skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recent events raised never ending question of "could the government place a backdoor in DES/AES/SHA/etc.?"

My personal perception (based on available evidence) is that government crypto is as strong as possible, but is weakened where needed via policies. A decade ago during crypto export limitation, there were no backdoors, but a policy: you may export only keys that long [so we can bruteforce them cheaper].

Another example: SSL is technically secure, but its biggest weakness is trust in a limited list of certificate authorities (CAs) like VeriSign. Then, there is policy that certificate authorities should give up their private keys when FBI/CIA asks for them.

Another example: you may encrypt your files, but must give away your password to a court.

Also, it makes sense economically. Government people need strong crypto like everyone else and the best way to test and verify it is by opening it up and deploying as widely as possible. So mistakes are noticed sooner than later. Then, people with guns will make sure you give up your secrets when they need you to.

I believe crypto systems are alright. It is policies and violent coercion we should be afraid of.
>>"At it's heart, web design should be about words."

>No.

There's some strange dissonance going on in my head reading this on a site with practically no images at all.

Once images went inline, the web's focus moved from content to presentation, much to its detriment (in my humble opinion). We progressively became more at the mercy of the page designer rather than the copy editor.
[Face-palm]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Room!_Make_Room!

It's actually not named after the movie, it's named after the artificial food that appears in Harry Harrison's book "Make Room! Make Room!" (the movie is extremely loosely based on the book). Steaks manufactured from soy bean and lentil are called [in the book] Soylent.

Soy bean and lentil, not people.
People still choose to write desktop apps in Java, Python, C# and others despite the existence of C++. Most types of apps do not need the optimizations asm.js allows. Hand-written JavaScript will continue to get faster.
Honest question: what is the advantage of Git over something like Dropbox or remote centralized storage accessed via ssh? The only possible answer I can think of is you get a revision history, but this doesn't seem terribly useful.

If you could provide a use case to demonstrate how Git+latex is a winner, I'd genuinely appreciate it!

Edit: As soon as I submitted this it occurred to me that for collaborative editing Git is the obvious choice.
Well also the fact that they shrunk the key size of DES from 128 bits to 54 bits while DES has a 64 bit block size.
I think most of them have been independently tested and vetted as well, and I would expect that the crypto community [read: people smarter than me] will do the same for SIMON and SPECK
I wonder if GitHub are planning to add LaTeX files compilation any time soon. It would be amazing to be able to see diffs on a generated output rather than source code.
If history is any indication, mass unemployment is exactly what will need to happen. Arguably it is already happening in Europe, where a significant portion of the population have no competitive advantage that meets the minimum wage in a massive free market like the EU.

I do hope that certain countries, such as Canada or Germany, will take a preventative approach rather than wait till the malignancy of unemployment metastasizes, causing unnecessary and irreversible harm to the fabric of society.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I generally don't look at people's usernames. When I do its usually only to see if it matches the name of the submitter.

Do people really judge here based HN micro-celebrity-ness?
I was thinking more along the lines of government waste and inefficiency, having some crappy document management system that can only serve PDF's, even for 404's.
It definitely is, but with any service the people you're following makes a huge difference.
Well that's a particular type of trap. To be honest, I wouldn't want to be a programmer or sysadmin at the NSA right now. They're going to "punish" all the remaining employees because of Snowden's actions.
I personally never found the freelance sites all that useful. Not saying people haven't done well, but I never liked them because it always seemed like a race to the lowest cost over value.

For us it has been all about networking and meeting people as while we are building our own products we are paying the bills by also building other peoples. Of course, the advantage is that gives you a foot in the door so you can hopefully sell your own product either to them or someone they know too.

You say full stack dev, what technologies specifically?
Exactly, and I was just starting to think that I heard everything that could be said on asm.js. Very well written.
I can't speak for the gravy train, but I did find a problem with this:

>I don't have a mac so I can't really make anything

Why can't you make apps for Android? Or Windows Phone?
I've switched to the highest contrast theme I could find. Third time's the charm... (I hope)
Hasan-Dan-Sabah's assassins were crazy: there was instances of them lying undercover for literally decades before their kill.

