skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Be careful about this assumption if you are working at a small startup. I recently changed jobs and was not eligible for health insurance for the first month in my new job. I thought "Oh, that's fine. I'll just pay for a month of COBRA coverage." When I went to apply I was told that COBRA only applied to companies with at least 20 employees and that I should use my state's equivalent of COBRA instead. When I went to apply for that I was told that it applies to all companies, but it is not available to people who leave their job voluntarily.

I ended up having to get a short term individual insurance plan instead. It's a bit of a risk because if a major issue related to a pre-existing condition flared up, I would probably not be covered. It's my understanding that when the new health care laws take effect next year, it will help absolve much of the risk that comes from using an individual insurance plan.
According to the NRA's 2010 form 990[1], total revenue in that year was $227 million. According to your link, only one corporate donor gave the NRA between $5 million and $10 million and four gave between $1 million and $4.9 million, etc.

$100 million alone was from membership fees, $11 million from royalties, $11 million from sales of goods, $20 million from advertising, etc.

Those who claim that the NRA is just an arm of the firearms industry don't understand the fervency of gun owners in the US.

EFF needs to be the NRA of privacy and electronic freedom and everyone needs to get as fervent about privacy as gun owners are about the 2nd amendment.

1: http://ia601205.us.archive.org/32/items/NationalRifleAssocia...
I wonder why the creator hasn't answered this question?
woah! ex post facto laws are illegal according to the constitution... oh wait... they don't follow that thing anymore do they?
The Net Before the Net: John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider
The top 5 proactive measures to minimize MySQL downtime
If you don't know C, learn it. Its very different from python and java, but will give you a feel for whats going on "under the hood" so to speak in both those languages.
I think you get to a point, where you can't trust electronics at all. (Active network or no.)

Van Eck phreaking. Optical Time-Domain Eavesdropping [1]. Zero-Day exploits on operating systems, browsers, etc. Built-in vulnerabilities to processors. Backdoors in encryption algorithms. Acoustic Keyboard analysis [2]. Laser Audio detection [3]. Hard drive recovery. DRAM recovery. [4]

[1] http://www.rootsecure.net/content/downloads/pdf/optical_temp...

[2] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Keyboard_Acoustic_E...

[3] http://spie.org/x40847.xml

[4] https://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/

If I wanted to send (very) secure email, I think I would want a Kindle-like device, with an ePaper display, no physical keyboard just a touchscreen, no bluetooth or wifi or 3G or microphone - just a single USB port. I'd install the software I want on it, and then I'd physically destroy the USB port. I'd want 4 AA batteries, no recharge port. I guess it would need a camera, as well. And it would have its own Faraday cage. And a built-in, non-electronic method that slags the RAM and storage with acid; possibly by pulling a pin out. I'd wipe the screen clean, every time I used it.

How do I get data out of it? I drop data into a QR code sending system. It would generate one full-screen QR-code like image every second or so. On another computer, I'd have a camera that I'd show the device to, and it would read the QR codes, and reconstruct the data. I can reverse the process to send data to it. Show it my computer screen, and it decodes the QR codes to a data file.

And if I personally wanted to increase the security, I would buy three completely different hardware random generators, XOR their output together, and make a giant One Time Pad. I'd invent a way to keep track of where you and I were, in that pad. (You'd start at one end, and I at the other.) I'd physically copy that data onto my secure-Kindle, and your secure-Kindle, and then physically destroy the random number generating system in its entirety. (And then destroy the USB port on both Kindles.) If I ever got a suspicious message from you (re-using One Time Pad, etc.), I'd slag my secure-Kindle. And you and I would invent pass phrases that we would use to communicate messages in secret.

My secure-Kindle would also have a password to let me power it on. And it would have one or more dummy passwords. If I entered a dummy password, the system would act completely normally in every way, but it would secretly insert the phrase "[COMPROMISED, DO NOT TRUST!]" or something like it, in the middle of every message I send.

I might need to have the dummy password electronically wipe the system, to help protect you from a government forcing me to decrypt messages you sent me.

But I honestly don't think there's a good way to stop this. If they have physical possession of the device, and of me, they can force me to reveal my passwords, and there's nothing I can do to stop them.
Disrupting postal services industry! Liked the idea. Except its name starting with 'sch' :/
It depends on what you admire them for.

For good treatment of people? Look up Semco.

For strong brand management? Look up Procter & Gamble.

For strong marketing? Look up Nike.

For great engineering? Look up Google.

