skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think he's trying to make it more secure, just trying to get a minimum level of security where he can open the laptop and input a password. Right now, the OP is unable to do that due to OSX not allowing any applications to run at the login screen.
Good read and a good reminder.

My primary job isn't writing software, but from time to time I do still end up writing software. My unofficial approach has been to solve a given set of problems, without adding complexity or new problems.

I wrote one piece of software that automated a process that had previously been 1/2 of a person's full-time job. The software I created was !@#$%^&. Part of the reason my software was so bad was because I was a relative novice programmer. But the biggest reason it was so bad was that the person who did the job had been so non-specific and inconsistent about requirements. While my software blew, I captured and solidified the underlying processes.

About 3-4 years after I finished that piece of software, I heard that a "professional" software programmer was hired to rewrite it from scratch. My first thought was, "OMG, some poor slop is going to have to wade through my !@#$%^& code!!!". But then I realized that I was actually grateful. I knew my code blew and it was going to get replaced with code that hopefully doesn't blow. More importantly, I knew that I had left the next programmer so much more of a foundation than I had when I had started working on the problem.

In the 3-4 years prior to the rewrite, I had been ashamed of what I had done. Since I found out about the rewrite, I've actually been really proud of my contribution. Because my biggest contribution wasn't code, it was the analysis and detailed documentation of the underlying processes.
This is similar to the difference between Ask and Guess cultures.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/375/ask_and_guess/
"identify, remove from office and bring to justice those officials who have abused power"

This, here, is the crux of the matter. Drag into the light the parasites that consume the living flesh of this society.
> Because Linux is a success, it must be because of Linus's particular brand of being a jerk [...] If you have a problem, explain what's wrong calmly and coherently, it's more efficient. Simply telling someone that they, or their code, is a piece of shit is not likely to be as efficient.

You're setting up quite a straw man there by making it look as though Linus's first reply to things he doesn't like is "this is a piece of shit". In fact, if you go through these threads, in almost every case there is an escalation where he explains his reasoning first, in detail and repeatedly. When someone really doesn't get it, he will indeed escalate to foul language. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Unlike established corporations, the Linux community doesn't have options like subtly threatening to fire someone.
OCaml in finance
Completely off-topic, but oh-my-god if the Guardian mobile website doesn't look so much better on a desktop browser than their non-mobile website... I thought they'd had a redesign for a moment.
This is a great post, in which the lead security person at Etsy built a system to determine which HTTPS/TLS CA's actually got used in traffic from their office to the Internet. Less than 29% of the CAs their browser trusted actually saw any use!

This sounds like something to be outraged about but is actually constructive good news: if more people repeat the experiment, someone could invest some engineering time into building a tool that would prune out CAs from browser trust stores. Every CA removed from your browser is one less attack vector.
Envy is an Asset
It's easy to spark interest in other developers by converting their Ruby/Python code to Clojure.

But LightTable has made it possible for me to recommend an editor that has integrated repl feedback and lets them hit the ground running with Clojure when they ask me how they should get started.

Since Lisps are so tool/workflow-dependent, it's just way too easy for a newcomer to dismiss it all after a bad experience because they simply didn't know about electric parens or they never discovered the tight repl feedback loop that makes us so productive. And it makes it frustrating for those of us as well that are trying to convince others to give Lisps a shot since we can't stand over their shoulders.

Sometime I'd like to make a well-planned gif (like that on the homepage of http://www.sublimetext.com/) that gives newcomers a glimpse of a solid workflow to strive for.
I'm not disagreeing with that, but with people that complains Apple stuff is expensive, except when it's not and they still complain for the opposite reason...
When I travel in areas at-risk for malaria or dengue, I treat my clothes with Permethrin as well.

I also opt for Picaridan over DEET. Doesn't feel as nasty on your skin.

That setup kept me bite-free for three months in Southeast Asia and India.
> And what are these "peers" that exist in our profession?

Your peers are people you work with to achieve a common goal.

> I have a team lead who doles out work, with a manager over him, with a manager over him and so on. The basic structure is no different than that of a dictatorship.

The basic structure is also no different from a democracy. Or a large open-source project.

> What's this "basic respect and human dignity" you find in your corporation which you can't find on lkml?

I hope this doesn't come as a surprise to you, but you're not supposed to rage out and flame your peers. It shows a lack of self control. Those examples you gave of CEOs losing control are notorious for a reason.

> I hope you never have to keep the network and desktops of a Wall Street trading floor running.

Do those still exist? (serious question)

> What planet did you just descend from?

