skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. Even if you did have a computer with a 12GHz clock, that doesn't give any indication of the performance that it can achieve.
JavaScript tool that validates your HTML and warns you in the web console
Frankly that does not make it any clearer to me. Which could be because I am bad at the nitty gritty of english syntax. But most importantly, with all due respect you are not Strunk and White. I am looking to a clear definitive reference and in the future I cant say "I know it is written this way because hga said so."
Yes.

For example, you can generate your own RSA private key (say, from the command line on a UNIX/Linux box).

You can use that key and generate an "SSL certificate" and have it signed by a certificate authority (a "public" for-profit CA or your own private internal CA).

You can use that same key with SSH for authentication.

You can use that same key with GnuPG for e-mail signing and authentication.
Profiling Python Part 1 [video]
Building Facebook is one thing, scaling Facebook is an entirely different beast.
We don't have one, but in previous companies (2, to be exact) the terms have effectively been: a pittance reward ($1000-$5000) plus an unlimited obligation to defend the patent in the future, long after one has left the company.

That latter part actually came up for me once; I was offered compensation for significant time spent providing expert support for a patent cross-licensing dispute, long after I'd left the company, but it was at a fiat rate far below my actual market value at the time.
My understanding is that people went to fastmail to get away from google's tracking not the NSA.
The Man of Steel, Myostatin, and Super Strength
Out of curiosity, what leads you to that conclusion? I have faith in certain parts of the US government to resist a decline too far, but what makes you so sure China won't one day decide to pass comprehensive freedom guarantees for their population that rival those present in the future of the US? It certainly doesn't seem terribly likely, but the world will eventually change and so will China. It isn't something I would ever claim couldn't happen.
I'd support a house of congress (or part of either or both existing houses) picked via sortition (with a filter for non felon, etc). Ancient Athens actually used this for the very reason of being harder to compromise. The problem with competitive elections for power is the people they attract.
Even if they “didn’t collect that much” they still need to protect sensitive data.
Seeing how they were rumored to be raising money at a lower valuation than this 3 months ago[1], it's hard to see how this could be a distressed sale.

[1] http://www.business-standard.com/article/finance/redbus-in-b...
I love these topical screencasts! Looks like this is a teaser to real knowledge though. Smart.
Ask HN: Help me avoid take home interview questions
Take home projects are actually a great way to see what a candidate will really work (Sorry for the deliberate bait) but they're extremely time-consuming in the aggregate, and serve no other purpose. I've got to be really interested in the job, but it's hard to tell because you're usually asked to do it before coming in for an interview.

Any suggestions on a demo project that hits many areas of interest for a full-stack web developer? Massive bonus points if it would help out some community. Some skills I've seen enough that they probably matter:
- Front end javascript graphical challenges.
- Back end parse an api stuff
- Testing / Specs
- Algorithms (Binary search trees seem to be popular)
- SQL - demonstrating knowledge of how to do various joins, in particular.

So long as the skill is marketable, it's fair game. I'd love to use this as an opportunity to learn/give back, rather than just show-off.

(Side note: I'll be in SF June 23-28, and am looking for very senior roles. I'll munge my linkedin profile to try to appease the capricious HN Gods: linkedin.com-in-jeffdeville)
Ask HN: Is there a market in US for simple to use to help home-bizs to grow?
I belong to a start-up based in India and we are building a simple to use tool that can help home based & small businesses to manage & engage existing customers to grow the biz. I wanted to check if such product can be a fit in home-biz & small biz in US? I do understand tools like demandforce, infusionsoft or thrivehive which charge above $99 a month. Our will be probably around $49 a month. thanks in advance!
Pg2 Failure Semantics
The Coming Age of Space Colonization
Variants of this come up from time to time, and that alone rather undercuts the question in the article title -- if no one gave a crap about "Freedom Zero," then people wouldn't keep asking the question.

My biggest problem with Atwood's specific argument is that claiming that Macs are "dongles" for OS X is that it's essentially an argument that platform incompatibilities violate Freedom Zero, which is, with all respect to Atwood, a little nutty. I owned a TRS-80 in the late 1980s, and I'm pretty sure that my inability to run Apple II software on it could not be accurately blamed on hardware-based copy protection. The Mac is not a dongle for OS X any more than OS X is a dongle for Cocoa software. Or are we seriously going to argue that it's harmful for consumers if we can't run all applications on all platforms, and that the differentiation should only be a matter of aesthetics? (Which, all platforms followed Freedom Zero, would be easily changeable anyway, right?)

