skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking for Developers and CTO for early-stage Startup in Berlin. English and German speakers welcome, EU work-permit necessary.

Are you interested in working for an early stage startup in one of the coolest cities in the world? Perfect! After graduating from Brown University, I just finished collecting a pre-seed round for an innovative social-media startup that is still in Stealth Mode. My startup team is looking for developers experienced in App or Website development that know their way around Ruby or PHP or iOS. If you have worked with social networks before, it’s a big plus, but not necessary, as we like to attract anybody that can adapt and take on new challenges.

Why should you apply? 3 reasons: 1.) You get to create an innovative social media product from the ground up that will scale all around the world!!! 2.) We do not just offer money, but also significant equity, so that you directly profit from the financial upside. 3.) If you have been to Berlin before, you know that it is one of the must international, buzzing cities in the world. I assure you, Berlin is tons of fun, super cheap to live in and you don’t need to know a word of German to get around.

Contact us to apply and for more information: startup.berlin.recruiting@gmail.com
We are all dumb at times.

People say as many crazy things in real life, it's just that we don't walk around recording what everyone says.

It should be possible for a police officer of average intelligence to distinguish between young peoples angry ramblings and a real threat.

And even if it isn't I certainly don't see an argument to the "swat team first, think later" that seems to be the norm.
Given how Big Mac is cheaper than salad, I don't think lettuce is a viable option.
HealthTech Innovation in New York
Germany could rule Europe now
I'm not even sure this is a case of him saying it to look tough/feared or something like that. From what I understand, someone left a comment calling him 'crazy' for a tactic he used in a recent game, and he responded with 'Yeah, I'm crazy', his remark about shooting, and then 'lol j/k'.

I've seen/heard many similar exchanges in games before, and it doesn't even register as more than idle trash talk anymore. The only difference seems to be this took place on Facebook rather than a short lived game lobby.
RIP Douglas Engelbart.
For those that liked this, the video comes from a fantastic series called Petrolicious:

http://www.youtube.com/user/PetroliciousCo

As a car nut I look forward to their videos and rewatch them regularly. They really do a better job of capturing "automotive enthusiasm" than any other series I've seen. They videos have a very positive energy and as a result the comments on these videos are also almost entirely positive - never seen this on YouTube before!

A few others that non-car-nuts might like are:

Never Enough Alfa (hilarious back story about his father)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx2sPfgqlkg
and Jack's Toy Is a BMW Isetta (nice energy, hilarious sweater):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70ufaopHIVI
or even more to the point, national intelligence agencies actually spy, news at 11.

if i were journalist i would compile a list of all of those agencies and then release a "story" each week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies

enough to milk this topic for years.

i am austrian, so our HNA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heeresnachrichtenamt would be my "scandal". they run a sigint station smack in the center of vienna, located in a WW2 flaktower. public knowledge, but just add Snowden, Morales, some other bullshit and voila, another great feat of journalism.
Btw, I would love to interview you. Can I email you?
...you can't find sympathy for someone who gets arrested for making a remark which is very obviously sarcastic/joking/hyperbolic that was taken completely out of context? People need to lighten the fuck up, and take context into account.

Also, once again the scope creep of the word "terrorist" ("terroristic") is deeply disturbing.
My knowledge of this topic is limited but I believe if you are saying that the majority of crypto libraries have had major bugs, in the sense that they are made trivial to break, that you are overreaching.

On the other hand if you are including minor bugs, that have a low impact on security, then you are surely right but this doesn't mean much. Minor bugs get caught even in audits of the code for nuclear power plants.
How did you come up with the idea for that? :)
This takes me back to 20 years ago when I was studying Japanese. Their traditional (pre-Arabic-numerals) system uses four-digit groupings instead of three: There are characters for ten, hundred, thousand, and ten-thousand. (I assume Chinese is similar.)

Sometimes we use the number "1 million" to mean "a lot"; in that system it would be written as 100 ten-thousands. A more "natural" way to express "a lot" in that system is ten-thousand ten-thousands, or 100 million in our system.

I loved learning little "weird" things like that, and discovering that our own way of doing things isn't the only way. Studying other cultures also teaches us about our own.

Any better-qualified Japanese speakers please correct anything I've gotten wrong, this memory file was just swapped in from 20 years ago...
Really? Government plans to kill people is the same thing as you thinking your sister-in-law is hot??

You were right the post being silly......
Found Stereoscopic Photos Make World War I Come Alive
I think I know: only use as directed.

Only use a crypto component for the exact purpose that is stated on the tin. Hash function turns lengthy text into a short unique digest. That's the only thing you can use it for. If you try to use it for any other purpose, you will likely screw it up.
The thing i like about this the most is that worthless degrees are free and usefull are expensive. So it's in the college's best interest to offer quality.
The Declaration of Independence
Hmm.. so it was too hard to keep the same UI because of Presto, and then the reasoning for the new UI is because they wanted a 'fresh start'? Seems like creating a vision in retrospect because of the time restraints.
USA, where prison is the solution to everything.

