skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Research. In a university. Not on the sidewalk with your iPhone.

Their ethical section on Kickstarter is a joke. People apparently said that this is a toy and you turn animals in a toy and the only response is basically:"Well, it's not a toy, because we could give it an extremely complicated title to make it sound like research."

Research has the goal of producing some sort of output. A paper, general knowledge, whatever. If people want to do some neuro science research, they should do it in a controlled environment and release a paper afterwards, but not buy a DIY cockroach-antenna-controller-toy for five bucks and call the toy "a research project".
So how does this work .. can the Pirate Party of Australia send preferences to Wikileaks?
Uber is disruptive because it caters toward the SV/SF crowd (20 something professionals living in a crowded city with bad infrastructure but have quite a bit of disposable cash) better than the traditional public transportation can.
Sure it's useful, but these days so many starts are no longer aiming to solve even first world problems now, they are aiming to solve the unique "silicon valley problems" that most people in this country can't even dream about.

Then investors throw millions at those companies and media put them under a glorified spotlight while the rest of the country is going through a rough recovery from one of the worst recessions in most people's memories, and that's when there is a backslash.

Again, not saying companies like Uber don't provide value, but how much capital in the form of money, talent, time and effort need to be poured into solving Silicon Valley problems for 20 something single professionals making six figures?
So you are asking "Who will step up and be the Simon Cowell of startup events?"
Poster sessions in a large space?

Might help with 'socializing' and even the 'event party' aspect. Non-extroverts could use QR codes to find the authors of interesting posters &c and have a chat.
This directly breaks groups/panes (viewing several files in parallel with their own tab lists).
And to do that you must also transmit the escrowed part of the key in the protocol -- which is 100% detectable as a blob of "extra but seemingly unnecessary data".

Do you see that? Does anybody see that? Has anybody seen that?
Good point. Perhaps it's not so much the idea itself that upsets me as the way it is presented.

I'm all for promoting research and understanding and I could see a role for this in a classroom, but they way this is being sold is far too toy-like for me. If you can just order an "augmented" cockroach off the internet to mess around with, it becomes a commodity or product and there is not much left to learn from it.

I also think that, although you are not actually taking over the body or brain of the cockroach, you are definitely taking over (a good deal of) its perception of reality, however primitive that may be. The fact that cockroaches can learn to ignore the artificial impulses and "escape the Matrix", so to speak, makes me feel only slightly less uncomfortable about doing this on a large scale.
Sounds like it only works for a brief while anyway:

Learning and Memory: After a few minutes the cockroach will stop responding to the RoboRaoch microstimulation. Why? The brain learns and adapts. That is what brains are designed to do. You can measure the time to adaptation for various stimulation frequencies.

TBH, I'd squash a cockroach in a second if I saw one in my kitchen, but this just feels...wrong.
It's a fantastic article that offers a critical yet mostly objective take on the mild insanity we all live in here in SV.
Target specific pages from a Prestashop Module's Hook
I didn't know this until a minute ago, but it seems that the NSA have a Police branch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_agencie... and http://www.nsa.gov/careers/faqs/).

I wonder if they serve their requests via that branch, or another. it'd be convenient to serve the requests from a more bureaucratic branch of the agency in order to allow them to fall outside of "law enforcement requests".
Pretty much nil. The NSA isn't stupid; even in the (exceptionally unlikely) case that they can just MITM any SSL connection without arousing suspicion in even a well-monitored network, why would they reveal that? Much easier to just hack your computer/telephone/...
7 reasons you need a business plan
Great. I will give it a try!
Ask HN: Developers' jobs in Europe. Best cover-letter, cv practices.
Dear European HNers,

I was wondering is there any special requirements ( like stronger cover-letter OR no need for good cover-letter, 4+ pages CV vs. <4 pages CV, etc. ) to apply for web-developer jobs in Europe ( specifically in Berlin and other tech-hubs in Europe ), since I know that there could be a bit difference than what it is in the US.

