skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Choose two? How do I pick security and convenience without freedom? I can't think of any way giving up freedom makes those easier. Blind trust can make me ignore security problems, but I can have blind trust and freedom, or lack of freedom without blind trust.

I feel like "security or convenience" is a better representation of the choice, even if it's not as cute. Freedom is off to the side.
Still hard to have a carnal comprehension of these. I had a tiny feeling of vertigo though.
Whether or not that something is better, however, depends very much on the use case. RedPhone and TextSecure are designed for very specific use cases (phone calls and text messages, respectively), whereas GnuPG is designed to be general-purpose and universal regardless of use case. Most jarringly, neither of those programs address email or file encryption/verification, and thus do nothing in GnuPG's primary realms of usage; by comparing them, you're basically comparing apples and crowbars.
Corruption and inequality are not threats to the existence of our species.

Also, this is a common illogical argument, akin to "how can you own a smartphone when kids are starving in Africa?"

Your smartphone is just another made up necessity to waste your money on...
Love your tagline!
Watch a Drone Save a Toy Helicopter in a Delicate Rescue Operation
One way to find out what is real very quickly is to apply for a loan to buy a home.
Paris already bans drones at night and requires a permit to operate during the day. The fourth sentence in the article states this...

It's far easier to "weaponize" your car and park it by a target. You'll do far more damage and be much less conspicuous than a drone operator who needs to maintain a line of sight to the drone. Yet cars are not banned.

Anything lightweight you would weaponize a drone with is already a monitored substance. The privacy and nuisance concerns associated with drones are far more significant than the threat of weaponized drones, which is really quite ludicrous and impractical.
Within my lifetime the current antibiotics will become useless

Also, bananas will be extinct by 2008, and there won't be enough oil or food.
> You need to be ready to do tree traversal, detect cycles in lists, sort and search, create a hash, find shortest paths in graphs.

Maybe it's because my focus is web, but I have never had to do any of these. My eyes typically glaze over any time someone mentions algorithms. Not because of lack of interest, but because I'm self-taught, have only had one or two academic CS classes, and have never taken a course on algorithms.

When we're hiring developers we do have a "take-home" test of sorts but you can do it in an hour or less. This is prior to our in-person general job/fit interview (my boss) and the technical interview/review (me).
Unless of course if you put in your grant application that the code will be licensed under GPLv3 or any other license that requires submittors to provide a license for patents.
Which is why I proposed that UI: it works automatically. While using the system, it simply indicates to you as you compose the message "Yes, the email address you are sending mail to belongs to the person you intend to message" or "No, that email address belongs to someone else" or "This is a brand new email address." This way when you are emailing your lawyer to set up a will, or you email your accountant with your tax info, you can be sure that (a) you are emailing just the right person and (b) that only they can read the communication.

While setting up the system, you are simply required to link your identity. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GMail, HN, the government all should allow you to easily link your identity. This should be a normal part of your account creation (this can tie in nicely with another change: getting rid of passwords and using a browser UI for identifying yourself a la Persona, but PGP based). Basically when signing up for Twitter, it should optionally let you upload one of your public keys (via a nice browser UI no less). Twitter (Facebook, GMail, etc.) would then expose a nice API for querying by public key fingerprint: "Who has 0xDEADBEEF?" => "@DeadBeef". Revocation, key updates, all that should be automatic: you revoke your public key and issue a replacement, all your services update automatically.

This is the point where lots of people will raise concerns about privacy: "This means Twitter now must have access to my GMail account! WTF?!". No. This process must be voluntary and optional. If you want to have 200 different identities online, go for it. I don't care to know your real name, I just care to know that I am talking only to the person I intend to talk to. Think emailing a well known developer on GitHub, having never met them. You don't need their real name, you are only interested in them in so far as they publish OSS on GitHub. This allows you to prove that github.com/example is @example on Twitter, example@example.com, example@gmail.com, and HN user "example".

And the benefit to "regular Joe" is that when he emails his accountant, he can now send his credit card number and SSN without fear of eavesdropping.
Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedish Navy?
1. Check your uni's regulations around that. Mine required companies to set an expiration date after November 1st, and to give all offers at least 1 week.

2. I'd just tell them you need more time (1-2 weeks minimum). Recruiting is expensive- if they really want you then they will be flexible regardless of "company policy". It's not worth it to lose you and have to interview 10 more candidates. This works better for smaller companies, the large ones tend to have too many applicants to care.
Right. The one thing that (tangentially related) is the quote "The prospect of substantially increased financial risk would discourage universities and other patent holders lacking extensive litigation resources from legitimately defending their patents".

