skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But what if there are quantitatively and qualitatively more full-time, well-funded cryptographers inside the NSA (and its collaborating sibling organizations in its close allies) than outside? They may have an internal system, with geographically-distributed schools of thought, specialties, and long-running debates, as rich and open as the outside world - just completely segregated.

At least, that's how I'd do it, if I found myself a global superpower after WW2, thanks in large part to superior signals/crypto work, and didn't want any other emergent groups to surprise me from a "higher perch" of signals omniscience.
Show HN: NoPSW.com - use secure passwords you don't need to remember
But Obama says he'll go ahead solo: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/us/politics/obama-syria.ht...
Depends, I guess. I'd check out Debian and maybe, yes, Mint.

The thing to realize is that you can use any kind of desktop environment on any of the main distros. With Ubuntu, moving from its default DE can sometimes result in certain hiccups. Other distros are more DE-modular; that's the feeling I get when working on a Debian desktop, at least.

Overall, Debian is a very user-friendly system (or rather, it exposes the same kinds of interfaces as Ubuntu does, once the leaky UI abstractions in Ubuntu do start leaking. ;)
Steve Wozniak rips new 'Jobs' movie (video)
My concern is that the federal gov't will do what they do with alcohol laws (legal drinking age, blood alcohol limits) which is "if you don't tow the federal line, you lose your highway funds".

Nothing get politicians to flip faster than money.
I've built a few digital asset management apps for fortune 500 companies, CRUD apps for non-profits, and several different startup ideas (sites, mobile, etc).

Nothing I've made has required a lot of input form complexity, which seems to be Symfony's strong suit.

I think you might be right about the project sweet-spots. Symfony certainly seems equipped to handle workloads you describe -- I've not seen form input validation as complex as Symfony.
I like unite + vimproc more than CtrlP:

http://www.codeography.com/2013/06/17/replacing-all-the-thin...
https://github.com/Shougo/unite.vim
> I'm not sure it's right to say that it's not clear how to charge for FOSS.

I said this because many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of open-source, and insist that open-source software cannot be sold.

Your response makes a lot of sense, but it's not really applicable to smaller scale products, and it's certainly not applicable to web-services, which are significantly easier to rip-off.
I remember the days when Netscape Navigator had all the market share.

Get off my lawn. :)
The comment was about whether the comment should be made in hacker news, not costa rica.
Poll: Who will be the next Microsoft CEO?
Would be interested to hear HN opinions!
Kevin Turner
Steve Sinofsky
Julie Larson-Green
Qi Lu
Tony Bates
Kiril Tatarinov
Terry Myerson
Paul Maritz
Kevin Johnson
John Donahoe
Dale Lee
Vic Gundotra
Jeff Raikes
Robbie Bach
Scott Forstall
Sheryl Sandberg
John Legere
You're certainly right. By "much" and especially in cases involving security, I don't think we can be happy with or report on the system's security with just a "majority" being all that's need to feel safe. In fact, I'd go as far to say that unless approaching 100% and without considering circumstances like those that involve an NSL, all bets are off. Circumstances concerning an NSL are another matter, and that's where we should eliminate the on-the-wire concerns and opt for PGP-like communication.
> Learning Vim is a side project: something you do casually, slowly, until and if you are able to do the actual switch.

No one appointed you the director of how one learns Vim.

This is one of the most obnoxious parts of Vim threads: that guy that responds to people talking about how they learned Vim (past tense, as in already happened) and tells them that they learned it "wrong".
At least for PowerShell such a thing should be trivial as the shell knows about its commands and parameter parsing is consistent for every command.

I'll probably try hacking something together on the weekend for PS.
I think the word "red" isn't a fair comparison. I'd use the word "love".

If Pat told Alex, "I love you", Alex would rightly infer that Pat had just expressed romantic interest. If Pat then said, "...like I love my dog," Alex would then rightly be confused (and angry).

