skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get the impression that the anti many eyes sentiment comes largely from non-programmers, am I wrong about that?

I can only speak for myself. I am a long-time programmer and security professional and I argue against the "many eyes" sentiment.

A significant portion of the projects that I assess code on I don't have the source. And yes, I find security-relevant bugs in that code.

There are claimed black boxes and "open" black boxes. On a linux system, do a "top" and tell me how many of those hundreds of open source programs the eyeballs have actually looked at and can testify to the absence of bugs or presence of trustworthiness?
Nope. This website is officially a reddit sub called /r/UberSucks. I'm gone.
When discussing becoming a successful company lots of us don't consider it obligatory to mention that you also shouldn't threaten people.

I tend to suspect that he was comfortable with the idea that some limits to what's ethically reasonable were assumed.

For lots of us the fact that ethics are a given is what makes them ethics.
Yes, Singapore Airlines gives you the ability to monitor your usage, as well as stop once you hit your prepaid limit.
Because, like Paul, he has the luxury to. If he ever held the tie-breaking vote he sure as hell would vote lockstep with the GOP. These people are "show libertarians," at best.
This is a company that pushed subprime loans on its drivers then substracts the debt from their income. That's called indentured servitude.
IT Systems Engineer
At the end of the video where Thiel compares AirBnB and Uber in challenging ethics, he clearly says that AirBnB is empowering communities whereas Uber is 'exploiting' Limo drivers. Sounds pretty negative language to me for Uber.
I feel your pain. My startup was featured on TechNet today, I was quoted saying how great Azure worked for us so far... lots of folks were checking us out, and then Azure went down hard, taking our production systems with them. Talk about negative publicity.
Oh come on, that's completely unfair. He's not sexist, he just doesn't like suffrage for anybody: "Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
Fabian, I'd like to chat as well. We too have had troubles finding reliable affiliate traction and have worked with companies like CJ to no success. jason@allscreenhq.com
Get a patent. Become a monopolist.

Is that unethical?

No.

Build a great product that everyone uses volunatrily.

Is that unethical?

No.

Commandeer the bay bridge and charge tolls.

Is that unethical? Sure

None of that is relevant to Uber.

Uber is involved in regulated businesses.

Those are monopolies by law (eg, taxi medalions in nYc)

the monopoly nature is not by choice of lyft or uber.

the issues about ethics involve how the process to enter those markets is being pursued.

That is not just a business question, but one of pr, lobbying, and legislative changes.

The process is what it is. Has nothing to do with Thiel.

How the game is played is another matter-- that's what he's commenting on.
A day in the life
I suspect a human config error. I don't see how else multiple services, in multiple regions, can all be affected at once.

Looking forward to the post mortem.
U.S. energy grid hacked 79 times this year
this, i'm not sure why it is hard to see that this is easy to implement without storing passwords in plaintext.
Uber is also the most staggering fund raising machine I have ever seen. Make of that what you will.
1) There's always some element of luck involved. After all, I can't control everything that happens. I played poker before trading. There are similarities and differences. You can tell when you get unlucky, like when you get aces cracked by two runners. It's hard to tell if you get unlucky when stopped out on a day trade.

2) At the very least, I don't think what I do is harmful to anyone.

I'd also like to add that I make many trades that are a better example of adding value. In the trade example of buying the dip in AAMRQ (prior blog post on my site), I am making the market more efficient (I'm saying this with the benefit of hindsight, of course). AAMRQ was moving adversely against its clear fundamental value (based on a stock merger deal with US Airways) and by buying it on weakness, I'm adding liquidity on the side that it should "eventually go to". This only works if I'm consistently right more than wrong. I also short garbage stocks that have no fundamental value, another example of trying to restore efficient prices. Price discovery is important so capital isn't allocated inefficiently.

3) Impossible to ban trading without destroying market liquidity. It's also way too difficult to define what trading is helpful vs. parasitic and have everyone agree on it. One could easily place a seemingly "outlawed" type of trade and claim to have sound intentions, which is what makes market manipulation difficult to prosecute.
You're not the only one in this comment thread to present this line of thinking, but I think you have explained it most explicitly, so I'll respond here.

I think that this is a very charitable interpretation of what Theil said in this interview. He doesn't talk about morality or mention it at all, except in a passing use of the term "ethically challenged." That term, and the others like it that he uses ("push the envelope," "disrupt") are all corporatespeak/Silicon Valleyspeak and euphemism.

