skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Not sure why you got downvoted, it's a very valid comment.

I think in retrospect that my normal dose of snark, even with the point I was trying to make, was probably not appropriate to the topic at hand. If nothing else it might seem flippant, and while I know that's not what I would mean, that doesn't mean people seeing the comment independently would realize that.

> The complexity of 'erasing cancer' is very much mis-understood, even though it is of course a noble goal.

If I had a do-over that's probably exactly how I would phrase it instead. Saying we should simply cure cancer, as it were always one massive public project away and just needed political will, just demonstrates an immature understanding of cancer research as it stands today.

Certainly it's a noble goal, but it's seemingly at odds with how biology works in a body in the long run.
At the end there is a request for niche areas that Daala could target. Here's my crazy idea:

Mozilla is adding webrtc into the browser, and I'm sure the basic case of video chat is being thought about. But another use case is screen sharing, and in particular sharing a web page. How much better/faster could a video encode be if you could feed it live information from the system that was drawing the page? e.g. knowing that nothing has changed without having to compare one picture to another, knowing that a certain area contains text, that another area contains a gradient, that another area is animated with a repeating animation or that the screen is being scrolled up/down at a certain speed,that the repeating background is composed of a specific repeating png, and so on.

No idea if that's a valid idea, but it's what popped into my head on reading the question.
What's your age?
I am 18.
You can make a seamless experience so that people don't even realize that their email is encrypted, but then the problem becomes: if their computer crashes and they lose their private key, they have now lost access to every previous email ever written. That's just unacceptable. I closely guard several backups of my private key, but most people aren't going to create an enormous single point of failure like that.
Lax security by banks is certainly nothing new, nor unique to Canada. I've always wondered about sites that do not allow "special" characters. What could they possibly be doing to not allow that other than storing passwords in plain-text? After all, any secure crypto hash (and even regular hashing algorithms) will not care about special characters in the source content. I suppose it could be any number of components between the user and storage, yet I can't think of any system off the top of my head that's that shoddy.
Spatial navigation algorithm used by the brain
You can watch the goal posts shifting for "AI" as we speak. Great result nonetheless!
I've read 'Darkness at noon'[1] at year ago or two. It's one of the books Orwell was heavily influenced by. It's about Stalin's Russia and it's amazing. Same topic, total gov control.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon
I'm on one from Evoluent as well (but as far as I know they updated it at least once since I got mine).

Wouldn't want to go back.
> I do not understand the Legal Certainty paragraph.

My interpretation is: Spam is deleted in order to give you plausible deniability that you haven't received and read it.

i.e. There is no spam folder.

But, this seems like it would normally be a bug rather than a feature.
Megaupload, The Copyright Lobby and Future of Digital Rights.[pdf]
Google is a great example. People were warned about severe privacy risk of using GMail, but Google made it really easy to use, has amazing spam filtering, and gave away 1 GB of storage.
If one talks about why Go is fast, and then compares techniques against other languages ANYWAYS, what the heck is the reader supposed to think? In an academic paper, this would be torpedoed right away: you aren't allowed to take the 5th if you want to beg the question.
We have had a similar discussion in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6663098
I lived this for a few years starting my business actually. I put off basically other priority to get things off the ground.

It worked! I accomplished more in two years than I ever thought possible. I now have a large measure of freedom in my work and life.

But, now I do more errands. I found a lot of non-work priorities really fell by the wayside when I took the monomaniacal approach.

I'm still not sure which is better. I have more of a social life now. I'm in better shape. I have a few hobbies. I'm reading more. I feel like I'm enjoying life.

Yet I also feel I'm at an inflection point workwise, where if I just returned to the old levels of productivity for six months, I'd pass into a level where I'm suddenly earning far more than I need, and can pull back even more than I have.

I'm 28 now. Turning 29 in a few months. I've come to terms with the finite amount of time available to me, and that certain activities are easier and harder at given ages.

It feels like I can trade off six months of the last year of my 20s to gain much freedom in the first years of my 30s. I don't think I'm going to do it, because I'm making pretty good progress as is, and I think there's still room to do more work by cutting out distractions (like HN) while continuing to focus on leisure I truly enjoy.

The short version is that I was a type C procrastinator for a bit. I think it was worth it, but I'm not sure if it's worth continuing at the same level.
The thing that really struck me when I left full-time employment for consulting was sick days and holidays. One of the very first things you learn in independent consulting is the value of a billable day. At a salaried job, if you don't show up to work some day, all that happens is some abstract counter of "personal days" ticks down by one. But as a freelancer, you don't show up, you don't get paid.

