skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Watsi.org is hiring for a front-end developer
Watsi.org is a global crowdfunding platform for healthcare that enables anyone to directly fund low-cost, high-impact medical treatments for people in need. We're a technology-focused non-profit startup fresh out of Y Combinator with one goal: global access to basic health care.

We're looking for a senior designer/front-end developer to join our fast-moving 4-person team in San Francisco. The ideal candidate will be an HTML/CSS expert with Javascript, design, mobile web, and Rails experience. The more Javascript and Rails experience you have the better. You have to be serious about alignment, consistency and executing the design to the fullest. In fact, the more design you do the better.

A few challenges we'd like this hire to tackle:
- constantly improve page load time, let’s say by 10% in the first few weeks
- implement a really nice redesign that looks right on all the most popular screen sizes
- take responsibility for anything a donor or a team member sees on all of our apps
- get us off of Bootstrap, or at least slim it down to the bare minimum
- maybe even get us off of the asset pipeline, as it slows down deployments to Heroku

If you are excited about joining a motivated, passionate team that's working its ass off to help people receive the medical care they deserve, we'd love to hear from you. Please send your resume/github to jobs@watsi.org

For more info, here are a few recent articles about us:

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/business/watsi-a-crowdfund...

Techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/30/watsi/

Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732382950457827...
Facebook in talks with Feds to allow FISA disclosures
Exactly.

I find it confounding how people are still attributing this stuff to Presidents when it should be obvious by now it's not the elected officials running this show. They're being led along by an entrenched bureaucracy with its own goals and agenda, no term limits, and with the ability to shape the world view and hence decisions of our elected officials by what information they choose to provide or withhold.

Stop talking about this in terms of Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat. The problem transcends any one elected individual or even political party.
I think the Lib Dems have collectively played their hand poorly since entering the government.

Objectively, they have achieved some huge wins from their own election pledges, which is no mean feat in a coalition. Probably their biggest success has been raising the tax thresholds in a way that benefits many of the less well-off but working people in the country. And for all the current mess about mass surveillance, you have to remember that compulsory ID cards for everyone were being pushed strongly by the previous administration and have been scrapped since.

The trouble is, the Lib Dems have terrible PR people who haven't played up their strengths to any significant extent at all, so they've just got lost in all the negative stories. They totally mishandled the tuition fees issue (at least, those of their MPs who didn't rebel did) and that cost them dearly, because they lost the credibility they so desperately needed to get things done in government and they've been playing defence ever since. Add in a couple of scandals costing Cabinet-level people their jobs, throw in this Lord Carlile guy that no-one had ever heard of until he became the Lib Dems' chief apologist for anything not really very liberal at all and Vince Cable as possibly the most overtly business-hostile Business Secretary in recorded history, and their top brass is looking more like a bunch of school kids playing at government than senior members of an actual national government. This in turn just plays into probably the Lib Dems' biggest PR problem coming into government, which was convincing people that all those nice-sounding policies they were free to advocate when they had no chance of winning the election could actually work for real.

As a point of interest, we were within a few metaphorical steps of "Papers please" on ID cards and it really was popular revolt that forced the political class to roll it back, so I'm not ruling out that significant public backlash you mentioned against the on-line surveillance. Almost everyone uses Facebook and Google, but a lot of people don't really like them very much, particularly the constant invasions of privacy, and I suspect a lot of people are getting fed up with the US overtly throwing its weight around one way or another too. It's not hard to imagine that this could become an issue with significant weight by election time unless it's all water under the bridge by then, and I don't see any chance of that happening if anyone in government really does try to force through the snooper's charter. Surely international relations are going to have a much higher profile next time than in the past, particularly with the EU debate and the rising profile of UKIP.
I think that's the point. They're using IP geolocation when the article suggests that the Accept-Language header would be a better choice.

I don't know whether this is generally true, but it sounds like it would probably help your situation.
Welcome to politics. I've been burned several times having a political conversation where it appears I'm in agreement with the other guy, only to realize later that the other guy only "agrees" with me because what I'm saying happens to make his side look good.
I work with Drew and he knows his stuff, so I would recommend this course.
As I read the article, I couldn't figure out why Derek and cdbaby didn't just script a solution to submit the data appropriately from his already amassed archive (which he could then sell as another service on the side).
Something like it exists (or is claimed to exist)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
Regardless of the disorganization, there is a set of people at the top that are going to be extremely difficult to dislodge, and they will thwart your every move. I am not a Ron Paul person, but you can look at what the party did to disenfranchise him. The problem here is that political parties are basically clubs, they have their own rules. So when party leaders violate parliamentary procedure to ignore successful votes to remove leaders, when they set up shadow offices for Establishment candidate when he doesn't win in a district, when they call police to eject people who win votes, your only alternative is "to form another party." At the same time the RNC and DNC have managed to weasel their way into preferential treatment under state laws, so they get to have their cake and eat it too.

