skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm not telling anyone to use Skype. I'm saying that the added security didn't come at a cost to usability.

What added security? I didn't say it's impossible to be easy and as safe as older versions of skype (which is to say, not very). I said it's impossible to be easy and safe. (In particular, you need some kind of key fingerprint checking, and no-one's found an effective, user-friendly way to do that).

> I would say that your bar is very high, then. This would defeat nearly everything that exists and is in use today.

It wouldn't defeat GPG, or OTR-based systems used in reasonably popular open-source clients.

> Also, there's probably no one in the world that can actually defend themselves against the NSA if the NSA is determined to know what they, specifically, are doing.

Sure. But let's look at a realistic threat model, and at what's actually happened: the NSA did intercept all communications channels run by individual providers, including skype. The NSA was prepared to demand these providers deploy new backdoors into software they distributed that didn't currently have them, as we saw with lavabit and RSA, and when lavabit refused they were shut down. The NSA were not terribly effective at compromising open, respected standards (they did succeed in getting a broken algorithm standardized, but the main reason this wasn't noticed is that hardly anyone was using it, and even then questions were being raised in the crypto community), and did not compromise GPG or similar open-source projects. Nor did they tap users of those systems indirectly by compromising their email clients or similar. Observe that Snowden, with inside knowledge, chose to use PGP to communicate with journalists, and this did in fact provide sufficient security.

Meaningful security is possible. Skype isn't it.
Certainly not. This was an update from the artist who had this happen to him. A prior article is here: http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/12/outrage-at-jf...

The parent article doesn't say much either, but I take it that the event happened, people are upset and the story is developing.
I found that a very weird thing to say, given that eight people have froze to death in this area during the last month.

I wouldn't assume that surviving the cold is very easy. Hypothermia doesn't even require very low temperatures.
Maybe your MVP could have less features?
5 Years of SaaS Growth: Every Month, Exact Numbers
A rightsholder would notify them.
"Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone."

WIGGLE ROOM ALERT: Apple might have worked with government contractors, just not the NSA directly.

"Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products. We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security."

WIGGLE ROOM ALERT: They could very well be unaware of this program -- but aware of another program that hasn't been disclosed yet.

For more on sneaky talk, read this fantastic Atlantic piece that dissects deliberately misleading statements by NSA officials: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/how-amer...

One key strategy they've had: they consistently deny specific programs, as opposed to general actions.
I'm going to be taking:

Introduction to Databases: https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/db/2014_1/abo...

Internet History, Technology, and History: https://www.coursera.org/course/insidetheinternet

CS169x SaaS - https://www.edx.org/course/uc-berkeleyx/uc-berkeleyx-cs169-1...
An interesting list. I'd enjoy seeing this in other fields besides CS.
Regarding health care being a failure of the free market, I recommend this (rather long) article for some perspective:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...
Construction -> Mortgage Borrowers -> Mortgage Securitizers -> Investment Banks -> Pension Funds

In the above scenario the demand form the right dried up, whereas with student loans the supply from the left is going to dry up, so it's a different scenario. However, who is the equivalent of the construction companies in this scenario? My guess is the companies who supply equipment etc to universities and are over reliant on their custom. If you can find them, short them.

Well anyway that's the best I could think up. Unlike other investments, a degree is something you keep forever, so it's interesting to analyse...
They could, but realistically that isn't going to happen. Hence the Office Space reference:

Michael Bolton: Yeah, well, at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.
Samir: You know, there's nothing wrong with that name.
Michael Bolton: There *was* nothing wrong with it... until I was
about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown
became famous and started winning Grammys.
Samir: Hmm... well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

Michael Bolton, the character in the movie, laments that he shares his name with a (real life) signer. He could go by another name, but refuses to because he thinks that the singer is at fault. Realistically Michael Bolton, the song singer, will never change his name, so Michael Bolton, the office worker, is choosing to instead complain and live with it. The humor comes from the ridiculous nature of the office worker's stance.

(Also, assuming the wifi on these buses is not in violation of FCC regulations, this really is this guys problem, not Google's.)
And what do you think caused the social change? Did you notice that it came about after the laws were put in place?

The laws didn't come from nowhere, but they certainly had an impact on the majority's way of thinking. Why else would the Religious Right be so absolutely set against laws allowing same-sex marriage? If laws didn't change social values, they'd have nothing to fear from them.
You're assuming that mining revenue must never decrease, but there's no reason for that to be true. A more likely scenario is that as block rewards go away, instead of transaction fees going up, overall mining revenue goes down. Some miners will exit, but as long as there's money to be made there will still be miners. Bitcoin users and miners will adjust fees until they reach a compromise that's mutually acceptable.
Can you expand on this? What happened after 130nm that was different than the previous scaling?
> I do have to say that as someone who sometimes conducts technical interviews, I'm not sure I would actually give this question to an interviewee, unless I was leaving him or her alone to work for a couple of hours, because of how long it would probably take to reach an answer.

