skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, awesome! I have vision impairment as a result of albinism too! (nystagmus; my corrected acuity is about 20/100 and 20/120-150 without glasses) Fellow red/blonde-haired pasty-white person unite~~!

For those running Linux, it's easy to change the font size of GTK+ and QT programs, which affect on all major apps on the system. That combined with browsers' zoomability makes it possible to get by... though yes, I do have to concede, it doesn't top Windows' magnifying glass. Maybe a nice Wayland WM will get there some day. We'll have to wait and see.

In the mean time, it is amusing to be working in the lab and have my coworkers be able to read the screen from halfway across the room...

For those of you who are curious, this is the font size that I'm comfortable at: http://i.imgur.com/O7tTskY.png

Agree with all your points. It's ironic that most of the coping/adjusting I do happens away from the computer. E.g. because I don't drive, I have to live in a city with reasonable public transport and have to depend on friends for shopping trips, etc. Maybe that's one reason why I like my job as a CS grad student: because I can adjust for my weaknesses to play to my strengths.
You can dismiss the infrequent and brief squealing in your ears, but once it becomes tinnitus, the incessant, constant high pitched tone makes it impossible to focus on anything.
It isn't all GoDaddy. I have no affiliation with GoDaddy. I don't use them anymore myself.

WestHost or otherwise, WordPress sites, bar none, need a caching plugin.
This happened to my Cousin a year ago. A small donation to the PBS in NY. Oddly he was a PBS member but knew he wouldn't put any membership on the card that was charged.

Apparently these small donations are just used to check if a stolen cred card is valid.
In this distribution, are shared libraries really shared, or duplicated?
They're somewhat alike in that the economic incidence of a tax on rentals will fall (in different proportions) on both of them, and in ways that the tax authorities can't control.
It might be a problem with your OS/distribution if you feel like it is awful to use in production. FreeBSD, for example, provides an excellent ruby version in it's package repository (and can have all of them installed, 1.8, 1.9, 2.0, rubinius, jruby, etc) and it's very easy to manage. This is true, I am sure, for many linux distributions as well, and many other OSes. I don't see how ruby can be blamed here.
The fundamental problem is that Facebook's "agreement" seeks to undermine a core aspect of the web, which is that everything --- everything --- sent across the wire is to be interpreted as a suggestion (not a requirement).

The recipient is free to enlarge the font if they have poor vision, they're free to pass the content it through a text-to-speech engine if they're blind, they're free to strip out all the Q's and J's, they're free to turn down the volume on videos, etc.

Facebook can try to impose their will, but all they'll end up doing is looking like a bunch of empathy-deficient, user-deaf nincompoops.
"I will assume that Twitter's revenues will reach $11.5 billion in 2023. That will be more than a twenty fold increase in revenues and translate into a revenue growth rate of 55% for the next 5 years, scaling down to stable growth (of 2.7%) in year 11."

"Why not use your knowledge of the future to play the stock markets? We could make trillions."
"Why make a trillion when we could make... billions?"
"You've got to find what you love... And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."
-- Steve Jobs
Well, I am not sure how often big-O applies to websites. Sure, you can tune your backend to handle processing in .1 s instead of .2, but then user can still wait 10-12 seconds till all the assets are downloaded and rendered.
I don't think that this rule (I don't know Gladwell's version, but I hear this often in Karate) is meant to say that nothing less than 10,000 hours is worth doing.

Why do you do anything, after all? Do you have to be an expert for it to be worth doing? If this were the case, certainly no one would be a parent. It's just a guideline to keep people from claiming expertise that they don't have yet, which is often a problem with people who have been doing things for a very short time.

Or for a specific example, I've been doing karate for 10 years very seriously. Overall, I've probably spent about 4,000 hours doing karate in classes. Of that, I've spent probably about 1,200 hours teaching, which I started doing after only maybe 800 hours of training. I've trained two students from white belt to black belt, and have introduced on the order of 100 students to karate.

But I'm not an expert. According to this rule I need about another 10 years to be one. Does that mean that I don't enjoy doing it? Or that me doing it doesn't contribute to the state of the art? Hardly. Being an expert and being able to contribute are not the same. I'm not going to have karate masters coming to me for advice. But I still have made the world a better place, in a small way, for ~100 people.

My father and mother both started new careers at 40, again at 45, again at 50, and now they're both moving to new things again at 53 (they were young when I was born). Neither of them will probably be experts at what they're working on in a technical sense, but they're still making substantial contributions to the world. Heck, my dad just got his very first journal article published this year in an area that he started working in at 50!

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/8/8/study-conflic...