It sounds obvious, but if you haven't experienced it yet, try it some time. It feels like a high-wire act.
I was talking to my father about this topic last week. We talked about the best strategies for combating procrastination. He used to be in the British Army and suggested that a militaristic approach has always worked for him. He talked about the button polishing, the bed sheet folding and the shirt starching. These were tasks that were set by the commanding officers and needed to be performed flawlessly. They weren't pleasurable, they were boring and often felt unnecessary. Failing these tasks meant severe punishment and potentially being kicked out of the army.

This gave him a framework for success. The knowledge that however boring something is, it needs to be done. A combination of a carrot and a stick can help this process.

Another approach, from a member of a mastermind group that I attend, has a 'dull day'. On Monday of every week he does all the administrative work that he hates. This includes dealing with expenses, filing, bug fixing, documenting etc. He has been doing it for months and loves the fact that he can start the day on Tuesday with a clear head and clear conscience.

So, breaking this down (from my admittedly small sample set):

- Be Strict -

Be strict with yourself and use incentives or disincentives. There are plenty of ways to provide a disincentive for failure. This startup has just launched and asks you to pay if you fail to hit your goals: https://gofuckingdoit.com/ [0]

- Have a Routine -

Habits are formed using triggers, routines and rewards. Try to set a good habit by working on your project using a trigger, a routine and a reward. You could try the Tiny Habits Method: http://tinyhabits.com/ [1]

- Make Time -

Make time for your project (rather than finding the time)Be honest with yourself and know that procrastination will happen. But, you can make time to get stuff done: http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/make-time-side-project/ [2]

[0] https://gofuckingdoit.com/

[1] http://tinyhabits.com/

[2] http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/make-time-side-project/
Backups can be seamless, too.

Just a tiny unobtrusive icon "hey, your key wasn't backed up, want to fix that?" would probably do the trick.

And with a proper passphrase I think one can even backup to the cloud(tm) without much worries.
It seems to me that S/MIME has a better chance for wide adoption due to it being built in to many email clients (Mail on OS X/iOS at least.) However it's still up to the user to get a certificate, which is a barrier. But I'm curious what others think, as I haven't seen S/MIME brought up in the recent encrypted email threads.
Your opinion is not universally accepted. (Perhaps not even mainstream?).

There's an element of behaviorism which stretches back to Descartes - how can you know that I exist? That I think? You can only observe through my behavior; that my behavior mimics yours.

How then can we judge machines any other way?
Any company that specializes in basic (i.e. dumb/feature) cell phones?
It seems like there will be a growing demand for basic cell phones as more and more people want to focus on the present moment and essentially choose to disconnect in order to reconnect.

I just picked up a Nokia 515 (1 month standby time), good looks, decent antenna/speakerphone, can send/receive texts, it does have basic email functionality and ultra-basic web access but I don't use them.

My question is, 'Is there a company focusing on creating stripped down (in terms of features) phones that just have good looks, HUGE battery life, EXCELLENT antennas/speakerphones/call-quality, and not email/web access, etc. ?'
My personal take out from this article is that typing on a keyboard is usually seen as distracting and somewhat less natural than hand writing.

I would think a signifiant number of students would already type faster than they can write, and wouldn't even need to continually look at the screen to take readable enough notes. At least that's was my experience in college after 3/4 years on IRC.
> Warning: I am constantly looking for any opportunity to mention my son and I am duty bound to include him an any headcount or history or whenever a new family face is born. If The Meyers do this, please try not to look shocked each time.

Yes, this is a huge point. Different families grieve differently, and how one properly memorializes their dead children is a problem I would wish on no one.

I have a picture of my deceased daughter on my desk next to pictures of my sons, which occasionally leads to awkward conversations, but I would rather have poignant and painful memories than to try to erase it all.

My wife will try to include a picture of her in current family photos, which always sounds weird to my friends—but I know exactly why my wife does it.

I hesitated to put a list of "ways you can help" since Eric (and his family!) might grieve differently, but I will say that each and every single item on this list I would have (and do) find helpful for my situation as well.
IRIW stands for "independent reads of independent writes".

IWP stands for "Intel white paper".