Interesting the '53 date too for the CIA as they intervened in Persia against Mossaddegh (but preferred to let angry local mobs do the assassinations rather than this James Bond shit...)
This dead zone is, in large measure, the result of US agriculture and ethanol subsidies, which encourage expanded and more intensive production than would otherwise exist.
I think the comment I was actually responding to here got deleted; it suggested that you shouldn't download PDFs from the NSA at all.
Now it appears Google is one of those almost all companies.
This looks like a job for a sourcemap: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...
I think it's pretty good looking myself... just that it would be better with desktop class parts, and sold as a mid-range option (between the mini and pro). As it stands, as a new pro, I think it's a failure. I'm with you on the hackintosh route.
Free translation service for .po files at Google
Images can be perceived and a narrative constructed regardless of language, but this may not be the same narrative the creator intended, in which case, nothing was communicated.
Glad to know I'm not alone. I live in a "wimbledon lawn" neighborhood in the NE US. Along with that comes vast caravans of clanking landscaping vehicles, a near constant drone of lawnmowers, leaf blowers, weed whackers, etc., and tiny yellow flags stuck into lawns with X marks covering pictograms of children and dogs.

The kicker: it's a lake community, where you're supposed to be able to swim and fish, and for the past two years the lake has been declared a biohazard* by late summer. Every month or so they treat the lake with some chemical cocktail that renders it "dangerous for swimming" for a week in an effort to fight the algae blooms.

Truly insane...I have to get out of here. And of course I'm an outcast for keeping my lawn all-natural. I do succumb to keeping it mowed so I'm not driven out of the neighborhood.

* blue-green algae if I remember correctly.
How do you expect DOM to be accessed from C++? Do you think it is possible to make an asm.js -> C++ code map for debugging? Or in worse case asm.js -> C++ (somehow) -> Scala debugging?
I sold 50 or so of my books through Amazon when I moved. I usually got a great price through the trade-in program, which is nice because you get paid as soon as they receive the book from you, but if I didn't think the trade-in price was high enough, I just sold it through the Amazon seller program. This is a service where you ship your books to them, name the price you're willing to sell each one for, they warehouse them for you, and when someone buys one they ship it out and cut you a check. Pretty great.
Lately I've been doing mostly Rails, JS, CSS, CoffeeScript, and Ruby stuff. I do have experience w/ PHP though
Color correction can't hurt either.
Right - the incentive needs to be consistent with the platform; this is why you bring a dinner host a bottle of wine instead of the equivalent amount of cash.
I'd really like to know how basic income is supposed to work to boost creation. In fact we have something that supports people that proved their basic level of knowledge and creativity. It is called grants. And may be R&D tax incentives.

But basic income for everyone to me now looks like casting the net that is two wide. Many people will just stop working and will sit in front of the TV with pizza.

Is there any research on how different forms of incentives, like tax breaks, grants, basic income affect (or may affect) the rate of innovation? To me that sounds like something worth of Nobel prize in economics if successful.
The graphs are really small.

I'm using Chromium on Linux Mint.
No one knows but the NSA may have a budget of twice that.

"Gordon Adams, a former White House budget official for national security, said he wouldn't be surprised if NSA's resources are "well north" of $20 billion a year." http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-surveillanc...
These Maps Prove That Rich People Love iPhones
Summary: the article claims that words are what makes the web what it is and that instead of being an after-thought in design they should be at the fore of web design. That words alone can convey a powerful [enough] message and so, it is intimated, minimal design is sufficient.