In the same way, the term "intellectual property rights" overloads the phrase "property rights". It's a poor choice of words and since "intellectual property rights" is the neologism, it should change. Otherwise, we'll have to come up with a new term for natural "property rights" and teach everyone what that term means.

And debts are not properties, they are stipulations in contracts that can sometimes be transferable. There are rights involved with forming contracts, but they aren't the same as property rights.
The convertible note was for $40,000, so they definitely had the money to spend if they were fully serious. I think they just played hardball.

There's no real legal recourse. I asked my lawyer the instant it happened. And even if there were, what's the best outcome you could get? Work at the accelerator with investors who hate you?

The mentor was the co-founder of the startup who "acquihired" me from my first startup.

And totally agreed on your last point. For me, it was definitely a lesson learned. The even better lesson was that I was spending a lot of time hustling for the wrong things. Why should I be working so hard just to get $40k? What would an accelerator do for me that I couldn't do for myself? Now I'm bootstrapping while consulting, a much more sensible choice for most businesses.
My understanding is that it is also possible France would join in?

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/france-militar...
I've switched from Google and Chrome to DDG and Firefox. Very happy with the switch. I've started recommending to my non-techie relatives to switch as well.

We've seen this sort of thing before. I've gone from no search engines, to Webcrawler, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Google, and now DuckDuckGo. No biggie.
You must realize that ThemeForest doesn't just sell CMS themes, they sell HTML templates as well.
Scott Guthrie
you are not a coder unless other coders say you are

Not everybody needs the approval of an external entity. I couldn't care less what other coders think of me. What I ship speaks for itself. What I write speaks for itself. What studies scientists publish speak for themselves. The rest is politics.
Not quite Anatoli Bugorski, but still a very interesting discussion here:

"Putting your hand in the Large Hadron Collider..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMqPT6oKJ8&list=TLwUB7ALPnO...
Funny enough, this all happened in Los Angeles. :)
nice, I would drop the user name , password length choic (it's copy paste anyway) and just have the user enter the domain
Not advocating non standard crypto, but if the system is at least somewhat good ( that is, not susceptible to automatic attacks), it would keep a actual human busy. And you don't loose security, assuming that the cyphertext of the obscure system is again encrypted by a well established cypher.
20 rules for picking the right collaboration solution
On the PostgreSQL note, here's a whitepaper I helped with that enumerates best practices for it on AWS: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_RDBMS_PostgreSQL.pdf
It's rarely that blatant. Most people use more covert methods to keep engineers out of the lifecycle. It can be frustrating because most of these statements can be valid when uttered under different circumstances.

- "Only "power users" will use that." Sometimes this one's true, but some people will say this about any idea engineers come up with.

- "Let's see what someone in product thinks." The key thing you have to pay attention to here is the subtext. If it's "Let's keep product people in the loop", that's good. If it's "Your idea is invalid because you don't have the title 'Product Manager'", then you have a problem.

- "I understand you don't want to complicate the code, but our customers don't care about that." This one's a minefield. It puts you in a place where you have to either make a poor technical decision, or get accused of not caring about the customer.

But by far the most common tactic is merely excluding engineers from important meetings, and only bringing them in when they need someone to write the code.
Since I'm trying out my CODE keyboard [1] I thought I'd go into a bit more detail.

My statement about inefficient code quickly is in terms of joules per computation. So while it is absolutely true that a junior perl programmer might slowly generate inefficient code and an experienced (lazy) perl programmer might quickly generate optimal perl code, neither of them would produce the same product written in assembly code (or better yet pure machine code).

To put that in a different perspective, I once wrote a BASIC interpreter in Java (one of my columns for JavaWorld) and it was pretty quick to do, and yet looking at the "source" to Microsoft BASIC written in 8080 assembler it was not very efficient. But it took Bill a lot longer to write Microsoft BASIC in assembler, and you couldn't even begin to port a full up Java VM to the 8080 (let's not argue about J2ME).