Ones that are good at all of the above? Very rare!
I'm sure it will be a consideration, but I wonder how MUCH of a consideration it really will end up being. The loudest voices against the government in the current debate seem unlikely to be people who would work for the government under most circumstances anyway. At the end of the day, the NSA will always be a secret government intelligence gathering organization, 3 descriptors that seem at odds with a big part of the hacker community to begin with.
That's a very good article (read it when it came out), it leaves out several reasons:

As the first "Called-Out" comment notes, it helps when you are right. For the current privacy concerns ... that's messier, e.g. there are people who want to harm us, like the Boston bombers, then again, our national security apparatus was completely useless against them, or the underwear bomber despite explicit warnings from e.g. his father. Etc. My point is that this is a lot less clear cut.

Most importantly, gun owners vote, and there are a lot more of them than NRA members. We vote in numbers that easily throw many elections, or even control of the Congress as in 1994. There are many national level politicians who found themselves spending more time with their families after betraying gun owners.

So we need to get more people voting on privacy. I should close this off for now, but I've got some observations I'll probably post at top level on how this works for gun owners.
Machine "reading" the email to glean useful advertising data != machine "reading" the email to find any excuse to label you a terrorist.
As far as their money goes. 4 million members at ~$25 per year = $100 million in annual revenue from dues alone. That doesn't count donations. The industry does of course contribute, but the mistake gun control activists make over and over again is that they assume the NRA is about money. They think they can outspend the NRA and win. They can't because the NRA is not about money. It's about people who are well organized and passionately engaged in the cause.

If you listen to people talk, you'd assume the NRA is one of the big spending DC lobbyists. They're not. Look up where they rank on open secrets and how much they donate to candidates. They have a presence, but it's no where near indicative of their power.

About a week before each election every NRA member gets a bright orange postcard in the mail with a list of the candidates, local and national, that are up for election and exactly what the NRA thinks of their stance on guns. Those members pay attention and vote. That is what makes the NRA powerful.
Is XML really slower then JSON? Round II (2013)
in 2004 things were different, in 2013 technology has moved on and this paper, by David Lee, experimentally tests the generally accepted notion that JSON is much faster then XML.
He's condemned to be a fugitive forever now. He can never go home, probably never see his family again. He also left his girlfriend behind.

So no he hasn't sacrificed his life, just his home, country, family and friends
The Congress is not investigating the President with any desire to get to the truth, they (the House) are merely keeping this in the public eye to make him and Clinton look bad for Clinton's run for the presidency.

We do not have a functioning legislature.
You know it's low level? How is it different?
>sold pieces of it here and there

care to back that up?
I hope pg is reading these comments and is pleased that hn has become one more of the innumerable discussion boards where calling the U.S. a "police state, plain and simple" has become part of the everyday discourse. Yuck.

I know there has always been a strain of the paranoid (sometimes well-earned) in hacker culture, but presumably it wasn't what this site was built to highlight.
Because NSA, CIA, etc... are in Maryland and Virginia?
If I'm wandering through the internet, it means I'm being unproductive and my body doesn't want to work. Whether I'm willing to accept it or not, I'm burned out or about to be burned out if I am in that situation. So take the night off.

Also, I'd recommend just having one news source, I can spend hours trolling The Register, SomethingAwful, HN, FunnyJunk, Reddit - but at the end of the day the only news that matters (to me) is HN.

Additionally, reading HN (constantly) has helped me refine my writing style to the tastes of HN.

I think it's called mono-tasking, do one thing and do it well at any one time.

Don't forget to take note when your body/mind gets tired, running & excercise will help you get more energy. But there will be times where you might just want to play XBOX, or eat, or troll the internet - all are signs of burnout. Mono-task to recovery.

I say this because I've done it before, I've told myself "Hey I'm not burned out, I'll just read this thread and at the same postulate that SQL query"... you just burn out faster.
Glassdoor’s Top 25 Most Difficult Companies To Interview
The tragically cancelled games that never were
Why You're Not Getting More Likes
I never claimed that the NRA is an arm of the firearms industry. Firearms are a viable enough commodity that they generate such revenues. Large corporate donations indicate the industry's health. Certainly it is because people like, and often need, their guns.

Bottom line, there's vastly more money going into fighting against privacy than for it.
I was on vacation last week, went to the Puget Sound area in Washington. Downtown Seattle has the usual homeless people wandering around like most cities in the U.S.. We went to Victoria BC in Canada one afternoon. No homeless beggars threatening the pedestrians. Crazy Canadians and their healthcare system, getting the mentally ill off the streets.
And they have their own lobby, the National Shooting Sports Foundation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Shooting_Sports_Founda...
Thankyou, that means a lot ;)
I don't get it. Is this real?
Haha you do but you are obviously correct.
My point of view about this is that if releasing the source code and allowing modifications and redistribution was the norm, technology that erode civil liberties would be naturally selected out or replaced.
It's even more ironic when you consider that Greenwald has criticized others in the media for focusing more on Snowden and his day-to-day actions or location instead of the NSA revelations.
A new Malaria vaccine has just completed human trials with 100% effectivity.
The implication is that it's unconstitutional.

