skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: UX/UI people for open source privacy projects
Tl;DR - Please use your UX/UI skill to make open source crypto, privacy and anonimity software usable for the masses! Contact me: jurre [monkeytail] useotrproject [dot] org

Dear Hacker News,

We all have heard the story about PRISM by now. Some of you don't want to hear the story and want to focus on creating, doing what you are good at, I can't blame you for that. Meanwhile, we can't simply ignore the story and carry on as if nothing happend.

Many of you are great designers and spend day and night working on little details to create that perfect interface and user experience for your soon to be launched adventure.

I would like to ask your experience, knowledge and time, to create usable software so we can finally email encrypted with our family and friends.
Is it really a good idea to put your email on a device like a Pi?
LSD probably did not assist Francis Crick in discovering the double helix. Although LSD was available in 1953, it wasn't widely known or used until the 60s, and there's no evidence Crick would have had access to it (see the excerpt from Matt Ridley's book at http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6835/was-francis...). This story seems to have originated with a Mail article published after Crick's death (http://www.miqel.com/entheogens/francis_crick_dna_lsd.html), and AFAIK has never been verified. While other evidence suggests that Crick experimented with LSD later in his life, he probably did not discover the double helix under its influence.

OTOH, Kary Mullis explicitly attributes PCR to his LSD use. I'd ordinarily believe the primary source over uninformed speculation, but Mullis is also an AIDS and climate change denialist who claims he once spoke to a glowing green raccoon, so he is probably not the most reliable source either.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Can't Tell You About NSA Abuses
Likewise - just lost my entire weekend to it. I think I finished it - but the ending isn't completely clear on the topic.
Let's see if someone in Physics StackExchange could answer this:

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69649/thermodynam...
I'm not fickle - I started having doubts on December 24, 2009 when they shut down the website to beg for money. I started wondering if their goal was money for the founder or leaking things.

My doubts grew larger on September 25, 2010 when Daniel Domscheit-Berg aired his complaints.

And dislike was finalized on October 22, 2010 - not because of what they released, but because they shut down the archive.

It turned from WikiLeaks to AssangeLeaks after that. Instead of releasing anything, they released only what Assange wanted to release.

They have done nothing since to regain the name "wiki". Assange has made himself into the story.
Generally the candidate picks their best language. Personally, I would never pick C because there is too much minutiae and not enough meat.
>which means that there was effectively no relationship at all.

This is in large part because Nutt's research is entirely fraudulent. C.f. my previous analysis here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044431
Yet by the very nature of a secret agency you will never know what safeguards they have or how effective they are. Plus there are a lot of really really smart people likely working there who know exactly how everything works. Aldrich Ames took advantage of his position and knowledge to out CIA spies for years.
You can! I did the same thing.

If you turn on the remote web inspector (in Settings it's under Safari > Advanced), and then open Safari on a Mac,
you can copy the game's save state (localStorage.gameState) to an instance of the game running on your computer.
Another way of looking at this:

When I'm interviewing someone, I want to get a sense of how they work through a problem and think about things. That sounds difficult right? It is, and your cooperation is appreciated. By saying you heard everything you gave the interviewer nothing. I guess you expected him to be a perfect authority figure and have an infinite vault of questions to throw at you.

Next time, try walking through one of the problems, explaining all the parts you find interesting, and bullshitting about what context it would be useful in. Try to relate to the problem and the interviewing process, and how it might fit in the job. You can be honest and joke about it if it doesn't fit. Remember, this isn't school and your interviewer is a coworker, not a professor with a hundred tests to grade.

Try and figure out how much he knows about the problem he just asked you.. and I bet 80% of the time the interview will go well if you show them something they're missing, or take them to the limits of their knowledge and show them something new or creative. People's egos tend to get in the way when you assume they will. Assume the best about 'em. Remember, the interviewer isn't a faceless part of The Machine out to dismiss you, but a potential coworker and friend that'll probably be happy learning something new with someone who can broaden their horizons.
Exactly.

The only thing that bothers me about stigmatization and legalization is the 40+ year old crowd that feel marijuana should not be legal.
> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any particular issues? It's totally okay to be an atheist today, but we need just one extra little step to be anarchists and it's so, so, so complicated. While belief in a magical all-powerful and caring government is no different than a belief in deity.

People "believe in" government not because they love it or think it is perfect, they do it because they believe the alternative is something like the Hobbsian state of nature. Given the way anarchists tend to describe an end goal that either looks like government by a different name (boring!) or something completely out of keeping with human nature, people won't "realize" what you want them to anytime soon.