His blog, e.g. http://justinjackson.ca/the-principle-that-changed-my-life/, seems to follow pretty mainstream design ideas.
I think the most important difference is conflict resolution. If you modify a file on DropBox and save it while someone else still has it opened, you're going to end up with two files, one named youFileName (conflicted copy of someone 06/20/13).tex and the original. Not only does Git allow you to see and fix the conflicts when you merge, it does it automatically most of the time, which is a huge advantage.
I agree with a lot of the things he said, but it would be nice to see some evidence rather than just taking his word for it. A lot of that sounds like it came straight out of a sci-fi book.
I like the idea of more VPN providers coming online. One thing that may be helpful is to differentiate yourselves from the other VPN providers. For example, I have a VPN provider. Should I switch to cryptoseal.com?
I felt that Justin was making the point the web is about words which I strongly disagree with. The words are a means, an important one and arguably the most important one, to an end.

Words are not what the web is about in the same way paint isn't what art is about.
I think if you're targeting companies for a data storage solution, you probably want to rather sell it in a way that the company has physical control of the data - it would be a much easier sell that way.

Something like Github enterprise?
I didn't say "take him to court", I said "consult a lawyer".

Any advice you get from HN is just as likely to get you in a heap of trouble as it is to work. If the time comes to enter a courtroom then obviously you will need representation, but the primary value of a lawyer is in the advice and experience you receive before even considering setting foot in court.
"Should" does not imply "wants to."

I could switch to COBOL in probably a couple weeks, but you'd have to pay me multiples of my current salary to do so for any length of time.
I'm saying that the form factor would be better suited as a mid-range product with more consumer class hardware inside. As it stands, I don't think it will do very well.
Existing model of financing long-term game-changing next-big-thing companies via equity dilution with angel/venture financing is less optimal from the founders' perspective than pursuing another feature start-up.

More risk, less equity, success is uncertain, reward far away in the future - why bother with making world better?

My 2 cents :-)

P.S.: a better model might be if the founder pursuing next-big-thing commits to certain ROI for investors (2-3-5 times on capital), thus increasing this founder's potential upside and motivation to go the hard way. Critique and suggestions are welcome.
Won't C/C++ developers choose to just write inline assembly since it can be faster? Sure, but that's doing things the hard way.
> what is the advantage of Git over something like Dropbox

Merging. People can work on the manuscript at the same time, and as long as they edited non-overlapping regions, git will merge both contributions silently and painlessly.

Editing a word processor document stored in a shared Dropbox folder, I guess you'd need to inspect both new versions and do the merge manually?
Congrats guys, that's a lot of cash!
As an engineering manager I have struggled many times trying to convey the real cost of these 'cant you just do this...' type of things. This article makes a clear case in a structured way.

I haven't run into many product manager that would understand the cost management exposed here. Most product development company I have been at avoid discussion/debates around the real cost of some of the development.

I'm not sure whether it's the lack of understanding, or simply the lack of interest for long term impacts sometime outlived by exit strategies.
Firebase tried it so hard. Had opensource competitors and they still succeeded. Let this be a lesson to everyone else.

To a firebase hater, I know someone indirectly, whose product you bought and silenced. No good move, sir.
Nope ... just compiled because it uses AMD. That is a modular JavaScript format that resolves dependency management. Source is also JS, just not minified.
I'll try:
Git repo can be forked, cloned and you can get to keep a local copy of whatever branches you prefer. Managing different versions from different authors while having an "offical" repo with dropbox seems harder to manage with dropbox than with git to me.

edit: just saw your edit :)
> if we standardize a subset of JavaScript that browsers can execute quicker, won't it cause a decline in the use of fully-featured, human-written JavaScript?

Sadly, no. Browsers have an eternal backward compatibility requirement with existing sites, so JavaScript as a directly written language seems unlikely to ever die.

On the bright side, efforts like this make it increasingly feasible to write code in languages that don't have to deal with a dozen quirky runtime implementations. Even if you prefer JavaScript, you might soon be able to use a translator that emulates a single consistent fully-featured implementation of the latest ECMA spec on top of whatever crazy substrate the browser provides.
And all the "unimaginative" folks would be the serfs, paying for the "imaginative".

