skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the hate I've seen for Google+ centred around being badgered constantly to 'use my real name' on things. YouTube was a particularly egregious example. Every time I logged in, it would say 'Hey, do you want to use your real name? How great would that be!' When I said no, it would reply with 'Hey, are you sure you want to not use your real name?', and if I then confirmed that no, I didn't want to, it would say 'Okay, well we'll ask you later then.'

If they had just said that 'Okay, your Google profile is now called Google+, and your YouTube account attached to your Google Profile is now your Google+ profile, and you can go to your settings to complete the migration', it wouldn't have been so bad. What they didn't do is offer anyone any reason to change.

All the benefits they hawked for YouTube's Google+ comment integration were actually such huge drawbacks that many top YouTubers turned off comments entirely. Unsurprisingly, YouTube comments had gone from the mindless, racist, misspelled prattling of the internet's ignorant masses to giant spam-filled, link-filled dumping grounds of (varyingly) penis enlargement spam and giant ASCII dicks, and YouTube comments went from bad to worse, a feat no one thought possible.

It really feels like the decision was made for the YouTube team by someone else (Page? Gundotra?), and the YouTube team just had to roll with it, with their input being ignored and the Google+ team saying 'No it'll be great, don't worry, you'll see, everything is better with Google+!'

To this day, people invite me by gmail address to threads, which I cannot leave unless I tie my Google account to a Google+ account so I can join the thread so I can leave the thread.

The entire thing was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and everything that they wanted out of it could have been accomplished by providing value, rather than extrinsic rationalization.
He misses the obvious analogy: to a Ponzi scheme.
HBO CEO thinks shared HBO GO passwords are a great promotion
There's still a prolonged exposure issue. You might get unlucky, but as I understand it you need to take on a certain amount of virus initially for it successfully develop into an infection.

While you might come into contact with a lot of people, it seems like even basic hygeine would be enough during incubation to protect most people.
Politics you know the 8th layer of the OSI stack :-)

Normally some one has a line they want to run and have their friends in the media to spin stuff to its the same in politics.
Heartbleed does not go away, let us fuck it...
Jeff Garzik Announces Partnership to Launch Bitcoin Satellites into Space
Crazy, many are still not patched ...
This is why I tend to not post much on either G+ or FB, it's a shaky moment where I'm worried, is it public, private, some weird in between state. Then again I didn't use iGoogle either, one thing that drew me to Google at the start was the daring to have a clean page, beckoning me to do one thing ... search.

Maybe if G+ used color shaded divs, something, anything to make it instantly clear what is what on the page. Another thing, every time I go there it asks hey do you know so and so, no or yes, doesn't matter just take me to the main page dang it.
I don't think there are many power plants on Earth that function unattended and maintenance-free for very long. It will be nice if transport to space will be commonplace enough 25 years from now that sending a regular rotation of maintenance techs will be feasible.
I adore your comment, but you're being far to subtle.
That is very cool! I live in Sedona, about 90 miles north of Mesa. Maybe I will drop by when my wife and I are in Phoenix shopping. I will check your calendar first. I get that it runs on volunteer effort, but who pays the rent?
Pre-mining and fixed generation rates aren't inherent to blockchain technology, so I think that distracts from your point.
"a CEO can't really help unless they have technical skills"

Sure they can. They can fetch pizza and drinks, they can test the product from an end-user perspective, etc., etc.
Looks like a rough launch. When I should have gotten a message that my registration was ok I got a timeout.

Not sure if the app was supposed to ask me more questions after an OK registration, when I tried to re-register and got "this username is taken", I tried to login and that worked. Found myself subscribed to a bunch of semi-random channels.

