skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without speaking to your overall proposal, which may be strategically sound, I have a few questions on the details:

> "but arguments along the lines of ['distrust government'] work better on Republicans"

Forgive me, as someone raised and educated outside of the US, I sometimes get a bit confused. Which party thinks the government should regulate abortion as a crime, and regulate which kinds of partnership qualify for marriage benefits? Which party thinks government should be trusted with truly massive budgets to use the US military to coerce other countries (as a possible measure of this, consider on whose watch the military budget grew, and on whose it shrank)?

By their works shall ye know them, I think? I concluded that the Republicans were the party of big government. Did I get confused again?

> "Paint the issue as giving the liberal administration the ability to snoop on conservative political organizations"

Well, you can paint it any way you like. In practice, I haven't heard of any abuses of surveillance aimed at political conservatives, maybe excepting the KKK (who you may or may not see as "political conservatives" anyway). Just look at how they spent the budget for COINTELPRO, a 15-year-plus abuse of FBI power to suppress political "subversion" (i.e. dissent with the status quo); 85% of that budget was spent on things like suppressing civil rights groups and anti-war protesters. Admittedly, COINTELPRO is going back a long way; if you know of specific abuses that are more recent, I'd certainly consider that more-interesting evidence.

> "This is not a cynical argument"

This, ultimately, is the part I'm questioning. I think this proposal's strategic suitability rests crucially on the distorted image that Republican voters have of the Republican party, and of the overall public discourse.

> "Moreover, people don't care about 'privacy.'"

I couldn't agree more.
I used a few on elance several years ago. It was a good experience.
IOS7: A Great New Beginning
PointHQ DNS service sold to Copper.io
Received the below email a little bit ago. I have several domain's DNS with Point at the moment and I'm not sure how I feel about this. So long as Copper.io maintains the same policies and feature set I won't be too annoyed. Point has had tremendously good uptime and functionality for me and I hope that continues

Hi Aroch

We're writing with exciting news about the future of Point - Point has now been acquired by Copper.io!

We developed Point 3 years ago with the goal of creating an attractive, easy-to-use and affordable DNS hosting service and we achieved this goal. Point has now reached a stage where it will benefit hugely from the resources Copper.io will be able to provide and the acquisition will allow us to concentrate on our core products - Codebase, Deploy & Sirportly.

For a brief intro - Copper.io is building a full stack of developer tools - and DNS is core to that. Copper.io have a number of other products and I'm sure they will fill you in on everything over the next few weeks.

If you have accounts with any of our other services, these will continue to function as normal and nothing will change in this area at all. The same applies to your Point account, you will be able to continue to login at the usual domain using your existing username & password. However, you will find that the links with our aTech Identity system have now been removed and your Point account details will be managed by Copper.io from now on.

If you have a paid account, you will be contacted nearer your renewal date to arrange to make your next subscription payment.

We have total faith in the Copper team and believe they are very well positioned to take the service from strength to strength in the coming years. You'll be hearing from them shortly with more info on Copper.io's plan to extend and support Point.

If you have any questions about this, please feel free to contact me at adam@atechmedia.com or Ed Byrne - the CEO of Copper - at ed@copper.io; and of course the usual support@pointhq.com works as well.

All the best;

Adam Cooke
Managing Director, aTech Media
Whoops. You're right. That's what I get for solving a mass transport problem at 5:00 AM.
Another, simpler way to put it is that, generally, Libertarians are very right economically, and are left socially. They basically want minimum government and maximum freedom.
This rendered very oddly in Chrome on OS X: http://i.imgur.com/xFiNhav.png
The 17th amendment lessened the power of the state and allowed for the current regulatory environment. We have Senators who have no caring or knowledge of what their actions do to the states. It broke the balance of our government.

