skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point was, you can't just fake it because development history looks very different than 'copy and pasted code in' history.

All of that is true, but my point is that you can't just gin up fake repositories to look good on a resume.
You are at risk of a dictionary attack on your password / passphrase. You need protect it with a long, computer generated passphrase to be secure. I would say at least 128 bits of entropy. By being stored on Dropbox, you have to assume that the the "agencies" have access to your database. At some point, computing will advance enough to either brute force the encryption or find a weakness in it.

The safest option is to prevent 3rd parties from having access to your encrypted data in the first place. This is the approach Bluepass is taking.
Well... never mind, easy enough, so I just pushed a fix now
Some good analysis there, though I've often felt the smartphone / tablet split is false and at least in Android will blur over time to become a moot distinction (as soon as telcos stop being useless, so this may take some time). We already have a word for it: the phablet. If lots of people buy Galaxy Notes and Xperia Z's instead of slightly larger Nexus 7s does that mean Android has failed as a tablet OS? I know I originally bought a Note rather than have a tablet plus phone.

When Apple only had 3.5" phones and 10" tablets there was some possibility of taking the moral high ground on this one and claiming anything smaller wasn't a real tablet. It's a lot harder to argue that with an iPad mini on the market.
It's back, but the bitter humor has not escaped me. Far too many aspiring programmers (job interviewees) are unable to do any pen-and-paper coding, they "solve" problems by googling and ending up at SO. Very sad (or is it meant to be that way?).
Have you considered supporting cloud sync? It should be possible to make it secure and it would be a huge convenience.
On June 3rd 2013, I started working [...], this week, I quit.

This article has no substance, and even if it did, he was not at Apple for very long.
I understand what you mean but I think the term '3rd world country' could be a bit discouraging to some of our American friends who might not have a clear picture about realities in our part of the world.

For example I also live in a small EU country. By no means this is a 3rd world country - we have pretty strong IT industry (e.g. some globally successful antivirus companies etc.) and the country is certainly developed enough to host companies providing SAAS. Yet we have certain advantages against the US:

1. our government is way weaker than the US government - their resources are obviously not even close and they would not be able to do what US government does even if they wanted to. But we are still an EU state and we can use EU as a shield when Americans come knocking.

2. it is a post-communist country and people still remember the experience of living in totalitarian/authoritarian country. Opposition against any sign of 'bad old times coming back' seem to be much stronger than the opposition of common American people against recent freedom-stripping. For example there was a proposal that our internet providers should be required to block un-licensed online gambling. The public backslash against 'censorship' was so big that the plan had to be abandoned in few days and the politician who proposed it had to apologize. Many things that are now normal in US or UK and some other western countries would not be possible here.

3. we are still an 'American ally' but the US are not nearly as popular with common people as they used to be here and anti-Americanism seem to be growing. Many politicians exploit that and see opposing to American requests as an easy way to score political points (we have seen this for example when US government wanted to build a part of their missile defence system here).
Apparently a business where some guy is moving paper mail icognito from one point to the ther could be a possible business. I guess lawyers may want this, especially lawyers working to defend issues related to abuse of privacy breach or executive actions.
Of course it will be hard to advertise such business.

If you'll be trying to keep this secrect by creating small cells of people not knowing each other and smart mailboxes preventing people exchanging t identify each other, you'll become suspect of supporting spying activity.

So you better work for the minimal number of clients and charge a lot to remain sustainble.

My understanding is that as long as keep the info concentrated in one spot (i.e. Paper mail) it is easy to grab it. If you dilute and spread the info using shared secret and hide it smartly in images or random text, this info would be much harder to catch but could use conventionnal transport means.

Extending this idea further, turn the mail network into one big world wide hologram. The information would then be spreaded, available from everywhere, very hard to censor, and private since you need some specific reference signal to extract the info. It's like shared secret.

Note however that the need to catch evil people using such communication system for evil means is needed. Just considering our own privacy regardless of what can go wrong with such system is in my opinion selfish. We will always need method to protect against abuses.
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In communism there was no progress exactly because of laws like this. Who wants to operate hosting business in the US now? Why not Asia? HK, Singapore? Or even New Zealand at this point. See how much business is lost. See how much Google, Yahoo, MS, Facebook are hurting now. That's true people will still use them, but not for business critical stuff. No way. In the name of catching a few idiots from a desert who try to blow up themselves they just handled over the whole IT industry to the rest of the world. How stupid you must be to do that?
I'm sceptical of Penrose's arguments. We don't see human brains as
symbol-manipulating formal systems, but that doesn't mean that aren't (or, more
correctly, that doesn't mean that there is no symbol-manipulating formal system
which is isomorphic to a particular brain, or brains in general).

