skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It did require one. They updated it some time after, but it was a common complaint.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/spotify-defends-new-facebook-re...
I'm a paid subscriber. I'm paying for the product, and therefore I shouldn't have to be the product.

The Wired article suggests that Spotify are only offering a binary choice: allow the little Spotify creep to squat on my phone taking notes on me, or stop using the service altogether. Are those really my only options?

I'm an email-only user (no Facebook for me).
A Definition of Closures (2007)
I think you're forgetting the obvious solution of having tons of preloaded magazines strapped to you.

Single button magazine ejection, slam your Uzis down onto fresh 100 round magazines. Bonus points for an automated system that moves the next set of magazines into the perfect arms length position at your side for the next reload.

Two handed reloads are for chumps when you are fighting zombies. You would be the guy I'm standing behind to give me that extra few seconds while they're busy eating you. That way once I finish off your attackers I can pick up your freshly loaded (but unspent) gun. And triple-wield!!
I like seeing these conversations and hope to see more public figures debate them in the open like this.
GitHub's Top Coding Languages Show Open Source Has Won
> And while it may have been more egalitarian to treat everyone the same, the kids on the bottom didn't really go anywhere.

Top-down controlling bureaucrats might think it more egalitarian, but treating everyone indifferently to their particular needs is not egalitarian.

The world is rich enough to provide ample resources for all children to meet all their needs. If children and educators could organize education to meet their needs instead of being forced to obey governments or markets, that would be egalitarian.
I don't think so. I could see it also creating more workplace animosity in the simple fact that when you put young guys and girls together, some of them will pair off. Guys tend to be accutely aware that there is a difference between "attention" and "sexual attention" (wrt. eye gaze, body language). Those receiving the former might not like seeing the latter done with coworkers. We may see some jealousy related issues with the ones that don't, or more frustration and aggression.

PS: Love the "devils/HR" advocate line.
Airbnb's pricing algorithm on GitHub
Building a Marathon Cluster on CoreOS and Bare Metal
Think of it this way:

What happens when IIS runs out of threads?

Without async code, it queues of requests and users sit there getting nothing from your server.

With async code, that's not the case! Well, until you reach the limit of what async code does, but that limit is quite high.

Typically a request thread that ends up blocking on I/O in some way (like accessing a database) sits there doing absolutely nothing for a very long time. The time it takes to get data from a database could be spent servicing many, many more requests! Async does just that. And before you ask, it doesn't spawn off any threads ... it leverages the asynchronous nature of the operating system to service I/O requests. It's actually really, really rad.

> Usually seems to be a premature optimization

If you have a user-facing system, it's most definitely not a premature optimization. If you know, for a fact, that you'll never need to worry about responsiveness, they're not worth it.
What do you think will happen with Angular after 2.0?
I'm reminded of the first industrial products. Handmade meant crummy and for poor people, whereas something from a production belt meant precision-engineered. But now that everyone can afford, say, a quality solid-state amplifier, suddenly it's hip to have the expensive point-to-point tube amp again. It's really about status and conspicuous consumption, but the snobbery is hidden behind notions of quality and authenticity.

Now let's circle back to software. High-level programming languages, interpreted languages, libraries, frameworks... all used to be really cool. Until people realized that now everyone can learn how to code, so there's a need for something to separate the elite from the plebeians, something to separate the software engineers from the script kiddies... how about handmade programming, maybe that'll do the trick?
I think more open-source Flash players would be the best. The problems stem from Adobe's implementation, not the SWF format itself; I think the latter is actually very well designed for its intended use cases, and if anything, attempts to replace it with HTML5/SVG/CSS/JS introduce even more inefficiency.
Same in Australia. I never joined at the time because I don't use FB, and haven't checked back since.
The first things you say are correct but then it goes subtly wrong.

Yes, studying in a foreign language is a hindrance -- but somehow it seems to be less of a hindrance for European and East Asian immigrants than for South American immigrants with little European admixture. In fact, even native English-speaking pupils/students of South American (and African) descent tend do rather bad.

There is an alternative theory that this is mostly an IQ issue -- and that IQ is heritable, largely genetic, and that one should expect different populations to have different mean IQs (given vastly different historical evolutionary pressures and a belief in evolution itself). This is extremely well backed with research.
Once you've given those permissions on Android by installing/upgrading Spotify, you have no guarantee that the app won't use them without your knowledge. Any options to limit the features from inside the app itself are purely cosmetic from an access control point of view.
Neil Postman wrote everything that is wrong with Twitter in the 1980s. Jerry Mander in the 1970s.

I don't need it.
The number of people that can implement secure communications without relying on third parties is close enough to zero that they basically don't count.

