skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I find it incredibly frustrating that the community seems polarized (assymetrically so, with a vast supermajority against the NSA).

Snowden is not a demigod who descended, perfect and fully formed, from the benevolent Lord of Hackers. He's not a tech messiah coming to herald an end to political abuse.

He's a dude. A perfectly fallible dude with strong politco-technical convictions, who did something big and now has a spotlight. That's literally all of it in a nutshell. He is allowed to make mistakes and still do a really cool thing. But human beings are pattern-searching creatures and have this neurosis with categorizing people as good or bad. That's my hypothesis, anyway.

People seem to be losing sight of this fact and acting as though there's no legitimate reason to argue for the NSA's actions. That's childish and unintelligent - if you don't agree, at least try to hold both sides of the argument in your head and entertain both before you argue one of them. It's fine to disagree, just don't insult a mass of people arguing against you as being misinformed sheeple.
> I’m scared.

Congratulations: You're normal. Look at it this way: You are commanding on a battlefield, there are a helluva lot of guys about to die. If you freeze up, they all die.

So make some fucking decisions, save as many as you can. Throw some into the line of fire for the sake of the others. It's what battlefield commanders do. The gods have chosen you for this role, rise up and do your best. You will make some bad calls, and don't sweat it. Focus on making the right calls, then course correcting the bad ones.

Good luck.
I just usually visit the cached version from Google. Here's a script that I wrote a few days back. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/169548
I like the look of this _much_ better than Newsblur, but I also want to be able to filter by feed. I didn't see that this is possible on Alt. Did I miss something?

edit: ah, i see what i missed.... Still, I'd like not to have to do that mouse-over to get to the list.
- Its user interface is inconsistent and poorly designed.

As I worked through this website (which is great by the way) it struck me that by focusing so clearly and completely on the underlying object graph that's supposed to lead to nirvana for learners, the site does a great job of highlighting the obtuseness of Git's command set.

I mean you've got a great honking big graph on the screen, another big honking graph to the side, and you're asked to "make this one look like that one". This should be so easy now that you see it - essentially drag and drop albeit with text commands - it should have almost no pedagogical value (if you built a model in Lego then it would literally be child's play). Yet even having identified what I needed to move and where I wanted to move it, the challenge remained - what is the weirdly named command I must type to make that (and only that) happen? Which way round are the arguments again? (eg. 'git rebase', to move stuff from the current branch to somewhere else, versus 'git merge', to 'move' stuff from somewhere else to the current branch, always gives me pause.)

I'm most grateful to this website for telling me about 'git branch -f <branch name> <destination>' as a way to repoint a ref. To think that all this time I thought you had to checkout the ref, reset --soft, then maybe checkout again if you wanted to get HEAD back to where it started (all the while dealing with the side effects and possible conflicts with your working directory). None of the tutorials or books I had read, such as "git for computer scientists", "Think Like a Git", or the "Pro Git" book ever mentioned (correct me if I'm wrong) that fairly fundamental operation despite schooling me quite thoroughly in the "think of the object graph" mindset. (Yeah it's in the man page, but then there's a lot of stuff in the manpage so noticing it is the problem there. And I tend to assume any option named "--force" is something that I shouldn't be messing with. Why not "git repoint-ref" or "git move-ref" anyway? Git has so many top-level commands already, it doesn't seem like they're worried about polluting that namespace.)
Aussies? What about Canadians? Sure, we don't pay the same dollar markup either of you do, but there's some goat to be got in finding at least a 10-15% markup on unit pricing before shipping and import taxes when the destination is on the same continent.
Has it occurred to you that the NSA's competence in signals intelligence might be used for industrial espionage, with counterterrorist surveillance being a convenient cover story?
I mean exactly what I said, nobody is going to send your data to 3rd parties besides you. (Who themselves can and will send it to other 3rd parties.) I've heard nice things about Tarsnap, but uh:

>At the present time, Tarsnap does not support Windows (except via Cygwin) and does not have a graphical user interface.

