skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, come ON: It was plenty clear just what the heck Obama was well before and during the election. E.g., Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and his other buddies. Then, during the campaign where he was campaigning and on a stage with Hillary and Bill Richardson and the US National Anthem was playing, Hillery and Bill had their hands over their hearts and Obama had his hands together and below his belt. Then there was his "my Muslim faith". Then on his apology tour where he bowed down to the heads of China, France, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

What did you expect?
Hack for Good  DocuSign MOMENTUM '16
You're completely right that there are undesirable consequences to mathematically absolute privacy that can't be compromised by any means. But I'd argue that the government has brought this scenario upon itself by blowing up the old system of procedural (rather than mathematical) safeguards.

In the past, Apple had your iMessage data, or at least the ability to decrypt it on-demand. It was understood that this data would be private by default, but would be disclosed to the government through an established, case-by-case process supervised by the courts. Everyone was pretty much OK with this. You and I got our data kept private, unless there was some material, specific reason for the government to suspect it was related to a crime. The government got to dump the data of people under investigation, if a court thought there was good reason to do so.

Then the government went nuclear. They said, here's a National Security Letter that compels you to give us everything you have. Bulk data. Any cooperation that is physically possible. You can't talk about it and you can't appeal to the courts. If you have to capability to MiTM all of your users and pipe everything to us, you have to do it. No oversight, no transparency and no safeguards. Whatever we do with the data is up to us.

In this context, what alternative do tech companies have besides to similarly escalate and build systems that make it physically impossible for them to cooperate?

The government destroyed the social compact between telecom providers and law enforcement with forced, secret bulk surveillance. If the government is willing to step back and make binding, unequivocal commitments that companies that do maintain the ability to decrypt their users' communications won't be forced to secretly use them en masse, maybe we can go back to the old status quo. But the government doesn't seem willing to do that. They want cooperation, but they also want the ability to bust in the back door with an NSL and say "give us everything, on everyone."

The legal system has become so tilted in the government's favour (see: the inability to challenge the constitutionality of bulk surveillance, because you can't prove it happened to you), that companies will no longer trust in the old procedural safeguards. The only thing we can trust is the mathematically proven safety of encryption. And that's the government's fault. So now we are forced to chose between absolute privacy and zero privacy.

So far, I think Apple is making the right choice.
All containers from the C++ standard library (please don't call it STL, that's Stepanov's original library) can be parameterized by an allocator. You can use whatever allocation policy you like best. However, most people use the default allocator because it's good enough.

In any case, while C++ has lots of defects, “loss of control relative to what C gives you” isn't one of them.
If I can gain access to your customer's data by gaining access to a cell phone owned by one of your employees then you are doing something deeply, deeply wrong.

You should fix that.
if this article makes you think kripke stole the idea of rigid designation, you may as well say he stole it from john stuart mill (or st. augustine, for that matter).
Obama, like all the recent US presidents is just a puppet.
All everything 'should' be free. At least, that which is not scarce.

The correct question to ask is 'can' all research papers be free - does the world continue to spin, will research still happen, will we still progress, if they are free?

The only reason we even have this debate to begin with is because the producers of this information require scarce/controlled resources in order to survive.
Best Contest Entry in History. Check It
So you're in favor of the government bugging and installing cameras secretly? Because you can't really bug say, Enron's corporate office without a warrant served, and so they'd know they're being watched.

The alternative is breaking and entering. So since retroactive paper trails will be devalued, the government will have to switch to preemptive collection and entrapment scenarios.

I'm not sure this is better for privacy or democracy.
Sanders will criticize Obama, one of the things I love about him. Especially compared to his opponent that wraps herself in Obama.
Who will produce meaningful research for free?
This kind of wrestling, as all wrestling I can think of, has nothing to do with MMA. This fights are much more similar to olympic wrestling than any martial arts. It is actually less physical or violent (not sure what word to use here) than olympic wrestling. Is all about getting the opponent to the floor under some rules and then the fight is over.

Very different sports.
> And templating is more of a PoC for coroutines in Go than a properly fleshed out library.

