they like their solution) that is actually smaller than they make it out to be. Busybodies.
CDMA doesn't do SIM card. Its encryption is built onto the board.
Kevin Rose has a spotty track record for Apple predictions.
See: http://www.technobuffalo.com/blog/apple/rumor-kevin-rose-let...

"Digg co-founder Kevin Rose has a track record with announcing Apple products that is spotty sometimes. Prior to the original iPhone he announced it would have two batteries and run on both AT&T and Verizon. Yeah, we’re still waiting on those tidbits. However, last year he predicted the iPod Nano down to the last detail, so he has earned some street cred in the realm of Apple predictions."

On new AppleTV: "iOS TV Applications: Expect to see an iPhone/Pad like marketplace for television applications. Video sharing/streaming/recording apps, interactive news apps, and of course games."

Front camera is a given, and a higher res screen is no surprise at all (though full 300ppi would be), so this seems like a non-story.
arpanet
While I never suffered the molestation, I can still relate to this guy. I also came from a fundementalist background that I’m only now coping with in middle age thanks to health consuling, a support group, and a family who have likewise forsaken those closeminded ways in favor of a more loving, “truer” version of the faith.
If you live in the USA you drivers license is issued by the state you live in. There is no USA national drivers license.

Don't confuse state's rights with Federal Government rights.
You're also forgetting that the OpenID provider could be storing passwords and things wrong too, or that they've been hacked and someone's collecting them in-transit. Really, any attack against a non-OpenID site is available to an OpenID site, but with the added problem that nobody has to know.

For example, if google had a security breach (ehem China?) and passwords got snarfed for a period of time, how would you or a customer site know?

In addition to those attacks, there's economic attacks available from the provider. One day Google can just decide they don't like you and poof there go your users. For a customer this is a pretty big problem that they all must worry about.

And, all of those attacks are pretty much available to any login system.
I wish I could give you more Karma for that.

As soon as "approved id" exist, the liability for allowing comments "without approved id" will skyrocket.
Based on what? Saying there is zero chance of it being optional (once it exists) seems pretty extreme.
Rails Deveoper Help Needed
I am the lead developer with a technology start up in Cleveland Ohio, and I am looking for two additional Ruby on Rails developers. I am new to the Rails world so I am hoping I can learn from someone, and also have them be a part of the start-up.

We are part of a tech incubator; however I wanted to reach out to the community to see if anyone can provide some insight before I approach the incubator.
Brutal! How can we help if we don't even know something's wrong?

(Assuming that wasn't rhetorical): By treating people with real respect and gentleness. You never know whom you are dealing with or how your behavior will impact them.

I was molested and raped as a child, something I'm pretty open about. For me, a big deal moment was after the birth of my second child when the doctor took off his gown and, apparently without really thinking about it, gently wiped some of the blood off of me. I have no idea what his name was. The birth of my second child happened pretty fast, so I interacted with this man for probably 15 minutes or less. I had never known a man to be that gentle or considerate before. I have no reason to think he ever had any idea how big of a deal that one action was to me. It made a big psychological and emotional impact and I still remember it with some clarity -- how startled I was and how strange and wondrous it seemed -- more than 21 years later (even in spite of the 9 or 10 years I was doped to the gills on prescription and non-prescription medication for a serious medical crisis, which has left me with "swiss cheese for brains"). It occupied my mind for some weeks afterwards, if not longer.

Peace.
Kerie cable cutting
Perhaps the fact that I dropped his name is overshadowing my point.

I think the politics surrounding it are likely to create a large amount of distrust from both ends of the political spectrum regardless of its technical merits, and that will put it at a severe disadvantage. This is assuming that its success is measured by its adoption rate, and that its adoption rate is dependent upon the level of trust in the system.
Unless I'm mistaken, Sony loses money on every PS3 you buy and use as a Linux box.
Most Profane Doctype on the Internet
Tabs are all about layout. Look into the windows (and how they fit in with buffers) and you'll start to notice the difference.

Basically, the only case where you should be using tabs is when you have several different arrangements of windows that you want to switch back and forth between.
Yes I have, but not much. I have a few contacts who are either affiliate program managers for large online stores or are otherwise involved with affiliate-based marketing on some level higher than simply being users of some affiliate program. One person expressed interest in the service after a debacle involving Live's CashBack program. I'm going to gather feedback from potential customers via adwords campaigns. This should also give me some idea of the level of interest.

