skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When he revealed this [1] was when I started to question Snowden. Hacking into the networks of a destabilized foreign power that is fighting a civil war that involves huge American interests including eventual military action seems like exactly the thing the NSA is supposed to be doing.

[1] - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/13/snowden-nsa-syr...
Can you think outside them?
"During the Bush administration, people were kidnapped all over the world and dumped in secret prisons, where they were tortured. During the Obama administration, the kidnappings, the secret prisons and the torture, have been replaced by death lists and extrajudicial executions of people, carried out by pilotless aircrafts, known as drones."
I spent hours and hours in 2007/08 watching Obama with the hope that change is real this time. And now, it's painful just to hear his name. With the current candidates on either side, just bracing for worse.
Delegating that job to journalists has always seemed to me like a responsible decision on his part. What would you have had him do instead?

If the journalists released "intelligence secrets that had nothing directly to do with the surveillance of Americans" (it's not clear to me that they did, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief here) isn't that on them, not Snowden?
> Perhaps more importantly, Apple and Google aren't particularly interested in cross-platform technology either.

Ah, the problem with generalizations about large companies. http://flutter.io/, by Google.
Of course a friendly REPL is part of any good IDE, but I could not have learned Python as fast as I did without DreamPie[1]. It's basically an IDLE that separates the input from the output—color highlighted as well. It seems small, but at least for me it really made a big difference.

[1] http://www.dreampie.org/
This is going to get deleted because it violates HN rules (only YC companies can post jobs, except on the monthly "Who's Hiring" thread). However, your philosophy is great, and I look forward to finishing the article.
By and large, what's been released seems relatively pertinent and 'on target'. To me it seems like he's handled it all pretty well, especially given the circumstances: I can't imagine the pressure and stress.

I'm much more ambivalent about the wikileaks cables leak, because that truly was a massive data dump, much of which was not exposing any wrongdoing, just private conversations.
24/192 music downloads make no sense
You can always choose to ignore the bullshit and focus on having a thoughtful conversation!
The story of David is meant to illustrate that we actually share the same values, but for some reason have chosen to demonize people we would otherwise lionize in retrospect.
This is great press for the food service Josephine. Decentralised meal delivery is a great idea however, so I guess they deserve it.
That seem like natural boundaries to me. That's what the platforms target. I wouldn't want the random people that follow me on twitter knowing the kind of things I post on Facebook.
What if Florence Foster Jenkins was a piano?
Cryptographic Failures in Practice
They obviously wouldn't have the stuff to release in the first place if it weren't for him.
I don't care about any of that because my friends don't use it. Ello, like others, is in a catch-22.
If I were responsible for security at Slack, the thought of potentially leaking uploaded files like this would keep me up at night. Slack has gained such wide adoption-think of the things that people are sharing with their coworkers all day, every day. Someone with ill intent could have found so many valuable things.
It's disappointing to see someone who is usually so thoughtful on these issues implying that the mass surveillance of the ~7 billion people on this planet who are not Americans was inappropriate to disclose.

Perhaps you meant something different, but that's not how your comment reads.
It depends. Older style controls yes, but it wouldn't be hard to use encrypted digital control signals and make that impossible.
Thats not the deal thats being offered, thats a lie which most people are willing to swallow.

The deal is, give up your freedom, in exchange for having masters. Still a reasonable deal for most people.
Coming to a Lab Near You, a Real Tractor Beam
My biggest issue with it is that they made a great demo yet they didn't really have a useful framework. They kept things hush hush for too long , with a lot of teasing and by the time they released something, people moved on.

Compare to what ionic did, and i'm not a big fan of it, but the ionic team demonstrated the usefulness of their framework quite fast with concrete apps.

As for making money obviously, you make money with consulting, cloud services,tools for professionals and co, but you need a community at first place. Famo.us never had a one.
They were also looking for Spaceship Engines :

"if the matter occluding the star is actually due to extensive megastructures, then microwave-driven spacecraft to service these structures could inadvertently be revealed by a powerful, wide bandwidth signal. "
"yay bahar" means "this spring" in hindi/urdu ("bahar" being of Persian origin). I'm not sure if "yay" also has Persian origins.
That's pretty good news. Hopefully the oil won't be delivered in boats -- that'd be less efficient than a pipeline probably.

