skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The politicians and national security bureaucrats advocating this are idiots. At least that's the charitable interpretation. The world is not static. Mass surveillance leads to mass demand, and therefore mass markets, for privacy products (e.g. VPNs, secure messaging). And a product will only be used by the masses if it is easy to use.

Can't these people see that they're shooting themselves in the foot (assuming their true goal is to intercept the communications of the 'terrorists/communists/lizard people' hiding under your bed)? Encryption is hard. Properly implementing a system that incorporates it is even harder. I doubt 99.9% of the aforementioned 'enemies of the week' have the technical capability to do so (ok, maybe the commies do). But that's no problem now! They can just buy a product off the shelf thanks to the new mass market you've just created!

Now they're trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle by banning encryption. Banning encryption? What does that even mean? How are you going to enforce that? I suspect the answer to the latter is: "selectively".

It feels like we're only a few iterations of this arms race away from our genius leaders pushing for telescreens to be installed in everyone's homes, to ensure they don't use any of that 'godless, un-american encryption that only evil lizard people use'.

After all, if you're doing nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide.
Silk Road Employee's Plan Z: Take to the Internet
With print rapidly dying, a re-negotiation might happen.
You're talking like encryption is hardware. It's software. You can confiscate eight billion copies but miss one and tomorrow there will be nine billion more.

And it doesn't come from companies. Originally it comes from academics, but nobody actually gets their copy of AES from Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. It's software on the internet. You can get it from Mozilla or Google. If you can't get it from them then you can get it from anyone at CCC or Debian servers in France or Brazil or your cousin in Russia or the Venezuelan government that loves any excuse to stick it to the US.

But let's pretend they're willing to cut all the fiber and close all the borders to keep encryption from crossing in from other countries. Your proposal is that they're going to go house to house and search your attic for the last of those t-shirts the EFF printed the last time this happened?

Now mind you, that doesn't mean banning encryption would have no effect. It would mean that your bank and your doctor couldn't use it to protect your finances and medical records, and they're the type of organization that could be compelled to comply with such a thing.
I argue that Twitter, like many other services, has become public infrastructure.
Public infrastructure costs money, needs maintenance and is depended upon by many.

As far as I know capitalism hasn't yet come up with an answer to the question about how to privately finance infrastructure without making it so expensive that a large portion of their users have to be excluded. (See public baths, railroads, sewage-systems etc.)

Maybe not everything that is useful can be turned into money.
I used to respond immediately because I'm not a fan of playing games but now I never do, mostly because nobody else does it either. But that is only when I text. I NEVER text these days. I'd rather call. I'm impatient and I'd rather have a short quick conversation than one uncomfortable one that stretches over days.

You can easily spot the fakers from the ones who are actually unavailable though. My ex before we broke up used to take days and days to respond but she was unemployed and had nothing going in her life, whereas I had super busy professors in big labs who for some reason respected my time enough to get back to me within 24 hours or 48 hours at most.
Completely agree. The thing that makes me concerned for some of the better journalism they still occasionally produce is that the website is absolute dog shit. They are just going to end up being Lebedev's buzzfeed at this rate.. Big fall from grace for a decent title IMO.
Yes, how much fun folks could have if you could connect a Repl into your game and arbitrarily change the rules on the fly!
(I was and still very strongly am pro-GitHub issues. I do think they're Great, though there are obviously some minor things that could be improved, like anything. Bugzilla would have been a huge mis-step.)
Cryptography is mostly done by software, not hardware.

How successful has been the war on movie and music piracy? And the war on leaked documents?

A government can certainly make most if its residents give up on cryptography. But it takes more severe measures than banning a device or another.
In apps we build on the Qbix Platform, we use oAuth 2 to generate session tokens in the native app. No password needed.

But how do we set up user accounts in the first place? Most of our users come from being invited by a friend. That invitation contains a unique link which, when clicked, allows the user to access their account. So they get an account and all their followers in one tap! And start using it immediately. Then when they download the native app, they sign in using oAuth 2. Everything is fast and secure and the only time they ever need to set up a password is when they want to set up an account on some shared public device. And even then, they could simply use their phone to verify the login, even if they get no cellphone signal.