It didn't make the US more democratic, it increased the power of the two parties in Washington DC and allowed for them ignoring their local feelings. It concentrated power wonderfully.
Actually, yes you can. Check out identity-based encryption and Voltage Security. It's currently in use by Wells Fargo, ADP, and other large enterprise customers.

The catch there is that IBE requires a centralized, trusted key-issuing service where you need to enroll to receive your message. If that's compromised, then game over.
> 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.

It might be easy to find out. Just check when the NSA cancelled their newspaper subscriptions.
I just posted this question the other day.

Let me explain some of my travails trying to use PGP with Thunderbird:

The install of T-Bird wasn't too bad

The install of OpenPGP was not easy but I managed it. The instructions on the site were not all that clear and for an out-of-date version, but YouTube helped out a lot. My mom, the business owners, or a computer science teacher at Central High School simply do not have time to do this. This could be streamlined.

The making of keys and storing of data was totally obtuse, fortunately, the wizard guided me through a lot of it. This could be streamlined.

Now sending a message is where it gets tough. OpenPGP says that I have to use [shift]+"left-click" on the Write button in T-bird to make sure the html won't be used so the PGP message will de-crypted correctly. This is non-sense. Why is this happening?

Ok now assuming I have a plain text email I have to hit [ctrl]+[shift]+[s] and [ctrl]+[shift]+[e] to sign and encrypt. BS. This needs to be better. Just a pop-up and type in the pass-phrase (brilliant wording, btw, phrase makes this so clear it has to be many words long my mom can understand this).

Ok now my buddy can't read it because I did not send him a public key? What the hell are those? Why do I care? I thought I put in my pass-phrase? Didn't he? What is going on?

I sort this out, I find the public key and send it over. Now he can read it. But wait I have another buddy that I have to do this with. Where were those options in the menus again?

There needs to be a button that remembers if I sent the public key to them, sends it if I did not, and then automatically tells their email client that I don't have theirs and gets theirs with permission from them.

Awww, fuck it... the NSA can probably crack this anyway.
People do not like sonic booms, at all.
Zero hate against Optimizely for advertising their quality product, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to see EA putting lots of effort into advertising/sales when the core gameplay of Sim City was so broken.
Using Go is a constant temptation and for small APIs it's probably a good choice.

Ruby (esp. Rails), for me, is worth the performance trade-off - even though that stings me coming from a C/assembler background originally.

With Rails you can build complex/deep APIs with very efficient syntax and clear tests - the conventions enforced mean that everything is in the same place/style no matter who coded it - so the finished app is more maintainable than in any other language/framework I've ever known.
Yeah I think I started writing before I really got your question, my apologies :)

It is very possible that government based research on crypto cracking is several years ahead of the rest of the world, but the attitude to these systems around the time of the dot com bubble was switching from security through obscurity to working in the open. The reason is the research cuts both ways, the US relies on AES as much as you or I. If there is a problem with it, they would be burned as well.
Brother, you're a fast learn and I'm impressed with you to no end.

Keep up the good fight.

There are some people who I would love to introduce you to who are also of the same mind. I wish there was an easy way to contact you so we could maybe set something up.
It does use PBKDF2, and the input to that is not just a passphrase but also one or more keyfiles, a salt, and some other metadata. My understanding is that the keyfiles should supply most of the randomness.
If you read the recent Wired article on Keith Alexander, the NSA director, he has made it clear he wants the NSA monitoring and storing everything to monitor "cyberthreats". So it figures they'd be monitoring the White House as well if that's their justification.
If you don't get better answers and you're at or near a university...

you could do a lot worse than spend a few hours browsing the faculty websites in departments related to your interests. Look for assistant or associate professors or grad students w/ informative websites (those will typically be the more senior and more independently motivated grad students) and look for people who post their code.

