skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Jesse Jackson wouldn't be heading to Hewlett Packard or any of the other big tech companies if they had done their job and accomplished diversity," she says. "He's shining a spotlight on one aspect of the growing inequality of this country."

I think that the problem of diversity in tech starts long before your interview at a Silicon Valley company. It starts at home, and at school. If you get more children of color exposed to technology (the making side, not the consuming side), math, and science early, then you'll have more of them in college, and more qualified candidates of color applying for Silicon Valley companies. What you expose kids to early on shapes what they'll become later on. If you emphasize basketball and football to Black kids, you'll get an NBA and NFL that are 70% Black.
How much coordination is there between, say, different Team Fortress 2 servers?
Previous article and discussion of Toyota's safety-critical firmware woes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6636811

Edit: and the title got edited to be the NYT title, which obscures the relevance to Hacker News. Ah well. This settlement is directly related to the court case Toyota recently lost, with expert testimony about the poor quality of Toyota's embedded safety-critical firmware...
An RSA key isn't 4096 random bytes.

OpenSSL doesn't always retrieve all its random bytes from urandom; it seeds its own local PRNG with urandom, and feeds raw random bytes from its own state.

There are no simple answers in public key crypto: the idea that you only need 256 bits of random data can blow your head off if you use something other than RSA. For instance, if you fill only some of the bits of a DSA k value, attackers can extract your private key from a series of public signatures.

Some of the comments on that bug thread are batty, though. The OpenSSL CLI tool doesn't implement its own randomness or key generation; it's a CLI wrapper around the core OpenSSL functions. The CLI might be for "debugging purposes" (but obviously not really, since most instructions for generating SSL certificates involve using that CLI), but the core routines surely aren't.
It's also possible that there is a legitimate reason (from a business perspective) they'd preferentially hired white tech workers, such as socioeconomic class leading to better training. (We see this effect in other places.)

I highly doubt that many of the confounding variables (age; exposure over time; socioeconomic status; etc) have been ruled out to come up with that statistic.

Not that I don't think there's a problem, just saying, the businesses might not be racist so much as minorities underperform (relative to their potential) because of socioeconomic factors. If that's truly what's happening, I'd argue that the place to combat that is the economics of the situation, and not attacking businesses for making prudent decisions.
Relevant: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-...

Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406572
Joel's definition of a blog is one that is very idiosyncratic, and I'm not sure that it's shared with very many other people. A blog is a web log. It's a space for you to write and share your thoughts. Nowhere does it say that you have to leave space for others or that you have to create a "community". If a community springs up, that's great! But a blog without comments is still a blog. If it weren't, what else would it be?
hmm, this guy has a lot of followers on Twitter, and this tweet is a couple days old. The lack of shitstorm, I presume means this isn't all it's cracked up to be? What is it that is supposedly decryptable with this key? Without more info I'm kinda stumped as to what we're looking at.
I do, and, honestly, I'm not a huge fan. The editor is fairly slick but the code base is an absolute rat's nest. If I want the power of a full-blown this-gen engine, I'd turn to Unreal; if I want rapid iteration and relatively painless development while sacrificing some (not all!) power, I'd turn to Unity.

But that's just me! Your mileage may certainly vary depending on what your project needs.
Very good. Now give it its own thread so I can upvote that too.
OpenTransactions (by Monetas) is trying to solve this problem at the root.
Crowdfunding with non-coercive forces.
That's more or less my view. I think if I had a blog that was part of some community, like a blog discussing issues of interest to Americans in Copenhagen or something similar, I might have comments. But for my personal site, which is a mixture of essays, annotated bibliographies, book reviews, research write-ups, etc., I'm not sure I want to support the ability of random passerby to append text to the end of the page. Maybe that means it's not a blog, which is also ok (I don't actually use the word "blog" anywhere on it).

I do like thoughtful feedback, and I also think additional information contributed by third parties can sometimes be useful to append to the end of an essay, if it has clarifications/corrections/etc. So my half-way approach has been to explicitly note at the bottom of each page that comments are welcome by email, and then, if I do receive useful emails, I'll update with the newly received information. For example, the bottom of http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html has short pointers to two things sent in by readers, which they presumably would have left as a comment, if I had comments.
Sigh You can't 'leak' a symmetric key. If the messages are encrypted on your phone then you already have the key. If they're not then it doesn't matter.
I use #bada55, I saw it in a comment on HN and thought it was funny. Pretty ugly, but I use HNES on my laptop anyway which negates my topcolor.