But step back then from that precipice, you have two versions of BASIC, one runs in a Browser and one runs on a 16 line by 64 character TVText S-100 card. (or 24 x 80 CRT terminal). Now you can run the same program in both contexts, unchanged, but the amount of energy you expend to do so varies a lot. So which is more "efficient?" I'd argue the one written in 8080 assembly is more efficient from a joules per kilo-core-second standpoint. Which was written more quickly? Mine, it only took about a week.

That is why talking about efficiency and productivity without getting anally crisp in your definitions can lead to two opposite interpretations of exactly the same statement.

[1] I find the lack of a wrist pad to rest on a challenge.
I think it's easier to not be alarmed about foreign-born PhDs returning home (if that is indeed where they go when they leave the us) than if it were US natives leaving, but I'm not sure that it's really that much less worrisome. Either way, smart people are deciding that they can earn a better life with their skills in a different country. If it's foreign-born PhDs returning home, it really only says that the natives are staying because of the difficulties of getting started in a new country, not that the long-term outlook of moving isn't bad.
First thing that came to mind when I read the name was a travel bookstore / center in Stanford Mall years back (I'm not sure when they closed). I like the name and the concept.

It seems like your initial plan is to do have everyone in the same travel group?

I like the idea. I travel a bit and always seem to get a bit of time in doing some work either at one of our local offices or at a coffee shop/coworking space.
Trisquel's abrowser also uses ddg as the default. Ddg contributes to the project
Here are a few clarifications and an answer
https://ozten.com/psto/2013/08/29/fc4-persona-questions/
We all may have a little Martian in us
Search is based upon machine learning algorithms that use stored data as signals. Google is not only REALLY good at what they do BECAUSE of the amount of data they have on the individual doing the searching, but the benefits of machine learning are that they will get even BETTER as more and more data is incorporated and stored.

Without proper machine learning on the individual level, DDG will never improve beyond a point. They're already kind of shitty, and even if they get millions of more queries they won't be able to improve at the rate that Google does.

It's a trade-off ('privacy' vs. 'quality') that 95% of the world doesn't give a shit about. Therefore I see this sort of move to DDG as just short-sighted and unreasonable overall.
It's definitely not just immigrants returning home. My wife is a neuroscientist, and we emigrated to Canada. Whether we will return is still an open question.
What are you trying to say about the linked story?
I've been reading these comments about DDG for what feels like years now. Was it so terrible to begin with or is considerable an overstatement?

It can't be improving so quickly and still pretty shitty for such a long period of time.
Why would storing personal information be necessary (not beneficial) to improve a service? There are plenty of ways to improve user experience, including actually communicating with users.
Tech Companies and Government May Soon Go to War Over Surveillance
TextMate keymap for PhpStorm
Thanks for the heads-up. It should be working now.
But then you consider that in the mid 90s, the raw number of devices regularly running Netscape Navigator was probably on par with todays usage statistics of Opera.
Centring Columns in Bootstrap
User data is commonly used to improve relevance.
To be clear, I'm not saying that traveling is a bad thing. I love it.

I myself just moved to San Francisco ~3 months ago after a lifetime of living within about a 100 mile circle of places on the East coast; a lot of these observations come from this experience. Ultimately, it's been a good experience for me, but it's not exactly what I expected from a naive point of view.

Packing up and moving your whole life has some pretty serious consequences that are easy to gloss over. There's a big difference between a vacation of a few weeks to a month and actually living somewhere else.

Being in SF, for me, meant living in an urban (vs. suburban) environment, which meant a variety of changes. Hopping in the car to go anywhere is no longer a requirement. It's also not an option if I want to get a load of groceries, unless I want to rent a ZipCar. Am I saying it's too hard to walk 2 blocks to the grocery store? No. But it's a new way of life.

All these changes to your lifestyle can be exciting and fun, but they can also be stressful; especially so if you are (as I am not) socially isolated by language and/or cultural differences.

