skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One relevant data point:the author of mixminion remailer is working for the tor project,probably killing mixminion(a far more secure anonymizer).

Do you mean Nick Mathewson or Roger Dingledine? Both are working for Tor now, as a matter of fact Roger was one of the core founders of Tor, and both of them co-founded the Tor Project as a nonprofit (though not sure of details).

For what it's worth (ahem, 0%), I believe both of them have very high ethical standards and are great people; I've only physically met them in passing so far, but insofar as I can trust an individual person, I do trust they do not have any secondary ulterior motives.

> probably killing mixminion(a far more secure anonymizer).

I'm not sure of details here, either. Both of them view Tor as, ultimately, a compromise between usability and security. This was a deliberate choice. Tor webpage makes it clear that Tor is not an ultimate ends to anonymity and privacy. I do agree that Mixminion, assuming other factors are kept to be invariant, is more secure. However, if only very few people were to use it, that would make it much less secure (as I'm sure you understand); etc. etc.

> Another relevant data point(for a similar strategy): Most of the research on JPEG steganography is done on grayscale images, which is mostly useless since mostly nobody sends grayscale images. Alot of What's done on color images is being done in places like iran, china and india(?).

I've heard about this - if this proves to indeed be the case, then yeah, kind of lol (in a sad way.) :(

> I wonder if it is used as a pressure release valve for anonymity software developers. That way they focus their efforts on tor, which might be more amenable to USG exploits, than other anonymity networks.

But this is an interesting point, I've thought of it as well. It could be that this is happening semi-organically, in a kind of emergent manner. This sounds magic-boxy, but: just as the mind is not a uniform machine, a government structure is not uniform, either; both, however, appear to produce semi-coherent (to an extent) behaviour that makes sense. Sorry for this rambling sentence, but the "top-down vs bottom-up" conspiracy question is an interesting one, and I don't know of ways to communicate it in a rigorous way.

But, again, the pressure valve idea is an interesting one for sure.
This isn't your father's PageMill.

It always seemed that this should be the logical way to go, but for some reason I've never really seen these things stick around (at least in my personal experience). Is it a matter of chasing trends/technology?

Looks slick. I owe it to myself to give it a whirl and keep an eye on its adoption.
> How do you square that with the claim that the NSA is tracking only metadata?

It's horseshit.
The credibility of this report is far from established, but I'm not sure this is the kind of thing you'll ever get a full confirmation on when you consider the risks for someone who would go on record.

Edward Snowden:

> Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.
I've been a lender on the site since derwiki first posted. There are still 2 critical pieces missing.

1) No insurance. I've talked to derwiki about this via email and he gave a personal guarantee that anything broken or stolen would be replaced. That was well-meant but not really the kind of guarantee I need to let random people rent my $3k equipment.

2) At least 2 days notice before someone makes a request. I've had 3 inquiries in the last 7 months to rent either my camera or my lenses. All 3 have been same-day, "can I pick that up in an hour" kinds of things. That model works for cars but not for cameras. Cars are easy. They sit in a parking spot and you can hook up remote triggers for them. Easy to rent out on demand. Cameras are pricy delicate devices requiring safe storage and well-padded bags. If someone wants to rent mine, I have to be available to hand it to them and to get it back when they're done. This requires scheduling.

If/when derwiki fixes the insurance and scheduling problems, I'll feel comfortable using his site. It's a great idea and just needs some polish.
> How are these decisions made?

When it's convenient for the career of the person with their finger on the button.

> Can we be sure that political considerations and/or racial / sexual / gender biases, (conscious or unconscious) do not play a role in the decision making process?

Quite the opposite, we can be sure that they do play a role. When you get to pick and choose your targets, it's a foregone conclusion that the targets you pick will be selected because of some criteria beyond the fact that they are merely in violation of the law.
I always ask myself if the unemployed engineers are indeed employable. If so, then there is no shortage. If they just appear unemployable, then maybe. If they are not, then there is a shortage regardless of the simple numbers.
The officer can believe whatever they want, but if they can't document in court the actual probable cause that generated the search, the evidence from that search is excluded. Probable cause is not as simple as "the officer says they believed the motorist was probably guilty".
I can't judge the coursera course, but for anyone who is interested in this field and wants a gentle introduction, I high recommend Programming Collective Intelligence (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do). It covers many of the types of recommender systems that the coursera course is likely to cover, and comes with a lot of nice Python code examples.

It's highly useful knowledge too. I ran across so many startups that needed recommender systems that I launched a company called Algorithmic.ly (http://algorithmic.ly) to help companies without the expertise integrate recommendation systems and other types of algorithms into their projects.
I've just watched the She++ documentary, literally 15 minutes ago. They say the US only graduates 30% of the IT workers needed every year, and even if a university like Stanford graduted all their students in CS, it wouldn't be enough. What gives?
"though I can't discuss further maybe someone with a civilian background in nuclear physics can fill in"

Oh spare us the cloak and dagger. I don't think oxygen radioactivation has been classified for about 80 years now.