This basically means it's for a couple percentage points of the population at best. Ideally I'd like to see more personal cloud users than that.

As far as the keys/encryption thing, I was saying it was a good idea. For the vast majority of people, encrypted backups would be miles ahead of where we are now.
I would call any new business a startup, but call the VC-driven, exponential-growth-seeking model "growth startup".

I think you make a great point, but out of curiosity, what do you suggest are the best avenues for funding a tech business in the more traditional revenue-driven-growth model, if you're not bringing enough seed capital to get off the ground on your own? It seems like what's missing is an accessible happy medium.
So if "startup" is off-limits, what should we call (and how will we fund) the mid-growth/mid-risk businesses that are too risky for a sane person to take personal liability (which banks tend to require) but aim for 15-50% growth per year as opposed to 5% per week (which is 12.6x annual growth-- impossible without what would be, excluding extreme resources, degenerate gambling).

We say in this country that getting rich slowly is the virtue and that get-rich-quick is the scam. Yet VC is obsessed with the latter.

I have some ideas on how to finance this currently underexplored (and underfunded) class of businesses: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... . But I have no power, so don't count on me to fix the problem.
He lived a long, great life and left a wonderful legacy behind and for that I thank him. Goodbye Richard, you will be appreciated more than you will be missed, a rare feat.
Nextphotos - Creative presentation of photos from around the world for you
Mission Nextphotos is an independent online publication dedicated to the discovery and presentation of image worldwide.
The relativistic correction is

Time_on_Ship = Time_on_Earth * (1 - (v/c)^2)^(1/2)

If v <<c we can use the Taylor approximation

Time_on_Ship =~ Time_on_Earth * (1 - (1/2) (v/c)^2)

Distributing

Time_on_Ship =~ Time_on_Earth - Time_on_Earth (1/2) (v/c)^2

With the current number, assuming instant acceleration to simplify the calculations:

Time_on_Earth = (22/.1)

Time difference =~ (22/.1) (1/2) * .1^2 years = 1.10 years

The important detail is that for small speeds, the correction is quadratic, so the difference is small unless the speed is very close to c. In this case the correction is only 0.5%.
That reminds me of a story of someone (I think it was one of the Cambridge Spies) joining MI6 and being faced with a complete shambles of an organisation - they assumed that, given MI6's reputation for deviousness that this was just a front and that once they had been there a while they would be introduced to the real MI6. Of course, that day never came...
> pulsing red

Yeah that's great when I'm trying to focus on an article I'm reading. This is why security people aren't allowed to touch UI.

All joking aside, I agree that this issue should be surfaced, and I think people would notice the security icon if it was in constant flux.
I've been going through the Rails 4.0 beta book over the past week or two. I'm just over 50% of the way through and have done all the optional exercises too. So far, I've not found a single problem.
"Flat UI was super hot months before Apple has used it and that’s rarely happened before."

One problem is Apple's yearly release schedule. This allows other companies to innovate while Apple is still waiting months for their next scheduled release.
That's unfortunate because, of all the Rails books I've purchased through the years, yours and Hartl's are the best for my particular learning style. Doubt it's just me...
Show HN: Filmstant beautifully displays movies out now.
Hi, Lua Missions author here!

Thanks for the kind words. One word of warning though: I never got around to make one mission about coroutines.

But I accept pull requests :)
I totally agree, this is hopefully going to be a platform where arcade multiplayer can shine, and I'm looking forward to all the indie games in this area.

