skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This, online services, and not taking action is no different than not taking action over bankers/politicians stealing your future.

If somebody had told me in say 2005 or 2006 that "hey, the government will just print like several trillions of dollars, ultimately backed only by your tax money, and just like that give them to failed banks and other corporations, the CEOs of said banks will then give themselves hefty bonuses for almost killing the economy. oh and the banks will also foreclose many peoples houses because the small people cant pay their debts either." and not one beep was heard from the population, not one broken window. Its not some small money stolen from them either, its entire college-educations and pensions, standard of living lowered. But, hey, they're still better than Africa so its fine.
Flybridge's Matt Witheiler Excited About Hardware's Crowdfunded Future
I hope this is useful...

General - site is overcrowded with too many photos and too much "stuff".

Suggestions:

1) Put a large bright "Order Today" button in the top right corner. Everything is secondary to this button.

2) Tone down everything.

3) Too many photos and screaming words without substance makes the product seem more about marketing than quality.

4) Don't underestimate the "quaintness" factor. The best site I've seen selling a similar product had a "terrible" website but sweet text.

Home:

- "Hero" slides have too many photos and text on top is hard to read. Simplify drastically. The photos are also zoomed too far in. It's like talking to someone that stands too close.

- Don't say "join our family" for ordering.

- Don't reuse photos like the raspberry one.

- Add some whitespace between hero slideshow and the logo.

- Logo bigger?

- Row of boxes: Our story, our balsamic, how to use... The text is repeated twice (and is the same links at the top and footer). Perhaps the text could be better.

- Do you really need a "cart" and "my account" link in the top right?

- Useful links in the footer are just the same links again.

- The Purchase links in the footer are nice. I would also consider moving the shopping cart block up a little.

- Join our family seems nice, but it confuses me. The text below the box makes more sense "signup to get the latest recipes, exclusive offers, special gifts and more..." Could this be trimmed down and more specific?

Our Story

- The photo at the top is pretty but turns me off. I don't get warm feelings until "A Family Collaboration"... Perhaps take everything out above it.

- How about a photo of people...not a stock photo, but one that looks like a real family photo.

About Our Balsamic
- Too many fonts, colors and photos...and reuse of the same photos again.
- The text seems pretty good... but perhaps tell us more about what makes a balsamic good.

Recipe Blog

- How about just "recipes"

- I like this page but it confuses me. Could it include more text on each recipe or perhaps a little less before I click?

- The recipes look great!

- The photos seem a little overpowering

Order

- I don't like this page at all. I don't know where to click and I assume I can somehow order here.

- Could the menu bar link at the top just link to the actual order page?

Actual Order Page

- Love the top part... put too much text further down. Perhaps use some of this text on other pages? I got this far. I want to order something... Don't make me read more text... Let's complete the sale and move on.

- I don't like the photo of 16 bottles. Can we just have a second "add to cart" button or a quantity discount at the top?

Other Ideas

- FAQ page? What is Balsamic? Why does aging make it better? Can I tour the farm? I'm not a chef, will it be OK to use on regular food?
NSA’s Snowden review focuses on access to China espionage files, officials say
Thanks, that was useful. Interesting that he is asking for asylum again in Russia, stating that he intends no harm to the USA. "No actions I take or plan are meant to harm the US ... I want the US to succeed."

Just my personal opinion, but I believe that Snowden did a good service to citizens of my country (USA). The fact that he probably destroyed his own life doing what he thought was necessary is a mitigating factor in breaking the law. I hope he does not get screwed over too badly and eventually has a normal life.
The Beauty of Text
I can see Edward Snowden taking your advice, because it would totally work.
PageRank Sculpting Is Dead! Long Live PageRank Sculpting. (2009)
I am currently a master student at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam studying "Information & Knowledge Management" which is a business administration specialization. Currrently finishing up my master thesis on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system implementations. I am studying the relativity of implementation success, simply put: The success of an enterprise system (ES) depends on who you talk to, and when you talk to them. Consider the high failure rate (complete or partial) of large scale ES implementations it is a very important topic to research. Not to mention that these are usually very expensive and require massive business process reengineering. I should hopefully finish in a month or two.

Once that is done, I am returning to my native Stockholm, Sweden to find a job. Hopefully it will be something interesting haha. Time will tell, thesis takes priority over finding a job at the moment.
The point is to give the defendant a proportionately strong incentive to show up at the trial. The judge has authority to set bail at a level that makes it likely they'll actually stand trial, which has to take into account the defendant's personal resources, the size of the potential punishment, and the level of danger they pose. If Bill Gates was being tried for first degree murder, I'm sure his bail would be set well north of $1 billion.
So You Want to be A Freelancer
Snowden asks for political asylum in Russia (photo of Snowden at hearing)
thanks.. I still think it's far too confusing for the average user. At least have an indicator if the "app" is already installed. Or, don't call the shortcuts apps, but only the ones using the SDK.
A blogger has proposed a “Quote Justin Carter” day for August 1.

http://ethicsalarms.com/2013/07/08/i-propose-a-quote-justin-...
Falkvinge is often insightful and I generally agree with him on issues, but in this case he is attributing to "online born vs. offline born" something that really has other causes.

