skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to suggest a compromise way to get wide scale email encryption rolling out: The key benefits are that (1) the user doesn't have to do anything at all and (2) it prevents mass surveillance and recording of email, but with a downside that it's not authenticated. There's significant benefit even when it's non-authenticated.

These days I get email from the other side of the Earth in several seconds. So adding a few more seconds to delivery shouldn't be a deal breaker on what I'm about to suggest.

Let every email client do opportunistic non-authenticated encryption with every other email client. That way, the user doesn't have to do a damn thing.

Example: Alice wants to send an email to Bob. Before sending the real email, Alice's email program sends an ephemeral public-key to Bob's email program -- hoping that Bob's email will promptly reply with its own ephemeral public-key. If Alice gets a reply within, say, 20 seconds, great. They can now send encrypted but non-authenticated email to each other. If Alice receives no reply or an error message, then her email program sends the email the usual way (as plaintext).

At this point, most readers will yell "man-in-the-middle attack." Bear in mind that this can be built upon and improved. The advantage is that it requires nothing at all from the user; the user might not even realize the email is being encrypted and decrypted. It requires only that the email client developers agree on the handshake mechanism.

But importantly, this thwarts the problem that we're most worried about, which is mass NSA surveillance. Yes, the NSA or others can still do targeted MITM attacks, but they are unlikely to do a MITM on every email exchange. And if they did, it would be detected and provable, and result in a backlash demand for authenticated encryption. Furthermore, clandestine wholesale recording of your emails is useless because the keys are ephemeral.
Will Uber be "just" another Groupon?
The Buy Nothing Project (started by a couple of friends of mine) is a successful model for this. It's not an app, but a network of Facebook groups.

From their 'About' page: "The Buy Nothing Project began as an experimental hyper-local gift economy on Bainbridge Island, WA; in just 8 months, it has become a social movement, growing to over 25,000 members in 150 groups, in 4 countries. Our local groups form gift economies that are complementary and parallel to local cash economies; whether people join because they’d like to quickly get rid of things that are cluttering their lives, or simply to save money by getting things for free, they quickly discover that our groups are not just another free recycling platform"

http://buynothingproject.org/
https://www.taskrabbit.com/

Can't remember where I heard of this (maybe here), but apparently assembling Ikea furniture was a popular task ^^
They should be slightly more explicit, but "...before the e-mails are accepted and reject anything that looks suspicious..." almost certainly means that spam is rejected with a 5xx message - or goes to your InBox, but is never accepted then hidden from you in a spam folder.

It's a good approach, and from a legal perspective I'm surprised more systems don't take this approach, because legally (at least in my local jurisdiction), you're deemed to have received an email when it "enters that information system" - i.e. when your SMTP server says 250.

This stuff matters quite a lot in the formation of contracts.
Buy maybe... fixing STARTTLS would give you most of this with SSL certificates instead.

Bingo.
Based on the article's description of password limits, normalizing maximum password strength into bits for easy comparison:

Toronto-Dominion Bank: 210 bits

Royal Bank of Canada: 195 bits

Bank of Nova Scotia: 83 bits

CIBC: 71 bits

Bank of Montreal: 36 bits

Tangerine: 20 bits
Real time collaborative playlists for parties, bars and resturants
Idea out of Startup Weekend Ottawa
TALENT
Yes, it's not accurate. It's a timing attack which means you have to be on the website all the time during the processing for it to actually work. But still it does work better for smaller sets of sites (up to 7) when set up to do every step 4 times for more accuracy.
When people imagine what a Turing Test conversation would look like, they frequently underestimate the conversation. I find Dennet's example of an imaginary Turing Test from Consciousness Explained to be a good counterexample:

Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough?

Dennett: "The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all."

I'm sure they didn't get anywhere near this with their 13-yr-old simulation. But this gives an idea of the heights AI has to scale before it can regularly pass the Turing Test.
> I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy.

Somewhat ironically IMO, Snowden himself seems to hold the NSA in higher esteem than HN does.

