skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somehow, when someone says 'unambiguous', C is the last language I can think of. I would sooner think of something more mathematically 'pure', or just reader-friendly, since the goal is expressing meaning, not actually running the contract... (I hope)

I suspect getting it to fly would be the biggest challenge, though, since our legal system is very much bound up in tradition and precedents.
If Google were to put a link on there front page which kept using a different key as an argument to link to the post would they block the whole of Google to?
http://www.modslog.com
Somebody ought, if they haven't already, post a link to this in reviews on the App Store for every one of his apps. Just to help karma out.
Great! now people will go back to blocking JS to avoid ads like the old days.

All that easy ride of blocking just the flash player left the web all screwed up with that JS for content running loose.

Good ridance, ajax.
The terms of a contract can be evidenced by anything that shows a meeting of the minds, including the actions of the parties in implementing the contractual terms (so-called "course of performance").

There is no doubt that diagrams can be used in contracts and frequently are. Though a diagram would not stand alone, it would constitute strong or even conclusive evidence of the meaning of the prose part of a written contract (or the meaning of words exchanged by parties in the case of a verbal contract).

Bottom line: a meeting of the minds always has reference to some context and all of that context can be relevant to determining meaning - if a diagram helps show the context in which parties are agreeing to something, it can and should be used to add clarity to a contract.
California Science+Technology+Policy Fellowships
With current technology, default encryption massively slows down the web. This is Dan Bernstein's key research topic (I believe he's currently working on "High Speed Cryptography", his book, but that's in support of both his DARPA grant and his mission statement, which is "default encryption for everything"). That's a cryptographer, inventing and defending entire new algorithms, because that's what he believes is necessary to achieve default encryption.

In the meantime, what we really need to do is get rid of the stigma about SSL, which credibly solves the problems we're talking about on this thread.
So essentially you are calling for anarchy?
Google and China: the attacks and their aftermath
Probably best to stick to doing it with chocolate.
There's pace and then there's content covered. Let me tell you, MIT's EECS undergraduate curriculum is fast paced and hard, and I assume they cover more ground than the ArsDigita University did (even subtracting the general requirements that don't overlap with an EECS degree).

I think 10 months is just too little time to absorb enough (and some "downtime" in e.g. a humanities course per term can be a blessing). MIT very strongly believes they need more than 4 years and established a 5 year MEng program that many if not most graduates take advantage of.

Perhaps a more narrow goal? (And I'll note that MIT is teaching everyone in the department some EE with the CS (and visa versa); less so with the new curriculum, although today the vast majority of EECS undergraduates go for the combined EECS major instead of the ones that focus on EE or CS.)
I saw this demonstrated by Clifford Stoll, except he used marshmallows. Fascinating stuff; my son is 9 now, and just started getting into being able to understand a little bit of this. I can't wait to do this with him.
Better then that they should not have stood by Google?
So is doing the right* thing for a mixture of right* and wrong* reasons is... wrong?

* for whatever values of right and wrong you choose.
I don't mean to be hasty, but the background on that website almost gives me a seizure. I would seriously consider changing it.

Am I the only one who had a hard time following text on this site?
Yes, in the case of ambiguity in meaning, the rule (when applied) states that such ambiguities are construed against the drafting party.
Actually, because tax time is coming up, and I'm a citizen of Canada who has to file taxes in both the US and Canada, I've been doing the math on this, the "nationalized health care is more expensive" thing is really quite the myth (that I believed myself).

Firstly, there's the commonly known factoid that the US spends more per capita for health care than any other industrialized nation - in fact you guys pay more than 2x what Canada pays for each of its citizens. So health care, on an aggregate basis anyhow, is actually much more expensive in the USA than Canada.

Secondly is the burden on the individual - I did the taxes for what I would have to pay in taxes in Canada (if I had earned the income there), and the total comes out to about $2K more than my tax burden in the USA. Considering my insurance (employer-subsidized) is still some $100 a month, the difference becomes even less pronounced. Not to mention there's no such thing as a co-pay in Canada (my US insurance plan has mediocre co-pays). Put it all together and suddenly you wonder why America just can't take the money it's already paying and just create a public system where everyone gets care.
France's anti-piracy goon squad pirates the font in its logo
Oh the irony! gg
Anarchy is the only logical and natural state of being, every other attempt to bring order to chaos is unnatural. Imho.
Male Chromosome May Evolve Fastest
Actually, there is a system in place for any bank to transfer money to another account at another bank. Its called ACH (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Clearing_House), and thats how direct debit and most other interbank transfers in the US work. Internationally there is SWIFT and wire transfers, but within the US all that you really need is a name, account number, and bank routing number. All of this information is printed on a personalized check from any bank; thats why some people ask for a void check to setup auto-pay.