Don't post ignorant flamebait. You have no idea what you're talking about.
There's no way $2000 even factored into Google's decision of who to link to.
Growing up is fun but really stressful, by an adolescent.
Some. I think it depends if you can explain it properly. That was supposed to be the media's job, in the 'self-regulating' system of democracy. Obviously, that failed. So now we have non-democracy, and little way out except...
I don't know where the term came from, but I suspect it came from investors trying to come up with a euphemism for "not investable". If your'e a VC, a lifestyle business actually is a bad thing - it just doesn't work for them.

Where the train goes off the tracks is when entrepreneurs start using the term in a way that roughly translates to "script kiddie". That is just immature.
Hundreds sysadmins?

I think tens of thousands, if not more. Thats whats worrying and horrifying about all this for me at least. There is a whole organization, a structure, a culture of people whos job is illegal and immoral activities, they know and they still continue doing it as Snowden said many of them are authoritarians - perhaps even feeling pleasure from having that power.

NSA is a big employer, and it took what 5-6 years for one leaker?
They are basing this on very conservative starting salary of less than 30K. It would be very hard to ask for any perks such as free housing or company car at this level of pay.
I wonder how much more Snowden will reveal since no one will provide him asylum?
I'm willing to bet that's just a theoretical upper limit, and will be tossed out at soon as its in front of a judge. But still. The fact he was arrested at all is just friggin stupid.
> He likely wouldn't have announced the same remarks in real life

I don't know, I think people jokingly threaten to do all kind of violent things to each other in conversation. I certainly do.
It really goes beyond this, because taking on some labels gets you labeled as a walking blasphemy, an immoral person who subscribes to a philosophy of mass murder. Atheism is understood as opposition to God (Satanism) in much of rural America. One area where Western Europeans really can be smug with justification.
Poe's law at it again [1]

Also, how long between the original comment and the lol j/k?

At most, I think, he can be accused of being insensitive.
If you're not willing to deal with "obscure" setup instructions, you probably don't need strong crypto.

If you do need strong crypto, i.e. your life and/or autonomy depend on it, you will hopefully be willing to take ten minutes of your time to install a properly written piece of software.

Cryptocat is cargo-cult cryptography. People think cryptography is cool, so they use cryptocat. They don't actually need the strong encryption it would [yet has never actually been able to] provide, but they think their two-bit marijuana transaction or liquor-soaked 19th birthday celebration is worthy of strong encryption, but not of the actual effort required to use it. So they use cryptocat.

These people who use cryptocat are stupid. The popularity of cryptocat just increases the risk that someone who actually needs security will use it, and could very likely experience severe injury as a result. That's not okay; it's not relevant whether someone is "being nice" or "learning" or whatever, it needs to not happen. Cryptocat is bad through and through, from conception to implementation.

Maybe if the tagline was "Cryptocat provides encrypted communication that probably isn't secure", people wouldn't pull out their hair.
> It took decades for the burrito to devolve into a wrap (substituting flour for corn tortillas, for example, to enable longer stored freshness).

No, burritos have been made from flour since the start. The adoption of flour tortillas likely had more to do with it being a better crop for the Chihuahua region in the late 1800s.
Yes. Self censorship is the thing we need to avoid.
Why would it surprise anyone (HN or otherwise) that the NSA is trying to do what is available COTS for enterprise, for auditing and law enforcement (CALEA), on a massive scale? Especially in the current environment of civil liberty erosion?
Because its outside their domain and expertise and/or they really haven't been paying attention.

EDIT: the point is that I don't believe that HN should be anymore knowledgeable about this than the General Public because it is a specialized domain. It's not 'the Internet'.
What is the case of being locked up for fantasizing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5990666
That is culture shock for you
He's been held for for at least three months on $500,000.00 bond. I'm not even sure he's been charged yet.
The most telling comment? "[H]is goal is to change people’s perceptions about McDonald’s food not being real"

Not "His goal is to change McDonalds food into something real". Just all about perception/spin.
I pay attention to what I eat and consider some options at McDonalds healthy. Their grilled chicken sandwich and salads are great options. I also like healthy choices from Subway.