Also plug for HNES while we're talking about Hacker News aesthetics, it makes HN way better (collapsible comments, inline reply, new stylesheet) and is open source. I've contributed and the repo owner (etcet) is very welcoming.
I challenge you to do anything that is first-class profession UI/UX experience in Java, and not want to tear your eyes out in the process. Try building something Aperture, Keynote, etc in Java. I don't know what you're building but my guess is it isn't 'beautiful' or innovative UI.
As an Asian American male, I've seen a great mixture of white and Asian men in tech companies in Silicon Valley. I've never worked in a frat house type startup, but rather ones with a great mixture of high end talent. So I concede I might be only experiencing an outlier.

Asians in America put a much higher priority on education than other races, at least based on college graduation statistics. If you look at marriages, the pairings which have the highest rate of possessing a college degree are Asian/Asian, White/Asian, and Asian/White. Most engineering jobs require a degree, so is it really a surprise that Asian's have higher representation in tech than perhaps other races?

I chose to do coding and design because it was something I enjoyed. Growing up, I did it on my own time despite the fact that it wasn't a particularly socially attractive endeavor especially compared to sports. I'm not griping that the NFL/NHL/MLB or Hollywood have few Asian American men or that I didn't end up going into those industries.

I get annoyed when people just assume that 'men' in tech purposefully exclude other races and genders. I couldn't care less the race or gender of the applicant.
Flappy 2048 AI
I think this is Cuban's way of saying "Hold on, I see now that compared to the exits we are heading towards, the valuations are not to big." Here's the problem with that type of thinking - we can always readjust our valuation expectations to be in line with increased valuations. Every bubble does that. It becomes the 'new normal'. But it's still not necessarily true. Regardless of SV's success at crafting exits, valuations might still be too high. Both statements can be true.
Excellent suggestion. Not the OP, but this suggestion allowed me to sign up.
I noticed this uses AngularJS under the hood. How would it play in an existing AngularJS app - can we install it as a module? Also, how would one do stacked bar charts?
In practice, you always have to put the hammer down and moderate, if you don't want your community to be overrun by people who are willing to invest the time and energy to ensure that their voices dominate the discussion.

This (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) is a very good essay that illustrates my point.
So the joy is in the traveling, not the destination, then?
The DK1's resolution is way too low for reading large amounts of text, and I'm somewhat skeptical that the DK2 is good enough to be used as a monitor replacement.

Different applications that place less emphasis on text may be a better fit for VR - think photoshop and autocad for a start.
Linus wrote Linux initially as an exercise to learn about writing kernels for i386. That it was just a hobby and not intended to be professional was even in the initial release announcement.

It is also possible to view Stallman as having written gcc and emacs so that he could live according to his own moral views with regards to software. That other people benefit from these pieces of software seems to be an altruistic component of Stallman's ethical worldview but ultimately a side effect of Stallman's personal goal of not needing to touch proprietary software. If Stallman was willing to compromise on his moral convictions, it is likely that neither gcc nor emacs would exist as they do today.
It has been known from day 1 that Whatsapp "encryption" uses this standard key. This isn't even news.
Oh, they have #0b00b5
The AES key in that post appears to be:

346A23652A46392B4D73257C67317E352E3372482177652C

The one in the linked Tweet appears to be different.
Once you get enough entropy into your crypto-random generator you are fine for a very, very long time. They basically use the same algorithms that are used for encryption itself (AES, etc.) and are of equal strength.

That means if you can't trust to these generators then you can't trust your encryption (i.e. you are screwed anyway).
What's also interesting about this is to know that Diaspora still exists.
That looks like a great company with a great product but it's only capital intensive relative to web software.
"All your chats are encrypted with the Advances Encryption Standard."
Only if they dictate what readers are allowed to do with their books (how many times they can read it, in what setting, can they lend a book to a friend, can they give it to their children and such), books that were written by copying Shakespeare's works but changing few words to make it more awesome.
This is the nature of shipping client code. Any key they used can be extracted by a sufficiently determined individual. The real security issue was not storing the database in the app's private directory.
Most people aren't going to want to hold their own keys as most people can't stop their computers from being constantly infected by malware. Just as people don't want to keep large amounts of cash in their safe, they will want someone else to take the responsibility of securing their coin.

Pretty much only the tech savvy will care to even understand what a key is or care to hold their own.

Bitcoin isn't a political movement to the masses, it's just a useful new technology; they aren't using it to kill banks or government and they don't care about the politics of the early adopters.
The two day old source tweet: https://twitter.com/kaepora/status/445623864065007616
YC was founded in 2005, so if you do the math...
Haha, yes, extensively. Should I not have?
The labels in the axis are misplaced in IE11. They look right in Chrome. http://imgur.com/oLHPoYy
Could you use some kind of master password that is entered temporarily to encrypt/decrypt the AES decryption key?
And it looks like it was written in Java. Compare against any serious iOS app, for example.

