skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The below linked post by Tobias Peggs describes the post-acquisition experience of their startup, and adjustment to working in a very large organization, and the effort to get changes and new things out the door.

There are a lot more groups of people and interests to consult with, so work is more of a process. Akin to getting a legislative bill through multiple committees, hearings, amended, voted on, and maybe signed into law.

Alignment. Consensus. Relationship building. Finding the best people in the various departments and learning from them. Dealing with big scale. Have the best possible job title: you cannot avoid that it is part of your reputation.

It's best to have multiple projects to be working on, so that having one project stalled for reasons that are not in your control is not the end of all of your project actvity.

"Just got acquired? 10 adjustments to make when working for a Big Co." (November 26, 2012)

http://tobiaspeggs.tumblr.com/post/36598440323/just-got-acqu...
I was hoping that you were going to critique the need to surround yourself with "positive people".

There's obviously a lot to be said for not surrounding yourself with pessimists, but (in the US, anyway, and silicon valley, in particular), the default personality type tends to be "optimism to the point of delusion". It's just as problematic to overdose on positive thinking as it is being surrounded by pessimists.

Optimism is like sugar: it's great and you need it, but if you eat too much of it you'll only get sick. And just like sugar, the average US diet already has plenty.
Do you mean that if I choose the path of self-improvement and self-education, then I could realistically aspire to become a male cover model, even though I'm not especially handsome, or play for the Knicks, despite being a mere five-foot-eight? Whoa, that must be some path.
Created an account just to thank you for your thoughtful, interesting post.
It wasn't, it was just raised to 56-bit from 40-bit.
Patents look complicated and twisted no matter what they're about.
As a human, out of curiosity I've previously tried to classify random tweets into emotions and failed, there just isn't enough context to make the judgements not arbitrary. In consequence I'm deeply suspicious of software that claims to be able to do so.
Whoa, wait a second here. Your reference article is arguing that there isn't any difference between these drugs and placebos, so by definition it was a "placebo controlled trial". To say that "double-blind prospective trials are nearly non-existent" is very wrong. Unless you are referring to very old psychiatric drugs, most of them have gone through such trials.

There was a lot of disagreement about the paper you referenced. CNS drug are notoriously hard to get positive clinical trial data for. The reasons are: (1) placebo effect is notoriously difficult to control for in psychiatric trials, (2) the clinical trial endpoints are very blunt measures of efficacy.

But you know what? That's the best we have right now. There certainly is a strong requirement for efficacy in psychiatric drugs as evidenced by how many have failed to get approved by the FDA.

The sad thing is that most big drug companies have completely pulled out of doing R&D for new CNS drugs. They are just too hard to get approved. The end result is that patients with psychiatric illnesses will end up with fewer treatments options unless this changes.
Worse? Good lord, Bush was on watch during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, housing collapse, stock market crash, two economic recessions, the hurricane Katrina debacle, tortured people in Gitmo and started two unwinnable wars.

Someone has a short memory.
So PPTP is insecure, and IPSec is fundamentally broken… How about OpenVPN? Is that compromised too?
Another shoot the messenger article. Somewhat they try to convince us that every single person ten miles around NSA is basically an archangel, incorruptible and honest, that work just for justice and fairness, and given by God the right of being over everyone else rights. And everyone in the other side must be punished, stripped of privacy and intellectual property and keep be unsafe while there are "bad" people around.

This really means that thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people which ultimate goal is to get money, and have little to none auditing on what they do, some NSA employees, some from private companies, can access your trade secrets, your bank account, or whatever that can be used to blackmail you, and make any kind of profit from it, no matter from where you are, or who you are. And that won't be even noticed by the authorities (if they even care, they have the "state secret" wildcard) unless they become public on that (they noticed what Snowden did because he went public, on pourpose). And that also means that that information (that they are "careful" having it safe) on which vulnerabilities they introduced on pourpose on every kind of "secure" software, if ever leaks, get reverse engineered or found out by luck, will be exploited by the bad guys too.

Hanlon's razor is not an excuse for this kind of article anymore.
This is a great read, much more interesting than the original article.

Thanks for the link.
Tracking API with Webhooks
"In 1999, all restrictions on key length were lifted, except for exports to embargoed countries." [1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/56-bit_encryption

If you have a source that contradicts this, I'm all ears. I'd just always believed (based on what I've read) that the period from '96-'99 opened up arbitrarily strong crypto (excluding embargos/restrictions to states like North Korea).
I think your only hope is that we develop a robustly secure Internet.
I haven't liked any of the changes they have made to gmail in the past three years. Literally.
I'm not saying that I think it is the case, but a possible other hypothesis might be that they stopped taking their drugs because they began to lose their marbles again.
Fascinating stuff. The "Cindie Spies" negotiations (and not just the spot-on name) provide good context for what it would be like developing crypto in a tumultuous, formative period for our current security technology/regulations.
>"Hey, you guys need to stop sabotaging crypto standards,
forcing tech companies to hand over data, and threatening
them with prison if they talk. Stick with the technical
prowess stuff you're supposed to be doing."