That will help filter out the people who are likely to care about this issue (ie people who want better code in their field) and who might be working on something you're interested in and could contribute to. Then email them, set up a meeting if possible, and ask them your questions in person :)

But, just to be clear, I wouldn't suggest that you volunteer to help them specifically; they will have no idea if you're reliable, any good, etc., and, like the parent said, this is a pretty low priority for them. But they should be able to help you get started in the right direction, and a lot of professors will feel (and may be) professionally obligated to guide you if you show progress and commitment.
Worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

In an exercise, an enemy using a method not easy to intercept sunk the US Navy. Oops.
There Is No Classical World
What? I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask for some evidence. If you said 30% faster, I'd just shrug and disagree. But you said 300% faster.

Developer efficiency is notoriously difficult to measure and prone to all sorts of biases. Perhaps the key word in your sentence is "I"?
Ask HN: What team chat tool do you recommend? Hipchat, Flowdock, Hall, Campfire?
Hey guys -

What team chat tools are you guys using? Having a strong mobile component is necessary since we all travel a lot! Hipchat is rated quite low/buggy on the App Store... Any others I'm overlooking/missing? Why do you use what you use, and how big is your team?

Thanks!

R
I guess I don't understand how this is different. Are you taking the position that the NSA gathers data without Obama's permission?

Nixon chose to wiretap the White House so he's fair game. Obama wiretaps the entire country and he's not?
> A better statement is that "Libertarians are right of Right and left of Left".

Only if you go by the American standards of "left." Libertarians support capitalism, which places them at best a shade left of center in a more global scale.
Overkill for an API endpoint that authenticates a user..
I find it difficult to believe that you are actually bothered by web developers referring to what they work on as "the internet."

Can we please suppress the burning need to find something "wrong" to nitpick in every headline? I know it's really satisfying to be the HN Superstar that points out a blatant error, but sometimes it just makes you look desperate.
Elasticsearch in Ruby
Ask PG: Can you make a statement on privacy regarding HN servers?
To give Ember some criticism, we're struggling with debugging at the moment:

The main issue https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/issues/2817 is that the run loop in Ember disassociates the invoking action from the event handler which makes figuring out what fired what a PITA.

That and the stacktraces are useless makes hunting down bugs often more difficult than it should be.

I don't know how this contrasts with other JS frameworks but we definitely feel the pain with this issue.
In-ear phones are a good budget option. It's like wearing ear plugs, plus the music kills any remaining low-volume sound that would get through.
That is why after your first FOIA request you send another FOIA request that requests all correspondence and documents generated as a result of your first. Rinse and repeat until you find an attractor. ;)
iOS would be better if it weren't so tied to OS X

Why is that?
I guarantee it's the bottle neck. I made a service getting between 1.5mil to 2mil hits a day, and the DB is the bottleneck for me, I was shocked to see how little resources Go and nginx were using.
Wait, so there is a problem with MS helping out our government protect its secrets? I agree, PRISIM was bad an invasion of privacy but people need to realize that government agencies have more secrets and do more then spy on us. I wouldn't want China, Russia or some other foreign country getting its hands on the locations of weapons, R&D, or our defense plans because of a exploit in a MS program.

Hackers will always be faster to take advantage of loopholes then companies or the government are at patching them. Do people really see the problem with MS doing this?
I really don't understand this outrage about the NSA (allegedly I know, but let's be serious) hacking Chinese targets. That's their job. The Chinese, through hacking, have obtained highly classified information about our most advanced weapons systems. They've stolen critical information about the F-35, AEGIS radar, not to mention hacking US companies to steal their intellectual property.