Regards,
Found: Apple's Secret Support Page for Business & Government
"Q.md5 - to one-way-encode passwords etc. in insecure websites before sending to the server"

This is a very bad advice which leads to a false sense of security:

1. A fast hash function is not desired for hashing passwords. (Bruteforce)

2. There are TBs of rainbowtables for unsalted md5.

3. If you use a salt, you would have to expose it clientsided.
i interpreted it the same way. Saying, even if he was tortured, he wouldn't be able to give up access to documentation. I think it's funny that we don't even second thought about the concept of torture. It has become too common.
The reason the antagonist of this story treated the woman "like crap" was because he wanted sex.

Thus, I think the classes you propose would have worked if they dealt with "how to not treat girls like crap" and still get regular sex from hot women.
THIS THREAD HAS BEEN MARKED AS DUPLICATE

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215
At best you can "it just works if you already know it well"; having done Windows development at three separate jobs, I still find it fiddly to get a dev environment working on Windows.

If everything in the MS ecosystem "just works" then I am either willfully overlooking its great features or like so much else, it's a function of what you know best.

There's little to gain by switching to another OS if you have enough money for licenses and you know its ecosystem well.
SMS, Voice on Verizon subject to main-in-the-middle attacks
He said he's not looking for high level security. Just something basic to "keep honest people honest".
As someone who's going to be buying a ton of shipping services, I really want something like this, the problem is that your website really doesn't give me an instant view of what I can actually do without diving right into the docs.

I bounced instead of doing all of that. The meat of your pitch is under the fold, and if I press "get started" - I have to sign-up to see anything. Let people see shit before!

"See how it works" should just scroll down below the fold (not to the docs!), and below this fold it should say what I can do in real terms. "Integrate faster" is too generic to be useful and all the tests are too developer-centric with curl calls being the "Try it now" option - instead of something I can play with as a non-dev, and you better believe the person actually looking for this service isn't a developer either.

I deal with sales / manufacturing engineering - not web work, but I'm the economic buyer trying to get this for our production line - I don't want to sift through your docs to see what calls / functionality I can get. A use case would be nice.

Just some unsolicited feedback.
It's just not possible, there are thousands of people who contribute to the Linux kernel. I believe I saw a chart a while back that showed two or three levels of hierarchy between Linus and contributors. Realistically, you run a small team of people who run other small teams of people who....

And because of that, it's entirely possible to be at the head of an organisation made up, primarily, of far better people than yourself.

Heck, it's highly probable that's going to happen if you fall far beneath the average in social skills and have significant leverage along some other axis. Nice people will generally refuse to work with an arsehole - but every now and then someone will, (maybe because they have thicker skin than the average, or value your leverage more, or come in for less of your flak.) So, the people who are nice and will, for whatever reason, put up with you tend to end up filling those positions because no-one else can do so effectively. If they're nasty, then no-one will be more likely to work with them than they are to work with you and the problem recurs one level down - except this time you need to find people'll who'll work with five (or whatever the size of your immediate project team is) arseholes rather than one to make the project work.

This all, of course, depends on the alternatives that the people at the base of the hierarchy have. In situations where the people can't go elsewhere it often seems to be very much a case of, 'You'll take it and like it, if you know what's good for you.'

Does any of this mean Linus is bad at running teams? No. But it does mean that he's not necessarily any good at it just because the system's giving reasonable output. The naive model of a hierarchy as something in which all the influence flows from the top down is nonsense.
Capital Market Climate Change
Cross account auth with gcutil in Google Compute Engine
Considering the norms of the particular industry would be good advice, but there are often choices within the industry. Dressing up False Choices in machismo not only obscures reality, but plays right into the hands of managers inclined to take advantage.
He is probably using some encryption technique which requires multiple keys to unlock, perhaps similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
Ask HN: do advertisers pay for impressions if I'm using adblock?
I use adblock plus, so I almost never see online ads. The only website I've found smart enough to address this is hulu. What about all the others? Do they charge for impressions even if I can't see an ad?
Agreed. The specificity of his claim seems to support that, as well:

>I cannot be coerced...

vs. "won't", "would never", et. al.
that is a bit childish. the time you began development is not relevant, and seeing as q.js is already popular, it is safe to say it will stay that way.
changing the name is great advice. consider it.
Could you elaborate a bit on what you can do with scripting in Reaper? That sounds very interesting.
> One thing's for certain, if you get caught doing something wrong in that situation, you're going to get an earful and it will most certainly NOT happen again.

I am really tempted to play the "citation needed" card on that one but in my experience yelling on someone has never prevented them doing the same mistake again. Quite the contrary.

Are the geeks on HN that were yelled at senseless during PE better at basket-ball or sports ? I Thought so.

Oh I don't say that encouraging someone with swearing or cursing to rise the adrenaline is bad. Cursing someone or yelling at him to get information conveyed ? Ridiculous.

