skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Startup Lessons from Homejoy
During startup school class the lesson I enjoyed the most was Lesson 4: Building products, talking to users and growing. I watched the video many times.

http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec04/

Homejoy's recent exit is quite interesting and valuable. What lessons do you see there? Any ideas are welcome.
Of course you did. Large companies have no vested interest in building systems that do the "right thing" for you as defined by tech types like us who are arguably more sensitive on this subject than most people.

They are building services that take your information and try to do something interesting enough with it to make it worthwhile...and why is it on by default? Because they want to make money off of the new features and deep integration with your information.

This isn't news. But it certainly may be another excuse to have the exact same conversation that nothing will come from.

Never mind that data generated and collected from cell phone usage will always make the privacy impinging features of your laptop look tame in comparison.

Never mind that the only way to stop companies from doing this is through the political processes that everyone seems to have written off.

EDIT: Downvoting because someone disagrees with the principal argument of the post is lame. Cheers.
It's the kind of thing that is more useful in an image-based language. It can be very useful for debugging a running instance you've invested a lot of effort in. I've never used it in production code though.

You could compare it to using a debugger to change the value of a variable in C or C++ in order to proceed with a program's run. For instance, you might notice that a your program should have updated a variable to correspond to some other data that was updated, so you make a mental note to add some code that will do that, manually change the variable yourself, and proceed.

Edit: this post is probably a response to the recent post on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9928485
Ask HN: How can i verify perfect secrecy of a cryptosystem?
i'm playing with an encryption algorithm (demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1kABn5dfXc). how can i prove it's information-theoretically secure?
Hoverboard by Lexus
> Is treason the criminal act against your country and "treachery" more personal, betraying a friend?

"treachery" is the more general term, that would apply to anything from personal betrayal to particularly underhanded business dealings. It's roughly equivalent to "betrayal", though more emphatic.

"treason" can technically refer to the same thing (you could say "this is treason" to refer to some personal act of betrayal, though it would come across as hyperbole), but in practice it almost exclusively refers to the crime.
A lot of the discussion was focused on the use of a crop of the Lena image. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704629

>I was shocked the first time I saw what the full picture looked like.

Me too! Ironically I probably wouldn't have ever seen the uncropped image if not for the controversy around the common use of the cropped version.
How to Work with AngularJS: The Ultimate Guide
This is why i think Tim Cook is genius for marketing Apple as the anti "We sell all your data and spy on you" companies.
That's a new one on me.

Bitlocker keys can be backed up to onedrive if you want, but you can also store them in a TPM or a smartcard (physical or virtual).
The idea of an operating system integrating with services like that still bothers me even though it is done in Mac OS X and Ubuntu.
Portland, OR protest blocks Shell Oil Vessel
I've seen code that wrote directly to the vtable pointer (in c++). The code knew what it was doing was dangerous, but jeez. Always made me uncomfortable.

FWIW I usually just use an enum. Easy to change on the fly, easy on the cache, easy to serialize, doesn't require indirection, ... Lots of benefits. Pisses off switch-phobic programmers, though.
>Most of those issues arise because you don't have a way of knowing that the person in front of you is different. At least Spock had his pointed ears to signal that he wasn't human. His acceptance by the crew of the Enterprise was in large part due to the relationships he was able to develop with his shipmates. Those relationships would arguably not have been possible if they had not known how he was different.

That can be a problem since telling people you have a mental illness is usually a career limiting move at most companies.
Sometimes a Controller Is Just a Controller [video]
I didn't realise either until I read that, fwiw :-)
Despite all of that, Floyd's attack to regain the yellow jersey after his bad day in the 2006 tour is still one of my favourite tour memories. Drugs or no, his ride that day was really entertaining.
That needed to be said. Thank you, jerf, I couldn't have said it better. I am sick and tired of people romanticising disabilities, or even worse, denying their existence. I am not surprised that some people on Hackernews are secluded enough that they can delude themselves into thinking that disability is always a tradeoff and the disabled must be a genius in some way.
^ hopefully i didn't sound too confident! Thanks for explanations.
Today's tools are certainly better. We had conference calls (and internal-only email) but basically none of the other tools you list. And maybe if a company had a real remote worker culture, it would be natural to slip into it even as a new hire. It's just a bit hard for me to imagine based on my own experience. But, as I say, different time and different culture.
There's a lot of text in there. Seems complicated (I haven't actually read it since I don't use HipChat).
Student housing Groningen, for years already: http://www.studenten.net/lifestyle/lifestyle/16842/wonen_in_... ( Dutch with pictures )
Oh, you're talking about a policy limitation, not a technological one. (And if you're talking about the DOE or NSF/Teragrid/XSEDE clusters, then you're probably right. Haven't touched those in years -- and even when I did, I wasn't doing anything crazy.)
Calico adds simple, highly efficient networking policy to Docker 1.7 release
How to Stay Sane While Working Remotely
I don't intend on leaving any of these on when I install Windows 10 but some of these seem to correspond directly with the whole "Cortana as personal assistant" thing. And there is whole separate system for controlling what Cortana knows about you.
Docker does not work with unix domain sockets
TL;DR: Numerous reasons:

1. 1024768 was already the XGA standard, and increasing WXGA to 1366768 was the easiest way to do this and retain the height of 768. If the height changed, other (small) things would have had to be changed.

