skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Internet privacy is one perfectly valid area for government to get involved. The average person has no idea about cookies, Facebook or Google tracking or how online ads are profiling them. The sop offered from the supply side has been to offer "opt-outs" which still track you. The more technical might use adblock, noscript or requestpolicy, but by doing this, we're just shifting the cost on our fellow internet users. This is not fair.

When the people's ignorance or reasonable lack of ability is being abused by corporations, that's exactly the time for the government to step in. Not the misguided EU cookie directive that just gives more power to the incumbents, but a genuine ability to protect their privacy by default.

Opt out you say? Such arrogance. Your responsibility as the priests of the electronic age* is to help your flock, not take advantage of them.

* as in you're holding exotic knowledge and power that is beyond the understanding of the average mortal
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On the contrary: Microsoft is almost all windows, but they all look inward.
In the short term, until enhancements like 38262 Outline view (née 3959 under OO) are taken seriously I very much doubt that office's core market of document creators will be threatened by LibreOffice.

For casual/light consumers of office documents, however, I think that Libre/Open office has very much arrived. I'm starting to see it in the default-install on my customers' machines.

In the longer term perhaps that will prove to be the thin end of the wedge.
Rails is missing the V8-like phenomena Node.js has.

Imagine if we would see something like V12 in the future, a JavaScript engine running on nVidia CUDA. That's where I would like to run my Node.js from ;-)
Ask HN: Is there a safe way to encrypt databases?
Dear HN,

Is there a safe way to encrypt databases?

My understanding of the issue is that if it is encrypted, then the key has to exist on the same machine anyway, so there's not much point.
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Here's mine, written on a lazy Sunday evening in January: https://github.com/shadowsun7/hacker-news-confidence

It runs on cron, scrapes HN once every 30 minutes, and sorts it according to the Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter (the one from the 'How Not To Sort' article here: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.... )

See the results here: http://hn.elijames.org/

I've found that the HN articles I like tend to have high vote counts as compared to comment counts. Mostly this makes sense: an article from Scientific American has more votes than comments, whereas an article on Why PHP Sucks (which I find boring) would be highly controversial, which would have higher comments.

So I've treated comments as a negative signal. Mostly this works - I find myself skimming more effectively from my page than from HN itself.
Convergence has a proxy system built in so you connect to notaries via other notaries. It's a rather rudimentary attempt at offering privacy to the user looking up the certificate. It (rightly or wrongly) works on the assumption that people running notaries wont collude.
You could use the user's password, when they log in?
lold at “No Longer Floppy” entry )
I think this would be even better if the nodes would be links to documentation. That way if you discovered a node you knew nothing about, you would just click it instead of having to google it.
I do. There are a lot of computer users out there that need to create an occasional spreadsheet or more complex text document. For these users, buying a product like MS Office is overkill, both in features and in price.

And as a bonus, LibreOffice has a ``collage'' program in the form of LibreOffice Draw, the vector drawing program. Microsoft Office doesn't have that.
What if they lose their password?

The password has to be hashed in the database, so there is no way to decrypt the data.

Furthermore, it introduces problems for sharing between users.
The cloud "hipness" seems to be already fading in some circles, due to privacy and concerns about who owns the data. Non-geeks creeped out about ads following them around based on what they type in a document, or their data being accessed by people that guess their password.

And remember that thin client/thick client has always been a cycle. A linear prediction toward everyone using services such as Google Docs is probably wrong.

Also, open source software for non-geeks seems to be on the rise as its usability has improved surprisingly in the last 5 years. I wouldn't say it's a direct threat for Microsoft though as their important customers are big enterprises...
Please can you explicitly list the technology of each solution?
+1 for Dropsync. definitely one of the most useful apps on my phone.

tdtran, one feature missing from Dropsync is the ability to exclude folders (like the cache folder in the camera DCIM directory). Please add this :)

[Edit: And welcome to HN. ]
nice page :)

Of course, by commenting here you are actually pushing this article downwards on your own page ;)
It absolutely does infringe on privacy. The only thing that is up for question is by how much and if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. People who benefit from them existing are obviously going to have a different view point to everyone else (on average).

I don't think that referrers should ever have been a part of the protocol and I don't think that the commercial value of them existing should have any influence on whether or not HTTP continues to include them. Unfortunately, both Google and Microsoft benefit financially from the existence of referrer headers, so I don't see them going anywhere in Chrome or IE at least.
Do it. Fix Later.
> HN is built using a homebrew stack, it's a miracle it performs as well as it does.

