skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple's endgame is saving face and customer trust. Just last year they were touting customer controlled security and privacy. This year the FBI wants them to help access a phone and what do you, they actually can! Oops. Failure on Apple's part which I'll come back to. Now, it sounds to me like Apple is just going to disable the auto-erase on pin failure and retry timeout, but not many people will understand that.

The FBI's endgame is requiring companies to build backdoors into their devices. Once they are able to successfully compel a company such as Apple to help them break into the phone, they are very close to compelling congress to pass laws to require that the option be available in the first place. "Hey, the court told them to do it before so why should they be allowed to block future need?". Here is where Apple's screw up comes into play. After all this they could shore up the security gaps to further remove themselves from the equation, but after a successful court order the FBI will move to block them from making an even more secure device.
IMO the main issue is how far the government can lawfully push a third party to help with an ongoing investigation.

Putting aside the technical issues for a minute, let's say everyone agrees Apple ought to help the US government's investigation of the San Bernideno terrorism case. Fine, and Apple might want to help, but how does their desire to help weigh against the hassle and expense of creating a new build of the OS every time something bad happens? Will it eventually get to a point where every impounded phone, of which I have to believe there are millions, can have a warrant issued and Apple has to help get the data out? They'd have to set up an entire department just to comply with the FBI's requests. At the scale of global law enforcement, it doesn't look so unreasonable that this ongoing nusiance will cost a ton of money and impair their ability to operate for their shareholders.

There's the encryption stuff, and how we have a right to privacy, but the real question is just how far a company has to go when the government asks for help with an investigation.
Overloading?
> We need to have incentives for maintaining this foundational software.

BountySource?[0] I'm not affiliated with them, but they seem to fit that kind of spot from what I've seen so far.

[0]: https://www.bountysource.com/
So if instead, the government asked for Apple's source code, build system, code-signing key, and flashing hardware, would that be okay to you?

It's not completely unprecedented to require active assistance from a third-party. There's a Supreme Court case about this very issue, United States vs New York Telephone Co. The FBI wanted New York Telephone to install monitoring hardware on their premises and assist the government in its operation. The district court issued an order to that effect. The company offered to instead give the FBI only information, which the FBI could then use to install and maintain the system themselves. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the FBI.

The main criteria that people have read out of that case is "unreasonable burden". I don't think that the FBI's request to Apple is an "unreasonable burden", especially since the government will pay for any costs. The biggest burden will be on Apple's reputation, but that is self-inflicted from making claims (honestly or not) that ultimately weren't true. I can't imagine the court allowing Apple to keep its technical assistance from the government.
I think you're being disingenuous for the sake of argument. There is a non-trivial scientific challenge of characterizing both proinsulin subunits and developing a protocol that works for public domain without adverse effects. Specifically, getting the sequence right to get the folding right.

Yeah, it's been done before but with different variations. To do so in a way that isn't locked up in IP is worthwhile. And it's a challenge that faces an uphill battle in terms of incentive and payoff. The crowdfunding covers that risk capital gap that would otherwise make this impossible. You could say their approach is a road not taken.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11147275
It's interesting to see YC investing in a subscription-based food/drink business years after that wave has peaked in popularity. It would seem there must be something special that I'm overlooking here.

Perhaps technology involved in the glass tubes or IP related to single servings of wine. Maybe it's just the relationships and the idea of cutting out middleman from vineyard to glass.
Any health or fitness regime needs repetition and commitment to be effective. A universally beneficial regime that can be easily done at home is yoga. There is a wealth of yoga apps available for Android and iOS ... As with the core FitStar app, FitStar Yoga first aims to get a sense of your fitness. http://buyfollowersinstantly.com/
> Seriously, with the rotten-ness of the US patent/copyright/political system

I've gotten this vibe on Reddit, but it seems people seem to be against copyright unless it's Youtube not enforcing it vigorously enough when it comes to small channel owners getting their content stolen. Then suddenly everyone appears to be for copyright laws.
Yep, I worked for a software dev company at the end of the 90's that did Clipper, FoxPro, VB, and Delphi. When Borland announced Kylix, we bought into it totally. We purchased Delphi 6. I did really enjoy working with it, but it seems like an eternity ago. One could purchase all these VCL components (Datepickers and all that) from third party people. Now days, it seems so odd to think of purchasing something for 100 dollars to put into a program. I can remember loading Kylix on one of my linux boxes, starting it up, and trying to load up one of my projects. It gave me so trouble and I just gave up. (The truth was, none of our clients were running linux desktops anyway!) I still miss that whole era before I became a web developer.
I guess Bill Gates doesn't care about customer privacy and making a modified iOS would open up a Pandora's Box that could be used as a tool to open up any iPhone and brute force the passcode.