I guess this was an easy decision at this point, with the cost of oil being so low.
It doesn't seem weird to me in the least, it's the nature of those two products that points in those directions. Sure Facebook wants you to make everything public, and sure Twitter offers private profiles and some private features like DMs, but in general they naturally gravitate towards the type of usage the GP describes.
One big difference is that you're distributing the binaries (or devices containing them) anyway, which makes them reverse-engineerable.
Toyota invests $1B in artificial intelligence in US
New Star Wars Trailer Surprises Everyone
Not a great solution for a drone flying over a populated area, or a drone potentially carrying a biological or chemical payload.
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Add TouchDesigner to that list, which is basically MaxMSP for demoscene-style visual effects. It gets used for fancy things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zMI-qbmIPk
To be clear, Snowden didn't reveal this to the public, the Guardian did. So it seems to me that if this shouldn't have been revealed, this is on them, not Snowden (unless you want to argue that none of what Snowden handed over to the Guardian should have been revealed).
Back in 2008 some friends invited me to celebrate Obama party. I was only one who told them then he is a damn liar, a good one, but a liar. Was a good party anyway.

And Im telling you know, a candidate will come a few months from now which will again win your hearts and minds and promise what you want, and you'll again fall for it.

Youre american presidential election is an strong illusion of partifipating in governmental decisions. Thats all it is, you dont have anyone reasonable to vote for.
Explaining 25% of the variance seems pretty respectable to me... certainly consistent with a "human languages may be shaped by X" headline. No one's claiming this is the _only_ thing shaping human languages.

Also, 10% of languages (about 600 languages) is basically as good as it gets for linguistic typology studies. [1] argues that around 500 independent languages is what you need to make strong claims about linguistic universals.

[1] http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Piantado... (pdf)
Looking at a video on YouTube of it, it seems it actually has a very modern search-based UI where you type something and it autocompletes/searches commands, and things are clickable by mouse too.

So for instance you type "Google" and it shows a bunch of Google-related stock ticker, you click one, then type "earnings" and it shows you some tools that allow you to learn about earnings, graph, project them, etc.

It doesn't look like you can do much better UI-wise even for beginners.

It seems substantially better than Google/Yahoo Finance though, so there could be a market for building a (ad-supported?) website that offers the most common tools with the same quality of the Bloomberg terminal.
Critique of the Xen Security Process
When I lived in Portland OR, an org called Free Geek let volunteers rebuild computers for folks who couldn't afford them. Even if you're not near them, maybe they can point you somewhere similar in your area

http://www.freegeek.org/#volunteer
You have a key error.

Take the highest serial number, add that number divided by the sample size, subtract one.

You can then intuitively observe that as sample size increases, the "m/n" component shrinks- our highest serial number is probably going to be a lot closer to the maximum. As sample size decreases all the way to 1, the "m/n" component grows- our largest sampled serial number is probably not very close to the maximum.
Hey all. I was the second engineer at famo.us and was later chief architect. I have many stories, but I won't go into any of them :-)

If you were interested in the library and are sad that this pivot means it won't be supported, I want to mention there is ongoing work in the OSS community outside the company supporting the pre-pivot vision.

I've personally been working on a fork called samsaraJS (http://samsaraJS.org), and there is another community effort at infamous.io.

These are both early stage labors of love, and always looking for contributors!
Journalists with a publicly verifiable track record who had a history of adversarial journalism. He chose them for their principles, not their charisma. It seems like you're grasping at straws here. How is an embedded contractor with high level security clearances supposed to get cozy with journalists? It's ludicrous.

Snowden watched what happened to Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and knew that the suggested whistleblowing path was a trap. Journalists were the second to last resort (the last being the wikileaks approach). The outcomes are evident. He was right. There is/was a problem and courts and commentators worldwide acknowledge that. Hell, even Obama acknowledged there were problems.

And on your last point: it turns out non-Americans have human rights too, something that Snowden would have no-doubt recognized after living in Switzerland. American exceptionalism bullshit is no excuse for crimes against humanity (i.e. mass surveillance).

These are uncharacteristically dumb comments from you.
just checking to make sure you've been successful since? let me know how we (Carina team) can help further
Hey I did not know you were an Aussie. My travel blog is ~3 weeks out of date; we are in Thailand at the moment :) I do not have much time to spend online these days since traveling keeps us very busy, but you can shoot me an email if you want to discuss anything.
I never understand this reasoning. That all the burden should be placed on Snowden to pour over the documents and determine what is breaking the law and what isn't. He was fairly certain a majority of it was - at that point it's most responsible of him to hand it off to people who are in a better decision to make those calls.

1) Do you expect a single person to go through 1000's of documents with their rudimentary understandings and interpretations of the law? Would you and why would you trust him if so?

2) Should he have a lawyer go through the documents with him?

3) Should he get second opinions on whether or not something is breaking the law?