The statement is well-tailored to be against Uber's actions without speaking specifically to cause, and that raises alarm bells to me. The thing is, Uber is taking just as much risk doing something both morally and legally wrong as they are doing something morally right and legally wrong. It's the same discussion and the same innuendos from the business end. It's the morality end that gets the short.
Flow doesn't have any semantic changes from JS, only semantic restrictions. For anything that is not types, Flow defers to JS. Dart defers to it's own specification.
Lyft's management hasn't looked anywhere near as competent as Uber's. They have gotten as far as they have by ridding in Uber's wake. Unless Uber destroys itself I don't see them pulling ahead.
> I don't think it's fair to say that Silicon Valley has a misogyny problem

Okay, let's flip it then. What's the canary? What are signs that an industry/organization/culture has a misogyny problem?

I'd honestly love to see someone posit a reasonable litmus test that the Valley(slash-our-industry) doesn't qualify for.
I got a gift of some Wearever ceramic pans a while back and I've fallen in love with them, despite having a complete set of All-clad cookware on hand. They're excellent value and have nice ergonomics as well.
My startup provides email marketing services. This is something we have always wanted to add into our product. We have looked at other services such as Litmus but, have not yet decided on a direction.

Some questions for you:

1) Can I white label it?

2) Do you provide an API that allows me to send you the html and you push back the screenshots or a URL to a whitelabel page

3) Your pricing page doesn't mention this: I can signup to the Unlimited Plan and then offer this as a feature (paid or free) to my users

4) Rendering time?

5) Will you be returning actual screenshots OR are you using some CSS trickery to show me how it will render theoretically.
How to Retarget Content to Facebook Custom Audiences
I think we all agree that progress on the technological front is important, but I disagree that you can ignore the political and cultural fronts.

Even if you have perfect encryption, if the government can demand anyone to decrypt anything at anytime (else go to jail) without due process or transparency, that's going to undermine the effectiveness of technological tools. Even modest legal protections for privacy will greatly increase the value of technological tools.

Along the same lines, what's the point of all our great tools if no one uses them? Some privacy tech is more successful than others, but why is most email sent as plain text? Technology has been around forever.

A lot can be said for increasing ease of use and so on, but until encrypted email is easier to use than unencrypted email (seems unlikely), what motivation do users have to switch if they don't value privacy? To get users to make the switch, they need to understand the value of privacy. This is a social problem, not a technological problem.
How to Become a Kickstarter Staff Pick
Why isn't this an electric skillet?
Should probably put a license, readme and maybe some contrib guidelines up.
Ongoing cost of the U.S. bases in Korea isn't likely an issue. You have to house those troops somewhere and bringing them back to the U.S. would require building and/or expanding of existing domestic facilities so the economics would make keeping the existing bases ideal.
I think it's a bit odd so many hackers view technology as even a possibility to their saving grace in this struggle. Were hackers the ones largely supporting actionable development efforts of Tor? Do they continue to? How many people do you know that use Tor for casual internet browsing vs spending more time on Facebook?

Take a look at your paycheck, expenses, taxes, and then contributions to technological solutions by-the-people, for-the-people. How many of you work at $job doing data-analysis for marketing schemes verses something useful to society. After all of that, then do some rough statistics on programmers that contribute to meaningful projects regarding cryptography (properly implemented, not talking about crap like 'secret') and freenet-type ideas. How many of us are going to quit our jobs to focus on this problem, how many of us could if we wanted to. Stop kidding yourselves, we're all literally paying for the work of evil-doers to subvert long extinguished ideas of privacy. Either adapt to survive or resist in a meaningful way, stop diluting yourselves with ideas of grandeur.

Tech people are nothing more than glorified marketers by-and-large. We handed the reigns of technology to those with capital, and the results are sickening. RMS was and will always be correct. The rest of you live in a vacuum fortified by paychecks and social support.
YourMechanic (YC W12) is hiring a product manager and full stack engineers
At YourMechanic, we are building the future of car maintenance. Our certified mechanics will go to your home or office to service your car at 20-30% less cost than a traditional dealer (convenience, lower cost and total transparency). Our customers love the service: http://www.yelp.com/biz/yourmechanic-san-francisco-2
We are live in 20 cities and growing rapidly.

Americans spend $80B every year on car maintenance and all they get is a shitty experience with zero transparency and ton of upselling. We are putting an end to this and you can help!

We are looking for a product manager and 4 full-stack engineers. To learn more, please email join at yourmechanic.com.

-- Location: SF or Mountain View --
> Sarah shined the light on various Uber failings of late

It's also relevant that she shone the light on various Uber failings, including several instances of misogyny (statements made by the Uber CEO, ads that sexualized women, etc.[0]).

It's not just that Lacy is a woman, though that's certainly part of it. It's relevant because this is how Uber chose to respond specifically to a woman complaining that they are misogynistic, not just to a reporter of unspecified gender accusing Uber of generally underhanded business practices.