I don't have a solution.
That's another thing in which CS has gone in the opposite direction. Before, the ambassadors had much stronger roles of welcoming and educating new members of the community, now they are less and less relevant. Ambassadors are what made the community a bit self-moderated before.
It is not ethical either, especially considering that the law itself is the exact same in the US(although NSA seems to be above it, which makes the whole issue even more contrversial IMO). Committing a crime abroad over the internet is no loophole to escape this fact, not even on moral grounds.
Of course, if you zap the wrong part of your brain you could also decrease your cognitive skills.

I'll wait until there's more evidence before I break out the soldering iron.
Can you point to some (respected) publications on the field that can prove cognitive enhancement?
Another day, another "proof" that Ruby is slower than X, which surprises exactly no one.

The interesting thing here though is that considering the trivial amount of work to be done, Ruby shouldn't be that slow. I'd like to see the source code of the Ruby project to see if some simple improvements could have been made that aren't too invasive.

The spike in latency at around 15,000 requests could be explained by the garbage collector, which normally is put out-of-band. This makes me believe that he used a single-threaded, single-worker approach for Ruby. I don't know about the Go framework he used, but maybe it was multi-threaded (and not green-threads).
On that subject, here's my favorite interview question to ask:

"What is something that's broken in the world that you want to fix?"

It's very open-ended so it tends to be a good conversation starter. Good candidates will have some answer, it could be about anything. Not so good candidates will have some kind of waffling answer.
This seems to be at odds with the existence of tools.
Difference being that Nixon ordered the tape recorders be installed. He was not compelled by anyone to record his conversations and they were recorded with his permission.
For any wedding photographer that reads this:

If YOU were getting married tomorrow and needed to hire someone to be YOUR wedding photographer, would you accept 2.5MP JPEGs as the final product?

Or would you demand full resolution JPEGs, along with RAWs so that you can have the full sensor data to play around with forever?
Have you got any examples of this? There are plenty of terrible ideas on /r/ideasfortheadmins, but I don't remember seeing Admins agree with them very often.
> I think that's the point. They're using IP geolocation when the article suggests that the Accept-Language header would be a better choice.

That was my point :) If I set up us-en everywhere, don't try to be smarter and just show me everything in English.
That's too bad. CenturyLink is a horrible company to deal with. Heroku provides enough functionality for what I need, thankfully.
This is one of the first times i've seen the round number price in BTC rather than USD.
Regardless of the aim of his request it does server a public good. It shows that this type of data, once collected, will never be limited to a specific usage. It's too tempting a thing and humans are too weak to resist the siren call.
There is of course, the ultimate litmus test: Would you trust Nixon with this data?

Also: "Would you trust J. Edgar Hoover[1] with this data?"

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
The shitty part is that committees, who have the power to decide what Congress even addresses, are basically organized along party lines which severely limits the impact a non-Democrat, non-Republican congressperson can have.
Trust me, everyone who knows me has heard the story. But you do make a point, I should write it up and put it up on a website to educate others as to some of the abuses that have been occurring for so long.
This is a really useful article on a rarely covered aspect of running a small start-up. Thanks.
Really? The polio vaccine made my body better without adverse effects, and there are literally hundreds of other examples.

Evolution is a process, not an endpoint - - it seems highly unlikely that no further improvements to the human body are possible.
This was an issue for our app. We went SSL-only for our API, which unfortunately fails with a cryptic error message if the clock is off. We eventually messages this to the user ("Sorry, Zite is broken, please reset your clock"), but there's no way to know how many users actually went and fixed it and returned to the app.
Nixon was the President, whose particular office recorded phone calls because a previous President made it standard practice. For him alone.

The White House and the IRS are large organizations with many employees, none of whom have 'tapes' of their calls, except POTUS.

There was no warrant required to make those tapes. POTUS is a special case. This guy wants every record of every communication by every staffer of both the White House and the IRS. This is going much much farther, and for seemingly no reason whatsoever. The Senator is basically suggesting the interns were part of a conspiracy, so we should find out what they had to hide.

If, for example, one person at either the White House or IRS was a closeted homosexual, and unwarranted recordings proving that are made public, the person's life could be ruined. All because some douchebag Senator wanted an unnecessarily broad fishing expedition for political reasons.