The thing I'd really like to see more focus on is data freedom. Maybe what I'm using to read ebooks, play music, watch videos, create word processing documents and spreadsheets, write code, and edit photos in is open source, maybe it isn't -- but switching to something else to do those things in shouldn't require me to lose fidelity/functionality in a conversion process, let alone require me to either re-buy something due to DRM (or crack the DRM). Yes, if I had the freedom and the ability to modify every application on every platform, I would theoretically have complete data freedom -- but I should be able to have that even if I'm using 100% closed source software.
Colbert explains it in detail: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/955486/
Vote bitcoin for president. Without term limit.
That wasn't pointless at all, though it was a bit rambling j/k :) Comments like yours are the reason I visit HN.
Depends. Maybe if they did it themselves, but not if they subbed it out.
>He's that good? Knows the `infinitude' of time? Chess gambit(@)?

Let's hope so!
You don't think they've thought of it being used between their contractors/executives? And that they haven't put any effort in to stopping that sort of use internally?
tl:dr NSA invented Bitcoin?
Retroactive lookup seems like the most plausible use case to me.
I agree with you that Zuck deserves praise for taking the idea of Social networking and running with it far longer and more successfully than anyone else. But, I can just as easily make the argument that people were using the Internet to interact socially before, they can interact socially on other websites, and they will continue to interact socially online even if Facebook didn't exist (we could be spending 2-3 hours a day on myspace or instagram right now). All of these companies (except for maybe Apple, who introduced a completely new paradigm with the consumer PC back in the 80's) took something consumers were already doing and did it better. Therefore, I think the argument has to be made from a technological perspective, where Amazon is the clear innovator.
I think you're almost onto something here, but I think the problem is not compensation or benefits. It's that the President has too much power.

And if I may quote Spider Man, with great power comes great responsibility. The constitution wasn't written under the assumption that the federal government would ever be as large as it is. It isn't set up for it. So the President is in charge of too much and is consequently spread too thin for any one person to handle.

Here's the problem: The number of officers of the federal executive branch who are elected: One. Just One.

Compare that to anything else. In any given state you'll elect the governor, but you'll also elect the mayor of each city and possibly the sheriff, etc. I want to vote for the head of the FBI. I want to vote for the head of the IRS. Stop putting it all at the feet of the President.
I was skeptical about the $100k/month by selling themes claim so I did some research. This guy (http://themeforest.net/user/Kriesi) on ThemeForest has 61,313 sales (which seem to be ~40$ on average). That's 2,452,520$ so I guess $100k/month is believable. I was quite surprised there was that much money to be made by selling themes.
That's true, but the stock they receive is more in the notion of an honorarium than a payment for services rendered, and there's often mutual benefit aside from the stock (being on advisory boards is, or used to be, a high-status thing). Advisors don't so much try to value the stock they receive. But a lawyer or a web designer has to do that.

Also, the value a company gets from an advisor is long-term. Not the advice, but the NASCAR-sticker-like endorsement the company gets from the name on their website.
Intro : Using  Celery and MongoDB
PGP alone will do nothing for anonymity. Someone with access to sensitive information sending encrypted email to a journalist who was most probably on the radar of intelligence and a film maker (Poitras) who we know was on the watch list should have raised eyebrows.

Being on a remote island with just over a million inhabitants would not make it easier to stay anonymous.
Not to speak of the strong military presence there.
Time, Probability, Soul.

Pick two.
You usually start with immunosuppressants...
I'd say what Snowden is doing fits fits their core values and goals perfectly. He's spreading gross misinformation and propaganda that's damaging to the US government and major US based technology companies. The fact that he may be doing it out of well-intentioned ignorance rather than willfully doesn't strike me as a big sticking point from their perspective.

[edit: I'm not surprised this is getting downmodded without any actual counterarguments. My comment is a bit too flippant, and the Snowden story really plays to the prevailing biases of the tech crowd. Still this whole episode does have me a little saddened by how otherwise intelligent people can behave so irrationally when something fits what they want to believe.]
It doesn't solve the decentralization problem.