Especially 0space, that game is amazing. Samurai Gunn, from the same developer is also very good. Although I haven't heard any rumours of Ouya, I think Gunn is now being ported for Vita (and possibly PS3/4 I suppose)
I've had my public key available on my website for years. Nobody uses it. The problem is social: people are not in the habit of using encryption and only the technically adept have any idea how. Even my correspondents who know how to use gpg don't bother.
Clojure is the first purely functional language I've ever tried to teach myself. I'm still learning, but I already find it a liberating experience to stop worrying about state and learn to love the function.
But that is backwards for this case. They are trying for "perfection" by writing a mobile app so it looks just so and the ui is just the way they want it, when "good enough" would be a simple web site that took a couple hours to make and have online.
Too Many Passwords, One Startup Looks To Solve The Problem
Which is why a website makes far more sense. You could do it for a couple hundred bucks.
Depends on the size of your Gemfile. There will inevitably be gems that have unpatched Rails 4 bugs.
"So, regardless of whether you think it's OK for the NSA to spy on everyone, this push did break down Al Quaida's organization."

OK, so why are we continuing it? We broke Al Qaeda, we killed their leaders. We got revenge for the September 11th attacks.

To put it another way, who is our enemy now?
New scheme for quantum computing
Good things rarely come from making radical changes at the last minute.

If you see any failures in the days after upgrading you have a new variable to consider on the cause.

Look at what the best/worst outcomes are from making the change - does the risk justify the benefit?

Would I do it? yes probably, I can't sleep if I'm on a 3 when I know there is a 4 around.
I can relate to the phenomenon you describe (people who can't, for example, decide if they are Libertarian or not). But some populations have worked out a complete, internally consistent alternate reality. Talk radio and Glenn Beck, for example, do not contradict themselves very much.

The jack-booted thugs are "the government", the ones being ordered around by Godless Communist Obama; they are taking away our guns while intentionally giving guns to Mexican gangsters and black panthers, using the IRS, preparing the Peace Corps as a Marxist militia and sending drones to kill Americans just for opposing him. No incompetence, just pure and concentrated tyranny and malice intentionally resulting in the apocalypse, because Obama and his supporters literally hate America and are literally violating the rights of Real Americans and literally preparing to exterminate them.

The ones who should get funded are types who will support us, particularly right-wing groups like Oath Keepers and militias, who won't comply with the Obama agenda and will help us defend ourselves from Obama's tyranny and restore the glory of America as a Christian state, as the founders intended. This isn't "the government," but rather "the people."

Obama and his supporters are winning right now by treachery (a brainy kind of competence) and support from archvillain "elites" like George Soros and almost every college professor, but in the long term they are corrupt and weak; the strength and purity and common sense of Real Americans will win and the cancer will be purged.

It's a complete picture.
Is this correct? Wouldn't they still need all of the leaf private keys to decrypt things?

My understanding was that having a CA's private key just enables someone to issue new child keys for that CA. That vulnerability could be addressed with certificate pinning.
Paper http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/15/6/063014/
Steve Jobs, le film, la bande annonce française.
What technical organization could you name which didn't have those two aspects?

What about Facebook? I think we could all name things they do which are brilliant, and things that are... not so much. How much worse would it be without the market to discipline them, with official secrecy to cover their every mistake, and limited to the pool of engineers who can pass a security screening?

The picture I get of the NSA is that the poles are just more extreme. Large scale architecture is done by someone like Binney, and then there are thousands who are like Snowden, with marginal academic credentials.
Or doing something outside the box. Some people used static variables. How about looking at the call stack.
If f() is invoked by f() do one thing, if you aren't do something else.
The NSA isn't focused exclusively on terrorism. It has ~40k employees who work on a wide range of areas, drug cartels, human trafficking, money laundering, counter intelligence, espionage, and hundreds of others. It's mighty presumptuous for people not "in the know" to speak on what is and isn't valuable to the NSA's missions.

As for terrorists, if someone were a skilled terrorist their entire life, they probably wouldn't live digital traces within the US. But this isn't the case; people become terrorists, and some of those become skilled terrorists. There is immense value in having intelligence on people before they become a terrorist and needless to say, before they hone their tradecraft and drop from the grid.
yeah but that kind of defeats the purpose, doesnt it ? I can do the same with my android phone, hook it up to the TV via Hdmi (or wireless via Miracast) and basically have the Ouya experience. All thats different is their dashboard software which also happens to be not very good.
XFCE, LXDE and Gnome-Shell running atop Mir
‘Snowden’ is an AI
I've had a GPG key of some sort since 2001-09-05, in active use essentially throughout (though for signing, not encryption).

