skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) We have to trust the 3rd parties with the master key, not just now, but forever. You can't "un-give" them master key access, nor has anyone proposed such a system. The idea is already unworkable for that very reason.

2) If you have jurisdiction over someone, you can force them to decrypt something based on a warrant, so it isn't even desireable for a backdoor to exist. Rather than hoping they follow the rules in their ultra-secret room that normal people will never see, they can work through the court system, publicly.

3) There's a concept called "attack surface." A backdoor increases that, by increasing the number of secrets.

4) The article goes into detail over the real-world failures of systems like these.

5) The device manufacturer does not necessarily have our interests at heart and should not be the party contesting warrants in any reasonable system.

6) Even if the encryption scheme was sound, human error trumps all. We're introducing all sorts of elements, each of which is a point of failure, and none of which has interests aligned with those of the end user (us). OTP is provably secure, you know. It's the key management that gets you.

So we haven't demonstrated the need for this vs. compelling someone via warrant to decrypt and other means. We have good reason to believe that illegal, dragnet surveillance is the real reason for opposition. Even if you believe that our own government is (and always will be) perfectly virtuous with that power, there are many foreign governments with similar capabilities. Not sending them any traffic? Think again (BGP hijacks). And we have lots of experience showing that such systems leave people vulnerable to bad guys.

So this asks us to take on big risks for bad reasons and we know that. There just aren't any good reasons not to dismiss and oppose such systems outright and there are many good reasons to be suspicious of the motives of anyone telling us otherwise.

I blacklisted WaPo some time ago as not being a credible news source. This editorial only gives me further reason to keep them blacklisted.
But those are the most important and interesting discussions to have, so I’m not convinced we should shy away from that sort of feedback.

That said, they’re also the sort of discussions which should often happen before code is written. Decisions can be changed much more quickly at that point, and people take it much less personally when you talk about how the design of something can be improved when they haven’t spent the time to implement it. :-)
YouTube is likely as profitable as Netflix.

http://news.investors.com/technology-click/051914-701377-goo...
And the world's most popular mobile OS.
Almost 41. Just started a new (gaming) company in SF and code the MVP myself. Will transition in a CTO role once we secured funding. I know a lot of developers 35+ and I enjoy working with them.
You would collect a cross-sample of infants from a wide variety of backgrounds and arrange for cameras to be put in their homes. This isn't unethical given certain constraints, and people have agreed to it before. Interactions with the child in the frame are coded by blinded coders as to whether it's an "angry" interaction or not. Every two to five years, you check in with the children and test them on impulse control and addictive behavior. If you have assloads of funding, follow them until they're 50 or 70 or however old you can afford.

Of course, nobody has assloads of funding like this, because science has basically reduced itself to clickbait.
You needn't be bothered about not sharing the same frustrations as others. Jonathan Blow is a game developer so the low-level memory management is very important. As a high-level programmer, you may never run into the same issues. That's perfectly fine and doesn't imply anything about "good programming". Enjoy doing what you're doing and at some point you may come up with your own list of grievances and ideas about implementing a more perfect language.
No need to apologise! I agree that trying to edit in tabular form would be worse than you have now; I was thinking of nudging the users towards the correct mental model purely by styling the divs that don't have the 'current' class.
AT&T to refund $80M in settlement of mobile cramming case
Startup process matters – or does it?
What is a good procedure for determining whether someone has good judgment? Is it never making an investment in a person or company that turns out wrong? Then those who never invest at all have the best judgment. But that can't be right.

I think good judgment is shown by those whose investments (of money, time, trust, reputation, or anything) turn out to be better than those in their class. By this measure, Thiel has shown good judgment - his investments of money, time and trust have turned out unusually positively overall. It's been...colorful, at times, but unusually positive overall.

To show someone has poor judgment, one would need to point to a pattern of poor decisions, preferably some hard metric (like investment returns). A single instance of misplaced trust seems inadequate. Does Thiel trusting Elon Musk cancel out his (probably delegated) trust in that Thiel Fellow? I think it does and much more.
Automate Everything – But Don’t Ignore Drift
I grew up in Bangalore for the first 15 years of my life. I consider my upbringing to have been pretty spoilt in terms of culinary things (among others, I'm sure), but I never had as much choice as you seem to have! My breakfast consisted of four idlies each morning 5 days a week. Friday was dosa day, which I had to negotiate seriously for. Vada/Upma/Poha/Rava idli were all weekend breakfast/brunch things and not every weekend. I'd compare it to about the frequency that I have waffles/omelettes/sausage and bacon over here in the US.
In my experience clients and consumers really just care about Feature Lists; power users maybe lean more towards Key Features. Performance and Stability are only a concern when they've already become a problem.
In France, lighting fires outside synagogues and chanting "Jews to the gas": http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/07/antisemitism-...

