skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's called the EFF.

The problem is, it's mostly supported by individuals, not the industry. And there are a lot more individuals interested in gun rights than electronic rights. It has a budget that's a tiny fraction of the NRA's.
Silent Circle: Another U.S. secure email service closes to protect users
> The fact it's possible at all means it's not worth it.

So having a feature which is widely agreed to be impossible to use tastefully is worth possible headaches and seizures in some people?
Click the whitespace near the comments, then type 1337... Don't do it in the search box.
Ask HN:  Secure email?  What about cotse.net?
I used https://www.cotse.net/ many years ago and I'm debating on switching back. I was wondering what other's experience with them has been like lately and if there were any glaring omissions with regard to privacy...
The little widget...maybe. But all the reporting...that takes a good bit of time to get right. And the reporting (ie. what all that data means) is really what's valuable here. So, I'm not worried about it.

Plus, when people say "I could easily whip that up myself"...they rarely actually do. :)
Pay By Face? UK Trials Payment App
How big is the part of the tech industry that relies on user trust?
That's the clearest response possible. I think the radical part is that we are going to have to convince the general populace that PAYING for privacy is going to be the way going forward. If we move into that realm because the government will not stop spying, then it might be a lot easier to have the privacy organizations band together with financial might. (The EFF is awesome, but they are not nearly big enough)
I don't trust other secure email providers, and to be honest, I don't trust Lavabit or SilentCircle...at least I don't trust them as far as they suggest I should trust them.

I trust providers that offer encryption to prevent basic things like my ISP looking at data or maybe casual eavesdropping if I'm in a foreign country. But the idea of hosted services that completely protect you even against the government of the hosting country, which is how these services seem to be sold, is sort of unrealistic.

And in the broader sense, I trust something like Lavabit less than Gmail. Permanently losing access to my email without any warning is a bigger threat to me than whatever ill defined privacy line Lavabit claims was being crossed. Email for me is primarily about convenient communication. If I want extra security for some reason, I'll use something else or combine GPG with email.
My reply on Reddit when I see people bring that up is simple:

You insult people who have experienced a police state by calling what we are experiencing a police state.

A police state has no distinction between legislation and executive.

Our legislation is currently investigating the president for:
* CIA coverup of the attack on our Benghazi consulate'
* IRS targeting of political opposition

They're planning on using their primary power, the power over our nations money, to enforce not only strict budget cuts, but requiring that the President's signature legislative victory be repealed.

That's before we discuss the court and how they've treated the President. Remember when they threw out his NLRB nominations as unconstitutional?

Now someone will bring up spying, but I urge you to realize that Congressional distaste for spying is centralized among the less important Congresspeople. Our leadership on both sides of the aisle is largely supportive of the infrastructure, seeing as they wrote and passed all of the laws that make it possibly. That's not an executive behaving without regard to legislation, it's one working with them.

I don't see a police state, and I think being cavalier with terminology does a grave injustice to lessons of the past and the people who have experienced (and are experiencing) a totalitarian government with truly no checks and balances.
I built such a system with an Arduino a while ago using the bluetooth shield (a huge energy hog). They key was adding some basic "sleep when inactive" routines, it wasn't that creative, if I remember rightly it was about ten extra lines of code to have it sleep for a while if it detected it wasn't in use.

The one gotcha was making sure the board being used had a reasonably efficient regulator on it, some of them have regulators which draw a (relatively) huge idle current so putting the chip to sleep has almost no impact.

Hope that's of some use!
Actual author here. Wrote this post last night to express my thoughts on hiring trends I've noticed but mostly to thank a friend of mine, went to bed, woke up to a bunch of tweets and one of my other friends said my post was on Hacker News. I have read everyone's comments and will try to answer as many of them as possible. Thanks for all the feedback everyone, no matter how positive or negative. It's interesting reading all of your perspectives. This made my day!
Do you really not like epileptics?
Hi,
the api for developer are available

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6185275

http://www.dog-finder.org/api-for-developers
Please tell us more about how you use this in your app builder. I'd love to see this implemented for real-time native response per online edit. Got a link you can share?
Email is not safe, by design. Even if you do encrypt the contents using PGP or GPG, the headers are too much exposure. They will know who when and with whom you correspond, and all the hosts the mail passed through (if you are not using anonymous re-mailers). The current implementation of email is "defective by design". But _there_are_ alternatives [1], you must just start using them.

[1] RetroShare, BitMessage, I2P Bote, Freenet + Frost and some others, which haven't tried yet.
If it's interesting and well written, nobody will balk at the length of your posts. Just go check out patio11's blog. The average post there is huge, but I (and I think many with me) read it all the way through anyway because there is so much value in it.

