skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was saying that with enough pressure, they wouldn't just allow redistribution or even publish the source code, they would even release it under the GPL and kiss the buyers' feet if asked to.
What do you Need to Be a Startup Mentor?
I think the issue of privacy is being intentionally and collusively kept a series of domestic affairs by national state agencies.

We need a global charter for privacy rights.
I did understand point 1: but this type of block would illustrate that a primary concern is the ability to abuse my personal e-mail address.
Assuming a company doesn't have that intent, I don't think they should send that signal.

Point 2 regarding abuse in the other direction is more interesting, and a fair point, thanks.
Sigh. It was a joke, in reference to the abysmal quality of YouTube comments.
Jake Davis: Why I am banned from associating with Anonymous
Very clean UI.
Nice to see that you 'planned' to release an API.
I find that extremely hard to believe....

Attachments? Google Drive? And why not lazy-load long emails?
You can certainly find libraries with interfaces like that. For example, OpenSSL has extensive libraries for all sorts of cryptographic primitives and protocols.

If you take a narrow focus on a particular cryptographic event (such as your encryption of a string with an RSA public key) then you miss the greater story about encryption: it's not just the individual cryptographic primitive that needs to be implemented correctly, it's everything else.

An RSA encryption like that does not stand alone. Keys must be generated, secured and distributed. The RSA library itself must be validated to ensure that it works correctly. The actual primitive must be used correctly (in the case of RSA don't use a stupid exponent as some have done). And the environment within which the encryption is used must be understood and secured (just look at the CRIME and BREACH attacks against TLS to see how something 'secure' can be broken because of something apparently irrelevant, in this case, compression).

The overriding reason that encryption is 'hard' is that secure computer systems have enemies and those enemies (attackers) will do _anything_ to attack the system. They will attack it based on timing, compression problems, flaws in the protocol, freezing the RAM to extract a private key, etc. etc. There's really no end to the variety of things you can try to attack a cryptosystem.

So, building a secure system may have encryption as a necessary condition, but it's not sufficient. So much else can and will go horribly wrong.

If you are interested in this hit the books and understand the history of cryptography. For example, look at how Vigenere was broken by Babbage, or the Venona ciphers, or Lorenz. These 'old' ciphers can tell you a lot about how people actually attack things. Then read about modern ciphers and attacks on them. Wikipedia has much. Read about TEMPEST and imagine other attacks possible in that way.
Internally, we call doing that Appception :)
Idea: An Android Snapchat to share all types of files
"Yes, we've filed for a patent"

"TestCafé loads websites via a proxy, thus allowing its engine to inject scripts that can access and manipulate the Document Object Model"

That's exactly how Selenium 1 worked when we created it 9 years ago. It also sounds like the approach used in Sahi, Windmill, JsTestDriver -- other web testing tools. Not cool.

"While loading via proxy is not a new idea, our implementation is unique. Our framework is the only one that automatically configures that proxy and allows direct communication with the page via JavaScript."

I look forward to reading your patent application.
Am I the only one who liked the Program Manager and the windows-minimise-to-the-desktop behaviour of win3.x? It seems like every other bizarre idea has been implemented in a window manager somewhere except that one. Or am I wrong?
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) in the UK is relevant here.

(http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/361693/teenager-jailed-for-refus...)
RIM (Blackberry) open to going private
AFAIK there's no "encryption for humans" library (at least no widely known, widely used, widely tested one) - they all rely on the developer to specify the right parameters into the function, with no sanity checking asserts.

The results of this is things like the developer who used "1" as the multiplication factor, so to decrypt the data, you need to divide each block by 1...
because it was cruel and ineffective

As Dr. Phil would say, "How's that working out for ya?"

It was a classic case of people wanting to be litigious or do-gooders and making the situation much worse than it already was rather than accepting the best option that was available.
They start looking exactly the way they should. Not worth wasting time on.
From some brief playing around, it's a web-based development environment:

1. At the simplest level, it's an installation of Ace (http://ace.c9.io/), an in-browser code editor. So you can edit code in-browser and it gets saved it to some (free) cloud storage.