For instance, one thing that was a hassle moving here for me, and would be worse internationally, is ADHD medication. It's a schedule 2 drug in the United States, meaning I can only ever get a month's supply, among other restrictions. So when I got here I had to get a new doctor almost immediately - and most doctors are reluctant to write a controlled substance prescription on demand.

Again, I love traveling, and if I was reading this article about a DC company (where I used to live) and I still lived there, I'd be the first to sign up.

But a lot of the differences are subtle, or unexpected, and you should realize that it can be - while enlightening, meaningful, and ultimately fun - a very stressful experience. It's sort of like the difference between telecommuting and working in the office - with google hangouts, teleconferences, etc, the communication should be the same, right? It's the same laptop whether at home or at work, right? And yet, for me, the experience is massively different.
It isn't like that at all. The funding picture has changed dramatically in the last few years. Back in 2003 the NIH success rate was around 30 %, if your idea wasn't too stupid you could count on your getting funded for the next five years. Now it's less than 10 %. If you are not at MIT or Caltech you might consider not even applying.

Folks, we are looking at the end of an empire.
Midori (the elementary OS browser) offers several default options for search, including DDG.
Such a license would not be an open-source license.
Yet another high energy physicist who thinks HEP is the only science being done. /condensedMatterPhysicistRant
see the original here: http://awsofa.info
The OFA team used Puppet, CloudFormation, furious typing in boto and the CLI, and later added a healthy helping of Netflix's Asgard system for system mgmt.
I highly, highly recommend Linux Mint (with Cinnamon) to those looking for an Ubuntu alternative. Cinnamon is a great desktop environment and Mint, in many ways, is Ubuntu without the privacy issues.
NSA has its own fab, located at Ft. Meade.
Can we get another section, as feature in, or customers? I.E. logos of companies using the startup, or techcrunch, pandodaily, forbes, etc...
You just reiterated your previous statement without addressing my point.

According to you, it is morally OK for government to decide what is a right and what isn't. In that case, is there anything morally wrong with government deciding to nationalize all retirement savings?
The Trusted Foundry Program isn't even a secret. (Unless you believe it's some kind of misdirection.)
I second this. With everything going on in the news recently, I've increased my VPN and Tor usage.
The easiest thing would be to just turn off the internet search option from the dash, or maybe uninstall the Amazon lens (but maybe there are other similar lenses...). Or change from Unity to another Desktop Environment (Gnome, Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon or whatever).

Unless you want to make a statement, then changing the distro might be the gesture you want.
If CAs gave up valid certs/signing keys for google.com, would the fingerprint be different? And if so, would it be possible to verify the fingerprint if Google hosted it at like pki.google.com?

I've been wondering if there's a public registry of certificate fingerprints somewhere to verify you're getting the cert the domain owner knows about.
Actually that would be a really good idea....
> I think it's easier to not be alarmed about foreign-born PhDs returning home (if that is indeed where they go when they leave the us) than if it were US natives leaving, but I'm not sure that it's really that much less worrisome.

It is a very different situation, and the meaningfulness is likewise different. For a foreign-born PhD holder, they have family back there, they'll become bigger fish in a smaller pond, they already know the language, probably have citizenship, are acculturated, may not have kids and wives deeply embedded into American culture & communities, etc. For an American-born PhD holder, most of these will be false. The cost to an American of moving permanently overseas is, on average, going to be vastly higher to them.

When you hear of some foreign-born PhD holders on the margin deciding to return home, it's no big deal, and is adequately explained by very small shifts in the rewards of being in the US and the rewards of going home. (And a survey means even less.) People simply don't want to leave their home countries for very good reasons. Think of how few Jews left Nazi Germany before it was too late, even when the writing was literally on the wall (in the form of anti-semitic graffiti).