Anyway, interesting article!
Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson Hangout G+
actually, according to the founder's speech(in turkish) koding is more about social project management than a IDE on the cloud, just because.

they hope to make money from selling servers.
Ask HN: Feedback on launch page for easiest way to print stamps or labels
Except that the FSF doesn't care whether technology is used to erode civil liberties, as long as the source code is available.
Blink's removal makes the Web less likely to make people sick. Epileptics have a terrible time with flashing things.
Why is Lavabit, based out of Texas, appealing in the Fourth Circuit (Maryland, West VA, Virginia, North and South Carolina)?
In the sense that they're defending our rights, yes you could say it's EFF.

But I'm a little worried about the idea of EFF having to lobby Congress the way NRA does (by paying them). I wouldn't want EFF to become a corrupted organization because it starts receiving a ton of money from the industry instead of the users.
I think you're being pedantic. No knock, no warrant, no redress when they murder you or a loved one for your family = police state, plain and simple.
Learning More About Stargardt Disease at Visions 2013
This is the kind of scenario one would expect to find if encryption were introduced into a totalitarian society.
Sounds almost like he self-immolated. Russia is not such a bad place after all, for people with cash, and as a good professional he will certainly get some, and will enjoy celebrity status, and KGB will care for him rather than scare him.
Working in the mailing business and dealing with the USPS carriers; they are not dummies (the usual people warning here) and if someone gets curious on why so many pieces arrive at a certain address w/o postage, I would expect that address to get flagged for a special looksee.
Probably because most of the "entertainers" are just people famous for pretending to be other people who are worthy of attention/respect (or would be, if they existed). Which makes their leveraging of this to push theirs views something of a hack attempt on the pychology of the viewer.
I'm currently using the Custom Buttons extension in Firefox to execute the script at:

http://pastebin.com/9wWg1Ssw

There is also a nice bookmarklet called invert-lightness I like a lot, however it is resource intensive on complicated pages as it must traverse the entire dom. So, I don't use it as much:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/color.html
"Note how a country's human rights problems becomes of interest to the US political and media class only when that country defies the US"

I am glad Greenwald has cottoned on to this and also made pointed remarks on the use of the abuses of others to question the ethics of Assange and Snowden in their "choice" of destination.
It's reminiscent of the cold war retort from the soviets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
We need a privacy amendment to the Constitution. It needs to shore up the legalese of the 4th which lawyers have made a runaround.
That's different, people have to use Facebook because all of their friends and family are on it.

If you don't like the company selling guns then you can easily go to another one -- you're not invested in one particular company.
Oh wow, that's pretty interesting. Was the recruiter from a small company just trying to aggressively go after candidates or were they legitimately interested in you project? Not to undermine your work at all but it's the first time I have heard of an experience like this. Congrats!
Startup GoodApril Gets Acquired Before Demo Day
>Our legislation is currently investigating the president for: * CIA coverup of the attack on our Benghazi consulate' * IRS targeting of political opposition

These investigations are politically motivated, effectively battles in a war between factions of the aristocracy.
Knowing when it's time to move on
I suppose you think the Constitution is a "living and breathing" document too, right?
Where most of the customers are governments. The gun industry donates less than 10% of the NRA's budget going from your link.
Ice ages only thanks to feedback
www.campaignforliberty.org
Not quite.
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/surveillance
I challenge you to stop asking about it and stand up to do something about it.
Those distinctions are increasingly meaningless in the US.

The entire NSA spying program was designed to thwart the separation of powers and to circumvent the democratic process.
The death of skeuomorphism
Competency based transcripts
It seems to be a growing trend with the Valley startups but I have noticed some other companies on the East coast adopting the pattern. I can't really comment on the UK/Europe, I am based in Canada myself. Are there any sites that UK/European companies use instead of LinkedIn and Github? I'm genuinely curious.
Contrary to the article's inflammatory title, software engineers haven't quit their jobs at the USG en masse.

As for the "with the government" vs the "for the government" rebuttals: surveillance and research contractors haven't stopped working with the USG either.
True, engineers don't tend to be manipulative bastards, we just care for the end completion and reward for it.
I can't draw an exact comparison between myself of some of those things. And I agree, things haven't changed they've just evolved.

I have this big issue at the moment, that too many companies are focusing on profits to satisfy investors. I suppose they have to get their ROI.

In most cases the guy at the top with biggest spending habits (whether that's an investor or a manager) will be pressuring the rest of company to increase profits at any expense.
Didn't realize Rust had support for this. At the end of your recent example, it pretty much says doing so sacrifices the runtime entirely. I know Go doesn't support calling from C for reasons similar to this. Where does further development on this functionality sit on the priorities list for Rust?
The Arduino _board_ is not designed for running of batteries and is inefficient. The AVR _microprocessor_ is very efficient; that article links to http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=11497 which documents a draw of 360uA in sleep mode. Even the 15ma of "fully on" is equivalent to a single LED.

