skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My phrasing would go something like this.

"I really would like to do this project. This is an amazing opportunity for me, and I feel incredibly privileged to be considered as a potential vendor.

"Unfortunately, I think we are at a fundamental disconnect regarding the amount of work to be done. This budget does not cover the amount of time that I believe I would need to spend to deliver a product to you at adequate quality, on time, with this feature list.

"I would love to have this project. Turning it down may, indeed, close down a channel of our business; we love this channel, and we get to do really cool work as a result.

"The problem is that I'm looking at having a precedent set for the price of my work which isn't actually something that I can survive; this budget would force me to deliver something shoddy, which would damage my reputation and possibly also yours.

"I think probably that you can find someone who's willing to do this work at this price. Still, I want to caution you: there's always someone willing to do work at basically any price; maybe they don't understand how much work it is, or maybe they expect to just add hours once you're dependant on them. I want you please to be careful while looking for another vendor at this price; I am very concerned that this budget is not in fact possible, which is why I'm walking away from an offer which means so much to me, both in business and in emotional terms. In the vernacular, you get what you pay for.

"But I'm not willing to do damage to you in order to accept a low-ball budget. Part of my responsibility as a contractor is to say no to impossible budgets, and with all due respect, this is an impossible budget.

"I have very much enjoyed working with and for you, and I don't want to lose this channel. But I must maintain my clients' safety, and at this price, I cannot.

"If you find another vendor, and if they don't work out for you, please consider my door wide open. I would love to retain your business and your relationship, even after a delay, and it is my belief that no contractor can succeed at this price.

"But, I apologize. I cannot accept this price sheet; it is unrealistic.

"Please be well, and understand that I remain available to you if you find that contractors willing to accept a rate like this are not able to deliver a quality with which you are satisfied. I look forward to the likelihood of doing business with you again soon, and I will make a rush rate available to you at a much lower cost than usual, to help you get back on schedule.

"Thank you for your consideration, and I hope the best for you. Please keep me in mind if you need a reliable contractor in the future."
> I'd take the SPro to bed

If the SPro is anything like the SurfaceRT, its not a bed device; its just way too wide to be used in portrait or landscape while laying down. The non-wide screen iPad works much better in bed than a Surface (my wife and I have both, and we are always fighting over who gets the iPad).
Oh, that's really cool, I didn't know they had this project in the pipe. I agree that bundling tools with the compiler is such a great idea; a build tool built specifically for the language can assume so much more and do so much more, it's a net win.
Usually I have zero interest in most of the "E-Mail 2.0" hype that springs up every couple months, but I do actually really like the idea of taking dynamic content a step or two further. I think email is fundamentally good at its intended purpose, but I could see things like revisions fitting in comfortably with the existing paradigm.
Yes. The failure/recovery mode for "speedometer is reporting inconsistent speeds" is stop the engine and coast to a stop. That doesn't work as well with planes.

Then again, human pilots are fallible, and lots of crashes would be avoided if they paid more attention to instruments and less to instinct (where's that horizon again?), so maybe programming planes to just blindly follow the instruments would result in a net reduction in crashes.
Yeah I wrote them a long letter asking to present to their team about 2 weeks ago but never got a response. Real bummer.
Magikarp, out of curiosity, why do you think the CSIS want to spy on you?

1) Because you are an anti-surveillance activist.

2) Because they want to eventually backdoor Crytocat in order to spy on the users.

3) Because the FBI asked CSIS to spy on you, and the FBI has their own motives.
Next step, rewrite Firefox in 6502 assembly, and run it in your NES emulator!
60% out of 200 studies is not all that good, really. It allows the experts to believe that if they're still in the top 25%, no machine can beat them (I know that this is not exactly what the studies say, but statistics are almost always being misinterpreted, so I do it here too).

The thing is: I expect Watson to perform significantly better than this. If it can beat Jeopardy grandmasters consistantly and if that technology is correctly being reapplied to the medical field, Watson should easily outperform anything we had before.
>which is essentially limited to what the NSA does in the US.

The NSA doesn't do field intelligence work, AFAIK, unlike CSIS.

>This story sounds...weird. I doubt it is quite as he suspects it is.

It's weird, but I'm not sure who else other than CSIS would have the motivation to hack an activists computer so it sends data to CSIS-affiliated servers.
You are right, it might work.
Why did I rule out versioning? Maybe just was overloaded by alternatives.
Thanks, I will consider this alternative if I will need to change the solution next time.

> Unless you imagine people don't enjoy seeing query-strings in their reports, perhaps.

