skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data?

If you do really want true anonymity and un-censorability as guarantees of the system design, then no, I don't think users can decide what they don't want to store or transmit. For, if they can, then their governments can coerce them into making the same "choice." Any preference that can be set by a user, can also be forced upon said user by a system administrator, operating system vendor, etc.

My real question is, do we need cryptography and anonymity built in at a protocol level to have something that's useful for political activism? It seems to me that there are only two real "innovations" these networks bring over, say, pushing encrypted blobs to people over SFTP drops (these, by coincidence, are both factors I've only really seen on Freenet):

1. That you have the ability to "push" content into the network, such that it will then replicate and spread through the network as it is accessed, without the possibility of an audit trail leading back to the source peer (even though the original source may know which client uploaded it, each peer only knows which other peer they got it from, so all you need to ensure anonymity is an internet cafe);

2. That content cannot be removed from the network easily--as there can always be dark peers who have copies of your data block, who will come online later and repopulate the network even if it has been seemingly purged of a block (by, say, all involved homes and data-centers being raided by the feds)--and that this happens pretty much transparently to the people involved, since people are always joining, leaving, and re-joining the mesh/swarm/whatever-it-is.

Encryption need only happen on a layer above this system, where and when it's desired. Anonymity need only happen at the end-points: the users can just access the system over Tor if they don't have the requisite internet cafe/seven proxies handy.

As long as you're just passing cat pictures around, why not just throw them onto a simple, infinitely-sized, everyone-can-create-files-but-nobody-can-delete-them DHT-based "disk"? And if you're passing political activism around, just encrypt and sign it like you were going to send it over email, then drop it in the mesh and email the URN instead. (This is presuming a stable PKI key-publishing/querying infrastructure as well, of course.)

And if you want to make it convenient for end-users, just make a browser extension that can load those URNs through the mesh as if they were regular HTTP URLs, and does the decryption and signature-validation automatically--and have the mesh software install that browser extension--and then you'll have something.
It's the fact that they don't enforce this policy that makes it controversial. How about to email Tim Cook about something? Plenty of tweets with tcook@apple.com in them.
It depends. Add "0% chance of failure", and I might have some ideas.
The Tivo analogy makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up, I figured initially that I was misunderstanding the point of the post and your analogy fixed it.
Which makes me think of customer development... And how difficult it can be to sort through which feedback matters and is worth iterating around and what you should ignore. I think the biggest successes of recent times, Inatagram and Facebook just had an innate sense of what their users wanted.
Facebook Stock Is Getting Crushed - 40% down
1- Who are your current customers - paid/non-paid (i.e validate your idea)
2- What are your current challenges next 1-6 mths
3- Who is your competition and how are you different
4- What will make you succeed
I think you would need to limit the scope from an entire decentralized , anonymous 'network' to just a decentralized anonymous website or discussion forum..

Something like an anonymous decentralized HN or reddit with mods that have the ability to ban posts, topics , & users. It wouldn't be as 'free' as tor or freenet, but with the right group of benevolent dictators it could be as free and useful for a certain niche topic like politics or news.
Box and Dropbox Come of Age in Cloud Computing
No, payroll code must track fed, state, and local tax rules in order to calculate employees' paychecks and payroll taxes due.
Can you explain what causes a piano that hasn't been tuned to lose the ability to stay tuned? It sounds interesting, and I can't quite figure out how that would work.
Discovery of a King Statue of No-Hittites Kingdom | Science feature
If it were to ship with GNU/Linux (like Debian or Ubuntu) and run Android stuff via something like Alien Dalvik, then I'd be much more interested. I can't get really excited about yet another android box, even if it had slightly unconventional form-factor.
Why Every Entrepreneur Should Live in San Francisco
> Every new PC sold with Windows 8 will be locked up tight with Microsoft's UEFI ... secure boot on

Not that I don't agree that there's a potentially dangerous precedent here, but this is omitting a key detail. For x86 computers, MS's certification requires that users can disable secure boot. Of course, this is not true for ARM computers, hence the dangerous precedent.
Unless they fork and go a different direction than Win8, this is dumb.
Wait, so 95% of your customers experience a TTFB of less than 500 microseconds (tp95 of 450 microseconds)? I just want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Because that's awesome.
Even more impressive is that 3 million downloads represents users upgrading, not OEM purchases.
If its anything like FFTactics for iOS, using a controller will be huge. When games aren't designed for touch controls, and are poorly ported, they might as well not even exist on the platform.

