skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've already made my legal and political opinions in other threads on the topic and won't rehash them here, especially since so many other people are making the points better than I did.

However, here's something I haven't thought of, though I sort of hate to boil the thing down to a business proposition. The fact is that iPhone is a massive business. What all is a company allowed to claim as "burden" in the discussion of undue burden?

Let's say the FBI wins, and Apple is forced into this. Then the narrative in the mind of the public is that Apple has back-doored their phones and made them insecure.

Apple loses literally billions of dollars per quarter for some amount of time until they can repair the PR damage.

Is the loss of, say, 50 billion dollars in revenue over the next calendar year something a reasonable person would call "undue burden?"

What about other ancillary effects that cost either direct money or productivity? There are rumors of something like an iPhone 6c that is scheduled to be released perhaps soon. (Supposedly a revamped 4" phone like the 5s but with the latest hardware) After all this hubbub about a potentially insecure 5c, who is going to go buy a 6c without wondering if it has the same problems?

Casual tech watchers don't understand the nuts and bolts of this situation. They hear some things, read some things and go along with the popular media consensus.

If the alleged 6c were actually going to be launched in a couple of months, the branding, production, packaging, marketing would all have been bought and paid for already.

Does having to recalibrate the launch of a new product and all the costs that might incur count as "undue burden?"

Etc., etc. Maybe they need a significant portion of the iOS team to do this, and the work causes delays in the next version of iOS, iPhone 7 has to get pushed back for release and misses the holiday quarter, again, lost sales accounting for billions.

I think the potential impact on Apple's bottom line could honestly be taken into consideration of burden. Curious about what other people think. Is money just not talked about in these considerations?
> Apple has in a number of cases objected to the Justice Department’s efforts to force its cooperation through a 1789 statute known as the All Writs Act

And the full (!) text of All Writs Act is just:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Writs_Act

--

"(a) The Supreme Court and all courts established by Act of Congress may issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.

(b) An alternative writ or rule nisi may be issued by a justice or judge of a court which has jurisdiction."

--

Note it's not any law that regulates any form of encryption or communication security or what some company has to do to help some law enforcement procedures, a lot of laws with such topics were fought about, proposed, discussed and introduced through the years, like CALEA. This is just "we can demand anything we want."

The issue is, should this Act be allowed to be used in such contexts. A precedent can even make unnecessary the current process by which the laws are being made. Note there's nothing specific in that sentence from 1789. Who needs laws if anything goes?
Just wonder how the voice-hearing people skim or fast-read. Does it sound like a fast-forward with a funny voice to them?
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve needs more input, so if anyone here is feeling up to it...
Seems like eHarmony might agree with you.

http://www.eharmony.co.uk/ehplus/
I was too negative in my last message.

To be more precise: I claim that, for a library for an unsafe interface, if the ratio of library interface area over the library implementation volume is high enough, it is not worth re-implementing in a safe language. I also claim that a libc implementation is generally well above this threshold.

I agree that this might not be the case for selected subsets of the library like libresolv.
Some of my contact lists disappeared the other day. I am using Skype 4.3 on Ubuntu 14.04. I am trying to move most of my communication to Slack, but some clients and friends are still on Skype which makes this a pain for me.
The 3 Types of Startup Pitches That You Will Always and Inevitably Give VCs
While I'm unsure about the inability to join calls, I can at least agree that the Linux client is terrible.

I finally caved a few months ago, got an account, and started using it ("oh wow it handles 's/woops/fixed/', that's awesome")... until the client began freezing, chewing 100% CPU for as long as I patiently left it running, and not getting itself sorted out. Removing ~/.Skype (XDG, anybody?) and re-signing in worked... for about 3 minutes, at which point my profile data re-synced, and the client began choking again.

Last I tried the Web-integrated version (Skype icon, top-right of outlook.com et. al., takes a minute to become clickable) I couldn't even type "/me ..." - the line would send verbatim. At that point I gave up completely.

I used to use IRC but I find it too Spartan nowadays, but on the other hand I don't want to have to remember what chat tab is in what window, and I can't handle the idea of running 15 isolated instances of Webkit for all the separate chat systems out there, so that kills websites and most current "desktop" chat clients.

I don't use the Internet to communicate much, somewhat ironically. Everything drives me to distraction.

Notes:

- XDG: TL;DR = says stuff should be in ~/.config, ~/.cache, etc. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory_supp...

- I cannot help but admire the reverse-engineering going on at https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe... to make the outlook/skype web integration programmatically consumable. I have no idea how it works but the commits are very recent, which is a big positive sign.
...and a Google account - which not everyone has / wants.

Also, from my experiences, it needs a more powerful computer to run smoothly.
This sounds like you're trying to scare people off using MSYS2 altogether with the GPL bogey man, and it misrepresents the point of MSYS2.