While exploring tasks, I started getting more timeouts.
Ask HN: Walls are closing in, I will work under market
I am a Computer Technology grad working for a SaaS video conferencing company as a Helpdesk rep, and former sorta Junior System Admin role. After trying my longest to negotiate higher pay, I am looking for another job but now in programming. I am already very behind on bills and debts, and the sooner I can hustle some side jobs the better. I have experience with iOS, Ruby, Rubymotion HTML/CSS, some Javascript and Rails. Does anyone need any iOS apps,Ruby coding, maybe a Wordpress setup or maybe some coding work? My job's work schedule does not let me go to after-work meetups so it is hard for me to find mixer's and networking events currently. I'm based in Los Angeles and willing to come work for you, or bust my ass coding up some work remotely. Also I will relocate anywhere who can pay me at least 60-70k. Email is in profile, and I can send you resume, github, etc. Thank you.
Lytro Illum: a camera that can change the focus after you have taken the photo
crazy!
Huzzah! Someone else recognizes GBU, i've been working with the FOCS dataset for some time, and wow is it difficult. My best result (using only the ocular region) is around 18% eer (note, with eer better is lower, my rank-1 id is easily +90%...but that's not a good measure of system performance IMO), Unfortunately it doesn't have the first name basis like LFW...
If you're reading Hacker News, it should take longer to type a complaint about logins that it does to find a way around said login.
I don't use social media. Facebook, Twitter, the rest of them. So I wasn't ever a likely Google+ user. I do use Google Apps, Sites, and mail however, and what really annoyed me about Google+ and their big "identity" push was the insistence on trying to consolidate three separate Google "identities" together and sort of mush all of those things together. Those identities represent "me" in separate roles and responsibilites with separate organizations. There was no need and no desire on my part to have all of that merged under "one" Google identity. In fact I actively wanted to keep them separate. The amount of extra work I have to do to keep it that way (deleting cookies, maintaining separate browser profiles, etc.) is just needless pain they are imposing on me.
> To everyone else: When did all these tech guys turn into grandparents,

Hehe

To be fair though it took some time before it became apparent how simple to page thingy was. I delayed the YouTube switch for months myself.
Reuters is reporting the settlement to be about $324million. So an order of magnitude less than speculated here.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/24/us-apple-google-la...

And just in case anyone is wondering that works out to: $3375 per employee effected.
"For simplicity, we assume that past greenhouse gas emissions followed an exponential path, which is a reasonable approximation for historical emissions."

Wow. That is quite the assumption.
And you can join the army and fight for your country and be able to have a drink.
Are you targeting businesses first? I know that some local ISPs have been successful by first poaching the fraternities/sororities around a school, then expanding from there.
I didn't know about those videos. Thanks for the links!
That link says "The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position."

So the board may have tried to convince him to stay as CTO, but not as CEO.
That's the problem with commission-based sales (like a real estate agent or a headhunter). They say "My fee is a % of the sale, so I want the best price!", but really it's in their best interests to close as soon as possible.

So, the lawyers could get their fee RIGHT NOW, or wait years til they get paid and do lots of extra work. Clearly, the lawyers maximize their fee per hour worked by settling now, rather than having years of trials and appeals.
True, this will only change when Mr CEO or HR person gets jail time.
Really? I seem to remember them nearly having to shut down their servers a few months back?
Oh stop being so cynical. I'd bet money that Larry Page will become at least as widespread a household name as William Durant or Charles Flint.
It is that he believes that God does not exist, in that he asserts that the probability of God is substantially less than the probability of no God. In the same way that he believes that, having looked both ways and seen no car, he won't be hit by a car when he's crossing the street (though I'm not asserting any relationship between the magnitude of the respective likelihoods). There's the possibility he's wrong, and that'd be unfortunate, but it's what he believes in that it's what his understanding of the world says and it's what determines his actions. Using the word "atheist" for such people seems entirely reasonable. Most of them will agree that they are, in some senses, strictly agnostic as well - the categories needn't be mutually exclusive.
Agreed, but to be fair, people have a lot more email these days.
I think it would be a good thing to start marking such sites - that require the reader to submit to registration - in the title so that people that would not register won't waste time clicking on it.
I wanted to note how it's used in practice.
Short term limits means you put more power in the hands of the civil service it takes at least 1 full electoral cycle to understand how it all really works.
Hi bluerail,

Thanks for taking time to reply! You are correct about it being hard to follow, I have had that come up a few times now. I hadn't thought about a video but I will investigate that option!

Your 2nd and 3rd points also make a lot of sense and I will work to include them.

Thanks :)
Indeed. We reverted it. All: please don't use linkbait titles, as the guidelines ask.
Agreed. As cool as Amazon is, it's unrealistic to expect them to have a 100% package delivery success rate, especially as the new kid on the block. Parcel carriers don't want to lose or damage packages, as it's both unsatisfactory customer service and extremely unprofitable.

The carriers invest millions into R&D to minimize their failure rates and I think they do a pretty good job. We order from Amazon often and have only had one package lost in the last several years, and probably only 3-4 that have been late. When you consider everything that's involved in getting that little box to you within 1-2 days, the current shipping industry seems pretty impressive, and I dare say it even seems cheap. You're buying your little box passage on airplanes, conveyors, trucks, etc. for a few bucks.
This is a pretty inspiring initiative. Thank you for doing this!
I wonder if using the supercharger deteriorates the battery more than a more gentle charge (I am warned about this for fast charging my Leaf). Find it interesting that they ask that question on the supercharger FAQ but don't answer it:

"How often can I Supercharge? Is it bad for my battery?
Supercharging does not alter the new vehicle warranty. Customers are free to use the network as much as they like."
100% agreed. I had the pleasure of working with Andreas (and you, if you're the Fabrice D. I think you are) on the Boot2Gecko project, and he was a great project leader. He's technically adept, he knows how to work with people, and just gets things done.

