skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tips For Building The Most Scalable Startup
It would have been funnier if the article had claimed that the reason Miley Cyrus occupied the top spot was because the NSA had censored their top story about spying.
That's rich. You can be imprisoned by your own UK government for having a file of random numbers and "refusing" to give the encryption key that doesn't exist, and neither citizens nor travelers have the right to even remain silent.

I think this anti-USA kick is misplaced anger about your own governments being happily in cahoots. Do you think US strong-armed UK into house arresting Assange or interrogating Miranda? The UK/USA liaisons are probably high-fiving each other over these things.

Germany apparently was using XKEYSCORE, but oh my where could that data have come from? The information fairy came and put it under their pillow!

Come on. Your governments are just as bad or worse and that's why these revelations are so troubling for you.
David Dampier's comment about cryptography in this article is a bit surprising:
“I don’t care what company is selling you encryption software. Whatever they are going to sell you, it can be decrypted. There’s nothing that is infallible.”
Leaving aside the fact that a significant fraction of cryptographic software that is free and open source (ssh, gpg, tls implementations in browsers, etc.) the idea that any cryptography available to an end user is breakable by an adversary like NSA is not supported by what we know about current and historical progress in the mathematics of cryptanalysis. Dampier's credentials on his academic home page are not that relevant or convincing when it comes to cryptography proper. I would be more likely to go with Bruce Schneier's opinion that cryptography is still secure with appropriate key sizes: "Still, I trust the mathematics" https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsas_cryp...
No threats, they'll just copy your data one way or another. If US corps and people have x protections, others have zero.
Technology could be making EVERYONE's lives better and decrease all of our work hours, however the average American's work hours are not decreased because instead of using technology to make everyone's work easier, the rich guy uses tech to replace workers and pockets the profits from that.
Hackers can solve this problem

- cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in businesses into small bite size chunks that can be done by masses of unskilled workers. This is purely a software task that hackers relish.

- training workers cheaply and effectively, khan academy/udacity/coursera style.The business model for this should not be charging students (an evil practice carried out by colleges) but instead charging businesses for access to those workers.

- decentralizing production. Making what is produced by large factories produceable in the home. 3d printers, home robots, and so on. These are also mostly software problems of controlling mechanical parts.

That there is joblessness is mostly because hackers are not thinking creatively and working hard enough. Help will not come from other segments of society, they are incapable of doing so because they lack the key skill of which we hackers are famous for - inventiveness.
Celebrity Cruise Recipe: Braaied Boerewors Burgers
>The thesis is that things like Linux belong to a category of >human endeavours that are opposite in nature to most of what >regular consumers are exposed to nowadays

But this is true for any open source project, why just Linux ? That said, I feel Linux too can't escape the "economy of bullshit" - commercial companies have interest and contribute to different parts of the Linux kernel for a reason. Heck even MS works on the hyper-v code base, not for the betterment of Linux but for the good of their own product. The "enterprise focus" of LKML activity is proof enough.
BeeLine Reader
A link to the source code is present in the article. You can find it here - https://gist.github.com/AnuragMishra/6474321

The NSDateFormatter is already being cached. That was my first suspicion on finding this issue too. We are using one formatter per thread in the production code, but that doesn't apply for the code I've posted since everything is done on the main thread using a single formatter instance.
If you raise the US Minimum wage to $20 an hour you will immediately see people move their companies to Mexico,China,etc.. So that will only make the problem worse. Instead of making $10 an hour those employees will be making $0.
Well for starters which one gets to talk to the Estonian state police?

But either way surveillance is either good or it's bad, I've never understood the reasoning of people who say that it's OK for their own state to do surveillance as they're "probably inept" anyways.

Would you be OK with NSA surveillance if the NSA were inept? No, you wouldn't, so apply the same standard to your own nation as you do to the USA.
Bullet Hole Statistics
LastPass has not made a direct statement. On their forums, however, a customer asked where data was hosted and this post was made by the CEO:

LastPass is "host proof" hosted meaning that your sensitive data is encrypted with a key we at LastPass NEVER have, removing many of the concerns PRISM raises with most cloud service providers. LastPass can't be forced to give the encryption key to your data as it has never hit our servers!

https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=89195
That makes sense. All of the above run strong in the rather new-agey community I grew up in.
I had a family friend die of the common flu. He was in his early 50's and otherwise completely healthy. Just got the flu and died. It was so sad...