This is a great point that I realized that when I sat down to write up a solution myself. The video-explanation-version of coding it up for the CFI course ended up being 60 minutes long.

Suspect when it does get asked in an interview context they might only want to see some of your problem solving process and algorithm devising, not a full code-up.
Is that the point? "In the past" there was a massive plan to build BART lines to all over the Bay Area[0] that never came to fruition. There isn't even serious talk about doing this. Modern companies, which didn't exist, are having to deal with the short-sightedness of times past (however, this is a regular lament of the young). It's not that these companies don't necessarily not want to provide for the public good (I don't know if they do or not, it's inconsequential), it's that the public didn't want them to. Even if there were plans, by the companies, to contribute to "solving" transit issues, it's easy to have it tied up in frustrating planning stages, a la Geary Bus Rapid Transit[1].

Meanwhile, people have to get to work.

What we're seeing is the result of a number of strong, independent, competing systems (transit, property rights, rent control, NIMBY, etc), working in isolation, resulting in a massive, fustercluck that doesn't have a solid solution that does anything other than continue to perpetuate it's own bureaucracy.

And again, saying that the companies are not doing anything to "solve" the transit problems ignores the fact that busing employees, in fact, are part of "solving" transit problems, specifically those of highway traffic (and second order impacts like greenhouse gas emissions and roadwear).

[0] this makes the internet rounds with Bay Area people every few months, https://www.google.com/search?q=bart+map+1950s

[1] http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/02/06/geary-brt-advisor-resig...
Sure no; but 97% of OS problems are hardware problems and OS/X and Windows are lucky to have hardware makers care to optimise their product for them. Still, with some research _before_ buying you can get a perfectly flawless Linux experience. And if you are lazy, there are rare but still options already baked for Linux, even from huge vendors like Dell.
I don't understand the argument that "the power of the country's government to tax" is a point in favor of a currency. I would say that it is pretty clear that the opposite is true for almost every significant tax; that a country collecting taxes in a currency would be a disadvantage of a currency. The fact that countries need to pass laws allowing taxation of non-local currencies seems to support that.

For a limited class of taxes, namely, taxes directly denominated in a currency (like property taxes), the taxability of a currency adds to the demand for that currency. But for the most part, since non-local currency transactions and barter transactions are taxed at the effective exchange rate / fair value, the fact that taxes are collected in dollars would seem to neither hurt nor help the currency.

That said, in summary, the "artificial supply limitation" applies to both Bitcoin and dollars, with dollars relying purely on trust that America will not increase the money supply unnecessarily. That inflation has actually been mild is a "bug" in the system -- the Fed is deliberately trying to spur inflation, and has not been having success, for reasons that nobody (including themselves) completely understands. The calculable probability of return that you refer to has been pretty reliable (just like MBS's in 2006, couldn't resist), so that is true, but I don't see that being related to the taxability of the currency so much as to the lack of apparent inflation compared to the nominal returns on sovereign debt.

The monetary base argument also seems specious; M0, the "monetary base", is not generally considered (except by non-mainstream economists) to be all that significant compared to the higher-order money supply factors caused by dollar-denominated assets of varying liquidity. Once (or if) Bitcoin develops a credit market, then the medium-term effective money supply will grow and shrink as the market demands.
But surely if we can observe that a "free-er and more market-based" approach is working less well than the approaches taken by other countries, we should change our approach? Our dubious superpower status will not be much comfort to those dying from treatable diseases they cannot afford to treat.
Citation for an opinion? But see above.
I don't have Python3 handy, but in Python2 I do this:

>>> answer = 1 + 1
>>> answer
2

Doesn't Python3 work the same way?

In any case, my PYTHONSTARTUP has this line:

from pprint import pprint as pp

and I find pp() very nice for printing various structures.
For patents, you do have to pay maintenance fees to renew a patent at the 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 year marks after issuance to keep it active, else it goes abandoned. A vast number of patents go un-renewed and lapse that (1) few patents turn out to be "profitable", and (2) most patents don't last their full terms.
Setting up for bitcoin transactions is even easier and faster. I often see bitcoin addresses listed on github accounts, asking for a small tip. Also: http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcointip

I remember some years ago when people were getting excited about microtransactions, but nobody found a good way to make them work. It seems like Bitcoin might be a viable way of bringing the idea back.
Why are people so thrilled about a slower more error prone way to do what amazon provides already? Just make an ami for each kind of server you want. Now you skip the waiting part, and the "oops, my pile of messy ruby scripts fucked up configuring the server" parts.
Good point.