I'm very optimistic about Mozilla's future with him as CTO.
You probably won't be able to sell anything that is not up to regulations. Since airwaves are considered public, you may also be banned from using any wireless communications either - regardless of if the regulation relates to the communication per se, as using public medium enables the government to regulate you and deny that use if you do not satisfy their conditions. Which means any hobbyist probably would have to follow that law if it is ever passed, unless some kind of special exception is added.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/are-med-school-grad...
I no longer work at my own company
FIPS support will be required by RedHat, SuSE and any other vendor that wants to do business with the US (and many other) federal governments.

If none of the major vendors will ship a non-FIPS certified crypto lib, then where exactly will it get used?
You're dead on. Cryptol is meant first and foremost as an executable specification language. There's an interpreter so that you can run your algorithms on concrete values to make sure that, for example, your test vectors check out. There's also a symbolic simulator for building formal models of the functions you define, so that you can prove properties about those programs using SMT.

Previous versions of Cryptol included backends for producing C and VHDL for higher-performing implementations on CPUs and FPGAs. Cryptol 2 is a ground-up rewrite and those backends aren't there yet, though we have plans to be working on new backends soon.

Cryptol is largely focused on issues of functional correctness. For power and timing attacks, you might want to build a C or Assembly implementation by hand that addresses those. However, what you're left with is fairly difficult to reason about on the level of functional correctness. We have another project, the Software Assurance Workbench, that builds formal models from LLVM and Java code. With this in hand, you prove equivalence between the hardened, high-performance implementation and the Cryptol specification.

Does that help clarify the role Cryptol might play in a cryptographer's workflow? Also, could you elaborate about your "how safe it is" question? I'm happy to answer :)
Just general observations from things like the rate of pay differences between the army and blackwater.

I'm imagining that if you phoned up the CIA/NSA to sell them a vulnerability that they would not pay you and instead would send some lawyers to seize the info under a flimsy pretext.

For the most part the gov't acts like working for the gov't is some noble thing worthy of losing pay over, as if it was some special honor to die being paid $40K per year instead of $400K per year.

That said if you can contract something out to the gov't through official channels they'll pay the stupidest rates imaginable. So I guess if there was an FBO contract for vulnerabilities you'd probably do quite well.
Maxthon Labs Private Beta
I'm coding in C, PHP, Python, Javascript. I'm doing a master of cryptography in Bordeaux (check my blog! www.cryptologie.net) and I have several apps online. My last one is www.3pages.fr that is being used by ~100 of people to write everyday.
Indeed. Hopefully his past beliefs are aligned with whichever opinion the mob adopts next.
Net Neutrality AMA on Reddit
...and about anyone not "a US resident with a US shipping address"? :P
Isn't this guy the main guy in the first picture on ycombinator.com?
It should be working again within minutes; sorry for the DNS snafu.
And the VFR funded by the Reichswehr in the early 30's
Thanks for the info. Do you know of a thread that contains this Google-lead debate? Or, are we talking about poking around the Chromium Github commits and reading between the lines?

It sounds like, with the shadow DOM, a lot of the discussion is about performance. I'd be curious how an element like a checkbox could have that much impact on performance even on mobile.
Building Wireless Sensor Networks with MQTT-S, RaspberryPi and Erlang

http://slideshare.net/nivertech/zvi-mqtts-foreuc2013
Before joining Mozilla, he worked on JITs for Java, and after he joined Mozilla, he worked on JITS for JavaScript mostly, from memory.

