skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My suspicion is essentially the opposite: Tor is secure, but the two high profile arrests (Freedom Hosting and Silk Road) where given priority to make the general public a.) feel that the entire function of Tor is illegal and often repulsive activity b.) that Tor is not safe.

The latter part of that theory, that law enforcement agencies intentionally stepped up the resources for both the FH and SR cases in order to intentionally create disgust and distrust of Tor, is of course merely conjecture. Basically I find it an amazing coincidence that the two most notorious parts of the Tor hidden service world where busted very quickly after a huge amount of positive public attention was brought to Tor right after the Snowden leaks. Additionally if you actually look at the details of the FH exploit the FBI unleashed it is fairly useless, but very terrifying when you read just the headline. Legally there seems no useful reason to use such an easy to discover exploit that would have delivered no particularly interesting information. However from the stand point of creating public fear it worked marvelously. If you talk to even technical people that don't understand security and Tor well they often assume that the feds "hacked Tor". Which, in my opinion, is exactly what state actors want people to think.

As for the former part of the claim, that Tor is secure, look at the Snowden leaks about the methods that the NSA was thinking about for attacking Tor. Egotistical Giraffe, the attack used on FH, as mentioned was not a particularly useful exploit, and attacks user behavior not the network. Other similar leaks also suggest that neither the NSA nor any other state agency, has the ability to completely compromise Tor.

Finally,if you are a state agency and you have completely compromised Tor, you would actually want the general public to think it is safe. It is an amazing advantage to have your adversary think they are on a secure line when they absolutely are not. On the other hand if you haven't (and probably can't) compromised Tor you want the majority of people to think you have so that they disregard one of their best tools for defense.

Now of course there is plenty of evidence that federal agencies can perform targeted timing attacks against specific individuals. Tor does not and really cannot guard against this, and this has always been the case and fairly well known. If a state agency is targeting you specifically, I don't think there is anything you can do. However, given the information that is available to us, I do think it's reasonable to assume that Tor is secure from general, large scale, untargeted surveillance.
I can't make a meaningful interpretation from this. It looks pretty, but what does it mean?
I would also be looking for the opposite. Software that eliminates the need for people, especially consultants, can be huge opportunities too.

That's what we're doing with MindOps–an easy-to-use OCR API. Currently humans transcribe receipts, we automate it.
> I suppose one could create a new market which could have capacity for such jobs. That might still be in the best interest of a startup.

Not that it precisely fills this need, but look at things like Mechanical Turk. That's one way to think about this problem: rather than being a direct employer of millions, find ways to connect millions with useful employment doing jobs that we can't easily automate.
What about YouTubers? Or people with Etsy stores. These businesses focus on letting people be able to make a living off their service.
Hi Diego,

Could you elaborate more on the cashing out of stock from public companies point? You sold IndexTank for 1.6 million dollars. I don't really consider that "never work again rich" in this day in age. Were the sales of your stock significant?
Does anyone know if there is an app that will produce a similar map, but that uses just your own data? I would love to have a map like that that shows where in my city I have been and that would encourage me to see more spots.
Request For Startups:

http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
Are we in the golden age of apps?
Since we have almost a billion people primed to use smartphones ; is it time to rethink what we can do now as a race?
>A live CD would not have helped any FreedomHosting victim.

Yes it would have. That attack relied on both a Windows-specific vulnerability, and accessing the internet without Tor. Neither would have happened to a user of Tails.
I'm more impressed that said PNG is nested 20 levels deep in div tags. I'm not exaggerating for the laughs, I counted exactly 20 wrapping divs.
http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
UK “Porn Filter” Triggers Widespread Internet Censorship
> And all the evidence points to sitting being a disaster health-wise.

What's the status of this? I've seen claims that standing at a desk is worse than sitting, and vice versa, and both groups like to point to scientific consensus. At the minimum, it seems to be like there would at least be some tradeoffs.
edit: To answer my own question, I guess it has to be a "job platform" like EBay or Uber, and not a company (as sama is saying). Otherwise the economics are quite challenging.

There is the distinction that EBay sellers get most of the revenue; EBay just takes a cut and thus doesn't have to have a huge amount of revenue itself.

-----

Doesn't this mean the company has to make more than $50 billion in revenue? Assuming a $50K wages a year, 1M jobs takes $50B to pay for.

Do the jobs have to be in the US?

Seems like an interesting idea, but my first thought is that you would want to find some way NOT to pay $50B a year... that would be a lot of profits. More profits than the vast majority of companies make.

It seems risky because it's hard to imagine getting to 1M jobs in less than 10 or 20 years. But in 10 or 20 years, computers will have gotten a lot better at the things that they are currently poor at. It's very hard to predict, but it will change rapidly.