Edit: I don't know who downvoted you, or my other comment, but this is basically abuse of the voting system and it's been going on for a while now. I wish there was some moderator just hovering over all these threads going "Why did so and so just downvote that guy? Reversed."
I think you can play it free in your browser. Works surprisingly well, actually.

http://blurst.com/raptor-safari/

My favorite Blurst game, though (not in the app store yet) is Minotaur China Shop. Doesn't get better than this.

http://blurst.com/minotaur-china-shop/
RunwayFinder replaced tens of thousands of dollars of hard-to-use maps and charts with a great free google maps interface. FlightPrep deserves to burn in hell as far as I'm concerned
Mea culpa, you are correct. I got the names mixed up.
No, you're thinking of Richard's sister Joan, not his daughter Michelle. Here's Michelle's blurb from http://tedxcaltech.com/speakers/michelle-feynman:

Michelle Feynman is the daughter of Richard Feynman. A
graduate of Art Center College of Design, Michelle is a
freelance photographer and spends most of her days taking
pictures. She is perhaps best known as the editor of
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The
Letters of Richard P. Feynman, a collection of letters
to and from her father.The book includes an introduction by
Michelle in which she describes what it was like to grow
up as the daughter of one of the world's best-known
physicists. Michelle has also gathered a compilation of her
father's artwork in a book entitled The Art of Richard P.
Feynman: Images by a Curious Character.
I'm upset that I didn't know about this until now. Thank you so much!
There are multiple plugins to cosmetically improve interaction with buffers, my favourite is minibufexplorer. Using tabs like you might in other editors is fine for a beginner, but once you begin to learn and use more advanced vim features you'll very quickly realize they don't scale.

Also, you should always make sure 'set hidden' is in your '~/.vimrc'. It's a crime that it's not default in my opinion. Takes care of the dumb "have to add ! if it's not saved)." thing.
"When we don't have those tools available, we have to think."

1) And remember.

How many people's phone numbers do you have memorized? Far fewer than you did before they were all programmed into your phone's address book.

2) I'll think.

I think I'll stop reading the NY Times on my phone for a while and instead take those times to ponder.
If I recall correctly, Verizon was Apple's first choice for US carrier, but refused to play ball with Apple's (admittedly unprecedented) demands.
Yeah that's what I meant by "phishing trap". In retrospect not a good choice of words, "compromised" would have been better. I am letting it remain as it is because you commented on it.

I think a better way to express my opinion about OpenId is this: say I trust that the probability a particular site will not be compromised is (1 - \epsilon). Then OpenId lets me maintain and transfer that value of trust over authentication transaction with other sites. As the saying goes, it is as strong as the weakest link.

There are protocols by which one can boost the level of trust beyond that (1 - \epsilon) but I have not come across a easy to use deployment of one such.
Most College Students Misunderstand the Scientific Basis of the Carbon Cycle
That's fascinating - I always thought it was based on latitude - basically the difference in angle between the north pole and the magnetic north pole.

Still though, even in that animation, Tampa seems pretty stable over time.
Ok first of all I really don't know how you're planning to gather potential customer feedback via adwords but I really advise you to get out there and have some face to face meetings with potential customers. You probably have a MVP at this point but you haven't done any customer development.

Please go have a look at this document, it should help you with validating your MVP and startup idea: http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...

Also I really don't care about karma or upvotes. I'm here to learn and share my knowledge. If this message helps you in any way, I'll be more than content.
I don't understand the comparisons of FB to AOL, besides their seemingly common goal to sandbox the internet.

People who use AOL who discovered "the real" internet had no reason to go back. Everything they wanted was just as available + more. There's no friction to switching, beyond learning how to use a search engine.

Facebook has billions of photos, posts, comments, friend requests, updates, registrations through connect, all being added to the site every day. The longer someone uses it, the higher the cost to stop using it, or switch to another.

That's why FB has the staying power AOL did not.
Why not read Nate Lawson's blog post? This will be the second time I've recommended it to you. One of the reasons I'm not going into too much depth is, why would I recap all of Nate Lawson? You're doing crypto dev, you should be reading him already.

