skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been helping my 64 year old mom use her smartphone. She has never used any computing device before and it's eye opening watching her work. Things we take for granted are a confusing mess for her.

And the author is absolutely spot on: thin fonts and low contrast are a terrible choice as far as user experience goes. My mom can't read her screen without her glasses and holding her phone close.
The Gig Economy Has a Big Problem
There will be a movement to "decriminalize sexting," or perhaps even "decriminalize youth," which will grow rapidly in the coming years.

It will be interesting to see how it fares against the rhetoric about child porn (and child safety generally) that characterizes the current political climate.
From what I've seen so far (10-15 examples), mobbing is superior to pair programming. Pair programming has a lot of social pressure (I don't like working with X!) that just isn't there with mob programming.

There's gotta be some inflection points, though. This is an extremely interesting area to watch. If it holds up in general, it's really completely re-structuring what we think about when we think about a tech team delivering value.

ADD: The thing to keep in mind here is that we're still very early in the hype cycle. Lots of smoke, and people who make money waving their arms around. Having said that, there is real value here. So it's interesting.
FYI there is a big market for non-touch music players if you know where to look. Over at HeadFi [1] you can find a large amount of reviews and discussion of players from iRiver, Sandisk, Sony, together with more niche brands like Fiio and HiFiMAN.

[1] http://www.head-fi.org/products/category/digital-audio-flac-...
I agree. I don't want to fall prey to the same problems the article does, and fold tech crunch in as a single entity as well as a single sector, but:

It is pretty fucking laughable that an article in techcrunch is decrying the glorification of unicorn / startup culture. What, if not publications like this, created that culture?

This isn't some hyper exclusive off-campus party in college. Shoe companies need backend accounting software. Every company needs technology?

> He hasn't seen the term sheets for these companies, he hasn't been there for investor meetings and board meetings to discuss long term strategy

Obviously, one can to some extent predict how "valuable" a company is. But people are pretty fucking quick to write off M & A and VC deals as "bad" or "overvalued".

Paul Graham said something like, 'when I saw how much snapchat was worth I thought wow, it was like someone had measured it and that was the value'. I bet that the team of people and consultants tearing through he books on due diligence, weighing the synergy and value gained by integrating it into the acquiring company, and all of the long term trend analysis, of both companies their unreleased products and long term strategies, have a better picture than me.
"As for governments, the austerity meme is class politics in disguise, and tends to lead to nasty social blowback."

The prevailing neo-liberal (and progressive, at least in the US) notion is that smart people "understand" keynesian counter-cyclical economics and only dopes or rubes ... or bad actors (as you suggest) would advocate for austerity.

However, it really needs to be repeated: austerity is only braindead if you insist on ever-increasing aggregate demand. If you are willing to accept stagnant or even decreasing aggregate demand (for whatever reason) then austerity is perfectly reasonable and perhaps a good choice.

I'm not saying I'm in that camp, but I really don't like this false dichotomy - that austerity is braindead and only morons would advocate for it ... and leaving unsaid the almost universal assumption that aggregate demand can never, ever, be allowed to drop.

EDIT: and I also don't like the condescending, custodial tone that this always takes ... "oh how quaint that you would conflate a national economy with a household economy, here let me mansplain it to you". In fact, there are boundary conditions where they behave exactly the same (see argentina). People aren't as dumb as you think they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10566664
Hey author here, I built this to combat my bad habit of copy-pasting from stack overflow. It's open sourced here https://github.com/jaxgeller/type-it-out
It depends a bit on the ages and intent of the teenagers. A 17 year old who has no sexual interest in other 17 year olds but who does have sexual interest in 13 year olds is possibly worrying, especially if they've managed to gather nude photographs of 13 year olds.

(Not saying anything like that happened here though).

But even ignoring the child sexual abuse images aspect: It's a pretty unhealthy culture where children assign point values to naked photographs of other children. That's not normal exploration of childhood sexuality.

In cultures that have much more open sexuality we see reduced sexual activity in children (eg, less sexually transmitted infection; fewer unplanned pregnancies).

The UK / US seem to have a problem with this and just telling children to stop doing it doesn't seem to be working.

(Fully agree that prosecuting a child for taking an image of themself is a bad idea)
I've never been in a vaguely successful startup where people do the right thing. What people do is approximate, do well enough to survive and grow, and defer the Right Thing until later.

Doing the Right Thing takes time.
Acting, or according to your context merely "betting" against an adversary is fine, but this assumes the capacity to act against an adversary, and that the actions taken will be big enough to have an effect.