Someday I'll even meet someone real in person and be able to get it signed!
That's a nice article to read. Happy to see this as a conclusion:

“They are trying to shift attention away from what the U.S. government has done onto what the people who have reported it have done.”

Seriously. It would be like if someone trespassing on OJ Simpson's property caught video of OJ harming people with a knife and then the public focusing on how terrible of a person the trespasser is, ignoring the fact that it's incredible video evidence of a much more serious crime. Further, it would be as though the trespasser only trespassed in the first place because he heard loud screams from the property.

In other words, Snowden's a whistleblower, but I think the media and gov't have succeeded in ruining the term 'whistleblower'. Whistleblowers almost by definition have to violate certain laws, but our protection laws were supposed to make that ok. It's highly complex and more so for people in intelligence whistleblowing on intelligence matters. That's why Snowden's also a hero.
JS Pride
> I really love my co-founder. It’s an enduring bromance that will last a lifetime. He’s a talented designer, supportive listener and I trust him entirely. However, he left me alone in the cold. He didn’t mean to do this, he didn’t even realize he did. I became the guy who would “do-it-all”. Biz Dev, check. Product Management, check. Support, check. Accounting, check. PR, check. Ad Copy, check. Development Lead, check. While he took complete ownership over design (and really excelling at it).

Communicate. communicate! Cofounder relationship is like any other and communication matters. a lot. You will get tired, feel low and discouraged. you'll have to share it and let one person know who has an outside chance of understanding it and help you out if possible. your co-founder(s).
Show HN: Later.js - the simplest way to work with recurring schedules
An Xbox 360 controller is $49.99 (without reductions) [0]. And I'm sure the price will come down over time. The trouble is I think when the console is only twice the price of the controller. So perhaps what your saying is the console is too cheap? :)

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Wireless-Controller-Glossy-Bl...
You're combatting an argument that the people supporting surveillance aren't making.

They don't care that the program hadn't been dismantled as a result of Snowden's actions. Their reaction is out of principle, and it's actually very reasonable and consistent with their side.

If surveillance is a good thing and they are right for supporting it, they are also right in being opposed to Snowden because he can potentially dismantle the program or discredit it. He can weaken public perception of the government. He literally prompted the whole NSA conversation. He is a lightning rod spearheading all public discussion of this topic.

Saying people shouldn't demonize him is like saying you shouldn't demonize a presidential candidate before he's had a chance to impact you in office. Sure, okay, but that's not how human beings operate.
> Key sizes are big enough that the laws of physics prevent you from brute-forcing them

A lot of it still boils down to password guessing. The limitation is in the user's choice of password, not the laws of physics.

Given the techniques listed here http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-mi... (e.g. generating password guesses with Markov chains) suprisingly long and un-obvious passwords are found without brute-forcing the whole space. In other words, you have to pay attention to a whole lot of lateral things to actually be secure. The mathematical properties of the key-space don't matter if your OS has been backdoored and a keystroke logger installed.
Here’s everything we’ve learned about how the NSA’s secret programs work
Thanks to all the committers and releasers involved. The countdown to Rails 5 has begun :D
Show HN: A library for making SSL use easier in Java
Some people might find this useful.
Thank you so much for your response, it's greatly appreciated!

With regards to ownership in the company, it was my understanding that it just had to be below 50%, or it could even be over as long as the company had the authority to hire/fire the individual on the H1B

Reference: http://danashultz.com/blog/2011/05/06/can-i-get-an-h-1b-visa...