Or maybe they will! Write a good, convincing anarchist manifesto. When it doesn't convince anybody, talk yourself into believing it's humanity that is flawed, not your manifesto.
I love PostgreSQL but many of the tools for it are nowhere near the same level of quality as PostgreSQL itself. Many of the past start-ups have used MySQL and whilst the base may not be as good the tooling on top makes their replication setups far simpler.

I've given up on using an explicit load balancer (pgpool scales badly and is temperamental as you write). The application itself now handles load balancing, swapping out database connectors depending on whether it requires writes / no-lag reads.

The current replicated PostgreSQL setup I have uses WAL-E for continuous archiving / backup (it recently got support for non-US-East S3 buckets[1]) and repmgr for replication management (hasn't seen a release in a year and the documentation is somewhat sparse). Don't get me wrong, I like and respect both projects, but I have less confidence in and more complications from them than PostgreSQL.

[1]: https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e/pull/3
Be sure to make a direct reference to the boys listening at some point in each call so that they can feel good that they're not being ignored. Remember, one of the most important aspects of networking is about establishing a warm relationship.

Right, boys?
I agree with Danny it is a sad sendoff for what was such a transformative technology. DEC never did understand open anything, and the Internet was always more of threat to them than a way to move forward.
AFAIK we have laws against this kind of food in EU, but the free trade agreement will give us e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Dell and other products without having to pay a high fee every time it goes through customs. Same goes for European products being sold in the US. It is expected to lead to BNP growth of around 1% in the EU region.
> Well, much of our current conception of "right to privacy" was invented by the Supreme Court

The court doesn't invent rights. Rights are not listed, enumerated, ordered, or limited. It says so right in the part of the US federal constitution that was feared could be mistaken for a list of rights.
Also interesting is that Milton Friedman considered his role in ending the draft his proudest achievement.

Friedman had no qualms about describing himself as a libertarian and not a conservative, and his influence in the Reagan administration was considerable, even outside of economics.

I find it strange that so many conservatives admire Reagan as their ultimate hero, but ignore any libertarian influence in his administration.
Thanks for this note - I just finished (after about 6-7 hours of playing, and, I was 95% certain I had managed to dodge everything - but it wasn't completely clear)

Happy to know the game ends in the way that you described and I didn't miss anything.
This has been my strategy for a while, and it's always worked for me. I never study for interviews, and I can usually find jobs.

In my experience, technical questions typically fall into two categories. The first is trivia about a programming language or other tool. The only people who need to "cram" for these are people who lied on their resume. Everybody else will answer these questions pretty easily just from working with the tools and having hands on experience. These are weed out questions to keep people honest.

The second category is to see how the candidate thinks about problems and solving them. It's not helpful to "cram" for these because the problem space is too large, and it would defeat the point anyway. If a company wanted people who've memorized "Coding Interviews For Dummies," they would just put that in the job requirements. In reality, the job they're hiring for doesn't have cookie cutter problems and solutions, and they want to see how the interviewee will work through a problem to find a solution. Knowing the answer to these in advance can actually hurt because it doesn't show them what they're looking for.
You're not serious, are you? Cows are fed corn feed to bulk them for slaughter weight sooner. If the cow ended up not being slaughtered it would end up dying due to disease. Antibiotics keep it alive in order to get it to our plates. The whole american food industry is ...ked. I dread the day we start producing GMO'd rice. - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/
We are headed in the opposite direction because that's not a solution, that's sticking your head in the sand.
Not to mention the high correlation between violent crimes and alcohol.

[0] http://ncadd.org/index.php/learn-about-alcohol/alcohol-and-c...
The Fundamentals of Pitching to an Investor - Infographic
Because Russia is easier to be manipulated. Their oligarchs have accounts in US (or in US influenced countries) or US could force sanctions upon Russia (without much fuss).

Putin is in a pickle - he doesn't want to appear weak before the US in eyes of his people, but he doesn't want to piss off US because above mentioned things.
You could (and still can) voluntarily sell yourself into slavery, it's still slavery.
I've been running maildir-label-syncing Sup for a while. It works great, but you need the master Sup client to be running for new email to get sorted. http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/12/maildir-synchronizing-sup/
Bitcoin: Argentinean fever for the digital money machine
The Fermi paradox is useful in that it shows us that something must be wrong with Drake. It is more likely to be something wrong in one or more of the assumptions, than with the empirical facts. I think the problem is with notions of "advanced" and "intelligent". When it comes down to it, that really just means like present humans. There is nothing inevitable nor qualitatively special about technology. It is just one particular evolutionary advantage which has helped one particular species on one particular planet. Dwelling on why there seems to be nobody else out there exactly like us is just narcisistic; a super-sensitive kid pining for their one-true-and-never-met soul-mate, when they are surrounded by potential lovers. These hypothetical advanced aliens seem like the scholastic pinhead angels of this age of reason. Having said that, life in general is utterly amazing. I have no evidence for this, but I imagine that if and when we humans discover extra-terrestrial life, we will find that some living organisms on this earth have already "known" about it for eons.
Omni: The "Oculus Rift" of 3D Treadmills
Maybe licensing issues would prevent it, or make it difficult or costly to do, but I think it would be superb if at least some of the source code powering AltaVista were to be released under a liberal open source license. This is especially true if it's no longer a feasible product.