Your invocation of SJCL is also a bit of a straw-man. SJCL doesn't do straight-up number-theoretic crypto; even the AE cipher modes it offers avoids it. You're doing SRP in Javascript. You also keep calling it "Tom Wu's SJCL". You're saying that because "Tom Wu" is the name on SRP. Tom Wu didn't write SJCL. The SJCL authors, for what it's worth, claim "the best security which is practically available in Javascript", follow by a parenthesis, followed by the word "Unfortunately", followed by more words you should read.

The two factor stuff, by the way? News to me as of this post. Twilio and 2-factor auth is a good idea (note though that I'm biased, as my friend Dug is doing something very similar --- http://www.duosecurity.com).
Well, in answer to the question "what would you do?", I guess number 1 on the list of possible actions would be to get a vasectomy after having my first child.
Facebook creates incredible peer pressure to join, if only to answer this question:

"what if they're talking about me on facebook?"

Facebook is directed peer pressure.
Global Net Access is a company in I think Atlanta. Their owner, Jeff Hinke, is a good guy. He owns a pretty nice datacenter named AtlantaNAP (which is notable, because in general, hosters his size usually don't own their facilities, but rather just lucked into good deals at carrier hotels after the telco crash). His model is a bizarre (bizarre to me due to the conflict of interests) mixture of carrier neutral datacenter space (AtlantaNAP) and generic hosting (GNAX). Linode has a pop there.

My guess is whoever did this chart pulled this information
lazily just did a traceroute and saw that the last hop to Gamador is an IP owned by GNAX (http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/63.247.64.154).

A somewhat more accurate method would have been to use ARIN to look up the ip address for www.gamador.com by going to http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/74.207.231.40). This would have shown that your hosting company was Linode, instead of GNAX.
Me too. I instantly knew what that time period was for me.

This concept immediately reminded me of an excerpt from the outstanding book "Rules for Aging" which talks about this and its potential dark side:

"A long happy life last five minutes. One would think that this rule would go without stating, but many people actually believe that a long life of uninterrupted happiness is a real possibility. And they act on this belief! They change families, careers, the structure of their faces, countries, everything, for no more substantial reason than they recall five minutes of uninterrupted happiness in the past, and now they wish to re-create the moment in perpetuity. They even convince themselves that the five-minute period they recall was really five years and giddily substitute the exception (bliss) for the rule (confusion, doubt, misery, fear, confusion, and confusion). Happiness is wonderful, but if you have had more than five consecutive minutes of it, it means you weren't thinking."

That book isn't really about aging, it's more about practical down-to-earth wisdom. I read it for the first time when I was in my early 20's, and it's very amusing and pure gold.
but it seems like where the companies (incl. GOOG) are trying to take net neutrality - into a controllable space with gov't teeth...

This is why I'm opposed to net neutrality.

Net neutrality has always been about "a controllable space with gov't teeth." Net "neutrality" is a contradiction in terms because it requires the government and corporate cronies to make it work, and the government and corporate cronies are not neutral.

It's unbelievable how the liberal crowd buys it, hook, line, and sinker. I hate to use a corny Star Wars quote but it's appropriate, something like this: "Liberty always dies to the sound of applause."
Thank you for the feedback, and especially the link. I plan on getting customer feedback by developing over the course of a month or two a list of keywords that get a high conversion for sign-ups to the mailing list. Then actually talking to the people on my mailing list. Also, in the past I have found that many people are willing to contact me via the contact form I have on a landing page, and those individuals are easy to engage for feedback.

As for the karma and votes, I know it's not about the karma. And one down-vote doesn't mean anything. For me it's the principle of it. I want people here to act right because I try so hard to uphold the values this place represents. It just seems like more and more people don't give a crap about that. Sigh.

Thanks again!

