skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like many, I feel that the poster is throwing the baby with the bathwater. Yes, SOAP and XML Schema are horrible. Don't use them, then. Yes, XML is verbose, but that's exactly why Relax NG has a compact syntax. Use that if you don't like the XML syntax. Yes, data can be expressed as attributes or elements, but there are simple rules of thumb to decide between one or the other: if your data can have structure, or you may want to have multiple instances of the same thing, it's generally better to use an element; otherwise an attribute should do the trick.

There are also errors and approximations: XML did not introduce the bracket syntax, it inherited it from SGML. A DTD is not a schema (and if you want to criticize XML, you should point out that it should not have inherited DTDs from SGML.) He doesn't even mention the worst part about comments, which is that you can't have -- inside a comment (very annoying when commenting a large block of data...)

XML has many beautiful applications, like SVG, SMIL (which never took off but keeps getting rediscovered/reimplemented in an inconsistent manner [full disclosure: I participated in the SMIL and CDF W3C working groups]), XSLT, &c. XHTML was not perfect by a long stretch but the new HTML5 syntax is much, much worse.

Use XML, JSON, and whatever is necessary to get the job done. For the project that I am working on right now, I am using XML for serializing Web app descriptions; in this situation, XML is clearly better than JSON.
The UK will be the next Denmark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Denmark
I agree with the sentiment, but Assange's prose is a little dense. Maybe it's OK for his target audience, as I assume the layman won't be reading cryptome.org.

What we really need is a champion to explain in relatable, plain English why encryption is essential even for mom and dad, and to explain it in a more mainstream venue. I think a big reason why people don't encrypt mail, etc., is because:

1) they don't know why it's important because nobody can explain it to them in relatable terms (like saying: when you send an email, Google keeps a copy forever, and the FBI can read it just by picking up a phone and asking nicely), and

2) if they do know the importance, the practicalities of encryption are explained impenetrably. A blur of acronyms, bad metaphors ("keys?" terrible choice of metaphor, considering how a pair is intertwined and their actual use), and no well-known authority you can trust to explain it all simply.

The problem isn't that people don't care. They would care if they knew the realities of how their communications are stored, processed, and exposed to their governments. The problem is that nobody can explain it to them in a way that's not ridiculously complex or laden with terms like "Platonic realm" and "transnational dystopia".
To make you feel a bit better - some of us are still on RHEL 5 and Python 2.4. Yes it is painful.
I would rather have 500 facebook likes than zero, building a fan page sucks!
Because the users will be useless, the count is just a proxy for engagement but there will be done due to the users you bring.
Did they happen to take a look at the phone market in China? They think it's the only way to go, but unfortunately Android got there first. Open source and free. Everything is going Android there, their own app stores too.

Unless they are releasing it for free too then I doubt they will overtake Android in China.
Nice username you got there. So you're saying this all conspiracy theory stuff? I think we've gotten way passed the point where the fact that the government monitors everyone online is just a conspiracy theory.
"at a given level, the Ivy students who ended up there are going to be worse than the state-school kids who got to that same place."

Yes, I agree.
Blocked on TalkTalk too although the message they show is the same as they one they show for the pirate bay (and actually includes TPB's logo).
It's shady. Deceptive.
Good point, I hadn't thought about the fact they might be polling for changes. Might be better if livecoding used an event based model to check for updates...
The Naked Truth About Halo 4
HEY EVERYONE: ONE DAY, YOURE GOING TO DIE.
Ember.js Docs - Heavily obfuscated English-syntax
Existing music copyright already has this property. Mechanical licensing means that, simply by paying a standarized fee, a performance or recording of a piece of music may be lawfully created. This issue occurs regularly during political campaigns in which a candidate or party may use a song (Palin's use of "Barracuda" and Silversun Pickup' "Panic Switch" by Romney) against the wishes of the musician in question. Generally the negative publicity of the musician's protest outweighs benefits to the campaign. But legally there's not much musicians can do.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/16/politics/music-in-campaigns/in...

More broadly, the question becomes: at what point is a work fair pickings -- should we be able to prohibit Mozart or Vivaldi or Shakespeare works from being appropriated by various commercial or political concerns? Regardless, "use against my wishes or viewpoints" isn't one of the concerns of copyright as formed in the US Constitution.

My view is that absent a brief period of commercial control, works should be released to public domain reasonably speedily.
Anakata still in solitary confinement
Assange speaks truth. You cannot deny the fundamentals of the state are violence. The US speaks already of a capacity for instant global weapon strikes within the hour. You claim it is wrong to question the system, implicitly suggesting there is no alternative. But anthropology shows clearly that premodern societies had more free time, greater material and economic equality. (Try 'Debt: The First 5000 Years').

You attack a perspective, quoting on a tangent, without contributing anything meaningful except the notion that government can have value: but of course! Nobody denies this.