[0] http://pando.com/2014/10/22/the-horrific-trickle-down-of-ass...
I appreciate rubygems.org, I visit the site every other day. I think a simple and functional design works better than this one. This looks over-designed and gets in its own way. The colors don't go well together. The old design works better for me, I find it more accessible and functional. Just giving feedback as someone that cares a lot about rubygems.org.
The hbgary stuff that trhway mentioned was what I was thinking of. It's sketchy, and the higher ups definitely don't seem to be above this sort of underhanded nonsense.
Salon du Cheval: une rencontre entre amis pour les amateurs d’équitation
It's a pet peeve of mine when a site puts a max length on characters (which is dumb itself) and then they don't put a max length on the password input later. Nothing but a regular workout for your 'forgot my password' feature.

It bothers me less now that I use a good password generator/safe, but still bothers me nonetheless.
please see my comment above. I don't think you have a solid handle on what makes a monopoly exist. Nor on the relation between the existence of a monopoly (earned or granted) and the concept of ethics. The existence of monopoly doesn't imply lack of ethics. Nor does the operation of a monopoly imply lack of ethics. That being said, you can un-ethically aquire a monopoly. And you can unethically abuse a monopoly position. But none of that makes any sense vis-a-vis you're approach. You need more resolution in your framework.
TheGlobe.Com
keeping the load light? <html><head></head><body>The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.</body></html>
DTV decoding is really processor intensive, and is really only now possible on the fastest processor. You can do it in an FPGA, but those are expensive. ASIC are still the cheapest way to go. It's like hardware vs software H.264 decoding; night and day speed and efficiency difference.
I see it more along the lines of being a hypothesis. We do not have nearly enough evidence to put it off the table, even though it is not the most likely explanation.
> You can be sure North and South will one day unify.

How can we be sure? We know countries unify and we also know that countries split never to be unified again.
I understand. I guess it depends on the level you are hiring at. If you need someone who has specific knowledge then they are probably too expensive, but if you can train someone, then you can probably hire someone with very limited experience and willing to grow with a company.

Good luck on your venture. Exciting times ahead for you and it's inspirational for the rest of us. Feel free to shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss the C#/MVC aspect.
The points you bring up are actually no longer huge problems for Uber

<Uber VP: we could spend $1M to take revenge on journalists>

That was yesterday, right?
Not to sound more cynical than the situation warrants, but in this case I'm not particularly surprised or disappointed. Congress is clueless and more concerned with partisan politics and re-election fundraising.

We should be (and many are) working to secure ourselves so that Congress and the legal system must work to catch up to the possibilities of citizens to protect themselves on their own terms: good end-to-end encryption, true anonymity when it's needed, and as much open and auditable code as we can get.

They're not going to give security and privacy to us — they wouldn't even if they could. So we make it ourselves, slowly, surely, and publicly, and maybe in a few years they'll be the ones that are outraged.
In general it is not a choice, but a question of numbers. Software businesses tend to benefit from having many customers, which requires growth and capital. A consultancy that develops and uses software tools might go the bootstrap route. Do the numbers and then decide. What does it cost to add and maintain a customer? Would you get more customers with a better feature set? How smooth is the API, interface, and documentation?

I have a nice consultancy that developed many unique software products. Over the years I have not been able to maintain them. If I had taken outside money I could have taken those tools to market and probably grown beyond my current stagnation point.
Trevor McKendrick – Finding a Hole in the Market
I saw an example of that on a JavaScript-related site recently, where a guy's username was aaa...aaa several hundred characters long, causing a ludicrous horizontal scroll bar. You'd think it would be easy enough to say upfront during account creation that both usernames and passwords are limited to x characters.
Not to sound more cynical than the situation warrants, but in this case I'm not particularly surprised or disappointed. Congress is clueless and more concerned with partisan politics and re-election fundraising.

We should be (and many are) working to secure ourselves so that Congress and the legal system must work to catch up to the possibilities of citizens to protect themselves on their own terms: good end-to-end encryption, true anonymity when it's needed, and as much open and auditable code as we can get.

They're not going to give security and privacy to us — they wouldn't even if they could. So we make it ourselves, slowly, surely, and publicly, and maybe in a few years they'll be the ones that are outraged.

(pasted from the other thread where I wrote this before I saw this one)
Microsoft, you've got to be kidding me. Just tried opening a billing ticket, completed the forms in detail, attached screenshots, clicked Submit...

'Unable to Submit Request
We are unable to complete the incident submission process at this time. Please refer to this page for phone numbers to call for Azure support.'
nonsense. Just because people and companies have contributed new features and capabilities to the language doesn't make your point. It's not a horrible language, any more than any language. Of course it has things that aren't ideal, but it's highly expressive and if you know what you're doing it can be elegant.
Eddy Cue Promotes Apple Pay
When I have a one-time computation job that takes an hour to write and two hours to run in Perl, but in C takes 10 hours to write and half an hour to run, then Perl is faster than C.