I am concerned about this a little, although I probably can live with that if everything else works OK.
I went to China to meet with tech firms, VCs and government officials. And to learn about the funding environment for Chinese firms investing in VCs. I know that Dave also met with LPs (who invest in in VC funds). But thanks for making the blind assumption about my trip and motives. Appreciate it.
toxins

... maybe it is time to say goodbye to HN after all.
This might be another reason to bill by the week instead of by the hour when freelancing.
Firebase can do this for you. It has a very flexible expression-based permissions model. You can set your rule to:

".write":"!data.exists()"

And people will be able to write only new items.
I have spent a fair bit of time discussing Cryptocat with Nadim in person. He is sincere in his development goals for Cryptocat and does not intend for it to be a honeypot.
Text simply doesn't work very well with SDTV resolutions. You could always use a monitor instead.
The Secret to Thriving as a Freelance Designer or Developer
Back around 2000 whenever the synopses and apocalypses were coming out I read each one with excitement, looking forward to how fun Perl 6 would be to program in.

The non-existence of a production Perl 6 implementation after over a decade of people writing code makes me genuinely sad.
Hmm, I can bet against both of them :P
I wonder where the TSA VIPR teams land on that axis.

As I understand it, they can be comprised of actual law enforcement personnel, including federal. But don't necessarily. And even if a VIPR team included federal law enforcement personnel, it's not clear that they're necessarily acting with federal law enforcement authority.

As if the TSA wasn't a confusing-enough bureaucratic monstrosity.
For a hacker site, why are so few people interested in seeing his logs?

I hope Nadim does a full write-up, including these, soon.

In the meantime, all the best and keep your (thankfully already) level head.
Don't be afraid to fail. Be inquisitive. Don't give up.
Find a good partner who is the opposite of you. If you're a developer, you're probably introverted and nerdy. Find yourself an extroverted slick salesman type. (Of course this is much easier said than done). Stick to what you do best, and make sure your partner sticks to what he does best.
how many construction workers are concerned with keeping their work boots and gloves free of dirt stains?

They may not think about it, but dirt particles can shorten the life of many materials. Particles that make their way into fabric damage the fibers. I forget what mud does to leather, but I'm pretty sure there are deleterious effects there as well.
from my own personal experience, govt folks like to follow. the business of knowing usually doesn't involve overt intimidation that is demonstrable to outside parties.
How to Beat Your Competition by Innovating in Ways They Can't
IMO, this is where personal responsibility has to trump personal freedom. If you're sick, you have a duty to isolate yourself.
American Experience: Silicon Valley
"massive boondoggle" because you were there and know what my business there was? I was there meeting tech professionals, VCs, government officials and investors in VC funds.
Perhaps the confusion is because CSIS spying on people is a legit thing.
Top 5 Start-up Buyers
ya i'm switching to node.js from Ruby. CoffeeTemplates is like dust.js and CoffeeShop is sort of like rails. except tremendously faster! :)
Wow, really newsworthy.
We provide online data organizer software to organize, manage and share data for team collaboration. I will contact Kirsty to find out more about how we can help.
Thanks,
Neal (MyDataOrganizer.com)
Key learnings in the first seven months of a startup
HN is a public forum. You really shouldn't post this sort of info here (unless you're trying to actively mislead whoever is targeting you).

As somebody else said: take a deep breath, take over 9000 backups, and start reducing your attack surface without falling to complete paranoia.
There seems to be a new pattern where anyone involved in promoting free speech and privacy through encryption gets harassed by the state, regardless if they actually did anything illegal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Investigation_a...

It really shows how those in power are scared of the liberating powers of technology.
Writing cryptography tools, and activism in general, aren't illegal and people who don't break laws should not be spied on or harassed.
And thank goodness we all know that now.
I sure hope so. Nothing shouts "I don't understand A/B testing so I'll just use Dustin Curtis' result" louder than that sign-off.
Rethinking ETL for the API age
I think you've got it mixed up: CSIS [0] is the Canadian CIA, having been created in the wake of shutting down Department D of the RCMP after one too many scandals in the 1970s. The Canadian NSA is the CSE [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Security_Intelligence_...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Security_Establi...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/the-pope/8009299/Po...
I always found the Catholic Church's response amusing.

"The senior Vatican scientist, Brother Guy Consolmagno, said that he would be delighted if we encountered intelligent aliens and would be happy to baptise them.
His pronouncement opens up the possibility of space missionaries heading out to the stars to convert aliens to Christianity.
Speaking on the eve of addressing the British Science Festival, Dr Consolmangno said he had no problem with science and religion co-existing together.
But he dismissed Creationism and claimed that the revival of “intelligent design" – the controversial theory that only God can explain gaps in the theory of evolution – was “bad theology".
Dr Consolmango is one of a team of 12 astronomers working for the Vatican, said the Catholic Church had been supporting and funding science for centuries."