This is really a key point that can't be emphasized enough. Anyone who was paying attention in the 1990s knew that the NSA has a significant technological advantage over the U.S. private sector and the rest of the world, but even pretty serious civil libertarians were not concerned, because there was no possibility of dragnet spying on today's scale, and because most of us assumed -- rightly or wrongly -- that the NSA was for the most part keeping out of domestic affairs and politics (funding issues aside).

Now, it's abundantly clear that the NSA not only has inserted itself deeply into our political process, routinely cooperates with domestic law enforcement, bullies, coerces, and co-opts U.S. industry, and very likely spies on politicians and activist groups. For anyone who has studied modern history, this sets off major alarm bells.

I keep hearing "what's changed" from NSA stalwart defendants. My answer: everything.
It is interesting that two drugs with the opposite mechanisms of action produce the same clinical response.

However, you might want to take the description of "reuptake enhancer" with a grain of salt. The mechanism of action (MOA) for drugs is notoriously difficult to determine.

The best example of this is Lyrica (Pfizer). The drug was designed to be a GABAase enzyme inhibitor (prevents GABA from being metabolized, increasing it's action). This MOA was pushed during the entire development of Lyrica. It wasn't until the drug hit the market that a researcher finally figured out that it works by modulating the glutamate neurotransmitter. It's effectiveness has nothing at all to do with GABA.
Entirely true, but not necessarily relevant.

Local time is a weird thing and changes all the time.

For giggles, look at the history of timezone rule changes in tzdata.

Most timezones have at least one duplicate hour per year (IE the same time occurs twice) in the US as well.

Local times are not an appropriate way to store time.

Note: ISO8601 does not give you local time anyway, since you cannot infer the timezone from the time offset.
I worked with a lot of Twitter data over the summer as part of an internship. I can say that signal to noise ratio is so abysmally inverted, this is almost certainly doing a lot of filtering just to get meaningful source data.

For instance, you have to filter out most posts with links (because they tend to have very little associated data, or are spam), anything in languages you don't have parsers or datasets for, etc. Then you can cut on character count (because there are a surprising amount of useless tweets that are under 5-9 characters)...

As others have and will continue to state, this further cuts down the sample size of an already fairly small sample (500+ million in the world[0]). If you want to be specific and only look at a single nation, you're cutting that sample size based on who has location turned on and/or broadcasts it in their profile. This is a significantly smaller number.

Edit: This is obviously a better sample size than a random poll of individuals, however, but that doesn't mean that the cumulative quality will be drastically higher.

[0] - http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/ (sources from three different input points)
They're Taking Over - jellyfish bloom and the future of the ocean.
I can't upvote this high enough.
Anybody who thinks iso8601 dates are a good way to store time should not be allowed to handle time.

The same hour does also not occur twice in unix timestamps, though it does in most timezones (but not time offsets).
Conversion rules are a mess, and have changed over time.
It is hard to beat a good CS curriculum with real teachers, peers, assignments, tests and grades.

I dunno... I think it depends on the individual a bit. OK, to be fair, I did drop out before finishing my B.S., but up to where I was at, I can honestly say that I learned 90% or more of what I learned, outside of class, reading and practicing on my own. The only class I really remember the teacher's explanations helping a whole lot, was in certain parts of Discrete Math.

I could be wrong, but I feel like some people are just "wired' for teaching themselves stuff, learning from books and videos and websites, and then throwing the occasional question up on the Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange[1], or /r/askcomputerscience or whatever.

At the very least, I would posit that most people can learn an awful lot through self-study. Maybe not enough to do ground breaking research in C.S., but certainly enough to bump up their knowledge of the "basics" to where they aren't clueless when somebody else in the room starts talking about algorithmic complexity or finite state machines or whatever.

[1]: cstheory.stackexchange.com

[2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/askcomputerscience
Statistics 101...sheesh. Not only is it limited to users of Twitter (and not the nation), but it's limited to users who geocode their tweets, which may be as little 1 to 2% of them.

After the presidential election, Gallup overhauled its polling methodology. Why? Because they significantly overestimated Mitt Romney's popularity, and one of the factors may have been relying too much on landline polling, as older (i.e. more conservative) people are disproportionately likely to still use landlines.

If Gallup's predictions are as sensitive to a factor like that, I imagine this neophyte tech/science company is going to be way off in their measurements.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/31/business/worldbusiness/31i...
pirating content really helps to prevent free software from being adopted. So... I guess that would be considered pretty righteous, right?