2. There are some social features added on to this, which I haven't really investigated, but I guess you can form groups, get a feed of updates, share projects, etc.

3. In addition to the basic cloud storage + editing, you can spin up (also free) VM instances to back the editor, forming a dev environment. Your web-based editing space gets mounted as /home, and you have root access to an Ubuntu machine so you can install whatever you need. This can all be managed through either the web interface, or SSH if you prefer. However since they're only intended to back the IDE, the VMs shut down about 20 mins after everyone accessing one has closed their Koding browser window, to discourage using them as free VPS hosting.

There are a few other companies in this space. Cloud9, which developed the Ace editor (https://c9.io/) are possibly the best-established. Koding seems to differentiate by emphasizing the social/collaborative features more, and possibly in being more generous with the VMs. There is also https://www.nitrous.io, which I don't know anything about. If anyone's up for writing an article, I'd certainly be interested in an overview of the current offerings from someone who's actually used them, i.e. more in-depth than I can glean from checking out their websites.
Ask HN: Good VPS offerings from companies outside the US? 
I want to migrate out of Digital Ocean, I don't want my personal data under the US jurisdiction. Have nothing to hide, but that's not the point.
If I've put the details together correctly, I remember the outrage that government translation contract created. Whether you made a lot of money out of your time with the company or not, you're ultimately better off not toiling for a badly-run enterprise that was built on lies.

I grew up close to where the company was based. Nice part of the world – sort of :) – but full of slippery "self-made man" characters.
I definitely haven't seen a finer writer or more intriguing than Adam Curtis. Malcom Gladwell comes to mind, but I subjectively like AC bit better. My favorite is the one on the interaction between pets and their owners on TV and how it changed over time.

I still would like to see some contra argument, though I doubt I'll find much on HN.
Dujdjdfjshjx
It doesn't matter whether they are any good at catching bad people. What matters is how they impact the lives of good people.
I would counter that the real state secret is that the threat of global conflict in this day and age has dimished but the cold war mentality has persisted.

Furthermore, people don't care about privacy and are willing to trade liberty for securiy. We like to talk the talk but when the we get to the crossroads the general public is indifferent.
How about the ACLU and the EFF?
Encryption is easy, security is hard. Every time you increase the security of a product, you decrease usability.

e.g. easiest to use :: SSH with password <<>> SSH with passphraseless keys <<>> SSH with passphrase-protected keys :: most secure
ABSOLUTELY.
Everyone who cares about privacy should support the EFF. I 100% agree.

However.

I would argue that with all due respect to the EFF, they have not achieved the desired result (yet). Arguably this is because it has remained what mainstream american would call a fringe interest group.

I find it hard to believe that the general public, if in fact educated (albeit briefly, but effectively) about the issue of what's happened to personal privacy in the USA over the past 15 years, would care less about it than say the right to buy a military assault rifle at a private gun show.

We need an aggressive EFF. It starts with money. We need an EFF that way more aggressively pursues big big money and big big names, names that joe the plumber and soccer mom sally would "respect" (I'm talking about movie stars and celebrities, people).

The NRA has (had actually) Charleton Heston.

Why doesn't the EFF have ... Oprah? or Ashton Kutcher? or Will Smith? or Tom Cruise?? (oh never mind that one, actually)... or Katy Perry? you get the idea
Locked to one OS. Expected mainstream ones. Useful for a niche of people.
Does anybody even check if the degree is real?
Breaking Through Limits on Spying
It looks to be that additional VMs cost money, so there's a business model to start with.

btw, your compilr link goes to a domain squatter.
Yet a "safe" email system is now gone. A better idea would be to move yourself and your encrypted email company to a country that will let you keep providing such a useful service (assuming there is one).
I agree it's immoral.