Granted, not enough centuries, but still a nice statement.
I was thinking it was a false-flag scenario as well. Other than the network identifiers, there's nothing to say it was the Canadians behind it.
Text on an SDTV worked perfectly fine through to the PS2 days and on the Wii. The problem is that nowadays with HD consoles taking the forefront, developers are all targeting HDTV resolutions, leaving SDTV users to deal with the unreadable text size.
or the best among all: Vanilla Js
http://vanilla-js.com/
Well, possibly, though spam is a pretty high volume game, and my guess is it's not worth the time for the mass spammers to analyze a few rejects (even if those rejects even do go to their actual address)

It depends on what you prioritize. I prioritize avoiding false-positives, so my spam filter of choice reflects that.

My current spam system (spamstopshere.com) does return bounce/reject messages depending on what filter the email triggers.
"That's a nice e-reader you have there ... it'd be a shame if someone reported it stolen and it stopped working. Maybe you should send me another fifty bucks."
I'm not very convinced by the analysis presented in this post, but it seems fairly clear to me that at some point in the (near?) future people will start to think of social web services as more of a commodity rather than some big shiny gold rush that we all have to be part of.

Maybe then we can stop throwing piles of money at people who want to build walled gardens and go back in the direction of people hosting their own content for others to peruse.

(Yes, I'm predicting the failure of Google+ as well as Facebook and all the other me-too services like mass photoblogging services and all that other crap.)

We've spent too much time and effort writing code to help people push their content into companies that will claim the right to own it. Let's make tools that help people express themselves in ways that benefit everyone and that ensure creators retain ownership of the work they create.
Enhancing in-person interactions with a webapp
I'd be mad if I was your co-founder too.

Instead of starting a new company could you transition into a new role in your first company that lets you do more coding and building? There may be more to the story than you've said; but from what you've given me to go on, starting a new company without first resolving things at the first seems like a irresponsible and selfish move.
Think Tracking DAUs Is Enough? Then Get Your Whole Mobile Story
It does!
Tried running minecraft on my old Pentium 4 laptop under Ubuntu in fullscreen.

With compiz ~8fps , without compiz ~25fps
I hired a co-CTO, he is not angry because I'm not doing a good job. But my co-founder expectations was that someday I would quit the inner workings of tech and become an executive. Me too, and I became, now I want to go back.

This is more complex than it seems. Let me try to explain by example: I wanted to be John Carmack and ended up being Larry Ellisson - just way less successful, obviously.
I expected the "sort by" thingy to be at the top-right of the list of things I was viewing.

Despite that minor gripe, please accept my compliments. I'd love to see a site that can point me at all the newest and most popular JS tools and maybe this can be it.
Sir James Dyson: master of invention has wind behind him
The author said "Hostnames that appear to belong to CSIS.". Reverse DNS should not be trusted. Saying that a hostname "appears to belong" to someone is a naive statement.
No need to read. You're not missing anything.
>govt folks like to follow

Do you mean trailing people and surveillance?
I fail to see in this article where the author backs up this claim:

> automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for humans to do that computers can't.

It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers.

At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.

Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have.

The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents worked as labours has exploded.

The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote accurately compared to the demands of the market.
So are you proposing that 3rd party sub-CAs be brought under public CT?

I could get on board with that.
Since you have already published so much of this story. How about full disclosure and post the actual hostnames, firewall entries and that email you received?
s/2013/2012/
> Anything wrong with that?

If you want to protect against the kind of attach he hypothesizes to have experienced, yes. Trying to catch root backdoor on your machine by running a firewall on that same machine won't be much help. He called it an "external firewall", so I imagine it was a separate machine that noticed the outgoing requests.
DC Comics Turns the Occupy Movement Into a Superhero Title
> and when you go any university lab all they have is Macs.

No.
Text works fine with SDTV resolutions, if made large enough.

And "large enough" doesn't mean absurdly large either, simply not the insane small sizes they're using. In most cases there really isn't a huge amount of text (we're talking video games here, not novels, here), and there's little apparent justification for the small size other than "hey it looked good on my dev monitor!"

Moreover, it's not just an "SDTV vs. HDTV" issue; as I mentioned, in most cases, the sizes used would be uncomfortable for almost anyone playing with a typical TV setup (where one tends to sit fairly far away from the display), even if their television is capable of resolving it. The sizes used seem pretty clearly intended for people using a typical desktop PC setup, where the monitor is much closer.
The key to self-promotion of your startups on HN is by providing useful content... not just pure self-promotion.
About half my posts to twitter, g+, and FB are just links back to my blog. I may spend 30 minutes writing a blog article, then 1 minute posting links to my own site. I also post short things that I hope people will enjoy, but most of my effort goes to blogging or writing books.