I worked with Rob on that library and that's really not the case. It was designed from the ground up to replace the existing template library which was bad in several ways. The parser (which is I think what you refer to) is just an implementation detail.
Amazon's Vogel told us something that should terrify a $140B industry
No argument. I shifted over to passive investing by the time I was about 3 years out of college. (I worked in financial software for the first 2 of those years, so holding actively managed funds gave me an added benefit of helping to understand what my industry looked like and how end-consumers experience all the complicated algorithm/decision products we were working on.)
Managing two million web servers
It need not be a monopoly even if there is only one. It could be a decentralized single entity along the lines of usenet with a whole pile of people contributing and there being only one major distribution network.
See Poe's Law

"Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers for sincere expressions of the parodied views."
The people who conduct the research, and the people who fund the research, are not collecting the fees to view the research.
My last Linux machine was a Fujitsu lifebook, and the best ACPI firmware available for it was on Windows. The second best one was mine, cobbled together from a guy who solved less than half the problems, a guy who no longer had a Lifebook, and an idea from another guy to try to backport things from a later model.

I probably blew a hundred hours of weekends and weeknights to get 50 minutes of run time out of my machine and something like five people benefited from it.

When Apple came out with a 13" laptop that was less than a pound heavier (with the real battery, not that shitty fake one that was 90 minutes of run time) and happened to run a video game I was interested in, I said screw this and jumped ship.

And suddenly I understood those guys who had been showing up to tech meetups for a year or two with MacBooks. I can spend all my time futzing with my machine like a classic car aficionado, or I can get out and enjoy doing things with it. Once I realized that I had never actually wanted to learn Linux, I just wanted to use it to learn other things, I couldn't go back.

I still occasionally maintain Linux boxes, and sometimes bash, find or sed is the answer to a problem, but with the exception of Docker you literally have to pay me to use it.
I also learned to properly program using Turbo Pascal. You might enjoy Go. I find its small language, library, and tools that I can keep in my head leave me feeling similar to how I felt using Turbo Pascal back in the day.
The good news is you don't have to bookmark this blog because when you're writing scala and googling questions, it's going to come up on page one, because it's one of the best.
I agree that being open to an alternate point of view is a good idea..

We need to share facts in this debate..

We know about technology, they know about law enforcement

Let us each bring facts to the table and resist coming up with conclusions from the outset. Obama is missing some facts, and in order to convince him that's true I think we need to be open to the idea that there may be some things we do not know

We're not going to find out about those things by conjecturing. We need the administration to share any relevant details as much as they need to understand encryption technology
This is largely overblown though. Even with unfettered access to great and easy to use crypto your society doesn't collapse. It turns out that maintaining anonymity is a giant pain in the ass, no more people are going to go full on tinfoil ghost on society to dodge taxes any more than they already disappear and live off the grid. Most businesses are easier to conduct in public and even derive benefit from it.

Regulatory enforcement is fairly easy: in order to have a license to operate your coal plant, you agree to hand over documents x, y, z. If in your crypto-dystopia I handed over encrypted docs instead of the plaintext for my coal plant I would just have my business fined out of existence just like would happen now.

If I have incriminating documents and no crypto I'm not going to encrypt them, I'm going to slag the hard drives they're on and burn the paper copies.

If you're a public official: make it illegal to use encryption beyond the provided email encryption (which the agency IT dept can also read). I think you can make the case that it is already illegal since an internally encrypted message that you refuse to decrypt (at the request of a superior, a court, or investigation) would have to have been misuse of gov't property (your first amendment rights do not allow you to use government systems for private use and you explicitly have no privacy with respect to the scenario mentioned above when you use them).

People have always had plenty of ways to be shitheads and get away with it, and there have always been mechanisms to make those decisions costly. These things continue to be true despite the presence of strong crypto.

The reason an "absolutist" position here makes sense is because this is a binary choice between everyone legally having security, or no one legally having security. Until now we haven't had to make this choice because neither was an option, we just all existed in a vague middle ground dictated by our circumstances, number of shits given, and technical acumen. True, you might not have had access to cryptography, but you didn't have data to encrypt so you lost nothing by having no encryption. Now everyone has a lot to lose but not everyone realizes that.
Have you played "The Room"? I might just install it again right here on my smartphone after reading your comment - "fetishist" that I am :)

With that statement of mine I was mostly trying to convey how some things shouldn't be easy.

Let me try to paraphrase:

I'm sure that Sherlock would find a way to open that safe without a computer doing it for him!

To a certain degree I can understand the frustration of executive agencies over their apparent missing-out on all the shiny low-hanging fruit - but they shouldn't worry so much as the promises of most tech be it the use of "big data" or accessing our all-encompassing "personal assistants" ultimately won't free them of doing their jobs.
MacGyvering HTML Email Using Perl's Template Toolkit
It's not exactly post-scarcity, it's just zero marginal cost. It's true that, given the product has already been created and has zero marginal cost, it "should" be free. But for setting the expectations that producers of future products have about what compensation they'll receive we can't simply say it should be free.
> The best thing for worried parents to do is just give the kids a chance to grow up, Chen says. In most of the studies done on relative age and ADHD, the difference in diagnosis rates vanished by the time the students reached their teenage years. "I think we have to wait for a while, he says. "We have to have more time to evaluate their behavior, attention and brain development."

