skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If we give up privacy we may become much safer.

Cut the propaganda.
Stop assailing our great leader Snowden Christ.
I'd love to know what the consequences of making public these secret court orders and trials. One company standing up to the government and making public the actual content and threats could make a big difference.
A little idea I had after posting this earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6185263

Thought others might like the idea!
Doesn't really present much evidence that this is happening so far, but I wouldn't be surprised if the continuing revelations push more and more hackers in this direction, especially at the margins. The possibility of such a "self-correcting" measure to the surveillance state, even without legislative reform, is one reason to be optimistic (though it would be naive to put too much hope in that alone)
Whenever I see something inspired by Clarke, Asimov or Roddenberry, I wonder who is inspiring the kids of today. Which movies or authors? Or will be indebted by the guidance of the early SF authors for the next 100 years?

My first guess is Avatar as a grand inspiration, but who are the writers out there standing of the giants before them? Quoting country music usually gets me in trouble, but "Who's gonna fill their shoes?"
Show HN: KanbanJovi -- A simple Kanban Tool for distributed teams using GApps
But they found no correlation. That's the point. Until someone can at least show that, there is not much we can discuss.
I don't see a police state

That's because you haven't been on the wrong end of it yet. Many others in the same state have, and their experience trumps yours.
As a different, less technical response: crypto is so hard because it's natural to assume that cryptanalysts are so persistent.

A good crypto library should keep your data safe for decades. We don't make the same demands (no bugs, due to no updates possible) of other software that often.
WxPython: How to Redirect Python’s Logging Module to a TextCtrl
I'm not really sure what you mean. If I have $100 in treasuries is there anything but a US gov't default that will prevent me from getting my whatever yield?
I have approx 6 months salary saved. I used to have more, but some home emergencies meant I had to eat into some of my savings recently. The government here decided that pursuing austerity for years without end was the way forward, and began implementing all sorts of new taxes, so I get paid the same as I did 4 years ago, but bring home approx 20% less. Same government policy has forced countless local businesses to shut down, meaning that there are very few job openings (programming or otherwise) available for the last couple of years. So I could quit now, manage approx 6 months payments and then stand a very good chance of still having no job. That or stay where I am and post about how my life sucks on HN.
> Wow, that's a rant you wrote!

Thanks :) I'm tired of seeing this kind of post over and over again. At best it's misguided in that it's only telling half the story, at worst it's linkbait.

> We should use software that allows encrypting of sensible information on the client's side. That's it.

Well said. If you care about security, this is the answer. We really, really need good, ubiquitous email encryption software. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely to be widely adopted anytime soon.

> If they want show me ads - all right then, let me choose out of categories that I'm really interesting in(i.e. Android, Ruby, running, my favorite authors and tv-shows etc-etc). And I will click that links.

The holy grail of online advertising is ads that provide value to the user. This is the model behind sponsors of nerdy podcasts (http://5by5.tv). The ads reads can actually be helpful. It's not easy to do with a user base as diverse as Gmail's, but I'm sure Google is trying.
Quite accurate. I was hoping for some sweet dev talks or something special for 'Geek Week' but all I got was a bunch of gaming videos.
That's a really good analogy, made me laugh out loud about the inept guy helping the girl. It was more or less just like that.

These days I have a more dubious attitude, I tend not to beleive something someone says until I've confirmed it with my own eyes. I mean, I'll pay it lip-service and make all the right noises, but then I'll go sneak off and investigate for myself.
For my first developer position, I actually went into the interview with my own laptop and showed the two developers some of my projects written in DarkBasic. They could see the code if they wanted to but I haven't released that code anywhere. The demos were very visual which was a great hook in an interview, I highly recommend that people take their closed source projects to interviews just to demonstrate what they are capable of.
Hey, thanks for the comment! I had originally made this to loop on the wall during a PLUTO party :) so didn't add an index. I'll consider adding it next time I get a moment.
Embarrassing typos reveal the dangers of the lonely data analyst
Sacrified his life? Please stop. He merely leaked classified data and sold pieces of it here and there. He is basically living the life of a celebrity right now yet dramafies his existence.
Even before seeing that the submission was from techdirt, the headline itself contains the type of assertion that is highly questionable on its face.

1. What is a "top" hacker? Someone who has hacked the most systems? Hacked the most secure system? Created the most cleverest exploit?

2. How do you know that it's actually the "top" hackers who are refusing to work with the USG? Because quite conceivably, there are great hackers who are already working at the USG and aren't revealing themselves or quitting in protest. The hackers you have now speaking out may indeed be refusing to work for the USG, but your article is then based on a self-selecting sample.