ISIS recruitment would plummet to zero if people had to get TLS working before joining.
That may be less true if you consider the costs of dealing with the disruptions caused by the behavioral problems frequently displayed by unchallenged gifted students.

But, yes, there's a lot of government policy at all levels that favors focussing on the low end and ignoring the high end of the ability scale -- that's exactly the thing that seems to be the focus of the complaint. So saying that the thing being complained about makes sense because of the exact thing being complained about is, somewhat circular logic.
I am a paying user for about 2 years and I don't use facebook to log in. Just email/password.
From https://twitter.com/eldsjal/status/634664239702102016

> @notch And again it's if you use those features that we'll ask permissions for it.

How will they ask me for permission to my contact data shared with them via someone else's address book?
That poor road markings can cause the self-driving system to fail does not instill confidence at all.
Why wouldn't they make two apps: simple (with minimal permissions) and advanced (current one)?
I just uninstalled it and am going to cancel my account in a few minutes. I pay money for it too so that I don't have to sell my personal info and that of my friends.
Mycroft – A distributed declarative logic language
One would hope that the legislating body would be held to a higher standard.
The perspective is about layered code and reuse. So what is wrong with delegation? My file access library should not know that it is linked in an application with an UI. Throwing an exception just delegates the issue to the code which depends on me. Whether the IO exception is really a problem can only be decided by the user of my library.
Robots don't treat everyone equally
What is the enforcement plan for this? Will people be taken to jail for sending encrypted communication? How will messaging be differentiated from banking? (if those who claim a more limited scope are correct) The whole plan just seems unworkable.
The best requirement to ensure you have a high quality project developed
The problem is that the granting of permission isn't strictly tried to that particular feature. So if the app asks you for permission A for "reasonable feature 1" it can then use that permission in the background for "unreasonable creepy feature 2" since you've now granted it unilateral permission.
So basically they made a design decision that was thought to be good for the users privacy and it turned out to be a horrible decision. I can understand the reasoning behind their ìnitial design, but I can't understand why this hasn't just been thrown out and replaced already after it turned out so obviously flawed?

At least they could have deprecated that system and allowed it to work with old apps, while encouraging new apps to use an iOS-like we'll-ask-when-we-need-it kind of system?
Ashley Madison Master List Search Tool
I don't think that you understand that the TLS technology used for online banking (which would still be legal) is the very same technology that lets you create a secure communication channel with other users.
NASA: There Is No Asteroid Threatening Earth
Adiabatic quantum computers are polynomially equivalent to what is usually referred as quantum computer so no surprise there. Dwave is neither, nor is it faster than classical computers. At best it is somewhat interesting from an engineering point of view.
I thought you were going to post this - considerably longer, but an interesting take on future education.

http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php
I'm pretty sure it will be available for all apps. It's going to be in the next version of Android. (edited)
They'll see their entire internet economy crash and hell will break loose.

The point is that the government want to ban encryption that they can't can't view. That essentially means you'll only be able to run an encrypted service if you're happy to hand over the unencrypted data to the government. It might also mean that end-to-end encrypted services are blocked by ISPs. But the average internet user will still see the little padlock in their browser, so they'll believe it's all still fine, and will carry on as normal.

What the government really seems to fail to understand[1] is the principle that if they can view the decrypted information then so can the bad guys.

[1] Or, I suspect, they do understand but they arrogantly believe they're better at security.
I use it to stop any long running io blocking my thread.
Can't believe they can actually get away with this, regardless of it being in their Terms. It's absolutely ridiculous!
The vast majority of developers I've worked with for the last 20 years think like that - convenience is always the primary motivator.
Have they removed their Contact Form (apparently the way to perma-close your account)?:

https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/how-can-i-close-my-sp...

Yet clicking on the "Contact Form" link returns me right to:

https://support.spotify.com/uk/contact-spotify-support/

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Digging through their forums I eventually located this:

https://support.spotify.com/us/close/
Heh, no. WinG was a disaster. It took years before game developers trusted Windows again. From http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/01/04/the-disnesy-disaster...

"Disney had done a deal with Compaq Computers to ship the Lion King Game pre-installed on a million Compaq Computers destined as Christmas presents for children everywhere across the country. The NEW Presario line had a NEW Cirrus video chip and NEW Cirrus video driver never before tested with WinG."
Or simply start instilling the idea into ignorant people's minds that crypto is bad and just keep repeating that until it becomes a "truth", or gain votes or leverage on the right occasion when needed with "we told you so".
As of today, women can attend the Software Circus conference for free
If you're on iOS you always have to opt-in to give an app access to photos or contacts. On Android, you can't do anything about it now, but it should be moving to a similar system with Android 6 (marshmallow). Neither allows you to restrict access to accelerometers, light sensors, etc as far as I am aware.