The problem is they are diagnosing 6-7 year olds and not diagnosing true peers but using proxies for age.
Did the Congress authorize all that uncostitutional surveillance for example? I thought it was a secret court interpreting the law in secret on behalf of the executive power. So "passing laws" in such context is not a far fetched claim.
I'm in favor of Apple's choices, but I can see the government's side of this too, I don't think it's as cut and dried morally as people are making it. I like to mentally "game out" repercussions of various scenarios to see where they lead, and I don't think it is bad with such wide sweeping and powerful technologies, to play devils advocate and argue on both sides.

A lot of people don't seem to want get into the fine details and debate at all. They just want to declare absolute privacy, like absolute freedom of speech, a done deal, and move on. I think there are interesting sociological, economic, and political issues to discuss not to curtail debate like that.

I also don't like the way the sides are demonized. Perhaps the end result is to enact a shift in the way police work is done and the way regulations are prosecuted. Perhaps the government can rule that privacy is a right only for personal communications, and does not apply to computers used for business sectors that are regulated. They can mandate anti-privacy, mandate transparency and paper trails, for say, health insurers, or makers of chemicals.

But the nuance and fine details need to be worked out.
I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.
> I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs.

No doubt he will. But let's stay focused on the debate for now. He's still in office. There's still time to share facts with him.

He says he has a digital services team. Who holds those positions currently?

And who are his technology advisors? What are they saying on this issue? What have they shared with Obama?

From Obama's remarks, it sounds like he treats the digital services team more as a toolset, rather than a team of trusted advisors.

EDIT: The next PCAST (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) meeting will be on March 25 and webcast here [1]. No need to sign up, just visit that page on the date to view. I suggest we all watch this and submit questions to their group in advance.

They meet every other month. The last meeting was on January 15, which predates Comey's open letter to the public (Feb 21) about the San Bernardino case, so they have not yet publicly discussed encryption in light of what's happened since Comey's letter.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast
Do average consumers still need Dropbox?
The marginal units absolutely can be free, just pay for the research itself. Fixed cost for fixed work.
Company Patents Person of Interest Tech
> ""We also know that the velocity of the water flow must have been more than 300 kilometres an hour."

I'm not sure how to visualize this.
Yup. Just as Dredd Pirate Roberts. :) Satoshi Nakamoto is probably the only one I've seen to successfully do near perfect OpSec.
2. No geographical boundaries.

Reading this always feels wrong to me. Face to face communication is higher bandwidth than text or video.
I agree with you that knowledge should be accessible to all.

But, do realize that there most certainly is value being contributed by journals who are making you pay. For example, the editorial work, the typesetting, the selection, the whole system, etc. So they do need a paycheck from somewhere.

So, I think this is actually like the common software/music/movies piracy situation... but a lot better!

My (simplified) feelings about piracy are: do it if you're dirt-poor, don't do it if you can easily afford it. By this account, Kanye was a d-bag for pirating.. whatever software he pirated, because he, of all people, should be able to afford it. A starving artist with lots of debts, in my opinion, can't be accused of doing a great moral wrong when he's stealing a thing which has an effective zero marginal cost (arguably). The biggest problem here is that... there do exist people like Kanye who really should pay for things but end up not doing so.

What's different in this scenario is that... I am almost 100% certain that all institutions that should be paying... will be paying! I mean, can you imagine some Harvard or MIT lab skipping payment on the journals? No, that's just not going to happen. The Harvards and MITs of the world will keep paying... the rest -- the public, or schools in suffering areas and nations, who can't afford it as easily, will be able to get it using scihub. It works out wonderfully in this way.
Dual booting Atom tablets with Android + Windows have been available since Windows 8.0 and people have already installed Ubuntu on those devices - it might already be supported, along with Android as a nice bonus!
Try Pocket. That's easier to organize.
I'm not sure what aspect of asking about the level of testing performed on an open source library gives you that idea, but sure: no offense taken.
This is not a fetish. This is a conflict between a government that has gotten away from the "we serve the citizens" mentality, and gone to "we'll do anything we want, routing around the constitution whenever we want, and use "serving citizens" as the excuse, and the citizens who should be able to specify, to any level detail that we want, exactly how those "servents" will serve us. It seems to be sliding away from us.
At least you don't have to stare in to a potato like in Latvia. Actually an imagination of a potato just before you die...
New Orleans, many areas of China (see 1931 China Floods), areas along the Ganges Delta, also look at the Special Flood Hazard Areas assigned in the US.
The good news about Trump is that he's not bought or sold. He is what he is, which from my viewpoint is better than the unknown that we currently have.
>The largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers for publication.