I've been writing UI code for years, including in Java, .NET, Android/iOS, web, etc, so I have a pretty decent clue about building complex apps in all of these frameworks. Java just isn't a modern environment, and by being cross-platform you end up with an ugly lower common denominator that doesn't have useful APIs for non-trivial designs. iOS is probably the best framework/api out there and even that has many issues (luckily obj-c's categories help you fill in the holes).
> We will try to operate this list without moderation, as we >feel moderation is an impediment to communication.

I feel like everyone wants to hate moderation but it's one of those things, that when used correctly, make a community good.

I'm on several mailing lists that have grown significantly over 3-7 years. I, along with most other founding members, left lists that didn't have any moderation as they inevitably grew into a community similar to what's described in this announcement.

But the mailing lists/forums that had moderate moderation, removing furry porn for example, have continued to grow and continue their initial cause. Good moderation is not censorship, I would even say that people disrupting the core purpose of a community censor more than a good moderator by burying worthwhile content below shit posts.
Why Money Is the Key to Happiness
The 7 Steps to Self Publishing (The old fashioned way)
That it uses the 'same' symmetric key for all users is what has everyone concerned. Coupled with the fact that WhatsApp stores your chats on external SD cards [1] without access controls, any APP you have installed can access and decrypt your WhatsApp chat history using this key.

[1] http://bas.bosschert.nl/steal-whatsapp-database/

This was on HackerNews a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7380136
>>There's also the problem of finding a ride home after the bars close

Completely agree here, but this has a really easy solution: let in Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, etc.
No, the entropy estimator in /dev/random does not keep /dev/random from spitting out unsafe bits while allowing /dev/urandom to do that. A CSPRNG is akin to a stream cipher. The keystream of a stream cipher is as secure at it's 0th bit as it is at its 18446744073709551616th. An AES-CTR keystream doesn't "run out" of key, and /dev/urandom doesn't "run out" of entropy.

It's frustrating the the Linux random man page implies otherwise, because the idea is cryptographically nonsensical.
Bloomberg chat/msg is available on iOS, Android and BB devices and app stores. You just don't get it unless you're a subscriber. The entire terminal is available on iPads, even.
The real security issue is using the same symmetric key with every client.
I was also really curious about that.
What about the other people? Can we get some context on the photos (the rest of the slideshow, that is)?
I wonder if this is similar to Snapchat. Snapchat uses AEC-ECB encryption (which you should never use) with a single key that is not-so-carefully hidden in every binary file they've ever distributed to a mobile device. The kind folks at Gibsonsec revealed Snapchat's "security by obscurity" and documented the API so well that I was able to make a Java Snapchat client in a few hours.

I hope that's not the case for WhatsApp, they have a lot more to lose.
It uses the same key for all instances? Wow.
Adobe Products Sweep 2014 Sony World Photography Awards
If the system were fully meritocratic, you'd expect a lot more females in the industry, for one. Unless you suppose that females of all races are objectively less capable in some way. But then you'd have to explain why there are so many females being successful in other hard sciences like biology.

The fact is that many people aren't given early access and encouragement to technology, and the ones that do experience constant pressure and put-downs. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. I've done hundreds of interviews and dozens of interview trainings, and have personally observed lots of silly behavior, from treating women more harshly than men, to dismissing a candidate because their family name implied a background of poverty.

A "safe" example to think about: it's very common to rubbish people who went to this university or that one instead of yours, which is obviously the best. You can write that off as good-natured play, but consider that I've had to build a career in tech without a degree. It's only by the slimmest chain of coincidences that I was able to even get the opportunity to be seen and evaluated. The "meritocratic" system simply doesn't believe that anyone without the nous to afford college is worth even noticing.

The hiring manager at the end of that food chain is often unaware of all that. He (and it's usually a "he") passes over resumes and chuckles at their university choices, then picks "the good ones" to jump through hoops and from there picks "the best". To him, that's meritocracy.
Let me get this straight. Justin Kan is responsible for your disgusting toilet? Have you no shame or sense of personal responsibility?
He's the main author of cryptocat, which in the past has gotten allot of flak for it's javascript/client side implementation of encryption.
"Many of my friends are entrepreneurs. A few have mentioned this deep hollow conflicted feeling. Their business ideas are not things the world wants. They're following the current tech entrepreneur stereotype, building social apps and pursuing investors. They're hating it, and having to admit they're doing it only for the jackpot. But if they stop, what's left?"

For me, that's exactly why I'm starting a company instead of going somewhere like Google. I'm not in it to hit the jackpot, I'm in it to make a lasting impact on the world and the way that we use technology. At this stage (early), it feels like I'm actually trying something useful. I feel like I have a purpose, and it's a more satisfying source of motivation than a potential jackpot.