I've recently read blog posts about "How to find a job in IT" but they are all specific for SF, NY and nothing about European Startups / Tech companies.

I recently applied with a cover letter, which inclues the company's logo created with CSS3, HTML by me @ codepen ( It looks like a trend now ), but I don't know if the HR team in Europe will think that this is unserious and will skip my application.

Can anyone suggest some best practices. Thanks!
How to License a Song for your Indie Game Trailer
I'd suggest he should have quit his job, made his disclosures and stayed put. Look at the three people in the linked interview - while it's undisputed that they've suffered great disruptions to their careers and lives in general, all three are free men, giving interviews to a national US newspaper. Edward Snowden is a fugitive in some strange limbo largely of his own making which he appears, inexplicably, quite blithely set on making worse.

As to the drone strikes, I was replying to the other commenter who seemed to think drone strikes or some sort or intervention by the US military is a realistic risk Snowden faces. I'd put 'covert CIA assassination' in the same bucket and I don't really know how to put this politely but this is, in my mind, tinfoilhattery.

He's facing a big fat criminal indictment - there are probably people at the DOJ working on it who didn't get to go home this weekend after he started talking about entirely unrelated (to his civil liberties claims) details of US intelligence operations. There's probably nothing the US government would like more than to see him tried on criminal charges in open, civilian court - it's a slam dunk of a case, by this point. There's nothing whatsoever to be gained by killing him.

Once indicted, I think kidnapping is at least a plausible concern - there are documented cases of US Marshals pursuing people wanted by the US courts overseas - with varying degrees of success and with or without the cooperation of local authorities. I can even think of a couple of cases pre-war-on-terror military interventions as part of efforts to apprehend wanted persons. The Achille Lauro hijackers come to mind - and even they, while being actual terrorists and actual murderers, ended up being prosecuted in Italy and serving time in Italian prisons. But again, Snowden could have trivially avoided this entire line of unpleasant possibilities by simply not getting on a plane to Hong Kong.
Ethically, what is the difference between controlling a cockroach through direct stimulation and controlling a dog through the usual combination of behavioral manipulation and physical restraints?
I think the rules said the companies are not allowed to disclose the exact amount of FISA requests. Instead they need to bundle them together with other requests from law enforcement.
Superman: Flying to a church near you
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube: Do they own your content?
Can these be customised for recording Bilderberg meetings and the like?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198934

> Our site is indexable by Google and it doesn't do much fancy. On certain URLs, we generate a small HTML view of the content in the <noscript> tag. You can see this by viewing source or disabling JS in your browser. It's just a simple ERB template in Rails, and uses the same object graph that we serialize via Active Model Serializers.

> Google can see it and index it, we've confirmed by searching post launch.

> As time goes on we'll probably work more on it to make the SEO even better. As you can imagine it was tough to do when we were in stealth mode ;)

Maybe we could get an update from eviltrout on that.
When twitter was first pitched, how many people would have said that the idea sucked? What about airbnb? Kickstarter? pinterest? The list goes on and on.

VCs make money by betting that only 1 in 100 of their investments will be a success. What makes you think that a random person at a start-up event will have any more success.
How to install VBox Guest Addition to a Debian Vm
Work Ethics vs Security Community Ideology
What do you choose when your work ethics are in conflict with your dedication to the security community. To disclose vulnerabilities you've found or not to disclose?
I don't know if it's just because I'm a biologist but I find this absolutely disgusting. Every living thing is valuable no matter how it looks or how "lowly" it is, even goddamn cockroaches.

I'm not saying these kinds of experiments don't happen in "real" science, of course they do! But to present it like its fun to enslave a creature like that just for entertainment purposes?