I'm seeing a lot of parallels between dotcom era payment systems like PayPal and even Flooz. Paypal's original concept was paying friends for things like splitting lunch.

The hook that's different here is that once you deposit legal tender and covert to bitcoin, you're basically trading something that is commodity-like. Basically, it's no different than bartering shares of gold.

My question is, when the regulatory system catches up, is bitcoin better than a commodity?
I am being taken out of context, I am not talking about making money I am talking about copy right protection. Disney has a vested interest, whether making money or not on a work, that Joe Schmo does not start reproducing a given work 1 to 1 and selling it as their own.

You may be right most income is derived from a work in its first 60 years, or that media created 60 years ago was not expected to be marketable 60 years later. Though I do not know this to be a historical fact, 60 years ago (1953) there was plenty of evidence to suggest a given work by a US author has plenty of commercial appeal after a mere 60 years of existence (Walden Pond, Civil Disobedience, Uncle Tom's Cabin, almost any Mark Twain novel).
I guess I had trouble understanding your idea because it's contrary to one of the few principles in computer architecture that nobody has ever argued about.

You want to stick a spinning rust platter with moving parts in front of a solid-state memory that is several hundred percent faster for sequential tasks, and is an order of magnitude faster for random tasks?

Okay.
This country is doomed.

Even during the cold war, in all the slapstick portrayals in movies and and sitcoms, you would never see Soviet (or Nazi) border or other guard types acting anywhere near as stupid as the CBP officers in this case.
The connection between lead and crime is tenuous. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6092990.
> Credit cards can charge 2.5% because they're awesome Some guy in Arizona can set himself up online, sign up for Stripe, have no set fees, and accept a payment from someone in Germany (or NY or Australia) that afternoon.

Last I checked, it takes at least a month to apply for and receive a credit card, so this is obviously wrong. Guess what, I could set you up with a bitcoin account and some bitcoins in less than a minute.

> 2.5% doesn't seem to bad for the people running those rails to collect (fraud, global movement etc)

Yeah, as long as something else doesn't come along that's even better at fraud prevention and global movement and only charges 0.01% (like bitcoin, for instance)
I moved from Perl to Python around 3 years ago. And google searches went from Perl Monks to SO. At first I found Stack Overflow nicer, with its clean modern interface, but as time goes by, I see the moderators attitude getting worse an worse.

Perl Monks encouraged discussion and deeper learning, even though a lot of it came down to Perl Golf.
Blueprint for Building Habit-Forming Products is #15 on Amazon's new free books
Google Chromebooks Rank No.1 in Amazon Best Sellers Notebooks
The scale is in 2012 dollars. That's indexed.
I don't think people realize how easy it is to run a Python2 and Python3 codebase at the same time if you have decent test coverage and run tox.

Before PyCon SurveyMonkey(my employer) will be deploying a major part of our application on Python3.
ANY ANDroid WORK FOR ME WILL HELP ME MOST.
Hello guys,

I have some financial issues. I am a freelancer developer. I would appreciate any work of android. I have two years working experience in developing android applications.

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Right, but this has nothing to do with the practice of protecting your private key.

That the most sophisticated attacker with the most resources may be able to tunnel into your data is no excuse for lax security.
We began accepting bitcoin last month and aren't converting all of our bitcoin to dollars. We have several employees who accept their pay in bitcoin.

Taking things a bit further, we are optimistic about bitcoin as a payment form with our suppliers as the volatility stabilises. As an example, one of our suppliers is Belgium based and we'd be able to save on the currency exchange with those payments. We've discussed it and they didn't turn their nose up to the idea.
Companies started to introduce new technological features starting with the 90nm node. This slide is a nice top level summary:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2011_5_6/Intel-Manufact...
In fairness, it seems to have eliminated Experts Exchange from search results.
One thing that the author is
Superpower in what sense? I mean, I think I know what sense you mean, but there are some glaring socioeconomic inconsistencies with the label "superpower":

* We have the highest first-day infant mortality in the industrial world: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-has-highest-first-day-infant-...

* The US has a very high poverty rate compared to other industrialized nations: http://depts.washington.edu/wcpc/povertyintheus

* The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world: http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/us-incarcerati...
They can threaten to sue you, but only a lawyer is really qualified to tell you whether or not the threats are proper.

In this case, the original poster is clearly toeing the legal line. IANAL, but it sounds like what he's doing is perfectly legal.