You can't realistically take actions against a belligerent force that has an overwhelming capacity to watch your every action and imprison or execute you. You can't take actions against forces that exist outside a legal framework and the juridictions you are subject to.

Placing bets is not taking direct action. It means sitting on the sidelines, and hoping that legal mechanisms take their natural course in a civilized society.
Ha you're right, thankyou! In my defence, the first Google hit for OSX screenshot is this Apple page [0] that doesn't even mention that utility - and "screenshot" in Spotlight doesn't suggest Grab. It's in the "Other" folder of Launchpad which I don't think I've ever opened.

But really, thanks - this is really helpful :)
Well, 1366768 on 15" dislay is 100 PPI. Lot of consumer class laptop have displays like that. Hell, even Lenovo T450 or T550 have 1600900 14" (127 PPI) or 1920*1080 15" (140 PPI) displays, and those are expensive, professional machines.

Generally displays in laptops are terrible, unless you go with ultrabook or Apple.
Maybe the children are being persecuted by their parents for making bad decisions, but they're not being prosecuted, which is what you likely meant.
I've tried so hard as an infrastructure person to explain this to people. It's better just to ignore the hype or move to sane orgs that aren't on the container hype train (so you're not wasting valuable time on tech that's going to get gutted eventually).

There is no magic tech that makes problems go away. Just abstractions (sometimes they work, sometimes they don't).
I'm torn about whether or not sexting is a legitimate problem... Very many teens do it with mutual consent, and for older teens it really shouldn't be illegal at all. But I do think that, to some extent, younger teenagers need to protected against themselves. They just don't have the maturity to recognize the consequences of their actions. I think that really, what really is important is fixing sexual education. America doesn't have rigorous guidelines for sex-education, and that means schools often take a DARE like approach to it. I think that the federal government might need to implement a national standard for sex-education, focusing more on the reality of sexual activity and the risks involved. I'm not sure that is ever going to happen though, it is probably far to left wing for social-conservatives in Congress.

Whether or not we reform sexual education, the legal system needs to figure out a better way of handling sexual activity among minors. Filing child porn charges on minors exchanging nude pictures is ridiculous. I'd support an exception to current child porn statues to protect minors from being falsely labeled "sex-offenders", sort of like the Romeo and Juliet clauses in most statutory rape statues. That would be a good step towards actually recognizing that people don't wait until they are 18 before developing sexuality. (Although they really should, because as soon as you turn 18, all the reasoning and maturity that makes you an adult comes in at once...)
Good read, thanks!
I'd like to thank uBlock even more: after finishing the article, it has blocked something I don't like for 221 times.
> When something is not happening at school

We don't know that. We don't whether some pictures were taken or traded inside the school. And if that's the case, the school administrator are responsible.

But I'm more concerned about the destinations of these photos which may likely end up in child-porn sites on the internet.

edit: ok it seems some pictures were actually taken in the school.
WhatsApp Reneges on Their Promise of True Message Encryption
I've certainly noticed that my decades of touch-typing experience make it much more difficult for me to enter text on a buttonless touch keyboard. I'm constantly growling and swearing at the machine and deleting words and typing them over, because I can't shake the habit of watching the text as I type instead of the buttons I'm trying to push. Someone who had never learned to type properly would be unlikely to have this problem.
Perhaps you talk about the 2000 french terrorists in Syria killing thousand of Syrians ?
That quote though. I legit lol-ed.
Without terrorists attack ? French terrorists are plenty in Syria.
Agreed. There is a narrative programmers tell when complaining online. It goes like

> If only they would just leave me alone! I would sit in silence for 4 hours pondering the depths of the system at hand. Then I would spend 30 minutes invoking VIM macros at 240 actions/minute (that's why I spent 12 years integrating VIM into my lower cortex, after all). Then I would spend 5 minutes admiring the perfection of my creation before retiring to the pub. Tomorrow, everyone will find everything just works so much better than yesterday and they won't even know how or why. I'll just lean back and say "You're Welcome."

But, the reality is that you don't work in a vacuum; you don't know the whole situation; your proposed solution probably isn't as good as you'd like to think it is; other people are doing stupid things and breaking stuff because you never mentor them; you are doing stupid things and breaking stuff because other people aren't informing you about what you should be doing better; even when you are actively working on code, you spend less than 5% of your time actually typing code; if you are a senior engineer working on non-trivial systems, you probably spend more time sorting out how other people's code works than your own.

These realities don't fit the http://hackertyper.net/ narrative. They're embarrassing and require inter-personal effort to resolve. But, brushing them off is making you a whole lot less productive than you should be.
> It's a pretty unhealthy culture where children assign point values to naked photographs of other children.