Additionally, if you could provide any input as to how much cash is needed to co-sponsor an H1B (relative to future implied contracts, expected future cash flow, etc) would be greatly appreciated
I've used Rails 4 in Action. It's in beta right now and definitely has a few problems. However, I believe Steve Klabnik has recently taken over updating the book, so hopefully things will start to come together soon.
ArchiveTeam strikes again - Xanga
Level 3 Intro - Create a branch, checkout, commit, checkout master, commit, merge. It says it can be done in five commands and I'm doing it in six (following the above steps very closely). What am I missing?
I agree he shouldn't generalize in principle, but as an American I complete agree with everything he said. We are somewhat conditioned to binarize information by a two party system.
Yet every bootstrapped company would grow faster if it took (the right kind of) VC money.

(For the record... I'm happily bootstrapping my startup which is a startup as far as I'm concerned. I'd call startups that rely on VC funding "VC startups.")
This is an awesome achievement.

There are so many improvements to this version that are not immediately visible, but which are maturing Rails in tremendous ways. I think it compares with the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). Especially in the perception on different types of users (experts to consumers).

On a different note, moving from 3.2 can best be done one gem at the time. For instance, implement strong parameters and you're one step closer to Rails 4.
https://github.com/rails/strong_parameters
> In security you can only be as strong as your weakest link, and when dealing with a global organization you will surely have weak links.

This is the point that this, bandwagon, article misses completely. They may be judging right, the smart criminals (or terrorists) understand tradecraft and how to avoid using obvious means of detection. However there are always many more low level folks that wil slip up due to lack of competence and lack of experience. When this happens we (non-terrorists) are able to establish a foothold at some, any, level of the organization and start to pick it apart.
I've always found these kind of websites to be too distracting so I made this. Hopefully someone else finds this useful. I'd love any feedback on bugs, improvements, etc.
Some people might find this useful.
Please help us save poddery.com, community run diaspora pod
If a Lisp-like was ever going to explode, it would have done so within the last 55 years.
The murder of Steven Lawrence was a huge thing in the UK. It has continued to be important.

The recent revelations are awful.

I guess this shows why I'm not bothered by GCHQ slurping my data - nothing happens to me as a result of it. But undercover police officers have demonstrated repeated failures.

Tracking the family of an innocent victim of a racist murder to discredit that victim is disgusting behaviour.

In theory their behaviour is governed by RIPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...).
This is very true. There are obviously a whole a range of potential causes of a referral. I just find the use of 'largest law firm' a bit ambiguous and unnecessary in light of the potential CoI issue. 'Network of firms' or something similar would be better.
dont lose hope

talk to your potential customers and competitors , your IP can be complimentary to someone or if your team is good you can get acquihired for sure
Most Americans think Snowden should be charged
I've always found that when large organizations start a large project or begin a radical shift (like pre- to post-9/11 NSA's surveillance program), the goal is every bit as competent and well thought out as any could be, but the implementation is always rushed and rickety.

That's probably what we have here. A very sophisticated surveillance program that siphons data from all the major networks, that also misses 99% of the communications it was designed to catch because that last 20% of implementation isn't worth the expenditure.
Given the amount of planning Snowden put into this, and that he only had 4 weeks at Booz Allen, the timetable for having a revelation that he wanted to become a whistleblower is almost implausibly compressed. It seems very plausible that he knew what he wanted to do before he took the job.
This is pretty crap, actually. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_c...

You couldn't even increment every position of a 256-bit key using the energy our Sun could provide, let alone brute force 256-bit AES.
Neat idea. I understand your domain is what it is, but you would be better served in the top left to put "Someday I want to..." since all of the tiles are fill in the blanks for that phrase.
> Depends on the size of your Gemfile.

Really, it's not large. The things I'm most worried about are

gem 'carrierwave'
gem 'jquery-fileupload-rails'
gem 'jquery-datatables-rails'
gem 'jquery-ui-rails'

All of those 1. I don't understand their guts too well, and 2. if they fail then our target audience will hate us and hunt us down with pitchforks.