Sadly things haven't changed all that much, there are plenty of people who still view this kind of stuff as normal 'industry best practice':

YCombinator funds companies in the spyware spam downloads 'industry'[1].

Path, a well funded startup whose CEO is well connected and has invested in YC startups, was caught stealing users address books and declared it was 'industry best practice'[2]. Twitter [3] and Facebook have done similar things.

AirBnB, another large well funded YC startup were caught spamming Craigslist and nobody that mattered (investors, employees, industry leaders etc) seemed to care. The founder also has previous convictions for spamming and again nobody seemed to care [4]

SocialCam, another YC startup was spamming Facebook [5].

Spamming is endemic in the SaaS industry, there are hundreds of other recent examples. Even if you are a serial spammer who has been caught multiple times that won't stop you being well respected in the industry and getting masses of funding. Spamming is rewarded by the community. They like to use euphemisms like 'growth hack', but we all know what it really means: SPAM.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5095974

[3] http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/14/business/la-fi-tn-tw...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5061140

[5] http://www.pcmike.com/what-im-thinkin/beware-of-socialcam
If you right click on a video, it will show a "Stats for nerds" option (showing the usual stats, but nice touch nevertheless).
There's no need to apologise. I found to be a great read!
Took me a couple moments to figure out this was a joke.
It sounds like their approach is the same one we took with the first version of Selenium. The approach is JavaScript injection through an HTTP proxy. Because of the same origin policy and JavaScript security model, we abandoned this approach when moving to Selenium 2. Selenium 2 goes for the most native approach for clicks and key events. (Continuing in that native-is-better approach, I'm now experimenting with robots, but that's another story.) I'm amazed they think their approach is better.

I'm surprised they think the Selenium 1 JavaScipt proxy-injection model is a better approach. But hey, I'm getting old... Get off my lawn, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I'm stunned they think it's better and trying to patent it. I really hope I'm missing some new key insight here. Please enlighten me, people.
I've watched / read just about everything created by Adam Curtis. He is a brilliant documentarist.

If you have a couple of hours start by watching "Century of the Self" where he tells the history of PR and Edward Bernays. (it's public domain)

If you like it then watch "The Trap" and "Pandora's box". "The Power of Nightmares" is also great. Subscribe to Adam's blog.

He is able to create brilliant connections which give a whole new perspective on history. Some people I've talked about him told they believe he is a conspiracy theorist however maybe I'm naive but most of the things he says make perfect sense to me.

I remember watching "Century of the Self" at 21 and having a tiny 'aha' moment about how things work.
It should be off only 1/4 of the time, but IIRC it was often not implemented correctly, and it would sometimes be 2-on,2-off instead of 3-on,1-off.
We can imagine something that runs the CLR in hardware, and we can imagine something that runs the JVM in hardware ( actually those things exist , but they don't and both the CLR and JVM are incapable of creating programs that _can_ run on hardware without C shims.

Rust is in almost the same boat since they are using the LLVM, but the LLVM differs from the JVM and CLR since it can generate stuff to run on hardware without a shim.
We've been a customer of these guys for months now. They power the preview functionality of our app builder.

I have to say that they're a bunch of awesome folks who are responsive to feedback and really work hard to make their service matter. Keep it up guys!
Show HN: Events In Your City
Linking up Foursquare and OpenStreetMap editing
Theorist helps sharpen tests of fundamental theory in high energy experiments
I think that a large number of people go into "startups" thinking they're some kind of antidote to the politics and flat-out unethical behavior seen in "the corporate world". That's not really true. These startups (i.e. companies designed to become, or be bought by, corporate behemoths) are often like junior gangsters-- that is, more violent, more unpredictable, because they're trying to prove themselves.

There's a gigantic survivor bias in startups at the upper end: to build a $200B company like Google or Facebook, you have to do a lot of things very right (and more than you do wrong). This makes it seem like "startups" are better than they are, because the ones with dogshit MBA culture crash and burn. Superiority is not intrinsic to startups, and there are plenty of shady players who still get exits and credibility.