If they siphon up your contact list and store it before Marshmallow comes out, blocking it later won't do you much good.
This is a pointless petition.

"We don't want to ban encryption." - Ed Vaizey, Minister of State at the Department of Culture, Media & Sport, on 16 July 2015 - http://www.scmagazineuk.com/uk-minister-cyber-security-a-pri...
I also do not have specific data, but when almost 1/10th[1] of the student body is learning in a second language, it's obvious that test scores will be lower and resources will need to be stretched a bit further and certain groups(such as gifted) will not receive the best possible education for their unique abilities.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=96
The GCHQ geeks are not stupid, they know banning end-to-end encryption is not really feasible.

Yes, increased usage of it will harm "bulk collection" but not too much. Your whatsapp might be end-to-end encrypted, but companies such as facebook and google aren't going to change too much because it would harm their business models.
Storing the different information in the same place is impossible. You could use stenography but then anyone with access to the program/source will immediately discover the deceit.

You can use what hiq is suggesting, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10097533, but that is a different method.
Ditto for me. I love Apple Music. I canceled my Spotify subscription prior to this news after using Apple Music and finding it more then satisfied my needs.
350M+People+Have+It,+Don't+Be+One+Of+Them+Friday+Roundup+News
Do you think they maybe meant the bundle of channel subscriptions?
>What language is used to program for this processor?

Dwave doesn't work that way. You can think of it like an ASIC that can only do a single clock cycle as you bring it into a quantum state.

The only way to prepare for this stuff is by learning the proposed quantum algorithm maths.
Sure, like I said there is no way for me to know that after they asked for permission to use GPS when I engaged the "Run" function the first time, they won't spy on my location every time I just use the app (apart from the little GPS activity icon perhaps).

But the context of me switching to the "running" feature and then I'm asked if I want to allow the GPS function is enough for me to not feel watched. It's all about context.

Same if the app asked for permission to see your photos (forever) when you use the custom cover art feature.

For a malicious app this makes no difference, but for those apps we (sort of) trust, the context makes all the difference.
Notch could not have overreacted more. Sure their ToS may allow for privacy creep, but that thread of messages between him and Daniel Ek was so cringe for Notch. He basically doesn't want Spotify to be able to access anybody's photos because how he utilizes music and playlists doesn't use photos. Sounds pretty selfish and naive to me.
Git-bisect helped a lot, yes, but you can see that the commit in question was huge, and complex, not "a few lines of code".
The rule against self-incrimination is a very important part of Roman law - the government can't force you to do anything that would lead to your conviction.

That's why the Brazilian police has a hard drive that is known to have tons of incriminating evidence against a number of bankers but they can't do anything about it because, well, TrueCrypt.

It sounds ridiculous that the discovery of a body would be nullified because the evidence leading to it was nullified but this is important because it forces the prosecution to comply with the law. It helps avoid the violation of a fundamental right.

I don't necessarily find that Roman Law is superior to Common Law but all of the silliness about people being forced to type passwords could be avoided with this very reasonable provision. Common Law allows you to incriminate yourself by forcing you to prove your innocence by assuming guilt unless you can prove your innocence via decryption - let's hope we can all remember all of passwords!
Make Animated GIFs with ImageMagick
In DonaldKnuth's paper "StructuredProgrammingWithGoToStatements", he wrote: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrematureOptimization)
Not sure about Android, but at least on iOS, you aren't prompted to allow access to photos until the you attempt to use the feature in most cases, which is what Spotify are arguing for here. But you're right, once you've granted permission it's up to the app to be responsible.

Makes me think the OS should provide a 'Just this once' button when being asked to allow access to extra permissions.
GPU and CPU cores are very different in how they process data / architecture.

You can think of GPU cores as you schedule a series of "vector" instruction over a large chunk of data. They are great at internally paralleling this process because the flow is simple. You assume the there will be little synchronization and little branching. That's why you need such fast memory on GPUs to keep streaming data at instruction speed.

CPU cores are a lot more general prepuce where you're generally building the business logic and the work load is a lot more branch oriented.

So if you have a problem that's trivially parallizable without (much) branching logic then throwing more GPU cores is easy. Problems like this numerical in nature like large matrix calculations (math or 3d meshes), streaming data (hashing).

