skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We think of cryptography as the best way of information hiding. But it is not the only way. This sounds like some group is testing the limits of non-cryptographic information hiding. In particular, multiple possible messages encoded. How do you craft a message so that everyone is led to the decoy except those who know the secret key? And the size of the plaintext is completely hidden. Most likely this is a group associated with an intelligence agency, although they are likely not running an official project. They have an idea and are exploring it for now.

Interestingly, the NSA has access to enough Internet traffic to be able to identify people who are playing this game, even if they don't get to the final round.
I made one that can let you visit the page in a data uri, and can edit itself awhile ago. I just put it on github. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862837
I'm an entrepreneur, so it all sounds great for me, but why would investors go for this? It seems like they give up a lot of down-side protection: (1) No ability to convert or abort in the absence of a QFE, (2) no more first creditor protection -- if the company goes under, but also has outstanding loans, investors don't participate in a share of the liquidation proceeds as they would as debt holders (3) no interest = less equity at conversion? Am I wrong here? What am I missing? Thanks YC for your ongoing efforts!
Woah woah woah, you can't just go around flashing your kilobytes around.
Ah, Thanks for the enlightenment! :}
I find the idea of a foodstuff reaching a '1.0 release' somewhat... offputting.
"Nerd sniping", http://xkcd.com/356/
The first and last female samples are identical (except for size, they appear to be exactly the same image). Hard to believe that one was identified correctly almost 80% of the time, and the other only 30%.
Could you possible pastebin me the message headers/mime for the email going to spam? The folks at mailgun would like to have a look at it. Thanks!
YC, with its clout, is probably the only entity that could push something like this through.
Final Fantasy VIII is available on Steam
TL:DR

Just learn to enjoy what you have.
Interesting post, but your blog has a horrible bug that scrolls the page to the top on Android randomly.
Why do you need to handle requests concurrently when something like the disruptor pattern can handle 6 million/sec on a single core.
> because by default most of society operates without seeking permission from the government to do anything

So I take it you don't drive, don't own a residence, don't have a bank account, don't own a business, ...?
The EPA / DHA fatty acids from fish oil are incorporated directly into the oil blend now.

Sounds like the fish oil is still there, it's even pre-mixed so you can only avoid it by replacing the oils entirely.
"correct horse battery staple" is actually not good. It's made up of 4 very common words. So the complexity to bruteforce is around

10000^4 = 10^16 ≈ 2^53.15

So only 53 bits of security. I wouldn't protect something like bitcoins with that.
Thank you for your contribution to the discussion. I too am shocked. That the United States actively supported the Apartheid regime is a great national shame. I'm friends with a woman who grew up in South Africa. She is white. The stories she tells about the attitudes and what happened there during the Apartheid regime are revolting. She thinks Mandela is a saint and is very grateful for his leadership.

Mandela was not a terrorist. He did not deserve jail. That he came out of that experience and did not engage in a campaign of retribution is a testament to the man's greatness. Those that denigrate him do so from ignorance or lack of empathy.
Yeah, it is a little strange to hear since it really isn't difficult to learn another language if you're already a seasoned developer.
I've been learning different languages after work (I'm a C# dev) to become a better engineer, but I really doubt anyone I work with does this. To most people in a .NET shop, learning another language means learning how to hack out some bad javascript. I guess I am a weird case in that I learned how to program on .NET and continue to work with it, but I honestly am just not excited by the framework or language and get my kicks after work when I work with ruby/python/js. Since the .NET framework is so damned large, I almost feel as if I know more about the languages/frameworks I work with on the side since I'm actively interested in it and trying to learn more. With .NET, I only do that when I have to interview.
If they continue to not process the health information, I bet they will offer some sort of plan to mitigate the horrible PR from the nightmare that would ensue if they don't. I heard a seminar from one of the VPs and she made it seem like they don't run those chips at a very high margin, so this might set them back a bit, but I think the future is in their favor.
The hype around Soylent is unbelievable. You realize you don't need to wait for it if you want, you can just go out and buy Ensure and similars?
Algorithm lets quadcopters keep flying on three or less propellers
5460 satoshis is the current default minimum that Bitcoin itself allows (other transactions are valid, but won't be forwarded, thus you need to hand it over to a miner yourself for inclusion in a block).
I'm in the same position, although I returned my kit before the November 22 cutoff date. I figure I could probably request a refund given the new FDA situation -- given their regulatory situation, they'll probably loosen their refund policy to avoid compounding matters. But I don't think my kit should have any less information than before, so I figured I'd let it play out and see what the results look like. Obviously if my results don't include health data, then I'll certainly ask for a refund, because that was the main reason I enrolled.
>Best part: your dismissal dings him for not calling earlier bubbles, in a story where he calls a bubble.