Edit: Really started checking out the PDF you linked me to. This is a fantastic find. I'll be reading this tonight over my favorite episodes of TNG.
"Turing completeness" does not mean "safe environment in which to run cryptography". There are in fact math problems in Javascript environments, but they are far from the worst problems you face there.
Which one will execute faster, if(flag==0) or if(0==flag)?
mobile site or the fb app?
I'm not incorrect. I did actually read your code, Zed. You think I've made a claim that I haven't made: that you wrote a serverside implementation of SRP. I know you're using the original SRP library. That was a good call. You know SRP is mutual auth, right?
Sprint: the DICKHEAD network
You've gotten to the real issues here. If the problem is lack of industry consensus (i.e. N standards instead of one), maybe the government can bully the industry into picking one.
Kanban Overview
Why not unfriend rather than hide for some of those situations?
I have to say I agree with you, there. I think there are benefits to be had, but saying "This is going to cause a huge shift in consumer use of the Internet" can only be described as overblown.
One thing to consider is AT&T may offer some really good deals to counter the VZ launch. If you can live without the iPhone for 30 days you might end up with a much better package over 2 years or a heavily discounted price on the hardware. I think it's probably worth the wait. I doubt VZ will be offering any good deals just because they have a decent amount of pent up demand for the iPhone. Why discount something you know people will pay full price for?
I mean no personal disrespect towards you, but you're implying that religions are themselves tolerant and respectful, and that people are flawed for not being able to "live up" to them. In reality, religions tend not to be tolerant and respectful, and criticizing people in general for not being "good enough" to live up to a religious standard is unfair.
My high school adviser told me I'd never get into UCSD. Not only did
I get in, but I graduated with honors. Never listen to people who
tell you what you can't do.
I'd say no, totally unrelated, since:

a) it wasn't today
b) that phone is now dated and was only $99 before; $50 less isn't a big deal considering that the real price includes a 2-yr contract
Inventor wins Microsoft appeal
Three weeks ago they were going to fight it:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018272
A lot of people still prefer work with revision control tools from a standard unix command line.... in an 80x25-ish window.....especially when it comes to debugging and investigating things (so we can use all our other nice shell text processing tools to make sense of things)

Something that fits nicely in that space is helpful in that case.
I love Facebook!

I derive a huge amount of value out of it. I put in the time to train it to show me what I want to see, and I don't become friends with everyone I meet.

It's silly to say that nobody likes Facebook. You don't, and that's fine. But you're in a very small minority (and arguably for a reason).
Five Data Blogs You Should Be Reading
This article reminded me of RescueTime. I think RescueTime might be OK, but not for me. I tried clicking the unsubscribe link in the emails, which did indeed unsubscribe me instantly. However I did not get to opt out of paying them another $75 at some point in the future that I can't identify.

Ah, it took some digging, but I found the account link. This could seem unfair, since the link was actually right in the middle of the page. But it was small, hard to see, and it didn't uninstall the RescueTime bot from my computer.

Now I have an OS X process running for a service that charged me one year in advance. And I have to go find this stupid thing. Just fuck off and die.
I want the text of that guarantee. What do I get if it doesn't become mandatory? And by when will it become mandatory?
refer to this article, "Aussie inventor's $445m Microsoft windfall wiped out" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851971
My favorite story about estimating yields of nuclear weapons is the confetti method. I recollect it being attributed both to von Neumann and Fermi. I am not sure
who the actual person was.

The way it worked was at the sign of the flash he released torn shreds of paper and noted how far they were dispersed by the shock wave that followed. This mental calculation turned up to be quite accurate.
2b) Tax consequences matter. Take advantage of options to reduce them, for example by fully funding your IRA. Particularly for the young kids here, you should be maxing your IRA every year if you're debt free. (And you should not, not, not tap it when you change jobs, want to fund a startup or wedding, etc.)
His friend asked for help on HN and posted the suicide note, but later deleted it. http://documents.from.bz/note.txt
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059862
Yes, there's something very strange here when there are ~6 companies using Linode for DNS but only one for hosting - I'm happy to be corrected but I'd be quite surprised if people use Linode DNS without also using the hosting.
The very disturbing thing is that "cyberspace" by term literally means the space between yours and my connection to the internet, be it phone line, cable, whatever.

Such broad usage of terminology and the idea of regulating it is wholly disturbing to me. This literally means everything from the last-mile connection from my ISP to my website is potentially up for interference from the government.

Why do I have the feeling that this will somehow be related to a massive crackdown on piracy?