The submitted article (published in CACM) is a less formal and condensed form of https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/weakmemory/x86tso-paper.pdf which does, in fact, define all of its acronyms and include examples numbered n1 through n8.
Damaging the 'environment' was allowed, so it's disappointing not to see any code that tries to disable or destroy the hardware by:

* Overheating or overvolting the CPU, GPU or other components

* Erasing boot firmware or boot settings stored in flash memory (and rebooting)

I know there are protection mechanisms, which may be impossible to circumvent, but you can try...
A big thing for me was understanding that I needed to take long periods of time for myself to read, play music and sort of "graze" among activities without really doing much of anything (for me, browsing the internet is not one of these activities, but it could be for others).

These quiet spaces of time help me be creative and focussed. Without them, I feel like my mind goes a million miles a second and I get unfocussed.
It's true, S/MIME would seem to be a more convenient method for wide adoption...
Mainframes are the usual culprit. I've worked on them, and its an interesting experience. Such as running programs that are 30-40 years old and the customer doesn't have the original source code anymore. I enjoyed COBOL, but the condition of old stuff poorly maintained is frustrating.
Is there somewhere online you can talk to him?
I was quite surprised to read such a quality article from TechCrunch.

I think this article makes the case for giving people a minimum standard income over minimum wage. It certainly makes sense that as we automate more things, we require less work from our labor force. Rather than give them "bullshit" jobs and keep them working when automation can make everyone's lives easier, why not pay them to not work the jobs that should be automated and let them live as they please? It seems like a compelling argument from my cursory knowledge of this topic, but I'm sure there are a whirlwind of counterarguments to this stance as well.
I have a Canadian bank account which requires [0-9] for your password, but it is only enforced in Javascript. If you disable Javascript, you can use any password you want. At least in their case, it is not a technical limitation.
"Users will notice your emails have some fancy security-related icons and curiosity will eventually prevail."

I wish this were true
I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to defend this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household possessions to deter burglars.
Yup, and for me, it created a lot of unhealthy pressure to Always Be Billing™. Maybe for some people that sort of internal nudge is fine, but it made me push myself even when I was sick or majorly burned out lest I not make enough to cover my bills next month (assuming the client pays on time, which they may or may not).

Eventually I couldn't handle the self-imposed stress (and, at the time, uncertainty about health insurance), so I happily returned to employment. :)
Too many women ignore their own misogyny
The problem with S/MIME is that it is strictly hierarchical. That already hasn't worked well for TLS.

The aim of email encryption is in a large part to prevent government-level parties from reading the emails. It doesn't really make sense to then go back to a system controlled by the very same parties.

OpenPGPs web-of-trust model seems more appropriate.

But both approaches share a significant number of problems, so...
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Required: fluency in Python, familiarity with Subversion or any other SCM, web front-end development experience with Django and happy to work on your own without excessive supervision.

We're also looking for DevOps and system administrators.

Further details about us and the open positions:

http://www.memset.com/careers/
>The sweet spot was 40 Hertz. Zapping sleeping volunteers at this frequency, part of the so-called gamma wave band, led their brains to produce brain waves of the same frequency, the researchers found, which triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time, as determined by self-reports from the dreamers after they were awoken.

>Now if we look to see the scores they gave for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they had, we find that the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively.

I don't understand. A score of 0.6 for insight means, at best, 40% strongly disagreed that they knew they were dreaming and 60% perhaps moderately disagreed (score=1). Some higher scores for the successes would result in even more than 40% strongly disagreeing that they knew they were awake. I could see it having an effect for a small number of people, but how does that translate into "triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time."
I think that this is one of the first early results of the work that Github is doing after here 100$M series-A
Github is transforming into a "document collaboration" platform, they will extend git usage to every single critical file format.
Great move guys :)
"But when I really have such tasks, procrastination is completely out of the way"

I know for me it doesn't work that way. I assume "REAL rewards" means long lasting meaningful rewards rather than a quick dopamine hit. But hyperbolic discounting [1] is a bitch, so even if I know that once I start some real work it will be engaging and interesting, and tomorrow or next week my happiness will be partly determined by how much of it I got done ... maybe I'll do just one more HN story / Watch Dogs online hacking mission / etc.

It's a pattern I recognize and no longer really adversely affects my life like it did when I was younger but I definitely still feel that pull that makes starting things more difficult than it would otherwise be.