4) Should he trust a team of respected journalists and their team of lawyers to go through the documents on his behalf?

The journalists he released the documents to have trust that they've established for years. That makes them hard to dismiss as looney bins. Snowden does not have that trust and would have been easy to dismiss by himself.
Frankly, Snowden is a Whistle-Blower by all definitions of the meaning. The US has some basic Whistle-Blower protections in place, which strongly motivates the government to flat-out deny any possible hint of it. Instead, the government has a large incentive to paint Snowden as a traitor, even if all evidence speaks to the contrary (nobody died from his leaks, nobody was in danger, it revealed capabilities all governments of the world already suspected and likely were attempting to guard against, he did not profit from it, he suffered at great personal detriment from the exposure, etc...)

John Oliver made a humorous analogy during his brief interview with Snowden.

When John Oliver framed the government domestic surveillance program as having the capability to intercept, store, and review your nude images (being sent to your partner, for example), it really made people upset.

However, when he framed it as being able to siphon all communications en masse, people essentially got the glazed-over look and stopped caring.

When presented with the fact that all that "nude image grabbery" and violations of personal privacy and freedoms has only resulted in a single "terrorist plot" being thwarted (that guy who gave money to a terrorist group and was promptly arrested)... people get very upset because the result certainly does not justify the cost.

It comes down to an understanding issue (or lack-thereof). Technical details bore most people, which makes them not care.

Another good analogy is the German Secret Police steaming open all letters, reviewing the contents, then re-sealing them and putting back into the mail stream. People think that's egregious, and that it would never happen in the US. But it clearly is...

These are certainly issues that majority of Americans are going to deeply care about - the trouble we have is how to communicate it in such a way as-to boil down and condense years of technical understanding in just a few words.
I get the idea behind very explicit method names, but seriously, python-like (or whoever invented it) slices are the most straightforward and succint I've seen so far, even without the [concrete:syntax].
The Safe Harbour with Europe has been revoked based on proof presented in the Snowden documents.

I'm European so I'm happy, but this wasn't in the best interests of US. Unless we're talking about freedom of speech.
A cause for celebration.
> I think the part about whether you can compel an owner is cut and dry. It says nothing about compelling owners. Period.

I was going to argue that, but after thinking about it realized I was making the incorrect assumption that the owner of the source code was the only one who could provide said code. Hence my incorrect interpretation.

> The part about countries being able to make laws about import/export, also very cut and dry. This is very clearly covered.

Not challenging that.

> The part about countries not being able to have courts order source access, yes, is a broad interpretation, but honestly, not inconsistent with how this kind of wording tends to be read by courts.

If that is the case, I don't see how any state with a decent technology sector would agree to it, because it would allow party states to basically set themselves up as piracy safe havens.

> Even if you cut the last part out, the other two are still very very worrying.

I don't think the first is worrying at all without the third. To try to extend the meaning of the first to include legal actions taken in copyright infringement cases would be tantamount to scuppering the very protections other parts of the same treaty are trying to enhance.
> The process of taking willow bark and turning it into a consumable product is not minimal

How did you get this idea? Scrape some bark off a tree and steep it in hot water. You now have a consumable product.
QML is elegant for GUI design.
Create your own Reddit-like community, powered by Bitcoin
Yeah, that's also why they tend to use 'spam' and 'eggs' instead of 'foo' and 'bar' in a lot of the official docs.
Not according to this account:

https://www.quora.com/What-does-Apple-think-of-React-Native
here's the last one I looked for - http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds001322

Did I make a mistake ?
Urinals and Usability
"So, you can easily end up with vastly more people with 25+ years’ experience than <5 years’ experience."

That seems to be false in practice.
You may be unaware that the idea and initial development of MRI came from someone who does not believe in the sodium potassium pump. In fact, it was developed specifically based on alternative theories regarding how ionic concentrations are regulated. He is also a creationist...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Vahan_Damadian

The guy who developed PCR (basically DNA testing) also has some interesting views:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

From this I conclude that scientific advancement doesn't depend so much on commonly accepted scientific claims.
One can always do better :) But yes, "autocomplete" (in Terminal parlance) has made discoverability much better. You can just start typing what you want and chances are you'll find what you're looking for right away. You can even ask it questions and it will answer the direct question for you if it can. (e.g. "What were Google's earnings?" takes you to the exact answer)
So they can invest $1B in this but not fix the spaghetti code in their cars that causes unintended acceleration? Priorities!
The FSF says that GPL is not a contract [1] [2] [3].