You guys all try to find ways to vilify the lowest-level tech working at Ft. Meade while Snowden complains in his interview that those same techs just trying to do the right thing "have been given a bad rap".
It's news to me that TD allows for good passwords. I sent in a scathing support ticket not 6 months ago.
Writing Modular and Versioned GLSL
An app that lets you track the last person to buy beer in a group of friends by taking their picture. With an in-app-purchase, you can ensure that the next time you meet that the app lists yourself as the last beer-monger (while still retaining the history accurately otherwise). Great for that manager or boss who never pays his share.
You can get fired for what you say on the internet these days.
https://twitter.com/zivcjs
Using Gmail (or any SSL-enabled mail server) already affords you those protections. (I'm not trying to be a naysayer, just that the protections PGP provides specifically go a step beyond what you're describing, which we essentially already have.)
I am wondering if it really makes a difference. Google for 'cheap ssl certificates' and you will easily find offers from well establish certificate authorities but for 10 % of the usual price, i.e., often below 10 USD. That is not for free but almost …
If I understand you correctly, this is for buying gifts for others and getting the same in return. I think the OP meant doing something for someone else, e.g. getting something from a store you're going to anyway, but being refunded.

I wouldn't be as inclined to gift something to a stranger as much as I'd be to grab something along for someone nearby. I don't need to be reimbursed for the effort, but I also don't want to loose money on it.
The moderator, 'dang, has asked that these not get posted anymore:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693262

("Something about having all these ideas in one place makes the whole less than the sum of its parts.", "Ideas are better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather than try to organize an idea-fest.")
elementary OS is one of the most promising Linux distributions. This for several reasons, like having a good installer and an overall clean desktop experience. But also because of the applications they are making themselves like Noise or Files.

That being said, I don't agree with some of the design decisions, which stop me from fully supporting the project.

For example I don't like the idea of having a top panel. It is constantly there wasting space only to show some tray icons a clock and a link to a launcher menu. Personally I prefer a single panel on the bottom, think Windows 7, there is enough horizontal space to show everything in a single row. Top panels just look bad in my opinion, for a normal maximized window you have the panel layer, then the titlebar layer, then the window. If you insist on having the notification bar on top at least, please, use wingpanel-slim (with the application launcher disabled and autohide).
System for product/service idea evaluation. I spend lots of time talking with friends and other hackers about ideas and wish I had a system to create objective evaluations of ideas based on a series of metrics. Right now we use a shared google sheet but there is bias that occurs, for example if we score the potential for viral growth on a 1-10 basis, we see each others scores.
Is this not what the government did to the telephone companies providing internet services, which subsequently caused them to stop investing in their infrastructure, thus resulting in the current market situation, where only cable companies provide broadband?
What? No error?
Absolutely!

Also, saying that longer password are more difficult to remember is not true. If you let me type a longer password including the space character, I'll use a sentence that is easy to remember for me.
The business model of StartSSL seems to be rather simple:

You pay as soon as a human being's work (or other substantial effort) is necessary.

With regard to revocation, I do not understand the complaints since the deal with StartSSL was pretty clear and revocation does not work in practice anyway. That does, however, NOT mean that a server has to remain vulnerable, just get another certificate …
Google doesn't require tow factor auth, but strongly recommend it and let you use it if you choose to.
Hmmm, should be using en-dashes (--) not hyphens (-) for date-ranges, uses mathematical superscripting $22^nd$ and so gets incorrect fonts and spacing of the superscript, .... It's a CV, write it (carefully) in LaTeX!
I read an article the other day about how jihadist software developers were complaining that higher-up leaders in their terrorist organization refused to switch away from GMail. And this from the very groups that should have known better!

I can only assume that problem has been fixed after Snowden leaked PRISM, but it illustrates the mentality you speak of quite vividly.
Blueprints for a decentralized Uber.
Wouldn't be the logical consequence to open a new subsidiary firm every 8000-9999 accounts?
At first reading, I thought it was about Black Mesa [1], the Half-Life (first Valve game) remake made by the community.

[1] http://www.blackmesasource.com/
Bummer. I'd always found it to be an enjoyable read. A really dense thread of intelligent idea-exchange.
Key word: "their." The lynchpin or a lot of the surveillance efforts is accessing information that doesn't belong to the target of the surveillance. Phone call metadata is generated by the phone company, stored in the phone company's computers, and is used for the phone company's business purposes. Its the phone company's data, not yours. Same thing with the data Google and Facebook collect about where you go on the internet. You didn't generate it and you can't even access it. How can you say its "yours?" Its "about you" but that's totally different. If your neighbor keeps a diary tracking your comings and goings, you can't assert 4th amendment protection over that data.