Surely it'd be sloppy oversight if the HN site couldn't be hosted on a homebrew stack?

People seem to imagine you need a constellation of mongo and load balancers and everything else just as a baseline for a helloworld web-app.

Paul rocks.
The developer tool can be configured to not display line numbers (and who knows, maybe it comes configured that way by default), so how are the screenshots deceptive?
I bought my first modem when I was 13 in 1985. It was the 300 baud Mitey Mo modem on my Commodore 64.

I'm sure there are plenty of people here that consider me a newcomer on the telecommunications scene.
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This could be a core culture issue for your company.

I did this for my first startup and it gave us a great company culture. We hired a "mom" that took care of us the nerds. Over time, we knew that we could always take up the discussion during lunch time in the kitchen, like on architecture wanderings, business cases, ideas, issues, etc.
So Mozilla's fully open "Boot to Gecko" will power the carriers walled garden "fully closed" wet dreams?
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The only innovative companies ever to come out of Europe have come out of Scandinavia, mainly Sweden: Linux (Finland); Opera (Norway); and Skype, My_sql and Spotify from Sweden. The rest is just hype, imho.
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: Inventor of e-mail honored by Smithsonian
The problem is one arm appears to offer the branch of privacy whilst another chips away at it using clauses in bills under the guise of protection for copyright etc.

Unfortunately, it appears that continued vigilance is needed to defend against bad laws.
IT Pros Takes 'Email Inventor' to Task
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> One feature of this administration has been a stronger commitment to openness via Freedom Of Information Act requests.

Not really:

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/02/aclu_sues_obama_administrati...
Yep, that's the exact position the gov't is taking, with the added position of, "hey, tech companies, we're gonna sit you down with privacy advocates and anti-regulation people to hash this out."

Also nice: the gov't is applying this to information sharing internally first, so we have a chance to sandbox for the while it'll take for Congress to take any action.
With second thought this does not make sense.

False certificates would be only problem in man-in-the-middle attacks of if the attacker can alter information in dns. In both cases the attacker could also fake the information about valid ca's.
Referrer information allows website owners to see who is linking to their site. It's like a private, reverse form of <a> tags
Have they started doing commercial launches? Last time I checked they were still testing the rockets... But yeah, it's much cheaper and hopefully it'll get cheaper in the future. Still not seeing the price go down to sub-$1000/kg anytime soon, though...
> their infrastructures have been reduced to that of a dumb pipe

This is a bad thing how? As far as I can see, carriers have far too much control over the devices that are used on their networks. I can't imagine consumers opting for devices where carriers have EVEN GREATER control!

It's consumers who buy the device, not carriers.
The people who learned with Rails always make me chuckle. The only reason Rails got anywhere was because of scaffolding and the hype that surrounded it - which of course already existed in some form in other platforms. It's completely revisionist to think that platforms like Java or .NET didn't already have application creators and ORM.

The genius of Rails and DHH was the marketing which isn't surprising seeing as how much he loves Apple for it. They can always try to say the other platforms were bloated, but this is coming from people who thought full Unicode support at launch wasn't necessary.
There's probably sme fascinating sociologogy/psychology papers that can be written if this takes off.

Also, cockstarter?
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This. It's not even older businesses--Office is THE standard in so many offices around the U.S. Talk to the IT department in a company that has more than 50 employees (and where processes can be document-heavy)--asking employees to switch to a new platform would be a massive undertaking. Folks that barely understand how to surf the web can compose documents in Word or fiddle with numbers in Excel.
The "Wifi Only" option exists.
They still didn't get their priorities right. Nobody care about those shitty monochrome icons. MAKE THE DAMN THING FASTER !!!!!
The soft heap
It's not about being hip. For small businesses with a few branches, Google Docs and other cloud-based services like Trello are god-send. Even though we have Microsoft Office, cloud-based collaborative and real-time update features are the most important criteria. We decided to use Google Docs instead of MS Office for more and more documents over time as their feature set matures and wireless infrastructure becomes widespread.
It shows wrong data. Shows files that have been downloaded from my ip when it's not possible to since Torrents are controlled by my firewall very strictly.
> Not pursuing hotness is the new hotness IMHO.