On the Mexican-American border with assault weapons, picking off migrant workers trying to find work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minuteman_Civil_Defense_Corps

In Greece, leading a prominent political party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_%28political_party...

And in America, dressed as police, shooting any black man they care to.

This isn't the greatest part of white supremacy or homophobia but it does exist and to claim it doesn't is either ignorance or (now that you don't have that excuse) willful complicity.
The actual product (actual content 2 links from the article):

http://www.blueprism.com/about/bpm.php

Basically sounds like Selenium for mainframes/win32 powered by some decision tables?

That's certainly one way to solve the enterprise integration problem...
Pretty sure that is accurate too, Steven Levy's book 'The Google story' documents their fear of Microsoft in particular realising what a massive deal search was going to be as a business, and how much cash it would generate. The culture of 'no success to see here' continued until they had established significant first mover advantage.
I think you're getting armament, munition and ammunition confused. The US Justice Department classifies cryptography as a "munition" (aka a weapon), not "ammunition" (used by a weapon).
What version? I'm on 32 on Ubuntu and it looks clean and crisp.
That's not the only axis to optimize to get more people from a target group. You can also devote a larger proportion of time/money towards searching for talent from that group, or you can provide better incentives. If your organization values top talent as well as diversity, you will prefer optimizing those axes over lowering the bar.
But what kind of rewards program does it have
I get what you are saying. This is something we are yet to explore. The freeform content editable input mechanism that we use currently is far from perfect with several browser quirks. Added to the common use cases of selection, moving the caret with keyboard etc, it becomes tad more tedius. But it is something we are planning to invest more time on. Thanks a ton for the feedback.
your contact? check my profile for twit id
The second half of your post just gave me a vietnam flashback to Linear Systems back in college

I wonder if you could actually model economic systems using impulse response and signal filtering mathematics
I've seen those, but this card (judging by the image on the landing page) doesn't have any visible number at all.
>Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks.

The virus doesn't gave a goal, to kill the patient. The death of the host is just an unfortunate side effect that really harms the spread of the virus. The really successful viruses have mutated to a form where they don't kill the host, don't make you sick enough to stay in bed, and just make you go to work and cough and sneeze all over everyone at the office.
Indians are willing to work under these conditions => willing or don't (think they) have much choice? And i'm sure rows of long, room wide desks without any separation between 1m workspaces with touching chairs and cameras pointing at you to keep you in your chair is not normal/allowed in the US? It certainly is not over here. I see quite a lot wrong with it. It keeps the prices low, sure. I didn't say the companies hiring them are happy though; I said they keep hiring them because it seems like a good idea and you have this team doing work, you can show the hours they spent, you can show what they did etc to your boss. It's kind of 'secure' compared to, let's say, Elance, where a really good developer(team) suddenly disappears to turn up a few months later with 'sorry, had some personal/company/financial/cosmic radiation issues' leaving you to explain why you hired this loose cannon.

Quality wise I have not seen anything coming from these shops, however that might be OK for departmental (read CRUD; the type MS Access was made for) LoB applications, mobile apps and internal sites.

Edit: stand corrected, I did say happy.
The Grid Uses Artificial Intelligence to Design Your Websites for You
>> I hear some companies actually get work done this way..

This statement and lack of any citations with statistics makes me suspect this as an opinion, not necessarily factual. I am a engineer from Bangalore, India. I worked for a few years with companies that outsource teams to many countries across the world. I lived in Bangalore for over 20 years and I know a lot of people who are in similar line of work. Most software companies provide competitive salaries (according to wages in India based on Indian cost of living, which is lower compared to the US) along with annual leaves, sick/casual leave, maternity leaves, statutory programs like provident fund (retirement benefits in India), gratuity fund etc. Many companies (all companies I have worked with and I know people working in) provide a lot more benefits than the ones I mentioned. I worked with companies that provided facilities like on-campus full time doctors, financial support programs, gyms, swimming pools, libraries, higher education support, employee rewards programs, sports programs, transport facilities etc. I have never heard of CS engineers hired and monitored by cameras to ensure work. I would like some citation on this, and even if it occurred at some place I doubt it's a problem at such a scale that it should be termed that it usually happens.

And, about quality of work, a large portion of the outsourcing projects involve support and maintenance of an existing software/website. Many of such customers do not have software as their primary business e.g. a internal web based software for a huge construction company. Such L2/L3 support work generally tends to be repetitive and does not require highly skilled software programmers. There are lot of companies that work on the same outsourcing model which cost the customers a lot higher and produce high quality work, such companies generally attract the better skilled engineers and customers that require high quality products.