3. Is being a "top" hacker an immutable thing? If top mercenaries said they'd never join the Navy SEALS, does that mean the SEALs are screwed? Only if you forget that they have no shortage of young men who are pruned and groomed to being elite fighters.
Review: Android 4.3 future-proofs platform with multitude of minor changes
Stay classy, Godaddy - you are the poster child for corporate sleaze and amorality.
"Also the sample size should be increased by a factor of 10."

You could say the same for just about any study. Obviously that would be a good thing. I don't know what the relevant p-values are, here, but my guess is that it's statistically significant. (I'm sure the full paper will include more statistical analysis of significance.)

I think more interesting would be to see how this varied across sector - these were all HR positions. It may be that the results would be quite different in, for example, programming positions.

In any case, it's an interesting question to be asking, and I'm glad people are doing research in it!
> everywhere I read tells me that Arduino is not power efficient at all, and people have to get creative to conserve power.

Not sure what you mean here, a microcontroller platform like Arduino can be extremely low power. The AVR chip itself uses a few mW running at full speed, and less in sleep mode (less than an LED). What uses most power is other devices in your circuit, you need to be careful with them and shut them off when not needed.
Born Again in a Second Language
I dont know about your second point, but I definitely agree the link quotes another article that says something "might" happen.
While I hope that the intelligencia of america wake the hell up and stop cooperating, this article is a crock of shit.
Encryption is hard because computers are constrained by (but exceptionally good at) discrete maths. All encryption does is slow cryptographic attacks down (a lot).

Also, proper key management is out of reach for most of us.
As I remember hearing it... Companies are willing to do white label products for trader joe's because of the purchasing leverage of aldi
I admit it is a nice wordplay on "bugs" that spooks use and the very British coarse word - bugger.
Nice! The next question is "How do you make this useful to Commercial Real Estate?" Answer that and you have yourself a business!
BlackBerry might be going private again
But this is what I worry about. A competent corrupt government is mostly concerned with crushing its genuine enemies. An incompetent one thrashes around crushing arbitrary people.
I think it was a reference to John Snow from a Game of Thrones. I'm undecided how I feel about that.
Patent cases are civil, you can absolutely choose where you want to go, correct. I can't imagine the same is true for which jurisdiction the government uses in handing down a NSL...as I type this I wonder if it came out of Maryland though...
Except... They aren't only recruiting "smart college grads" they're recruiting smart college Freshmen etc. I know several people who did internships with the NSA/DoD starting their freshmen year. And I can tell you at that point there is still the shiny, "I work for the NSA! This is so cool!" feeling.
I think it's safe to say that most pro-gun American's would hold their pro-gun views with or without NRA propaganda. (but don't get me wrong, the NRA does spew plenty unwarranted of propaganda) Guns are very much a cultural issue, and if you are completely and 100% anti-gun, you are lacking a similar amount of empathy for people's rights as the very political groups you rally against.
Wild Bees are Dying Off
This is why I prefer a clearer distinction between 'geek' and 'nerd'. A geek cares a whole lot about the history of background characters in star wars, or about collecting limited-run Japanese mecha toys. A nerd cares a whole lot about his/her favorite scripting language, or about inorganic chemistry.

One can, of course, be varying degrees of either and/or a mix of both.
In theory, the basic exemptions for each dependent (including, for independent taxpayers, the taxpayer the self) serve a loosely analogous role.

But yes, businesses are treated somewhat differently (but mostly it's businesses, not corporations; an individual with business income and expenses can do the same as a corporation, at least to offset business income -- I forget whether business losses that exceed business income apply against other income, though ISTR they do and that's a key difference between hobby expenses (which can only offset hobby income) and business expenses.
$55k at a mature startup like Tumblr would be an insult to a good programmer, who is being flooded with six-fig offers from hedge funds and banks. In NYC, it's almost about what a grad student who interns in the summer would gross in a year.
6 bad habits in web development
I was studying business in Australia when Aldi came in and had a tutor who was a little obsessed with them.

Most supermarkets (Coles, Woolworths/Safeway) employed a lot of cheap, casual or part time, high turnover staff. Award rates (Australia complicated alternative to minimum wages) are lower for younger employees (up to 21 yrs) so they employed a lot of high schoolers. The jobs were very narrow. Checkout chicks don't leave the counter. When no one is waiting, they need to pretend to be cleaning their workstations.

Aldi paid slightly above award. They preferred to hire adults. They preferred to hire for the long term. They had raises & advancement opportunities. They kept costs down by with efficiency instead of low wages. Intelligent efficiency with brains in use at all levels. Employees are far more independent. If there are long queues, they open another counter. If not, the stock shelve. If they have time, they take stock counts or do something else. The job satisfaction is way way higher.