And a violation on such scale...
Not saying Stallman is like Hitler but I honestly find his views such as "everything should be free (as in speech)" very hypocritical. At a conference I attended he also stated "artists and musicians should not expect money for their work" which I find is again very arrogant. Those pursuits also require effort and those people can determine how much they value what they create. I still think Stallman has provided a ton of value to the community, I just disagree with some of his views. He is still a good person.
@gringofyx: it looks like you took a passive-aggressive approach, and sabotaged the company from the inside once you returned to Bulgaria. You know what I think, to some extent, you are the younger version of John, as ruthless as him. This is why you accepted to work for him, since you felt the attraction of the same. I would really love to see how your next ventures unfold, especially from the human side of things. I am sure financially you'll do well.
It's all about the billion$.
We absolutely should expect historic pages to work in modern browsers (you want to just wantonly throw away history for no good reason?)
And you absolutely cannot reliably run older browsers. This logic doesn't even work out right- So, once all the servers in the world break backwards compatibility with the old browsers (thus making them absolutely incapable of being run on modern networks), THEN we should go back to our modern browsers, and make them render the old pages again, after we dropped support. What?
If you restrict the basis of decision-making to certainty rather than "estimated likelihood"

That's not what I said. I said that the law should not be able to impose punishment based on likelihood of harm, only based on actual harm. That has nothing to do with whether or not people should take into account likelihood of harm when making their own decisions; of course they should.

the limits there are not abnormally low because the legislators and bureaucrats are using unsound information, but because they intentionally ignore (or don't even bother acquiring) recommendations which indicate that a higher speed would be safe

Which is exactly what I have said elsewhere in these posts. In what you quoted, I was only pointing out that in fact, even if the legislators and bureaucrats were trying to set the "right" speed limits; they can't, because they can't possibly have all the relevant information. So the common belief that the legislators and bureaucrats are "helping to keep the roads safe" by setting speed limits is wrong in two ways: (1) that's not their real motivation; and (2) they're not capable of doing it anyway.
El-Erian: A lesson on gender bias from my daughter
Sorry, but I can't find any sign of an "Open Messaging Service" by Yahoo anywhere. I can't find clients, I can't find sources. The OP doesn't cite a single post but brazenly makes broad assertions with nothing to back them up.

Citations, links, anything, please?

Edit: Apparently the post is fictional. I didn't realize this when I skimmed it.
"Thousands of Daily Mail readers couldn't be wrong."
It will be interesting. They could launch several fully-automated business based on autonomous vehicles: taxi, parcel delivery, (B2B) distribution, and probably many more. Other options are for them to license out the technology, or get into vehicle manufacturing, but I think those are far less interesting.
As the director of one of the world's most well funded intelligence agencies one would expect that Petraeus would have been properly versed in all manner of security precautions, as well as knowing how to conduct clandestine affairs without coming under the scrutiny of his counterparts, yet this was not the case at all.

So, either Petraeus was a blundering fool, or there exists no privacy for anyone...

I'm guessing that Petraeus was no blundering fool.
That's not a problem unique to encryption. Firearms have good uses and bad uses - you can hunt and feed your family, or you could kill someone. With a powerful privacy advocacy group, as proposed by OP or like the EFF as mentioned by others, you can have the same voice like the NRA does to promote responsible "good" uses of firearms but for privacy technology.
> You insult people who have experienced a police state by calling what we are experiencing a police state.

I think you insult their experience much more by allowing your country to become a police state while denying what's happening.

It's true, it could be far, far worse. But that doesn't change the fact that the US is rapidly moving into that direction. The fact that the executive branch and the legislature both support the police state, doesn't make it any less of a police state. Yes, you can call it something else, but a police state by any other name stinks just as much.
They're all challenging hacks. I have this quote by Randy Pausch visible all the time on my computer:

"The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people."

You have to try, and you have to be persistent
I tried to register with github and now it just loops a popup that closes immediately forever when I try to sign in with github or register with github. Cool.

Update:
Tried it in my unprotected chrome and after a few bumps got it working. Once you are signed in the demo is pretty good.
>I even proposed to have a results-based salary

Do you realize how insane such a suggestion is? I know it probably sounds totally reasonable from a "the harder you work the better you do" mindset, but companies abandoned that in the 1980s. There's a reason why even as technology has multiplied the productivity of employees by leaps and bounds average salaries have remained flat since 1980.