Edit: There is more detail on this below, with some contrasting views for FF3, which I've never played.
Don't waste your time. Actual title of the post: Inbox Inefficiency Vanquished at Long Last – KeyRocket Now Supports Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts
How to Create CSS3 Gradient Buttons
In this quick tutorial we'll create a set of CSS3 gradient buttons that are cross-browser compatible and come in 3 sizes: big, medium, small.
At least Top Gear will have a ample supply of pianos to drop on cars :).
An option that you missed was, "let it pass, but have no regrets." Every opportunity followed comes at the cost of 100 others.
That's not true. My grandmother has a old piano in her house. I think her father bought it used in the 1920s or 30s. It's an "Ortiz&Cussó", a brand created in 1898 and, based on some findings in the web, that piano could have perfectly one hundred years. And it even survived the 700km travel when my grandmother moved to another city.

It has lost a lot of volume, some keys are "bited" and some strings get easily out of tune. But, believe me, it still sounds great. The lower range of notes beats most pianos I have heard (and played). It needs maintenance, but it's not useless. I think a piano can last a lot of time if you take care of it.
I actually filed a bug a while back about the annoying Alt-` behavior: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661119 . The AlternateTab extension (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/) has matured a lot since it was first released, and it now fulfills my needs, so perhaps you should take a look at it, too.
The tuning pegs might become stuck to the side of the pegboard holes they are in. Also, if the strings are not kept at the correct tension, there is a real possibility of the iron frame becoming warped or even breaking.
Wouldn't compression between redis and hiredis make sense as well?

How much load would compression put on a Redis instance that talks to n clients where each client sends/receives medium sized JSON docs. And how much would be gained in terms of faster responses from Redis.
Nope. It was done as a pretty thorough remake for the DS a few years ago - added 3D, changes to core gameplay (that were not very well implemented as someone else pointed out), etc. These DS versions are what have been ported to iOS and Android.
Customer Service Isn’t an Option
Here's a specific example my wife discovered last night. Downtown Abbey Season 2 is not available on Netflix or PBS (which does typically offer streaming without much delay), but the whole season is available on Hulu.

I will say, though, that for every time this happens, there have been ten other times where Hulu only had the previous five episodes. If Hulu+ offered the full current season it would be so much more worth it.
biometrics needs to get comprehensive, with dozens of separate identifying features, and no public release of what those features are.
This is unfortunate. I was about to implement MixPanel on my startups site (it already laced in our development code), but their API being down completely locks our application ... actually shipping MixPanel in production not looking so hot right now.

EDIT: As others have voiced my issue was that it was taking up to 30 seconds for requests to timeout disrupting various things in my JS code (it is a Backbone app) -- it didn't actually "lock" it. I was using the JS API.
Do people still believe this crap? It's not as if OEMs are being forced to make Microsoft the sole CA of machines they sell. The requirement for the logo is that the feature is available. Any OEM who doesn't provide options to enable/disable the feature or adjust trust options is crazy. I mean, come on -- what if your hard drive fails? These are desktop computers we're talking about. It's an open platform.

To be honest, I'm very excited for Secure Boot. It, combined with TPMs and disk encryption, will finally allow desktop computers to be a truly secure platform (barring opening up the ICs on the motherboard, anyway).
Same thing happens with a guitar if you leave it without strings or heavily detuned. The neck can begin to warp and become very easy to break.
Incidentally it seems Al-Qaida may be becoming a more effective force in Syria than the Free Syrian Army[1].

[1] - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/30/al-qaida-rebels-...
Asynchronous learning
Again: missing the point. This is not about objective truth, but what people take from it. This is an elementary distinction in advertising, and rhetoric more generally.
It's D-Day for the US Post Office
Two comments:

DBAD: Don't Be A Dick

OTOH, many "geeky" types have faced a lot of rejection -- at least, in my generation. It is perhaps not entirely unexpected to encounter negative reaction when presenting oneself in a fashion that they have been conditioned to read as communicating/implying, or just being -- whether or not the message is intended, "You can't have this."

You may think it's unfair. But step away from yourself, for a second, and look at the reality.

(And, if it makes you feel any better, "pretty boys" can and do encounter similar animosity from male geeks.)

Female or male, I think many end up resenting those who are fawned over for their appearance and the resulting advantages they accumulate.

(If you're still unclear on the male side of this, consider perceptions of tall, type A "football" types.)

The negative reaction is sometimes a well-conditioned defense mechanism. And those don't tend to exist in a vacuum, i.e. like them or not, they have some validity -- some real reason for their existence.

That said, we can all learn to act and react better. But denying the underlying basis is not a good point from which to start.