And these one-time/rare/short jobs are much more frequent than intense, high throughput C code like the nginix web server or the node javascript interpreter.
AI can truly ruin our lives and end our existence. it is easier than you think
Scariest wreck I ever had: maybe two miles an hour on a bike path. Slipped in wet leaves, loud bang, bright flash, and the world was on its side. Later on I figured it out: even with the helmet on I'd hit hard enough to lose that little bit of time.

Helmet, always, every time.
Let's flip it again; what are signs that various female dominated occupations have a misandry problem in the same fashion? The thing we were just discussing with avions de chasses, why is that intrinsically misogynistic while the similarly themed ManServant startup is not intrinsically misandrist? Why are the attacks on the former a blaring cacophony and the attacks on the latter practically non-existent?

I don't think it's reasonable to actually claim that something so broad can actually exist unless it's utterly global. It's individuals that make choices on their acceptable behaviours, not the industries in which they are employed.

Some individuals are misogynistic or misandrist, and they might be drawn to industries where their own gender is dominant, but using that as a petard to attack those industries in entirety and everyone involved within them strikes me as missing the problem entirely.
Should I rootkit my own machine?
Two weeks ago a scary thing happened to me, I left my laptop in a coffee shop, and attempts to locate it have not been successful. Basically I know someone out there is cruising my keyboard. The only thing I can think is, I should have installed a rootkit on my own machine. What do other people do to protect your data, or have a little fun, in the event your laptop is stolen / lost?
This is good advice if you are going to do it.

I'd argue though that the best option is to offer them a dedicated instance of your app and secure access via VPN (as someone else already suggested). Having the app installed within their datacenter will likely require you to have two different deployment models, one for your standard usage and one for their datacenter. It may even require you to make custom code modifications to work around limitations or security settings that do on their "standard" OS images. So once you go into their datacenter, you need to provide prepackaged deployments that have a configuration tool etc. Not saying any of this is insurmountable but you have to make sure you properly charge and expect it to take far longer than you anticipate as has been said.
Yeah, I know about hbgary. They definitely have a tainted public perception - I just question the extent to which people seem to vilify them.

Regarding ethics - absolutely. It's also harder to notice when you're being paid quite a bit. It's a pity our profession doesn't have some explicit oaths along the lines of the Hippocratic oath. While it wouldn't stop anyone out to willfully do evil, it might at least make our the average programmer a little more thoughtful regarding values and morals and how they apply to their livelihood.
CodeConnect – Code Bubbles in Visual Studio
You will, however, be bound by current 'lawful intercept and storage' laws. If you provide a remote computing service (email, hosting, cloud storage, fitness tracking, etc) you will be bound by 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f) [1]. If you provide telecommunications you will be bound by CALEA [2]. You will be bound by the Stored Communications Act and by the Patriot Act, and you will be bound to provide access to the core of your service and/or your private keys if you are given an NSL.

Essentially - you can not provide secure communication as a service.

If you try to provide it as a product it's more blurry. With precedents like Blackberry, RSA and Skype you need to make sure you're operationally able to deal with extreme levels of leverage and influence.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2703

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
In addition to the frontend issue mod mentioned, it often happens accidentally without any errors or warnings when using a VARCHAR in a relational database, which have a maximum length. If the username field is VARCHAR(20), the application ignores database truncation warnings, and the developer didn't think to check the username length before storing it in the database, it'll truncate a 21-character username without you knowing. This comes down to the devs using sensible field lengths and handling edge cases.
I agree, bribing (sorry, I meant lobbying) polticians seem to be the easiest way for Uber to get out of the situation right now.
For what it's worth, I've been watching several Azure-hosted sites that I control and they've been coming back online sequentially (and are all back online now). Whatever they're fixing, it seems to be taking some time, but is progressing steadily at a good pace in the last hour.
Object Oriented ANSI C (1993) [pdf]
It also sends a message to China that if the regime falls, China won't have to pay for the aftermath.
The trend of using ultrathin fonts everywhere will be short-lived and date interfaces quickly. It's a trend inspired totally by the mere fact that high dpi displays can render them without pixelated artifacts, and not because they make sense for design or readability on a fundamental level.

Thin weight type has uses in good design, but the way it's being applied ad nauseum today is a gimmick.
"The remarks attributed to me ... do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company's views or approach," Michael later said. "They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them."
Uber, a Startup Going So Fast It Could Miss a Turn
On the page for a gem [0] there is a lot of padding. It makes the page feel larger than it needs to be to present the little information it has.

[0] e.g. https://rubygems.org/gems/aws-mfa
Hasn't Cisco already solved this problem by doing the cooking at the factory? That would be an additional advantage of the sealed bag. It's basically a short term canning process.