My point, outsourcing software companies in India are definitely not sweatshops. There are sweatshops in parts of India mainly in the textile industry and they most certainly do not hire CS engineers. And, there are good and bad engineers everywhere, it's not determined by where they are from or who employs them.
I have a Myo as well, and it's pretty disappointing. The gestures are so rarely recognized correctly for me (maybe 20% of the time for the fist, pinky to thumb and open palm) that it's always easier to do the action another way. Other people have much better luck, so it may just be limitations in their training data (also, there's no way to train the classifier for your particular body, so you're currently stuck with averages).

But the real disappointment is that there's no access in the SDK to the raw EMG data. This means that as a developer, you only have access to the (in my case useless) gestures and the accelerometer data, which can be captured by much smaller and cheaper devices.

I'm hoping that Myo will open up their data sources, or at least improve gesture recognition. Right now it's pretty useless as a developer device.
Nobel Prize for medicine goes to discoverers of brain’s 'inner GPS'
"and therefore making every worker's skill and experience important, instead of them being just a replaceable cog"

Problem with this is that most workers don't have the skills and experience, and self-teaching can only go so far in a lot of specialized areas.

Further, you run into the issue of a worker who is, say, 50 and has just been 'automated out'. Learning an entirely new skill set and trying to get into a field where your previous experience may not even be applicable at that age would be brutal, if its even possible in many instances.

To make matters worse, some developed countries (UK and USA to name a couple) have taken to the mindset of cutting education and skills training and prioritized those areas even lower so that it'll only become that much harder for workers to build up skills in the first place...
If the West was in decline, it wouldn't still be the engine of science and innovation, which is exactly what it still is. In fact, the West dominates both categories to an extreme, despite the rise of China, India and Japan since the moon landing.

The West still possesses by far and away the best universities and school systems. The US in particular, so dominates the top college rankings, others have a hard time getting a single school into the top ten list.

There's no aspect that we can consider regarding other competitors, that outshine the West. Manufacturing? The US and Germany are both better at it, cleaner at it, and more efficient at it than China. Science? Not even a real competition. Energy? The US and Europe have led and created a huge portion of the technology around pretty much every form of energy production. Information technology? The West leads, easily, again; with countries like China always copying and running five or ten years behind. Nobel laureates? The West wins again. Space? The West dominates again, with no sign of suddenly being bested by China or Japan or India. Quality of life? The West is doing extremely well overall, with Japan and South Korea being the sole countries in the East that are competitive - and it's worth pointing out, Japan is in a 30 year stagnation, and China is the world's fastest accumulator of debt. Medical / pharma / biotech? Again not even a real competition, with the US and Europe dominating in most every regard, from the science of it to the products and drugs.

I'd struggle to come up with any positive categories the West isn't still leading in. Your claim appears to have zero basis in reality.
> I have no idea what you mean by "security vulnerability" in this case. Key escrows are the primary way asymmetric crypto is used in practice. An escrow recovers the symmetric key a message was encrypted with and you proceed as normal.

You're using an unusually broad definition of what "key escrow" means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_escrow

And your definition is covering the scenarios that nobody would call a back door, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Giving a third party access to your private information is a security vulnerability unless you can trust the third party, and "you can trust the government" is a statement contrary to evidence.

> By that logic, government agencies should operate exclusively by typewriter. They don't because crypto primitives are designed to be secure against unrealistically strong adversaries. No crypto paper has ever said, "Our construction is secure in the standard model as long as the ROI is less than epsilon."

Once again, the crypto is not the issue. Nobody is expecting the attacker to solve the discrete logarithm problem. But breaking the cryptosystem is not the only way to obtain the encryption keys. You have a serious security vulnerability if the expected value of the attacker obtaining the secret key is larger than the amount of money required to bribe the relevant government employee(s). Or if the servers the government keeps the keys on are vulnerable to heartbleed/shellshock/whatever at any point after attackers learn of the vulnerability, regardless of the strength of the escrow cryptosystem.

> You can go down the path of "what if there's another Snowden, and it's a snow day in Kentucky...," but you aren't doing cryptography anymore--you're just developing mild paranoia.

It's not doing cryptography at all. It isn't a cryptographic problem. The strength of the cryptography makes little difference because the cryptography is not the weakest link.
Yes, it's true:

http://allthingsd.com/20091005/new-yorker-bezos-initial-goog...
The Magazine is shutting down
In the vid they say '2 nos', not 'ons' for onions and also '4 nos' for lasagna sheets. I'm guessing whoever typed that thought units were required and typed a variant of 'nºs' to mean 'numbers'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_sign
Natto for breakfast in Japan ? This claim is completely unfounded. Tons of Japanese actually HATE natto themselves.
I agree, remember Twitter? It started getting popular quite a while ago, but servers couldn't handle the load which lead to a lot of down time.