The internet open, free, etc but the world is still defined by borders and national interest. Nations have always needed to collect intel to inform their decision making and they've employed spies to do it. It just so happens the medium that the NSA operates in is the digital one, with their spies sitting in a big black building in Virginia instead of being some James Bond style agent.
Good question - sorry to come over as negative! Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, XBox (I only think the new name is misleading), Playstation (though it does sound like a childs play area - which I guess it is...), Oracle, Sun, Apple, Mac (this one is weird, Macintosh??, the abbreviation is short for friend or nice drink), Trillian, Xerox (a bit dated - but different), Knoppix, Debian (I like name inspired ones), OCP, Acorn, MSX (original XBox?), Dragon, Spectrum, Spectre, OpenSource, Ubuntu, Redhat/Fedora, Suse (brain is struggling now), Hobnob, Jaffacake, Pathe, Universal, Pegasus, Mercury messenger, Kindle, Nook, Monster Munch, Twiglets, Suma, Pot noodle, Marmite, Oat Crunchies, Audi, Honda, Kia, Lotus, Epic, The Who, The Fall, The The - sure there are loads more, but can't think of them off the top of my head.

(I guess it was clever of Flickr, to do something at least different, but the other web2.0 wannabe names feel like second rate copy cats.)
From my experience, Chrome installs default to en-US without trying to pick up language settings from your computer. (I'm probably doing it wrong)

Not an excuse, but it sounds like they don't trust accept-language to be correct.
Talk to grad students; more time, fewer commitments, still very knowledgeable, but with less "turf" to defend.
Hi, this is Lucas, founder and CEO of AppFog. Just wanted to address this up front.

CenturyLink is committed to taking our PaaS offering to the next level through significant investments. AppFog is going to evolve rapidly, both for the public and private cloud. For our public cloud developers, this means more infrastructure options, increased levels of support, and accelerated launches of new features that our community has been asking for. We will soon be adding high-speed Savvis infrastructures options for deploying apps, including paid-only infrastructures with better reliability and performance. And for our private cloud developers within enterprises, we will soon be delivering AppFog-in-a-Box, a self-service private PaaS offering baked into Savvis’s cloud offering, a Gartner #1 Leader.

We have found a great partner in CenturyLink. CenturyLink is the 3rd largest telco in the United States, providing fiber networks to business around the world. Savvis, CenturyLink’s IaaS, is a great complement to AppFog so that as you scale your applications past the boundaries of AppFog, you can start adding high-speed IaaS resources quickly and easily.

CenturyLink is going to be an accelerant for us and I am proud to prove you wrong. :)
Or, to give a less charitable phrasing, "Reposting it now causes us to draw illogical inferences due to the context at the top of our minds."
It's an excellent question, I don't think its possible to predict the outcome. In places where heroin is both easily available (low friction) and there is little social stigma attached to it, you get folks wasting away in opium dens, but not everyone who could be in those dens, are.

No doubt a lot will depend on how functional folks can be while 'high'. I have known people who were essentially 'pill heads' or addicted to oxycodone such that they were constantly under the influence but they were still able to do the job assigned to them. (I make no judgement as to whether their performance was improved or hampered by their drug use). Perhaps folks could dial it up or dial it down depending on their need.

But what scares policy maker types is that you have an unpredictable effect if something comes into existence. They will try hard to prevent its creation because of the possibility of bad outcomes even in the presence of the possibility of good outcomes (perhaps you'd have lower workplace rage events if people could dial in a mild soporific state).
And have 10x more upkeep than a statically typed language. Go is more durable, and APIs kind of need that.
Snowden Smuggled Documents From NSA on a Thumb Drive
That sounds unlikely, encrypted email is relatively common in business. For example many domain registrars used it as a mechanism for changing domain settings before "APIs" were a thing.
To be honest I don't think the United States needs a Pirate Party. I know I would not vote for them. I agree we need a free as possible internet, but the Libertarian party already supports that (and has a larger political platform) so that would be what I would vote.

I believe most Americans would vote similarly.
I tried MySQL Workbench and it does not fully work with MariaDB. Using some of the GUI actions would cause it to spin and not return any results.
Yeah, but that necessarily pits him against other Congressfolks. Stockman VERSUS EVERYBODY!!!!

The move as-he-played-it is smarter, right? He's inviting other Congressfolks to join him in making political hay by trolling the executive branch. He's saying to Issa "someone should be embarrassed about this.... would you like to be embarrasser or embarrassee?"