The 'msys2' software repository (as opposed to the 'mingw32' and 'mingw64' ones) contains things that link to msys-2.0.dll which is GPL, and yes it includes compilers and linkers that in turn generate new PECOFF objects that in turn link to msys-2.0.dll. This repository exists mostly as build scaffolding (Autotools, bash) to support building native Windows software (as exists in the other two repositories) and that is the real goal of MSYS2. If you want POSIX-y GPLed software on Windows, use Cygwin.

You are right to caution people on the naive usage of our msys2/gcc package, but you've made it sound like something much worse than it is.
You're right, I didn't explain it there, I'll update it, but you can just escape it with a \ so "bshimmin\@mail.com" would work.
Yes, that's kind of weird this empathy we feel toward these robots.

It's just a machine, yet it's so... human.
Is It Worth the Time?
It's not just the Linux client. The Windows client has terrible usability issues too.
Not a bad rule, I have to admit (and true in my case, my post was certainly off topic). As a general rule it's a bit broad though, I think. If one wants to address another's points directly, it can be hard to avoid the second person pronoun.
Skype has been getting worse and worse over the years. Personally I've switched to Telegram for chats, and I'll be looking for alternatives as far as voice calls are concerned.
The funny thing is they don't want to develop an all-purpose trojan. It's only meant to intercept communication before it is encrypted and sent over the wire. This came to happen because they were unable to listen in on Skype calls in the past. So they're basically deploying a trojan which is able to copy VOIP traffic.

From media reports it's unclear if communication includes chat and email, which would make the trojan a keylogger. There are lawyers that argue email, without PGP encryption, is within the 'Quellen-TKÜ' laws reach.

Furthermore the government is not allowed to turn the infected machine into a listening station, by law the flat of a person is under stronger protection than his communication.

Technically this will be really hard to enforce in software...
Are you deliberately being misleading, or do you not actually check your info?

There were 6 cases of leukemia in Elbmarsch, and it's not clear if they have anything to do with the reactor. Asse II has not hurt anyone. Southern Bavaria is not specific enough to google.

6 cases, and no one died as far as I can tell.

> Areas where nuclear waste or faulty reactors contaminated tap water, and people were never told about it until the leukemia rate reached several hundred times of the normal rate.

What areas?

> Just counting direct deaths is misleading.

Go for it. Count leukemia if you like - Nuclear still comes in far ahead.
A few weeks ago there was a post[0][1] on hn from a guy who wrote a daily til for a whole year.

I stole his idea[1] and created jekyll blog on Github, I can just create a new .md file and put the things for the til down. With the new upload feature from github you can also just write the md file locally and just drop it in.

I like it so far, just need to get in the habit of writing it down daily.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11068902
[1] https://github.com/jbranchaud/til
[2] http://arminmsg.github.io/blog/til/ http://arminmsg.github.io/blog/til/
I use web.skype.com these days. I don't want that piece of crapware installed on my box, as I don't trust it.

The web client works well enough for chat so I can talk to my friends who don't want to move away from it.

It does however not support calls since for some reason it needs a browser plugin for that. WebRTC would clearly be too easy.
So I just link people a Firefox Hello link whenever they want to use voice.
Multitasking is killing your brain and moral
I think the point is that templates themselves can't contain logic. All logic is declared at compile time so that the compiler can optimize it, but then used at runtime like any other templating language.
It's not the Terminator T-800 yet, still it's impressing. :-)))
The Xbox client isn't much better. After install, it would only run for me if I specifically did NOT accept the terms and conditions. Account management is also dodgy as hell.
I updated to 1.8.* (Windows) last week when the app notified me of the new version and found it hugely unstable. I've since downgraded back to 1.7.0 and will be continuing to use that until I have a real need to upgrade.

It's a huge shame that SourceTree isn't open source. I'd love to lend my WPF expertise to the project; it seems whoever's working on the Windows version is a bit clueless.
In the past they used it to infect the laptop of a potentially drug trafficking medical doctor.

Of course it's unclear what the secret police is up to. This is mainly for the federal police and customs police.
Actually, open-source is the exact opposite of what patents are intended to do - patents discourage trade secrets that die with their inventors by giving their holders a right to timed exclusivity (regardless of whether other people know how to copy them or not), in exchange for publicly documenting said trade secrets.

Open-source is essentially just a tool for collaborating on software more easily (ignoring the Free Software side for a sec), but which requires giving up propriety over the software.
Player Piano, the first novel of Kurt Vonnegut, was published in 1952. It depicts a dystopia of automation, describing the deterioration it can cause to quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class—the engineers and managers who keep society running—and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become hallmarks developed further in Vonnegut's later works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)
This has been going on in MMORPG's for years, at least there it's a bit more up-front and transparent. And people can do other things to pass the time while they wait for the fake girlfriend to login. :)
I don't think I have ever agreed more with a post :)
@otimson, are you working in the analytics industry?
Since I use Jinja syntax for tempaltes already and potentially would like to switch to Rust later, would it make more sense later to add Jinja support to this library or to go with https://github.com/jroweboy/jinja2-c ?
> Is the loss of, say, 50 billion dollars in revenue over the next calendar year something a reasonable person would call "undue burden?"