Privacy advocates talk about "metadata is data" as if the government's lawyers don't understand that bits are just bits. What privacy advocates don't understand is that the "metadata" distinction is about generation, ownership, and control, which are implicated in the 4th amendment by the word "their."
If you were in the market for new hardware and wanted the purchase to support initiatives such as this--what would you buy?

I don't really game any more but like to support the ecosystem.
As someone who's spent a lot of time and money trying to solve this problem, I will say that the biggest impediment is usability, and the largest technical hurdle on that front is key management (general users will never, ever take the time to understand what they're supposed to do with their keys). Beyond those problems, though, are the other problems mentioned elsewhere on this page; the inherent weaknesses in email that PGP can't circumvent (specifically the meta-data leaks--who is sending messages to whom). I think Adam Langley's Pond[0] is the most interesting candidate for an email replacement, although it's not yet ready for prime-time (and even further from a level of usability that could reach mass appeal).

[0] https://pond.imperialviolet.org
Because the OpenGL specification is actually something very complex, and doesn't map directly to hardware. There are many things that are higher-level, or that are features
of the OpenGL implementation, and not of the hardware.
(you'll notice that if you run a newer version of Mesa
on older hardware you get some new extensions supported)

So it is beneficial if code can be shared between hardware drivers.
You could have a full implementation for each GPU/vendor, each with its own set of bugs, missing features and incompatibilities.
Or you can do as Mesa did and try to implement the hardware independent parts in a common place, and have just the hardware-specific parts implemented by the drivers.

For example you definitely don't want a separate implementation of the GLSL compiler for each GPU/vendor,
GLSL is compiled to an intermediate representation and that is then further translated to hardware specific instructions.
(although in practice I think you still have 2 implementations: one for Intel, and another for all other Gallium drivers)

Think of it this way: would you like a full C compiler written from scratch for each CPU architecture, or would you want to share where possible (parser, type checker, hardware-independent optimizers, etc.).

So an analogy would be: GCC frontend is like core Mesa, and a GCC backend is like a Mesa hardware driver.
Another analogy would be libc: the majority of the code is hardware-independent that implements the various C99/POSIX APIs (i.e. like core Mesa), with just the hardware-specific parts / optimizations implemented in assembly (i.e. like Mesa drivers).
For Canada specifically, they might be worried about people creating a password using a Canadian English+French keyboard (which has a good few accented characters etc.), then trying to type it in on an American English keyboard, and finding those characters unavailable. (Both keyboard types are commonplace here.)
> Using Gmail (or any SSL-enabled mail server) already affords you those protections.

It absolutely does not.

What I'm suggesting is end-to-end. With Gmail or with SSL-enabled connections, the host (Google in your example) can read your email; the encryption there is only between you and Google.

I'm saying that the key exchange should be from your email client (Thunderbird, Outlook, a browser) to the other person's client. I think it could be made to work even with Gmail if the functionality was built into the browser.
Yeah. They're pretty much free too, from Comodo and Startcom. You can get one for ~$10 from Certum (what I use) and $30 from Globalsign.

It's handy too, as I can sign emails using my iPhone just by importing my p12.
I didn't take notes either. I just put paper in front of me to show I'm not just daydreaming though. I watch a lecture like I watch a tv show. Its not hard to remember what happens in a tv show. And anything that's truly important or hard to remember was always either online or in the book or on the class blackboard page.
From the perspective of this sysadmin: get Microsoft to build PGP into Exchange, and integrate the functionality into Outlook. It would be the tipping point you seek, perhaps the only one that exists.
With 'dull Monday' approach my biggest worry would be if I'm having a weak day, I might not have the will power to overcome the "I hate the work I have to do today". I'd argue it requires a lot more will power to convince yourself to start work on something you detest & which you know will last the whole day.
D-day landings scenes in 1944 and now
http://www.dorousa.us/

They basically sell a cellphone for seniors.

More to what your point. I think the ideal "dumb" phone for me would be an updated LG Keybro (for texting) that can do wifi tether.
if i'm not mistaken, there's a separate phone PIN for this reason.
Comparing death tolls is a facetious argument. DC ground to a halt during the sniper's shootings even though he killed just a handful of people. The whole point of terrorism is the psychological impact.