> Without a trusted certification authority and a secure infrastructure, the above four security features cannot be achieved, and electronic commerce becomes impossible over an untrusted transmission medium.
Not necessarily, but they were out in front of the idea in the 90's.
I'm working with some of the folks at stopwatching.us, and we've got some cool things going on. We're currently working with some of Aaron Schwartz code that he wrote when getting involved in politics to deliver citizens' emails to congress en masse. There's a bunch of really interesting projects going on that are starting to come together these days. It's an exciting time to be a politically-active developer!

If you're interested in volunteering some dev time on some creative ways of getting involved, let me know! My email is pvnick@gmail.com :)
This is the best article I've read yet on the subject of what's actually going on. The NSA slide deck was always inconsistent with most of the public statements of industry execs, and this article reconciles them nicely.

The more I read on PRISM, it seems that PRISM itself is a minor revelation (that being, PRISM just automates what used to be done manually).

Most of the outrage just flows naturally from the Protect America Act, which was never a secret. The public is just now hearing about how the act is used in practice.
I disagree with the comment "If I had more room and time, I’d work Amazon into the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks well behind the other three."

IMHO, Amazon is up there as an equal peer with G/A/F.

Edit: I agree with the rest of the article though. I expect (hope for?) more interesting things happening from small players, especially in non-USA markets.
You right, no proof of work either
Get On Top
Their proposal requires a central bank. They discuss how to do "offline" transactions without contacting this central authority, but double-spending would only be detected when money is "deposited" back into the central bank.
Why lawyer up when you believe the outcome will be the same regardless? No lawyer can change the outcome. Better that he live it up until the inevitable happens.
For what it's worth, I was in full agreement with you right up until the "rich old white men" comment.

Edit: Changed "fully" to "full".
Yes, that's considerably more likely now than a decade ago.
Exactly what makes you think NSA "subcontracts" attacks?
General Assembly: Transforming Thinkers Into Creators
I can't imagine Naomi Wolf has that much specialized experience with whistleblowing. She is a pop feminist by trade and her political consulting work dealt with reaching female voters, not state secrets.

That said I still think this article has value as a think piece.
I think she has some interesting points, but they don't necessarily stand up to scrutiny. Occam's Razor says that we should be skeptical of conspiracy theories and require a lot more evidence than a celebrity's hunch.

On the issue of hiring a filmmaker, a little investigation suggests that Greenwald might have had a prior connection with her. The filmmaker's name is Laura Poitras [1]. There's a New York Times article covering her involvement in making the video [2]. In April 2012, Greenwald wrote an article about the U.S. detaining her at the border [3]. I think it's reasonable to believe that Greenwald may have had a prior connection with her.

Also, as I mentioned in another comment [4], history shows that reformers learn from their predecessors' successes and mistakes. The way he orchestrated the release of the documents could be a symptom of his learning from previous whistle-blowers.

It's unfortunate that the best part of her post was at the very end. Regardless of the merits of the rest of her post, I think her last statement is worth remembering: "But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times — rather than the machine itself — that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests — why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times — unless we know about it?"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/business/media/filmmaker-l...

[3] http://www.salon.com/2012/04/08/u_s_filmmaker_repeatedly_det...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5885959
I am the original author of ChatSecure [1], the only free and open source OTR client for iOS devices. We also released an Objective-C wrapper around libotr called OTRKit [2] to help other developers integrate their apps with the OTR protocol. Gibberbot [3] is the equivalent program for Android devices, both of which are currently supported by The Guardian Project.

1. https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS

2. https://github.com/ChatSecure/OTRKit

3. https://github.com/guardianproject/Gibberbot
The U.S. is already far behind many European, and a few African countries on freedom of the press, economic freedom, and other rankings.

Based on trends, it will also soon exceeded by a few Asian countries such as South Korea.

Given that China has copied the same economic and political transition of other Asian countries such as South Korea, but is simply further behind chronologically, please tell be why it's completely inconceivable that China will exceed the U.S. in freedom.
Frankly quickest way to be 'rich' is to be content with the riches you already have.
This kind of shows the amount of power the people behind the scenes have on Obama.

No, this shows how willing Obama is to cave. We needed a Sam Adams or Lincoln or MLK and instead we got a Benedict Arnold.
Can someone share experience about using Numba in practice? I'm interested in use cases and the performance gain achieved.

I guess that once you have compiled the code the application will be rock solid, is this correct?
> It seems that rather than attracting the best of the best to lead this country we managed to arrive at a process that reliably picks the most self serving crooks this country has to offer and allow them to run this country.