That said banks in the US have been very very slow to make this technology easy for customer's to use, partially because they just suck at user friendly technology, and partly because they don't want to make it too easy for people to move their money to an account at another bank.
The UK varies - if you get fired they tend to escort you out under guard. If you leave they work you to the last second of your notice and hope you can be persuaded to stay late and finish 'just one more thing'.
Add to the list plentyoffish.com (aka pof.com)
I read the name as "twital-bums"
Yes, some idea require a certain nuanced approach to fully comprehend, others however, do not. This is not one of them. I guess you can throw up you up your hand and cry "I can't decide, these waters are too ethically difficult to navigate, argh!" and forever cop out. It's easier.

That is not what he is saying though. He is arguing for a more rational and more balanced view than that advocated by the original article, which was quite "all-or-nothing". This does not mean that genocide is not bad, it certainly is. But because they committed genocide does not mean they did not have other good qualities and achievements as well.
Yes, and you can break Bob and Cindy's fingers to get their passphrases. That is a very easy step. That is why steganography should be used. There shouldn't even be an ecrypted text for them to try to decrypt, at least as far as they know. Because once, there is, they can always get the password. The next best thing is is fake encryption or some kind of nested encryption, so that the outer layer decrypts to something plausable but ultimately benign.

A password doesn't even fall under 'free speech', so even in a free country like US one can get slapped with 'obstruction of justice' if one doesn't provide a password. I'll leave it to your imagination to what happens in other, more oppressive countries...
Not trying to be rude, but who is Patrick McKenzie? From what I've gathered, he created an app called Bingo Card Creator and blogs about it. I haven't had a chance to peruse his entire blog, but I'm assuming that his posts are pretty solid to justify this being news?
Hm... yahoo shedding some fat or is it a firesale?
Some suggestions:

- get your friends to add their cars to the site, and make sure they use your code on the forums they frequent (I'm assuming that you link back to modslog)

- make the value prop clearer: add a car, share the details online. It doesn't jump out right away on the front page

- show how the auto-generation works, even if it isn't your car. I wanted to see how this worked, but I couldn't on the only car in the system

- somehow surface the name of the owner of the vehicle, and make a garage-centric view of cars. You want narcissistic users to be able to make garages and show it off to other people.

- fill out your sample car more - e.g. why is statistics, events, and m&r not filled out for your sample car?
If it's far outside his experiences then by definition his comment will be uninformed. Might be nicer to inform him. No need to be condescending.
What’s Next in HTML, episode 1
On California, Don't Believe the Hype
Everything will be fixed in the redesign.

The goal of the original design was to just get something out there as quickly as possible and to start building up the community/content. The sooner you start, the sooner you finish.

You know the whole release early mantra.

This way there is no rush, and I can build something nice, since I now know that the site is something people want to use.
Awesome. It only locks out the site you searched on -- so you can do that with faas.cn, then go to baidu with no problems. Sneaky!
Interesting point. It is a sort of a MEAD (Mutually Economic Assured destruction), a complement to the nuclear MAD.
If they have no action to take, does it really matter what they say? More relevant will be what Microsoft does in response, since Yahoo is basically out of the China search game.
Once again, you've fallen for one of my classic pranks
The thing is, it's not embarrassing for the US government. I would guess they were told about the announcement way before it happened.

The thing is, Google can make this accusation and be above suspicion. If the US government made tis accusation, it would turn into a PR fight and no one would know who to believe.
And even before 1973, the gold in the Fed's vaults did not back all the currency in circulation, only a fraction of ith (thats why it was called the fractional reserve system).

Also, banks cannot actually create money. Before a bank can lend money to a customer, it has to receive money from another customer. During any given business day they may end up lending more money than they received (or vice versa), but at the end of the day they just borrow it in the overnight Fed Funds market (or lend the excess). The only agency that actually creates money (electronically or physically) in the US is the Federal Reserve. They typically do this by creating money electronically, and then buying bonds, so that the money enters circulation.
Seems reasonable. And I don't think you guys got the humor when he said "Escalate". You all want to think you're SO smart and nobody else can pick his nose. Obviously he knew who he was talking to, do you really think he uses PHP and doesn't know who he was dealing with?

Anyway, saying they wouldn't fix it is fine, but the bitchy answers he got to legitimate questions just shows how juvenile R is.
I like the idea but why did you choose a public channel to share links to a private resource rather than something like direct messages?
Thanks for the input! Yes, there are links back to the site when a user wants to enlarge a photo or see details for anything else. I'll definitely work on the value proposition. I've probably been way too close to this for a long time and need to try to take a step back and view this with fresh eyes.