Do universities really see themselves as the ones "lacking extensive litigation resources"? I think they don't understand the nature of 'small inventors'.
Activator 1.3.0 released
I was shocked when I first visited Silicon Valley. It looked like Skokie, IL.

Arlington, VA is an example of a suburb who successfully created a densish environment by building a subway corridor.
> Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice.

It's really just dumb luck. One thinks one can extract a lesson from this hindsight, but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it?

> Do what excites you and put your energy into that.

Absolutely.
This article hits close to home.

I spent a day at Oculus when they were evaluating my product (pre Facebook acquisition) and we were able to play with some of their prototype headsets. They had games, space sims, etc to check out. But the most shocking simulation was just a bedroom, that was detailed out to the 9's. The developer was articulate around textures and shades and it felt like I was in a real bedroom. Taking off the headset, I felt shocked that that I wasn't removed from my virtual world, it felt like an extension of the real world. It really made me question what reality was and how sensory organs can be manipulated to the point to think something is real when it isn't.

Another example is I am starting to feel a connection to digital bits that probably shouldn't exist. I have built systems that have drawn a connection to my identity through media that I collect. This system has been up for 8 years (over a quarter of my life) and it has recently had a catastrophic failure. I genuinely feel sad, and feel that I am missing a piece of myself, my identity.

I agree with the article that virtual worlds, social media, and digital identity are skewing perceptions of reality. It will be interesting to see what is on the other side of tunnel of these advancements. Hopefully it will improve humanity and reality, not cloud or hurt it.
Other worth watching, to all those who live by "I don't care, I have nothing to hide mantra:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/

Spoiler: it's not what you consider worth hiding, it's how the government will interpret it.
Gooooo us! Whispernet for everything!
>> Did MS start out to just write BASIC for the Altair?

Yes, in 1975. The DOS deal with IBM didn't come around until 1980, Excel showed up in 1982, Word in 1983, and Windows in 1984.
Really depends on how much effort you put into it.
I have seen this last year in HN, now looks totally different version 1.0.0 :)
> Airlines are not one of them, afaik

Oh the big consolidated IATA airlines are raking it in, don't worry about them

"On a per passenger basis, [IATA] airlines will make a net profit of $7.08 in 2015. That is up on the $6.02 earned in 2014 and more than double the $3.38 earnings per passenger achieved in 2013."

http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2014-12-10-01.aspx

Incidentally, Ryanair are frequently not the cheapest. They rely on people assuming that; sometimes IATA behemoths are actually cheaper.
Tired of Safari, but for different reasons. Mobile Safari is probably the biggest reason I don't want to use iPad or iPhone. No reflow of text after zoom, and I don't want to move back and forth right and left to read larger size text. Very useful when reading while walking or when website text is just too small. Reading list doesn't replace good zoom text reflow.

I have an iPhone, but I use it so rarely it's sometimes out of battery for weeks. I guess it's too "one size fits all" device to me. Some things are deceptively nice in it, it's smooth... but it doesn't respect my wishes.

Using Opera on Android instead. Perfect mobile browser for a mobile phone after enabling flow option in the settings (Text wrap).

Another app I couldn't live without is f.lux or equivalent. I wish iOS could have it without jailbreak.
nor does it allow you to search for specific times i.e. if i want to go somewhere for the weekend, flights at 6am on friday are not that useful...
Save money when not drinking coffee ?
"time of work" meaning the person will work for you or your company for an amount of hours or for a specific project until it is done.

As an employer.
love it!

Fellow SVG nut : https://s3.amazonaws.com/macslow/index.html
> You know you're one of only a few people in the world who is in a position to do that, right? Anyone else would (rightfully!) get torn to shreds on HN by tptacek or yourself. And I say "rightfully" because it is very likely that other people would screw up some central aspect to the security of any new product that claims security.

This attitude is why GnuPG (and other PGP implementations) are in a position to be criticized by the Moxies of the world. Is there some particular reason why anybody outside of some recognized elite should be discouraged from at least trying to create a better, improved system? Yeah, they'll probably fail in a lot of cases, but if the world really wants a modern, easy-to-use alternative to PGP (a real alternative, not use-case-specific alternatives like RedPhone and TextSecure; encrypted/signed email is still a valid use case that both those things blissfully ignore, by the way), this sort of attitude - that anyone outside of a select few rightfully deserves to be scolded for trying to make better crypto - is lethally toxic to that goal.
While the level of corruption may not be that much bigger, the ability of the corrupt to cause harm has greatly increase through use of modern technology.
I would have thought you are correct. Harvard is sitting on $32B and Stanford $18.7B in tax-free endowments, the largest and 3rd largest endowments respectively.