Brains aren't implementing any known algorithm, but that doesn't mean they
aren't implementing any unknown algorithm.

It brings to mind Minksky's advice to Sussman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan#Uncarved_block
Free Schnail Mail for life
I admire people that roll the dice like this, and I've probably done it more than a few times myself.

The one that stood out for me though - was being healthy and losing weight. It can be just as difficult to be healthy when you're doing nothing, when you're travelling, when you're working for the man, when you're doing 80 hours a week in your own startup -- or even this guy, who says he was in his (perhaps) ideal job.

A lifestyle reboot has it's place, but I've found thought-processes like "if I wasn't working here I would be healthy" are rarely true.
What old browsers can we still run reliably? Serious question.
If Google et al are facing major potential economic loss due to a widespread lack of confidence in the security of their data, they had better come up with a plan to combat that loss.
Clean nudity is inferior to clean clothing, that's OK.

However, we allow fully clothed homeless that haven't bathed in months, or even anybody with poor personal hygiene. We allow dirty street, dirty buses and public transports, kids playing in sewers in bad area of town, hoarders and countless other documented hygiene threats.

So let's be intellectually honest and accept that nakedness is a morality issue first and foremost.
I think Hushmail are pretty up front about being no protection if the person who wants access has a court order. I would not go so far as to say 'snake oil'.

From wikipedia:
"The issue originally revolved around the use of the non-Java version of the Hush system. It performed the encrypt and decrypt steps on Hush's servers and then used SSL to transmit the data to the user. The data is available as cleartext during this small window; additionally the passphrase can be captured at this point. This facilitates the decryption of all stored messages and future messages using this passphrase."

"Hushmail has stated that the Java version is also vulnerable in that they may be compelled to deliver a compromised java applet to a user.[5][7]"

In [7] "Brian" working for hushmail responds to a wired journalist agreeing that the applet was an attack vector and Brian even points to a schneier.com article stating the same[2].
He did weasel around a bit about "viewing applet/HTML source" which he admits is no use for determining the validity of the applet as it is compiled.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...

[2] https://www.schneier.com/essay-191.html

[5] http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai.htm...

[7] http://web.archive.org/web/20071019225245/http://blog.wired....
After Lavabit shutdown, another encrypted e-mail service closes
Yubikey could be interesting for protecting the local vault. I haven't looked into it yet on how easy it is to do, but it is interesting and I will look into it. I cannot make any guarantees yet though.
Curious to who is the second? Penny for your thoughts?
An SMTP API for transactional emails
Jesus! The guy is being leaned on by the Government. This is his only option to maintain customer privacy. "disrespectful"? There aren't polite words to describe the contenpt I have for whiners like you.
Ask HN: If you were to build a new webapp today, how would you pick your techs?
The needs are pretty generic, users post content that gets hashed into a url and stored. Other users can now follow that link and see that content on their browser/device/application.

Assuming the client side is done already. I'm now pondering what technology to use for the backend.

I'm technology agnostic and would love to kill two birds in one stone with this project: make it work and learn something new. For the "make it work" part I can do it quickly with my legacy skills since I already have significant experience with those in production systems (mostly java-based), but I'm not sure I'm going to learn much here from a technical point of view and part of me would love to add a new technical line to the resume.

How would you go about it? Would you try something new to you, something new to the "scene"? Any tech in particular? (passion) Or would you get it done first (reason), deferring the learning part to the challenges at scale later down the way, which may or may not happen at all?

Bonus: how often do you ask yourself this very question?
Youtube Easter Egg - One for the Geeks
1. Go to youtube.com
2. Play any video
3. In the page (i.e. not in the search bar)
4. Type 1980
5. Enjoy and happy Geek Week!
Doesn't really matter. To read a regular mail you just need so much more in legal terms compared to reading somebody's email that it's just not worth contemplating no matter what. It's not like with emails where after 6 months they automatically are open to the Government sniffing. Because of the political reasons it's not even worth contemplating -- look -- you need regular court order, not some BS whatever rubber-stamp.
I'm sure some of the largest of the tech firms are getting something for their troubles.
This is so epic. I want the software. We have a MarioKart 64 room with bean bags at Distilled's London office and I'd die to have stats like this.

I might have to spend some money on setting this up... Thanks for sharing. :)
>If you plan to develop device drivers, or work with artificial intelligence or on real-time embedded systems with loads of algorithm analysis, a CS degree is a must.