There's even a pretty good wikipedia page at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_oxygen

The "natural" stable isotope O-16 needs to get triple neutron activated before you get an unstable isotope O-19 and the half life of that is like a minute. So its about half a million minutes per year, and its been about two years, so thats about a million half lives later... I think all the O-19 is long gone.

I do agree 100% that the "stuff" dissolved in the water is about a zillion times more important than the oxygen itself.

Its so mainstream there's some interesting radio oxygen dating work done using the Dole Effect, which also has a wiki page. TLDR is photosynthesis preferentially concentrates certain O isotopes so you can make all kinds of assumptions about glaciation and where plants are growing (ocean or land) given some 16O:18O ratios.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dole_effect

There's even a cool wikipedia article with a UTF-8 name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9418O

Which brings you to the greater topic of isotope geochemistry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_geochemistry

I'm sure there is at least some cloak and dagger stuff that can't be discussed but there's a simply huge amount of open literature about oxygen radioactivity. I would suspect there's more open lit stuff about isotopic geochemistry than cloak and dagger stuff.
After reading it, the 30-second summary: Most companies -- and their users -- would be better served by a responsive web site/app.

Rather than making a native app because {it might seem cooler | our competitor does that | marketing out-shouts the CTO if any | a Dilbert-esque CEO said "app" and no one is willing or able to educate}.
it should probably detect that I'm on a Mac and not direct me to download a .exe file...
It's probably hard to gather meaningful evidence. Just think of how they would have to present it to the clueless jury.

It's much easier to show a direct access to some child porn site.

I'm almost certain NSA controls a bunch of nodes and exit nodes and can figure out who loads what. VPN is the way around it.
Quick aside: This is a really well-written article in and of itself. Joseph Volpe seems like an actually-great writer, and it was refreshing to see some tech journalism that feels like old-school journalism.

It's not all bad out there, but as the lines between "writing" and "blogging a scoop to get page views" blurs further every day, it's nice to see some people still care about the writing itself.
I'm interested to hear more of this perspective. Are you saying that imagination on the product side is creating insurmountable technical debt?
Member Center is one of four services still not back up again. "Everything" is not fine yet, and they haven't stated anything to that effect. Why don't you wait for the issue to be resolved before expecting a post-mortem?
Hey 6thSigma! I'm Leo, CTO @ Kivo:

There are two things you'd merge: changes to the whole presentation (i.e. new slides), and multiple changes to the same slide. In the first instance, we slot together the slides and alert the user. In the latter instance (if you sync a change and I sync a change to a single slide), they will both appear chronologically in the list. It is up to the user to merge these versions together.

Automatic merging works well with code because you can move locations of functions and -- to some extent -- chunks of code (although git usually will require some merge resolution); as we are merging something (a slide) which, unlike code, has to appear a certain way visually, this approach doesn't make much sense. Auto-merging together two slides with different content would not have a desirable result. I'd love to hear your ideas on what you think the best UX for this is.
There's a very easy work around. Tell the USCIS that you're bringing 'HTML guy' for $80K/year, but in reality it's a software engineer that would otherwise make $120K+ in the US.
Samsung's Sorrow, Apple's Tomorrow
It all boils down to bioaccumulation. Radioactive stuff that just floats around is diluted fast into nothingness.

Chernobyl was bad, but most of the fallout landed on forests and lakes that are not significant source of human food chain (mushrooms, fish in lake and animals in the forest still have traces left).

Fukushima did not blow stuff into the atmosphere, most of the leak is from water leaking to the soil and to the sea. Almost everything living in the sea is important part of the human food chain.
Vlad, Webflow says my browser screen is too small. I am using Firefox 22.0.
Can you elaborate on this further? Are you implying that it is the quality of the candidates and not the number?

I can't say I disagree with that statement in and of itself. Yet I believe you are getting few qualified candidates because companies are asking for highly skilled people with a great deal of experience and then only, and my opinion is intentionally, offering well below market wages. This then allows them to scream "there are not enough developers". The whole shtick is just meant to repress wages..
Ok, without the snark, I am specifically saying that this is not journalism. It is an advert with suspect claims.
Epigenetics is the least of the problems with the "reconstruct body from genome" concept. Bodies are grown in a complex environment which is totally external to the genetic code. The most obvious kind of thing you wouldn't capture would be an amputation, as a crass example, but every aspect of the body is contingent rather than described solely by the genome.
The website loads perfectly if you take out s in http[s]

http://www.cryptocloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2894&p=3852#p...
Choice quote right at the end of the article:

"He [a Range Resources spokesman] went on to tell the paper that there was no evidence that the Hallowich family was affected by exposure to gas development."