Good luck, Andreas. Thanks, Brendan.
Just open an incognito window.
I never said misled. If you need an example of misleading the company (and industry), look no further than the no poaching lawsuit, where Larry specifically mentions to keep the deal out of email and off the books. Don't be evil. Sure Larry. Sure.
You would think they would be convincing magazine editors to doing a long-form 'we drove a tesla across the US' type article. I'd be very interested in reading something like that - what its really like to string together a long trip using supercharger stations.
It wasn't free speech and public dialogue, it was a spineless witchhunt. Quit trying to sweeten the cyanide.
> Maybe a campaign against those practices could be worthwhile

It's very difficult to convince people to not eat food when the alternative is starving.
We are currently developing the similar chatroom service.
https://www.underline.io/chat/hackernews
Since we are developing, it's not reliable.
OpenRCT2 – an attempt to reverse engineer the x86 exe, turn it into C
People actually really like Facebook, so I don't think "don't be Facebook" is a good business strategy. Google tried to exploit Facebook's privacy weaknesses with Circles and just made it more difficult for people to post to their networks, and Facebook had the functionality copied within a couple of weeks anyway (and no one uses it there either).
> Everybody [...] focused intently on spending all of their energy not leaving Facebook for some reason. The hate-on for Google+ was above tepid.

Really? I don't think so. At the very beginning there were two distinctly separate groups: The geeks, a minority which were eager to jump on the G+ boat -- And the non geeks, which were helplessly oblivious of it, or the advantages were not worth the hassle to them.

It just didn't gain enough momentum, and it was not because of any hate.

Years later though, they began cramming it down people's throats, for example with the annoying pop-ups in Youtube, riddled with dark patterns. Really, don't-be-evil Google? Really?

That's when people started (rightfully) getting pissed off.
That's actually an impressively small percentage.
Ask HN: My host has been down for 8 hours, who should I move too?
My host (OpSource) has been down for 8 hours and has provided absolutely terrible customer service. I'm looking to move off of them.

I've spent a bit looking at alternatives and was wondering what peoples opinions are. I am looking for a cloud provider, but one of the things I would like is a direct connection between multiple datacenters (like LA to NY for example) to provide proper failover. This appears to be the one thing that is hard too find. It may not be a requirement but I have a master <-> master configuration I would like to keep as performant as possible, while having multiple datacenter failover.

I have been investigating Linode, Rackspace, Amazon and SoftLayer.
Hashpolls
Hashpolls is the smartest way to get your audience's opinion across social and traditional medias. It enables deeper engagement, boosts audience participation, captures exciting insights and drives more traffic to your content
$0.05/kwh. About what industrial users pay in most of the US.
um...4.4% is huge in this case.
Life != humans. The early land fossils they say they've found were photosynthesizing single-celled organisms, which seem unlikely to have evolved into humans.

Also, Cosmos seems more interested in creating an engaging narrative for people with little to no science knowledge than delivering an accurate and complete model that best explains what we currently observe in the world. That's not a bad thing, but I'd take the details they provide as a good basic explanation but not always technically correct. For instance it bothered me when they showed discrete electrons orbiting nuclei. Electrons don't orbit, they exist in a locational probability around the atom in often surprisingly shaped clouds, that is, until observed. But I don't expect a show that's supposed to get people excited about our universe to explain convoluted tangential details that they don't need for the overall point.
Putin calls the Internet a 'CIA project'
Oh, nice catch! I use t as a motion all the time, but that still slipped by. Just updated the post with the correction, thanks!
Anyone know if this is possible within the Google Apps console? Or is it locked out from us.
"Though Comcast doesn't disclose it specifically, analysts have estimated that Comcast's profit margins on broadband service are 80 percent or higher. In 2008, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Craig
Moffett estimated Comcast's data margins at 80 percent, and Credit Suisse reported in fall 2010 that Comcast's gross margins on high-speed data were 93 percent."

https://www.freepress.net/sites/default/files/resources/Comc...
Not really sure why people keep repeating this.

If it were "easily containable compared to other infections", the doctors and nurses who treat the patients wouldn't have to wear full biohazard gear or use isolation wards. They'd simply pop on some gloves and a mask.

This strain of Ebola isn't airborne, but it's plenty virulent -- it spreads through contact with nearly every bodily fluid. Get some on your hands and touch your face (which we all do, hundreds of times a day), and you're in trouble.
Ask HN: Interesting forks in the road
Recently I read that Andreas Gal became CTO of Mozilla. I realized quickly he used to be my academic project adviser in undergrad, and he tried to recruit me into the comp sci phd program. I did a couple projects pro bono during the summer, but I decided against the phd and went into the workforce.

I kind of now wonder what would have happened if I committed to the phd program and followed his coat tails many years ago.

Does anyone else out there have any interesting stories of forks in the road?
That is evidence for the eye evolving in the seas. Knauth's theory is that our progressively more complex ancestors went from the land to the sea to the land. This is still consistent with the eye evolving in the sea.
Tesla recently completed a cross country road trip using the Supercharger stations. They put up a bunch of blog posts and videos about it.

Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou46vykyIAk