I do want to make a video screencast walking through the whole simple process. And I'm in complete agreement with all of your other points. Thanks for these quick assessments!
China's Secret Cyberterrorism
A very interesting and very long post.

Am I understanding you are advocating a limit on the human population? How would you suggest actually achieving that?
As a Canadian, that's the bizarre thing I've found about the American system. The US spends more per capita on Medicare than Canadians do on healthcare - you'd think they would want to try to fix that before they tried to "extend coverage" and force everyone to participate in a public system. I should point out further though that the Canadian model is less than sustainable. As I've mentioned to others in the past, it took me over 6 months to book a physical and unless you know people access to specialists is a very lengthy wait.
Patrick == patio11 (which is mentioned in the top comment in this thread). Most of us know him from his activity in comment threads here. He has written a lot of about the process of building a MicroISV on his blog, and he's a pretty smart guy to boot.
That says nothing, considering this is coded up in an interpreted language (JS), compared to the speed of a compiled language (C/ObjC) on an official iPhone version of Flash, should there ever be one.
The numbers I've seen show that economic growth since China joined WTO in October 2000 surpasses any other period you may choose. In my original comment, I mention "change" (social, political, and economic) in China over the past 10 years simply because I've lived in Shanghai since summer 2000 and personally witnessed the change.

I can't speak for South Korea or Japan because I've never lived there and have only read about those places.

Although I personally lean toward "free-market" policies, I recognize that a significant portion of the U.S. economy (my country) does not operate on free-market principles. Energy, Government, some aspects of Health Care, mostly operate under controlled, non-free-market conditions.
I was not attempting to excuse it. I was simply pointing out that it was part of something that United States of America, ended up being humanity's greatest achievement to date.

Say what you want about America, but it pioneered most of the rights that the entire first world enjoys, and which are spreading throughout the rest to this date. Capitalism, civil liberties, social mobility. None of them were invented here perhaps, but the whole (which is far greater than the sum of its parts) was.

There's a reason you've probably never seen a public hanging or a head on a pike. There's a reason wars victimize fewer and fewer civilians every decade. America's history is certainly not without blemishes, including this one, slavery, a few ill-advised wars, etc. But on the whole it's been an incredible windfall for humanity.

So no, I wouldn't undo the whole thing. Nothing is perfect, and to take the view that we could have made the omelet we enjoy today without cracking a few eggs along the way is naive at best.

It's hard to make any argument that the holocaust was part of a bigger package that benefited humanity, so the two are dissimilar and entirely unrelated.
Same here - this is like the former expertsexchange , you need to add a hyphen at the right place.
When we first discussed this, we came to the conclusion that a lot of people don't read direct messages in Twitter. Based on this we chose to use a mention instead.

However, we are working on letting the user choose its preferred method of notification from within the app.
Packing Tetrahedrons, and Closing In on a Perfect Fit
Google's cyber woes in China may aid securities firms
It could very easily do that. Try writing a check for a million dollars - the bank won't pay it, and the same if you try using your debit card for very large amounts. Visa/Mastercard/others request authorization from the banks before they authorize payment. The banks choose not to link the authorization directly to the customers balance, thus allowing them to spend more money than they have while paying the bank a $34 fee for $4 coffee.

Banks can make money in other ways - in many parts of Europe banks don't charge overdraft fees - they just charge you a monthly fee to cover the cost of providing service. Other banks (e.g., ING Direct, Uno-e) in those same countries provide accounts without fees, and without access to a branch network. You can choose what service level you want without being screwed over by the bank.
I'm talking about basing your worldview, not what you currently believe. Worldviews are things people attach significant identities to, and internalize to form the foundations for the rest of their beliefs.

If there's nothing you can think of that can topple you, then kudos, you may have reached enlightenment.
never thought of it like that :)
I think it uses some built-in datastore that only safari has. I don't know.
could you define "work" a bit more? i'd like it broken down into more fine grained parts, as i'm curious what types of work you're doing at what time.
Life-time employment is sort of on the decline in Japan, and it was never as big as the popular press had it, but be that as it may I have a job which implies lifetime employment and am considered fairly valuable to my company (particularly for my age). I was pretty honest with them when I started that I could promise them 2 ~ 3 years and we'd reevaluate where we were then, and it has been 2.5 years and I have reevaluated.

That said, they've been good to me and I don't want to burn bridges or poison the well for their next foreign employee. (By, for example, doing what I'm entitled to under Japanese labor law and just giving them two weeks. Sure, the contract says I can do that, but the social relationship is the real contract. One thing I've learned over the years is that that is true in America, too, but we're less cognizant about it.)