> But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.

These two facts seem to point strongly to the publishers' being in the right. 30% is not a high number. If they were to lower their prices by 30%, running completely as nonprofits (or whatever number would break even), do you think people's complaints about difficulty of access would go away? If not, your complaining is not about their profit.

And you can't seriously expect them to eat a >$1000 loss on every paper.

Either we need a single party to fund upfront, like the government, or we need some other way to pay for it.
Let's take a moment of deep appreciation for President Obama's decision to not panic after the San Bernadino shooting, reinstate color terror alert codes, spark a ground invasion of Syria, or in any other way overreact.

For a brief interlude in American history, we had a president that didn't capitalize on terror attacks politically, or generally set a tone of paranoia and fear.

We won't always be this lucky.
The issue isn't that they won't hand over documents x,y,z, they'll just hand over fake documents x, y, and z, while the real documents remain encrypted. When the government asks why they can't read files Real_X, Real_y, and Real_Z, they'll claim they're private email communications between employees, and that you can't force them to turn over the keys.

But in reality, they were secret bribery emails between corporate executives and local politicians.

Prior to cryptography, you could pull this off as well, you could have fake books. Hide the real books offsite so warrants can't find them, etc. Cryptography doesn't change whether it's possible to do or not, it just makes it easier to do and scales better.

I mean, even the Nazi's could have used one time pads by carrier pigeon if they wanted to, Enigma wasn't even needed. But the logistics of doing it are less convenient.

As cryptography becomes more universal, more automatic, more user friendly, OpSec will become less of a burden for less diligent people.

Infact, we hope it does, because sloppy OpSec is a huge problem for society right now. Just look at passwords.
Way to burn a strawman the height of Mount Everest. Nobody is asking for cryptoanarchy, just freedom of backdoored communication.

In any case, I surely hope my bank is already practicing that kind of opsec. That doesn't mean they suddenly stop giving reports to the government. Why would it? That's just.. what?
> dragnet surveillance of nearly all communications. That's not the bargain the public has had with law enforcement

I'm not sure this is the argument to make to Obama and the DOJ. They are already framing this as a privacy issue

The factors they understand are the public safety and economic impacts. Let us speak to those points and allow privacy to be a secondary concern. Obama himself told President Xi last year that the exact same policies would dramatically hurt Xi's economy [1]

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obama-china-idUSKBN0LY...
Netherlands.
Because it wouldn't work. You're purposefully trying to work around the intent of things. Judges tend to take ill view of cute things like that.

Besides, ok you ban the sale of ammunition. Now are you going to ban reloaders and selling of ammunition components too? How far are you willing to go down that rabbit hole? Noting that it isn't that hard to make ammunition are you going to ban the knowledge of that as well? It would be pretty easy for a lawyer to point out the whole idea is an end run around the spirit of owning armaments. For that reason alone its not any better of an idea than trying to ban guns outright.
I took that class on the Stanford campus in the Summer of 2011. Keith was one of the most engaging instructors I've ever had. His enthusiasm and knowledge were boundless.

The course was video-recorded and I downloaded and saved most of the lectures (and I gave Keith a DVD with a copy of them.) I still have them, but I don't know if it's okay to put them on YouTube or not.
Moreover, the people conducting the research pay to the journals too. There's sort of an application fee for submitting your paper to a lot of big-name journals.
>2 years in and you haven't launched?

It wasn't the original plan, but things change. You often don't know what you don't know when you first set down a path. Sometimes the bar for a proper MVP is beyond reach without a team. It can take a long time to realize that.

>Without real feedback how do you know if you are building something people actually want?

Good question. I've watched several companies come into existence in that time, and also watched several established companies add similar features to their products. Every time this happens it's both well received by users while at the same time revealing a larger trend. Each represents a piece of the same puzzle, it's just that nobody has put them together yet.

I'm also scratching my own itch in terms of what I'm building, so that's a plus. Fortunately it seems to be an itch a lot of people have.
Learning to Learn as a New Coder