[1] http://www.damninteresting.com/hyperbolic-discounting/
Writing new software is easy. Maintaining large, existing codebases for mission-critical software is hard. Banks were early adopters; there's fifty year old code that does some things extremely well, but also sometimes results in user-facing quirks like oddly limited password fields.
Second 'Darkness at Noon'. A very powerful read. By Arthur Koestler 1940. Orwell's 1984 was published in 1948, wasn't it?
An Extensive Guide To Encryption
Xfce 4.10: Simple, Fast, Reliable
Both my Swedish banks require two-factor authentication - you get a physical PIN pad when you sign up, and you can also set up a 2-factor app on your phone. All transfer amounts and account numbers have to be signed on the PIN-pad, securing you from man in the middle attacks that are possible with one-time-codes. They both also have password-only login, but it's read-only, you can't do transfers.

I wonder what makes the banks in the two countries have such different views on security?
eOS has too much eye candy. Someone suggested in the comment section to install alucryd's PKGBUILDs to gain access to updated packages on Arch. If you're already thinking of Arch because of that comment, this should be enough eye candy: lightdm, cinnamon + CoverflowAltTab, plank + plank-themer, nautilus or spaceFM, themes like Numix + cinnamon-chronumix [1], awesomeWM, and reEFInd and a minimal theme [2]. Not sure why people opt in for a visual representation of applications when they need to browse to install applications...there's the list of applications in the wiki and /r/unixporn if you need visuals..

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/serdotlinecho/cinnamon-chr...

[2] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/32729998da4401a2aef674308...
Show HN: Beta available for our website that connects past, present and future
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Check out and please let me know what do you think.
My highly cynical take: education. It will fucking take education.

All this "oh my god but PGP is so complicated, how can a regular user be expected to use all this?" thing is crap we use to delude ourselves into ignoring the fact that most e-mail users are too ignorant to understand why invasions of their privacy are so dangerous, let alone that it can be done or how.

Seriously, it's not complicated. There are a ton of everyday tasks that are far more complicated than setting up and using Enigmail, and yet average users do them every day. If people can set up a fucking network printer with HP's crapware, they can most certainly use a PGP plug-in for their e-mail client of choice.

PGP does have a lot of problems, from unencrypted subjects to usability problems with mailing lists and stuff. But it's still better than nothing, and if poor usability were such an important factor, Altair 8800 would have been the first and last PC.

But even if all these problems were to be solved, we'd still face the fact that the vast majority of e-mail users don't even know what a mail client is, don't understand just how widely-available the contents of their messages are, and don't really understand the far-reaching implications of them being available pretty much in the open.

And even after that, we'd have to face the even sadder reality that this is but a really tiny win in terms of privacy, because convincing people to use PGP is nothing compared to convincing people to stop using Facebook, Google and webmasters to stop using the tracking shit that fills 90% of the post-web 2.0 pages.
Computer becomes first to pass Turing Test
I had two friends bitten by brown recluse. One was sick for days and his knee swelled up like a Mellon and the other didn't fare much better.
The link to the YouTube video of "The Mother of All Demos" is dead. I found another one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
Guys I would invite you to read my perspective on what we can do about this:

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

And please, put the new video camera technology to good use and sign this petition:

http://wh.gov/lsuFw

Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints -- sometimes by 80%!

http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_tha...

http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-po...

"The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment."

All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people. Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police officer who landed them in the hospital.

You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.
Ah. Digicert offers what you want with their wild cards, FYI.
> Gmail seems like an obvious entry point ... but it would go against their business model (they could no longer mine your emails).

A few ideas why google won't mind encryption that much:

http://www.reddit.com/r/tech/comments/278cze/google_launches...

> Is there any hope?

TextSecure is already offering a secure communication service(that in my view could be a decent replacement for email). They will also release a browser extension in the future. Those(and the fact google's involved) are good signs for google's encryption project , at least technically.

And assuming the technical infrastructure for easy encryption does exist, i can see some sort of hybrid model[1] becoming popular and/or mandated in some groups, and growing from there.

[1]For example, textSecure/redPhone's model lets you send sms to everybody, but if it detects the other side has encryption , it encrypts it. There's also an easy to use method for out-of-band key verification.
It's funny you bring this up. I was talking to a friend the other day and we were talking about the future of mobile devices. I made a comment that I would rather go back to a "dumb" phone with better reception quality and better battery. I find myself using my iPad and laptop more and more over my phone for web and email and really just use my phone for calls/texting. I would rather have a plan with two devices one being a cheap phone and the other just unlimited (truly unlimited) data for my tablet. I know you can do this to some extent already, but it could be better.