*edit: clarity.

or were you thinking along the lines media piracy?

I have no justifications or rationalizations there. There's a giant bureaucracy that will never move, and never let me watch their content. So more or less, I don't.
Of course. My point is that cat's out of the bag. You can't prevent them from being able to, so worry about whether they are allowed to.
The US domestic market is filled with 3D movies precisely because the Chinese market demands them. They are shown in the US to drive international distribution.
I enjoyed the post but there is one sentence I can't understand:

> 2/ Only surround yourself with brilliant and positive people. Negative and mediocre people are everywhere and their influence on you can be devastating.

The thing is that I'm potentially one of those "mediocre" people and I don't see why my influence should be devastating.

For instance, what is wrong about being negative? Not that my days are about it but, when I find myself thinking about the society we've built, I feel depressed and helplessness. Our society runs on poverty, climate change, INC governments, wars. We got to a point where some perpetuate violence on people and animals for living.

Not only that but from a certain perspective, I've a reason to think about myself as a mediocre person, cause I managed to get lot of good things from life, including a fun job but I'm not the "cool kid" and, as such, I think I'm quite a mediocre guy.

So my question is as follows, what are you suggesting here: the best way to avoid any negativity get to you, is to eliminate these gloomy people from your life ?

Sounds more a strategy for distraction.
ZZT was also my first programming experience. It was great. The message passing concurrency was pretty nice except it worked as an external goto. Also zzt-oop had lots of shortcoming so people had to come with with very creative workarounds (especially for arithmetic). Despite that it was good fun. In some ways it'd be nice to have a modern clone with an improved language and a similar simple model (graphical objects with contained concurrent programs, message passing only).
I will share my two cents, how I overcome my depression. It sounds deadly simple, and it sort of is.

1) regular excercise. Make some small, daily routine (I prefer running) and stick to it. The endorphines work wonders. The body starts feeling good after a few days.

2) (and this will be maybe controversial due to The religious undertones) regular meditation. While excercise clears your body, meditation clears your mind. Maybe it's not "really" doing anything and it's just a placebo, but frankly, it doesn't really matter. What I do is zen meditation (of soto school), which is basically just staring to wall for 20 minutes a day.... and it helps wonders.

So yeah.... those two commandments help me. Your mileage may vary.
If I was the NSA, I would flatly decline that we are doing any kind of eavesdropping at all. How would you prove we are eavesdropping? It is not like I am going to admit that information as evidence in a public court of law.

I think at this point we have to treat the NSA as guilty until proven innocent. Nothing they say, either to the public or publicly to our elected representatives Congress holds any water. How can we ever trust them again to be truthful?
Don't they contribute little to begin with anyway? I remember there was a bit of mudslinging last year and the hot topic was that Microsoft contributed more code to Linux than Canonical did. While I think they've done great things for the overall landscape - I don't particularly like the direction they've been going since Unity. I'm not saying that it's the wrong thing for everyone everywhere. What I don't like, in particular, is that it feels like they're closing off something that wasn't meant to be. Unfortunate as it is, I hope they continue to remain viable - as they are a stepping stone off of the Microsoft and Apple platforms.
I was chair of the IPSEC working group at the IETF, and I think I know what John Gilmore was referring to with respect to the question of the Initialization Vector. The person who expressed a concern with a per-packet IV (which by the way had indeed done a lot of consulting for the NSA; nice guy, though) didn't like the idea because it's too easy for people to screw up and use an incrementing counter for the IV. This is bad, because if the first couple of bytes in the packet are mostly fixed (becuase you are encapsulating a TCP or UDP packet, for example), the resulting plaintext in the first block of these packets will have a very low hamming distance between them, and this can enable certain cryptoanalytic attacks (i.e., such as differential cryptoanalysis). He was not advocating using the same IV across the entire session, in the sense that we would use the same IV for each packet (which would have been a cryptographic disaster), but rather we use the previous packet's cipherblock as the IV for the next packet (i.e., just keep chaining the cipherblocks).

As is often the case in standards bodies when there is disagreement, neither side won, and we left things unspecified. The RFC doesn't constrain how the IV should be chosen, so you can initialize the IV either way.

There was language indicating that the IV should never be the same, as well as an additional method of generating the IV, by using a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR), which also will eliminate the potential problem of related plaintext being sent to the crypto algorithm. So although the RFC doesn't say this, I would recommend either the use of a LFSR, or the last cipherblock in the previous packet encrypted using that key, and to avoid using a simple counter in your IPSEC implementation for the Initialization Vector (IV) in each packet.