The main power consumer in the GSM case is of course the GSM transmitter, so it's no suprise that he can improve power consumption by turning it off.

Generally on more powerful machines you take for granted the operating system, firmware and their many conveniences, but often there will be bugs or poor design decisions that increase power consumption by quite a lot.
I always thought that <blink> should be implemented by alternating between a high and low intensity color. That way it's not invisible 30% of the time when you're reading it. I suspect if it had been done this way, it would have been seen as far less offensive.
> The case is closed, at least until someone invalidates their study.

Studies don't prove anything, it's so difficult to show causation with the methodology of a study that very few of them even attempt it. The best you can get is a strong correlation.
See also the section "Arguments against skeuomorphism in digital design" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
JeeNode's creator has lots of posts on alternative powering to the JeeNode - which is also based on ATMEGA and Arduino compatible, and has a RF module. See http://jeelabs.org/tag/lowpower/
The war on curly braces and angle brackets
I think such a thing would be unenforceable without the consent of those same nations which currently ignore privacy rights.
I don't care what you say, there is no rhyme or reason for browsers to keep dropping <blink> support while all of them continue to support <marquee> (though it's probably just a matter of time?)
Same reason more patent cases are taken to east Texas: some states seem more favourable than others to certain parties in certain types of case.
That was just an example in my post. I used to do a lot of C programming in my spare time. My commonly used tools back then included splint, valgrind, gdb and man. Like I said, developers will find similar tools when the language they are coding in changes.
Can you explain/give a link?
Lots of good answers here. NaCl (salt) is one (relatively) recent effort to be just such a library, see eg under the sub-heading "High Level Primitives" on the features page:

http://nacl.cr.yp.to/features.html

High-level primitives

A typical cryptographic library requires several
steps to authenticate and encrypt a message.
Consider, for example, the following typical
combination of RSA, AES, etc.:

* Generate a random AES key.
* Use the AES key to encrypt the message.
* Hash the encrypted message using SHA-256.
* Read the sender's RSA secret key from
"wire format."
* Use the sender's RSA secret key to sign the
hash.
* Read the recipient's RSA public key from wire format.
* Use the recipient's public key to encrypt the
AES key, hash, and signature.
* Convert the encrypted key, hash, and signature to wire
format.
* Concatenate with the encrypted message.

Sometimes even more steps are required for storage
allocation, error handling, etc.

NaCl provides a simple crypto_box function that
does everything in one step. The function takes the
sender's secret key, the recipient's public
key, and a message, and produces an authenticated
ciphertext. All objects are represented in wire
format, as sequences of bytes suitable for
transmission; the crypto_box function
automatically handles all necessary conversions,
initializations, etc.

Of course, "such libs have bugs" -- it is software after all. But bugs can (and will be) fixed.

Somewhat unique to security and cryptography are the number of subtle bugs possible. There are both problems of actual "normal" bugs (like the Debian entropy bug) and system level design errors (like CRIME).

NaCl/Salt tries to reduce the number of errors possible by using the library wrong (as opposed to eg: openssl that has a very (some say too) rich interface). But you could still end up writing the secret key to swap. Or doing something silly with the plain text. Or expose yourself to a buffer overflow in the part of the code that renders those cute avatar-images for your chat application.

edit: formating
I may have missed some clarifications, so I feel the need to ask:

Did the USG not force Google to comply with their demands, and also keep quiet about it? I know that was the initial story.

Or is the issue that Google went above and beyond the USG's requests?
Look into the TI MSP430. It was built with low-power in mind. There's even an Arduino IDE port for it called Energia if you're not comfortable in C/C++. Check out http://www.43oh.com for forums. Also, I put together an aggregated list of links to tutorials from a really nice blog http://goo.gl/IFsrJi . Also, I should mention, these boards are < $5 shipped from TI and includes 2 chips and a USB cable!
I don't think there will be droves of people leaving because of recent scandals. But it sure will make it harder to answer a smart college grad who asks "Why should I work for the NSA?" when he/she has options at private tech companies.
I agree with you in that a key difference would be if people were held accountable for illegal acts. However, simply investigating the president is not enough - it would actually need to be possible for him to be accused and held liable.

An investigation in which the conclusion is already obvious and no one will be held accountable is not really an investigation, it is only smoke and mirrors. Throwing out one set of nominations as unconstitutional among hundreds is the same smoke and mirrors.

The ability to create a public drama while the real decisions occur underneath is certainly no proof of the lack of totalitarian government. Not that I'd say the USA is a totalitarian government, just that your proof is very shaky.
Putting in the Requisite (Debugging) Time
Encryption being painfully and needlessly difficult is one reason why it isn't widespread on both the business end and the consumer end. GPG, which _everybody_ should use for email, has one of the most terrible interfaces conceived. It is absolutely no surprise that people would rather be spied on than spend a week getting that POS working.