No thanks.

If you notice the pattern of innovation, its usually not driven by a bunch of dreamers trying to think of the next big idea. Its driven by people trying to solve a very specific problem and finding a solution that is more generally applicable.

The electronic telegraph was created as an electronic method of replacing the old optical telegraph systems.

The cathode ray tube was discovered in order to observe the waveform electricity for physicists.

The solid-state transistor was discovered at Bell Labs as a replacement for the vacuum tube amplifier.

UNIX was created at Bell Labs as a programming environment to create programs to drive the telephone exchange.

Follow the chain of innovation and this pattern appears over and over. Solve a specific problem, find a general solution.
Why would there be any asymetry of legal fees depending on company size?

Suing a small entity would take exactly as much lawyers on both sides as suing a huge entity. If you're fighting Bigcorp and they're somehow justifying $10million of lawyers for the case, and you feel that you're right, then you'll be justified in bringing $10million of lawyers on your side, paid in full by them.
You are already able to do this; simply disable stylesheets or as you said use a reader app. We've already discussed using technology like adblocker.

Your issue therefore is not with the design but rather with the browser. There is nothing preventing you from using a text-based browser or even writing your own.

I do not know if you are a developer, designer, or something else, but you must realize that minimalism is itself a "design sensibility" as you term it.
Varnish Cache 3.0.4 Released
I'm hoping this will help justify limiting purchases of the F-35 and replacing it sooner with cheaper, more expendable, but roughly equally effective UCAVs and better missiles.
Actually, the law is somewhat about who is right. If he has a trademark for name that covers your space and you use the exact same name, then (IANAL) it sounds like he's correct. But you should spend some time and money to consult a lawyer. My guess is they would tell you that you don't have a case.
The Second Battle Of Thermopylae
Centered text, large white borders, and larger than standard font size are all design. Minimal design, but it does feel very different if you look at it completely unstyled:

http://i.imgur.com/xOWPr8E.png

I feel like it subverts the message a bit that he still felt the need to style things.
Merging? If you have 2 dozen authors collaborating, there's bound to be people working on the same files.
"Albert was the only investor we pitched who immediately made a Firebase app"

Now that's kind of cool for a VC!
This should be all set now. Thanks for letting me know about the issue. You've made this post more readable for millions of nostaglia-starved programmers across the globe!
Well, being limited to a 256gb mSATA SSD might hold it back a little. It's not the hardware I have issue with so much as the form factor... I think the form factor screams low-mid range, and not upgradable. I think the form factor would be great with mid-range consumer hardware, a Core i7 and two consumer class GPUs.
They are just thumbnails. If you open them in another tab you'll see they aren't being dynamically resized or anything
A few points as an outsider about how asm.js could be considered a new VM:

- PNaCl is different from a true "plugin technology" by being built into the browser, open, etc. Although browser vendors are not likely to stop competing on JavaScript speed, in a world where PNaCl is the "correct way" to run C/C++ code, C/C++ compiled to JavaScript will become far less important to optimize compared to hand-written, dynamic JavaScript: although of course there is overlap, the priorities are fairly different.

- For optimum performance, some sort of ahead-of-time compilation is absolutely required. Although a "sufficiently smart compiler" might include ahead-of-time compilation for functions whose types are statically known or speculative specialized compilation in general, I do not think any JS engine currently does that or will do that soon, so in practice you're talking about a separate code path for asm.js. Not even close to the size of something like NaCl, but there.

- Similarly, I have heard claims that a custom parser provides a significant speedup, and it's listed as a future project for OdinMonkey. This is probably only a tiny bit of code, but it also requires an explicit commitment to asm.js.

