skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are soft-pedaling this. There is much, much more on the SF-86 (http://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf)

They have extensive sections on psychological health (e.g., have you seen anyone for a mental health issue in the last 7 years, if so who, and their contact information). There are extensive sections on criminal history and past employment, including reason for leaving, especially if it was Federal employment.

There are also sections on past friends, past addresses, and spouses and ex-spouses, and foreign contacts.

Furthermore, it's not just convictions, you also have to report being charged with any felony offense, even if not convicted. Also, drug and alcohol related history, and gambling. And repossessions, liens, etc.

The SF-85 is a less intrusive version of the SF-86. I think a typical contractor working on open projects would use a SF-85. But note, when you sign the SF-85, you allow the government to collect additional information from various sources (but not medical information). This compiled information would presumably be stored on the systems that were targeted in this hack.

I know people who resigned from their job rather than fill out the SF-85. Part of their reason was that something like this might happen.
Well, it's more that French is an official language of those countries, rather than those countries speak French. WP has a list where most of those countries have only around 10%[1] of the population that can speak French. Given that French isn't particularly popular in the world of business (English and Chinese rule there) and that English seems to have become the default in science and engineering, it seems an assumption that a growing African economy would retain its French as it's primary 'international' language.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_...
This. I loved that string concatenation example! I still don't understand how people can be so against big-O notation when it's such a simple idea, with so many applications.
You are 100% correct. It's a very big net.
i'm sure that this will cause no amount of poor people to no longer have enough money for food, water, or shelter, much less health care, education, or other social contract goods, because enough non-profits will spring up to fill the gap and richer people will just be begging to fund them with all their freed up capital from no longer having to pay taxes. right?

Who knows? More likely it would lead to a lot less poor people, and much lower prices for health care, education, etc., so there would be a much smaller problem of poor people lacking such essentials to begin with.

Whatever you think about that, it's clear that the present system certainly hasn't done a very good job of eliminating poverty. I would think it's time to try an alternative.

In either case, it would be a Good Thing to have less institutionalized use of force in our society.
Why Amazon Has Entered The Ebook Subscription Market
Google has not been doing a lot right, lately, but this is bang on the money (pun intended). Bravo!
If a business sells something directly for USD, how do they do VAT? (Assuming that the company is not in the US since the US doesn't have VAT.)
And it is all or none. If you fall on bad times and can't pay the subscription, you cannot have any books. Unlike your owned collection which you can reduce down to books you love. If you are low on cash, you cannot save and buy a book - you have to be subscribed all the time.

If subscription becomes the dominant mode of book consumption, it would be disastrous. As an add on service, it is nice. Especially in the areas without strong library systems.
The converse of the original statement is that if you hate the writing, you don't value rationality and truth. You didn't state the converse, you seem to have taken it as a starting point and disproved it. But nobody was arguing the converse was true, which was my point.
My favorite FREE IDE...is Visual Studio and here why:)
>If microwaves are indeed so far more technically advanced, why then is it so hard to upgrade them?

Because they're not connected to the internet. Was this actually a question?
Looks interesting, might port one of my tastypie projects to it.

However I'm very concerned about the author's inactivity. Tastypie has gone unmaintained several times for a long time. It looks like restless is headed that way as well. Concerning.
Life in the Trenches of healthcare.gov
https://github.com/toastdriven/restless
Thanks for the kind words Mike. I would definitely love to integrate Diffbot, it looks like a really useful add on. I'll give you a shout.
Sure thing! Glad you've been using Anki also. /r/korean is definitely growing and becoming more active. It used to be pretty dead about a year ago but it's really coming to life as an awesome resource recently.

The main deck I've been working with is the 1000 most common. I figure that will get me up to speed enough to start digging into basic grammar without getting too hung up on common vocabulary. It's a pretty good deck, a few of the definitions I've been changing a bit because they're either not clear or not quite right (after running them past my wife). It's a little lacking in nouns, it's much more focused on common verbs, connecting terms (like 그런데) and support words like 뿐. So I'm already planning on following up with some more dedicated noun study.

At the moment, kdramas and movies are pretty impenetrable for me. It'll take me about an hour to get through a 5-10 minute youtube video with lots of subtitles, and I only get about 5-30% depending. 영국남자 is pretty good. For example I got about 40-50% of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFRUoygkaeI&list=UUg-p3lQIqm... which is not bad after a month of study.