I think it's up to history to determine whether Bitcoin's a bubble or not. Rather than a bubble, it may simply be the first of a new type of digital commodity backed by computing power. There was a time when a domain like sex.com could be had for very little money. Now it's worth significantly more money. Is that due to being a bubble or simply it being prime real estate (which BTC might be compared to altcoins)?
Harsh Sentences are Killing the Jury Trial
For what it's worth, my info is still visible so it might be possible that it'll be up for you too by the time sequencing is done.
I'm assuming that the theory here is that the good investors are more concerned about being in on the next Snapchat or Airbnb, and a lot less interested in bolstering downside protections that only apply if an investment is going to be one of the unproductive ones anyways.

Meanwhile, the good companies aren't going to be likely to entertain financing on anything but terms like these, so fighting them just incurs an adverse selection penalty.

The same thing seems to have happened with convertible debt, which was preceded by financing mechanisms that were way, way more onerous for entrepreneurs.
It's amazing how much of this is getting to the West Coast of the US.

By one measure 29% of SF's air pollution originates in Asia.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/88/i46/8846news3.html?T+Online+...
What platform did you use for deployment? When I dove into Node awhile back it seemed the most difficult part was finding a stable hosting solution...
"the preferred stock that a SAFE holder is issued will have a liquidation preference that is equal to the original SAFE investment amount, rather than based on the price of the shares issued to the investors of new money in the financing. "

This point is incredibly important and one of the key downsides of debt from the company perspective, as convertible notes create outsized liquidation preference upon conversion. And when things don't go as well as you hoped, liquidation preference matters a ton.

Kudos PG et al. EXCELLENT work.

See: http://ycombinator.com/safe/SAFE_Primer.docx
Why don't you start using some of the ones currently on the market then?? Why wait?
Even so, anything that allows you to omit one more bit of entropy can make you safer by making you more anonymous. We've already seen a few high profile attacks where the attacker exploited a vulnerability that arose out of how two or more services handle personally identifiable information. The Apple/Amazon one is one such example. The security professionals at each company choose to request different bits of entropy to identify someone and may give out other bits of entropy not among their identity bits. When two or more services complement each other in this regard, you can contact the first to get information to give to the second.

Facebook makes this even worse in that is exposes a lots of the commonly requested bits of entropy. It's not hard to identify someone's mother on Facebook. From there, you can identify her parents (if still alive) or brothers and cousins, to get her maiden name. Now if your birthday is visible or published anywhere, an attacker has yet another bit of entropy. Add enough together and an attacker now has enough information to walk into a bank agency with your bank account number and possibly gain access to your account.

TBH, we're at the point where it shouldn't be legal to secure accounts with any method that involves multiple bits of entropy. Any system that permits someone close to you (friends or family) to pretend to be you simply isn't secure. These days you don't even need to bother with power of attorney because it is so stupidly easy to impersonate one's parents, significant other, sibling, children, etc.
Right... it's not really creativity itself that people are afraid of, it's risk. When someone suggests an idea that's new, never been tried before, nobody can really assess the risk. So they go to worst-possible-case scenarios, or just reject the idea out of hand. Unless it's one of those flashes of insight that is immediately and obviously a good idea, people will take the risk-averse position on most "creative" ideas.
> You don't have to send your kid to that kind of school or to any school at all, but you do have to educate them.

Sounds reasonable on its face, but the reality is that if you try and homeschool you will face all types of resistance from the educational establishment. Tellingly, you will encounter that resistance from public primary schools (many colleges love homeschoolers). This is because the primary goal of the system is to strengthen and reinforce itself. This is so that it may have complete power to create generations of people who contribute to making a strong country through work and capitalism.

This purpose may be good or bad, I leave that judgement as an exercise to the reader. But let's not pretend that any of this is done in the best interests of children.
I don't yet have one. Is there not a way to download your information? They should certainly allow some sort of export.
> If school systems are so inherently broken, how come all the economically successful countries have public school systems that go on for years?

Long compulsory schooling was not a leading indicator of the success of the U.S. We were an outstandingly successful nation back when most people were schooled far less than they are now.

This isn't strong proof of anything about today, but it is at odds with the narrative that institutional schooling is the basic feature that makes a society good.
Awesome, now get an affiliate account at Amazon and make gift suggestions
Perhaps I should have replied to the grandparent comment :-)

I was reacting to this part: "Larger ideas usually end up being tried through force or by going behind somebody's back, and that's probably how it'll stay."

My impression was that you appeared to believe this is the only way to do things. I was hoping to suggest that it doesn't have to be. Re-reading your post again, I see better what you're trying to say.
Perhaps they're related. Gabe Newell is really taking great lengths to obscure the coming of Half-Life (2: Episode) 3.
There were no concrete findings - these were informal tests in a field where concrete findings are nigh-on impossible.