So to be fair, in this particular case, the person with "known associations with the NSA" was actually trying to make things better, although he did feel constrained in not explaining all of his reasons in the open wg meeting. Which no doubt tripped Gilmore's paranoia, and I can't blame him for that either.
It does seem a pretty fair that the IPSEC process, and IPSEC in general, has been an utter clusterfuck. Raccoon, etc. are horrible (really anything with IKE). Free S/WAN had its own problems, but at least Hugh was fairly reasonable. That doesn't necessarily point to NSA, though.

(most of this criticism applies to DNSSEC too)
It does seem like a slightly odd choice, but Debian releases are all named after toys from a Disney movie, so...

When you think about it, how many people even know what the code name for their phone is? As developers and just generally tech-savvy people, we're aware of what version we run and what it's called, but to many users, I suspect that even knowing that their Galaxy S4 is running a thing called "Android" is at the edge of their knowledge. (The cute robot in the messaging software may help clue them in--but there are no icons of jelly beans of KitKat bars to my knowledge.)
hi,

I am following the approach of putting minimal yet useful version out and then tailor according to early adopters. That way I will not end up cluttering it with things not needed.
Like for instance 3 exercises are ok, but if its goes more than that, I will have to develop a feature where you could hide an exercise you are not interested it (and may be add it later if needed).

But I will do it very soon. Best would be if you sign up and you would some to know immediately. Or follow us on twitter for updates @hmpgr.

BTW thanks for showing the interest. Would love to get more feedback if you find anything interesting to share about the app experience.
So the OP has basically ripped off more than "fair use" of multiple sources to compose this post, and all of those major news sources only speculate from anonymous sources.

But it's not until the end that we see the memo that justifies this title. And it's a ripoff of this site:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/12-u-s-intelligence-o...

And if you click through to that link, you'll see that the memo doesn't come from "U.S. Intelligence Officers" at all, it comes from:

a dozen former U.S. military and intelligence officials are telling President Obama

And this dozen officials, which could literally include anyone from Oliver North to the manager of the CIA's kids website, have labeled their group, the "VIPS", short for: "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity"

And as icing on the cake, their memo is titled: "Is Syria a Trap?"

Yes, sounds authoritative indeed.
If you think of yourself as mediocre, then you'll be mediocre- people that think negatively about themselves are no fun to be around.

There is a difference between the ability to critically analyze yourself and thinking of yourself negatively.
honestly? take a grad class in algorithms and sit in in as many relevant seminars as you can. conversation is much stronger for theoretical knowledge than it is for memorization. the idea is to work through the problems yourself with strong mentor support, so there really isn't a shortcut here.
But your not the only person using the SSD, you can't trust that every VM, will A) Discard or B) use the SSD in a sane way.
Holy shit, that's a whole lot of nothing.
It will be interesting to see if the NSA can still push their way into standards bodies. I wonder if similar techniques were used on WebRTC security.
I sat in on a psychiatry conference one afternoon where the docs discussed the treatment of several patients. Never was a scientific article or concept uttered. It was all "well, let's try him on seroquel and olanzapine, let's also throw Paxil in there."

One data point? You're talking about the 'how are we going to treat our current patients' conferences? I've been in a couple of those myself, and you're expecting something weird from them. It'd be like spending the afternoon with engineers and saying "I didn't hear any of them mention any of the laws of thermodynamics!".

I've worked with engineers building hardware, both medical and agricultural, and much of their day-to-day work is based on their innate understanding of the tasks at hand. At critical points in the design process, they will break out their formulas, but when they're discussing the generalities of what to do with their colleagues, they're not citing canonical resources. What you're desiring is a fantasy world.

You can't run any diagnostic tests on patients.

As someone who spent several years as a neuro tech, this isn't true. Some things have some tests. It is a very difficult field of study - possibly the most difficult in all of human experience - and it's true that there isn't a great amount of test coverage over the whole field. But you're mischaracterising it to say there are no tests.

We need better mechanical and abstract understanding of the mind before we douse it in chemicals.

That's a nice throwaway line. You make it sound like the mind is an easy thing to understand, and that it won't take long. And apparently, until we have this complete understanding, we should just say 'fuck you' to the people who are currently in need of help?

Overuse of pharmaceuticals is a problem, but the answer isn't to run screaming into the absolutist opposite direction.
> I have never seen a psychiatrist refer a patient to see a psychologist or a cognitive behavioral therapist, and they have no incentive to really.

Plenty do, and there are questions about the efficacy of those techniques as well.
So mere non-fetishization of militaries and surveillance is enough to prevent despots from gaining that power?

Remember we're not talking about the people foisting this on themselves, we're talking about the government taking on that power.
There's a difference between "how about we approach it more appropriately" and kyro's "we shouldn't use this at all until we have a near-complete understanding".