We also know that healthy children and teens without any known risk factors die from the flu

Austin’s case is not unusual, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released Thursday. In fact, 43 percent American children who died from flu were perfectly healthy beforehand, CDC researchers found. While conditions such as cerebral palsy and asthma can make flu especially dangerous for a child, there’s no way to tell which children will become seriously ill or even die from seasonal flu, the researchers warn.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/49465633/ns/health-cold_and_flu/t/...
I wouldn't call an application that writes once and never deletes anything on the hard drive a write-intensive workload. Filling up a SSD with write-once data means paying well over 50¢/GB for your writes, which isn't something you can do if you are "write-intensive" -- if you're writing 100x the capacity of the drive over its lifetime, then you are really write-intensive, at which point the distinction between delete-intensive and write-intensive is nearly nonexistent for obvious reasons.
There is without doubt an asymmetry at play. Try to read the following headlines with reversed roles: http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/01/06/us-ambassador-to-spai... In many countries the patience is running out. If that turns out to have political consequence remains to be seen. But I do not believe that all governments are the same in that respect.
It has a table-assistant, a matrix assistant etc., but you decide.
> Still, I'd rather my money went to local interests, and my data stayed within a sphere I have some control of.

Yeah, that has an appeal all its own completely independent of what you feel about spying in general.

The USA certainly does the same in reverse, there's always a big push for buying things "Made in the USA" so it's fair to push for it the other way. :)
Yeah that would probably be the way to go ultimately if you're doing a lot of date parsing, I agree!
That verse is perhaps the clearest explanation I have ever read of why religion exists. Thank you.
I've been wondering why WatchGuard firewalls require mandatory registration before working. There they ask questions like, is this firewall being used to secure important military site etc. Wtf, if I would use it to protect important military / nuclear research lab etc... Do they really think I would tell it? I'm sure that information is directly passed to "authorities" and then they can bypass that firewall/vpn/ipsec to steal secrets whenever they want to.
As an adult who had shingles, allow me to add that you definitely do not want shingles and it is not as benign as most of us remember childhood chicken pox as.
AOLs and content farms are nothing new: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/02/you-may-not-like-it-b...

Here's more context about Findthebest with someone from there trying to claim that they have a large editorial team that hand edits the lists http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo
This can cut both ways. I've had two experiences where I saw police officers do things that would have gotten the department in trouble if it'd been videotaped.

So, it may be a dream for some enforcement and a nightmare for others.
The Linux kernel was never proprietary.
Thanks. Unfortunately I don't catch all posts on here. ;)
With NSA surveillance it makes it a much more real of a possibility..
Somewhat off-topic: What are some alternatives to XMPP? I haven't found much about messaging protocols.
Ouya Free the Games Fund project suspended by Kickstarter
Are you using mktime to get the unix timestamp? That might be the slower part as opposed to strptime.
Which higher-level encryption is illegal?
You may be right but then again you might be wrong. I'd rather not psychoanalyze in the middle of a discussion. The universal police with a 10-year long jail with no trial is there, and it is not the UK's or Spain for that matter.

But I digress.
From the documents published by the New York Times it seems that the NSA have introduced backdoors into VPN and SSL hardware crypto chips. There aren't that many major vendors who make such chips and undoubtedly people are going to be trying to find them now.

The question is what's going to happen when the vendors are identified ? - I can't imagine it'll be good for their customer base or their share-price.

Imagine you're a bank using vendor X's backdoored SSL acceleration. Say you're involved in a lawsuit where a customer claims they didn't authorise a transaction, now the customer can point to the fact that you're knowingly using hardware which has backdoor which would have allowed a third party to silently steal the users credentials.

This is a huge deal.
The duration needs to be based on syllables, otherwise the rhythm is totally off.

Has anyone made a syllabic RSVP reader before? Might be interesting to see how much more natural it would be (my hunch is "a lot").
We thought Twitter had the potential to be an important platform. This was before the company changed its attitude to third parties building things on top of it.
Gandi.net offer VPS with virtual networking between your instances, it's decent and inexpensive. Flexible pricing.

But ensure you choose their French data center and not the one they now have in Baltimore...

No affiliation other than being a Gandi customer for six years.
this looks a bit different from the other side.
When I worked at in a big retail shop we had to have forms (ie. zip/city) validation.
There was a time when validation was as simple as proposed in the article (checking for presence of data, not the meaning).
You wouldn't believe the things people are able to type into forms.

One of the most common errors was a bad combination of zip/city (ie. zip code for a different country area) which required a live person on the phone asking customer about proper data - it costed money.

The most unusual one was when a person managed to type gibberish in every field avaliable and than add to it a proper adress, name, zip etc... all in a three or four letter wide house-number box.

VALIDATE ALL THE THINGS!
Yeah, that's unfortunate. I wonder if there's much of a business built around providing this solution for companies, "ready made."
You love Quality? You'll really love new-Maps, then!

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/29472.aspx

Grand Central Astoria Station. :P
I am, source is here: https://gist.github.com/jurre/6475263

My c is quite poor so if you have any suggestions on how to improve I'd love to hear them!
I think he simply meant that he's never met someone with autism, in his experience.