Assange and other politically engaged hackers like him seek improved systems of governance: greater protection of fundamental freedoms, greater availability of additional freedoms, greater truth and transparency.

Relax, nobody wants to topple your car and burn your house down.
I don't agree that C++ is not coming back for front-end applications. There's some currents against managed code (i.e. WinRT), but more importantly, it never left.

I assume you are using IE, Firefox, or a WebKit browser to read this; that means you are using a majority-C++ front-end app right now!

In web browsers, text editors, video editing, IDEs, games, etc, there's hardly anything that can compete with C-derivative languages. Exceptions do exist (Eclipse, Minecraft) but are universally slow.
I know I can scroll the Calendar widget vertically. Don't know about horizontal for other widgets.
No.

There's a lot of options on the mobile space already (iOS, Android and WM8) - which, IMHO is enough (not to mention BB, FirefoxOS, WebOS, Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia)...
Many governments now have no fear of encryption - trust no one....
How is the blocking being carried out?

For example, if you switch to Google DNS, does that get around the issue?
Sounds like mission creep to me. They are getting out of war, so now they have to find a reason to keep those people employed. What is the point in replicating the CIA? I thought the country needed budgets cuts to get rid of the debt or something?
For this reason I am fond of Jonathan Zittrain. Not that he particularly aligns with Assange but he is very good at presenting these issues in a compelling manner.
XPS 13 easily.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/dell-releases-powerfu...
Life:

- Reflecting myself constantly. (Looking at things from another perspective often allows you to learn not only from your own, but also from other peoples mistakes)

- Completely turning off TV and other mainstream media for several years.

- Starting to leave my comfort zone occasionally to extend it constantly.

Programming / Profession:

- Accepting the fact that, although being good as a programmer, I'm even better in managing things and mentoring/coaching. (accepting this was hard: i love doing programming)

- Focussing on the big picture and final results instead of wasting time with unimportant details.

- Reading/Reviewing/Discussing more code than you write actually results in writing better code and being more productive.
It's meego.
Here's a rendering of the texture map so you can see what it generates directly: http://jsfiddle.net/cXvKa/
They tried implementing a similar system here in Australia, but recently our Communications Minister Stephen Conroy backed down and instead said they would only block sites related to child abuse only after years of public backlash about the filter.

Seeing what has happened in the UK even if it was an accident with The Promo Bay has made me realise that even though a government says it has its peoples interests at heart with a filter, it's all too easy to add a site to a blocklist when it should be a much more complicated and drawn out process that ensures only bad sites get blocked not sites trying to help unsigned artists.
Aren't the following canvas/javascript specific?

ctx = document.getElementById('game').getContext('2d');

pixels = ctx.createImageData(w, h);

ctx.putImageData(pixels, 0, 0);

EDIT: Thanks for the clarification!
They aim to crack China and their reasoning is that the big players haven't got a foothold yet due to being a young-ish market.

At the same time they are looking to developers to create native apps for it and hardly anyone is going to develop for a phone if their primary market is China where 99.9% people steal.
Your argument is a non sequitur: states are necessary, therefore states are not systems through which coercive force flows.

If you want to argue that states are necessary, fine. But call a spade a spade. Can you imagine a state that doesn't wield violence? That's what a state is.

The lack of clarity on this issue leads to a lot of bad conclusions. When we argue that the state should solve any particular problem, we are explicitly saying the problem needs to be solved by coercive force. Maybe that's necessary. But let's not have any illusions about how states work and how laws are enforced.
I don't at all disagree with you but for the benefit of the others I'd like to ask you, what do you mean by truth? (What do you indicate by the term of truth?)

edit: To say something is truth if it's true is too circular - as a definition it doesn't have matters that can be confirmed by others so isn't so helpful to convince them.
Part of the reason it's slow is that it doesn't use typed arrays. This may be much faster for you:
http://jsfiddle.net/uzMPU/1573/
How do you tell someone that their idea/site is bad?
>Are you saying there is a common set of C++ libraries that ship with both iOS and Android that you could dynamically link to in your app portably?

I do link in some of my own libraries, but the code compiles to less than 1Mb.

Mostly what I link to is OpenGL, which is available on iOS and Android, and a few standard Posix APIs.
This is a complete straw man. Assange wasn't calling for the abolition of government, nor did he say they're the only ones who do bad things.

Further, Hobbes' state of nature has zero grounding in empirical fact. Which historical state of nature does it refer to?
Does anyone else have a problem with the obviously unrealistic video? I have never seen an e-ink display running at ~30FPS smoothly.
That's actually what I expected, but I couldn't find any reference. So, I defaulted to the optimistic, but probably wrong stance hoping that someone would correct me. Thanks!