The website is a mix of marketing and longform, advertising dyslexia services. Often it's read by the parent of a dyslexic so there's two audiences to address. Of the dyslexics we tested with, all found the fonts hurt readability and they were seeing individual letters (instead of words) more than they were with a standard font (Source Sans Pro). The parents we also tested found the 'Dyslexic' fonts very hard to read. So for our small sample of children it didn't help, and in this situation wasn't worth pursuing.

Most of these children IIRC find a coloured overlay is all they need to read acceptably; colour and contrast is another thing I'd have liked to test but there's only so much you can subject children (who aren't your own) to!
Even so, there's no way in hell the "darknet" is 5000x larger than the "surface" web.
Drones should be banned from private use, says Google's Eric Schmidt
crap is crap, both make it to the front page, both don't belong there.
An ode to Sharkon
From their FAQ:

I purchased a kit as a gift before November 22nd, but have not given it to the recipient. Will they still receive health results when they send it in?
Yes. Access to health-related results is based on the purchase date of the kit. Any kit purchased before November 22, 2013 and returned to our lab will receive health-related results.

That being said, aren't the kits only good for a year?
Somehow I feel safer with a random pirate having my DNA in a database than Google.
Ask HN: good portfolio material?
I made this site as something to show potential employers, please offer some criticisms and suggestions. It is made with django rest api and angular. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
www.kiteswing.com
you can login with user/pass hank/hank
This is really interesting. My company is currently funded with convertible debt, and we have had to modify the conversion date at least three times thus far as we progressed through various twists and turns in our business model and funding structure. The SAFE mechanism would have likely alleviated a large and (unfortunately) recurring headache.
There are cases when you're wrong: ignorance is better than very, very, very severe information without context. I chose not to view whether I have risk for Alz, Parkinson's, and carry BRCA because I will not be able to process that information, as a human, and I can't act on it anyway - all it can do is harm me.

Because I'm being downvoted, I feel the need to take a stronger stance: sometimes, information is more harmful to a person because we do not always act well on it.
XMPP is standard. Grab a client for the platform of your choice [0], open an account on ddg.gg (duckduckgo's xmpp server), and you're done. I personnally use pidgin on the desktop and chatsecure on Android.

The only thing XMPP is lacking is marketing. Multi-billion-dollars-level marketing; shouldn't be too hard to do, right ?

[0] http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/clients/
Do You Know What Metrics are Driving Your Performance?
ClearView empowers a company to not only identify the optimal key metric thresholds that deliver the overall best customer experience but it also enables them to manage their organization to those identified metrics goals.
Bitcoin: Bubble? Maybe. The Wave of the Future? Definitely.
I'm hosting this on a Digitalocean box, proxying Node through Nginx. Not sure if I did all that correctly, because that certainly was completely new to me, but it seems to work fine for now!
I don't see why they can't just put up a disclaimer that's like "This is only an indication of medical issues you may have. Always consult a doctor." Or something like that.

How come they try to make these guys shut down, but largely leave homeopathy alone? I would say homeopathy is way more damaging than seeing whats in your genes.

Why does the FDA have to be jerks? (that's rhetorical. I know why they have to be jerks. It just sucks.)
It's quite obvious from your very own quote that it's the author of the article who's confused about the three (!) different notions of unindexable contents larger that the indexable one (deep web) vs. anonymous p2p file sharing networks (darknets) vs. Tor hidden services. I'm tempted to call this "a confusion hat-trick". ;-)
Sharkon = the Google App Engine logo
Yeah, me too. The primary reason I purchased this is that I know I have 50% odds of having a BRCA mutation (1 of my parents does). I was really looking forward to that test.
New neutrino cooling theory changes understanding of stars’ surface
Unfortunately they're no incentive for interoperability. In fact there's a strong disincentive for it.

The value in these companies is the captive audience and the network effect that makes users sticky. There's very little money in producing a commodity chat client (a la Pidgin or Adium).

It is in all of these companies' interests to not work with each other, as their only value is the size and exclusivity of their userbase.

Personally I just SMS now. I'm sick and tired of installing apps just to talk to that one friend who uses it, especially when SMS works just fine.
23andMe surrenders to FDA
Is there anything wrong with this? Not everybody can be an astronaut. Somebody has to plant the corn or pick up the garbage.
Um, yeah.. read the fine print.. you have to subscribe to Total Defense Premium and they bill your card before you get the rebate.

Good luck cancelling.
Right, but I wasn't speaking in the broad sense. In the legal sense, an option has to have a very specific underlying security. That's the case with even a naked option - you know exactly what the underlying security is. The Safe is substantively different because the underlying security isn't defined at that specific level.