The point to that being that, if vaccines do cause autism, he should have met someone with autism. The fact that he didn't seems to argue against the hypothesis that vaccines do cause autism.
Services like Mechanical Turk/TaskRabbit/eLance etc emphasize workers as commodities leading to a race to the bottom in prices and the most profit for the platform vendor.

Looking at the average earnings on these sorts of platforms it would seem like a challenge to eek out even a meagre existence in a first world country.
What about Moxie's TextSecure? I think it's going to be integrated into CyanogenMod ROM's soon, so I'd like to see an evaluation of that, too. An evaluation of Surespot would be nice, too, even though it's not using PFS.
Yeah that'd be great.
I have a dirty solution of syncing my latest keychain backup with owncloud but that's merely for backup
Chicken pox is not harmless. It kills adults, and if you get it as a child you can get shingles as an adult which is debilitating.

Vaccinating on your own schedule is dumb. Do you have a MD? Did you develop the vaccine? Trust the experts.

Skipping vaccines is dumb. Science and medicine make progress. To put this in HN terms: this is like saying I'm going to build my startup's website using DOS and XTs, because that's what existed when I was a kid. It's a dumb idea.

If there's a vaccine available: get it. There is no scientific reason not to. Skipping vaccinations means your an irresponsible parent and member of society.
Clickable:
http://hmpgr.com/apps/running
Invite Code: HN
frankly I haven't done any research into that (the way to present it or the effectiveness of the idea), I might have found the idea somewhere else, like in the "About Face" book or in one of D.Norman's books, but I don't remember.
I strongly believe in showing the future in users before they click. They are afraid to click and explore, that way they know what to expect.
It's the same with the date field, you can type a lot of stuff in it and it will tell you what it decides to understand: the first letters of "Today", "Yesterday", a number will be understood as the last day with this number(this month or last month), a full date, etc.
Agreed.

However, there is a thing called economic espionage. Depending on what you're doing, having your own government spy on you can be a very different thing from having a foreign government spy on you.

And no, I don't believe for a second the NSA isn't involved in economic espionage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/820758.stm
Services are forever tainted. And services are the most interesting part of the puzzle.

I see it as a plus. But I've been against the very concept of such services in the first place. I think most centralization is unnecessary, that the reason it is so common today is because it is a straight-forward business plan for a company to insert itself as an intermediary between all of the users and thus extract money (and therefore efficiency) from their interactions.

Facebook's the ultimate example. Their popularity is a result of people needing a place to easily host and share their photos. But the cheaper storage and bandwidth get, the less utility Facebook provides compared to a distributed system. I think we are at a point today where high-end phones could host all the content that the majority of people want to share. Combine that with a little smart caching between "friends" so that their phones on wifi can pick up the slack when the original host is cell-only and throw in a distributed hash table for finding new "friends" and the value that facebook provides users by centralization drops precipitously.

If these NSA revelations help kickstart a new (but actually old) paradigm where each internet user is essentially self-hosting, then I believe that will be a great boon in the long run.
How does the NSA copy the data from a server hosted in Germany by a German company?
That's thoroughly depressing.

The Page and Brin quote is interesting. I searched for it and got the original paper (back when it was called "Backrub"). The relevant quote is in Appendix A: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a

I agree that we should support alternative SEs. The first step might be decoupling "Google" from "Internet" in the mindset for a lot of web users. I don't know if that's even doable at this point before tackling the "Facebook/Twitter = Internet" problem first.
If you're looking for encrypted OTR/decentralized/p2p messaging, also take a look at http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
perfect, honest answer. we all did.
Has anyone done a cryptographic audit of this?
Personally, I am a Last Pass user. It is well included in most browsers out there and you have access to it on your mobile if you subscribe to the premium offer (12 dollars per year).
A class like NSDateFormatter is designed to handle a wide range of date formats. This usual results in sub-optimal performance. If you find it too slow and you have a known, specific date format you should write a specific fast parser.

I did the same with Java's Integer.parseInt(...) method. It is an interesting task to go through.

Now I'll spend the rest of this rainy afternoon playing around with writing a fast ISO date parser :)

Edit: Seems Java's Joda Time library already does parse ISO dates really quickly. 7 seconds for 4 million on my MBP

Edit: A fast custom date parser for ISO dates I just wrote can parse 4 million dates in 150 milliseconds.
I can't see where in my argument I said "everyone in the same situation should be like I am," nor where in your argument it is so clear that I should follow your (personal) standards. Also I'm getting a feeling that in your comment you imply I am happy with my (probable) bad grammar. I am not happy with it, but I hit diminishing returns a long time ago.