Source: http://qbix.com/platform/features/invitations

This is just some of the thousands of things we took care of so your apps don't have to. Another cool thing: all session ids are signed with an HMAC when generated, so your load balancer won't need to do any I/O when deciding to reject bogus requests. This reduces the impact of DDOS attacks on your app once it becomes well-known.
This is definitely right. Creation on Twitter isn't for everyone. It's confusing, convoluted and hard to use. Consuming Twitter is something almost everyone does unwittingly. New stories are generated there, celebrities post directly. It tears down walls between PR and the masses. It's a great service, but truly Twitter must give up on the idea that it's going to be able to get everyone or even a larger chunk of the population to actively send messages there -- it can't and won't.
How Banks Got Too Big to Fail: Merger History Infographic
"Twitter is the world’s most important social network."

Not it's not. It's a great tool for news journalists and announcements (Tesla). I don't like Twitter, I don't know how to use it and it doesn't provide enough value for me to care to learn. I like some funny stuff like Borat Dev Ops or WeWantPlates. But short of that I don't need extra cognitive overhead. Newspapers, HN etc. are my frontends for Twitter.
6 Steps to Refocus Your Business on Customer Delight
Ok, but there is also a [dead] indication. What is the difference?
Creative Cloud removing contents of first hidden folder on a drive
> ...they're often willing to accept a significant embedded risk buffer in a proposal if it means they can limit unexpected costs.

So if they want 95% confidence in estimates, you need to pad the estimate a lot. It doesn't make risk go away. It just offloads risk onto the contractor.

That just means the contractor is assuming the risk of missing the 95% estimate. It also means the head of the contracting operation needs to be diligent about backing up the estimates of his employees. Or mitigating risk some other way (making sure each contract is a small fraction of the business, having enough cash to absorb risk, owning lots of other businesses, etc.).

Now, realistically, the risk is also absorbed by the developers in the form of unpaid overtime, stress, lost bonuses, and in other ways. That's just all the more reason for individual contributors to insist on honest estimates. Or find bosses that understand business models better and don't offload risk onto employees.

[] I understand that this is complicated and bosses don't typically mean to make employees miss bonuses and have terrible work/life balance. But to some degree it doesn't matter. Intentions don't make down payments on houses, make sure kids do their homework, or get us a full night of sleep.
I have an alias for the diff params bellow, which has basically the same visual result, without the need to install anything.

$ git diff --color --color-words --abbrev
Yes. The answer to that is yes. Just look at advertising: sex sells. There are definitely companies that do this.

Edit: To expand upon this a bit, I've noticed it with salesfolks that come to my office. It's always more "traditional" salesfolk that do it, say people trying to sell you a copier.

Though I'd say with regards to men selling things to women it is probably more common to have them 'talk down' to them. My mom was just complaining about how a car salesman wouldn't even talk to her about what she wanted and kept saying for her to bring my dad with her. I've had salesmen do it at the Apple store when I'm with someone who's buying a computer. They ask me what the woman should get.
Why Haven’t We Automated Our Meetings Yet?
53 historians weigh in on Barack Obama's legacy (2015)
I'm curious how this problem is unique to Vancouver. Berlin's real-estate values have risen some 40% in just the last 7 years or so. New York City, in the 10 years I lived there, had an enormous escalation in what you get for the same rent payment, even adjusted for inflation. Big cities deal with this all over, so how do they deal with this "problem," or is Vancouver somehow unique in other ways?
> Without this rule, you can run into situations that allow companies to dodge taxes. Apple and many other companies do this all the time to take U.S. profits and funnel them to Ireland to avoid paying U.S. taxes

It doesn't really change your overall point, but that's not exactly true. Apple uses transfer prices to take non-US profits and funnel them to Ireland. They then use tricks such as the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich to minimise their Irish taxes. However they can't avoid US taxes; all they can do is delay them. If and when those profits are moved to the US, they'll still be taxed at the full US rate; all the fancy Irish tricks won't do anything. And those tricks don't work on US profits at all; since Apple's IP is owned by the US firm, they can't transfer US profits to the Irish subsidiary.
Book Review: “C++ Concurrency in Action” by Anthony Williams
Kaiser Permanente in California has a website with all records. I went there to get a blood test and the results showed up on the web site over the next few days.

I could check the values myself for abnormalities even before talking to a doctor which was very nice.
As a new grad who has worked a couple different jobs now, some things I don't get about this:

- What do you do when you don't have a spec and when you ask the senior engineer you are working with questions, they don't respond or push back against having a spec or a plan longer than the very next feature?

- The author says that estimation is easier to do if you are doing something you have done before. What do you do if you are always working with a new framework or language?

- How do you break down the steps if you don't know what a project entails until you are finished?