His premise seems to be that the governments would respect privacy if only they understood the implications of their policies. But that's silly. In fact some older-generation people may fail to understand tech-related issues, but others do, and in either case the ruling class simply couldn't care about citizens' rights. They see an opportunity to gain more power for their respective governments, and a better position in relation to other nations, and that's all there is to it. They don't mind lying, concealing or spewing whatever euphemistic rhetoric or pretexts they can think of to mollify the public, but it has little to do with their actual policy objectives.

There is a valid point however, that privacy is not about who knows what, rather it is about being in control of what others know about oneself.
It is still a political project. We have to assume it's compromised, although by friendly government.
Not impossible, but some smart people have been looking, at least for Apple's FileVault 2:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/an_analysis_of...

Paper here:

http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/374.pdf

Currently, there seem to be three vectors:

1) Weak passwords

2) If you opt-in to store a recovery key with Apple

3) If attacker has physical access to machine, and machine is powered on (direct memory access via Thunderbolt or Firewire) (Edit: seems like this is not the case, see below)

But no backdoor has been found (yet!)
Of course there are back doors, like the well known NSAKEY one [1] in Windows. Apple also seem to have backdoors into encryption on both Mac and iOS [2].

If you want your data to be reasonably secure against someone who casually steals it then they're fine but if you want to be secure against government employees, or even well connected corporations, then Apple & Microsoft solutions are not very useful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57583843-38/apple-deluged-...
I've found Fastmail to be really good (although I haven't been able to figure out some of the anti-spam stuff so far).
Is it just me or was the author's point that services can disappear (Reader) yet most of these threads assume the reason to switch are privacy concerns. Maybe we're projecting too much?
The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging & ReFinding Your Links
Do any SEOs put thought into the internal linking structure of their sites?

It would seem that, because PageRank is divided amongst the number of links on a page, that a page with fewer links is more effective at passing link juice then a page with many links.
Original Slackware project announcement was 20 years ago today
...how the UNIX wars ended up.

I'm sorry, how was that? My recollection seems to be that they all got stale and overpriced, and then GNU/Linux ate their lunch.
Oh, you're right, m is not a constant but also varies somewhat independently of n, so you can't exclude it from the big O notation. And whether mn or nlogn is the lower order of the two terms depends highly on the value of m, which is the number of unique words in the text. A really long text that's just the same word over and over will have a big n but a small m.
Agile development: How to prioritize a backlog?
The best part is when OS X asks you if you want to store the encryption 'recovery key' on Apple's servers ...
For the record, local time in Moscow is UTC+4; at the time of writing this comment, that is about 18 o'clock.
There are two parts to this story:

-Estonia has an internet voting system

-Estonia just released the source code to their voting system

Even if internet voting is a terrible idea, a transparent election system is a very good idea, and releasing the source code for your voting system is a big step in that direction.
If commercially viable, this looks very disruptive to me: if everyone can get virtually unlimited, ultra-fast, lasts-a-million-years local storage in all their Internet-connected devices, the planet's online needs would change significantly in unpredictable ways. For example, third-party cloud-storage providers would face intense price pressure as more customers find it cheaper to store data locally and pay for more bandwidth.

--

PS. Does anyone here have sufficient knowledge of or experience with Photonics and nanostructured glass to comment on the near-term feasibility and commercial viability of this technology? Here's the paper: http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Stora...
What is your background and skills?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6027779

How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages (guardian.co.uk)
408 points by shakes 19 hours ago | flag | 146 comments
The NSA stated, in 1975, that it's not bound or beholden the US Constitution or law. I don't expect that their opinion has changed much. I can't recall any lawless institution that all of the sudden became lawful of its own accord:

> "NSA does not have a statutory charter; its operational responsibilities are set forth exclusively in executive directives first issued in the 1950s. One of the questions which the Senate asked the Committee to consider was the "need for specific legislative authority to govern the operations of...the National Security Agency."

> According to NSA's General Counsel, no existing statutes control, limit, or define the signals intelligence activities of NSA. Further, the General Counsel asserts that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to NSA's interception of Americans' international communications for foreign intelligence purposes."

> http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/C...
Unexpected DuckDuckGo search for "ruby gsub!"
*Answering "No" will flag your account for review by the NSA.
Yup. And you can add Open Nebula to the list.