So, if they want me to stick around a little while to help them finish a project or two, I'm inclined to attempt to be flexible.
I haven't seen OAuth in use on the iPhone, though I've only tried a couple of Twitter clients.
> Everything will be fixed in the redesign.

Famous last words :)

Nice write-up, although in my eyes it has crash-and-burn written all over it, esp. the eating part. Also, doesn't it get lonely?
That's a good point, and given the non-standard treatment of DMs in most twitter clients I've used it's almost definitely the right choice.
And yet retaining information is only part of the problem. The Patriot Act can put some pretty demanding requirements on companies such as Google. They can be asked, if not obliged to cooperate with investigations by providing search data or email headers.

Take for example this article by the ACLU, in particular the Pen register searches applied to the Internet section (http://www.aclu.org/national-security/surveillance-under-usa...). I'm not a lawyer, but given those guidelines the query string variables used by Google seem to be within the purveys of the law. Subsequently they are required to allow the appropriate government agencies to access these requests if they so desire.

In brief, Schmidt's quote is incredibly relevant, because people might be mistaken about what is private under the law. He suggests that people adopt a common sense approach to their activities, especially the ones they consider of a sensitive nature. Instead of suggesting people become familiar with very complex legal documents or adopt a false sense of security. People need to stop thinking that all transactions with web servers are somehow private or privileged, when the government clearly does not want them to be.
To be clear I am not suggesting that Japan had the same level of growth from 2000 vs 2010 rather when you compare growth at similar levels of development the growth seems less impressive. I used to think much more highly of China but after watching how much supervision a group of visiting academics had I became far less enchanted.

PS: Visiting China it's easy to overestimate the level of growth if you are anywhere near the coast, I would suggest you wonder around western china to get some idea of how far the country has to go.

Edit: Find China http://geology.com/articles/satellite-photo-earth-at-night.s... granted I think that's a compost from the mid 90's but you can still see the trend on where development takes place.
Here is the review they did for us on ReadWriteWeb:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitalbums_private_coll...
Congratulations Patrick. Can't wait to see what you come up with.

Best of luck with everything.
Time to get some help! No one should have to maintain that for very long.
Good comments lhuang. I am often surprised at the negative "drive-by" comments against China. China does have a lot of problems to solve. I'm truly amazed they've made it this far and we should spend a bit of time celebrating their advances if we expect them to take our criticism. I'm sure there are people in government in China that are just in it to pull money out of the system. But in my experience, they are the minority. A China government official must make net positive progress or get replaced.
Facebook is not your friend
Possible to install Adobe Reader without installing AIR and Download Manager?
Is there any way to minimize your security exposure to Adobe products (avoid the Google toolbar, Adobe Download manager, Adobe AIR)?
As cwan points out, access to a waiting list is not access to health care.

When you ignore easily gamed statistics like life expectancy and look at things like cancer survival rates, you see that we seem to be getting something for the extra money we're spending. And we're a rich nation, it would hardly be odd for us to choose to spend a lot there.

And for now, there are choices. At times I've had minimal health insurance, e.g. catastrophic illness or injury was covered but not my occasional sinus infection.
I was not thinking about this particular situation but suicide as a general. At the end of the day either i am informed or not, i would conculude with the same thought
Cookie stuffing is an old trick. This seems like a way of defrauding AdSense uniquely by juicing the conversion rate, which is easily doable if one views the conversion code and puts some thought into this sort of method. But it still seems easy enough for Google to catch over time as they track-back the AdSense accounts.
If so, you need to qualify it with the conditions in which your personally defined comparison method fails. In real life, the comparison method fails for everyone outside your value system. So it's not obvious that one culture is better than another, and it's not obvious that a certain course should be taken, etc...
GrandCentral was reborn as Google Voice, so I hope similar things will happen with Omnisio. I imagine Etherpad is simply being folded into the Google Wave team proper though.
I came to Scheme from C and Java and have looked briefly at Clojure. Clojure is a great effort and makes interfacing with Java simple but unless you are forced to use the JVM, I would recommend a regular Scheme instead. Clojure doesn't support continuations and tail call optimisation which are key features of Scheme and contribute significantly to its brilliance.

Gambit is a very practical implementation that is fast and offers relatively easy interfacing to C.

But, most serious effort in functional programming is done in Haskell or OCaml so thats where the libraries and jobs are. Of the two, I think Haskell is probably bigger and is the better language with more features.

My recommendation would be to learn Scheme until you understand the basics, continuations and macros and then move on to Haskell which will be a lot easier having come from Scheme.
The font is too small, too.