If you want to understand managers/business people, read their books. Seriously, read the books they have on their shelf. Books written for managers are like something produced in a bizarre sociopathic universe. And they very consciously divorce the idea of employee compensation from the value of the work an employee does.
It seems to me like a great way for the government to really start keeping close tabs on you would be to have any sort of tech job for them and quit -- especially after Snowden.
>As long as the devices occasionally share a (W)LAN, it will work.

How about a VPN? I have a work laptop that is rarely (if ever) connected to my home network directly. -- However it is connected to my home network through a VPN daily.
I stopped reading after "Yes, we filed for a patent"
Also, the voice of the presenter in the video sounds like from some tele-shopping channel.
This is the most confusing blog post I've ever read. Is this guy on planet earth?
Thanks, that's some good info! I might prototype with Arduino as a proof of concept and see how far I can get with these TI boards if/when I put the project into "production".
For those that don't make it that far through, one of the things that's mentioned that I hadn't heard about before is that in 1982 a GCHQ employee called Geoffrey Prime was caught selling British secrets to the Soviets, not because of the work of the security services but because he confessed after being caught sexually assaulting children whose movements he'd been monitoring via his job.
The archive.org guy:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/what-...
Why do you care about that, we all know that because we all sin, God will all send us to hell for eternity. That hypothetical situation is much more awful than your hypothetical situation!
Yes. I made a lot of sacrifices to my programming skills to take on other roles and responsibilities to move the company forward. Now, 3 years later, I'm finding it tough to leave. I wish I could just jump ship, but having bills to pay is a huge motivator to maintain the status quo.
Being able to run runtime-less and still use the language is quite high on the priorities, and I believe moving GC to pluggable library types and cleaning up the standard library feed into that.
Free time tracking software
Free time tracking software with all features for 1 - 3 users - no trial period.
primaERP / TIME TRACKING is a cloud based application which allows you to track and evaluate your time.
Application automatically generates reports of the tracked time, that can be used for billing your clients. Reports allow you to evaluate the efficiency of each of your tasks or projects and provide you all the information needed for making the right decisions in order to increase productivity.
You can collaborate with your team on the projects, delegate tasks and get the instant answer to the question „What the hell is my team doing“.
App is connected to external applications such as Basecamp, MS Exchange calendar and Google Calendar. It has an open API, that allows you to easily connect your favourite project management tool or any other software of your choice.
It is a very useful app for both personal and business use, especially intended for entrepreneurs, managers, self-employed, business and productivity consultants, freelancers and others, who want to know, where do they invest their time.
Related but I just checked the USPTO, and the trademark for "State Secrets" is available.
if you read the comments thread on jwz's site there's a discussion that concludes that blink doesn't blink fast enough to cause seizures- There's specific MIL specs they cite.
The "day dreamer" signature is relevant
> Junto - Day dreamer.

From the page.
Their concerns are not about unencrypted email, they refuse to install eavesdropping equipment in their server rack.

You can encrypt your email all you want but it's not encrypted in the space between your load balancer and your app server.
On the subject of whether it's a police state, illegality is irrelevant. If the law makes it a police state, it's still a police state.
It appears to be a projection of what could be, if Yahoo! followed through with juntos' vision.
Perhaps I am crazy but maybe we should stop entrusting corporations to handle our private communications. I think the real feature of secure, private messaging is a P2P or federated approach.
Well, actually - yes; depending on the country. But that's not the point. The point is that your own country has to go through more convoluted international channels to get your data.
There is also vastly more money against the NRA than for it. With Bloomberg around, it's essentially infinite. You don't need money. You need people who care.
Costco is also interesting due to subtle non-uniformity between stores and a steadily changing product line-up. I'm lucky to live in an area where I'm an easy drive to 3 Costcos within 10-15 minutes and 2 more within 25-30 minutes from my home and they all have subtly different products.

We'll find some item that we like there only for it to be completely gone 3 months later and never to return. While at another local Costco they have palettes full of it. 3 months after that the product will disappear from all Costcos and a different, but better one will show up everywhere. Things like Wine selection will also differ quite a bit from store to store.

That or there will be sudden changes to the packaging of staple items in the store for no real reason. Milk, for example, seems to get a packaging overhaul every year or so.

Either way, even with limited choice, over time the number of products you might buy at a Costco turns out to be quite a few.

Other retailers, on the other hand, are surprisingly more uniform in their product selection. The half dozen Targets in my area offer more or less the same products and fit it all within 1 or 2 master floor layouts.
hey I know the feeling :] Hope it gets better, soon. Sports is definitely the best natural way, next to meditation..