Apple really values the customer's privacy and has the best encryption method for their iPhone and passcode function to set delays and erase the phone for too many bad guesses.

Satya Nadella hasn't voiced his opinion on this yet, but he retweeted an article that sided with Apple. He should protect Windows Phones as well from brute force passcode and a modified OS.
The central role Jews played in the ideological formation and implementation of Bolshevism cannot be denied. Hand-waving about a "conspiracy theory" will not change the ethnicity of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, or Zinoviev (five of the seven members of the first Politburo) nor that of Sverdlov (first Communist party leader and progenitor of the Red Terror) nor of the many Jews who rushed to join the Cheka (the majority in certain regions) to carry out atrocities against the Russian and then Soviet populace. (Not to mention the significance of, oh, Marx.) The financial contribution of financiers like Jacob Schiff, likely though it seems, is the only aspect that lies in the realm of the unproven. Referring to those who point out the facts as "conspiracy theorists" is a disingenuous response solely intended to deflect attention from reality and again marginalize and dismiss the Nazis as "irrational" moustache-twirling villains. You don't have to prove a "conspiracy" among the participants every time you apprehend a trend among a given population group for the trend to be true in a heuristic sense.
The problem with that thinking is that there is no firm definition of the "Good Guys", and the guys you think are good today, may not be so good tomorrow.

> this software is not secure. That's why we have this backdoor option.

It's not perfectly secure, but still awfully secure if even the US Government can't break it themselves.
I don't know what's wrong with this guy, but I do know that the state should just go to war with him. Why should there be a road leading to this guy's house?
Seriously... My favorite was in a lower level DB class we had to write, basically, a small PHP app connected to MySQL. On the first day of class the instructor stressed this class was about databases, not PHP, and would basically just cover getting a connection going and the rest was up to us. I think having been doing development and getting paid for it via 'internships' at various companies when I was younger really made me a better, but angrier student in my college CS days. On the one hand, I needed zero time to get up to speed on C, C++, Java, and PHP syntax so I could focus on the algorithms and other topics being taught. But I doing so it became very clear that I was going to the real world and most of this stuff wasn't coming with me.
Ava, the virtual assistant for professional services
Classpass for Clubbing and Shows
Per the California Coastal Act, you're free to walk along the waterline (below the high tide line). However this particular beach is surrounded by rocky cliffs so it's unlikely you'd get very far. Closest access would probably be via kayak from San Gregorio State Beach 3-5 miles south. Though there are lots of pullouts along that stretch of Highway 1.
If we invoke the ancient European idea of the "public trust doctrine" to bolster the justness of the argument that Vinod Khosla should create a path on his private land for the public use -- then why can't California invoke that same reasoning to overturn the antequated water ownership laws that give private, transferrable ownership of ground resources (including water) for large landowners who control a large portion of the state's water sources?

The attitude about California's ground water is, "Hey, they own the water based on the laws on the books, what can you do?" Much of the public would rather they not use all that water on almonds and alfalfa and whatnot, just to export elsewhere. Why can't the rest of the country grow that stuff? How can someone exclusively own the groundwater like that??

Whatever law that applies to Vinod Khosla should apply to those large water-wasting water-owners.

(And it follows that however dastardly Vinod Khosla may seem, the large water-owners in California are irrevocably screwing over California's future generations' water resources, and are thus in my book, much more worthy of scorn and "public trust doctrine" action.)
An oligarchy?
It's not about the number of approvers (just one), but more the approver knowing that the submitter is done making revisions. Usually after the first merge request, we do code review then wait for revisions, that's when the tag happens.

Now this would be awesome:

> We’re thinking about more improvements to the Merge Request Approvals, the main improvement being automatic suggestions for reviewers, based on the history of the changed files in the merge request. For instance, if Jane worked a lot on a certain class and you submit a change to that class, Jane gets suggested to approve your merge request.

Today we are using the self-hosted community edition though.
Who goes Trump?
Nazism, Communism, Islamism. What makes mind viruses take control of societies and use human hosts to battle other mind viruses in an effort to build an organization to propagate the ideas?

I view it in an epidemiological context. Yes, there is a certain susceptibility in the human mind, but we have much bigger second-order effects when it comes to groups of people, and organizations. Our own ideology is Liberal Democracy, which is more tolerant of multiculturalism. But the "psychology of the masses" can be a dangerous thing. It can cause a flint (three teenagers being kidnapped in West Bank) to escalate into a flame (war in Gaza where 1500 civilians die), or via escalating reprisals where "refugees" rape women and mobs of hooligans raid peaceful refugees, and so forth.