If you are like this, you'll probably like Knuth's "My advice to young people", http://www.webofstories.com/play/17152. The relevant part:

And I think one of the things that I would, that would sort of come first to me is this idea of, don't just believe that because something is trendy, that it's good. I'd probably go the other extreme where if something, if I find too many people adopting a certain idea I'd probably think it's wrong or if, you know, if my work had become too popular I'd probably think I'd have to change.
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you don't need modes for richness of expression and complexity- Modal errors can mystify even the most experienced of users- and waste vast amounts of time while you're learning to use VIM. Emacs is really no better. Sublime Text 2 is as close to modeless as I've seen, but there's still a long way to go.
The trend is moving toward putting the view logic into the clients as championed by the many Javascript MVC frameworks such as Backbone.js, Ember.js etc. When you use these to build your web interface, what is needed on the server is just JSON API. From this point of usage, Rails is "bloated" as you do not generate views on the server and push down to the clients.

There is also another aspect of the web that might caused that view. That is the rising usage of websocket type of real time app, which Rails is not able to handle directly yet. This makes full-stack framework like Rails looks less agile thus bloated when you compare to Node.js for example.
You shouldn't need an alias in the first place. "Convention over configuration."
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well - it depends on the category. For games/entertainment this is true, but for productivity etc, a good SEO can make a big difference ( http://www.slideshare.net/kolinko/app-store-seo-tutorial )
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So the solution should be standardized testing?
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Comparing today's computers to 1995's
After everyone saw how it easy it was to write your own blog in Rails, everyone ... used Wordpress anyway.

The Rails use case was always truly limited. I still don't know any application that achieved maturity and stayed coded in Rails. For a while that was Twitter, but then they started moving stuff over the jvm.

Node will probably end up in a similar way, because at the end of the day no one wants to manage thousands of lines of Javascript (or any other language that doesn't enjoy the benefits of a statically typed ide).
You can also look at the video where he talks about Convergence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA (Start from 35m35s)
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Except in the case of subsidized devices.
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I solved this by having isolated gemset for every project. This way I can use rake without fear of having multiple conflicting gem versions.
I agree that referrer information is useful to site owners. What you need to understand is that just because something is good for site owners, doesn't mean it's good for site visitors, or the web in general.

If you wanted to see who was linking to your site, and referrer headers didn't exist, you'd use a search engine. Hell, people would build dedicated search engines which alert you when somebody links to your site.

Referrers are good for identifying where a user came from, or what they were searching for when they land on your site. Well, sometimes they don't want you to have that information, and most of the time people are completely unaware that you're getting it.
Fred Wilson's blog automatically becomes a podcast with the VoiceBunny API
The Github profile as a resume mentality
US Government Announces Open Source App Contest
Hopefully they're giving as much weight to the opinions of organisations like the EFF as they are to Google and Facebook.
Your favourite programming language is not good enough
I'm curious why you used BeautifulSoup when scrapy has its own built-in HTML parser (HtmlXPathSelector).

Is there an advantage to BeautifulSoup or is it just the tool that you're most comfortable with?
I don't understand this distinction. A client is a client; how are you to distinguish "browsers" from other clients?
I disagree.. while there a certain similarities, especially when it comes to "becoming better" at both playing chess and programming ( it comes harder to improve at a certain level), the whole concept, motivation and purpose is different. Chess is about winning a defined game, with a defined set of moves. The motivation is, primarily, to win the game. Only very few players are playing chess professionally, but most do it as a hobby.
Programming on the other hand is the contrary: it's not a competition. It's about solving problems, so your opponent is not necessarily another developer, but a problem that's complicated to solve. And the solution depends on the exact definition of the problem. I don't see where an equivalent to the elo-score would fit in here, let alone have any use whatsoever.
As much as I appreciate the efforts to build a successful, truly open mobile OS, the "browser as an OS" approach is an incredibly dumb idea. It's another step away from general purpose computing, and I don't like this direction one bit. Some people here on HN might not really want to hear this, but web apps aren't the future. You just fundamentally cannot put everything on the web. It works for incredibly simple things. But that's it.