Also, cars kill twice as many people as murderers each year. If we ignore the difference between accidents and malicious acts, and the deterrent effect involved, you can probably make a case that its not worthwhile to enforce criminal laws at all.
The thing about elementary and OS X is that elementary seems a whole lot better than OS X. This wouldn't count of course if I hadn't used OS X a few years. (Then again I mostly have used Linux whenever possible for the last 5-10 years and I also think Windows 8 is great.)

Things that are better (in my view) in elementary are for example: alt-tab, standard open source apps works nicely (no need to run in an extra x), no global menu.

Of course no Mac user should switch, but for anyone like me who almost like mac except for the:"stupid" parts elementary is great.
This is why I think it's so silly for people to be such strong detractors of meal replacement products (like mealsquares, ambronite, and soylent), not wanting to eliminate EVERY meal from your life is quite understandable, but wasting hours of your day when you're deep in flow state on food is a terrible tradeoff in much the same way laundry is.
The only thing TLS in the mail server can't give you is a way to outsource the running of your domain's MX server without trusting that server with your SSL key. If the sending server PGP encrypts instead you can decrypt it later.

That would make running your own mail a little easier. Use any normal SMTP/POP/IMAP email service to handle the network side and then encrypt/decrypt locally. You only have to trust your own mail user agent running on your own hardware. As it stands right now to run my own email (something I've been contemplating) I have to either put my SSL key in a machine I don't control (e.g. Linode VPS) or try to run a mail server on a residential internet connection. Neither seems a good option.
Accelerometer sensors to monitor natural gas fracking locations.
I've slowly found that by focusing on interesting things (and sometimes productive) instead of dedicating time to school projects that are merely time wasters, I can complete projects I want whilst doing satisfactory in school with minimal effort.
Make a word cloud from a text
> An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice, it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea.

I am more than happy to truly believe this premise (and if you read some of the things I write, and how I use punctuation, I hope the reader will agree ;P), and can come up with situations where the extra comma "breaks the rythm" and cases where it "makes the sentence".

> Momentum, syncopation, rhythm and pattern make a sentence flow, because writers are trying to transfer the voices in their heads into yours.

However, I simply can't bring myself to read this without speaking "rythm, and pattern": the sentence is expertly crafted and frankly sounds amazing; but, if I accept the author's premise that he really and truly carefully decided to not put a comma there because he didnt want me to pause, the sentence sounds horrible: in fact, this sentence sounds pretty un-lyrical to me unless I also add a pause--yes, not one but two added commas--after "pattern", at which point I would say it sounds downright powerful; I could, alternatively, appreciate a smaller pause between "momentum" and "syncopation", which would form a grouping that I think almost sounds even better? (though which I have a difficult time "performing"), but then we have to give up the first comma as well: "momentum/syncopation, rythm and pattern, are"... I really would love to hear the author read this sentence of the article out loud.
related: http://www.snipe.net/2008/12/warcraft-security-better-than-b...

(i think i actually remember a better article about that, that went into more detail why WoW has better security than banks, but I can't find it. I probably saw the article that I am thinking of on Hacker News)
Originally there was an issue in the underlying barcode gem which we have since patched. We're planning to roll out 0.2.0 shortly which includes support for QR codes.

Thanks!
The history of Bell, AT&T and Comcast is quite complex:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T

And in this context we should not forget about the United States Justice Department opened the case United States v. AT&T in 1974 (violation of anti-trust law).
Thank you! Lucky for us a few folks in the community were nice enough to submit PRs to fix a few of our typos, we'll make sure to proof read better next time.
Ask HN: Side projects and liabilities
I've been building a web app during the past few weekends for myself and I'm now thinking of putting it online so other people can use it. This made me think of possible liabilities (unexpected lawsuits, patent infringements) since I'm "owning" the app as a person and not a company.

What care do people normally exercise when launching side projects to avoid getting into trouble that may hurt you financially or legally? Are there any general recommendations (like putting up a TOS) that can limit risk?
I have no intention of turning this into a business or making any kind of money out of it. I don't even know if anyone besides myself would find it useful. Worst case I see it as a decent portfolio project.

Registering a US LLC is not really possible/practical because I'm on an H1B visa and my home country doesn't seem to offer LLC.

Any advice will be much appreciated.
"The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett:

http://bookre.org/reader?file=230833
Medoo 0.9.6 is released