Korean is one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. The Foreign Service Institute ranks languages based on the average number of study hours it takes an English speaker to achieve proficiency in Speaking and Reading. To achieve what they call "general proficiency" which is basic fluency (or a 3/3 in reading and speaking), it takes about 600 hours to learn a Category I language like French, Spanish or Norwegian. A category V language takes about 2200 hours of study and the languages in that group are Arabic (for various linguistic reasons), Chinese (speaking is considered relatively easy, like a Cat I but reading is incredibly hard), Japanese (speaking is hard, plus all the downsides of written Chinese) and Korean (speaking is hard and particularly listening is difficult, especially with the double consonants and very specific vowel distinction we don't make in spoken English).

The Defense Language Institute (DLI) ranks it a Category IV (the highest) as well - at 64 weeks of intense, 8 hour a day instruction. I think this number has shrunk as well as I know a few DLI trained Korean speakers who swear they spend almost 2 years there. While French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are over in 26 weeks. DLI's language education goal is actually lower than FSI's and the goal is only 2/2.

To compare, a language like Finnish, Russian or Vietnamese, one category down, is expected to be done after only 1,100 class hours, or half the time.
Why should my blog of static pages need to be served over HTTPS to avoid having Firefox slap a scary red icon next to it?
Wargames

Hackers

Revolution OS

Freedom Downtime

Any/all Jason Scott movies

Short Circuit 2

I also made a short ~8min piece about GNU with Stephen Fry that I'm still fond of. http://gnu.org/fry/
Top Electrifying Insights from Stanford Superstar Feross Aboukhadijeh(2013)
Ask HN: Crowdsourced project ideas that split equity
I remember there being a site, seen here recently that voted on a new project idea each month. Afterwords, ownership of the project would be divided up among the participating members.

I cannot recall what sits this was, and gooing is getting me no where. Was it real?

Where else does HN recommend going to find new projects/groups to work on/with?
Putting a red icon on 90% of all websites means the meaning of the icon will just saturate and people won't pay attention to the red icon any more.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/the-nsa-thinks-linux...
That being said, in some languages string1 + string2 + ... + stringn isn't an O(n^2) operation. (Notably, if your string type is a rope, or if the language has a nary string concatenation operator, or is guaranteed to use something along the lines of a StringBuffer intermediary object)
Greeaaaat. Just what everyone needs. An extra expense and further entrenchment of our exploitative CA system.

I like this idea, but not when it puts more money in the pocket of the CAs.
Tell that to e-gold
As far as malware attacks go, this seems to be pretty run-of-the-mill (no clever vulnerabilities used). The key seems to be that the automated malware dropping is adapted to all sorts of 'restricted environments' (i.e. chroot, virtual servers, non-root accounts, etc). It doesn't look like there is any privilege escalation involved (which, say in the case of most targeted attacks, there usually is).
I don't see how the opto can ever be turned on? Its cathode is always at highest potential in the left half circuit.
HTTPS does nothing for anonymity, though, right? It's only for protecting the actual content being transmitted? If so, there is no sensitive content being exchanged between a user and a static page that doesn't support login or anything.
I thought the Tolkien family was famously aggressive about enforcing JRR's copyrights.

I am surprised that Palantir Technologies hasn't received a C&D from the Estate; though perhaps the copyrights don't extend that far? Is that a risk for this project?

Regardless, this sounds like software that could be very useful for some of the work I'm involved in. Exciting to see the positive review here. Will have to check it out.
Explicit GoTenna Use Case: Buying Drugs
No.

Not all sites exchange data worth the SSL-layer...let's say, 30-50% of the sites...that means for roughly half a user's non-email/social-networking web-browsing, they're going to either be saturated with a warning message that, if psychology research is to believed, is going to be promptly ignored like your apartment's super-sensitive smoke detector or the boy watching out for wolves.

What's the actual reasoning in OP's mind here? That the average web user is someone who, when the computer gives some warning sign that is disconnected from any kind of discernable threat, that the user will automatically take it seriously? That they'll demand to know why they're in danger, and then will rise up and petition the Internet regulatory commission to make all sites do what it takes to make that red icon go away, and the web will be more secure?

I don't want to be overtly negative towards well-intended idealism, but this is such a bizarrely naive viewpoint that it must be openly challenged. That, and it just blithely ignores all the research showing what happens when humans are overloaded with impotent warning signs. This is the kind of idealism-without-consequences that can end up causing more harm than good.
Yeah I know. Thanks :)

I just like poking at the conspiracy nuts and hoping they try to rationalize why a US plot to extradite Assange from the UK involves Sweden at all.
China to Tighten Oversight of Internet TV Programming
I hope you can take more hints from permacoin. There is an important economical point in permacoin's whitepaper:

"The expected reward per unit of work is approximately constant, even for very small investments of computational effort. This prevents large participants from monopolizing the system and driving out ordinary participants."