But yes, Nixon should have had to turn over the tapes, because there was already clear evidence he had something to hide. That's why we're supposed to issue warrants - if there is due cause.
Min.io - sell your digital goods with Bitcoin
Since their logic is you cannot be safe unless they know everything about you - they most likely have a file on every human being in the USA, maybe a large majority of the planet.
I have played with AppFog, but nothing serious. In any case, I like using PaaS products and more completion should make pricing fair.

Off topic, but what I would like to see is more low end for resources, but high end in services PaaS offerings: low memory and bandwidth, but: never get swapped out so loading request times become an issue, and inexpensive SSL support. I have some fun projects that may get less that a thousand requests a day but that I would still like no swaps and SSL for.
A new web site for Bletchley Park
How I Published my Book on Go
They can already be made real.

A) Make sure your ship is bigger

B) Shoot a ton of highly charged electron beams at the enemy space ship to ionize their hull

C) Magnetize your hull to the opposite charge and bring in the ship
At the risk of sounding trollish: isn't the acquirer (Savvis aka CenturyLink) a major US telco who is pretty friendly with the NSA snooping (and who somehow also acquired Qwest which resurfaced a few times through the NSA maelstrom)?
51% of all turns are right hand turns.
Yeah, the NSA's budget is at exactly zero risk from this entire story, or this little sideshow in particular.

If you think otherwise, you're kidding yourself.
Client-side AES encryption in Javascript
Thanks, that's what I wanted to know.
And now, we start using call logs to investigate non-terrorist crimes? Politics aside, this is what everyone's actually worried about.

If there were some magical guarantee from the good fairy of civil liberties that broad surveillance could only ever be used to stop terrorism, it would be far, far less troublesome.

The problem is using surveillance for any crime one wants to investigate.
http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded-internet-design/43724...

The only feasible thing against AES 128 right now would be if a flaw was discovered. This is also why it doesn't matter whether you use 128, 192, 256, or higher. If one is flawed, they all are. The reason we even have higher than 128 is simply because the government loves excessive amounts of redundancy. It lets them sleep easier at night, even if it's completely unnecessary.
Cars and trains have changed a lot.

This video shows the difference pretty clearly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_ptUrQOMPs (it's a head-on crash test between a 1959 Bel Air and a 2009 Malibu).

Cars are immensely safer than the death-traps they were in the past. They're also immensely more comfortable, mind-bogglingly more fuel efficient, and produce a hell of a lot less pollution.

These aren't marginal improvements.
I fail to see how that is our best hope.
I can't remember who said this, but my response to your comment can be best articulated with this quote "all philosophical arguments root from grammatical inconsistencies".

So, I apologize if I made you feel that way. That was not my intent. The only other time I remember such an outcry here at HN was when Steve Jobs passed. A big and depressing event, indeed. I just don't understand why we complain so sparsely about "bigger" problems as we are doing about these privacy issues. There have been some discussions about education policies, but they come and go. Privacy issues have been lurking around ever since social media emerged, and as I said, I am worried that this event makes it go overboard.
Some games even more recent than that don't run well on modern versions of Windows. Wine functions better than Windows in these cases, just like ports of old games are often done with DOSBox. It's very easy to emulate the hardware specs needed back then.

Accessible computing power is growing much faster than it has been in the last few decades thanks to networking. In just a few seconds, I can start as many cloud servers as I want and stream data directly to myself. I can easily run emulators of every past or present video game console right now on a phone. Sony is vocal about moving their infrastructure to the cloud as well.

This next generation is running on traditional AMD processors, and by 2020, I'm sure that emulating the correct environment for their software will not be a problem. Whether you stream your data from Sony or yourself, accessing it and your games will not be a problem. The console itself will eventually be just a DRM device to get you to the servers. The power or compatibility of the machine means very little in that case.
Not just "plenty of people" -- actual majorities in both parties:

"There are significant partisan differences [in 2013] in views of the government's program to obtain call logs and Internet communication. Democrats are more likely to approve, by 49% to 40%. Independents (34% vs. 56%) and Republicans (32% to 63%) are much more likely to disapprove than approve.

"In 2006, when Gallup asked the similar question about a program that came to light at that point, Republicans were significantly more likely to approve than Democrats. The differences in partisan reaction between 2006 and 2013 reflect the party of the president under whose watch the programs were carried out at those two points in time."

http://www.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-gover...