2. The bizarre aspect ratio, 683:384, reduces to 16.008:9, which is very close to the common aspect ratio of 16:9. 1365.33768 would give 16:9 and a fractional pixel.

3. The resolution of 1360768 is uncommon, but video data can be stored entirely in an 8MiB memory chip. Adding the extra 6 lines requires a slightly more expensive 16MiB chip. Not sure why they didn't go with 1360*768.
Potato, potato. I don't make the rules. I just think "embarrassingly parallel" sounds like a college freshman trying way too hard to sound smart and cool.
Awesome congrats for achieving that figure. Its not that easy to reach that milestone. Plus I dont think everyone would surely upload a pic daily.

Some would have surely missed some day. True? Any data on that?
Okay. Good to know. So, when
I decide to upgrade from Windows
XP, I will install the legal DVD
I have of Windows 7 and stay with
that for years!

No Windows 8, 10, etc. for me until
Microsoft makes some fantastically strong and
solid statements about compatibility
with old software, security, and privacy.
Victoria Taylor joins WeWork as director of digital community
You should watch the show before you speak about it. They make fun of each other, they make fun of Americans, they make fun of the Welsh, they make fun of people from the North, they make fun of the French, the Germans, Mexicans, Africans, Koreans and many more. Literally everyone. The show was about them pushing limits. They were cast as hyperbole factories. They were caricatures of middle-aged white English guys.
Then stop using them. Problem solved.

On an unrelated note, we're gonna need you to come in and work for free this weekend.
Yes. Unless the site owner agreed to accept all liability for malware potentially dropped by ads. They would need funds in escrow, and a claims mechanism.
Imagine the behavior profiler learning enough to notice trends and even changes in groups. Imagine if it could identify enough to determine people who had previously been sexually victimized. I wonder how much that type of data could sell for.

My problem with all of this prfiling/bio-metrics is an extension of the problem with retinal scanning. It isn't a question of if it works or not, but of what information other than identity does it leak.
It took me FOREVER to dig this up. My memory is better than my browser history!

Re: YouTube vs Artists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936257
OSHA SIC Codes Not Updated for the Internet
A somewhat-related idea: posting web forms to Trello http://boardthreads.com/
Or notices from law enforcement, in the event that their exit node is used to commit a crime.
> Some companies like Fidelity don’t work with small businesses.

This is true and something we set out to fix at Justworks. Because we are a PEO we have tons of small customers that get access to 401k much earlier in their life cycle as a business than they would otherwise. For instance, we have some 2 person startups using Fidelity funds (as well as Vanguard etc.). The space is definitely ready for some innovation, though, so it's nice to see a YC company working on it.
I'm wondering how much of it is related to the fact that Safari just does less? I'm sure more work needs to be done to make the browser more HTML5 compliant, for example. How much of the HTML5 parts would Safari wouldn't process at all and just ignore them?
That one was a phone screen, so no it was not the deepest technical dive ever. But in fairness a 1-hour interview is rarely the deepest technical dive possible. I normally pose some big problem like "design a system that accomplishes X at high scale" and then drill into some area iteratively until we're discussing fairly specific details. At the high level I'm looking for the candidate to recognize tradeoffs between centralized/distributed designs, sanely choose the major components, deal with stateful and stateless components, recognize security tradeoffs, etc. As we drill in we might talk about data partitioning, georeplication, or high availability and implementation tradeoffs there. We might get down to the level of something like handling out-of-order change notifications. Rarely do I drill down to the level of file I/O or memory management strategies.
Nice work. Some suggestions from my personal experience using Strava:

* Most runs are training runs so they carry their purposes instead of full-effort race simulation therefore predications based on training runs are usually a bit off.

* Having said that, Strava supports tagging runs which are races; not sure if the API can expose the tags but it would be useful to do a past race based prediction.

* Other than race time predictions, another area of interest is to evaluate training quality. A Chrome plugin, StravistiX does some of it but I'd like to see more such as using VDOT based on Jack Daniels' running formula which have their meanings in training.
Living in a digital world is changing the way our brains function
No love from HN? Bummer...
See also an episode from The X-Files - Kill Switch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_%28The_X-Files%29
> and why is it on by default?

