skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"""I prefer to live in a society where people can't march through the streets waving signs designed specifically to vilify a specific group. Can you tell me how this freedom makes your society better in any way?"""

For one, what if that specific group makes life worse for the others, so it's rightly villified? Then it would be important that their complaint is known.

Second, even if what they say in their "signs" is wrong, I better publicly KNOW that there are people that think this way, and take precautions, that have them do it in secret.

Third, it never stops there. It opens an Overton Window that makes speaking freely all the more difficult.
There are "incentives" that are shoveled down companies throats and secured in place by gag orders. Perfectly legal too.
This article may help explain how: http://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2011-ssl-perfect-forward-se...
Jacob Appelbaum - Digital Anti-Repression Workshop (2012)
Why Pens Are Popular On Kickstarter And What It Means For Crowdfunders
Intel has known for a while that it has to take the lead in designing and marketing (the Ultrabook is an excellent example) if they are to stay relevant. I'd say Microsoft is in a similar position.

I wouldn't want Intel to think I am to be dependant. The Surface RT line makes a statement. A weak one but it is nonetheless a statement.
> "Automate everything. Nothing should be manual."

This mindset seems to miss the point of technology (and software development). It is the business impact, not the automation for its own sake.

E.g. we can automate the hell out of the office arrangements or whatever, if it does not have a business impact, we are just wasting our time.
You don't even have to mail it. You just need to store it on a server abroad and ssh into that server and copy your encrypted files.
Advanced Google Search Tricks
A startup around this actually won the Princeton TigerLaunch pitch/business-plan competition this past year, but I'm having trouble finding any press releases or details online at the moment.
> I believe the way PFS works is that it uses RSA to verify identity and then Diffie-Hellman to establish keys.

It's the other way around. First you do the DH and then use RSA to authenticate (a hash of) DH parameters.
Privacy, for starters.

Using a different nickname for different domains of online services helps preventing the casual google-user from finding out all online activites of a person. Example: I use different nicknames for HN and flashback.org, so you can't find my flashback post history by googling my HN username.

Using different user names also helps me remembering which password I used for that account.
The hidden part about this story is that the woman is still not empowered. She's now the princess to the knight in shining armor, rescued from the horrible dragon. The author hasn't changed the narrative, he's completed it.

It's still a story where a man decides the outcome. What he did was indeed chivalrous, good even, but chivalry is nothing original.
:s/is/was/

:(
How much institutions care about the contests can be a factor as well. I ended up as the only American placing in a data-mining contest once [1], which I entered as a hobby I spent a few weekends on. But a full 5 of the 12 awards went to a single German university, RWTH Aachen, which had a ton of entries, and apparently had set it up as something students would do as part of a course.

That does lead to the next-order question of why American universities don't care about such contests (if indeed they don't).

[1] The 2009 UC San Diego data-mining competition, which seems to have disappeared from the web, but is archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20101124175648/http://mill.ucsd.e...
Another way to look at this would be to say, "we (i.e., men) are all sexist and we need to help each other not treat women like crap/objects/trophies".

I don't like this way of interpreting the author's article, because it portrays women as helpless princesses that need saving, but I'm not sure what a better one would be.
I couldn't agree more. I would never want to work for someone who is able to fire anyone after only a week for whatever reason (assuming he does good screening of candidates, otherwise the problem is his broken hiring process and I don't want to work for him in that case either).
See the section labelled "Compass" here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Then suck in air for ballast, it may be similar to ocean going vessels they float when idle but need power or wind for propulsion plus ballast to stabilize.
> How would you define "manual user acquisition"?

I think it's what PG calls schlep[1], or at least similar. Tasks like talking to users (not just your family and friends), scouring internet forums, reading everything you can to learn as much as possible about your demographic / target users and what makes them tick, going door to door (in the case of airbnb), being active on social media, etc. It's doing the stuff that nobody whats to do, because it's not glamorous, and it's not necessarily the most exciting. It's constant, it's draining (on every level), it's time consuming and its tough.

It may be easier to understand by looking at the opposite end of the spectrum - some sort of automated user acquisition: the expectation that a user acquisition plan can be conceived and launched, which will trigger loads of users knocking at your door, all requiring little to no maintenance afterwards. A strategy like this may include press releases about a new product and a giant paid marketing budget. Just flip the switch on those and the users start rolling in, then we can get back to building. ;-)

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
>"Here's an example" - good: I don't believe you should be able to make and distribute a film equating an established world religion with nazism.

Then you are a little fascist youself: you want to impose into people what they can and cannot say.