BTW, given that NIST uses Eucalyptus, you could argue that Eucalyptus meets not just the formal definition of cloud computing, but also the practical one.
I assume they are referring to the English Bill of Rights's (1689) provision that "excessive bail ought not to be required" as a precursor to the USA's 8th Amendment to the Constitution (1791) that "Excessive bail shall not be required"
Right.. but when you find correlation, you just see that two things are obviously related in some way - there is a common factor. It could be direct causation, or it could be any number of other things.
The question is whether or not you have a theory that can be analyzed to see if this is a CAUSE or not... and we can't test every correlated thing out there exhaustively.
I think you need to fix the achievement/completion placeholder images. because had I wanted to share my progress it would have looked silly. and would have cost valuable PR. just saying. looks good though.

I was a little disappointed by the "repl" on the home page, i had to basically type exactly what was asked else it had not idea what to do, not very good for learning.

good job
Lernstift, the first pen that vibrates when you make a mistake
Do you know what is depressing? The gamification of society, of human kind: in the past intelligence agencies needed intelligence and resources to work. Now, they press a button and they receive all the information without much effort.

Skipping the obvious opinion against the NSA and "The Society of Likes". At least taxpayers (how I hate this word! but it is ironic in this context) should force the Government to fire a big percentage of its workforce since the work is trivial and algorithms to analyze the information are in general already published.
As we know all services are vulnerable at any time to disappearing. Startups failing, large companies sunsetting. It then appears the question becomes "What is the cost to me of this service going away?" where cost can be how long it would take to move to a comparable offering at that time. Then you way that up against "How much am I giving up each day/week/month if I use a service I want less but am doing so due to my fear of being "all in" and at the mercy of Google's whims?" So when I see an article like this (which I enjoyed) I tend to think the above is simply out of whack with a "I'm getting off every service"
New Toyota Camry 2013
Security which is only effective in the absence of an "attacker" isn't security. This is why we engineer for the worst case.

As an aside: as a failure mode, I'd rather see vote selling than punishment or torture.
Git Reflow. A simple git workflow without BS.
Keep in mind that a positive research result is not necessarily anywhere close to any of usability, commercial viability, or even possibility outside the lab. Nuclear fusion is a prominent example of this, and I'm still waiting for MRAM, which has been "around the corner" for quite some time now. Until memory glass may be available, who knows what else is.
Storage is already pretty cheap, but it's a pain in the ass to manage, because you need to handle backups and make sure they are not in one spot, so a fire won't destroy 50 years of your photos. That's why cloud services and online backup is so successful recently. People want somebody else to secure their data, and they are willing to pay for it.

Our future is small computers + high speed internet available everywhere + online storage and services. Not the other way around.
> Let's say someone is using your library within that function and you reference undefined. You get the string "oops". Oops indeed.

That is incorrect. It might be correct if the word 'library' was replaced by 'code snippet' to indicate a copy-and-paste-of-your-code issue. But if you've created a library then your functions are over in some other file, where `typeof undefined === "undefined"`.

The proper attitude here is the same as the Python attitude towards not having `private` attributes: "If some other programmers want to do something crazy with my code, that's their prerogative. If it blows up in their faces, that's their problem."
You're presenting a false choice: It's entirely possible to care about privacy, and still use Facebook and GMail.

Simply pretend that everything you post on Facebook and GMail is in the public domain, posted in the public square.

If I never share anything I don't want public, then my privacy is guaranteed. I'd advise others with privacy concerns to do the same.

Given that you NEVER KNOW, EVER that you can 100% trust the people you're sharing with (no matter which media you use), I think people are kind of crazy to act any other way.
No no. It is like this:

Do you agree that your information will given to the NSA?
[ ] Yes, I agree
[X] No, I don't mind.
Kasparov is a totally manufactured 'Russian opposition' figure.

As late as 2004 he was a member of a US "Security Advisory Council" (NSAC). It was funny to see Kasparov's name on the website under the slogan: "Advisory Council members have dedicated their careers to American security", right next to assistant Secretary of Defence http://img717.imageshack.us.nyud.net/img717/1337/kasparov.jp...

I respect his anti-Putin views, and his chess achievements, but how exactly can he make a political career in Russia with such a background?

Most likely has left Russia because he has became completely irrelevant as a politician there, not because of some crackdown.
Regarding [2], it's not clear yet what Apple does here: it looks like they bruteforce the iPhones when requested by the relevant authorities (possibly using a custom bootrom) and specifically not via a backdoor. If there was a backdoor, presumably Apple wouldn't have a backlog of requests[3]. Though no one really knows, and presumably it's always possible Apple will intentionally compromise their security in future if they get tired of having to bruteforce all these phones.