This means that, at least on traditional forward rendering GPUs (Nvidia, Adreno), overdraw is full cost even for pixels covered by opaque views. Do the PowerVR chips still get effectively-zero opaque overdraw from their tile-based-deferred-rendering approach?

Meanwhile, I'm not totally clear how hidden surface removal works on Mali chips. They use TBDR, but still recommend drawing front-to-back to avoid overdraw http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....
Not to mention Qt
I almost routinely upvote useful stuff that people create and then make available for others to use. It's almost universally positive stuff. Decent icon sets tend to be particularly useful to the more technically and less artistically oriented crowd on HN.
Charity uses affiliate marketing to raise donations
> But anthropology shows clearly that premodern societies had more free time, greater material and economic equality.

I already disagreed with the grandparent comment, but I need to criticize this too: those metrics are terrible, and we shouldn't be looking to the past for the good old days.

Free time: only if you don't consider all the free time lost by all the people who died as children (extremely high premodern child mortality).

Material and economic equality: being equally poor is not really a solution anyone would like.
it uses IR illumination from 3 rather large IR leds. A problem with this approach like all other IR approaches is that it's quite subject to IR interference from itself (unwanted reflections), sunlight, halogen lights, etc... not much you can do about it.
Why is this the first I am hearing about this? On such a niche site like HN too? This should be all over the interwebs...
That is certainly one of the hypotheses. The reason I'm skeptical is that it seems such a fashionable wall to hit that it's almost tacky. Which I admit is not a valid reason to be skeptical.
> This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process.

Feeling like you are stupid is an attitude. I find it is one of the biggest barriers to learning. If you feel stupid, you are less likely to try "stupid" things that teach you a lot. Also, feeling stupid leads to anger, and anger prevents learning.

Aaron Hillegass said this best in the beginning of Cocoa Programing for Mac OS X, and I'll never forget it. You can preview it on Amazon under "How to learn."
Hugh MacLeod’s Gapingvoid And The Future Of Motivational Office Art
I've actually been researching this recently. The cheapest I found (better than S3) was a machine at http://www.hetzner.de/ loaded with drives.
IANAL but I don't believe marital status falls in the protected category.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
It's blocked for me on BT, same message as The Pirate Bay

> Error - site blocked
Did you just s/RSA/AES/ ?

And you are suggesting he use a OTP?

Assange is not the one that does not know anything about cryptography here.
>their personalized results are stuck in the uncanny valley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I'm not entirely sure what you meant to say in that last sentence, but I know you didn't mean to say "uncanny valley". Stuck in limbo, perhaps? (whatever that would mean)
Summary: The case against being quiet is that you won't build press contacts.

Press contacts can be "rented" easily with a good PR firm, provided of course you have a story people are going to care about.
The UI is pathetic. Why are people so bent on such complex gestures? Scroll up for this, scroll down for that, two finger slide up for another thing. Seriously?

xemacs has a cult following and so will sailfish. But you know how xemacs will do in the "market".
> AES is based on factoring.

And you say _he_ doesn't understand cryptography?
Don't worry, I'm pretty local as far as eating is concerned.
This pinball machine records every movement of your game
Ehhhh.....I use a 1TB time machine with my Mac. And backblaze. I'm covered under most imaginable circumstances and it's much cheaper and automatic than doing drive cloning.

Neat idea though.
Eben Moglen has also made several good talks about the abolishment of privacy, and its effects. I would especially suggest listening to the Berlin talk made this year called "Why Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media and Why Free Media Require Free Technology".
RhinoReg - Event Registration powered by Stripe
My worst life mistake is the same, I wasted about 7 years in between periods of education.
> The second thing we note is the “science” part. The US Constitution only gives Congress the right to protect works of knowledge – educational works, if you like – with a copyright monopoly. “Creative works” such as movies and music are nowhere to be found whatsoever in this empowerment of Congress to create temporary government-sanctioned monopolies.

"Science" in the 18th century did not mean the same thing it does now. What we now call "science" would have been called "natural philosophy" back then. There was not much discussion of the copyright clause when the Constitution was being drafted, and the changes between drafts seem to have been more due to bikesheding than due to legal concerns.

The main intent of the copyright clause seems to have been to allow for a Federal law to provide a uniform replacement for the patchwork of common law and state law that was currently in effect. They didn't feel the need to specify in great deal exactly what types of works could be covered because that was implicitly the kind of works state and common law copyright covered.

From the very first Congress onward, Congress and the Supreme Court took this as basically being any work of authorship.
Very cool, but a few notes to anyone getting their hopes up on the powers of Canvas:

As you may have anticipated, this demo runs at less than 1 frame per second on my Nexus 7. :/

In terms of per-pixel manipulation of a Canvas, it is very slow, even with javascript's (not very well supported) typed arrays. Simply put, multidimensional loops (unrolled or not) will always kill performance in JS with any significant dimensions. I learned this the hard way by trying to write a pixel-based GUI, and even that (with some crazy optimizations) could not render fast enough for all devices. If you are just doing blits, Canvas works very well (especially since this operation often uses the GPU).