It just baffles me that many Americans are so myopic on this issue that they can't even see past a single election cycle!
Why Feedback Management Tools Don't Work
Apple TV is iOS, not OS X.
This is why I will never donate to Kickstarter. Anyone can do this.
There are nine exemptions to the FOIA (that we know of)

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/foia/
The Netflix Tech Blog: Isthmus - Resiliency against ELB outages
Robots can learn by imagining the existence of people
> Regardless of the disorganization, there is a set of people at the top that are going to be extremely difficult to dislodge, and they will thwart your every move.

You don't need to dislodge them. You just need to convince them that you've got a political platform that will get votes, to counter demographic trends (people who remember the Soviet Union dying off, etc) that don't work in their favor. Bill surveillance as an attack on religious groups, a way for the IRS to more strictly enforce tax laws, etc, and you can present them with a platform that will get votes from their base.

I haven't been watching the news lately, but I can't believe that the republicans aren't already trying to tie the NSA thing to the IRS thing.
I have a question that perhaps a cryptography expert could answer for me.

My father told me when he was young, he visited Oak Ridge National Labs on a trip, and while there, they told him they had satellites that could read the print on a newspaper. At the time, it wasn't classified information; it was just something that nobody knew. Approximately 15-20 years later, satellites with that capability became well-known. This indicates to me that top secret technology is probably somewhere around 15-20 years ahead of what the general public knows about. This may be less true today than it was back then since nowadays the equipment and factories to develop state-of-the-art technology run in the billions of dollars.

Where I'm going with this: is it reasonable to assume that "future technology" 20 years from now could crack AES-256 or PGP? If so, it seems reasonable to me that the NSA could already crack today's encryption for high-priority data. Add that to the fact that they tend to hire the very best experts in the field (mathematicians and cryptographers) and it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me that their decryption technologies are pretty good. Of course, I'm not talking about better technology in a brute-force sense; it would still be impossible to crack 256-bit encryption. I'm talking about algorithmic weaknesses.

But then again, I have only a basic knowledge of cryptography. Would any experts like to comment?
Hell is other people: avoid your friends
The pattern of events is pretty strange.

Snowden, a US citizen, chose to leak the documents to Guardian and not New York Times, meant to be published while he is in Hong Kong, which is under Chinese rule in the matters of foreign policy.

I'm genuinely trying to understand as to why he didn't trust a single person from his country? With the claims of the access he made, it should have been far easier to find one, without going to a non-US newspaper* and boarding a plane to a nation that is not on exactly the friendliest terms to US.

(* Nothing against Guardian, it's just that the visible pieces of the puzzle do not seem to fit together.)

It is very hard to believe that he had sweeping access levels. For one, NSA has its own chip manufacturing facilities, teams of mathematicians and security experts. Even if we don't know how NSA works, we can deduce from its contributions to open source: selinux, Apache Accumulo. Surely, they are expected to have tighter systems.

Besides, he was an employee of a contractor. Even less reason to provide elevated access to him. So, if he has material in his hands, than his security clearance would allow, then it is way more surprising.

Snowden's statements ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

Edited: grammar.

Update: thanks to zecho and brown9-2 for their comments; Snowden leaked it to an American.
A slow dynamic bytecode-interpreted globally VM-locked language running a massive completely-overkill framework is only 10x slower than a statically compiled natively concurrent language running a tiny microframework? I'd say that's a massive positive for Ruby and Rails to be honest.
Thanks for that, good read.
John Galliano Appears in First Interview Since Blow-Up
That's not exactly a problem. Asynchronous turnover in the branches helps provide operational stability while still allowing for accountability by voting the bastards out.

At least that's the theory.
Compute power is far from the most effective brute force method to get someone's encryption key. Other means include; rendition, waterboarding, jail, similar threats and keyloggers.
Percentages are useless without any context: http://xkcd.com/1102/
That's only for things like online money transfers, and not account related. They maybe have pulled the particular document I'm referring to, but at one point they had the same / similar text to what Schneier quotes.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/bank_botches_...
it would be deeply ironic if, with your doubled cognitive ability, you realised that that was a bad bargain.
@aryastark - What's the nature of AES 128 & Co., meaning: Who can and cannot discover flaws? Is this like open source where the whole world can watch or is this somehow a closed thing like Windows, MacOS, etc.?
NuoDB's NewSQL database now supports SQLAlechemy
I know what you're saying, but ever since this started, I immediately thought of Nixon and Watergate. This scandal deserves to be as big as Watergate, so then we should see everything, and all docs related to this should be declassified.

Enough of this "we should know everything about you, but you can't know anything about us - so trust us".