The upshot of all this is that they can run stores with far fewer employees. A lot of other things go into this (store layouts, fewer product choices, display-in-bulk packaging), but better treated, more empowered employees is a big one. Hourly rates is just a part of the picture.
I think it is inaccurate. The concerns of lavabit and silent circle seemed to be about unencrypted email.
Look up the profits of the two major (only?) publicly traded gun companies (Ruger and Smith & Wesson). Compare them to any single tech giant. The sporting arms industry is tiny.

As far as the NRA pushing the industry around, there was a very public spat with Smith & Wesson around 2000 that nearly ruined the company. Google it. These days, the industry is more in line with with the NRA, but make no mistake about who has the power - it's the NRA (i.e. the customers).
Do Product Faster: On being a Techstar Hackstar
The problem is encryption is useful for many things. Some good, some bad. It's great for underground humanitarian organizations in third world countries...it's also great for kiddy diddlers hiding their stash. But the tech is the same, so we pick both or non. Right now, government is leaning on none.
When It Comes To Your Data, It’s Time To Enforce Your Own Terms And Conditions
BigVideo.js : Background video
Entrepreneurs, Failure and the Curse of Cognitive Dissonance
Having a good RNG free from external interference is getting easier. Where you previously needed to buy expensive hardware or rely on external services like random.org, many "system on a chip" solutions have built-in hardware RNG (though not all systems build using them expose it in a useful manner) and the newest server lines of chips out of Intel do too.

The SoC used by the rPi for instance has such a generator, exposes as /dev/hwrng once the appropriate module is loaded. It passes all the tests I've exposed it to and seems to reliably serve ~550,000 bits/sec. No doubt many other small computers have a similar facility available by some means.

That would not have helped that infamous Debian bug of course, as that was due to a change meaning the SSL libs were not properly using the entropy pools that were available (no entropy source is useful if you ignore it).
First and foremost, thank you for your reply. It's greatly appreciated.

I am a solo founder and I am more than willing to bring on a co-founder but I haven't really reached out to anyone in that regard. Maybe it's time I look for someone?

I do believe I could push the growth faster if I had the time to put into it. I have been looking at some stats about my last year and noticed that the days that I have spent more than 4 hours on the site have helped bring more people through the door.

At this point I have the content, I have the industry contacts. What I need now is promotion and marketing, I need people to be repeat users. Most of my users are bouncers, they come in the door, read the article and then take off. I have just revamped the site with that in mind and am hoping that it helps turn that around.

I mainly use FB and Twitter for promo but would need some additional funding to reach new targets. My audience is very tech savvy so internet marketing is top priority.

I believe my content is on par with the larger sites in my niche, but more geared toward the general public.

At this point I can't jump in full time as I need my day job to pay the bills. If I had investors that would gladly help me achieve this, I'd do it as soon as possible.
If their friends, condemned their actions i.e. working for a bunch of incompetent, paranoid spooks, their job outlook would change as well.
Shifting the blame and the burden for policy reform onto firms is not only silly but also unfair, you can't really expect them to shut down, they are not one man operations like Lavabit.
Wow that forbes article is fantastic. I think the privacy campaign can afford to learns lots from this...
Now this is awesome. My favourite part was "Video destroyed. Game over". Lol
So... as long as there are two or more parties within the State, squabbling about issues unrelated to the over-reach of executive power, spying, police militarization, etc -- it's not a Police State?

Surely every police state has had factions that have vied for political primacy via such side-shows. That can't possibly be a disqualifier.
Interesting, I don't think I would ever tamper with my employment history. If I got asked why I am not at a company anymore I would be honest.
So ... they're like any other bureaucrat?
Welcome to the world of business.

I'm glad that when I was 15 years old and my first employer tried to pull that "we'll get rich together" horseshit I just said 'I'll kick myself later. Pay me my rate.'

An honest person, whether in business or elsewhere, will base what they pay you on the value of the work you can do. As soon as they decide they want more value than they're paying for, they've become a con artist. There are tons of con artists at work today, taking advantage of the fact that a lot of employees are still under the impression that working for an employer grants them security and predictability - even though they get laid off the first time the company doesn't meet quarterly projections.

Especially once John could quantify the amount of business he was bringing to the company, he should have set an ultimatum that he be paid based on that or he walks. Sure the con artist boss might think 'I'll just get rid of him and find another rube' and he even might (but probably not, employers always vastly underestimate the value of experience and domain-specific knowledge), but at least he wouldn't just keep feeding into the con himself.
Tumblr founder to get $81 million to remain at Yahoo
Indeed, it's as much as a cult of personality as Apple is.