I wonder the same. In another comment in this thread I mention that it's not just undue burden here that is expected under AWA according to USA vs. New York Telephone, it is also expected that the FBI pay for any work they ask Apple to do.

Yahoo was forced to deal with many requests from the NSA in 2008, only those dealings were unknown to the public until recently. [1] The last 8 years have not treated Yahoo too well..

It seems when you fight the government on privacy, you lose. It's better if you roll over and wag your tail like Microsoft

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/11/yahoo-nsa-lawsu...
Does the OS X client work well for anyone else?

I keep having inability to join calls, getting stuck in calls and at worst even having the client say I'm not in any calls and no sound coming out of my speakers while others can still see me in the call and hear my microphone.
I am wrestling with it now, because I cant justify spending 150EUR/month _and_ 1500EUR at year end to keep books and file returns. I have but six to ten invoices a year, and only myself as an employee; but such an animal doesn't seem very interesting to every relevant tax and accounting professional I've inquired with in Berlin. Perhaps it is the "English" premium, but at those costs I'm stuck spending more time than I care, at possibly greater risk than I am aware of, trying to do my own paperwork and books. In a system I mostly grok from (translated!) blog posts!
How to audit Python?
I use tox[1] with my family and some friends.

https://tox.chat/
For the half day that I used the new version before realising it was too broken I noticed that the UX hasn't really changed; the UI has though, i.e. most of the changes are purely cosmetic.
> "Having a couple of thousand people watching my region centered vegan cooking videos is nothing."

You're wrong. That's what change from the grass roots looks like.

> "The other is applying my own engineering skills, tied very tightly to logistics (NP-hard optimization)."

Interesting. Is this related to promoting a vegan diet?
The quality of outbound calls to telephones ("Skype Out" I think) has dropped markedly recently. My respondants can't hear me about half the time. The quality seems to come and go by the week.
Ecstasy Trip Turned into a Rare Anxiety Disorder
Can someone explain what would be the single greatest challenge (from a research perspective) in making such a robot today? For example, is it:

1. The sensors?

2. The actuators?

3. Coming up with accurate dynamical models?

4. Solving the models accurately?

5. Solving the models efficiently?

6. Making the models robust to inaccuracy/noise?

Yes, I realize all of these are probably hard. What I'm trying to understand is whether the biggest challenge is coming up with e.g. an accurate (possibly nonlinear) dynamical model, or with solving the model (efficiency/accuracy), or with making existing models that are otherwise already completely accurate robust to outside noise, or with the manufacturing aspect (precision), or whatever.
At least on that OS it can be installed in a straightforward way.

If one really wants to install skype on a 64 bits debian, they need to apply loads of tricks (and risk to bork their system in the process).

Last time I attempted that, the package installer prompted me to first uninstall X - the window system - (amongst a whole lot of other crucial software) as incompatible dependencies...
Levenhuk Skyline 120x1000 EQ Telescope
Slightly altered to protect the guilty, but yes, this is a real example. There are few things more frustrating when converting hand written recursive descent parsers into proper grammars than having to insert arbitrary rules about where newlines can or cannot be. You generally can't change the language if there's production code out there (and if there isn't, why are reverse engineering a grammar?) because changing the semantics will lead to more confusion.

You just end up making a grammar with really weird rules about where newlines can or cannot be put, and comments that this should not be changed. Oh, and a BIG test suite.

Once you've dealt with the grammar then you'll only have bugs in the compiler and runtime semantics to emulate, and language implementations often have an exciting set of those.
I've run Hangouts on a 1st gen netbook (Asus EEE PC) without any performance issues.
The only times where performance could be an issue is when you are running a video conference call which technically Skype doesn't really supports (w/o a premium or business account).
My internal number line exists as a ribbon of squares laying flat (i.e roughly parallel to the ground plane, although they exist floating in an infinite black space). From zero, it goes right to left, then turns around at 10 and goes back behind that line from left to right and then loops around again at 20 in front of the first line. Also, at this point the "camera" turns around following the line, such that it is now viewed behind the first line, going left to right. From there it proceeds in a straight line, with a slight incline, and then plateaus at 100.
Agree with the sentiment, except for RTE.