Oh, and I'm completely happy about sounding stupid when speaking a foreign language (so far no-one has complained about my spoken English or German, only in France I've had "complaints") as long as other people can understand what I try to say and what I say is meaningful to them.
Security Analysis of TrueCrypt 7.0a
I think it is fair to assume that the guys who set up and run Google, Apple, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, etc, all started with great honorable intentions. Yes, even the hated Bill Gates. I chose to believe that is true. I believe these people were once us. Up till recently, its been a cat and mouse game of how they can get money from customers and how customers can mitigate that. This to me is fine, it is business and they all need financial structures to survive.

Of course what has happened now is that the jack boot of government has poisoned the well, and I cant believe there is no group of people more upset and angry than these pioneers. I bet if we could talk to any of them off record they would be as annoyed as "we" are, if not more. After all, its their baby being ruined, not ours.

I would add to that the corporate high finance thing as a poison too, but again, that's just money. It does soil the, er, purity of things, but doesn't not threaten freedom and liberty.
Youtube to Myspace does not seem like the same as the other comparisons. Myspace is/was a social network and better in-page videos -- no matter where they are served from - would only make Myspace more appealing because of how they catered to music bands. to say that Youtube stole Myspace's traction is like saying imgur stole Reddit's traction when instead, it's more likely that imgur's great service accelerated Reddit's popularity (at least with memes...I'm talking quantity, not quality :)) -- and vice versa. There was no reason that couldn't have happened with myspace/youtube
It isn't so much a fear of technology, as a distrust of the authorities. Like the author said, some of it has a rational basis, and some does not. I know vaccines usually work, and are mostly safe. I remain very skeptical though for several reasons including: The difficulty of proving vaccine injury, and inadequate remedies. The business incentives caused by the NVCIA[1] (no fault vaccine court). Personal experience with doctors, pediatricians, and other medical professionals. The lack of credible statistics for vaccine adverse reactions.

It is nearly impossible to find authorities on the subject who can calmly and rationally explain the risks and benefits, and help you evaluate the risk properly. It is also nearly impossible to find objective impartial information from any source. The "debate" on the subject is very polarized. Skepticism is often treated as heresy or idiocy.

We still vaccinate our children, but not for everything[2], and not always on schedule.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...

[2] We delayed the HEP-B at birth and opted not to take the rotavirus vaccine.
Off topic, but that is a really pretty wine app. You ever thought about pairing with wineries later on to get tasting packs out? After all, you have the data to make informed recommendations, so you might as well sell the wine.
I hope all of these companies will lose a lot of customers due to these revelations. Their cooperation with NSA to weaken their security software while selling it as "very secure" to their customers is disgusting, and it's irrelevant whether they did it voluntarily or not. There's always a choice, and they have no excuse.

If you still believe in such things as "American values" and "patriotism", this is the exact opposite of that: un-American, and unpatriotic.
this is a must watch video for founders.
Incomplete Thought: The Psychology Of Red Teaming Failure – Do Not Pass Go…
As for me, no. Mail the devs for any questions, they're very available.

The application itself is open-source.
Project-Tyson: faking the UI of iOS 7 in HTML, CSS and Javascript
In a conversation like this, it's important to discount hypothetical risks. Vaccination has been around for a long time. Hypothetically, there could be one with a 40% risk of long-term disability. But there isn't.

Show me an example of disability caused by vaccination (they exist), complete with a percentage estimate of how many people will suffer. Then we can talk about the associated costs.
The CA doesn't usually have access to your private key - they just sign the public key.
Probably Kickstarter figured they were going to scam Ouya (ie: pay themselves good part of the funding, and then get Ouya double money thing)
Re polio: read "Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio", it tells the story of the fear that polio inspired and the public health efforts--including taking sick children away from their parents, forcibly if necessary--that it occasioned. Although not as widespread as the flu, polio was far more feared because of its seeming random occurrence and often debilitating effects on even its survivors.

I'm not one to call things miracles. But if I were, the progress of anti-microbials in the century to the 1950s would be the one. Vaccines, sulpha drugs, antibiotics... it's interesting that this wave of science-driven discovery is given such short shrift among the tech community, it has certainly (alright, arguably) made a greater difference to our species than any other thing we've done.
The surprising demographics of American technology entrepreneurs
So what you're saying is something like "no litigation without representation"?
With LastPass, all data are encrypted locally on your machine so except if there is a backdoor in their extensions/desktop applications, you are normally pretty safe.
I'm quite for supporting Google at their pages.

But don't count on me to enable third party scripts and cookies. I'm quite against having somebody tracking all the sites I visit, and running random software on my computer.
Yeah, as the other commenter says, 'siphoning' is probably better though it is still stealing if you don't think of traffic as a zero-sum game. It's after all only in zero-sum games like physical goods that stealing reduces value to the owner.