This is false. John Carmack, for example, has made significant contributions in terms of real-time systems and algorithm analysis. Others without degrees have done the same in other fields. Even the chief data scientist of the data science-focused Kaggle came from a non-traditional background. An education is a must. Schooling isn't.
I've had my computer science engineering education at an institution that taught programming the "Dijkstra way": designing and proving correct programs by hand, with pen and paper. Still, if you're asking me to solve some problem I'd rather have a look at stackoverflow first than immediately firing up the mathematical machine in my head to design a nice solution. Besides, for most problems and programmers, chances are that their pen-and-paper created solutions are either trivial, not completely correct, or take too much time to be practically feasible. Churning out something working now is often more important than be able to get a better solution tomorrow.
> Taken together, the closures signal that e-mails, even if they are encrypted, can be accessed by government authorities and that the only way to prevent turning over the data is to obliterate the servers that the data sits on.

Can someone explain to me how this is possible? Or is this inaccurate?
I did consider it, and the Bluepass sync protocol has an option for a node type without an encryption key. Such a node is merely "reflector" of traffic, which can be useful in case you have two disjoint sets of devices that are never on the same LAN.

This could be later addition. However it does decrease the security slightly because now you have to assume that others now have access to your encrypted data. It is still a lot better than the alternatives because still no dictionary attack is possible, you'd have to break RSA to get to it.
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Founder is experienced entrepreneur in the Motorsport and Automotive space looking to develop a MVP for Porsche, Aston Martin and Radical Sportscars with the idea of launching a new company in London and securing seed stage VC funding.

So if you (1) ship code and (2) like the automotive space, please get in touch with Byron at byron.smith@me.com

Offices in Chiswell Street, EC2
Programming Challenge: Bollinger Bands
Crowd-based companies
We have crowd-founding, various product-sharing scheme, location independent companies, globalization and other trends.

How about crowd-based companies? Do we indeed need the hierarchies and

The limitation of freelancing and start-ups is, that it is not possible to really do large projects. The crowd-based companies could overcome that.

ok, lot of things are nature-based, but on the other hand, in the IT world is everything possible.

What do you think about it?
It depends on your experience and career trajectory. You have a lot of firm specific knowledge, which makes you more valuable to the firm but if you're using an internal stack maybe the only people who value that knowledge are the company you're working for. That's a bad bargaining position. And if you've been at the same company for nine years and have not been negotiating aggressively for raises the whole time there's an excellent chance you're underpaid because job hopping every two years is really the only semi-reliable way to get a 20% raise.

Try interviewing and seeing what you get offered.
Speed of light measurement using ping
Great work! It was super easy to set up a project and it just worked. It just worked, I love it when I can say that.

A couple of feedback points:

- If the simulator could be more responsive, it would be great

- Seems like even though you are simulating an iPhone 5, it doesn't use Retina images (I'm on a MacBook Pro Retina and the images look pixelated)

- I think being able to set up a password should be available on the free plan as well

Also, for cost:

- Are you thinking of also implementing a (cheaper) "freelance" payment plan? Someone that can have up to 5 apps, but only needs a maximum of 5,000 views/month. I think the $109/month is a bit too much for a freelance developer
"Works on my machine" :))
I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to add a userstyle for having <blink> back. Actually... I think I'll do just that.
I've been using a similar approach actually, with a keepass db on Dropbox. It provides a reasonable level of security assuming your passphrases are indeed random and computer generated (humans are lousy random number generators).

However I wanted to bring the security to the next level after that, and this is what Bluepass is about.
How Sergey Aleynikov Learned Never to Talk to the Police
Never say never; I think most American speakers would find that the 'fabricated iPhones' noun phrase implies that the iPhones are counterfeits. Otherwise the adjective would be awkwardly unnecessary – all iPhones are already manufactured. So, it must be there to emphasize (or at least hint at) the other meaning of 'fabricated'.

It's a little bit of an uncommon/sloppy usage, but still clear... more likely to appear in impromptu speech than writing.
Hey, do you have a link/url to the Reddit's Engineering Approach article/post. I'd very much like to read it. Thanks.
Remember what you're protecting here: the keys to your data, not the data itself.

You're at risk from the US government, but it's unclear that a government that can compel Dropbox to hand over your database and then crack some pretty heavy encryption can't access the accounts you're protecting with those passwords in some other way.

The main adversaries, IMO, you're protecting against are non-government actors, and your setup should be completely adequate for those.