This is the worst possible way to educate people (and especially kids!) about the beauty of life and respect to nature.
I would love to see the project other way around: extend the cockroaches capabilities by placing it as a pilot controlling a larger robot/vehicle. Make artificial antennas/sensors in the vehicle and connect the stimulus to cockroaches antennas.
I've read some of the comments and the project creators obviously aren't callous about it. They claim that it actually helps students get a respect for the cockroach beyond that of a pest. An interesting and great result if true.

I'm going to go ahead and back this despite my ethical concerns. The stuff coming up in biotech (even stuff that's already here and quite widely implemented, i.e. in vitro zygote selection) is much scarier from an ethics standpoint. If this Kickstarter gets more attention it could help drive a very fruitful discussion.
I think this has a place in research, but commercially?

Also, I wouldn't have kids play with this for a number of reasons.
>> "This is blatantly false, and the Government has said as much."

The government probably isn't the best source when making a decision as to what you think the program allows.
Because I believe you aren't completely in control of the dog. Just like you aren't completely control of another human when using conversational techniques to make them do something.

You wouldn't be able to manipulate a dog into taking its own life, but with this cockroach you would against its will.
Sorry, I strongly disagree. Cockroaches don't have the emotions or capabilities to suffer from pain. There is no ethics issue here, except that anyone doing this experiment with children (as co-experimentators, not as subjects, stupid!) should make this point about not hurting higher animals very very clearly and repeatedly.
It's the same thing in the gaming space. 99% of people's game ideas suck (honestly, it's extremely difficult to have a non-shitty idea, especially if you are trying to be unique and invent new game mechanics).

Part of the problem is that everyone thinks they can be a "game designer". It's one of those skills that is not measurable; so if you suck at it, it's hard to tell.

I think that as people gain maturity and experience, their eyes open, and are more willing to give and receive criticism like this (hopefully). Another reason why age and experience are valuable.
Yeh right as long as you don't annoy the powers that be it is
Debian: how to decently sort du -sh *
Is it more ethical to control a cockroach by holding it on your hand?
It's actually more complex than that. One of the things that really gets in the way of encrypted storage, when you think about it, is the reality that key management involves tradeoffs too. For example, we could divide things up that you could get the encryption key only on a separate system and so only a public key and the public key encrypted symmetric key are stored. In this model you only get either symmetric key-encrypted data, or the public key-encrypted symmetric key.

The problem though is that someone still has to have the right to rotate keys and this process can be attacked too. For example, one could rotate keys to a known value thus giving the attacker access to the plain text. Worse, the person who can rotate the keys has to have the right to access both old and new keys in an unencrypted state.

Now, given that reality, it isn't clear to me that the fact that someone could set up the database to log all queries, and allowing passphrases for encryption to be passed in in the query poses a real added danger.

Another option is just not to allow key rotation but that allows for attacks on the key itself. You can get aroudn this by having a different key for each piece of data and thus limit the utility of cracking each piece.

However if you go that route, then you have two computers to secure instead of one, and it is vulnerable to more types of attacks than before since you are now trusting the client.....
At ilab in Brisbane last year, I was honest when I came across some people's ideas: if they'd been attempted (seriously, with actual execution) before and had no luck, I pointed that out. If the idea wasn't fully formed yet, I chatted to other founders about what it was missing, from what I could see.

A lot of Australian founders really didn't like that for the most part, but a couple (whom I'm now friends with!) took it really well, pivoted, or decided to do something else entirely, and they thanked me for the feedback (and the feedback of the mentors that said similar things!).

Mentors giving feedback like that was often met with incredulity and hurt. "You are NOT your idea" is really important, but I have a theory that Australia's (especially Brisbane!) startup scene is so small, and so fledgling, that we're still learning :)

For what it's worth, I was told my idea was good, but my numbers (which were realistic, based on exits from companies that were similar but not the same, about $6-9mil after 2-3 years) were said to be too small for venture capital to try.