Well, except the $750k you just shipped them....
But that's just the version control used by the owners of various Go packages this Go package depends on - it has nothing to do with the code itself?
#TwitterSilence - Is it the Right Approach?
I recently discovered this also. Was going crazy debugging my site, trying to figure out why it took so damn long to load the page...only to discover that with 1 free dyno, the entire app is just dead and then spins up when a request is made.
Worse case accident for solar:

Ow. I dropped the solar panel on my foot.

For nuclear:

Oops, we destroyed $270B of real estate.
I really think you are misunderstanding that sentence. The author didn't mean what you think it means. His point was that it's not very difficult to come up with just the right data and statistics to support whatever idea you're trying to promote.

Data is basically worthless if you can't trust the methodology behind it.
I don't understand how people who keep bringing up that conventional power generation kills more people than nuclear ever has (yet!) get around having their nose rubbed in the fact that we haven't experienced a worst case nuclear incident yet and that we keep getting lucky and scraping past worst cases -- at least according to what I read about all those old fuel rods stored at Fukushima. People keep ignoring safety precautions and we keep getting lucky, but luck and hope is not an acceptable strategy when you can irradiate large chunks of countries as a worst case scenario.

@SuperChihuahua: I can't find the articles now, but just one failure case is there were pools with spent nuclear rods in them that required active cooling. Failure to do so produces a plume of radiation straight into the air. Of course you're never supposed to store that many fuel rods, yet somehow safety wasn't important and there we where with tons of fuel rods in pools that required active cooling and no real plan for what to do if, say, we couldn't actively cool them.
Thank you. Yes, the name comes from a famous Chinese poem titled "7 Cups of Tea" The basic idea is that each cup of tea brings a greater level of healing. Also, I just liked the name because it suggests meeting with a friend several times and having a conversation.
Show HN: Borentra - Borrow things from your friends and family
They're not related. For instance, the problem with civil asset forfeiture is financial incentives; the problem with the war on drugs was a single major public policy error, &c.
As I say in my other comment, since it is web-distributed, it "can't" have carrier specific software. "Assembled by me," in black, with (almost) pure Android.
AirBnB's big secret was siphoning off Craigslist traffic. It really was a bit of marketing genius (note that they sold boxes of cereal all across the country for $50 each using Craigslist; they were experienced Craigslist spammers.)

If you had a rental property up on CL, you got an email asking you to list it. They would often times relist that property on CL with a link back to AirBnB. They had a better product than CL for rental properties, so it worked like a charm.
Ask HN: When is a business cofounder absolutely necessary?
I'm technical and founding my own startup right now - it is vastly technical SaaS startup, but while it is very technical - there is a lot of work on the business end that doesn't meet my background.

I do have a little background in business (from college) but nothing that matters too much on the business from the real world (IMO).

Right now, I'm moonlighting my own startup and have focused for about the past 3 months now solely on the product. Before working on the product I did some market research, did a survey to my initial target audience, and have talked to a handful of individuals about it. All with pretty positive feedback once I thoroughly explained it (and no they weren't my best friends).

My question is, when is a cofounder (on business end) absolutely needed?
--> I know optimally, the sooner the better, even 3 months earlier would have been better - but I haven't found a good fit so far. Any ideas?

If I could do it all myself, I would, but that is unrealistic for one person, while moonlighting :)

Thank you - to anyone with advice or thoughts on this.
Sun radiation is limited. You get ~1.4 kW/m2 at 100% efficiency. You need enormous plots of land to get anywhere close to what a small nuclear plant can produce.

Renewables will only get so far if we don't stop increasing our energy demands exponentially every year. Since that seems unlikely, we will produce every single way we can.
I'd start hydrating now.
The article claimed that the logical reason for the company's actions [since they can't underpay] is that they are recruiting for junior / lower paying [e.g. system analyst instead of software engineer] positions when in reality they are getting something like a senior dev with 5-10 years experience.

Personally, I think anyone with a 4 year degree should be allowed to get a green card if they can show they have the $$ to live in the US for a year and agree to look for work. Because the way it works now, even if the article is bullshit, it is comically vulnerable to arbitrage [LOL yes, why we do indeed need a 'junior web developer' that knows C so he can understand how our api works...oh, well, we realized after he arrived we needed him to work on this C project that was critical to our infrastructure and is responsible for 100k+/day in revenue while we pay him half of that of the guy that quit] if you can pay a lawyer for an hour.

Just my two cents.
I didn't dismiss that argument, I simply said it doesn't have an empirical grounding despite the language that was used in the parent comment that made it appear otherwise.