P.S. Physical attraction is also just -- fundamentally, biologically -- distracting. And many people at... "geeky" conferences are not their to be distracted by or communicate with others distracted by a lot of what they consider to be off-topic activity and, erm, "presentation".
I'll have to try a new digital. Part of the problem is that they're a moving target. I am probably judging digitals by the standards of eight or even ten years ago, and that's a mistake.
I want to be a stickler about logic:

"Innocent civilian IHH members have been killed" != "IHH members have killed innocent civilians"

"Innocent civilian IHH members have been killed" != "IHH members are terrorists"

Stop being ridiculous.
Here's How To Save Radio Shack
"Myth #2: A summer intern will enter with a well defined, correctly scoped project that requires no revising."

This myth applies to just about any software development project I've ever worked on in the span of 20 years.
If you're running out of memory, one would think adding more swap would be the best way to offload the overhead. Hacks aside, if you run into a similar problem again, letting the VM take over will save you time to keep replicating until your load settles down.

Also, if you're using ssh and you need maximum performance you should probably be using an arcfour cipher (`ssh -c arcfour`, alternatives are arcfour128 and arcfour256). I often see a 10x increase in bandwidth using these potentially less-secure algorithms, and slightly lower latency. If you need to save even more bandwidth, a UDP-based SSL VPN may improve things (depending on distance; long links are of course notoriously horrible) or SCTP patched into SSH as a compromise (I haven't played with this yet).

If you're not CPU bound, lzma might gain you bigger savings with marginally higher CPU if you need it down the road.

(I'd also like to take this moment to point out to the Redis devs that 'optimization' of the protocol could have prevented this hack from being necessary until much later. And to the admins of the systems, that monitoring metrics of network bandwidth could have shown the immensity of the traffic for replication. But hindsight is 20/20; let's just remember these examples!)
Did you actually look at the commits? They're releasing new versions, but the amount of commits is very low. It seems pretty limited to running source code through lint, updated translations and fixing typo's in stuff that was changed.

Anyway, this is not the future of GNOME. Different projects and all that.
Overachievers in the Software Industry
Valve's Linux video games plan described as 'unethical' by RMS
Here's an excellently produced video showing just how ambitious the design is:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1090
Unless they are smart enough to detect that those multiple accounts are really one. Then they can still treat you as one person for their analytics.
Ask HN: What are your feelings about OAuth 2.0?
Will you be implementing 2.0 or sticking with 1.0?
Michael, Pipedrive Inc is incorporated in the US with development and support office in Tallinn, Estonia. Founders are splitting time between SF and Estonia.
Microsoft launches Outlook.com, a clean, fresh take on webmail
Couldn't it - or a similar algorithm - be used as a bittorrent alternative with superior anonymity? If yes, this might become a more common use case.
Ha Long Bay is selling at cheap price | Vietnam Travel News
Seattle takes the lead in social innovation
shouldn't the API calls you make to a tracking service be done in such away that they would not effect your application whether they're available or not available? Analytics is nice, but not having it shouldn't cause your whole app to lock up right? Kind of similar to say a caching infrastructure - if memcached goes down your app just slows down, but doesn't crash right?
plus the missing Youtube channel on Roku makes me want to buy Apple TV.
PhoneGap Day: The future looks golden
My wife grew up in Oklahoma, and there are several women in her extended family who fit the profile. I've been watching how her family interacts with technology for over a decade now. The behavior cited in the article makes a lot of sense to me.

First, a warning: it would be a big mistake to think these women are technologically backwards. They _love_ computers and the internet. They were installing wifi routers years before my own East Coast elite-educated family. My wife's sister has 5 iphones for 4 family members, half of them are jailbroken.

Part of what they love about the net is that it makes them feel _modern_ and _included_. They're no fools. They see the money, the power, the TV all emerging from NYC and LA. They know that the most their town has produced is a country singer with a chip on his should (Toby Keith).

Going online, by contrast, feels cosmopolitan, sophisticated, like they're "in it," in the modern world. (There's a similar phenomenon with chain restaurants: Oklahomans _love_ chain restaurants, because it's the same meal you could get anywhere.)

So having heard all the buzz about the net, they go online and ... well, here the paths diverge. The younger and/or savvier become sort of power-consumers. Like my sister in law with the jailbroken iPhones. She can quote you all the specs and all the industry-celebrity gossip, and there are at least a dozen USB devices hanging off her computer.

But the older and/or less savvy, they equate the net with buzz, so when they go online, they go to its buzziest parts: banner ads, scams, get-rich-quick schemes, "empowerment" classes, etc.