The code from the Digital era, for instance, would be quite a contribution to the Internet community, even if just for the sake of preserving historically-important software.
Indeed the debate doesn't end there. Is doing meditation cheating? sports?
I disagree with your characterization of our accomplishments. Getting to the moon isn't just a matter of distance from earth's center, it's a fundamental difference in kind from anything done before by living things on this planet. We could, today, launch a craft in the direction of a star. It would eventually get there, it would just take a long time.
Scatter App Syncs Files Between Android, Windows, iOS and Mac Automagically
It effects everybody differently.I highly suggest Rick Strassman's book 'DMT the spirit molecule'. It shows how different and similar they are
I'm not a doctor, so i wouldn't claim your theory is impossible. But we americans have a horrible diet, and we eat tons of food. I can't say much about height, but breadth comes from 1300 calorie fast food lunches.
I'm under the impression you're from Ireland judging by your username. Kids and adolescents that are well fed tend to grow more than those that aren't, and portion size in the US tends to be substantially greater than elsewhere, especially Europe. Also, there seems to be a greater focus on working out for aesthetic reasons in the US. All of this is, however, does appear to be changing, and moving more toward an American norm. You may also be suffering from confirmation bias! Or, you're right and something in American food is affecting growth rates, but there doesn't appear to be a lot of evidence to support this notion.
Few things can replace suspicionless mass surveillance of everybody on the face of the planet, and personally I'd rather we live in a world where that doesn't get replaced with anything -- it's put to an end in the same spirit that slavery is.

Yes I'm aware everybody doesn't use the internet, and yes I'm aware slavery is still quite prevalent, however my point stands -- slavery is an affront to self-determination and so is suspicionless surveillance.
The same path you're following has destroyed uncountable lives. Just go ahead and watch this film [0]. May the truth set you free.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276962/?ref_=sr_1
Well you will get downvotes if you don't actually provide any evidence beyond "he looks funny". The whole beef hormone controvosy is complete bullshit; the EU has lost cases against the US & Canada in the WTO twice now, both times for lack of scientific evidence behind their decision. The ban happened when Europe was wrestling with mad cow disease, which in no small part influenced the populance against the scientific method with regards to food saftey. This, along with the fact that MEP's had recently been elected for the first time, made the decision almost entirely populist. The EU has _never_ justified the ban scientifically.
It must be depressing sometimes to think of things like AltaVista that Yahoo had run into the ground under leadership that apparently didn't understand the assets they owned.

When AltaVista first appeared, I had used Lexis quite a bit, and had built my own inverted index for law forms. I thought "Wow, you can do that to Web pages!"

But it is even more depressing to keeping dragging the corpse of AltaVista around. Time to let go.
You must be confused. The Second Amendment deals with possession, not use.
Foxconn to speed up robot deployment; 20,000 robots already in its factories
This phenomenon has been studied, but is currently thought to be because of lifestyle differences. See "The Health Toll of Immigration": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/health/the-health-toll-of-...
Yes, LastPass which is why I use 1Password + DropBox. As soon as a non-Dropbox cloud (eg. aerofs) share becomes available that works for 1Password, I'm switching to that.
Look at the top of Der Spiegel's page: where it says "English" leads to the International Edition. http://www.spiegel.de/international/
>>This style of description would need more parameters for a proper classification of alcohol's 'abilities' in relation to other substances

Yes, it does need that. Luckily researchers do these sorts of measurements. I recommend reading things like "Drugs without the hot air" mentioned a few times in this thread. I'm posting from my phone so not going to look up references right now.

>> This is PURELY on an individual basis...

Different substances have different addiction profiles. Some people don't get addicted to tobacco. Most users don't get addicted to cocaine. Many people do develop alcohol addiction, and the addiction profile turns out to be higher than for many (not all) illegal drugs.

>> It's also true of almost ANY type of abuse.

Sure, but the actual harms from alcohol can be pretty damn awful compared to other things.

I love my beer. But just because it's socially acceptable and not a problem in small amounts, we shouldn't make it immune to honest evaluation. And honest evaluation puts it higher up the scale of harm than a variety of other recreational drugs, many of which are illegal.
Have you read Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds? If you haven't, you really need to.
I only looked at it briefly and also wondered about that. If it's not open source it doesn't make sense.
Lessig (or something) is deleting my comment on Disqus. Here it is:

----

The the government's claims of transparency and audibility of the NSA's PRISM program is analogous (if not directly related) to the claims of Palantir's. Search for "immutable auditing" below:

http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2...