(I don't agree with that argument though; we're going to have to figure safe nuclear out, because we can't keep dumping pollutants into the atmosphere).
Where is the "contact us" information? Did I simply miss it? I want to contact you directly, having done a bunch of work in this field already, and having relevant feedback.
"ObjC is a fine language, but when compared to other more modern tools in the same space (C++, Java, C#, D, Go, maybe Haskell, etc...) it really doesn't have much to recommend it."

Much simpler than C++. Much more dynamic than any of the languages you mention. Can use straight C anyplace you need performance, with no FFI. Finally has some decent syntax for JSON types (NSDictionary/Array/Number), which some of those languages have and some don't. Performant collection classes.

http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/array.html

Block syntax (Java famously lacks, those other languages have some equivalent).

An outstanding UI library, unfortunately tied to Apple devices.

I think Objective-C has stood up brilliantly to the test of time. The potential for Ruby-like flexibility with C-like performance, it's not an accident the software behind Apple's rise to the most valuable company in the world (for a time), was written in Objective-C.
They can, but they aren't really. Why would any consumer anywhere care if the apple dev forums are down for 2 weeks. Nobody knows, cares, or has any reason to know or care. less than 1% of people likely. Readers of HN do not account for all buyers of smartphones as it happens.
Some investors say that they back the team, not so much the product. In which case, if you're going to need a partner to fulfill the vision you sell investors, you may want to pick one sooner.
BuckeyeBox
Tools for Ongoing Customer Development
CBS Blocks Time Warner Cable Internet Users from Full Episodes Online
From experience, it's not "the companies" that are saying there's no qualified people. It's the engineers on the teams trying to hire people that interview those "qualified" people that send in their resume and then can't write FizzBuzz to save their life, have no idea how to even approach a design problem, knows all the buzzwords but can't explain what they mean, and have no idea how the Internet works at even the highest levels.
Carton ("Bundler for Perl") reaches 1.0
The issue is even if there is very little $ cost, there is very little benefit. They're trying to get people onto games with a larger installed base so that there's more value created between players.
The $6,000,000,000,000 Price Tag of War
The Drug Enforcement Agency Has A Secret Surveillance Program
A reddit/HN clone that customizes the content you see based off your voting history. This has been tried a few times before, but I've just never seen one take off. In fact, reddit had this feature when it started but couldn't scale it well enough so dumped it.

I feel like it would increase the quality of upvotes generally because people would know that their votes will impact the future content they see so it may slow the rate at which people up vote just to show they simply agreement and reserve it for actual high quality they we to see more of. That is just my theory, perhaps in practice it would reveal that people just care more about only seeing content they agree with anyway.
Adaptive optics is far too complex to summarize in a HN comment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics

Hubble is of the best spy satellites. It was built by the same team that builds spy satellites, using all the same parts and equipment, tested in the same facilities, etc. It just has a slightly different secondary mirror setup and a very different set of instruments and control mechanisms, since it's meant to point at galaxies and do astronomy, not at the Earth doing surveillance.

Seriously, one of the hardest parts of the Hubble program was figuring out how to do it in the view of the public without revealing the underlying surveillance programme.
Just saying putting an IP address in some code doesn't mean the owner of that IP address is responsible for writing the code.
From last October: Supposedly phone-based therapy works as well as in-person for people with mild symptoms, and _better_ for more-severe.

http://www.choosehelp.com/news/emotional-health/study-phone-...

And from last week: Ditto for online.

http://www.examiner.com/article/internet-therapy-works-just-...

I don't know if the latter is a result of your own PR effort or great luck. Either way, congrats! :)
Somehow we managed to have 3D hinting on the monochrome (1-bit) Macintosh. Affordance doesn't have to mean heavy graphics, gradients, blurred drop shadows or any other battery-vampire elements.
The whole point is that we're blind to our own biases, as fish are blind to water. That includes our bias towards physical matter over simulated matter. (It's funny how the notion of a simulated universe unsettles people and destabilizes their narratives, despite the fact that discovering it would change precisely nothing about the subjective reality of our universe.)
One of the concerns I've seen mentioned is that while it is illegal to pay less than the median, that median can be shifted by changing the job title.

In the CNN article, it is mentioned that the most requested position is for "computer systems analyst" which "is also a lower-paying job compared to jobs like software engineer and requires only a two-year degree." It is quite possible that some of those analysts are over-qualified for their jobs and should be making software engineer or senior engineer money.

The Government Acountability Office wrote up a report about 2.5 years ago [1] that does mention limited oversight (page 3). The text:

"Elements of the H-1B program that could serve as worker protections
such as the requirement to pay prevailing wages, the visa’s
temporary status, and the cap itself are weakened by
several factors."

Just because it is illegal, doesn't mean it isn't happening.

[1] http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d1126.pdf
http://www.archives.gov

lynx -dump http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_tra... |sed '/The right of the people to be secure/,/be seized./s/ \[ Redacted \]/'