Because Cortana would be useless without it and that's a big user-facing feature of Windows 10.
Major flaw could let lone-wolf hacker bring down huge swaths of Internet
What if they click the button before the script loads?
Thanks to all of you!
It encrypts locally and sends encrypted data to "the cloud".
Just as a word of caution. I used to do exactly this and my flagging privileges were "taken away", and this was with flagging at most 5 stories a day.

My flagging privileges have since been magically returned though, so maybe I was on a year long time out? :)

Thanks for doing this by the way!
I use a local account on Windows 8 (which is pretty much configured to run like Windows 7) but that completely keeps me from being able to use the Windows Store and therefore any of those universal apps.

I'm sure if I choose the same option in Windows 10 a large part of the OS will be completely closed off.
To say nothing of the people who want to limit one's rights based on mental health. (While it sounds like a good idea in theory, in practice it will lead to people hiding any issues.)
A minimal documentation for ES6 Features with examples
See http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/07/29/wind-nos/ ; "Windows 10 automatically encrypts the drive its installed on and generates a BitLocker recovery key. That’s backed up to your OneDrive account." Together with the ToS: "We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services."
Encode mpeg-dash with widevine modular drm
Upon seeing these options in the installation, I thought I downloaded beta version that needs these for feedbacks
Realizing I have installed retail version, I regretted my decision now I will read the all EULA for the firet time in my lifetime to see what it gets without asking. And probably I will just keep windows for games only.
It isn't that different, 7 of the top 10 of the top500 are in the top 10 of this HPCG benchmark. Most barely changed positions.
Promotional voting is not allowed on Hacker News.

We want people to vote for a story because they personally found it intellectually interesting, not because they or their friends or employer have something to promote.
What sort of legal protections does Mexico have for people running a Tor node?
I've been impressed with the RISC-V folks. Seem to have solid talent and realistic goals.
"Things like Periscope."

And how do you expect things like Periscope to stay in business without earning revenue?
My security advice for non-technical users is everything here: https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/06/guide-securing-your-busin...

Namely:

1. Even security advice should carry an expiration date!
2. Keep every piece of software up to date.
3. Use a password manager. Let it generate passwords for you.

I would stress the first one over the other two, but definitely mention them.
The Steve Jobs you never saw: Amazing photos of dot-com revolution
He makes fun of himself, his co-presenters and basically everything about the UK and British people constantly (especially when it comes to manufacturing).

For that matter, they've done entire episodes about how terrible the UK is at things, like the British Leyland cheap car challenge.

If he made those comments about anything else, someone would call them offensive. I find that double standard and the concept that you can't make jokes about anything far more concerning than the content of his "controversies" aside from the punching.
Something like Cortana could have been built to work locally, using your own resources. But it wasn't. This was an opportunity to say "we're not like Siri and Google Now, we respect your privacy", but instead they built something just like them.
Good point. However, if that is indeed the case, then would the ethical issues surrounding the use of human cells in such a fashion be properly founded?

I mean, if you took primate or whale brain tissue and grew it to scale, I think you'd have similar results. Maybe even with rat neurons, who knows.

Point being: the primary ethical issue ultimately may not be the underlying type of biological substrate, but how that substrate is grown, trained, and used.

Semantics aside, any such experiments would undoubtedly be creepy as hell, regardless of tissue type. Definitely Frankenstein stuff.
and iOS and Android...
I know. I think it's actually pretty cool. (Though it doesn't seem to work well with some builtin mic's.)

I really like the direction they are headed.
Of course not. Apple wants to add support for blocking ads on mobile web to encourage companies to write native apps that can contain unblockable ads. That way Apple gets more content on its platform and potentially a piece of the ad revenue with iAd.
Microsoft is in bed with the NSA and could care less about the privacy of end users. I would argue they develop cloud technologies for the sole purpose of pleasing the goons in surveillance state. They want your data...all of it.
Does this mean gists can have comment notifications again?
Also if you use Cortana, its default settings are sending MSFT location history, search history etc.
I turned it off on Edge as well as by default.
Ok, you don't want their shit. How do you propose to give the creators of the content you're visiting revenue so they can continue?
That's a good model to adopt. It's also the "ubiquitous encryption" that has James Comey crying like a baby.

I encourage more apps and services to adopt this model. Just, be careful when you do. Definitely open source your code, and definitely get it audited by a qualified team (e.g. NCC Group's crypto services).
Granted most individuals may not be concerned with these intrusions-by-design, but businesses dealing with sensitive information - or who simply have a vested interest in security - may see this as a reason to forgo the Microsoft Office suite altogether, which is one of Microsoft's few stable revenue streams after all these years.
Agar.io Clone DMCA
> safely bypass surveillance from across the world

Is this true, for a global passive adversary? If all of the nodes which route your link go through a friendly IC that shares ToR traffic patterns, I'm pretty sure traffic analysis can disclose where you are browsing or which hidden service you are visiting (or at least where it's hosted).