In the end, don't do stuff because you want recognition as an expert, do it because you care. Expertise will follow, for the things that are worth it.
Milaap Social Venture http://milaap.org

It's basically Kiva for india.
Using Philip Elmer-DeWitt and Daniel Eran Dilger as source of arguments say a lot of the author, not worth reading.
This is a joke right? How much were they paid by the NSA to write this post?
>but he is a far more professional reporter of facts than the vast majority of mainstream outlets.

Well, if you count lying, writing wrong facts and trying to bash everybody but Apple as professional reporter of facts then yes, he is.
24 MoveOn polls show GOP could lose House in wake of shutdown
It may not be named this but you got to admit. It could be used for this. Which reverses the idea of the Internet being open to all users.
The US government will just take their server. They don't care if you go out of business.

Look at what they did to megaupload.com.
I really wish that HP, Dell or anyone else would do the same in Australia.

I cannot for the life of me buy a laptop with ubuntu preloaded today.

I look forward to this initiative spreading further :)
Note the obvious caveat though:

"There are of course other avenues available to obtain your data. Our colocation providers could be compelled to give physical access to our servers. Network capturing devices could be installed. And in the worst case an attacker could simply force their way into the datacentre and physically remove our servers."

As the colocation providers are based in the U.S., they would be subject to the National Security Letters. FastMail claims this is no different from any other hacking attempt. But in a normal hacking attempt, colocation providers would be free to explain to FastMail the extent of any hacking on their end. Moreover, hackers typically do not have physical access to any data. Even with encryption, physical access opens up a lot of attack vectors that most sysadmins don't anticipate.
The only real benefit I see here is that your IP won't be easily revealed. That is, given a fastmail account, the e.g. FBI cannot quickly get your login IP, like they can with e.g. Outlook or Gmail. So, for just low-level anti-surveillance, SSL to fastmail might suffice instead of using Tor with Gmail.

Unless you're using PGP or S/MIME, SMTP is still most often unencrypted.
Y Combinator Summer 2013
HotSpot is a large, complex application written in C++, it beats many metacircular VMs written in Java.
> There are of course other avenues available to obtain your data. Our colocation providers could be compelled to give physical access to our servers. Network capturing devices could be installed. And in the worst case an attacker could simply force their way into the datacentre and physically remove our servers.

> These are not things we can protect against directly but again, we can make it extremely difficult for these things to occur by using strong encryption and careful systems monitoring. Were anything like this ever to happen we would be talking about it very publically. Such an action would not remain secret for long.

> Ultimately though, our opinion is that these kinds of attacks are no different to any other hacking attempt. We can and will do everything in our power to make getting unauthorised access to your data as difficult and expensive as possible, but no online service provider can guarantee that it will never happen.

This kind of frank disclosure should be highly rewarded. I provided similar frank disclosure text (elsewhere) only to have it whitewashed.

When everyone is underplaying the real limitations it's impossible for people to choose alternative tradeoffs— "Why should I use this slightly harder to use crypto thing when foo is already secure?"— because the risks have been misrepresented. Underplaying the limitations also removes the incentives to invent better protection— "Doesn't foo already have perfect security?".
If this is a all it takes to be in a "death spiral" then we're way past the event horizon and in a vertical free-fall.

Call me when your hiring process is brain dead, there's no management training, 6 month reviews are tied to bonuses, governance only happens yearly, "phase two" is the punchline of the never ending joke of quality, and 60%+ of the engineers are contractors...
Speaking as someone who was familiar with Jeremy many years ago, I feel compelled to say that despite his more "radical" nature (as some have noted), he really is a great person.

I'm not happy that he is currently facing a long time in prison (again). But he's as truer to his beliefs than anyone I've ever met.

Unfortunately, his ideals aren't an excuse for breaking the law. Nonetheless, I wish him the best of luck with his case.
So they are saying that they can never get a NSL to turn over information, but where are these servers? Who has the keys to the door of the server room?

So maybe they don't get the NSL, but the people/group/company that is handling the servers might. This seems disingenuous. I could be wrong, but it feels like they are making claims that will dupe people into their service because they feel safe.
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In this case, I think you want to be using unison rather than rsync.
If they mount webcams and other sensors inside the cabinet, they could detect unexplained access to their servers. Not sure what it'd really accomplish. The colo provider would either say "tech mistakenly opened that cabinet" or "no comment". The only real defense is to assume any such access is a breach and have servers immediately overwrite FDE keys in RAM and power off - and if they were that committed, they wouldn't host in the US in the first place.
Your Job Description Is Not Getting Into My Pants
While I agree with you in theory (I think these sites are disgusting) - their legal argument is that what they are doing isn't extortion, because it's not a case of "Pay us money or we publish" - because everything they have on their site has already been published and is public information

I think the best approach is shutting down the avenues of payment, so that we can eliminate any way for people to benefit from this behavior.
Edit: I just realised that I'm replying to someone other than the author.