Eventually, users just left twitter and they shut down the site a year later.
Youtube is certainly not best of class, it's 'only' the most popular.
Sandboxing. It's present on OS X.
Exploring fatal commercial passenger plane incidents since 1993
If you want Grand Engineering, why not get behind the Soviets? Their progress to space outclasses any other non-US country. So why is Russia a second world country, with world-class math, science, and comp-sci talent?

Further: the 'softer' half of any Tech-accelerator - consumer apps or anything ad-based - would be a non-starter for venture capital if it were based in Russia. But Russians do have the ambition and skill to execute these concepts. The reason for this disparity is worth considering if we want to make Thiel's techno-vision our first principles for economic growth.

I'd propose: it was not the big projects in rocket science but the crass day-to-day business of ordinary people to meet ordinary peoples' needs that led the US to develop into the wealthiest country.

The idea that having a bunch of users that never pay you money is a symptom of an affluent society like ours, and although it seems kind of disgusting when you thing about it, is probably more essential to our economy than whatever DARPA and NASA are cooking up right now.
Right now I'm working on our company's new commissions payment system. Thanks to you I'm going to have nightmares tonight.
I didn't say that; I said I see a rise (also in Bangalore) of actual sweatshops (my definition of sweatshops is tainted by the west and especially the EU; I find workplaces where my chair touches my neighbours rather unworkable; I know actual manual labor sweatshops are much much worse than that) with coders; I never said 'Indian outsourcing companies are sweatshops' as I know that's not true at all. I just see a lot of them and it's growing, I believe. And of course it is an opinion; I don't know if anyone does research in this area. I just say what I hear (from friends who own/founded outsourcing companies who live in India, including Bangalore) and see.
This many years after Clipper, you are really claiming key escrow as a legal requirement for doing business in the US is a practical idea? You really don't know how many bad outcomes would have arisen from Clipper?
HTC announces the Re Camera, an action camera for the rest of us
The Linux kernel is tiny compared to a large company's need for source control. It easily fits on one machine. Think about what you'd need to put all the projects in an entire Linux distro in one source control system; that's more like the scale I'm talking about.

Linus built a tool that suits his needs well but he's not working at the same scale.
Dogecoin Ticker, an Android app to monitor Dogecoin prices
IIRC the data bandwidth requirements for any holographic projection that isn't static is astronomical. We'll have the display technology well before we have the bandwidth technology for animated holographic display at any reasonable frame rate and resolution.
All I can do is scratch my head, wondering what the reporter isn't saying. Just what is it that Firestone is doing differently? It sure appears to be working, so it would be great to replicate if possible.

Marbel is a company town of 80,000 ... a city more or less owned and run by Firestone, benevolently it appears, for nearly a century.

Perhaps they're better at guarding and enforcing their border ... effectively keeping themselves mostly isolated from disease vectors coming in.

Perhaps that helps them avoid being outnumbered by the sick and, more importantly, the ignorant [1]. After all, it's easy to keep an eye on those exposed when they're comparatively few and you have reliable information ... which comes from having a literate, educated population you've been working with for decades.

Perhaps it's also easier to get honest [2], voluntary compliance when you're a close-knit community and the infected are usually coming from the outside (and, again, are few in number).

It sure is interesting that while Firestone has hazmat suits intended for dealing with chemical spills, that infected nurse in Spain [3] says the blame goes to her Level 2 biosafety suit since it wasn't the preferred Level 4. Please correct me if I'm wrong ... I get the sense Firestone's suits aren't comparable to Level 4.

Contrast this to the success (lack thereof) of the CDC, WHO, RSF, and other aid organizations. Sadly, they're either overwhelmed or incompetant. So what's needed is more Firestones, really? That's interesting.

-----

[1] Yes, ignorance is massively lethal. See this story from August, of a mob who decided it would be fun to ransack and rob and already-overwhelmed Ebola clinic, stealing everything and taking it home ... all while taking Ebola home with them.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/16/man-without-a...

[2] As opposed to the diplomat who deceived his way into continuing on to a meeting of regional leaders ... thereby effectively causing the outbreak in Nigeria. And as opposed to the CDC today handing out fliers in airports and expecting voluntary compliance, in a sense informing travelers of how to lie in order to get into the USA where the good hospitals are.

[3] http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/10/07/paradigm-shif...
This Ingenious Augmented Reality Mirror Will Take Telepresence to a New Level
I think this is, to put it mildly, undemonstrated.

The KKK wore hoods for a reason. Sure, there were plenty of racists willing to be open about their views. But letting people be anonymous assholes greatly increases the awfulness.

Even gamers know it: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19