> One thing's for certain, if you get caught doing something wrong in that situation, you're going to get an earful and it will most certainly NOT happen again.

When do we really man up and just punch the other guy in the face ? That should make sure he doesn't make the same mistake again since we just associate something physically to make things connect.

> jlgreco's example of working on a farm is incredibly relevant because one tiny mistake on a farm can literally cost the lives of anyone or everyone in the family. If you're working on a tractor and you get something remotely wrong then suddenly you can't harvest this season, and everyone is broke and starving. Or the tractor falls and kills you and anyone else working under it.

Right. Because on the farms, they are dumb enough to let newbies who saw a cow for the first time in their life on the tractor when real dangerous work is needed. I have worked on a farm for some days and my SO's cousins are all farmers. They ain't that dumb.

> "Please, don't loosen that bolt until you jack up the rest." is NOT perfectly fine if it does not sufficiently drive the importance of that sentence home.

Yes, it does. We don't need cursing words as big punctuation sign to get our attention focused on the task at hand. We need words like "now, listen boy, this is dangerous and this is how you do it safely". It works as well and you don't perpetuate violence and intimidation disguised as manhood.
I'm curious, how do you document your code?

Or are you strictly in the camp that if it is machine-readable and works properly that you've done your job?
Great work guys. I'm sure you've heard a hundred times that this idea is too small or too something, but it is executed super well. Hopefully we can get our own moved over from Google Sites (yikes).
Seems like anyone with a clue would have made a raw copy of the data before applying the password. Assuming the raw media is physically accessible to them, that is. Hmmm....
Laird v. Tatum definitely bares some insight as to what the EFF is up against, the case is one of countless others in which the Supreme Court has considered the "chilling effect" of various government policies on protected expression.

If you're interested in this concept, take a closer look at Wieman v. Updegraff (where the term "chilling effect" was first used), Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General, a case very similar to Laird, and Meese v. Keene.

The following paper goes quite deep into the matter:

http://www.bc.edu/dam/files/schools/law/lawreviews/journals/...
For me #2 is a feature :)

It does take a bit longer but you have more control of how things fit in the mix.
Why Some People Are Mosquito Magnets
Right. They're just doing it to make a political statement and pull in donations/new members. Maybe they could get a religious organization that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a member of in Denver to join as a plaintive and argue that by killing citizen members of their group the government was interfering with the practice of their religion. But, I don't think that would even pass in US courts since you couldn't prove Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was under direct surveillance while on US soil and that it played a role in his killing. The American Intelligence Community is completely untouchable. Honestly, I don't even think Obama is powerful enough to stop the surveillance if he wanted to. It would just go "compartmental" in the organization or they'd get rid of Obama.
As Tyler E suggested:

"Wonder if he could somehow get his one-button clicker to translate morse code into ascii."

Use the Arduino Leonardo to send native keyboard key strokes into the USB port of the Mac - it's robust and works every time - plug and play (once it's been programmed).

The Leonardo could be programmed to listen out for a specific pattern of switching and then send the entire password down the USB cable, or alternatively it could have some simple or complex feedback (lights / tones / onscreen keyboard display on a second mini screen) to allow individual characters/keystrokes to be sent down the USB cable from the Arduino.

I've been making stuff like this in the UK for the charity Scope, and their users - often people who have cerebral palsy. I could potentially make you something and post it over - if you are interested drop me a line.
In my anecdotal experience the problem with "yell on my employee to make them work better" is not when it is used for getting your point across when they have done something wrong. When it fails is when you repeatedly rant at them. Structural problems cannot be solved by yelling at people.
Web site design is always on topic on HN. You are safe here.
Narrator's comment, to which I was responding, implied that some might want a fork because the host is a 'bad' host.

The other barrier is the effort required to compete with what is currently the most used Linux kernel base. It's not like forking OpenOffice, KDevelop, or Eclipse where you can compete as an alternative on top of a standard OS. It's replacing the basis of the OS that everything else is written to work for.
Meet the Dropbox for Books…Ownshelf
I back to point A. The NSA doesn't want my stinking DNA. There's no actionable intelligence from it, which is the "all" referred to in that silly WP link. It's completely lunacy. The other two are moot points as a result, I just though they were funny.

Jeez, even if they have it, who the hell cares beyond it beyond the the principle of having my privacy invaded.