However, Yale is on the list and they have $20.7B (2nd largest). It does seem disingenuous for Yale to claim "[t]he prospect of substantially increased financial risk would discourage universities and other patent holders lacking extensive litigation resources from legitimately defending their patents." Not a whole lot of businesses are sitting on +$20B in cash period, much less +$20B tax free.

As a side the top 10 school endowments in 2013 = ~$141B.[1]

[1] http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list...
So do you take his thoughts seriously or not? Do you now think AI researchers are engaging in unethical behavior since they don't care about AI safety?
In fullscreen mode drag a tab somewhere so that a new window gets created. This new window will have some vertical offset broken and can't be fixed by anything you do (black stripe on the bottom in fullscreen mode, lots of strange behaviour)
Email as a Network
Real Resume Examples from 1000's of Top Paid Professionals
46) Despite interesting premises, many articles will just be unedited stream of conscious fluff pieces. Wildly inconsistent in quality and often submitted with little concern beyond fulfilling a certain word count.
Show HN: Create a mobile adventure game for your next date
This was initially a valentine's day surprise for my girlfriend. I got a lot of positive feedback, and have been testing the concept with ad traffic to see if there's broader appeal. I myself am not convinced this is worth pursuing.

The premise of the game is quite simple: your significant other completes real-life missions (e.g. go on a hike with you), earns tokens, and then redeems the tokens for prizes (e.g. dinner and a movie).

You come up with the missions, tokens rewarded, and prizes and input them into the system. You then send them a link to the game that they open on their phone. The two of you work together to complete the missions. As they go through each mission, you use your own phone to mark them off as completed.

URL: http://katiesbigadventure.com

Pros:
- Fairly novel idea
- Potential for viral growth (people will be sharing their adventures)

Challenges:
- Hard to easily explain concept
- Low potential for recurring revenue (people will likely do it once)
- Competing for attention with higher margin products (jewelry, flowers, etc). Drives up ad rates.

I'd love to get the HN take. Is this worth pursuing? Do you see any potential?
Why I Want Text-File Preferences for Every Application I Use
Analyzing a Web graph with 129B edges using FlashGraph
They won't give it until you're a long way through their script. They always try to deflect questions like that by telling you how wonderful they are, or what they're going to do for you. They know the risks of giving their business name too early, and craft the script accordingly.
> With the initial key exchange out of the way, both parties can then continue communicating with an OTR-style protocol as usual. Since the server never hands out the same prekey twice (and the client would never accept the same prekey twice), we are able to provide forward secrecy in a fully asynchronous environment.

So, my laptop is off-line, and I have access to a recipients public key. How do I encrypt my message, before moving it to a machine that's on-line for sending via smtp?

This isn't really asynchronous in the sense that email is (stop-forwards-stop-forward). Nor does it appear to work for writing and encrypting an sms while on an air-plane (the message will only be encrypted when the pre-key can be retrieved).

It doesn't seem quite fair to claim (or rather imply) that the scheme does for email what pgp does.

It also carries more state around (on the "server" and on the "client") so it's not decentralized. It might be closer to pgp than classic otr, but it's not really a replacement for pgp as far as I can tell.
Okay, both of the companies were relatively smaller organizations. My university unfortunately has no posted requirement on offers and leaves it up to the employer (this is pretty obnoxious because I know there are other companies that do this 2-3 day crap to my peers). I'll try to push for a week as I think that'll give me enough time to respond.
The PS2 Slim's disc mechanism is the same as the PS1's (except that it spins faster).
Has privacy become a luxury? Phone companies charging users for security
There are way more candidates than vacancies for some firms. But there is way more work to do than competent individuals to do it. So companies will always be chasing the top talent. It's kind of a love triangle.
I'd recommend you to bite the bullet and work through "Programming in Scala 2E" by Odersky, Spoon and Venners. It's a pretty thorough and systematic introduction to the language and its philosophy.
$7 on a ticket costing hundreds is hardly "raking it in".
Clickable: http://katiesbigadventure.com
How many mobile developers/shops do you know that don't target iOS? How many do you know that are iOS only? The latter number likely dwarfs the former. This isn't about end users. Its about the fact that if a standard doesn't roll out on iOS at this point, it won't see a ton of adoption.
Only if you assume that the last time they stole the Gemalto keys was in 2011. The Snowden documents themselves go up to 2012.
How many times can he make this same blog post with different wording?
Anyone who tries to predict timeline of future technologies: psychohistory didn't work.
Afrobios – A Replacement for Echonest API (African Based Platforms)
Plus, oh, finding and keeping enough people in the study willing to get 1-3 blood draws a day???