When you hear of a lot of American scientists leaving America permanently, then it's time to start panicking.
Working for a company that takes privacy very seriously, I can say that it can be a PITA. Worth doing, but still a PITA. We had to resort to some clever trickery just to count monthly active users without any sort of unique identifier. I bet DDG faces similar challenges.
AppURL: Deep linking into apps
Ask HN: Portable secure Linux OS
I have been looking in to linux distros which are able to be installed on to a USB with privacy in mind.

I have been testing Linux Tails although all traffic on the OS is via Tor - Not always suitable.

Are their any recommendations regarding a Linux OS with security/privacy as a key focus that is able to be installed and run from a USB?

PS. Has any considered a creating a "Privacy Kit"? - which includes something like a live USB with potable OS, basic documentation plus other resources and guides on services and how to be safe/secure online.
Stop comparing programming languages with benchmarks
Bay Area Bike Share
"Isn't enough for pictures" really depends on the frequency that you offload photos from the phone.

Personally, if I'm storing important memories, I am NOT going to trust a loseable, breakable thing in my pocket to be the final resting place of JPEGs.
>Generally speaking I think ddg went with the "we don't store data" route because it's the niche they were left with and that ultimately means that their search won't improve beyond a certain point.

I'd have to agree with this sentiment. After using ddg for about two years, I was kind of expecting something more to come from the whole zero click thing that could change the way users interact with search and how websites and information is discovered (like a different take on SEO).

Now they could totally ride (and should) the "we don't store data" wave, but I wonder how far the ddg team thinks it will take them and does the general population of people equate that to being a better search engine?
I'm confused why you think these countries are in any way similar? Their cultures are vastly different, latinos adopted a lot of Spanish (etc) centuries ago and are 90+ percent Catholic, a church that has officially frowned on child-rape for over a decade.

I'm also confused why you think imposing your views on latinos, who typically love women, and as many as they can, will solve inequality in India.
To be fair, it's entirely possible to create aliases with more intuitive names and dump a "you can type ____ for short" message on each run.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the accelerators work something like this:

1) Fund a bunch of companies with the expectation that maybe 1 in 10 will succeed.

2) When the other 9 fail, you have a bunch of talented developers all in one place. And guess what? The really successful company is hiring.

It's pretty brilliant, if not Machiavellian.
Oh, okay, cool. In that case...

Just kidding, that doesn't change my core premise, that it's an immature organization and you're dealing with the problem in an immature fashion.

"It's an internal struggle of mine to get my teammates to properly match my level of expectations, not just make something passable that hapazardly works."

That's the problem, right there. Your expectations are yours and yours alone. Everyone under you is a person, a human being, with thoughts and feelings and goals and, rightfully, they don't give two shits about what you think they should be doing. Real life is not a meritocracy and everyone is not a highly disciplined type A producer. Your expectations are your problem, not theirs, and holding other people up to them is the express route to disappointmenttown, population: a bad version of you.

You need to understand what it means to be a manager, and an empathetic human being.

Pro tip: those are mostly the same thing.

Maybe you will need to separate the wheat from the chaff one day, but that day is after you understand exactly what it is all those people do, and why they do it, and how they do it, and what their goals are, and what their motivations are, not as employees, not as cogs in your great machine, but as human beings.

That day is not today. You don't know enough, and it's not possible for you know enough yet. You haven't been doing the job long enough, you don't know the people well enough, and you don't have enough life experience.
I find the metric questionable, or maybe established poorly (there is a strong difference between "considering the idea as a far flung possible track" and a visceral near-line option)
It's not just economics. The key to excellence in science is to attract the best, keep the best, and give them what they need to do their best.

Researchers start out as grad-students, and the U.S. is a lot less friendly to foreign students than it used to be. Whether it's increased trouble with permits or being treated like terrorists by the TSA, fewer foreign grad students are staying in the U.S.. Many students considering a move to the U.S. are dissuaded after just one conference on U.S. soil! Overly nationalistic individuals from other countries can take some joy in this since it means better minds for their own nations, but science is a global endeavor and what lessens one nation lessens us all!