- What do you do if asked to estimate how long something will take to debug? What if you just started on a project and the error message you are trying to debug doesn't make sense? My approach there is to try to understand the system I am working with. If the system doesn't have documentation and the existing people on the project don't have time to give a walk through of things, I figure that means source diving. However, I've gotten the feedback that I should avoid trying to "understand the universe" when debugging. What can I do to produce accurate estimates of how long it takes to find a bug in a system without spending the time to gain a mental model of the system?

- This excercise takes a lot of time. What do you do when asked for an estimate in a meeting rather than over email? What

- What do you do if the thing you are building relies on getting an external API to work and that API is either undocumented or is documented in a foreign language? Assume that the google translation is not making sense and this is your first project and you don't have a budget to hire a professional translator? This sounds like something you would need to get working before you could actually give an estimate.

Why do experienced engineers ask for estimates anyway? Every time I give one I feel like I am lying and I try to warn people "I really don't know how to come up with estimates but I am guessing 3 hours". How do I deal with it when they are upset about it taking a week and a half?
Sort of. What if a woman said that her ideal husband would be a handsome man who wasnt a workaholic? I agree with you, but im just pointing out how, deep inside, everyone objectifies to some extent.
The Daily Mail regularly commits acts of simple journalism. For example, any sort of "it bleeds, it leads" crisis, from terrorism to when a tornado hit my home town killing 160 people, it's a great place to see a bunch of relevant photos and get the basic facts.

They also do this sort of thing, granted, for both, in a sensational style, for a variety of topics that just aren't covered by the US mainstream media monoculture.

(I've never noticed this to be true of any other British tabloid.)
This series (the first series at least) is one of my favorite documentary series of all time. I've always been vaguely interested in history but usually in terms of the occasional specific topic or passing interest. The way this series dives into history in terms of interconnections rather than chronology makes it immensely more engaging. I watched the entire thing over the course of a couple of weeks maybe 10 years ago and enjoyed every bit.

Chances are, this sort of presentation is a bit too close to "pop history" or layman's terms for serious history scholars but in the same way that Cosmos brought a lot of physics, astronomy, and cosmology to an audience that may not have much background knowledge, I found Connections to be a great way to learn about history in an engaging way.

I never did get around to watching later series but with this reminder, maybe I'll dig around for it (especially since I seem to have exhausted my supply of shows to binge-watch on Netflix and Amazon).
It is complicated because anecdotally I've found that if I respond to a woman's texts immediately, their interest drops dramatically regardless of how attracted to me they may have been in the first place. They say we should strive to "be ourselves" but me being punished for respecting another person's time makes me a bit cynical. Nowadays I make sure I wait 30 minutes minimum to respond to a text if I don't know you, and if I do respond it will be to ask you when is the best time to call. I hate texting - it is a weird and unnatural form of communication. By talking to you I can judge very quickly whether you are worth the effort.
Thanks, I didn't know how international shipping was organized, but the trick they use to get low prices is pretty clever.
I might be wrong but it appears that Twitter is mostly useful for reporters who want to write a story on something and find it easy to get quotes.

Whereas before this required traveling to the random place where the story takes place (with potential danger and hassle of travel), now they merely have to open twitter and find some random twat with an opinion on the subject. And presto - a quote is ready.

The problem, of course, is that the importance of the quote is greatly diminished and just 'someone with a twitter account thinks X'. If before the reporter actually had to go out and ask people for their opinions which presented an accurate view 'on the ground', now he's getting a view of the 'twitter-sphere' - which might have little bearing on views of affected population at large.
An Automagically Generated Timeline of the Volkswagen Scandal – Tenreads
Absolutely fantastic show.
The opening of chapter 1 is placed on the NYC WTC Building, and 9 minutes into the chapter is a flight 911... he, he for all you conspiracy/Nostradamus freaks.
It makes sense economically, but at some point you have to draw a line. Should I be taxed when I cook a meal for myself, because it's a valuable service that would cost $X if I had somebody do it for me? Should I be taxed based on the price of transportation if I walk somewhere? Breathing?

It seems that we typically draw the line at the individual or household. If not there, then where should it go?
Statistics of contributors to angular.js – live charts
Feralcore
No idea....I just figured there might be some info on HN about it and decided to search there. Thought it at least might be a start on finding info on the subject :)
That took a long long time for them to respond. It's day 29 now. In fact, they could have communicated something after even a week - probably something similar to what they have actually written, only more 'We're looking at your list and we'll try to get back to you as soon as possible'.