Human life is often lost in the greatest amounts when one ideology is "completing its revolution". Whether it is the Holodomor or China's Three Terrible Years man made famines, or the persecution of Falun Gong, the rights of human beings take a backseat to ideology. That's what I find to be most dangerous politically.

Although I fear actual viruses, bacteria, overpopulation and world-ending events more, an inflexible ideology + power is a pretty terrible combination.
I don't want to take anything away from entrepreneurs, but one thing that you need to accept when you get rich is this: the price of being rich is that no one gives a shit about your problems anymore. I'm sorry but it's true. It doesn't matter how hard you worked, and whether you had to perform self surgery to cut out your own spleen and sell it, once you are rich no one is going to care about your problems.

The fact is that Bernie Sanders is not targeting you as an individual, he's just using the rich as a symbol, and frankly, he's right. The wealth gap is not good for society, it's not good for the rich because it causes instability, and instability is bad for the existing power structure. Instead of taking it personally, recognize that A) your personal story is not necessarily indicative of any greater societal truth, and B) if you are rich you already have advantages that outweigh any tax penalty you may pay, so if taxes are a problem just focus on making more money instead of attempting to justify your own wealth (not because it's unjustified, but because no one gives a shit).

If you want to argue that higher taxes are bad because the government doesn't know what it's doing then I'm all for that, but it's a mistake for reach people to make a personal appeal—it's not anyone else's job to validate your worthiness; be humble, acknowledge your own luck, and then you may find that even as a rich person people will still listen to your opinion.
Yeah that sounds like complete bullshit to me. I know some top quant traders who make high-six/low-seven figure comp consistently at that point in their careers, but they're nowhere near able to retire with a comfortable lifestyle, and that's an extremely biased sample. For every person like them, 100 others fail early on, 10 stick around making a nice but not much higher than Google salary, and 5 have a couple busy high comp years then get pushed out by greedy management, have their edge eaten by competitors, or quit when the markets slow down.

Getting to that level is like making partner in a law firm. You have to do much better than "well" and anyone who gets there would be a fool to retire and likely wouldn't want to anyway due to the personality traits/defects required to get there in the first place.
Donor/recipient enhancement of memory in rat hippocampus (2013)
For example, the blind?
It is easy to build $1-2M SaaS company
I'm looking at the ToC. It doesn't even get into OTP until the last chapter.
The trouble is you can't really traverse the waterline because there are lots of cliffs on either side of the beach - hence the importance of this access road.
Juttle/juttle: Juttle dataflow programming language
Because that is what most of us learn as children?

Even now, other than white and black, I'd have to think what light combinations make what colour.
> Corporations aren't fundamentally different from the government.

Yes, and that is the problem. Both are enormous institutions with tremendous wealth, resources, and power over individuals. A democracy is supposed to check this kind of power, but instead we're relying on it, only from a different source. The corporations' interests are currently aligned with the people's only by good fortune. When they're not, who will check them? Who will check the government?

Corporate interests are not a sustainable, effective, or remotely wise defense of liberty. The fact that Cook and Zuckerberg are doing our fighting for us is evidence that the correct methods are not functioning properly.
Not at all, this time would require Apple to literally sign a lie.

Also, before had zero risk of going wrong. This is difficult and already fucked up by the FBI.
Machine Eye-Some cool image classifications
I think if was Turbo Vision.
You want it to be that way, but it's the other way.

If you're just a "cog in the machine" doing research or writing software for a trader, and he ends up sucking, the firm will probably shuffle you around to work under someone else. You have generally useful technical skills, cost less than the trader, and recruiting good technical people is expensive.

If you're a supposedly brilliant trader but cost the firm money taking stupid risk or fail to make any profit to justify your inflated salary and bonus, there's not really much they can do with you.
That's what makes it strange: At least for our group, it's not even a binary, it's PHP. Unless a database-schema changes, things ought to be simpler than they are.
What you propose is inherently paradoxical and irrational.

You say people (or intellectuals, at least) should make a conscious effort to avoid the psychology and biases of in-group/out-grouping.

But what you are proposing is simply the creation of another in-group: "those of us who don't in-group," contrasted with the new out-group of "those who do in-group and out-group."

You advocate for everyone to join your in-group of "non-in-groupers," and condemn the out-groupers, those not aligned with your prescription for correct behavior -- exactly as all in-groupers have done before you, and precisely what you claim to be deploring.