I've seen far more unethical behavior in the startup world than in finance. Large tech companies are somewhere in between. Why? It's not that finance people are intrinsically better, but that even junior bankers know how to fight for themselves. Junior tech workers, in general, haven't a clue, which is why a lot of these dodgy startups will fire people without severance for completely bogus reasons.

On the founder's statement to the effect of "I pay you a wage and you do the work": the lesson is that loyalty has to be earned. Don't just give that away.

I feel like a lot of us, when we start our careers, are like that socially inept guy who'll go out of his way to help some girl who isn't really interested but is basically nice to him, and he overvalues the interaction (and, in some cases, fabricates an emotional relationship in his mind). Just because the boss is basically nice to you, and may pretend to want to be your friend, doesn't mean you should trust him blindly. Con artists are nice, until they screw you over. Loyalty has to go both ways.
And lets not forget the entropy problems - if you control the RNG you control the encryption - case in point http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number_... the infamous debian openssl error. So you need to be sure in your RNG.
I found it quite approachable and thorough, although it throws the the diagonal
lemma out there without any real explanation even though it's crucial to the
reasoning that follows it.

Also I disagree with the completely unfounded assumptions at the end that the
(terribly named) Reals have something to do with reality. The Reals are a
Mathematical curiosity at best, but more often than not they complicate the
understanding of subjects to which they have no relevance, eg. fractions
(especially their decimal notation), calculus, physics, computing (especially
floating point) and so on.

It's fine to treat infinite constructs like the Reals declaratively, eg. as
functions which can be composed, but it's meaningless to reason about doing
things to their 'final results', since there are no such things by definition.
In more precise terms, it makes sense to reason about the output of
co-terminating functions (which loop forever, spitting out, for example, a
never-ending sequence of digits) but not diverging functions (which loop forever
without ever getting as far as their first digit).
I don't understand their video at all and the voice is annoying.
The burden isn't on Google (I'm not sure why you are singling out Google) their hands are tied from a legal and practical standpoints.

They receive warrants and subpoenas with which they have to comply to keep doing business, if you don't care for that blame the politician and the legal system, focusing on Google is not only missing the point, it's unfair
This is only because our mobile market is so small that we only have 3 providers and they are all subsidiaries of global companies (O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone) with headquarters under different jurisdictions. This is not enforced by our government and if anyone wanted to circumvent this filter (which would be easy - VPN would do) AFAIK it would not be illegal here.
Why does putting a human in the loop change anything? Either way, my data is being used on behalf of other people.
With NZ becoming less safe, it seems that's exactly what Mega intends to do for its storage service and the upcoming secure e-mail service. If he does it right, it could fill the space left Lavabit and Silent Mail.

https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-will-move-mega-privacy-s...
Have you seen RetroShare? I like it quite a bit & have used it with a few friends so far. It claims security... but I don't know enough to be certain.
I skim-read their website and watched a good chunk of their video. I still have no idea what this actually is, and why I would use it over my existing toolset (Behat, Selenium + WebDriver, CasperJS, etc).

If any DevExpress guys/gals are reading this, please consider making a shorter (2-3 min) video showing some tests being written and run.
This doesn't support iOS which makes it pointless. Requiring Java is a non starter anyway. I think the only way this will be at least somewhat palatable if it was an open source native application with the servers in a country likely to not interfere with them. Is there such a place?
"Secure email" is an oxymoron. Email isn't secure. We should treat it as such.

Even if you use the "technically challenging" PGP (i.e. challenging for the layman), then the metadata still leaks relationships.

We need a replacement that is secure by default and easy to use, so that 'Mom and Pop' can make the easy switch. Get that right and you can replace email.