There's a massive market for easy-to-use encryption. Easy-to-use does not imply insecure in any way at all.
I wouldn't think so; in fact, if anything, I would expect the opposite. If there is an accident in a state with ordinary (i.e., not no-fault) insurance, one party (the one not at fault) is always going to have an incentive to report it. If there is an accident in a no-fault state, it's possible that neither party will want to report it (because it might cause both of their premiums to go up).
That's a myth. The NRA is not among the big spenders in the lobbying world, and money has little to do with their power. Michael Bloomberg pretty much proved that when he dropped $12 million and came up with nothing to show for it.

Your tone suggests you have made up your mind on this, but if you really want to know why the NRA is powerful, read this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/amyshowalter/2013/05/16/five-rea... .

It's the people, not the money.
The final difference between a true police state and now is that they're allowed to say that they're not allowed to say anything, or that's how it feels.
There were judges that wanted to drag him up in front of court. In cases where the interpreter was of too poor quality the case might have been thrown out of court. They made themselves infamous throughout the UK for all the wrong reasons.

But then it got sold off and rebranded beyond recognition.

I had to attend court the other week and on my way in I was reading a noticeboard, I had to do a double-take when I saw a familiar email address up there on a memo regarding interpreters
It's amazing. The NRA is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the USA. (http://www.timewarner.com/newsroom/press-releases/1999/11/FO...)
Well JS is keeping you thinking in pretty ancient ways. The "ideas" in JS are so old that you need quotes around the word.
This sounds like from a Blub programmer. I'd better add a reference because Blub programers don't know what Blub means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programme...
And now we have completed the move to the story is about Snowden.

I wonder what his favorite food is? What is his favorite band? Where is his favorite place to shop? What does he think of the architecture of St. Basils?

A few more weeks and it will be 'Privacy Expert Snowden says...' and no one will remember why he's even famous.
I see. So we can have a more perfect surveillance state. And then it will be OK.
That's just not true. The NRA pushes the industry (which is quite small) around, not the other way around.
i agree with this statement. i don't think that anyone was saying they would quit the government en masse. i actually got the impression that they were talking about freelancers and such, but i could be wrong.
We have UK-based VPS packages... www.hartserver.net/servers/vps/
I never knew Trader Joe's and Aldi's were related companies. I had jokingly referred to Trader Joe's as the "Aldi's" or organic food stores, but never thought the comparison was so close. I was mostly basing it off of the cheap prices and smallish store sizes.

I've generally been impressed by Aldi's ability to maintain a quality shopping experience while maintaining such low prices. Typically in the US, bargain-type stores tend to skimp on things like cleaning, repairs, merchandising/stocking, etc. This isn't really the case with Aldi.
If you're talking about government snooping, they most likely can aggregate information from different sources.

If you're talking about the nebulous "one company has all my information and may do something evil" argument, I still say that it doesn't matter. Email is by far the most sensitive thing most people do online, so if there was a real threat from a company having all that information, also having searches is not substantially worse.

Regardless, I still don't see a credible threat of harm from Google having this information that outweighs the actual threat of hacking.
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It might sound odd, but I think an easier solution is to commit to being persecuted by the tyranny. The alternatives are to prevent it or live under it, committing to the persecution should encourage prevention.
[citation needed]

Something you can reconcile with the NRA's $1/4 billion annual turnover would be great.
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Anyone who has ever Googled their name and hometown must realize how much information is being sold about us. Google is just presenting the top layer, but this problem is a very old one. For better or worse, I think we have to get used to a post-privacy society. If it forces us to be more tolerant of each other's imperfections (because our own are shared with the world) all the better.
I fully support this. If it's not your secret sauce then why not give it to the community? The common rebuttal I hear for this is "but we have to then maintain it". Granted, maintenance is time consuming but even if you do not do anything after open sourcing it, someone could still fork it and tailor it to suit their needs. I don't open source something if I am on the fence about whether what I have coded is a tool or a potential product. I also don't open source something if it's really untidy, I try to do a bit for the community before putting it out there like making sure it runs on Heroku for example (if it's a web app let's say) and that it is somewhat readable. Not saying my current work on my Github is perfect but I am always learning.
I like the common indented syntax you get with this approach. Much less work for your brain when working with coffeescript, SASS and JADE.
But was mosaic made with love in Nashville? ;-)
The science behind data visualisation
I found it very odd a web tools company highlighted the patent bit. I wonder how companies like this go in the javascript space given the range of choice in OSS alternatives.
Yahoo's new killer app