[3] http://www.informationweek.com/security/encryption/apple-iph...
> Some Canadian lady saw his Facebook post and called the police.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian,_Texas
The return of the Unix wars? (2012)
The Guardian is (of course) carrying it as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/12/edward-snowden-t...
If you are not working on the right thing. It's offen a systemic issue with the whole company. You need to figure out the deep reason and evaluate your options from time to time.
"Deus Ex the fall" jams guns on jailbroken iOS devices
I am working on http://makerops.com, part time with the hope of it replacing my 9-5 income (along with consulting); the 9-5 has slowed progress though, which entails writing a ton or ruby (puppet), and managing critical infrastructure systems.
I wonder how orientation is just a single degree of freedom though; somehow one of the polarization directions of the light must get lost along the way.
Interesting reference. I've submitted an article that expands on the idea at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6032604
Ok, I have full open-source stack and run a cloud service on it. I also give NSA full access to my servers. How does open-source helps there?
EMD Serps: What not to be Impressed With
A company doesn't have to decrypt to meet their CALEA obligations. If CALEA is the sole legal authority for a particular communications interception, that would be the end of it. However, I've seen nothing that indicates that CALEA is the legal authority behind the NSA interceptions.
Such action is extremely impotent if you still keep Gmail. Aside from chat, email is the most private service on the list and failing to give up on that exemplifies how people value convenience over privacy. This type of "activism" is almost negative if you're fighting for better privacy.
I feel so stupid and so ashamed of myself for all the time I have thought of everything Richard Stallman had to say about privacy and security concern as a "neck-beard, tin-foil hat, nutjob".

He was right all along, it was us who didn't care enough to understand what he was saying and its importance.
The joke is that that's probably not a joke.
FWIW, I use Linux and am fairly happy with Amazon Cloud Player.

The lack of Linux support for their downloader is annoying, but I don't feel the need to download entire albums particularly frequently. When I do, spinning up a Windows VM is the work of but a moment (I haven't tried running the downloader under wine, but it probably works well).

I don't mean to excuse Amazon for their Windows-only mindset or suggest that lack of Linux support won't be a big deal for you, but don't let this post discourage you from trying it in case you're a Linux user who wants to give it a shot.
Corporate programming - very cool (but long) video by Zed Shaw
TwitLamp - Better Way To Browse Your Twitter Timeline
In case you missed them: "Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg", "Japan Declares War on U.S." "Man On The Moon" "Dewey Defeats Truman" "Beatle John Lennon Slain"

Do you know how to use the search feature?

This was mentioned three weeks ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951050 .
Cookies are sent in the Cookie and Set-Cookie headers. No separate files.
Two or more points of verification are stronger than one.
But they'll never expect you to have two cellphones!
It's a pithy quote and nothing more, one I can disprove handily by pointing at any number of completely free, donation based services online.

You are not being "sold". That entire line of thinking is intellectually lazy and meant to provoke an emotional response. I wish people would stop it.
Thinking Beyond Cost-Per-Install App Marketing
Putting aside Gladwell for a moment...

By the end of the article, you realize that the whole point is about the negatives of "culturalism". He says:

> Like racism, culturalism distracts away from asking more meaningful questions, and obscures pertinent facts.

> Like racism, culturalism puts a large group of people beyond rational understanding.

> like racism, culturalism destroys individual agency.

> Culturalism causes real harm. It obfuscates the truth.

But he hasn't backed this up at all, except for a single lengthy anecdote about Gladwell's chapter. Speaking as someone who has lived in in several different countries besides the US (including 8 years in one), cultural attitudes are extremely important everywhere you go and can explain lots of important things.

Just look at Geert Hofstede's "Cultures and Organizations" if you want empirical data for it.

Seeking cultural explanations for things is no different from seeking any other kind of explanation. Even if it winds up not being true, it's perfectly valid to wonder if cultural things are at work. Looking for cultural explanations is not a distraction, and it does not put anyone "beyond rational understanding" -- to the contrary, it tries to explain things rationally.

I understand that the author is bothered by speculation about Korean culture, but honestly, that's just silly. It's not emblematic of some kind of anti-Korean attitudes in US media or anything, and the author's done nothing to show that it is.
going to try for devil's advocate angle.

could there be a case where the parties in a conversation are legitimate suspects? in such a case, why does it matter if it's Microsoft or some other private company that the NSA hires to break encryption?

it seems that the article is presenting the Microsoft / NSA relationship, and later states “If you look at what happened when Bush, Cheney and General Hayden – who was head of the NSA at the time – deliberately violated the law to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant" which hints at a vague conclusion that Microsoft is helping to spy on citizens without a warrant.

possibly i missed something, so is the point that Microsoft (or any private company) should not do any work for NSA, or that it should not do it without a warrant, or that we can't trust it with anything because it did some work for the NSA? Or is that the details are still not disclosed so it's pure speculation?