In my opinion, a company like Yahoo is in the perfect position to write, sponsor and open source an new innovative messaging solution, that is secure by default (and cannot be made insecure) and cannot be monitored. External validation of the source code and cryptographic implementation would be paramount. A whole ecosystem of new "secure messaging" servers and clients could spring up. It could be the next paradigm shift on the internet.

Yahoo are slowly getting back on their feet. If there ever was a perfect time to release a killer app that would resonate with the majority, it would be this. From trampled and downtrodden to the golden boys (and girls) again.

Go on Yahoo. I dare you!
I'd forgotten about Duncan Campbell until I saw a reference to him the other day on HN. I ended up watching his 1980s documentary from the Secret Society series "In Time Of Crisis: Government Emergency Powers".

The described how the UK goverment prepared legislation that would be rushed through in times of crisis. However, as this is held in a perpetual "draft" status this legislation is never really discussed and would be rushed through in Parliament should an emergency arise. From what leaks suggest this draft legislation allowed for extremely widespread and sweeping powers. Perhaps understandable in the context of the Cold War....

Now what I thought was interesting is that I bet those Cold War era Emergency Powers bills are still sitting there in Whitehall waiting to be passed. However, we still don't discuss them and I can see no good reason why not.

The documentary is on Youtube - search for "In Time Of Crisis: Government Emergency Powers"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_%28journalist%2...
I'd also recommend they reach out to Selenium developers and having a conversation with them to see if what they've done is really patentable. [Disclosure: I created Selenium]
Heroku provides free VM's also. Though the dyno's apparently go idle if not hit by traffic in X time. Also, of course you don't get full SSH access to do whatever you want.
At what time do you come home/start working? I'm living next to work, but with 8 hours to work I don't have much time to do anything else.. start around 9, work until around 6pm (8hours + 1hour lunch) that doesn't leave much time
How is it possible for Snowden to be inspired any further?

He sacrified his life for us. He is the inspiration.

Certainly no president in the next few terms will rest until he is rendered, he has to look over his shoulder now forever.

Thank you for your sacrifice Mr. Snowden.
This is a great answer, thank you. I have a day job as a .NET developer but I am bored and looking into developing (indie) games (I envy your 5 years AAA experience!). I have tried Lua and Go and like both. They seem both simple enough to be productive in but with some very powerful features at the same time (e.g. concurrency in Go, tables and coroutines in Lua). I have tried Clojure (as a language, not for game development), but the 'mental overhead' for me is just too much. Rust seems to be a bit more heavy on syntax and features, but I will have to look into it a bit more to find out if that is justified.

I have tried Unity (especially since I could leverage my C# experience) but as a developer I like the 'code-first' approach rather than being tied down in a graphical tool with scripting capabilities (especially for 2D games?).
Show HN: DIY substitute for expensive whiteboard
Koding(en)'s been on my radar a while since they're in a vaguely similar space (lightweight virtualization).

But as a coder, I could never for the life of me figure out what Koding is for. Apparently the Koding team doesn't know either.

It's a bunch of (admittedly cool) tech features thrown in a box and shaken up a bit. Now the team is scratching their heads about what it is they've built, trying to justify their investment money. Koding is a fine example of a "sitcom" startup in YC parlance [1]: social virtualized viral cloud coding, just because.

So that's my analysis. If anyone from the Koding team reads this, here's my advice: Stop. Take a machete to 80% of the product. Figure out what it is that you're great at, and that people really, really want. Then you won't need to be making silly goggle videos or tragic blog posts like this one.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Not always. Several new security-oriented email providers boast diskless email servers and end-to-end encryption.
How Risk-Averse Entrepreneurs Succeed
Having Dog Poop Initiative
Dog Finder Api for Developers
Fetch the list of lost and found dogs ordered by distance and put the data in your web page
I am Jason Cohen, Co-Founder/CEO of WPengine. Ask Me Anything
Beyond celebrities, who is the corporate America sponsor?

Personally I feel that if you want to get it done you'll need both celebs and corporate backing.

//sigh... I feel dirty. I'll go shower.