Maybe I don't have a deep understanding how filecoin works, but as far as I know if you don't have the storage capacity which can even reach the current difficulty then you have an expected reward of 0. Maybe it's a non-issue and the difficulty will never reach let's say 10MB, but if it reaches 1TB then it will be really hard to hop in the mining business.
Perhaps, but is there a more authoritative source on the art of pillow talk?
I think the point of the article was showing that none were really needed to still cause massive damage.
Short answer is I hope coins are shareable but that there's no requirement to run them through any central authority. So they disclose information in exchange for not privileging a particular party.

Edit: it should be possible to write an app that works only locally on the phone via p2p sync, with no central server, that collects public signatures from friend-of-a-friend wallets, that can provide a decent reach if there were ever a critical mass of users. Opening the possibility to have a functioning trust network without needing everyone to see everyone's coins.
Why Free Software Phone Doesn't Exist [oggcast]
You do physics.

The fact that you do it by writing software is incidental. Obviously mathematical skill is necessary to write software that models and controls complex physical/mechanical systems. No one is saying it isn't. That's a strawman.

Many problem domains, however, are not mathematical in nature. I don't need to know anything about calculus, have accurate hand-computation skills, remember probability formulas, etc. to write a database application, for example.

But then obviously I would need these things to write and validate a financial modeling/risk assessment system.

I (and many others) would argue that when math becomes relevant to programming, it is because math is relevant to the problem domain in which you are working. Programming, by itself, has little to do with math (or, more precisely, skill in computation-based math classes and exams is not a proxy for programming skill.)
Had you read the sentence that followed right after, you would know that no, it wasn't actually a question...
Show HN: Ajenti on a terminal.com container – Configure your vm graphically
Indeed, it's a known problem area for the Federal government. http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR430.html
little bit of a stretch. I wouldn't want a security guard drunk either. Doesn't mean I don't think workers should have rights.
Lat. long. doesn't have a length limitation of the binary search system, 10:10 so the information isn't wasted because where the grid is sparser near the equator we just extend the decimal places.
Except that Malthusianisms have been shown to be completely bogus.

Let's use an example from that page to deconstruct that:

> Why can’t everyone just agree to a family-friendly,
> 40-hour workweek? Because then anyone who chose to
> work a 90-hour week would clean our clocks.

Except that more and more people do work a family-friendly 40 hour week even with the opportunity to do more. They have "enough" so they want to spend more time with family than at work. The implication is that the pursuit of "money" presumably would allow the person working 90 hours a week to make more than twice or three times as much. But what do they get out of that? Where is their motivation? So that they are rich enough not to work at all?

What has been demonstrated repeatedly through history is that that once the 'need' it met the behavior stops. And the example at hand here is population growth. Why do "industrialized" populations have a lower population rate than "pre-industrial" populations? They both have functioning genitalia, they both have time. But when you can't count on being able to work until you are 70 and being able to live off your savings until you die, you really really want family that is younger than you so that you can move in with them. But when you don't perceive a 'need' for children to support you in your golden years, many people forego the obvious cost and bother of having them in the first place. There is no sudden new use for children that substitutes in.

Affluent parts of the world aren't running out of fresh water, they can recycle it or desalinate it. When the costs for doing that are connected with the water they choose to use it differently (like not watering a lawn in Las Vegas for example). We're low on water in California at the moment due to weather, not due to outrageous consumption by individuals.

Similarly with energy, we use less and less. Our stuff gets more efficient, our use gets more refined. From a 350 watt tube TV in the living room to a 50 Watt LCD to a 5 watt tablet/phone. We still consume news and entertainment but we don't consume it using the same methodologies at the same energy costs.

People make extrapolations and hold technologies and attitudes constant, it has been shown time and time again that you always get the wrong answer if you do that.
HTTPS protects metadata as well (to a large extent).
Ask HN: Little hacks that make your life easier?
Everyone has those own little workarounds that make life easier.

Here are a couple of mine -

1. Using AutoHotKey to write my signatures, frequently used expressions (ex: plm becomes "Please let me know if you need some more information." , answers to frequently asked queries by customers, open specific files with a keyboard shortcut)

2. Using IFTTT : This tool helps a lot. One of the ways I use it is to save my monthly utility bills (arriving in Gmail) automatically every month direct in my chartered accountant's shared dropbox folder. That email in turn is auto archived, so such bills are completely out of my way.

What are your time saving hacks that you use frequently?
To be fair, the reason why only 90% of English speakers would get every word in that poem right is because there's a lot of very uncommon words in there. 'Sward' or 'phlegmatic' are not things I've ever heard used in casual conversation. I'm pretty well read, but I have never heard of Terpsichore before today. Similarly, Arkansas is an American peculiarism - I wouldn't expect a non-American to get that one right, same with Islington being a UK peculiarism. Probably should have left names out of the poem, because names have a ridiculously wide allowance for pronunciation.