But even with such an audit trail to the core, it is known that it isn't sufficient:

http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09....

I wager that for any given system that touts immutable audibility, there is a way to hack around it. Privacy through automated means is impossible. At best it is a kind of DRM that the NSA can easily work around secretly if it wanted it. What we should be advocating instead is Perfect Forward Secrecy in our internet architecture, and the dismantling of PRISM and related data centers.

Prof Lessig, in your book "Code", you are using the issue of copyright to condone the current direction of the surveillance state and offering red herrings as "balancing" compromises. Such a balance is impossible in the face of concentrated storage of (even encrypted) storage data by intelligence agencies. As long as the NSA can tap the wires and record information in vast databases for cold storage, we are absolutely in risk.

More technical discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966942

P.S., FTFY: "I have not, AND would not ever, accept money from Palantir..."
I find it odd that the author of the article assumes his daughter is going to try drugs one day. Personally, I never have, and never plan to (23 years old). In fact, there's plenty of people I know who don't even drink -- not because of any moral or legal reason, but simply because they aren't interested in it. To clarify, I don't care what things other people try (I encourage everyone to make their own decisions), but it strikes me as odd that he just assumes she's going to go ahead and try all sorts of things.

I get the impression that people who have tried drugs before are incredulous that there exist people who are simply apathetic about the whole experience.
Ask HN: Good technology podcasts?
I like listening to podcasts, but I'm frustrated with what's on offer when it comes to technology.

Most of them seem to be interested in:

- Kremlinology about what Apple or Google or some other tech giant is going to do next.

- Consumer electronics

- Highly subjective rants presented as momentous observations, e.g. Apple is doomed because we don't like the iOS 7 icons.

Is there a good tech podcast for people who actually create technology, and are interested in the stories of people doing the same?
There is clearly a significant leverage coming to the negotiations knowing much more than those on another side.

In order to be informed try to follow the topics of disagreements between EU and US, there are enough of those, and any European citizen is affected. Just a small example where EU first opposed and then did everything US wanted:

http://www.dw.de/report-us-can-snoop-on-europeans-flying-to-...
I think the distinction is that getting something going with enough velocity to escape the gravity well of the Sun, and in a vector the points it towards another star's gravity well is different than getting living representatives from a civilization around one star to another.

Philosophically, even an Ark ship, with technology capable of sustaining a population of humans for a million years wouldn't fit the bill since I'd argue that by the time the descendants arrive they:

a) would probably not be the same species anymore, having evolved over thousands of generations for ship life

b) wouldn't be the same civilization anymore, having developed their own micro-civilization in the intervening years -- they'd no longer be representatives from their home civilization...any more than I as an American can be a representative for the European civilizations I am descended from when I travel to Asia

c) their home population and civilization will have evolved and diverged from the Ark's population and civilization regardless of the Ark's conditions. Even if the population on the Ark was put into some kind of suspended animation for the length of the trip (preserving the both the original species and civilization) they'd be representing a species and civilization that no longer existed
As I said I was not talking about your particular case. I dont care about where you live at all.

I was using an 'impersonal you'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
Fraud you say?

Perhaps you should inform Imperial College, one of the UK's most prestigious science and engineering institutes, where he currently holds a chair in neuropsychopharmacology.
Why not? You can use mdraid on removable devices, which takes care of the single-point-of-failure problem...
Oh go stick your schadenfreude where the sun don't shine.
Ask HN: Best online CS degree program?
Hi,

So far I just know of Thomas Edison State College http://www.tesc.edu/heavin/undergrad-certificates/Computer-Science.cfm, but I haven't done much research yet.

I figured a good place to start would be here to learn what HN readers know to be good.

Thanks

Regards,

-c
Jx9 In 5 Minutes Or Less
Notice that I said the first millenium, not the first century. By the 5th century, Christianity had a stable foothold.

By ontological support I mean a substance. The mind is still an undefined substance. Is it the brain or is the soul? If you state it is the brain, as I take it to be the default naturalistic/atheist option, than the problem is still not solved. So it's still a problem, something that needs explanation.
What would be the issue? Is it any more likely to go farbot than a more beefy machine (probably less, due to the lack of moving parts). Never mind that the author is using it to backup his email. It would probably run some kind of fetchmail script as a cron job and caching it locally, so that you don't have to keep a full-fledged computer running all the time. And once that's started up, the backup could easily be downloaded, so that you store your data on several machines.

Pretty common setup, people do stuff like this quite often with their routers.