VC's and investors in Australia are also learning, and are a lot less willing to give an idea money to try. But that's okay! Things will change, given time and effort.
Word and Excel have NEVER crashed on me and I've been using them since the '97 versions

My anecdata has seen a bunch of crashes, at least in Word (I was never a heavy Excel user) and mostly in the earlier versions. If we steer away from application crash to merely screwing up the document, then you can probably double it.

I, too, have been running win7 since 2009 without requiring a reboot, but despite having a 64GB SSD boot drive, it has somehow filled it (\programfiles is on d:) and every now and then I need to go in and clear crap out. 64GB! I can account for perhaps 20GB in user data (\users is 16, \progfiles is 6). Crazy.

My one and only experience with Win8 was helping a neighbour install some older software that worked fine on XP and Vista, which pretty much defines my whole experience with it as doesn't 'just work'. Perhaps not a fair comparison, but when metro decides that I REALLY WANT the troubleshooting pdf to be fullscreen instead of having it side-by-side with the issue I'm dealing with, then screw being fair to it.
Startup engineering coursera course
A few hours until it starts..

https://www.coursera.org/course/startup

Anyone have any tips for it?
There is no ethical question. Cockroaches are neurologically incapable of suffering from pain, and human compassion can't deal with billions of the little critters.

That said, you can feel compassion towards roaches you keep as pet. For example I wouldn't use the species they are using in this video, I'd prefer bigger ones that also can't procreate in your household beyond their cage...

The roaches survive these experiments. It's less harm than being eaten by predators...
Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.

This is why Facebook and Google are a nightmare scenario for privacy, they retain everything and then some to profit from it. If they have it (and boy do they have info on users,) NSA and FBI can easily obtain it, all in one place.
That doesn't increase security unless your baseline is broken. All NAT is potentially replacing from a security perspective is a single default drop (or default reject) rule, which should have been there to start with.

While it could be argued that NAT adds an extra layer to security-in-depth by making it harder to accidentally open things up by missing out the default drop/reject rule, but I'd argue that all the faf that NAT can create by making it difficult to arrange point-to-point connections where they are actually desirable is not worth that little bit of protection against failing to configure the firewall correctly.
My thoughts exactly. Turning a living creature into a plaything and masquerading it as educational is just sick. It degrades the creature, and it degrades the science.
‘Location tracking’ of every Indian mobile user by 2014
I'm moving away from Dropbox today. Thanks for this jensen2k.
This is a terribly cruel thing to do to another life form. It's better to be kind than clever, but this is neither. It's cruel.
The whole computer security business couldn't have paid billions for the sort of free advertising they got this week...
It's a nightmare for them and I'm sure they'll lose customers over it, but I'm staying when two days ago I was planning on canceling my vps due to underuse.

It was ridiculously fast for a vm (>700MB/s with vpsbench, all tests), but the $5/mo Digital Ocean instances were fast enough with PostgreSQL/Sphinx that none of my (free) users were complaining. I like Digital Ocean, I'm keeping some stuff over there, but I appreciate Ramnode's transparency & dedication during this. It doesn't hurt that they're probably going to be constructively paranoid now that they've gotten burned. This is one of those things my partner saw all the time running a restaurant - screwups are unavoidable, but handling them well can actually get you a loyal customer.
Autocomplete With Elasticsearch and Tire
Are the Pirate Party running candidates for the senate in this coming election? I think they have a good chance of getting a few seats is so... the youth vote is big and I foresee a lot of GenYers putting 1 above the line for the Pirate Party.
That's a lie, and worse yet, it's a lie to justify the inexpressibly cruel treatment of a life form.

Congratulations, you may be less human than the coakroach is.
App Store Success Stories and Lessons Learned
Came in the comments to share my disgust. I'm glad I'm not the only one disturbed by this.
I have been proven wrong far too many times to believe that I am still in any way a decent judge of what may be a good idea or viable startup.