Does anyone know more about how a ToR link is chosen, whether you can control it, and what some alternatives might be?
How does that help when Safari is slow and is a memory hog?
Quite a lot of users keep uploading daily. If you do that, your "Streak number" grows. Once you stop uploading for more than two days - the streak number goes back to zero (you can still upload those missed photos though). You can see a list of users sorted by their streak number here: https://tookapic.com/projects?sort=streak
Yes, but they could include it on all google products.
Great suggestions - thanks!

My thought on the training run piece is that you don't even have to think about which runs or races (or even subsegments of runs/races) are your fastest. Just throw everything into the funnel and out come your race predictions. I'll think about how to use the race tag, because that is available through the API.

Training quality is a big one for me, too (especially with a family). I've actually been working on something similar and much larger than just having race predictions.
> You can even have it AWS where it will get automatic updates with almost no effort: https://cloud.torproject.org/

I guess you didn't click on your own link....

> As of May 8, 2015, the Tor Cloud project has been discontinued.
Oh please. Spare us the sanctimonious BS. It's no different at all? In any way?
Apparently just like you feel entitled to enjoy the content others have made for free.
> when I decide to upgrade from Windows XP

Oh no.
For 0..max random integer it depends on max and length. If max is 2^32 and 2^32 modulo charset.length = 0 it should be fine. Am I right?
In our case length is 85 and it is indeed biased. Needs a pull request.
It's probably legal, but it hasn't yet been tested in courts: https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en
Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant, so I expected to see all these things as defaults. The advanced features just couldn't work without it. I'm glad there's at least an opt-out, but I do think that Windows needs an OS-wide incognito mode, just a simple switch to record or not record data.

I generally use that on my browser for when I hand my laptop to someone else and don't want their activity polluting my history, but now there's the risk of the entire OS learning someone else's habits when they just need to use the computer and don't want to log in. Sometimes, guest accounts are too restrictive.

I do like having the option of a personalized experience, and Microsoft is generally one of the most restrictive companies when it comes to sharing data. With their push toward more personal cloud services, I hope they will take special care to maintain that record, although everyone knows that certain groups like government have ways of getting whatever they want if it's available.

Hopefully, some of the fine-grained permissions of Windows Phone will soon carry over to the unified platform for those who want it, but either way, I would still do any especially sensitive work on Debian or a similar system.
I was gonna say this, but now I'll just second it.
You're trolling, but the thing a lot of people might not realize is that OpenBSD builds are done on the hardware. Each platform is capable of building itself and that's how they operate. I'm not aware of any exceptions.
I know all that and I believe there has been controversy over Apple and KHTML. But, I see it as a matter that Apple started playing but dropped the ball for Google to pick up to move forward.

There's no telling where things would be if Google had gone a different route. What if they bought Opera? What if they forked KHTML themselves? It could have been better, it could have been worse. I don't speculate on that, I just react to what I see. Right now, to me, Google has been better about moving things forward with Webkit than Apple has in quite a while.
No, that's a fucking cop out. Answer the question: why do you feel entitled to view the content that others have worked to create for free? Why should we not expect the same of you? Why should we not expect you to work for free?
Worried about security and privacy...yet still uses Windows XP?
Germany Just Got 78 Percent of Its Electricity from Renewable Sources
did we miss something? Can you elaborate?
I imagine the resource costs would be too high to really make that worthwhile. The choice is probably between bad privacy settings, a bad personal assistant, or bad battery life and disk usage. Microsoft chose the option that would likely upset the smallest group of people.
If you seriously are still using Windows XP on an internet-connected device, it is not like your biggest worry is sending data to Microsoft.
I can see that one as a default for non-nefarious reasons. If you make it easy for non-specialist users to encrypt their machine, and there is no way for technical support to recover their data, you're going to inevitably end up with angry users. What's not as clear to me is whether you can change the default.
Apple just spies on you, they're vertically integrated so there's no need to sell the data.
All obtainable with a subpoena, I would imagine.

No way.
Correct, that's the edge case where it actually falls together neatly.

If you're starting with a random byte and charset.length is an even power of 2, you end up with no bias.

It's better to design functions like this to discard values outside of an acceptable range and try again until they generate a safe value (also, apply a & bit mask to reduce the number of retries). This allows you to accept any arbitrary charset size without being concerned about security.

See also:

https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat/blob/5aa6689651a5...

I'll open a PR tonight if nobody beats me to it.