For now, I think the best option is still WebGL, even though it is not widely supported yet, mobile devices are beginning to pick it up (Blackberry, for example).
Africa continues to have pockets of what you call "self-sufficiency" (and what the rest of the world calls "subsistence farming").

You might be surprised to discover that people don't actually like "self sufficiency" very much. In fact, they attempt to escape it as fast as they can, typically by migrating from rural areas to urban slums. Strangely, Africans enjoy capitalist luxuries like mobile phones and antibiotics just as much as westerners do.

Africa is "dependent" on foreign aid simply because they nowadays their population desires colonial luxuries like education and running water, whereas before colonialism they didn't know such things existed.
It made me reflect on how different people are. If someone like Mr. Sivers has found a way for himself to be happy and productive, more power to him. CD Baby alone has done a huge amount for others.
So Assange, who has actually developed part of Truecrypt, doesn't understand encryption. In that case I wonder what the rest of the tc team is smoking to let him contribute :p

The use of AES is clever. It will be crackable at some point in the future for sure - everyone knows this. I'd be willing to put 20 bucks on NSA already having cracked it anyway, even if that makes me one of those tinfoil hat types, but that would make no difference to Wikileaks - in fact it probably plays into Wikileaks' hands.

The fact that the insurance file probably -will- be cracked at some point in the future means that the information will ultimately be public. Perhaps this encourages more prompt action against Assange but it's a matter of weighing up this risk with the perhaps higher priority of eventually releasing the information - even if every mechanism of distributing the key in case of emergency fails, it will be cracked ONE day. I think this strategy is easily plausible enough.

One could claim that Assange's strategy is poor - certainly being under house arrest hasn't been empowering - but saying Assange is ignorant of encryption is ridiculous.
Not federally, but yes, for purposes of employment, in many states including California, New York, Illinois, and Washington.
Do you believe latent mental illness exists in that large of a percentage of the population? I've seen this happen to a few people, but I don't believe it's a large risk.
You're talking about the Insurance Files, right? Why would Assange give a toss if the government decrypted that? Its their stuff in the first place. Also, the Insurance Files were an exception to the way Wikileaks usually did business, not a demonstration of their typical use of encryption.

What use would a one-time-pad be with the only key around his neck when he got arrested? He needed a dead-mans-handle type arrangement.

There are lots of things that can be claimed about Assange, but claiming that he doesn't know encryption is not one of them.

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Insurance_files
http://promobay.org/ is blocked here on Virgin Media, http://thepromobay.co.uk/ seems ok - looks legit?
To anyone reading this, please note that while some of beloch's points are valid, the analysis of AES and the breakability thereof is not. While it's true that at some point it's likely that AES will be broken, it's also true that at some point our solar system will be destroyed.

OTP is theoretically unbreakable, but that would require a key that is as long as the ciphertext, at which point Mr Assange can just keep the data on the USB stick around his neck.
a) No one time pad is used, because that would make the whole point of publishing the encrypted blob pointless in the first place. The point of publishing it is that the key could be published very easily in an emergency, e.g. using a tweet. If the one time pad key has to be published, he could just keep the data to himself and publish it unencrypted later. Pretty pointless.

b) The argument about deferred encryption may be correct. However this is not related to the relations between Wikileaks and any government. (The argument may also be wrong. It could turn out that decrypting AES is still hard even in 100 years. In any case it is likely to be safe until the data is de-classified anyway.)
>Again, that has not been the case when decriminalization of drugs has happened in other places.

I doubt this to be true. Illegality has some effect on the amount and number of users. Personally, I don't touch the stuff for a variety of reasons, of which one is illegality which leads to having to deal with drug dealers. If it were legal (or decriminalised), it would increase the chances of me coming across it at a party or similar. At the margin this would have some effect on usage.

The problem with trying to do before/after studies is the patchy data, usually filled in by statistical sampling which leads to error margins. It's pretty easy to determine how much alcohol is consumed per year, because of the status of the industry you can work it out from the sales (the amount of home-brewed hooch wouldn't even been a rounding error).

In any case like this, with very large data sizes (ie, a big chunk of the adult population), any change in the legal status will have an effect at the margins. Hard-core and even regular users will not be affected by the legal status - but on the margin there will be plenty of people who might be inclined to take the occasional puff but don't because of constricted supply and the fact that it is illegal. Remove this and usage will go up - the degree is unknown and probably unknowable - but it will be there.

Any change in the law changes the future, and especially so in this case.

I'm not really arguing for or against here, just pointing out that usage will go up, and nobody knows exactly what that will mean.