Did EBay create 1M jobs? i.e. a significant number of people have made their entire living on Ebay. I think it might have been on the order of 1M, but not sure.

edit: http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=170073

Ebay in 2005 claims 724K as primary or secondary source of income. If I had to guess it would be more like 72K "jobs", as 1/10th of those people might have Ebay as their primary source. That was 2005, but I don't think the order of magnitude has changed in the last 9 years.
The URLs are adding ?one=one, ?two=two at the end to avoid being flagged as duplicates. There seem to be plenty of more natural numbers to continue the sequence!
I'm reading this as "one million indirect jobs" as opposed to "one million directly employed jobs". I'm not sure that a corporation with one million direct employees is currently a desirable end goal due to large organizational overhead, political infighting and large inertia. Of course redefining what "jobs" are, would help.
Interesting. Thinking about what computers can't do now or in any foreseeable future, I wouldn't be surprised if spending time with people in need of human interaction becomes a huge industry in coming years. I first laughed at ideas like Awesomeness Reminders etc, but I can see there's a future in that direction!
Curious if there are any companies which currently create millions of jobs?

I'd be really surprised if Microsoft or Google didn't have this impact worldwide, though in Microsoft's case it might be tough to distinguish whether those are net jobs. (Though in fairness, in a very real sense, everyone at Google and Google's ecosystem owes their jobs to Bill Gates putting a computer on every desk and many homes.)
Growth hacker Zilyo applies metasearch to Airbnb and other rentals
assuming you are in the US look at small markets. They have a great deal of trouble competing with high cost high pay markets.
I love this! Too many of my friends who are great engineers melt down completely when faced with an actual interview for various reasons.

But I do wonder if I could put this to use in freelancing as well. Sometimes clients, especially early-stage startups, go for a very normal-technical-interview approach to hiring freelancers
The Red Pill is leaking onto HN now? Damn
UberX Wages War On Bay Area Taxis With 25% Price Cut
Hi Michael, I came upon your post before and read them with interest. I agree with a lot of what you say re: "programmers being a defeated tribe" and how business doesn't respect coders to work on their craft. However, I don't necessarily agree with your reaction to the problem though.

Not to be patronizing, as I'm younger and have less technical/life xp than you, I'm 27, but you seem to respect the financial services a lot and consider them a "more honest" bunch than VC's, why not go into algorithmic trading for yourself? Knowing how trivial I make it sound, but it just seems like you're the type of the person who respect the merits of one's sheer intelligence, math, being financially/spiritually independent and answering to no one (least of all, management BS?).

Furthermore, in your posts, you seem to care a lot about "respect" (e.g., programmer salary and choice of programming languages in relation to VC salary and business decisions). I've experienced this myself great many times over in scrum project planning, layoff's and politics of CYA; so what you say is pretty much how I feel I could've written and most likely the stories of a lot of people here. But IMHO, we all made a choice to be "mercantile programmers" and had we cared about say, Haskell, Clojure or computational modeling, then one should apply for a PhD program in such or take a pay-cut to work in a research organization.

Again, I agree with you and would like better pay and opportunities to develop my career according to my selfish interest. But for a mediocre person like myself, I don't see how I can get away with everything (can't have the "salary" cake and eat "job satisfaction" it too). I struggle mightily with this but at some point, I have to make a choice that's most important to me, talking abstractly now but concretely, that means choosing better tech/research oriented opportunities over money.
Yeah, I came here to ask this as well. I get really excited about shops that work hard to facilitate and lower the barrier of entry for people to make a living doing what they love (Etsy is a specific career-crush for me). Curious whether this is included in the sort of thing the RFS is talking about.
To be fair to Google, it opposed the European court ruling. But its implementation of it looks odd, perhaps clumsy.

I find it incredible that Google is held at fault in this case because they don't choose whether it is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" in a way that fits the author's view. Such an analysis is so absurdly subjective, and it is impossible for Google to satisfy both sides.

The European Court ruling is pure absurdity, and this article could more accurately be titled "European Court Rules That Past Must Be Wiped. Much Comedy As Result."

There is no possible way that Google can implement it that won't endlessly earn them criticism, such as this piece.
As someone more or less in the OPs situation (greg), you stay in a hostel for a few days while looking at local ads or knocking on doors. If someone doesn't have a room or apt, they likely will take you to a neighbor who does.