The best example I can give here is from a few years ago when I was chatting online with some startup folks. One of them was building a Twitter based app where you would enter your tweets and it would post them at an interval you specify. I believe my thoughts at the time were that it must be the lamest idea I ever came across. Fast forward a few years and that startup, now known to the world as Buffer, is making over a million dollars a year and growing at a crazy rate.
Typical Rails bugs
Prediksi Skor Yordania VS Oman Kualifikasi Piala Dunia 18 Juni 2013
Prediksi Skor Yordania VS Oman Kualifikasi Piala Dunia 18 Juni 2013 – Pekan ini FIFA telah menjadwalkan beberapa pertandingan babak penyisihan Piala Konfederasi dan juga laga lanjutan kualifikasi Piala Dunia. Meskipun, tak semua negara melakoninya, namun pertandingan-pertandingan besar tetap akan tersaji baik di Piala Konfederasi mapun babak kualifikasi Piala Dunia. Kali ini kami akan mencoba membahas serta memberikan prediksi dari salah satiu pertandingan seru babak kualifikasi Piala Dunia zona Asia antara Yordania kontra Oman. Meskipun kedua negara bukan merupakan negara yang dijagokan, namun laga kali ini akan tetap seru untuk diikuti - See more at: http://www.situsjudi.org/prediksi-skor-yordania-vs-oman-kualifikasi-piala-dunia-18-juni-2013#sthash.GT1zZVZN.dpuf
Quote: "even kept them trapped in bowls and cages purely for my own amusement."

Well, I`m just not that kind of person :)

Later edit: the things you list are completely unrelated to making a living organism do something -without its consent-.
Android OEM's applications (in)security and backdoors without permission [pdf]
How Many People are in Space Right Now?
One quick way of testing if a creature has "capabilities to suffer from pain" is to put a heat source on them. If they move away from it, they do. There really is an ethical issue here.
Google's Schmidt: People Upset With Street View Can Always Move (2010)
It's pretty easy to make a whippet run into heavy traffic merely by throwing a ball.
I don't think there is that much of a difference, just as I think it's not very ethical of us to say that we can't eat dogs because it's unethical, but chickens are a-okay. They are just another species living on this planet. They may not be as smart, they also have no play in deciding what's the intelligence level they need to be at before humans can stop considering them food.

We, humans, decide what we can and cannot eat. And some of us still hunt animals just for sport or for their horns and fur, even if they are in that "higher intelligence" bracket.

But hopefully as our societies evolve, and technologies also evolve to at least give us a choice between having to eat a chicken, and having to eat manufactured/replicated meat, we'll learn to give up on these, too.
> (when you add a new device to iMessage all the other devices "see" the new device being added and tell you about it)

And who writes the software on those devices that tells you about the new key again?

Based on what I'm reading, absent physical access to one of the devices authorized for using iMessage at the time, past iMessages should be safe. But, given the apparent ease of adding new authorized devices, tapping future iMessages sounds like it wouldn't be hard.
From the article "U.S. law enforcement could use the USA PATRIOT Act on a U.S.-based organisation, like Microsoft, Google, Dropbox or Amazon, for example, to force its local subsidiary companies across the world into handing over user data to U.S. authorities."

Exactly how? By my understanding a company in EU operates under EU law and US parent company is only stock owner. Stock owner can not by my understanding force the company to do anything if the company does not want. Lets assume that US company does not want to force daughter company, how can NSA to make them?

EDIT: I'm fully aware that by harassment or blackmail anything can be done, no question here. What I meant to inquiry, out of curiosity, is, is there a legal way to _force_. I know that parent company can control and fire board etc, but can they be forced to do so. Or more broadly, can some US agency take full control of US company and run it like they please. Can f.e. NSA if they really-really wan't to rise McDonalds burgerflippers salary by twofold? Does Patriot Act or something allow that?
A bitingly clever game about personal data & privacy
Pay Booz Allen billions a year the same rate as NSA does and you'll have it solved in a short time. of course incentives and priorities matter also (the soldiers have already done the fighting, so what's the rush might be the attitude.)