Hi, I'm the guy who logged the bug that used the words "HTML5 DRM". [1] That was, of course, a bit of a simplification. However, for a number of reasons, EME is bad for the following reasons:

1. A key distribution mechanism for only playback and for one element indicates that this is the first stage in wanting to apply this sort of rubbish to the rest of the standard

2. EME requires a CDM. While there is a well defined interface to the CDM, the CDM itself is a binary blob that won't be documented, might use OS specific features (e.g. The DRM system of the OS), and will need to be built for each individual browser and potentially operating system.

3. The EME draft is specific to encrypted playback. This is to allow Hollywood and others the ability to produce walled content. It's somewhat obtuse to say that EME will be used for anything other than implementing a DRM system. So far, the only CDM implemented is Google's Widevine DRM for Chrome only. I believe that Microsoft have something waiting in the wings, along with Netflix.

For that matter - let's look at the case where a specific DRM system is not used, and an encrypted key is sent to the CDM, which just decrypts the content. How is that not a form of DRM?

The post gives the following as to why Mozilla is great:

1. The Web should be open: The Internet is a public source of information that must be open to and accessible to anybody around the world.

2. The Web should be interoperable: People should not be locked in to an ecosystem and they should be able to use the technology they prefer to access the Internet.

3. The Web should be ours: People should have the ability to shape the Internet experience and be able to contribute with content without requiring permission from a central entity.

How is enabling Encrypted Media Extensions for the sole purpose of only preventing the playback of video and audio of the web enabling any of those important pillars of Mozilla's raisin d'être?

1. See previous HN submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6493510
Bittorrent Protocol Specification v1.0
>The ONLY was to cut down CO2 emissions is nuclear power plants. Nothing else is practical. If you care about CO2, and you have the opportunity, lobby to have a nuclear plant installed near you[r city].

Agree 100%, and I've been saying this for years. I'll even say that I don't take anybody talking about the threat of climate change/global warming seriously if they aren't willing to do this. Everything else I've heard suggested about how to actually go about massively reducing global CO2 emissions sounds like a joke. Am I supposed to believe that they think the threat is real when they won't advocate for the only thing that has a decent chance at making a difference?

Anything involving changing your personal lifestyle won't work. Food, living space, transportation habits, whatever. Maybe it makes you feel good somehow, but it won't scale to the world population, so it can't make a difference.

I am actually in favor of more walkable cities, since I personally like walking, but it isn't going to make a difference as far as CO2 emissions. A city with less motorized transportation, and more of it electric like trains and such, probably does produce much less CO2, but our cities are already built. Rebuilding them to be like that would produce so much CO2 that it would probably take the better part of a century to actually see a net reduction in total CO2 emitted.

Renewable energy is nice where it works, but I'm not convinced that it's capable of scaling big enough fast enough to solve the problem. Prove me wrong by all means, but while we're working on getting that going, how about we get started on something that we know will work? I was given to understand that this was urgent and all.
Wordpress Plugins Trac Down
Quantum black hole study opens bridge to another Universe
Full disk encryption would be another option, with the key being obtained over a secure channel from servers hosted remotely before booting to the real system. Then, as long as they can detect whether the server asking for the key has been compromised, I think it should be pretty safe. (Not a security researcher though, I wouldn't bet money on it.)
This is by the same guy who notoriously wrote “Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republi­can) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 198os, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.”
That's one of the most sadly ironic things I've ever read.
They do in fact mention that in the article:

> There are of course other avenues available to obtain your data. Our colocation providers could be compelled to give physical access to our servers. Network capturing devices could be installed. And in the worst case an attacker could simply force their way into the datacentre and physically remove our servers.
While I agree that these types of practices are repugnant, trying to put even more legal restrictions on speech seems to be a bit overkill for this problem.

I'd prefer to see the problem addressed at the source: mugshots should be kept under some form of copyright, in addition to being kept confidential at least until a person is convicted. The copyright would drive these extortion sites underground, reducing impact on peoples' reputations, and the confidentiality would make it difficult to maintain an extortion site by choking off the data supply.
True, but other crews pay for intel on competitor delivery driver operations because that's their ATM machine: robbing and taxing weak criminals. Especially the pill customers, it's likely they have other delivery drivers since they are addicts and wouldn't think twice about dropping a dime on this guy for some free Oxy. The other crew then sticks a gun in his face, and demands to know where the boss keeps the safe house and it's all downhill from there. I guess his 'boss' paid taxes to avoid this.

I learned all this from an unfortunate but informative stint in jail for a minor computer tresspassing charge. Guy's in there close to release form new crews and when they get out the first thing they do is rob a delivery driver to start their new business. They approach existing org crime outfits and receive loans, guns and vehicles to go conquer and tax new territory.