It is thus a wholly and profoundly self-contradictory proposition, which cannot be admitted as logical or rational.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11156136 and marked it off-topic.
That's not how taxes work. Why don't you donate extra money to the government that there is no law saying you have to pay?
Google to Shut Down Its Comparison-Shopping Website
Most likely copy-paste from wikiquote or something similar.
Thanks. Url changed from http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-smallest-language-h....
Seems pretty cool, I often use bash and python to script things but always feel like some things area way way easier in only one of them.
Welsh-made hydrogen car prototype unveiled for trial
Which is why I wrote: Hence the questions of what "efficient" and "abuse" means, which go into the pricing negotiations.
> I realize they have not taken security seriously in designing their delivery mechanisms. However I do not care.

I hope then that you don't use you computer for developing software or for work or anything remotely important, because otherwise using insecure software is most egregiously unethical towards your users/customers/employers because you are consciously choosing to exposing them to unnecessary risks.
Just to play devil's advocate here... I believe last time this came up he raised a fuss about him having to maintain the road, or he had spent $x on it already, or something like that.

Was their substance to that, or just an attempt to drag out the process?
So it was 3300 USD total for the solution?

And the interesting detail, in the article that the author links there is this opinion from the doctor who uses the portable ultrasound device:

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/05/pocket-ultrasound-machin...

"Other doctors often ask me if I bill for my exams. I don’t, because billing and the detailed documentation and posturing that would be necessary to prove to an insurance company that an ultrasound was necessary would take more time than I have."

The rest of the article is also insightful.
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534
Well, this just reminded me how awesome DDG is and made me switch! Thanks :)
Bill Gates Thinks Apple Should Help FBI (paywall)
I believe you meant wrench.
Bill Gates' argument seems to miss an important component of Apple's complaint--the expansion of the All Writs Act of 1798 to unprecedented scope. The FBI's need for some way to "get the keys" is worth consideration, though.
Yeah you're right, neither involve actual people.
Why? Are you under the impression that you can't install Android apps except through an app store?
Justice Department Wants Data from About 12 Other iPhones
"Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent."

Taking on enough of a local accent to be understood is good. Losing your accent is a terrible cost that requires hard work to achieve. Why would you work hard to hurt yourself?

After all, chicks dig an accent.
Ask HN: File format for declarative language?
I'm in the process of developing a pure declarative language. The source consists of simple JS-like data structures that would be at home in a JSON file. I have two questions ...

- I'm naturally considering using JSON, but I don't think it is great for writing original code. It has too much visual clutter like quotes. My next thought was YAML but it seems kind of obtuse and overly-complex. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Am I overlooking any?

- Assuming I have a format chosen, can I use a new custom file suffix matching my language or must it be `.yml`, `.json`, etc.? One could argue that the suffix should match the syntax (`.json`) or one could argue it should match the semantics (my language). There are languages than match C syntax but don't have the `.C` suffix (if I'm not mistaken).
This survey is so biased.

The survey asks people to self-rank themselves on their knowledge of the case based on how much they heard about it. Most people said they heard a lot about it already.

Then it asks them if Apple should or should not unlock the iPhone, as if that were something Apple could do with the turn of a key and without having future implications.

There's no attempt to provide background information at all, or truly ascertain the respondent's understanding.
> This is idiotic.

This breaks the HN guidelines. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The government is in theory our employees

Thought experiment: what would happen if you exercised any discretion in whether to continue employing them, or even how much of your income you pay them?
You literally did nothing except call Assange's motives into question. You don't have anything substantive, you're nothing but motive.
Bill Gates backs FBI iPhone hack request
All Seeing Eye. That's the point.
I dunno, the US Government had billions of USD go mysteriously missing during our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan so it seems unlikely that the powers that be are too concerned about corruption for the sake of stamping out corruption.
Find Out Amir Najam’s Professional Profile at LinkedIn
Piracy feels wrong because programmers worked hard to get the code working and deserve to earn money from the sales of the software from their company.

Some people used piracy to try a software program before they decide to buy it. For example Microsoft Windows was pirated by BBS systems, and it got popular and pirates would buy their own copy after trying it out first. People who pirated Windows 3.X for example, went on to buy Windows 95 when it came out.

I used to work for PC Shops and they would give us copies of floppies with MS-DOS and Windows on it to install for customers without paying Microsoft OEM fees. This was before activation keys and online activation. I felt bad about doing it, but if I used a legit version and charged for it I'd be fired. It was custom PC and AT systems with parts made in China and Taiwan and sometimes a 386 as well when they could afford it.
Oh, stewardess. I speak Jive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j2dVuhr6s
Yes high cocoa content from Lindt is disgusting, but that's not true of smaller good quality brands, or actually if you're in Canada Loblaws' organic no-name "brand".

I don't claim to be a specialist but I suspect the big difference co.es from cocoa fat vs solid percentage.