They click the banner ads because they think that's what you're "supposed to do" on the net, and doing so makes them feel a part of the modern world. They're not stuck in a fly-over state, they're right in front of the busy modern world, right there on their computer screen.
How did they know so much about anime?
If you don't like the direction that Gnome team is pushing (ie Gnome3), why would you ever want them to go to the projects you like (ie Mate)?
Not saying it was significant, only predictable.

Also I think this was the most likely outcome. Act like a minor mea culpa and pay them off.
The number of commits always pick up before a major release and drop off afterwards. If you try to conclude anything from your analysis, please be a bit thorough!
And that was despite KDE4 being much more similar to KDE3 than GNOME 3 is to GNOME 2.
ReactOS is one of the slowest moving open-source projects I've ever seen. It's amazing to me that it is still going.

It's interesting to look at the release dates of the different versions:
0.0.10 came out in 1998, 0.1.0 in 2003, 0.2.0 in 2004, and 0.3.0 in 2006.

So, it's been 6 years since the 0.3.0 release and we're now on 0.3.14.

Does anyone know how many people are still actively involved?

http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Roadmap
A few points for Karim Ani
The user outcry of "I already pay Netflix a whole $10 a month, and now they want me to pay MORE?" would be ridiculously huge, if the previous fiasco is any indication.
Nice article and I agree. I have forced myself to use GNOME3 at work and honestly I like it. I think most people criticizing it haven't use it enough. It's a new workflow, and as such, you need some training to get to work as fast (or in this case faster) as before. Just imagine how first mouse users felt. It should have been a horrible experience, but good things last. And IMHO GNOME3 will last. Keep up the good work!
You're talking about upright pianos... Affordability? Talking with other piano players, here in Spain you can't find a decent piano under 1000€. And, if you're going to buy a crappy piano for "getting distracted" that won't last more than 10 years, better search for a digital one: for the same price of a crappy piano you can get a pretty decent digital keyboard that will fit your needs (and will occupy even less space).
Brand new Buffer analytics for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
Speaking as someone who uses a ton of mixpanel in production (http://www.twitch.tv/) the way you handle this is to make all your calls asynchronous.

I am bummed that we are going to have missing data though :-(
Black Hat conversation with Neal Stephenson and Brian Krebs
Rare Photos of the Soviet Bomb Project
CloudFlares Newest App Partner - My Startup
"Most people today who want to run Linux on a Mac use the Compatibility Support Module (CSM), which provides BIOS emulation on the Mac. This method is messy, doesn't work that well, and I'm quite certain will fail miserably on Secure Boot Windows 8 PCs."

Am I missing something here, as I post this from Debian running on my work iMac? All I had to do was install rEFIt ( http://refit.sourceforge.net/ ), install Debian, and let rEFIt detect it (I forget if it involved manual configuration, been a while.)

I think this is much ado about nothing, especially given that Microsoft seems to be insisting that manufacturers leave in the option to turn off secure boot. I also thought Linux had the capability to boot off of UEFI; is this not true?
Are the alternatives worse, or are they just different? Obviously anything sufficiently different enough to be called disruptive is going to throw off your workflow. The mitigating factor in how much anyone is going to like change is how quickly they can adapt to the change. If the answer is never (or a long time), the change stops being relevant (think Dvorak keyboard). If the answer is reasonably quickly, you find a sliding scale of market penetration between trackball mice and computers that print stdout to screens instead of paper.

The question is, is the desktop metaphor still a good one? I would argue it never was good, just necessary. My question is, why do I have to move my mouse here and there to get things done on a desktop? Why is it so painful to use a laptop trackpad to get here and there with any accuracy? Newer window managers try to mitigate that by removing the need for a mouse altogether. That's a step in the right direction, I think.
I know nothing about pianos so I just want to clarify the metaphor of the car without an oil change.

I just rebuilt the engine in my truck. A neglected engine does not spell the end for a vehicle - but it seems to be that that is in fact the case for a neglected piano. Is that true?
Oh and that will get 357 million back?
Correct. That option should've been there.
Grab your Outlook.com email ID before someone reserves it
Microsoft rebrands Hotmail as Outlook, adds fresh Metro design & Skype calling
Does it do focus-follows-mouse (AKA, sloppy focus) right?

EDIT: I'm speaking from my experience with Unity, where you could enable sloppy focus with the gconf-editor, but it caused various kinds of wigging out and wonkiness with Unity (probably why there's no easy way to enable sloppy focus).

I tried gnome 3 for a few minutes once, and got the feeling it would probably have similar problems with focus-follows-mouse, and that's probably why there's no easy way to enable it there either.
Apple is considering a stock split