What would interest me more in B2G is whether the Linux base underneath it is fully functional. And not just a slightly advanced "bootloader" for B2G. A fully functional, mostly free GNU/Linux system that gets widespread adoption, even just as a smartphone OS, would be a great blessing to the efforts of the Free Software community.
"hip" was probably the wrong word. It's more like "having the temporary advantage". I expect desktop office programs will also support real-time collaboration in the near future. It's indeed an incredibly useful feature, so there is no reason why it would remain limited to third-party hosted web programs.

(and desktop programs could implement security features such as encryption, and/or use peer-to-peer protocols, preventing third-party privacy issues)
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So is its competitor. Do you know of any plans by the maintainers to do away with the desktop version of either one?
The only way to restrain abuse is to restrain the underlying power. Social networks may be used to organize more effectively, but ordinary people have a limited budget of attention and time. This means the lobbyists have to wait just long enough for things to blow over. A system rigged, like a ratchet, to increase its own scope is not going to he held back by periodic bouts of publicity.
Dropbox really had to play catchup on this one: lots of competitors offered this (Sugarsync, Box, etc), and lots of addon tools for Android were popping up with this functionality.
HN traffic is pretty high. Also, I believe that RTM had a hand in optimizing HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2120756

And comparing HN to a helloworld web-app is simplifying things a bit, the fact that it is sparsely designed does not mean there isn't a significant amount of work done under the hood.
In hackerspace its so cool to rail against MS and especially against Steve Ballmer.

The truth is that MS has always been a great company, on all accounts I have ever read on the matter it appears to me that MS is a kind of organization that any hacker would love to work for.

But its been a fifteen years from when MS was considered cool. Hip kids don't want to look at it. They don't even want to educate about it. So they go and work and sing praises to Google and FB, who have just now started to show their different, corporate nature.

And geeks have gone and given them the scepter of Power. And I find it ironic that these new hip companies represent a greater danger to computing, freedom and privacy than MS ever has.

They say that he who fails to learn the lessons of the past is doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
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I have the feeling that Ninjas are. And I really hate these jobs postings. Whether it's ninja, wizard or Speedy Gonzales.
Is Cloud Computing for Small Business? Definitely
It seems smart to just clean up rather than alienate their users with radical and risky changes. People just want to code... Not learn a new interface to code...
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> it is totally possible to move your image editing online

That's insane from both a time and horsepower standpoint. Online image editors are one-use fringe case stops of convenience.
Lloyds Banking Group completes 'immense' Halifax system migration
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You'll get no argument from me that sinatra is simpler, faster and elegant.

However, I've often found that sinatra APIs end up re-implementing rails features one by one over time. Have you not seen a similar trend?
My experience has been that ORMs generally 'suck' outside the trivial CRUD use-cases, and it's usually faster and simpler just to write native queries again your database.

I've used hibernate, linq, active record and mongoose in real production applications, and pretty much every time the same sequence of events happen.

1) Wow, this ORM is so cool, I've saved so much time as I dont need to learn anything about the underlying DB.

2) New feature comes in that requires something other than CRUD. Oh how do I do this with the ORM. Either you extend it with plugins, or learn the ORM query language that's kinda like the native query language but worse.

3) Now we got some real data, why is it slow as hell? Oh, those 'cool' abstractions are creating n^2 queries, implicit joins, etc

4) Let's rip apart the ORM, and use a thin layer that just execute the native queries.

A few years back I worked on a quant finance application that had 100GBs of tick data in a oracle DB, and the only way to get reasonable performance AND abstraction was to write optimised stored procs for each feature in the end application, and have the middle tier just call them through a thin abstraction layer.

At our startup dump.ly, we started with using Mongoose with Mongo because it was so easy just to persist some JSON data. However very quickly we went thought the above loop, and are now 100% Redis, with a thin layer that executes native Redis commands. It just ended up being simpler and faster.

Takeaway is that in general ORMs are an anti-pattern. Every DB (noSQL or yesSQL) is a compromise between a set of features, performance, consistency, scalability etc. You need to understand these in detail and hence should not be abstracted away.
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I really like it when someone takes the time to package up their experience into a form that is easy to understand. A github profile as a resume could feel like that person hasn't taken the time to show why we need them. When there is only one job vacant the best pitch wins.
I don't know where you got that from. Struts was my first proper web framework- the kind where adding a column was an all-day affair.

The simplicity of Rails, even now, is that you'd only need to put it in two places- the migration and the view. You don't need to mess around with Hibernate XML configurations all day. Just add the damned column and get on with your life.