Not to mention, nazism is a historical phenomenon. Same as the slaughters of millions in the name of various Gods. So why shouldn't anyone equate an "established world religion with nazism"? If anything, some religious wars killed more people than nazism did -- or at least affected and enslaved larger areas for far far more years -- millenia even.
Most addicted city is apparently Eglin Air Force Base. But then how did you conclude that they were changing the rankings of Reddit posts?
In defense of the founders, there's a lot to be said for failing fast. And while it's entirely possible you could have built a better product, it's more likely the resulting business would hardly have paid a fraction of your salary, let alone theirs.

If you think the idea is really good, you should ask for permission to develop it on your own as a side business. And if you don't think so... there's no point in chiding them for agreeing that the work isn't worth your time.
That's a tricky question. For example, I would love official immigration to be streamlined and allow more people, but if you count illegal immigration I don't know if I want the total number of immigrants to increase.
> the guys who get the "creepy" treatment are the socially awkward men with average intentions

Perhaps we could address this by fixing the "socially awkward" bit -- explicitly spelling out (perhaps through education, or a book, or something) what sorts of things are and are not acceptable.

It's difficult enough to get parents to consent to "sex ed" from a biological standpoint as it is, but I would have found it useful to have had classes in {elementary, middle} school about how to not treat girls like crap. Do you think that it would be possible to build a program that addressed this problem?
Thanks, that list of online courses is a helpful starting point (although I would argue no complete, just after doing some quick searching).

I think there are definitely enough classes available to create something like you were mentioning, or even just comparing classes available online to offerings in degree programs of top institutions (so show what classes are available / you have to take to get a Stanford CS degree for example and show what similar classes are online and where). Might consider making this a project of mine
> I am the author. I did start that blog just for that post.

Can you prove that you are not an agent of the NSA trying to dissuade people from using services like DDG? I mean, you are using BlogSpot of all services, so you are directly contributing to the tracking of individuals (heck, you are encouraging it), so forgive me if your motives are suspect.

Frankly, that you cannot prove otherwise, I think you should say as much: that you should not be trusted.
Why I will never say, "That's a bad startup idea"
I think this is an interesting concept. There are certainly concerns around electricity and bandwidth usage, but these costs are surely increased by the advertising that is already prevalent on the web. I could picture this as a "pay as you go" means of rewarding content creators that doesn't involve traditional ads.
Cool. Another thing I think would be useful and I am thinking of adding it to a site I made (http://gitray.com) is to be able to kind of press play on a github project. So I could view the project at it's initial commit and then step through the project and watch it get built. Is this something others would find useful?
I've talked to higher-level support reps, no script. They lied too. "Sure, we'll send a team out to install your cable"
systemd does NOT require /usr to be mounted at start. That is just a myth.

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is...
To quote the great Ronnie Coleman:

"Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but ain't nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weight."
Microsoft and key retailers chop Surface RT prices by $150
What about, "I don't, because who cares?", or "I don't care."?
Before embarking on this project, you should check out the company that was founded 6 years ago that does the thing you described: http://www.pluraprocessing.com/
Well, I have to admit that I have met some folks who could turn even the most fun stuff into drudgery.
I find the idea really interesting. And the portuguese startup called crowdprocess seems to be down with this stuff.

I just think that charity would be a great angle to it. How about you donate your CPU cycles for charity ? Companies that need to use large scale parallel processing use the service, your browser does the client side processing and the money that the gets paid by companies goes to charity minus running costs.

Now that would be beautiful. CPU cycles for charity!
Men are typically rewarded for being proactive, rather than reactive like the author, waiting for the perfect situation to occur for him to show his saintly virtues, then go home and write a blog post about his white knighting.

Unfortunately it seems a lot more bad guys are in the former category, and a lot of good guys fall into the other. This does not mean that this author wins any points with me for this article.
I'm sorry, but doesn't DANE RFC (DNS-based check of certs validity) solve the same problem and already implemented in Chrome and (via a plugin) Firefox?

With DANE, one doesn't even need CA to issue the cert -- self-signed will work just fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...
Isn't that the chromebook pixel?
Manos Accelerator - Seeking Latino Entrepreneurs
Nice site. Be careful about asking about medical conditions. It's illegal in New York State and about to be illegal nationally.
If my connection to my SMTP server is encrypted and my receiver's POP connection is encrypted, is there really a need to encrypt the message itself?
Can you expand on this? What did Fourier prove and why was it accidental and what was the quicksand?
It would probably be sufficient to equalize the tax treatment of employer provided insurance and wages (currently insurance is paid for with pre-tax dollars, wages with post-tax dollars).
I wonder why Debian didn't go with OpenRC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRC) as it is compatible with both Linux and *BSD, which also offers 'Process segregation through cgroups'.
I was there and a lot of the talks were great, but Dr. Seltzer's Automatically Scalable Computing was my favorite by far:

http://ricon.io/archive/2013/east.html%23automatically-scala...