Yow. I thought that by Phase III safety was pretty well established and you'd be looking for efficacy endpoints, surrogate or real. Emphasis on endpoint ... but I guess not.

But ... if vague memory serves, from the overview of some Phase III trials, maybe not the first one, I remember more like hundreds of participants. Maybe not quite a thousand, but a lot.
The main problem is that most of the time arguments about humanity obviating itself are couched in a framework where the only thing that has advanced, in this instance artificial intelligence, is the science needed to make it a reality. This has never been the case, which is why you see so much eye rolling when arguments like this (or some of the others here about robots replacing human workforces) are made.

How can we say that by the time we have such wondrous machines that we as a species will not have found ways to move ourselves forward to a place on equal footing with whatever we create? Why do we assume that humanity won't move past our current societal constructs when we introduce new actors into the mix? These are the questions we should be asking when someone writes or speaks about the perceived dangers of some future event.

In light of this, while some of the dissent may seem opinionated, I would argue that the original premise of the article is somewhat opinionated itself. I think it goes without saying that most of us would prefer that humanity not obviate itself - but when we think about it do we really believe that the technology to create hyper intelligent machines will come before our society adapts to handle them? The answer may be yes, but lets not pretend such technology will be born into a world that looks like today.
Reasoning based on concrete examples is easier to convey to other human meat brains for understanding and retention. If you start off with "big picture" or "vision" you're already into meaningless buzzword territory, and any discussion quickly derails practical advice/progress/suggestions.

Examples first, details later.

The Altair->Microsoft example also emphasizes the minimum condition necessary. What seems small but could be big (given the proper market growth and a mother who's also an IBM executive to get you free connections+business)?

Also see this great example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082844
If the "greatest threat to humanity" is something everybody agrees neither exists nor is imminently about to be created, we are pretty lucky. I wish that were the case, but it clearly isn't.

But what I absolutely don't understand is the logic of predicting the apocalypse. You can either be wrong or dead – there is zero upside.
Many successful companies started as university startups working with federal funds. If the university was not able to patent, then the startups could never happen. Since startups are credited with being the innovation driver in the commercial world, killing off all of these startups would have a stifling effect on innovation in the US.

A similar situation is with the small business innovative research program (SBIR). The main purpose of this program is to provide federal funds to perform research in order to help new small businesses grow, which in turn become large companies or get acquired by large companies. If all federal research dollars ended up resulting in no patents for the companies performing the research, then these startups wouldn't exist, and the purpose of the program would be destroyed.

Everyone agrees that public dollars should result in public benefit. However, there is more public benefit to be had by creating lots of startups than there is by creating a bunch of non-patent publications.

The US thrives due to it's technological advancement, which is driven by startups. Let's be careful to not destroy that benefit.
Thats understandable. Walmarts brand is pretty much defined as "We treat our employees poorly, but look how cheap things are."

I wouldn't consider either of those factors good selling points for an employer.
Performance of DQN in the Game Space Invaders [video]
Looks like a great way to get sandboxing!
Better HN search with bash
The interface for Algolia search is horrible for picking date ranges so I made this little bash function to fix it (noting that "open" is an alias to "xdg-open" for me on Linux).

Might work in other shells too.

function hn() {
if test $# -lt 1 || test $# -gt 3; then
echo "Usage: $0 <query> [start=1970] [end=now]"
echo "start and end are ISO dates like 2014-03-23."
return 1
fi
query=$1
start=$(test $# -gt 1 && date --date "$2" +%s || date --date @0 +%s)
end=$(test $# -gt 2 && date --date "$3" +%s || date +%s)
url="https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&type=story&query=${query}&dateRange=custom&dateStart=${start}&dateEnd=${end}"
echo $url
open "$url"
}
This story covers it. FBI, not CIA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...
While the tremor thing might be a factor, it's by far not the main reasons why games need higher framerate.

Games are fundamentally different from films for a simple fact:

Games show reactions to your input, films are only consumed passively.

This means for games it's not only important how the stuff on the screen looks and moves, but how much time passes between you pressing a button, and a thing moving. At 60 FPS that time is ~16 ms, which is almost unnoticable. At 30 FPS that time is ~32 ms, twice as long, and for people used to 60 FPS extremely noticable as a form of sluggishness on the controls. (Although for some games that have the gameplay with some inbuilt sluggishness that effect disappears, Dark Souls for example.)
This is why it matters that we say GNU/Linux, not just "Linux". Android and Chromebook run the Linux kernel. As well as Firefox OS AFAIK.