I've lived for many, many months on what people back home (US) spend on food per month. To do this, you might have to lower standards a little and increase the importance of having new experiences. If I wasn't struggling financially for various reasons, but making a very average "US office job" salary while abroad, I'd have lived like a king in the countries I've lived in. As is, I've lived in what I'd consider interesting locations and been in interesting situations, never at risk of going hungry but, frankly, always worried about it. In my early 30s, I'm now rethinking my lifestyle a bit but don't regret what I've lived.
Sorry, I meant automated testing. Getting all the piecies running in a test stage isn't hard.
Creating jobs is a strange goal. The effective, simplest and most probable solution is working inefficiently. Working efficiently, on the other hand, typically eliminates jobs.

All politicians talk about creating jobs. 99% of the time it leads to bad regulation that creates jobs through incentivizing inefficiency. People of course will vote for politicians that advocate job creation because people want jobs. The extreme form of this is ludditism.

People miss the whole point of companies. The goal should never be providing jobs but creating value. If a company could be made automatic and all it's employees jobless, then that would obviously be positive. The company would still create the same value to society, but would require less people.

The main counter-argument is that those who advocate job creation only advocate "necessary jobs or "meaningful jobs". In practise that doesn't pan out. It's simply a backwards way of trying to create more products and services.
Ask HN: How do you vote on comments?
When I arrived on HN, I immediately gained the impression of higher-quality discourse than other news-based forums. Over time, I grew to understand that this was because lower-quality commentary would get down-voted by the community, higher-quality commentary would get up-voted.

I 'feel' a trend where this may not be the case with a significant number of members. Amongst my HN-using peers (in meatspace and on IRC), we've seen what appears to be votes for agreement (or lack thereof) rather than for quality. Or maybe the site's secret sauce is a bit more ... acidic?

In any case, I'd like to start some discourse on how we vote: do you base it on whether you agree with the comment? On comment quality? Does the notoriety of the commenter influence your decision?
Both groups exist.

Think of the "buying freedom" bump as the bump that happens when a new restaurant opens. A lot of people buying pot for the first time (or the first time in a long time) probably don't really care about pot that much. Not enough to break the law to buy it. It's just fun to try something new.

Replacing "Pot" with "Norwegian Cuisine" is maybe a useful exercise. I'm in the group that doesn't care much about either (from the consumer standpoint). I wouldn't break the law to smoke pot, nor would I break the law to eat Norwegian food. But if either was suddenly legalized, of course I'd go try them out a few times, why not?
Looks like the RFS is looking to build an army.
Good idea! It leapfrogs the scores of existing "code interview practice tools" that give you a problem and a text editor and do some auto-validation on your answer by providing a human element. Something like this seems like a more relevant kind of practice.

How does the business model here work? Are interviewers paid? Are you planning on eventually expanding into recruiting?
oh that's why some DJ's that I follow are moving to mixcloud
From a customer's perspective a false sense of security. From Coinbase's point of view, it decreases their need for liquidity and their chances of a run.
Agreed, at least in mostly pure code. Lennart proposed one on his blog but I don't think it got far.

For IO heavy stuff I think a debugger would still be valuable.
Well I never thought it would take more than a few days for this to happen...
So many comments asking why people don't use credit cards. The easy answer, already told, is that many Brazilian people don't have bank accounts or credit card.

This is only half truth and probably not relevant to the case here, as the malware in question will only affect people accessing their bank accounts through the internet.

The "boleto" system is actually a very nice way to handle payments. The boleto mostly substitutes mailing checks: the company I owe send me the bill with a numeric code (and a corresponding bar code for convenience), and I can use this code to pay the bill at a bank, supermarket, lottery houses or, of course, directly from my bank account through the internet or ATM.

A boleto is different from a account deposit because each boleto is unique: the code identifies who that specific boleto was sent to, so payment processing is done automatically. No out-of-band bank codes or check handling involved.

Boletos are used in several contexts where a credit card is not appropriate, such as paying the credit card bill. However, it may substitute credit cards sometimes: an online commerce outlet will happily generate a boleto for you to pay instead of paying with credit card. You can then pay for you purchase without revealing personal information, having a credit card or sending checks by mail.

Actually, paper checks are very, very rare in Brazil nowadays, even in business contexts. Most retail business won't accept them anymore.

Also, when you pay a boleto, you get an timestamped authentication code proving you paid it. The company can't allege the check was incorrect, for example. The code may also carry the amount to be paid and/or expiration date, preventing payment of the wrong value of after the due date.

This is actually a very functional system that credit cards cannot completely substitute, even if everyone had a bank account or credit card.

EDIT: clarity and a bit of extra info
Dreaming big is good, but may be that goal is off by an order of magnitude or two? For comparison, just look at [1].