Does anyone know if the opening paragraph thanking Issa is sincere or snark? I don't know what Issa's record/politics have been.
Its not about convenience.
its about money. Like everything really.

Using GPG/PGP for example (which IMO is the best solution) is nice. It has a good, convenient design.
The clients, UI, etc are terrible. Theyre extremely inconvenient.
That can be fixed. This needs some time and a little dedication.
Nobody will pay for a product that has proper, easy, fast PGP support across the board. Nobody.
Since it's not a trivial task, and the benefits are "only" privacy, it didn't happen yet.
If anything, people re-code their own, incompatible and generally lesser version of PGP, because they will get financial gain, or popularity from it (patching GPG doesn't give you as much popularity as making your own, you see.. and we're quite ego-driven / NIH-happy)

So, here we are. And I'm to blame too, I haven't worked on this either.
I'm secretly hoping things like PRISM will actually help making this move forward.
Those comments are scathing, they read like a post doc talking to an undergrad about their problem sheet!

"Equation (9) actually applies only to a perfectly conducting sphere and has been known for over 100 years..."
Meetups suffer from this too...You can chat for a couple hours and "connect" but it's really really hard to take it beyond that. I dislike it but am guilty of it too, it's too hard to take a chance on giving people more of your valuable time, I suppose?
I like how in one of the videos floating around, the police (or militia) fire off their first tear gas round just as the narrators, and others in his pack, shout "Sem Violência!"
I don't think you need a disorganized party to hollow out and crawl inside of.

The secret to the US two party system is that primary elections are really, really important and virtual no one partakes in them. Democrats get elected in safe blue districts and Republicans get elected in safe red districts and only a tiny number of purple districts are really up for grabs. So if you want to shape who wins the general election, the place to apply your time and money is in the primary elections.

Even if you don't win, nothing turns a politician faster than a strong primary challenge. Most of the "old guard" Republicans who defeated their Tea Party challengers none-the-less have shifted course to appease the Tea Party.

So if you want to get Congress to move on domestic spying, start primary-ing Congressmen with anti-spying candidates.
I don't like ad-hoc benchamarks that do not attempt at all to investigate what was the cause of measured differences.

There are many factors that influence request processing time, language is only one of them. Web APIs are most often IO bound, so large differences between frameworks often indicate the IO is handled differently. From my experience, dynamic languages can easily handle HTTP requests below 10ms without any DB interaction, and out-of-a-box DB interaction that framework provide is often suboptimal. If you investigate, it can for example turn out that ORM runs several SQL queries for operations that could be performed with just one, or that it makes a separate DB connection for each request (looking at you Django).

Ruby 10x faster than Golang tells nothing.

Why is that there there is a big spike around 15,000 requests? If you investigate, you may discover that Puma by default creates 16 threads, and the benchmark simulates 20 clients (https://github.com/puma/puma), so requests from 4 clients need to wait in queues. As a result, the benchmark may be comparing apples to oranges: code with no upper limit on number of concurrent requests, with code that can handle 16 concurrent requests.
I can't speak to Matt's source code, but you can find ours at GitHub [1].

In fact, the ETA for Round 6 is next Thursday, June 20. If you can point out any tuning for us to put in place for the Ruby tests before June 17, we may be able to get pull requests accepted before we kick off the test runs.

[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks
It would be really nice to have an open, human-readable scientific data format. Basically a CSV+ that had a single piece of metadata - uniform mandatory SI units.

To be able to read/write/import/export that to and from desktop machines to the web would aid science so much.

AND it seems like a perfect job for the Mozilla foundation. I have no idea from their (uninformative) article what they're actually doing...
How To Give Presence To Your Web Marketing Voice
Savvis was pretty fun to work at back in the day. The CEO was a bit of a mess: http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2008/09/businessma...
Google servers slowing down?