But agreed, kudos to YC :)
I believe the color was added by the author for the photo; it still comes beige and unflavored. But, the author also experimented with adding flavoring, too, to reasonable effect.
That's a silly metric, though, because it just depends on where you divide things up politically. If China split into two independent countries, suddenly it wouldn't lead the world anymore, but the environment would not be any better off. Similarly, if Europe merged into a United States of Europe, its emissions would be much higher-ranked (maybe the largest), but it would not actually emit more than currently. The environment does not care at what scale you draw your political borders.

Per-capita emissions are one way of accounting for the obvious fact that if Denmark (a nation of 5 million people) generated as much CO2 per year as Germany does (a nation of 80 million people), Denmark would in this hypothetical be more blameworthy, and it would be fair to ask Denmark to reduce its emissions more than Germany, as it would already be emitting far out of proportion to its size. Put differently, if every country reduced their per-capita emissions to China's level, we'd actually be in great shape. That suggests that China is not the main problem.
Bootstrapping new media - Sullivan's Daily Dish Update
I like client certificates and use them myself, but be forewarned that requiring them is a good way to ensure that very few people use your API.
It probably is safer in that, you will pretty much assume it will be use for nefarious purposes eventually. So going in you probably have the right mind set to protect yourself.
That class action lawsuit is horrible... 23andme is awesome and I love having it. I never felt cheated or any of that because I read it carefully.
How Do You Develop Seed Eco-systems Around The World?
Not working here in Dubai and neither are the alternative domains provided. If it doesn't work for you try the direct IP (162.243.32.243).
I don't think this tool says anything of value. A quick experiment:

PHASE 1

1. Seed a first character with Lastpass password generator with all character classes enabled. Turns out to be an 'x'

2. Try the entire possible keyspace in the second character slot to see which characters are "expected". This turns out to be all but members of the set (h,H,b,B,n,N,6,8,~,#). That is, of 94 possible character (on my keyboard) 84 are "expected". That's 89% of the keyspace.

OK, so perhaps we can explain this by the simple expedient of the fact that any 2 character password is bruteforceable, though if this is the true explanation, I'm not sure why h,H,b,B,n,N,6,8,~, and # should be singled out as unpredictable.

Phase 2 tests whether password length explains the phenomenon of the applications seemingly lax definition of "expected".

PHASE 2

1. Seed first 31 characters with Lastpass password generator. This turns out to be 't4lzV%geWagnJW3&3tntDBWI5K0eL' (without the enclosing single quotes). Significantly, the app only considers 4 of the characters in this supposedly (pseudo)randomly generated 31 character string to be "unexpected".

2. Same as above, try each key in the entire keyspace to fill in the 32nd character slot. Again, all possible values are considered expected save for members of the set (a, A, l, L, e, E, 1, 3, 4, 7, @, ^, &). So the app "expects" 81 out of 94 possible values at that 32nd character slot. This constitutes 86% of the keyspace.

So... apparently bruteforceability doesn't explain the first result.

The prediction model seems to be so wildly unrealistic in judging the predictability of a password (or even in fact a particular character within a password) as to be completely unusable for any practical purpose. In fact, limiting your passwords to strings that maximize the number of "unexpected" characters seems incredibly ill-advised as it mainly reduces your keyspace on a per-character basis to ~15% of its potential size. And since this application exists and is accessible to everyone, it can be integrated into password cracking attempts (especially if the algorithm is published).
And that makes my (snarky) question any less valid. Why not talk about the cultural norms of white programmers from the midwest? Why not talk about the cultural norms of girl programmers then? The problem with shit like this is it can act as a heuristic that you can use to feed your confirmation bias or it can bite you the fuck in the ass.

E.g. not every guy of an Indian ethnicity is a yes man to use ideas from malux85's anecdote. Neither are women inherently bad at math or computer science to use Larry Summers's stupid-ass argument.
IMHO you left out a couple key data points.

1) How senior are you?

2) How much do you respect the folks that will be your boss, and how much time will they give you?

The more junior you are, the more important #2 is.
I think they're already doing this. I have ads I placed in a subreddit displaying on my front page right now.
Except they're here imposing this as a global task.

Of course we need lower level labor as well, but those do not require much formal education in the first place.
Nine awesome features and extensions for Mercurial
Not available here in Victoria, BC either.
When I said "the FDA," I really meant the entire legal and regulatory system that puts these silly limitations on a harmless product like 23andMe's DNA test.
To me it is likely a fear of the unknown.

Warning: generalizations ahead

Current parents were raised in an environment where TV and computer screens occupied a small fraction of the time they do of current children. They played outside more and socialized more. We are worried about the consequence of such a change in upbringing.

Such worries probably occur with every generation (and newer technologies) and things tend to turn out alright. That being said, as a soon-to-be parent, I can't say that it doesn't worry me as well.
Stripe. Probably the only SaaS UI I don't hate in significant ways. It has a fairly minimal feature set though which helps.
That's an "interesting" idea: Google Ads targeted for your genome.