It's a crazy approach and they've made impressive progress on it. I could see it becoming a standard technique in a few decades...
> I'd like to, but the people I email don't know how to (or won't) use encryption.

The situation today is even less conducive to getting the people I email to use encryption than it was 10 years ago. In the past there was maybe a chance I could convince people to install a plugin, or in the case of family members I could set it up myself when visiting. But now everyone uses Gmail, and often uses it from multiple devices, which makes that difficult. There are browser plugins that will try to do GPG in Javascript, but they seem to break routinely with Gmail changes, and the one that used to be most used (FireGPG) was discontinued. And the Gmail app on mobile devices doesn't support such extensions anyway.
You mean nobody like http://crowdprocess.com?

Or the (dead) http://pluraprocessing.com from 2009?
Then you can not answer the poll :P
This story was totally not what I expected regarding Instagram accounts.

In my Americentric preconceived assumption I thought it would be about selling Instagram accounts, not using them as storefronts.
with no mousewheel you have problems to scroll. Using the scrollbar is made impossible by overlapping … : (
The fact that you know its name ruins your credibility.
I've talked to Erik on a few occasions. And I think he is extremely bright and seeing someone pour over with enthusiasm like him is what motivates me to do better programming wise.

In response here are a few things I think people should consider:

It seems to me that the GPA requirements for computer science are being made pretty strict in response to trying to get the students to take other paths because some colleges don't want to have so many computer science major students. This seems like a problem because these colleges are not really adapting to the situation and are instead just trying to push students to other curriculum by making the grade requirements much stricter for certain majors.

I think math in college is probably much better than it was in middleschool as well. I definitely agree I hated repeating multiplication tables and all that. It just was not fun. And it did not even feel like learning. I think there are many people who are interested in math and will not really know it till they read more about the different subjects that are in it.

Theres no easy answers in education like there is no easy answers in government policy. It's just too much generalization that cannot be quantified. The abstraction in some college classes has gotten me a bit annoyed since the teachers almost do not consider the other students.

One case is where I had a teacher who on the last day of class changed the main assignment of the whole class to be more clearly worded in a really bad way. He failed to provide adequate time for students mainly.

On the last day of class he decided that students writing a group assignment should only hand in 1 group assignment (with no instruction about how one person can remove a copy of the assignment turned in through blackboard). When a group of 4 people has to coordinate anything in less than a single day it's an idiots game.

My main compliant- This could have been much easier if he just graded the latest turned in papers. Or he graded the earliest ones. It wouldn't have mattered that much to some, but he really threw a bunch of his students under the bus for a grading policy that was rather unreasonable. Instead he decided to deduct 10% off that grade because of some rule he made up in the last day of a 6 week class that was unfair because he did not provide adequate instruction.

Simple Game Theory will tell you something will go wrong in such a small time frame with no information. Unfortunately, my college was silly enough to not want to fix this huge blunder an professor made. In my honest opinion even the basics of game theory should be taught to teachers and people looking to go into politics. People need to understand there is a reasoning policy behind different actions. Even if it's a non-mathematical introduction to game-theory for the most part. People need to realize there are smarter ways of getting people motivated to do things which may be better than what they are thinking.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but the narrative won't change without both men and women being involved in making that change.

My limited understanding of history is that "affluent white men" were involved in granting women and blacks the right to vote, due to the nature of "democratic" processes at the time.

Similarly, ongoing debate about granting equal legal (tax, etc.) benefits to those in homosexual relationships requires the consent from a government consisting (mostly) of heterosexual people.
The performance of DO has absolutely nothing to do with a dedicated box.
Reminds me of http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/43651/
| the pulseaudio stuff didn't go smooth

That wasn't the fault of the developer so much as it was the fault of the distributions for jumping on the bandwagon (making it the default audio system) too early.
Most of the traditional English courses,

That's what I was thinking too. There's got to be some way to get them to understand their there and they're in less time than is usually taken. And, TBH, studying literature in HS made me hate it. It took years before I'd read again for fun.