I agree, and I think the problem stems exactly from the culture that vilifies sex. If you treat sex as something natural and normal, I think teenagers will be much less likely to treat it as something to "collect".
I think it is a little more grey than you are describing it. The article notes that there was a "points" system among students, for who could collect the "best" nudes. I think that is pretty wrong. I also feel like peer pressure needs to be considered. Do you really think there are no kids at that school who felt pressured into sharing nudes?
(I do think that describing it as a "nude-sharing ring" is ridiculous, it makes it sound like they were all doing something nefarious.)
Basically, yes. And it's not about us personally, it's about who they take away thus freeing us from being affected by bullying, crime and bad influence.

Maybe they only have to take away one in hundred, the bad seed.
Because it is better to let your own terrorist grow the biggest terrorist owned zone, and build an enormous army full of cash ? This is exactly what create this big projection power that make successful terrorist attack in France.
Well, if all they're after is a system to inform the ops where a train is... put active microwave beacons on the train ends, and recievers in regular distances in the tunnels. Problem solved.
There are PNG decoders written in a bunch of safe languages.

For instance the JVM uses a Java PNG decoder. So it isn't vulnerable.
Why is your style guide someone else's style guide?
It was happening in school - some of the images were taken at school. The coordination was mostly done at school. The main people involved were all part of the school American Football team.

And the school was the only thing that all those children shared. The culture of the school is obviously a factor.

You can support and educate your child about nude images, but if s/he's spending 30 hours a week among people pressuring her/him for nude photos s/he is going to need to do a lot of resisting. (Which, in this case, may have increased the "point value" (if that bit's true) and thus increase the numbers of people trying to get pictures.)

> The police shouldn't be involved unless a charge has been levied by someone (e.g. "this person took pictures without my permission")

Children can't consent to sexual activity. Law makers decided that nude images of children is sexual activity. Thus, children can't consent to making nude images of themselves.

EDIT: Also, Bob may not care that Ann has the image. But if Ann's phone images get hacked and Bob's nude image ends up on the Internet Bob may feel considerable distress. We know that some / many people who were photographed during their child sexual abuse will experience trauma from the existence of those images.
You're precisely right.
http://libpng.sourceforge.net/index.html
My beliefs were definitely influenced by Sam Harris' writing (on religion anyhow, not a fan of his views on statism and torture).

You're right that other religions have similarly violent claims (like Christianity), but we generally don't see people going around committing violent acts and using the Bible as justification for them.

Here's how I account for the difference -- most Christians no longer deeply believe in the more violent passages in the Bible anymore. For example, what would the average Christian say if you asked that person, "should adulterers be put to death?" [1] The far majority of Christians will say no. You don't see many pastors and priests preaching fire and brimstone anymore. All their parishioners have gone elsewhere (but those verses are still in the Bible!) Nonetheless, Christians certainly had their turn in senselessly murdering people (e.g. the Crusades), and those people rationalized their actions using actual verses in the Bible.

However, if you ask the average Muslim, "Can suicide bombing of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified?" A large percentage of them will say yes! [2] Even if it's not a majority of Muslims, the fact that there are double-digit percentages who either "sometimes" or "rarely" say such actions are justified is scary.

Now as for the question of WHY do most Christians no longer believe in violence while Muslims do, I don't have a fully formed opinion on that matter, so I'll withhold it. But I still think it's valid to claim that religious texts can and are used as justification for violence.

[1] Leviticus 20:10 "If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death."

[2] Using the numbering at the bottom of the page, see the table on page 53 --http://www.pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-ameri...
I don't see how this measures analytical capabilities.

For example, people with mild ADHD will probably fair poorly on your tests. Now, if you are hiring for something that requires profound attention to detail (dispensing medicines in a hospital), keep on. If you are trying to measure analytical abilities, you should try measuring that, not some proxy that has little to do with analytical abilities.

(and the reverse also applies - I know people with great attention to detail but that I wouldn't rate particularly highly on analytical skills).
> Which is the point: the "sharing economy" encourages service provision by amateurs without regulation, oversight, formal accountability, or adequate backup.

Yes.

> It looks like a win because it's cheaper, but that's only true until something goes badly wrong.

It isn't a win in my opinion, for many reasons. It violates all kinds of social contracts.

> Oversight and regulation aren't always a bad thing.

Agreed.

> Sometimes they prevent avoidable accidents.