It's also interesting that the poem writer has a particular accent:
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Where I live, grieve and sieve rhyme, and neither rhyme with any verson of 'live' (though they do rhyme with 'leave'...). To me, sieve is 'seev', to the author, it's 'siv'.

The poem is very, very well put-together, but I think that the uncommon words and names should have been left out - the rest of the words (most of them) are pretty common, and most native English speakers that occasionally pick up a book should be able to get them.

The problem is that lack of diacritics - I was travelling through Vietnam and found it funny that they used so many diacritics where English needed none... then I realised English definitely needs them - for example, how do you pronounce 'wind'? It depends on context. If you're talking about air movement, it's pronounced differently to rolling something up on a spool...
I vote for the NSA logo
This is not a user-oriented proposal, this is clearly directed at the website owners which are not going to want their users to see red stuff on the URL bar.
A Modest Proposal: C++ Resyntaxed
Oh, I'm using Anki to learn Chinese, and it's actually not very hard at all to modify a deck to include English->Chinese as well.

Anki has a set of `fields` which you can embed in html templates to make each card's front and back.

Start studying from a deck, press "e" (or click the edit button), then click "cards" from the top.
From that menu, you can adjust the card to make reverse direction cards, or even sound only cards. It's quite flexible.

I had to pull out all the English->Chinese cards and put them in a new deck to try and study them at the same time, but that it maybe fixable if there's a sort order.
Why shouldn't it is the real question.

There's a parallel universe where ssh is plaintext, and only "sensitive commands", such as "sudo", are encrypted. In that universe though, plaintext HTTP doesn't exist and they're making fun of us.
Ask HN: State management with React
So, React looks pretty cool, and I have most of the other questions answered as far as building a client-side app with it.

What are people using to manage state with React these days? I see some people using Backbone, but Backbone's API feels really clunky and overly ceremonious to me. I'd love to hear what you guys are having success/difficulty with.
What about warning the user when they start to type in a login box on a non-https site? Browsers should already know what is a login box, since they know how to prompt you to remember the password.
Where do they get all that data on other players? And surely there have been attempts to automate this process they use?
Aggregating the content of the web pages you have read can be used to deduce your identity, and/or the content of the web pages can be used to select you for targeting, like in the article I linked to above.

For example, let's say you wrote a blog post about fixing a configuration issue for touchpad issues on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon on Ubuntu 12.04. Imagine that a passive MitM saved the IP address of everybody who read that blog post in a database. Then, if an "interesting" person is known to be a ThinkPad X1 Carbon owner that uses Ubuntu 12.04. They can use that list of IP addresses of readers of that specific blog post to help narrow the search for the possible locations (via geo-IP) of that user.

Right now it is pretty easy to distinguish which webpage on your blog the reader is reading through traffic analysis, even when HTTPS is being used. But, people are working on things that make that traffic analysis more difficult.
If a better/broader alternative to CAs comes along and is adopted (say, such as SPDY), I take it the icon would behave the same way. Your comment is really unwarranted...

Not to mention this is just some random guy. It's not like mozilla is actually thinking about this (they really should).
You could try to "guess the slope" if the slope were static, but it's not. Aptitude and track record are, in my experience, not correlated. I can get specific about this if you want, but I don't want to be tiresome about this subject (you can find similar comments in my history).

A short preemptive summary is: the last 10 amazing hires we made would not have been distinguishable from their online portfolios.
There have been a few times when I've got a legitimate red icon for bad certificates and what not. Pushing this to the rest of the web will mean I'll miss real errors through the noise because they happen so infrequently that I'll just stop checking if every website has a red icon.
And what would happen to the value of bitcoin?
Spark Summit 2014 videos
A very cost effective way is to go for Baby plan (around $3) on Hostgator, 1 click Wordpress install and you are good to go.
I have used many shared environments in past several years, HG shared account can easily handle 5k - 8k visitors a day if wp is optimized properly.
I love Ann Arbor and miss living there, but Ann Arbor is the textbook case of a locale with a thin market for tech labor. Wanting to live in Ann Arbor more or less eliminates your negotiating leverage with employers.
Then Alan Watts is the wisest person ever to have lived.
Worse than being simply annoying and deceptive (since there are plenty of ways to get around it if you care), it's also literally useless.

For example, I just went into Incognito on another machine out of curiosity. I unclicked 'I am 13 or older' and then clicked on random grayed-out whitespace, and it showed the full article. Unless they kept my home IP from previous requests, but at that point, why bother with the age gate? Lawyers?

Not sure how anyone can defend this deceptive UX bullshit.
There's electrochemical gradients just about anywhere... If you have for example stratified rock, there's energy in the differing potentials between the layers.