Here's a timely article about exactly what we are talking about: http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2013/10/04/corey-lal-took-over...
اسلام مستر بين
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I have a family and limited time. I could lay out an exact plan of how to do a lot of things, including get around all of this. But I just don't have enough time to implement it.

My microwave has been broken for 4 weeks and I haven't had time to even replace it. There are only 24 hours in a day.
The code is pretty dirty but it made for a nice Sunday project.

It was trivial to implement the REPL functionality using scriptcs - Huge props to the team on that one.
He used Tesseract for the OCR, I don't recall what he used to make it highlightable. It was quite impressive when he demoed it on a XKCD comic.
If I was going to set up a honeypot for evil-doers/dissidents, this is the message I would spread.
Agreed - I think the ToS is pretty clearly targetting people who alter the display of the site for OTHERS, not themselves. Malware, DoS attacks, etc.

If they apply this rule to individuals who alter the way the site appears to them, they are opening a can of worms. There is no way they consistently enforce this.
How likely is it that Fastmail data could be obtained without anybody at Fastmail noticing? And the key point is that Fastmail cannot be complied to keep such an attempt secret - which is not the case for a US company.
Wow this is fantastic. I really wish Apple would give us this kind of insight into iOS.
Removal of ads isn't even something I "advertise" as a feature. It's a side-effect of being able to remove anything you want from the UI.

And if they have a problem with that, surely they would have sued AdBlock Plus by now. Right?
>>Risk is a function of both the likelihood and consequences of failure.

Only in a mathematical argument. Failures are difficult to deal with personally, especially if you have to deal with them repeatedly without any sign of success around. The typical result is frustration gradually turning into a form of burnout and depression.
...and then decided against it every time, so obviously it has less value to him than other things he could be doing with his life.
The point that they're trying to make, and which is true in the Megaupload case, is that they would know that this had happened and they would disclose the fact that it happened.
> So maybe they don't get the NSL, but the people/group/company that is handling the servers might. This seems disingenuous.

well they do say explicitly that, near the bottom. Hardly disingenuous.
Oh, okay. I genuinely thought it meant 'without'. Thanks for clearing up the confusion.

(I wonder if it was really worth trying to save those two letters?)
> Addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6505227

False dichotomy. There is no technical debt. Both Ruby 1.9.3 and Ruby 2 are functional and used in production. It will take some time to totally move to 2, and when that happens, there will be applications on different release versions of 2. I don't want to wait for os packaging to use a new ruby release, and I don't want to be forced by the packaging to use a particular version(older or newer).

> I don't work in a Ruby shop anymore, but I'd look at Bundler

Um. I use Bundler along with rvm.

> maintaining multiple gemsets on the same machine is an antipattern that points to technical debt.

Having a restriction of not more than one app on one machine is as stupid as it gets.
No it doesn't. But throwing away RVM doesn't fix the things RVM fixes. RVM doesn't solve all problems; that doesn't mean it isn't useful for problems it solves.
Conformal/btcd
The persuasive part of this is disclosure. It's a promise to be open about any breaches, plus an observation that the US lacks the legal clout to stop the promise from being kept.
Occupy Yosemite
Good chance for learning Python
Or check out the specification at bittorrent.org: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Dm_oT-Y... (site was down when posted...)
EXACTLY. Listen, I hope to benefit from my work on Social Fixer. Donations are not my income, but they are a small added bonus. I've not gotten rich from this. But my goal is not to get rich. My goal is to create useful software that empowers and benefits users. I trust that if I do this not only for this app but for others, that I will benefit. It's a long-term bet, not a short-sighted investment strategy. There aren't enough people in the world who will do the right thing and hope to profit from it, rather than doing anything in their power to profit. Facebook certainly seems to fall into the latter category.

They have many people who have invested their lives creating this company. They want their payout. If they have to create a bubble to get it, that's what they are going to do. They'll get their cash, you can bet on that.
The personal location of the operators is probably the #1 most important security risk; location of customers, location of servers, and country of incorporation are also important.

It's much easier to compel operators to do something (through legal threats or potentially physical threats) than it is to do any active modifications to a complex system, undetectably. Passive ubiquitous monitoring is a concern because it's passive and thus hard to detect -- it's highly unlikely TAO can go after a large number of well-defended systems without getting caught. Obviously they'd be likely to hide their actions behind HACKED BY CHINESEEEE or something, but even then, it's relatively rare to have a complete penetration of a large site in a way which isn't end-user affecting, and rarer still for the site not to publicize it.

That said, if I wanted to compromise Fastmail, I'd either compromise a staffer or some of their administrative systems to impersonate staff.