>'make a birdhouse' stuff should be de-emphasized and replaced with 'fixing your toilet'

Agreed, but in my HS the wood-shop was where all the special folks went, it seemed to keep them busy.
But the attractiveness is the lynchpin of the entire story. Dude wouldn't be hitting on her if she were unattractive. And who wants to rescue an ugly chick? Is the author Shrek or something? There's no fantasy for the reader if she's not attractive.

I think it's passive sexism, in that to play his role he needs a aggressively sexist beast in the triangle.
Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to exactly his needs.

What you get out of university is what you put into it. Want to be judged for something other than test taking? Get involved in research. Get involved in one of the many math and CS organizations your campus has. But you have to go get them yourself. Nobody's going to say "oh, you're so smart, please join our team!"

Get it out of your head that being smart entitles you to anything or makes you special. You'll find your classmates aren't robots, and are just as smart as you, and have a lot to offer.
http://folding.stanford.edu/home/ I believe has a screensaver that will run simulations and has the results fired back to be collated. It also has a cool visualization :)
Yes. The adversary is assumed to be global here and so it can listen to the traffic at both ends. Also, both servers can make copies of the email.

PGP gives you end-to-end encryption, which starts from your computer and ends at the computer of the recipient.
It's exactly for this kind of use-case that we built Bondsy, an app that lets you trade with friends. Doesn't have to be for money.

Check it out, it's free.

http://www.bondsy.com
Though I'm not necessarily a proponent of automation or integration of sending emails (getting ridiculous amounts of auto-generated/useless email is pretty prevalent at many companies, and I certainly don't like it, nor think it is effective), I think tracking the flow of conversation is very important.

Especially when it comes to customers, keeping in mind everything the customer has communicated and having it at arms reach is very important, and also probably fosters some feeling that someone is looking at their case personally, and has been paying close attention to the back and forth (even when you haven't).
Even in the age of mail clients the popular option as I understand it was outlook. (Though even that could have had a PGP plugin added.)

The webmail problem is probably the biggest barrier to PGP adoption right now, even above the issues with understanding PGP itself.
What about your respective SMTP servers' disks?
So the guy could have gone up to the girl and said, "Is this guy bothering you?" and then encouraged her to talk back to him herself. That's not nearly so stereotypical.
I had this discussion with one of my professors who basically said winning a CS or Math contest has little to no long term value for a student and the preparation required to win is not particularly useful.
If the SMTP server relays your message in plain text, isn't it vulnerable to snooping in transit?
OP, from your description of your relationship with math in school I think you would enjoy Lockhart's Lament (pdf warning): http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

I had a similar experience to yours and Lockhart's essay felt both inspiring and vindicating when I found it.
People who use Gmail can use Thunderbird with Enigmail. It works very well and there are detailed tutorials available. I agree though, it's still not as easy as it should be.

User studies of PGP:

Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (http://www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf)

Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of Email Encryption Software (http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2006/posters/sheng-poster_abstr...)
> PHP

> Pick a template engine at least.

There's a great one for PHP, it's called PHP.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3821125
you generally only know about the crypto on the first smtp hop. SMTP crypto is fail-open, unauthenticated and not end to end. it's transport only, decrypted on each SMTP hop.
I had a similar experience. As an undergrad I actually competed in the ACM competition but we had barely enough interest for a 3-person team. Furthermore, I only found out about the competition the year I graduated; advertising was very limited.

However, competitions like this are more focused on algorithms/math, which might not coincide with American universities' focus on software engineering. Hackathons, which do coincide, seem to be far more prevalent.
Every currency created since the advent of money 2,700 years ago has fit nicely into one of two classifications: Either it was a representative money system, deriving its worth from a link to some physical store of value like gold, silver or gemstones; or it was fiat [...]

And then the author suddenly stops and ignores the next obvious question: where do gold, silver and gemstones get their value from? The simple answer is because people like to have them and their supply is more or less fixed (which causes people to believe they won't suddenly lose their value). The exact same thing applies to bitcoins: bitcoin is the store of value.

The US already tried once to make a certain type of currency it couldn't control illegal: in 1933 it forbid anyone to own gold. That didn't make gold worthless any more than it will make bitcoins worthless. The only thing I believe that could do that to bitcoin is if it is replaced by another digital currency.
"People would be calling us constantly".

I probably would have been majorly bummed out at that moment.
Bit of a song and dance getting a full featured OS (like Debian) onto it to make it developer ready. Unless you are suggesting always using the Pixel for remote development.
As it was running on a shipping phone, I think it was at least as ready as Android at the time of the iPhone launch. The difference was that Google did a U-turn quite quickly while Nokia just pressed on with Symbian which turned out to be a dead end (like WM6, PalmOS and BN).