Hence why it's easier to keep adding GPU cores... it means games can process more geometry data in a fame, but adding more general prepuce CPU cores is harder because the complexity of business logic goes up as you split up the work and have to worry about ordering/synchronization.
As a kid I had a hard time getting to sleep (small home, could hear everything). I eventually learned to block everything out and sleep using the following routine:
1. Start breathing as slow as possible.
2. Count breathes, starting at 100 and working back.
That usually did the trick.
Intel wows with future tech
I didn't cancel my account (like Notch did) but I did remove it from my phone. It should be safe to continue using on my desktop unless they're mining data from my computer too.
Indeed there is, it is called plausible deniability [1]. With Truecrypt, you can nest a hidden volume within another volume, so you can decrypt the latter and it will only show innocuous files, while another password (using other parts of the volume) would provide other (incriminating) files.

I wonder what is in a judge's mind when the encrypted evidence turns out to be kitten pictures and the defendant claims that he does not have any other password to provide.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability#Use_in_c...

edit: clarification
Recent immigration from mainland China?

If the newcomers are bright, hungry, and hardworking whereas the native Singapore Chinese are by now a bit more laid back + if the Singapore Malay are not as bright, hungry, and hardworking but more established so above them in SES, then it might make sense.

Singapore is far from ethnically homogeneous.
I just did the same and so did a couple of my friends. Sometimes a zero tolerance, knee-jerk reaction is the best reaction to this sort of thing.

I just want to stream music that I want to listen to. That's it. I don't want any social features, I don't want my play list being generated automatically by my heart rate, etc.
Many custom Android roms have had deep per-app permissions for years (CM is basically built around it at this point), and previous versions of Android loosely supported per-app permissions through the App Ops app.
Xiaomi is a good example and I intentionally left it out so someone smart could mention it ;). The engineering is quality, and I can see it becoming popular outside of China.

Regarding manufacturing quality and the similar trajectory, you are correct. But in the 80s and onward it wasn't just electronics we were getting from Japan. Anime, jpop, ramen, sushi, all of these cultural products - which couldn't quite be emblematic of anywhere else - made Japan a soft power juggernaut.

Can China do the same? I'm not sure. Part of being cool is the ability to say "fuck the man," whoever that is and in whatever way, but dissent is too tightly managed for such an entity to be both globally enjoyed and accepted by the state, lest others start asking questions about the way things are run.
Nice work Mark. I fully support your approach. I hope it's successful!
Just to clarify, by "jump" do you mean "surprised", "hit", or "beat the s* out of"? I wasn't familiar with a usage of "jumped" that didn't include at least being hit (if not beat up), and Urban dictionary seems to agree with that interpretation: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jumped
in terms of use-cases, what about DRM for things like rdio / spotify / ...? what will be the alternative for that?
Optimizing Desktop VR for Mobile the Hard Way
What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
I agree. I'm going to try to narrow down what might be causing the issue by comparing a 1.4.2 profile and a 1.5 profile. Hopefully it'll be clear what changed and I can write a reproducible test case for it. Either way, I'll probably be posting to the mailing list soon.
What's new – Last.fm
> Reading planet.debian.org I seem to get the impression that btrfs it's not 100% there yet, unless you feel a little adventurous.

Netgear evidently disagrees and has built consumer-grade NASes based on btrfs.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/netgear-revamps-readynas-storag...

I'm also using btrfs for all my home-devices and I've yet to suffer any issues.
exactly, guardian trolling at it's finest
I put the source files on Github for easier browsing: https://github.com/mscharrer/povray_scenes/tree/master/abstr...
One of the unintended lessons I learned in school was that pushing myself was not a requirement for success. Tests and homework were easy for me. As a result, school became that place I had to go during the day until I could come home and play video games or otherwise goof off.

It took a very long time for me to internalize the values of hard work and studying, since I never needed either in school. It depresses me to speculate on where I could be and what I could have accomplished if I'd been pushed harder at an age where I was too naive to know that I should push myself.
You can get this on Android already if you install Cyanogenmod.
So what's the big deal here? Spotify are(have) introducing(ed) features that require new permissions to work and everyone has gone mad? Is there any specific reason people are up in arms over this or is it just the usual "Facebook Messenger wants access to my microphone therefore they're always listening to me!!!" overreaction?
Deus Ex: Human Revolution played by its developers
They're even working on POV-Ray 4 now. http://news.povray.org/povray.pov4.discussion.general/ They sure have my respect.
I am especially bothered by the part about "contact phone numbers" - I am OK with people giving up their privacy but I want to be protected against someone who has my phone number giving it to them. If Spotify or anyone else want my phone number, they should have my consent, not just consent of someone who happens to have my phone number.
My guess would be that there would be a brief pause between scanlines where the angle of the mirror was acute. Where as oscillation ensures there is always a section of the viewable screen being rendered. But this is just an educated guess so I too would be interested to read the actual reason.