This thread is idiotic. HN quality has been just obliterated with the tin-foil hat/NWO crowd. The stupid is just breathtaking.
As a tech entrepreneur that got parachuted into the federal government a month ago as a Presidential Innovation Fellow - I will say that the people working on next.data.gov are really tech savvy and thinking hard about how to make this site as usable and accessible as possible both for developers and the general public.
I don't understand why projects like this don't use anonymization techniques to protect themselves from C&Ds. Release through torrents, take donations through bitcoin, etc.
This! A thousand times, this!
"If people are interested in electronic privacy, I think there is a lot to be learned from the success and methods of the Anti-Saloon league."

I agree, but I would add that the key difference here is that the Anti-Saloon League had a clear, concise, understandable goal. Privacy and anonymity advocates are all over the place.
I would find it intresting whether tacile interfaces of that kind would aggravate the problem we allready know as phantom ringing. You sure know the feeling that your phone has just rung in your pocket, but when you get it out, it didn't ring at all. Having these tacile buttons on your skin will proably just make the problem worse.
With the NSA saving all your data, it's entirely possible someone could steal it. Unlikely maybe, but your data may very well be there 50 years later. Whatever the government becomes, whoever gets access to that data in that time, how many people will have tried to hack into it in that time.
I can't wait until the first public attack using this method to capture a Twitter, Facebook, or Google account. Score one for incredibly badly designed two-factor auth!
This is great! Thank you, it's about time!
So how do you actually find first class flights for 80-90% off?
> "You can't have your cake and eat it too."

Sure you can. You can grant ownership of the underlying cables to the company willing to build out the network, essentially granting them guaranteed utility profits even if a competitor springs up via the Open Access that you can mandate as part of the deal.

When DSL was oh-so-briefly deregulated, small towns might not have been enjoying the (relatively) high-speed bonanza their neighbors were shortly offered, but they were still getting DSL (inasmuch as they physically could) and AT&T was still profiting off the network, even when competitors were offering the higher-margin services over AT&T lines.

It worked just fine for voice services and it worked wonderfully for the short period of time it applied to data over that same network.

There's no reason it wouldn't work just as well if applied to data over fiber or coax or whatever else.
Congrats on the speaking gig.
Camp at the end until the wind turns?
No, I did it myself and ever since I have been disappointed with the result. If I did it again I would definitely spend a lot more effort on this (or get someone to do it, although that isn't always easy to do).
Would an American Jury Even Convict Edward Snowden?
heh, you bet ! When I read the article, I was like FFS ! You've got to be kidding me ! Is this really on the NY-effing-times ! ...but then I read the comments ...ah well, first world ignorance of ^low-tech^ solutions. Next thing you know somebody would be 'discovering' water is good to fight dehydration ! :)
On the issue of a central leader figure, I have seen projects fail precisely because someone was staking a career on it. In that scenario, the customers you truly serve are your boss and your boss's boss. Users? Damn them and their expensive 'requirements'. Support? Someone else's problem. Maintainability? How is that going to get me promoted? All of those things cost time and money, and therefore are risks to be avoided. Better to spend your time burying bad news and selling your failure as 'success' to those who really matter.

All of the self-managing teams I've ever worked on have been much more user-focused and success-oriented (in the true sense) than any project where someone was afraid of losing their head. Self-managing teams just seem to be immune to certain kinds of office politics.
Truly hardcore games will remain on the PC for the same reason they always have: input devices. Nothing else offers the complexity of the keyboard or the precision of the mouse, which is why console gaming has always been a second-class citizen, with auto-aim a necessity and the most exciting new genres impossible. Unless and until we see radically new input devices, that's going to remain the case.
Instagram Designer Tim Van Damme Is Leaving Facebook For Dropbox
Heritability is precisely specified. It allows you to make predictions within its realm of validity. It's useful and so it is used.

If you know my genome, and you know the broad social environment I live in, you can make more accurate predictions about my obesity than if you only know my social environment.

> This is no mere statistical fine point: it means that the entire project of assessing how essentially genetic traits are in terms of measured heritability coefficients is a fool’s errand.

The key word in this statement is "essentially," which in this context is being used to mean "fundamentally." But we DO know something about the environment, so it doesn't matter if heritability is a "fundamental" measure, if all you want to do is use it to make predictions about things.

If you live on an Earth that has food on it you can expect that the heritability of "starves to death" is different than if you live on an Earth that does not have food on it, in which case heritability is undefined because everyone dies (no variation, divide by zero). Similarly, if you have performed your heritability studies in a modern Western society then that heritability estimate remains valid for people drawn from that society despite the fact that it is not an "essential" measure of anything.

None of this contradicts the quotes that you have included, but I want to make sure people understand that there is actually a reason we use heritability, it matches intuitions so long as your environment is fixed or similar, and that it does actually provide us with information about the world we live in. It doesn't tell you how controllable a phenotype is through environmental factors, but it does tell you how much it's being controlled right now.