Here's the Steve Jobs of the NRA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ju4Gla2odw

Those aren't gun-toting wingnuts in the audience, they're business leaders and politicians. You can't buy that kind of reverence.

I'm sure there are a lot of prominent people that still remember fondly about the past, and when they die their sentiment will die with them.
Knowing in advance that the intent is to read my mail feels icky and invasive. Google did not start out reading our mail; their approach was a classic case of the slow-boiled toad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog).

Perhaps you should gain users confidence and trust first by NOT reading their mail and giving them an opportunity to become reliant on the service. At less than 0.50 per piece, postal mail is not so expensive that it weights a risk/benefit analysis in your favor with this model. Most people would probably opt to just continue paying for their mail versus having it read. (Also, not sure people want to create bad friend karma -- ha! -- by having their friends spammed with "junk" mail.)

Moving from critiquing to finding a more viable option: I think you can still make money with this upfront by "skinning" the mail with fully printed ad envelopes (obviously with windows for the addresses to show) paid for by general consumer advertisers who don't have as much of a need for making sure they are hitting a niche group.

Once, and if, you gain a critical mass of users then you could introduce the "read" option with some kind of incentive to get people to opt-in. At least they will trust you more by that time, theoretically. And you could then sign up more advertisers including niche marketers.

The current model is not palatable -- unless it were used by a small business/entrepreneur that is sending marketing mail and therefore does not care if it is read (but that then poses a problem of them potentially having a competitor's materials inserted with their materials). If the model remains as is I would have to say #schnailmailfail.

-Felicia Joy
@feliciajoy
Another thing I didnt see (sorry if it already exists) would be something like a table of contents or an index of all the different maps.
I think some of them are a lot more interesting than others and skipping multiple maps would be good.
Ask HN: What prgramming language to learn?
I know some python and java. Where should i go from here?
Humanizer V0.4 - turn type names, enum fields into a human friendly format
Why are you so sure these programs are illegal? Might it be possible that you find them distasteful, but that under our current Constitutional and legal regime, there's nothing for anyone to be "held accountable" for?
GEB is awesome.

David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity covers Cantor and is an interesting read about... you guessed it.. Infinity.

Re: Turing
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html
How to build Java WebSocket Applications Using the JSR 356 API
Request a shorter lunch - there's research out there to say that taking a long lunch makes you less productive in the afternoon.

Also, do something physical for your lunch - even if it's just walking to a shop and back.

Your evenings matter, yes you'll be more productive in the mornings but you have to go to work. The sooner you finish work, the more time you have to relax before you start work again.

I'd also ask about starting earlier or working from home or flexitime.

If you can afford the time on weekends try and work in the mornings.

I'd also force yourself to have a night or two off every week.

Build a routine, your body-clock will change and it may start to exhaust you if you change too many things too fast. So expect to work at a slower pace until you've refined your routine.
Here's a tongue in cheek piece that goes with this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6185468
To answer the "why is it hard?" question, I tried to collect my own experiences at http://www.acooke.org/cute/WhyandHowW0.html - not sure I did a good job, but the main conclusion was that you underestimate how important experience is in avoiding errors.

To repeat what others have said in answer to your more general question - solutions to "real world" problems include more than a single call to a primitive. So you need to find libraries that provide a higher level API, like parts of NaCL http://nacl.cr.yp.to/, Google's keyczar http://www.keyczar.org/, etc.

Even for simply encrypting a string with a password - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/simple-crypt which is what I talk about in the first link - I needed three things: key strengthening, the encryption itself, and an HMAC. Making those work well together was harder than I expected (at least 5 bugs harder...)
Edit: I updated the tutorials link with a list of other links I've compiled. Also, it looks like they upped the board price to $9.99 ( http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/msp430_head.html ). It is absolutely worth it IMO. Good luck with your project!
Yeah, I like the Launchpads. I ported Contiki to them, and wrote some stuff for eg low-power wireless networking. Unfortunately had to rip out stuff like uIP. Check this post for an in-depth write-up of a low-power radio duty cycling protocol, with lots of measurements etc.
http://www.bithappens.se/blog/2013/05/26/simple-yet-efficien...

For those not interested in Contiki, late in the post there are some power consumption measurements that illustrate rather clearly why switching off the 60 mW radio as much as possible is a must as soon as you go battery.

You can find the Contiki-port at
https://github.com/msloth/contiki-launchpad
Hmm... its possible for people to miss even massive changes in culture at the point of inflection.

I personally felt it this morning when I was getting ready to reply to an email to a friend with a cold-war joke that in times past I would have never thought twice about sending. I didn't send.
> living the life of a celebrity right now

I very much doubt it's as glamorous as you seem to be imagining.