Where is Jono Bacon in all of this?

edit: OK, I feel kind of bad for mentioning Jono because I've watched him do awesome things over the years. I've sent him an email out of the blue asking him to respond - hopefully he gets it.
Apple iAd App Network will be discontinued on June 30
The iAd App Network will be discontinued as of June 30, 2016. Although we are no longer accepting new apps into the network, advertising campaigns may continue to run and you can still earn advertising revenue until June 30. If you’d like to continue promoting your apps through iAd until then, you can create a campaign using iAd Workbench. We will continue to keep you updated, but if you have any questions, contact us.
When Computers Started Beating Chess Champions
>Your proposal is that they're going to go house to house and search your attic for the last of those t-shirts the EFF printed the last time this happened?

As every comms is under surveillance its vastly easier than that. You just need to look for traffic you can't read. And then go after the sender. If you make encrypted communication a criminal offense, that's an easy task.
Is it legal to keep the money as cash (literal cash, not in a bank at all) or do you still have to declare it as savings? Not sure what inflation is like for you but it's sub-1% in the US so if yours is comparable and you don't have to declare that type of savings you'd probably come out marginally ahead.
Additionally, I really love the more "film-style" production they relied on in the absence of easy non-linear editing and digital effects. That's not to say I am against those things because I do a bit of video production work and they're immensely helpful. Still, it was nice to see how skilled production was carried out using a style and technique that's not as common anymore.
Barclays Must Cut Investment Bank as Outlook Dims, JPMorgan Says
Not only that, it seems like an ineffective strategy. I can't imagine you'd get more than a 10% response rate from this - and that's if you are exceedingly attractive. If you are just an average joe, this strategy basically does not work. If I had enough things going on in my life though I'd also always wait for the woman to contact me first because I've been used and manipulated too many times and don't see most women as worth the effort.
Several professors at my school highly recommend Swirl to students brand new to programming, and the results have been pretty good overall. Thanks for working on this!
> There are already enough houses and condos in the city with no lights on because no one actually lives in them.

To me, there seems to be a pretty obvious public policy response. Institute a very high property tax, which is abated on some kind of curve according to the amount of time the owner or tenants spend living in a property, with no tax being due if the property is legitimately occupied for more than, say, ten months.

It might not solve the problem entirely, but at least you would reduce the effect of a diminution of housing supply that is driven by these kinds of absentee owners, and that must be driving up rents, at least.
Sex May Be Happiness, but Wealth Isn't Sexiness (2004)
Well maybe now with them throwing more resources towards it it will improve? One can only hope.
Sure, obviously that looks bad for both the company and the individual in question.

But I think maxcan's point is that at no point in the process has the cheating really lead to any actual consumer harm. Which is a pretty important point.
Thank you for the link. I just reported it. I hope many more people here will do the same.
Who knows, maybe something will change.
Wouldn't near break even be the long term equilibrium in perfect competition for investment management services? Doesn't this really just expose how much other managers over charge?
I didn't think that I should use flag as a simple downvote.
>> This is the only part of the Jai philosophy I struggle to understand. How is an explicit delete keyword better than deterministic destruction? From my perspective, the former method reintroduces the problem the latter method solves.

My interpretation of statements like "problems game programmer's don't have" is that they don't mean game programmers don't run into situations where things like RAII or polymorphism would be useful, just that the stereotypical game programmer doesn't care about using them because they have their own ways to get the same results. Which often involves programming practices that aren't considered safe for most other application domains.

The thing with 'game programmers' when referring to people like Jonathan Blow and e.g. Casey Muratori (who does Handmade Hero), is that they have been writing the same kinds of systems for so long, and have developed so much 'muscle memory' to avoid the pitfalls of their coding style, that they appear to have gotten a blind spot for all the deficiencies in the code they write. It works, it's efficient, and someone with the same mindset could make progress on it despite of the minefields they've created, but it's usually not 'good code'. The Handmade Hero code for example is atrocious if you ask me.

It never ceases to amaze me how people who are so smart, much smarter than myself, fail to acknowledge all the ways in which they could write better code without throwing out any of the goals they've set for themselves (performance, compilation speed, predictability, ...). All things considered, it does not surprise me that so many games ship in a half-broken state.
Your announcement has been placed in the special filing cabinet.
> Why wouldn't one just call and avoid all this nonsense?

Because if you're trying to take out a 20-something that you've only had passing interaction with, texting is the socially acceptable way to do it. You don't just call.
Doesn't the Financial Times compete more with The Wall Street Journal and, say, The Economist than those other papers you cite? I know they make a serious pitch of that sort to people like me and my father, and we'd have accepted it if our interests were more international.
This is a bit odd. The tone of the post is "isn't this funny" when really it should be "look at the crap that female support staff have to put up with".