I'd be interested to see Elon Musk weigh in on this. Hitting the financial jackpot seems very far from his mind. He said himself, his goal is to die as a resident of Mars, and the rest is just trying to pay the bills so he can fund his dream.
The two comments below (and the others that will follow) aside, I was thinking the same thing. The article doesn't really paint his qualifications well.
How The Zetas Cartel Took Over Mexico With Walkie-Talkies
While it seems like you're moving goalposts, this example also appears to be something a person could know without touching on nested loops or O(n) at all.

Case in point, 10s of Googling produced this link:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2831212/python-sets-vs-li... ...and I don't even use Python yet.
I wish everyone from Google, Facebook to YC followed the model CRV has been using [1], "Each member votes on a scale of one to four how confident they are in the investment, with one being least confident and 4 being highly confident. A majority of votes in either the least or most confident category is considered a troubling sign."

I think the issue with YC now is a bottom up issue. It's hard to bring outside partners if you have no working experience with them. Those that you can work with, are mostly YC alums who were vetted through the YC culling process which often breeds the same people.

So YC might want to use a similar approach as CRV. If everyone is so confident about a team then maybe they are picking the same old people. In contrast if there is a strong dispute, that might be a good sign.

At least you bring diversity and maybe some unusual bets into the YC and ultimately in 4-5 years end up with a more diverse group of partners.

That being said, this might mean a big change in the application process, as the current early round filtering process by the alums will most likely eliminate diversity.

[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattlynley/how-a-boston-venture-capi...
At my last company, I interviewed around 100 candidates for senior/principal software engineering positions.

There was filtering before things got to me, and maybe the people doing the filtering were racist. (I don't think so, but how would I know?)

But of those 100 candidates, only one was black.

I think somewhere upstream the pipeline is broken.
I think the term is "geometric"
I have never seen as many pivots as Mr. Kan. Regardless of what you think about his products/services, he sure knows how to stay in the game. And I respect that. I'm still amazed that socialcam got schooled by vine. I thought he was on time and on the money on that pivot. I never saw vine coming. I imagine he didn't either. He's like the Steve Nash of SV. A play maker. So this is probably a good step for YC. Congrats.
Bitcoin 0.9.0 FINAL is available
To add: not only you test for primality, but also for common attacks. Not all primes are equally strong
http://www.uow.edu.au/~jennie/WEB/WEB99/1999_07.pdf
> Was Elon's resume impressive back in 2002 [..] and Paypal

Paypal wasn't exactly some trivial event in his life, it IPOed in early 2002 and made him (and his investors) fabulously wealthy. It was also one of the first successful IPOs in the wake of the .com bubble bursting.

Musk made ~$25M from shares that were sold in the IPO, and his remaining stake of the company (10 percent!) was worth somewhere near $150M.[1] I'd say that's a pretty impressive resume.

It's a bit easier to start a rocket company when your net worth is in the 9-digit range and you just made a bunch of investors a ton of money in your first project.

[1] - http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-935360.html
We haven't exposed it on the site yet, but if you have an existing Angular.js app then you can import Variance as an Angular module for a cost of about 34kB.
Email variancecharts@generalreactives.com and we can get you squared away.
> Any luck on delivering a feature to prevent exchanges like Coinbase from stealing my money, or ability to retrieve my money once it's been stolen? There seems to be no way not to use exchanges when using Bitcoin, so this is a real problem.

FYI, Coinbase isn't an exchange; they're an online wallet and Bitcoin broker. Exchanges are for trading, and have much much lower fees. Gox was an exchange, as is BTC-e and Bitstamp.
Agreed. It is quickly becoming a bit of a joke.
I never, ever blamed the companies, I agree that " not enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an industry".
I've heard that argument many times and all it does is reinforce the idea that no other implementation can work. And how you end-up with an implementation mono-culture. Forks of a single block happen regularly, it can be dealt with. A production system can detect a fork and check the reference implementation's behavior, preventing any longer fork.

The *coin ecosystem need more than one implementation, a single codebase can't cater to all uses. I should know, I'm an Apache member.
> Are there serious descriptions of these good-old-days software methodologies that the kids these days with their agile and their hippety-hop are corrupting?

Yes; the references in the Wikipedia article on the Waterfall model [1] are good place to look.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model
sounds like someone's having a hard time investing and hiring.
One of the problems is that most things are pretty "connect-the-dots". Getting acquired by Bloomberg has historically not been a valid exit, as we will simply build the functionality people want and fully integrate it into the product in a fraction of the time it would take to fully integrate a company (if it is even possible).
Is it just me or do the arrows not lock to the game and push the scrollbar up, making you not see the whole game? The previous game had the same problem.
That's really just security through obscurity. You're still shipping code that explains the process of obtaining the key. If they store their credentials to obtain the key in a public directory, it's just as vulnerable.
That's honestly all I got out of this.
Fuck every last thing about this.