Isn't this obviously visible in the structure of the democracies?

How do politicians get selected? By votes from people. The more people like one (politician, party), the more they vote for them. Given that saying/doing the right thing is likely to offend at least some groups of people, it will always be the case that political groups trying to be popular will be selected by the system in favour of the ones trying to get things right. It's deep in the structure of this process; our democracies optimize for short-term popularity contests, not making the right calls that benefit the nation most.
Cartoon World's Greatest Dad
> Income tax had been found to be unconstitutional.

No, it hadn't. As I stated earlier (and cited the case in which the decision was made), tax on certain forms of income (specifically, income from sales of property) was ruled to be a direct tax requiring apportionment under the Constitution.

> An "excise tax", which was the same thing, was implemented as a workaround.

Presumably, this is a reference to the Corporate Excise Tax of 1909, which wasn't the same thing, as the Court had explicitly previously ruled that a tax on corporations that was an excise for the privilege of operating a corporation, even when assessed by income, and even when the income included income from sales of property, was not a "direct tax" under the Constitution and thus did not require apportionment.

> The income tax amendment eliminated the unconstitutionality

...of Congress taxing income from sale of property without apportionment, yes. That was the problem with the tax act that had been struck down -- the fact that it included taxes on that one particular source of income in a non-apportioned tax.
Agreed, but I find scaling Amazon's physical and digital infrastructures in tandem is equally impressive.
Comparing with CIA search trends is equally interesting:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=nsa#q=nsa%2C%20CIA&cm...
Why would they want to do Snowden any favors? Their best move is to be very vocal, and milk the scandal for all its worth.
Maybe you just had a bad experience with your provider in Atlanta. Webpass in SF is pretty awesome. 200mbps for 50/mo.
Paranoid thinking is an extremely valuable asset for security researchers. The things we're all joking about are impractical for an average person, but in a spy vs. spy scenario, especially when each side is well funded, these are the kind of things that will actually get used.

Examples of genuine vulnerabilities that would make you look paranoid just by defending against:

* Make educated guesses about passwords from a microphone recording of the keypresses. Both the intervals between keypresses indicate the region of the keyboard being touched, and the sound of each key differs slightly. Given a statistically significant sample of typing, you could deduce which keys are which based on the frequency of their use. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11318

* Read a screen through a reflection, even from far away http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/spying_on_comp...
(Shrug) Who cares? Talk is cheap, even for Nazis.

Take your Orwellian worldview and peddle it somewhere else. Our history books evidently say very different things.
They probably wouldn't have looked the page unless they were auditing him. He found their decision unfair and appealed it but lost in court, so at least one instance considers Skatteverket's claims legitimate.

Now I have less faith in the lower courts than I should but it does bring legitimacy to Skatteverket's decision.
Here's the TI-Chronos [1]. It's similar to the Smartwatch in many ways, and is based on the MSP430 chips used in the TI Launchpad.

[1] - http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos
Which is probably why he used "$1 million" instead of "rich". :)
It's a "hits" business though, right? For every person doing $100k/mo, there are how many doing $10/mo?
For anyone wondering why Paraguay is the top country here, it has nothing to do with the National Security Agency but rather Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, a transportation/bus company in Paraguay.
I thought about going the WordPress theme route about a year ago and stumbled upon these same statistics. At first it seemed like a great idea. I mean, I already knew how to build them since I use WordPress for almost all my client projects.

But then I realized that part of why I was bored freelancing is that building a WordPress theme is essentially doing the same thing over and over and over again. It's just like an assembly line, factory job.

These days I'm much happier working a salary job for a company on a large scale project that is constantly getting new features and presenting fresh engineering challenges. The salary is good. I'm not a millionaire, but at least I enjoy what I spend 8-10 hours of my day doing.
We are planning to write about it soon.
My answer, as always:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615

Another answer:

Get a $120k/yr job. Live like you make $50k/yr. Wait.

Note that both these approaches also mesh well with investment in real estate or whatnot.

Also note that both these approaches leverage technology.
If your Xbox Live account is banned, you also forfeit your game licenses
Thanks for the history. For those only reading the excerpt, this article is from 2008.
This article (1) says PGP. It also tells us that apparently professional journalists are incapable of using PGP or learning how to and that newspapers will hold confidential information for the most opportunistic moment, be that running it or selling their soul to the government.

1: https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/edward-snowden-...