How in the world is RTE anything but pure evil? For a country that is in dire need of new schools, how can any law that closes existing schools with flimsy reasons and zero due process (not that it matters when you have 200 years backlog in courts) be anything but pure evil? These are private schools started by individuals with no government funds. It has made impossible for hindus who form 85+% of the population to start and operate schools (irrespective of the social status/caste/financial status). It has essentially made an essential commodity that is education scarce (as you know it's not economically viable for 85% of the population to start one).
if you want to bypass the forced startup wizard/login crap on OSX:

defaults write com.torusknot.SourceTreeNotMAS STWelcomeStageAtlassianAccount -int 0
defaults write com.torusknot.SourceTreeNotMAS STWelcomeStageCloning -int 0
defaults write com.torusknot.SourceTreeNotMAS STWelcomeStageLicense -int 0
defaults write com.torusknot.SourceTreeNotMAS STWelcomeStageRemotes -int 0
defaults write com.torusknot.SourceTreeNotMAS agreedToEULA2 -int 1
defaults write com.torusknot.SourceTreeNotMAS AtlassianAccountEmail -string me@my.atlassian.com
defaults write com.torusknot.SourceTreeNotMAS completedWelcomeWizardVersion -int 3
I can't figure out how points are calculated. Most of the times I just 7 8 or 9, but sometimes I get 100.
Autorebase hell is I hope a thing of the past. We made all of the executables involved in the running of pacman static (except msys-2.0.dll obviously, and some post-install scripts, but we try to remove those) and split the update procedure into two parts, "update-core" which handles updating the core of MSYS2 and pacman. The rest of the system update is then completed with "pacman -Su". We've had no reports of update failures since then.

We didn't remove support for symlinks, you can enable them in the MSYS env. var winsymlinks:nativestrict if you want. If symlinks didn't require special permissions, we'd enable them by default, but unfortunately they do. Maybe one day Microsoft will change their minds on this. I can only hope so. I guess you may have meant that we don't create the 'Cygwin special' symlinks that winsymlinks:native falls back to when it doesn't get permissions? Yes those are an interoperability disaster for MSYS2 when native programs read them.
On thing you can already bet on is that in 20 years that guy is going to wake up in the middle of the night to find a T1000 with a hockey stick in it's hands and a grin on it's facial expression monitor pointing at a box and say "would you kindly; pick it up?". Later his tomb stone will say "Don't be a dick to robots".
Well components, are purely static. They are the equivalent of text expansion, or string interpolation.

A Function's logic, isn't defined in Polly. You have to define it in Rust. This moves all the logic to your Rust server, where your logic should be. It also provides the advantage of being compiled, and optimised with the program, rather than if Polly defined it's own syntax for functions, and logic, and trying to parse that out at run-time.
Also, the login window on Windows is a web browser view which uses Internet Explorer and keeps throwing up modal script error windows.

Edit: Admittedly, I have IE8 installed on my work laptop. Not sure if IE11 has the same behaviour.
> I'm in a minimalist passeist phase.

> ...one to one with that simple machine.

Recommendation: Forth (cf. colorForth)

Warning: Save snapshot of current mental state/perspective/worldview first, to guarantee sustained mental health :P
I'm curious what this means with regards to someone who is deaf? Language comprehension and the auditory system are decoupled, with obvious empirical evidence (people who can't hear can still read, write, and speak). What is a 'voice in your head' for a deaf person?
there it is: http://gameofbombs.com/
Linphone (VoIP) works beautifully, is free software and is cross-platform (also works on android). It's also lightweight and personally I find the quality of calls to be superior to Skype.
> until the client began freezing, chewing 100% CPU for as long as I patiently left it running, and not getting itself sorted out.

The same happens for me on iOS and OS X quite often. I disabled mobile data and push notifcations on iOS as it sucked up tonnes of data (I've seen 30MB/day even when I haven't opened the app), and repeated or delayed notifications. Whenever I open a conversation I have to leave it 30s - 1 minute until it updates with the latest messages.
Philly's Rise Conf: https://rise2015.splashthat.com/
Code for Philly?
Quit Smoking Health Advice – Alphega Pharmacy
Does that have a native app for the desktop? I'm tired of everything using Electron and requiring hundreds of megabytes of RAM for simple stuff :-(
Did you try https://whispersystems.org/ ? There is a desktop version but it doesn't support voice: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop/
Similar to Girlfriend PlusPlus, except without human operators.
As someone who works in the VoIP mobile client area for 7 years (though not for Skype) I have to be fair and say that this is unlikely to be Skypes fault.

They are known to use state of the art codecs so most likely the issue lies in the PSTN network that you are calling into.

For the out calling feature they are relying on Carriers all around the world for the VoIP -> PSTN functionality.

It would be another thing if you said that VoIP -> VoIP quality has dropped, here Skype has somewhat more control, although still not perfect control as they rely on the quality of Internet connection between caller and callee.
The syntax of Jinja is completely different to Polly's. If you're really persistent about using Jinja, you should probably use Jinja2-c.