I'm not discouraging, but what startup even has the potential to hope to employ even 100000 individuals within the next 10 years?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_th...
Commenters aren't realizing you can create jobs without hiring people.

Uber has created many jobs. Airbnb too.
I just set up that command line client the other day too.
So Active Record is building its SQL from string concatenation, not using prepared statements with bind variables?
Using algorithms to determine authorship in unsigned judicial opinions [pdf]
I think a problem in your analysis is that the miners are the equivalent of the Fed, not the developers. The developers are technical experts on whom the miners rely for tools, but are not the equivalent of the substantive decision makers.

But the bigger problem, whether you view miners or miners+developers as parallel to the Fed, is that you've failed present any argument or evidence supporting your key point, to wit, that the "few" who form the "government of bitcoin" (by your description) are somehow inherently "limited in their ability to be corrupt".
It depends on the individual. Most (75%?) of engineers are not suited for management.

Most engineers have a "busy-beaver" personality type. "Show me the problem, I'll go solve it." This is a great personality type for an engineer, but it doesn't work well for a manager.

Managing is a different game. A lot of it is about pushing back and asking, "what is the question? does this really solve the right problem? are we solving the right problem?" You must be ready to negotiate on every front.

I made my share of rookie management mistakes. But I had the right personality type and I was generally quite successful as a manager.

In such a short message I can't possibly give your question due diligence. But I'd summarize it like this: if you have talent for what you do AND you are in the 25% of people with the "management" personality type, you will be successful.
It's an analogy, not an isomorphism.
This is very interesting. This is one of the few actual disruptions that I've seen in the interviewing/hiring space.

One small issue: I don't know what I'm getting into when I join the waiting list. I understand what the site is about, if I join will I suddenly be asked to take an interview next Friday? It would be nice to know a little more about the process.
> Tor users know through high-profile

Yeah sure. Just install Firefox privacy extension and you are running Tor. Or your children can do it for you.
Just for some context Google have ~50,000 employees according to this https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
I think that this _may_ miss the point, though I do appreciate the accuracy.

One of the arguments against legalization is that once marijuana is legal, we would see a significant _increase_ in crime.[1] So a __statistically__ insignificant result is not a __politically__ insignificant result.

1: From TFA: ""Expect more crime, more kids using marijuana and pot for sale everywhere," said Douglas County Sheriff David Weaver in 2012."
I haven't used it, but I remember hearing about "Fog of World"[1], which seems like it might be what you're looking for.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fog-of-world/id505367096?mt=...
I like that they told the author that his article would no longer be viewable.

If that's the case, and the 'removal' is not secret, then they could (should?) totally make available a separate database of articles that people have asked to be removed.

Basically, the original article may be old (or theoretically irrelevant) but the fact that someone asked for it to be removed is very new and not at all irrelevant. It would be awesome to see this as the Streisand effect writ large - everything that people want to see buried actually gets a new surge of attention.
Unless Google wants to treat the EU like they did China and redirect all searches to a jurisdiction with actual press freedoms, they're doing all they can here.
Dave McClure on bubbles and getting YC’s ‘sloppy seconds’
I live in Europe, baltic country. you can get a lot of workers to work for 10k/year. for 20 it can be almost top level workers.
hey, good question. right now, interviewers aren't paid, but that may change. re business model, ultimately, i'd like to have this platform be something companies can use to find candidates rather than relying on proxies like pedigree (or resume, for that matter!).
I suspect the issue is Iron, though rust-http certainly isn't helping much. Here are some graphs, generated from data made by rust-http's benchmarking script (https://github.com/chris-morgan/rust-http/tree/master/compar...), on my box.

A spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-5_4wPPKNBYZ6yuw-rRl...
The raw data: https://gist.github.com/cmr/3648bcc6365c1dba83f1

The charts themselves: http://imgur.com/gw1mp40,Hn3929i,h2OQiTh

Software versions:

rustc 0.11.0-pre (44ec28cfac9fa3f738e0e77ccca1d804125fd1dd
2014-07-01 21:26:33 +0000)

go version go1.3 linux/amd64

node v0.10.29

Apache 2.4.9

wrk 3.1.0

Arch Linux, x86_64, CPU: https://gist.github.com/cmr/7cc6df806caff2253667
Yep!
Is it wrong of me to have thought that HN's filters were better than that?
I think that's becoming an increasingly popular opinion, but I really don't buy into it. If you have one year of runway, certainly you should have a one year plan, but I like to see something longer term as well.
I do wonder what people think is going to happen to children who accidentally ingest the stuff. AFAICT there's not a lot of danger compared to alcohol.

I absolutely am not suggesting kids should be allowed pot, just that I think the hysteria is overstated.