I hear arguments like yours all the time but they're never backed up with actual data. It's just generic fast food bashing. Many fast food places have healthy choices along side unhealthy choices. The options are there.
That's totally cool :)

(The thing that would make us skeptical is if the person just said they wanted to get back into programming, but hadn't actually done it.)
Samsung Confirms Boxee Acquisition
It is flamebait. But it is also true.
Well, it is marketing after all...
Microsoft Windows Local Privilege Escalation Metasploit Exploit
"Oregon free". You get four free beers now, but most pay 3% of you salary next mount in return. You need a minimum of 2 000 monthly pay to qualify :)
> anyone that pays attention to their health and what they eat, would not consider McDonalds a healthy meal

Which is, at best, half-true. Health can only be determined as fitness for purpose and it's possible that a McDonald's meal is fit for a certain purpose. Nothing magically makes McDonald's food evil, even if it's rarely fit for a purpose most First World people have.
Normally I don't believe in making these kinds of posts but - I've never heard of the McWrap before. Is it really "summer blockbuster" level of advertising? Have I been able to insulate myself that well from such things with ad-block and watching pirated tv shows (which have the ads excised)? Or was that hyperbole in the article?
Why the London 'Tube' is enough to drive you crazy
by releasing a tool that makes it extremely easy to decrypt the conversations encoded by CryptoCat at specific times, has done exactly the same thing?

Assuming that cryptocat is used to avoid the monitoring of entire nations, you can be absolutely certain that those with the motivations have long ago cracked this. That is exactly why security professionals get so passionate about this, because they know that bad crypto is literally much worse than no crypto at all -- at least in the latter case you have no illusions.

Cryptocat has been under significant criticism for a long time. For instance-

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5194713

-and for very good reason. After the farcical story about being investigated by CSIS (which seems laughable, because if there's one thing that government security agencies love, it's bad crypto), this project seems to be held aloft by nothing more than people saying "But he's young and passionate, so give him a chance" -- that isn't credible reasoning for crypto.
There are two possible conclusions: Everyone does it, there is no hope, just resign yourself to surveillance. Or, one can conclude that no matter how much you trust your own government to treat surveillance data correctly, whatever that might mean to you, some other government is out to get your business data, etc. with no compunctions, so you better secure your systems and communications.
Here is a video of Chris Evans letting James May drive his £12 million 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxWMYcPX27s
Checked your profile page and you seem to be doing some fascinating things with your company. Mind telling us more? :)

(Emailed you btw).
Do you know how much all those secret spying programs cost?
Crowd-sourced neuroscience -- help cluster neurons
Most likely the way this will work in practice is that the Oregon government pays colleges up front on a per-student basis, and then calls the program "revenue neutral" based on predictions of what they will later pay.
I have to disagree. If you pay attention to pesticides, or organic stuff then you are just out of luck at a McDonalds. That 'healthy' chicken breast is actually really low quality chicken. You say you pay attention to your health by choosing the 'healthy' options at McDonalds, but realistically thats not all that healthy, especially for me.

Everyones genetics allow them to eat differently. If McDonalds is healthy and working for you, great. If you want to try something different, figure out where the meat and vegetables are coming from before you put it in your mouth. Might seem extreme, but actually its logical.

Also, my point wasn't the lack of healthy options at a fast food joint (ironic), but is that generally people don't go there to eat healthy. Remember, you are what you eat. Even the most in shape people know there is no such thing as exercising yourself into shape without a good diet.

Side note: I live in a world where processed foods are the devil and pretty cook and subsist off of 1 meal per day. I am the extreme. But I used to be on the opposite side of the spectrum, picking a fast food place daily for lunch and stuff. Lost over 50lbs and bf under 15 for the first time in my life. I went from almost diabetic to completely healthy, "with a strong heart".

Also, a shout out to fatburningman.com because that site will teach you some honest fitness, life and health skills.
"Venture Capital is in Crisis"
I'm in agreement here. I've set up PGP email, and S/MIME, and it isn't really that hard to use once it's in place. Mail clients that support it offer easily-invokable "sign" and "encrypt and sign" options. But when few people you email use it, you yourself end up using it rarely, and then you get a new computer, lose your keys, and you can't even revoke them because you didn't keep a backup. So you have to do it all over again. Then it seems "difficult to use" because you have to stop and read some man pages again.
I'm the founder of a firm that has had investors reach out from time-to-time and some do ask "Are you trying to build a big business or a lifestyle business?" In this context, "lifestyle biz" is absolutely a pejorative term.

The implications/sub-text of that question is:

1. If you don't plan to take money, you're probably not thinking big, are not ambitious, etc

2. You'll need capital and expertise (probably ours) to build a big business

What I've found is that the better investors tend to ask a different question "At what point, if any, would you think of raising capital?" This question gives the investor the same info without the insulting sub-text.

Related notes:
- Most tech M&A exits are less than <$100M. If you're playing the odds, a "lifestyle" business may be the way to go. http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/acquisitions/tech-mergers-acq...

- Building a real business (revenue > costs) and growing it gives you more leverage with investors down the road should you want to go down that path. That's our plan. http://www.cbinsights.com/team-blog/investors/
People say stupid things all the time (like politicians). But bad speech is no reason for long prison sentences and $500,000 bail. Words are just puffs of air or clicks of keys not actions. Remember the childhood saying "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me". If we choose to punish words then people may as well turn to the hard stuff.
> they could easily grow lettuce on the roofs of their restaurants.