Either way, if he cares about his website, he should seek legal counsel.
Have you seen this? http://jetpack.me/support/json-api/
How is Santa Monica taking a step back from cool outside things to do? SM is one of the most beautiful places in the country, the weather is nearly perfect, and you are a walk or a short drive away from many outdoor activities.
Chromebooks actually can be viable for coding. Firstly, Crouton lets you operate Linux and switch instantly between ChromeOS and Linux. Secondly, you can use an online IDE through Chrome. Thirdly, you could remotely operate in Windows using either a personal machine or a hosted Web server and this could be either through Linux or Chrome. This would enable using Visual Studio, for instance. I think the Chromebook Pixel with a decent home Server used for a traditional and powerful desktop environment would pair quite nicely.
One of the actuaries where I worked wrote a paper or gave a talk somewhere that I found very thought-provoking. In the future, he said, healthcare costs might rise to be as high as 50% or even 90% of GDP, and there would be nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It would simply reflect our evolving priorities of valuing good health more than anything else in our lives.

If this is a real person giving a real talk that was taken seriously by other professionals, then that is terrifying (it's already ~20% GDP and climbing).
a lot of the 'development server in a box' type AMIs (like from the AWS marketplace) have cpanel/webmin-type crap.
> each bus wouldn't be using the same one

Why is that? Do these buses frequently drive next to each other?

(Honest question. I don't live in the Bay Area, nor do I work for Google.)
A quick example is the obvious contradiction in the following quotes from the blog:

> With healthcare, the free market has clearly failed.

> Does this even qualify as a “free market”? I don’t think so.

Later the post pulls out some talking points about Mitt Romney and some conservative think tanks, which are definitely relevant if you are trying to score political points instead of discussing healthcare policy.

The closing section that glosses over the big problems with centralized planning systems (broken promises with no legal recourse, implementation issues caused by politics interfering with sound decision making) and finishes with enthusiastic exclamation points:

> Now this is what a free market looks like!

> Wow!

> This is a time to be proud.

It seems like political cheerleading to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

To summarize this piece, it seems like this guy felt guilty for working at an insurance company, but now he feels better because the he politically supports the ACA, which he feels is going pretty well. Is there an apolitical thesis for this blog post that I'm missing? Why was it written if not to express a political position?

EDIT: The Romney and think tank thing is clearly an association fallacy. I don't want to get into pointless political bickering, which is why I was hesitant to comment in the first place. I brought up that part of the article because it only serves this sort of tangent instead of furthering the (IMO much more interesting) discussion of healthcare costs, policy, and incentives.
You can use Ansible to create an AMI to get the best of both worlds - fast provisioning, plus the ability to make new AMIs in a repeatable, self-documenting manner. You're arguing configuration management is "error prone", but I've found it a lot less error prone than other methods. If something doesn't install right I can blow away the whole thing rather than trying to un-break a destroyed install.

If your Ansible scripts are in Ruby you've done something very odd, and if they're messy it's your own fault. Mine are pretty clean, and once built they work the same way for subsequent runs.
http://getontracks.org/ has worked well enough to use it daily for two years.
Yeah, like I said only one supplier and the cost is astronomical.
They probably had a lawyer advice them on which threats were substantial, and which ones weren't.

The RIAA is famous for sending out threats on anyone or anything that remotely does anything they disagree with. They don't necessarily even have a legal argument to win the case. But they have their lawyers write up nasty letters and emails to coerce you into doing what they want.

Without a lawyer of your own, who can sift through these C&D letters... you're pretty much defenseless.

--------------

More realistically... the Youtube / Tumbler approach was most likely "Ignore the Letters, and hope for the best". These kinds of letters aren't necessarily threatening legal action.
I've never seen so many cringeworthy projections in a row.

These people are paid employees of the United States government. Them doing something ordinary is exactly what they should be doing. Them breaking peoples things for no reason whatsoever (there are many, many examples beyond this) is becoming more and more common and ALWAYS results in zero discipline or compensation. Your expectation that people just pretend like this isn't happening is completely ridiculous.
Not anymore - the girls and culture are all moving to Oakland!
Wouldn't it be easier and less visible to everyone to bug at ship time? Why is two days your estimate?
Update: We hit our goal! http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/careervillage-inspire-the-... Thanks to @ada1981 and @czbond for advice, and to @piratebroadcast and many others for pushing hard to get the news out.
Well a blog is probably going to have a first article :\

I agree that the "world" could benefit from an easier to use cryptography product than PGP (event thought I'm fine with PGP) and I think that this post is valid criticism.

Disclaimer: Not a cryptography expert in any way, neither annoyed by the fact cryptography is hard and will probably benefit from processes like peer-review.
I think if they're going to argue that routine gameplay is a special feature, they're going to be on a loser when the courts and/or trading standards people get hold of them. At least in the UK, that term seems to be clearly unfair and therefore unlikely to stand up if customers start demanding compensation.
Being a newbie at Python myself and seeing how much the Python devs are trying to get people using Python 3, I was initially planning on just using Python 3 for all my Python coding. That was until I realized how many libraries exist only for Python 2.