That's a tricky one. I suspect this particular tree-swing would have killed someone, it's a coincidence that it had to be an AirBNB guest so even if this particular person may not have died the accident itself would have probably happened anyway sooner or later. Which is sort of the root of my whole argument about this being a tragedy rather than an issue of liability.
Except Postmates is already operating in over 100 cities other than San Francisco.
Why were the ambergris (obviously rare) and marrow left out? Both are very high in fat and would have dramatically changed the texture of the recipe.
As a former Dj I can say that youtube is an invaluable tool to find rare out of print vinyls. Spotify and the like only have popular music. Apart from youtube the only other option is to download illegal mp3s.
I assume the authors of the C standard expected developers to typedef their C project's existing bool or BOOL types to _Bool. There is also a stdbool.h header that defines macros for bool (_Bool), true (1), and false (0).
> Isn't it clear that this is not child porn, and that the law is wrong, when teenagers are sexting?

The fact that it was taken by the "subject" , send to another minor makes no difference. Some porn has been produced and may very well end up on a child porn site.

The problem is the absurd harsh penalty risked by these minors if they get caught. Like becoming a registered sex offender and stuff like that. That's where the problem is.

But you can't deny that this is underage porn content. Sexting doesn't mean anything new. There should be however some leniency because of the intent and that's not always the case. The justice system has to catch up. no question.

You need to also consider that it looked like a well organized system if more than a 100 people were participating. Is it still just sexting when content is traded among students ?
The original spec, "Anything that fits into a refrigerator," is a pretty darn good one. It conforms to Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others".

We can develop a spec in a vacuum, but we can't be sure what users actually want from our refrigerator. Maybe a live penguin actually does belong in there, as in the famous children's novel.
If that's the case, and bpp is always 8 or less, then software where the programmers were "lazy" and always allocated 256 entries for the palette might not be vulnerable.

From a quick search in MXR (https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/) for the identifiers "png_set_PLTE" and "png_set_PLTE", it seems that at least Mozilla (Firefox) did the lazy thing and always allocated 256 entries.

Edit: I was right, from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1224244 "Mozilla is not vulnerable to the security issues that it fixes, when using either the in-tree libpng or the system libpng."
How do you find companies working on important problems? When I look at the London software scene, I mostly find trivial (or dull corporate) web and mobile apps.

Which kinds of industries have software engineers working on real technology problems?
wow... the people who painted themselves into a corner and then asked for pity also couldn't configure a website to handle traffic spikes.

a sad tale of dum
Wouldn't it be relatively easy to have each owner of a phone enter their birthdate upon setting up the phone, and then do image-detection so the phone would just block the saving of any photo that contained nudity until the owner was over 18? Of course, technology can be circumvented but this would be a start.
Welcome to my world. I'm currently dealing with DevOps and the cloud. It seems that the marketing machines in tech are running at full speed.
As interesting as this would be on another occasion, the fact is, its not poverty which leads people to commit terrorism.

The problem of les banlieues is a social problem for France, but ghetto youth are more interested in girls, drugs, and otherwise acting out than in terrorism.

As Osama Bin Laden and others show, you can be given every opportunity in life and still choose terrorism. You can be well educated (many Daesh members are) and choose terrorism.

The elephant in the room that many refuse to address is that terrorism exists anywhere Islam does, there are insurgencies in nearly every country where Muslims are a sizeable minority.

A little anecdote - my wife comes from a very poor country, from a Muslim region. The poor kids aren't the ones growing up wearing hijabs, aren't the ones committing terrorism. Terrorists have been apprehended from her village trying to get into the west - the one thing they had in common - they went to a local madrassa funded by a Gulf state.

A similar comparison can be made in the US. Ghetto youth don't go around committing mass shootings. They don't join Daesh. It's the middle class, outcast white kids that are doing mass shootings, or newly converted/radicalized middle class youth that join Daesh.

Anyhow, it is a brilliantly written piece, but on this occasion I'm not sure its particularly relevant.
This is a technology problem, and I expect that we'll find a technology solution. I bet there are dozens of bright young things working on image processing algorithms to detect various undesirable states of undress and the exposure of sexual organs, and that these algorithms will be baked into the terms of service of the Internet as we know it, and that said Internet will be a much more user friendly place without such images.
Thanks Wicher and baudehlo, great tips.
> I am always cursing after swiping in some direction by mistake.

Spotify is the same way. If you swipe the wrong way when trying to queue a song it removes the song from your library without the (shake) option to undo. It's infuriating.
> Ethnic tensions are not terrorism.

That is a matter of perception for many. When someone attempts to burn down a Mosque or a Synagogue for some that is 'ethnic tensions' for others those are acts of terrorism. It's not clear-cut at all and the whole freedomfighter/terrorist duality makes it even harder to determine which label to apply and when.