In some parts of the year in some regions. Otherwise it's down to greenhouses and irrigation. Not to mention relying on minimum wage employees to farm successfully enough to build a business around.
NSA surveillance protest
Restore the Fourth protesters stage rallies against NSA surveillance
How about "Free" as in "in exchange for a valid email address"
In private conversation - yes. But posting on Facebook and Twitter is the equivalent to standing in a busy street and announcing your comments loudly for all to hear. Which was my point; Facebook isn't a tool you use if you want to make private jokes.
The company has to pay taxes on them already as most perks as considered compensation (except for a narrow class of business expenses, and health care). If the 3% was applied there it could avoid this issue.
> If crypto software is going to be used, it has to be usable

If crypto software is going to be labeled crypto software, it has to be secure. Otherwise it's just software.

Yes, I agree with you. Crypto software must be usable, otherwise it will never catch on. The average person doesn't care about their security, and thus the smallest compromise in UX for improved security will lose you large amounts of users. However, if you design something fantastically usable and pretty and call it "secure software" doesn't make it so.

I think that this whole argument stems from people misunderstanding the term "secure". Cryptographers, when talking about "security", consider it more or less binary: "Secure" is something for which no attack (even theoretical) exists. Laymen mean "my spouse/neighbour/boss/ISP/government can't read my messages".

In the former meaning, CryptoCat is entirely broken and useless. In the latter meaning, CryptoCat is on the low end of the "security" scale. It can be used for hiding things from your neighbour, assuming your neighbour doesn't have lots of technical knowledge. If it were advertised as such, I don't think anyone would be lambasting them now, but it was advertised as "cryptographer" secure when it's probably not even "layman" secure.

Having "cryptographer" security means you have to make UX concessions. You just can't have both. Saying "but CryptoCat has both great UX and great security" is false, because it doesn't. It has great UX at the expense of security, and they should probably make people aware of this more.

All this having been said, I do recognize that sometimes you need to sacrifice security to get better UX (see iMessage), and that is perfectly reasonable, and probably necessary. I would love to see more semi-secure software with great UX that people will use more than the completely insecure software now, and I really hope CryptoCat achieves its goal of security and ease of use and becomes more popular.
Thanks. I am personally interested in Passenger and Passenger Enterprise -- I do run Passenger (free version) on several self-managed servers, and am happy with it.

There are two reasons I did not include Passenger Enterprise in my benchmarks:

1. As far as I know there is no way to run it on heroku. And I was intentionally benchmarking on heroku.

2. I wasn't going to pay for it just for the purpose of running benchmarks on it.
It is real. It may not serve your goals, however.
This is how it should have been done all along.

The "higher education" system as it exists now is just pure exploitation, and decimating the middle class.

Allow current student loan holders to enter bankruptcy like normal human beings, and have all future financing be a small set cut of future earnings.

Focus much more energy on apprenticing programs like in Germany, where kids actually get real job experience instead of sitting in a classroom with 150 other kids while some 28 year old associate professor walks through a powerpoint presentation.

I mean, the basic problem is that corporate America doesn't really need as much labor input anymore. But we have an entire generation of young Americans who pay more on the "education" loans than their rents. That's a complete injustice.
Are there any implications for the WebCrypto API after this? I think he used Javascript crypto at first, but not sure after he turned it into a "Chrome app" (presumably based on Native Client - or is it still Javascript?).
This is a good idea in general. It is really what the market should be correcting for already.

I don't understand why the college doesn't lend you the money to attend their courses already.
>> even if CryptoCat has issues it's likely better, and easier to use, than other competing projects in this space based on its popularity?

Easier to use does not imply better in this space.
In fact it may be worse than not providing a product at all because it encourages people to think they have a secure channel when in fact it's trivially breakable.
France 'has vast data surveillance' - Le Monde report
When is the (secure) e-mail service coming, is what I'd like to know.
It's not the "joke" I have a problem with. If you read my comment you'll see that it's because he posted it publicly. If this was a private message, then I'd have complete sympathy for the guy.
Adium is a local mac-specific app, and multi protocol, and pretty complicated. Far bigger and more complicated than I would want to trust. Doesn't ship with OTR out of the box (iirc).

Something either browser-extension or mobile app would be a lot better. IMO, also not supporting legacy stuff like aim/yahoo/etc, and supporting OTR out of the box.

Nadim did a decent job on the simple UI front. I don't know about the lack of persistent identity (pluses and minuses to that).
Too bad I cannot edit it again now that I am on a computer :( (I typed it on a phone)
I had...a noodle wrapped egg sausage, sage, sesame...something tonight. Street food can be nice in an Asian summer.
I made an app that aggregates available rideshares from all around the world