FWIW, I have the same setup, but with Keepass.
Is this at all related to the Android-streaming software on http://www.appsurfer.com/, or is just a similar idea on a different platform?
you should also check out http://www.appsurfer.com/ for running android apps.
Clicking on the AngelList (or any other source for that matter) under 'Sources', filters it down.
The WETI Institute
It's been reported that Dropbox is "coming soon" to PRISM.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/06/prism-comp...
They pay their employees well and actually limit profit margins so that they're sustainable.

I watched a documentary[1] a few months ago wherein it was outlined that the company's former CEO witnessed the rise and fall of several other big-warehouse wholesalers. He noticed that what kept happening was that companies would start with lean margins, capture lots of customers, raise the margins, and collapse as soon as another wholesaler with leaner margins appeared. To avoid that fate, he apparently put a hard cap on Costco's profit margins.

That said, now that Costco's so big, they could theoretically raise their prices and still muscle out competitors. Let's hope that doesn't happen.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f6gRxwHGII
Second that. University is not the only source of education there is. Expert guidance is helpful, but not absolute necessity in many cases.
You don't hand your password to anyone but your email provider - and they can implement two-factor authentication (or anything else they like) - as GMail have done, for instance.

Which means that 99% of sites don't need to worry about security for passwords, and you don't need to worry that your password has been stolen by hackers and now they're trying that same password on every site you might have ever used.

It's also decentralised, so there's no tracking of what sites you've logged in to. (Or, at least, it will be, once email providers implement IDPs themselves rather than using the Mozilla fallback). And the way the certification works, the IDP has no idea what sites you're signing into, so you're safe from that too.
I would almost certainly build the back end from the ground up based on the concept of a stream of events. Current state is then expressed as left fold over a base empty state and all of the event types you're interested in.

Benefits that I can see:

* Purity. You can test the hell out of this with no side effects.

* Transaction log built in.

* The ability to look back in time, by only applying the events up until the point you're interested in and disregarding the rest.

* Very flexible and scalable.

* You can retrospectively answer questions that you might not have known how to ask, by creating new operations over your states.

* Plays well with monitoring, and analysis. E.g. just stream all of your events into logstash and elastic search.
Over-reliance on Google and Q/A forums has its problems, but I think it may be better than spending 4 months poring over the documentation and other books, working through everyone you know in your social circle who might know C better than you do, vainly trying to get responses on usenet, and then finally giving up and realizing you may never know why your program segfaults (me circa 1995).

Besides, unassisted trouble coding isn't exactly rare or new:

“I’ve assigned this problem [binary search] in courses at Bell Labs and IBM. Professional programmers had a couple of hours to convert the description into a programming language of their choice; a high-level pseudo code was fine... Ninety percent of the programmers found bugs in their programs (and I wasn’t always convinced of the correctness of the code in which no bugs were found).” - Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls, 1986
Do you remember google asking for your telephone number? They knew what they were doing.
Why do you think Sweden would extradite him? That's just conspiracy theories.
I was about to ask the question "Why didn't you use the video element" - answered well within the link (if anyone has the same question)
Very cool - I notice it works well on iOS Safari too.

Any plans for a native app or mobile optimised interface? For some apps, being able to touch is going to make the demo experience much better, and hopefully convert more users to paid installs.
afraid.org looks nice - thanks for sharing :)
Two of the best programmers I know have not got degrees. However, I also know a few that have got degrees and are really smart.

Having a good degree does apparently demonstrate that you are able to apply yourself, without someone standing over you nagging you to finish your assignments (ala Mama and Papa whilst at school).

That is an attractive quality for an employer. I have a crap degree, hated my course but have been a successful freelancer for over 10 years, mostly working remotely. I deliver and my clients trust me. I may be an exception, but in my opinion degrees don't really mean diddly-squat.

I'll take work experience over a degree any day of the week.
Open source unfortunately gives no such guarantee [1].

[1]. https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp... (Reflections on trusting trust)
Sorry But I will recapture his thinking here:

* Try to be explicit { rather than implicit }
* Carefully consider inlining { large blocks of code }
* Do not use static initializers { for infrequency or trivialities }
WETI
OK, the tech behind this could be the first serious competitor to Teamviewer in a while. This is cool!
I believe you can run multiple simulators with some hacking. (I did it successfully pre iOS5 but I think it can still be done)
I've never understood why password managers use browser plugins. It should be an application agnostic overlay that pastes selected passwords into the currently selected textbox.

I'm working around that at the moment with a combination of Emacs, the Mac keychain and Alfred.app - it's not beautiful though.

What are your plans for this?
netflix sux by supporting DRM. its unthinkable to trim and strip words in a sentence and still pretend you respect free speech.
Bill Gates sceptical of Google's high altitude 3G network covering Africa +