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/200104_seminar.html

[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html

[3] https://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf
So is this a sabbatical or is he actually stepping away from YC?
When the science goes against the Narrative, do what our church fathers did: go with Scripture.

First, the American Anthropological Association, next the APA? They might as well come of the closet and stop pretending so I can stop putting dick quotes around social "scientists."

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/30/anthroscience
Don't worry about it. We have always taken time to recognize our heroes. History is littered with people who were called traitors who now have roads and schools named after them.

But I do wonder if our politicians were to trying to pull off another Iraq Invasion type event, whether it would be as easy today as they made it appear in 2003. Would it be easier for a whistleblower to disrupt it today? It doesn't feel so.
> I hope that you built around the Dart Tooling of IntelliJ

Dart's IntelliJ tooling is built on top of a reusable analysis library written in Dart[1]. It exposes a service-like API so that it can be integrated into lots of different editors/IDEs without each having to reinvent the world.

Just to be clear, this is full-featured, rich static analysis, not just parsing and syntax highlighting. The entire static type system of the lanugage, including the new stronger type checking[2] is in there.

The Atom plug-in uses that too.

[1]: https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/analyzer
[2]: https://github.com/dart-lang/dev_compiler/blob/master/STRONG...
How did they get a hold of famous.org? Should startups be spending money on domains like that?
This is great to hear. I wonder if they're pumping some of this money into TTI-C as part of this initiative.
What's non-RISC about POWER?

IBM's power consumption is probably mostly because they've never put the processors into energy sensitive applications. More importantly, they are sold because of some benchmarks and extreme reliability.
Congratulations Gary!
Pittsburgh’s Robot Film Festival: Preview
It's a bit unfair to blame "business leaders" when this trend of Christian power-politics started with Constantine the Great.
I'd actually be ok with explicitly endorsing something if it's something I really like (and not get a revenue cut). The sort of product/services where I'm a "Net Promoter" 9-10.

Could have a sort of "tinder for endorsements" built into the platform, refreshed once every week maybe, that lets companies request your endorsement for a particular ad/message.

You flip through with an endorse/don't endorse (and some granularity around "I'll never endorse" this) and have that tied to a custom decay function where your endorsement expires and needs to be requested again.

Maybe you have a paid sub to opt out of this system entirely. And for those who don't want to pay or endorse, ok, let's see if the other mechanisms are enough to support them too.
> What do you consider awesome in Windows Phone comparing to Android and iOS?

So I only have experience using a cheap phone I bought from Amazon last year (it was a $35 Windows Phone that surprisingly worked very well) but it has a lot of things to love about it

- Smooth OS even on older / cheaper phones. Can't always say the same with Android.

- It does notifications the right way in that it has updates on the app tiles in addition to the drop down. So if you dismiss it from the drop down the number will still be present in the app (I constantly dismissed all notifications in Android and it would take some time to figure out what app had a notification I accidentally dismissed).

- The development environment is second to none. It's so easy to get started, build, deploy and your app can work on a mobile phone, tablet, computer and even a freaking gaming console. Single software project!

- Live tiles are awesome; basically a nice and easy way to do widgets that iOS sorely lacks but forces them to be more uniform so you don't have oddly styled widgets like you run into on occasion in Android

- Cortana is more open than Google Now and Siri and was the first assistant that could help you with things regarding contacts and locations ("Remind me to tell my wife I love her the next time I talk to her" works)

I'm not disillusioned though; I'm pretty sure it lacks stuff that some of the other OSes have I just don't really remember off hand as it's been a year since I've used it. But it's an incredible little OS that, with the newest phones, you can plugin in a monitor and keyboard and bam, you're using the same applications in a desktop view (so it's not enlarging the mobile app; you get the same menus that you get on the desktop).

If it had most of the apps I use every day I would move to it.
All the best Garry.
Congrats Garry! Spending time with family. Thats what it's all about.
-->>I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.

Bravo, Bravo. This can't be more true. I don't follow friends on twitter, just news sites twitter accounts and other interesting people that I don't know in IRL. Friends don't follow me on twitter, so I'm not trying to impress people with the latest family "staged" photo shoot.

I have always argued that Twitter is nicely organized RSS feed / generator.

Twitter, I believe is a very important in spreading news, in real time. Most of the time before main stream media. Remember the guy that inadvertently tweeted the Osama bin Laden operation? Finally, since it's only 141 characters, there isn't a lot of spin on news via twitter, just the facts. At that point you can chose which direction to go with the spin...

However the internet can be a cesspool, but I see twitter as the filter that cleans out.

okay, I got to get back to work...