- 50% C speed is not enough - I think everyone would like this to approach 100%. Although I don't think OdinMonkey currently does this, there would probably be a speedup by using virtual memory tricks - either reserving 4GB of address space for the heap to avoid having to explicitly check the validity of an array index, or doing something similar to NaCl, plus possibly even trying to detect and convert pointer-like integer arguments to real pointers. I think this is a good thing and should happen, but it very much falls into the territory of custom asm.js VM.

- You might also get a performance increase by just replacing the optimizing compiler wholesale with LLVM? I don't know if this would actually yield a significant improvement, because a lot of the advanced optimizations would have already happened at an IR level in emscripten, and I suppose browser makers would be likely to incorporate whatever improvements into their JS engines rather than actually adopting LLVM, but I'm not sure I'd rule it completely out...

- Some proposed JavaScript features are really mostly useful only for asm.js: multi-threaded access to ArrayBuffers plus locks (and there's no way asm.js can be competitive without that); function futures; GC hooks for JVM->asm.js.

- And some that, while generally useful in some cases, feel aimed towards asm.js: BinaryData, value objects, SIMD (ala Dart, not Intel's high level stuff).
Yeah I agree. I don't think that's what he was saying though.

I think he was pretty clear that the words are a tool (i.e., a means to an end). I think he said webdesign should be about words (i.e., don't get wrapped up in frilly widgets and shinny buttons over the content of your communications), not that the web itself is about words.
The first comment on that page sort of made me face palm... but then it got me thinking.

"Simplicity of usage should always win over simplicity of coding. The purpose of a product is to solve the end user's pain, no one should give a dime about the engineer's problem. IMHO that was the genius of Steve Jobs, he could take any pre-exiting product and increase its complexity by 50x while simplifying its usage by 10x."

I am relatively new to coding, and really, I want to know what do you guys think about this? Does this really scale? Does simplifying the front end often compromise the backend?
To be completely truthful, they compared binary dumps of hand-assembled, and machine-assembled software, to ensure that everything was exactly the same. But yes, they hand-assembled some weird instruction set. I can't recall asking if they assembled to ASCII hexadecimal word (24-bit) representations, or to something else.

I believe this was for "Commerical Titan", a short-lived, Titan 34D variant. Four flights, one of which left Intelsat VI in the wrong orbit. That wasn't software, but plugging the wrong cable in.
Tons of reasons, actually. Just have a look at URL shorteners... http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam#Dead_or_B...
> I just installed DD-WRT on my router to use OpenVPN client on the router, the bandwidth speed drops to a level that makes the setup totally useless.

A fair amount of that has to do with how little CPU is available on your router device, I suspect no manufacturer will support a device that can do a lot of crypto and still be in the consumer price range.

That said, I could ship you a device right now that'll do 100Mbps of encrypted traffic all day long, but it doesn't have wifi and its about $500...
This Is What Creepy Tech PR Looks Like
Google admits its famous job interview questions were a ‘complete waste of time’
Centralizing my social media is making me think about what I post
We've had a few teams internally give this a try and found it quite good. Its a much better tool than a wiki which we've found stagnates or email which is often a pain to search.
A lot of this is heading off complexity at the beginning. Every new feature should come with "Do we really understand why we're doing this?" It's ok to experiment, but prune prune prune....
Maybe all the ADA programmers retired.
Paint Shop or Corel Draw are much cheaper. If you still need commercial softare.
Grab a notebook or keep your phone handy. Write down some inefficient or problem you are faced with or observed.

OR....

Partner with an "idea" guy and steal... borrow? s/he ideas :) ha! - But seriously, there are a TON of real problems that just need a better technical solution. - Go attend a conference or meetup that you would never think about - Nontechnical - e.g. education/teachers or a space your interested in working in - city council meetings.

Just a thought - good luck!
I feel that words are the best way to communicate because words are born purely out of us; they are literally our thoughts in physical form. Videos, music, pictures, are all representations of physical things in the world around us; words are representations of the worlds inside us.