A blog is a great way to meet people with similar interests, which is the purported reason for social networks. Nothing wrong with people using social networks but for people who can manage their own site, that just seems like a better way to invest energy creating content.
>There will still be a need for computer programmers, but a lot of programming can already be automated [...]
We could [...] flat-out ban certain types of robots and automated software.

I write software for a living and have no idea what this means. It's either horribly misinformed, or a call to ban compilers.
Ah my mistake. I mis-understood

>I opened a new company and I'm trying to build some software that hasn't been built before and hired a co-CTO to help me with my duties.

to mean you hired a co-CTO at the new company. Now it makes more sense, sorry for the confusion.
It's become popular recently to talk of corporations as psychopathic. I have to say I that I find this diagnosis quite compelling. There's a great documentary about this sort of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(film)
It's funny that so many resources have been put into training Watson... far more than would ever go into training a medical student...

It has access to medical evidence that is stuck behind pay walls otherwise... it has access to case histories that another clinician learning oncology could never access...

Because of this, in some ways it's irrelevant to compare Watson to the old way of doing things... Of course it's better!

It's a great development in technology... maybe in the end this is the only solution to the general disillusionment with doctors... it's too difficult and inefficient and failure prone to train warm bodies with their own personalities to do medicine. Watson and its ilk are an alternative with a better return on investment, and improving them is therefore easier to incentivize.

A (closed source) triumph for technology... but a failure for education and academia...
Don't forget gogoc.
About the pretty URLs. I can even try to submit all the logs to the same object /my-bucket/log. The version ID is then the key to distinguish them.

http://my-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/log?versionId=L4kqtJlcpXro...

http://my-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/log?versionId=X4xxxJlcpXro...

http://my-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/log?versionId=Y4yyyJlcpXro...
yet another cry for attention from this talented but misguided young man. First it was TSA and Homeland, now the Canadian CSIS -please! You yell and scream about silent circle, about Skype -you demean and disrespect other noted cryptographers when they get press....I work for the govt -your little Hello-Kitty plug in is akin to sugar koolaid. There are many senior experienced folks here that would make great mentors. Get a good mentor -but please stop with the high-school drama. its not reality. I am too old to placate this and someone needs to bring this young man under his wing. He has a future if he stops pining for attention.
Instead of signing a petition, I simply choose not to install Java on my computer.

Thankfully with my needs I'm really not missing much.
have they done things like use your accounts to make posts in your name? they do that to poeple.
Totally agree. Email works perfectly fine for me. For private purposes as well as for my job. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't see anything that's broken or that would require fixing.
I can see both sides of this argument.

We should all note, however, that when the establishment appropriates the language of the upstarts and insurgents the aim is often to disenfranchise the movement while paying lip service to that movement's original aims.

How to counter this? Not a simple question. That said, once government promises "open data" or "open government" it might be time to think up a new (more pressing) demand with a new slogan to boot.
good thing, too
I personally know and have seen the logs from an activist who has CSIS host-names show up in his blog for the past few years. This came after the G8 fiasco in Toronto, where they pulled him in for questioning.
They really should have tried harder. For some reason, I really can't picture pg in a black suit.
Disconnect computer from network.

Try to dump RAM image.

Image the drive, sign and optionally encrypt the contents, preferably file-by-file checksum and copy to multiple secure locations. Copy of checksums in additional secure location.

Get out of your house with your computer as soon as possible (as soon as you upload one or two images). Do not leave the computer, they will try to destroy or confiscate the evidence. Plan to store computer in secure location, preferably with 24/7 video monitoring and a heavy duty safe. Preserving the evidence is probably that important.

Try to be in the company of someone you trust so they can act as a witness and can protect you from physical intimidation or attack.

Assume phones are compromised including GPS on your mobile phone. Assume you are under physical surveillance. Assume your car is compromised.

Relatives and close friends will be known to operatives. May be a good idea to spend 1-2 nights in a motel with a friend without anyone's cell phone paying cash until you secure copies of your data and get advice on what to do next.
whatever you do make sure to document every single little detail, take photos, videos, audio recording, keep the emails, etc...
I think that my comment came out a little too polemic, that's why I removed it.
I believe for CT to "work" all CAs on the public internet need to participate.

I also believe that certificate transparency by itself is insufficient and the other items I mentioned are also needed.
Ok, it's sensible to make these logs easier to parse.

I don't understand why an entirely new Tag-Value scheme was invented though, and this article doesn't attempt to justify it. Maybe it's not new and I just haven't heard of it?

Why not use:
JSON
ASN.1 BER
Or any other scheme with existing, mature, encoders and parsers.
An interesting thought: coffee is probably much easier to make than arbitrary 3D objects made of various materials. Yet coffee makers have not become as ubiquitous as CD burners.

What I want to know is why.