skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When it comes to things like GNOME 3 and Ubuntu (i.e., Unity), I think you're neglecting to look at the big picture.

Yes, there are a small number of people who like the changes that have taken place. But their numbers are indeed quite small compared to the much larger number of people who have been driven away completely by these changes.

I don't think that you appreciate how many GNOME 2 users (including former developers and other contributors) are either still using GNOME 2, or have moved on to KDE, Xfce, or other non-GNOME desktops.

The same goes for Ubuntu. With Unity and their other recent changes, many users have instead moved to Linux Mint, Debian, and other distributions.

These are the worst users to lose, especially the contributors, because they're the ones who did do things correctly, leading to the initial success of the project. Once they start to leave, we end up with GNOME 3-style debacles where it's one bad design or decision after another.
They are dumb and evil. But in some ways they're also very bright. It's the most dangerous mix possible; To be effective at being incompetent.
I think that's why the author calls it a dystopia.
Google and Facebook are now basically corporate interests/extended arms of the USG.
UK for example. International tuition fees are more than twice the rate for EU citizens.
Ha, I love how /about is also represented as JSON. Also, good call adding the 'Pro' field. Are you getting any traction there?
But it's the protagonist's own past choices that ultimately control what information he is fed. That, the environment, and some algorithms. Just like in the real world, but with a more egocentric concentration.
Seeing that photo all the time makes me cringe a bit, after all this was the guy who ordered this: http://cdn0.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/7158603/Steve_jo...
Bioshock is basically a parody of Rand, and didn't Atlas Shrugged come out in the late 50s? Heinleins more political works are early 60s, too. Honestly, TV/movie sci-fi really never was that good and only rarely picked up the more philosophical themes. Rarely surpassing pulp. And quite often it's just another genre in a sci-fi shell (fantasy, horror, crime).

(Never mind a more literal interpretation of my previous post...)
In doing so, you invalidated your argument.
Making choices out of a selection determined by someone else is not freedom. They have this freedom even in places like North Korea...
Thin, pale-grey font on a white background, so even though this looks like an interesting story it's going to be a strain for me to read it.

Guys, fire your designers when they tell you this is okay. Fire them out of a cannon into the SUN. Your content is why people are following links to your site, and if you make it hard to read your content, why bother having the site?

At least have DARK grey text on the white background, but better is black, with solid fonts for the main body.
>Maybe I'm being naive, but what's preventing Google or Facebook from using their resources to launch a PR campaign against these requests from the FBI, or at the very least be a bit more outspoken about them?

In theory, nothing. In practice, creating tension with the FBI and DoJ who may then decide to investigate or prosecute them for entirely unrelated things that would otherwise not have been investigated or prosecuted, etc.

They have a choice between doing the Right Thing and doing the Easy Thing. We'll know what they choose soon enough.
Until recently the US Government was issuing tech companies National Security Letters (different from subpoenas, they do not require judicial approval) and the letters had built in gag orders. In other words if the recipient could not discuss what was being requested by the government, or even challenge the request in court without criminal penalties. Recently courts have reviewed this and given a partial lift on the built in gag orders. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter)
No, the point of the argument was that people should be FORCED to subclass String. Which is kinda pointless, as its easy for lazy programmers to circumvent, and there ARE things that are fit to be represented by just Strings. But I do agree with the author that it should be either subclassed or run through a validator function in a lot of cases.
Isn't email inherently social?
There's no need to.
> Service providers specifically go out of their way to avoid being seen as publishers, as that would make them liable for the content they authorize. So when facebook does take the extraordinary measure to remove content after the fact, they are actively censoring rather than not publishing.

If you're going for the legal perspective, it's more complicated than that. Depending on jurisdiction, service provider immunity may not work after they're notified about the illegal content but decline to remove it. E.g. [1]. (Note that some causes of action may have more specific defences for operators of websites, e.g. [2]).

But really, that isn't relevant here. No-one's suggested that the image here's illegal. This is just about facebook being able to decline to publish whatever it likes.

> when facebook does take the extraordinary measure to remove content after the fact, they are actively censoring rather than not publishing

I don't agree. As you yourself pointed out two sentences before that one, facebook don't editorially filter stuff before putting it up. So if they're notified that a thing they don't want to host has been put up, any action they take is always going to be "after the fact"!

How can the right line to draw be between a provider that filters after publishing and one that filters before, such that the former is "censoring" but the latter is "not publishing"? Filtering after publishing (in response to user reports) is, for a website with a userbase the size of facebook's, just more efficient than doing it before. I don't see any moral difference between the two, just a practical one.

(And FWIW, I think you way over-interpreted netrus' comment. All he did was point out the flaw in mixedbit's comparison).

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2002/2013/regulation/19/m...

[2] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/26/section/5
The synergetic energy of The Product will lure people in. "Why didn't I think of that!" and "It's so simple and obvious but I never saw it coming" will be common terms after people use The Product.

The Product will appeal to wide range of audiences of all ages. People will share The Product with their friends, family and co-workers over social media sharing websites. The Product will be blogged about, tweeted, shared, liked, +1'd, reviewed, tagged and even more. The Product will be viral.

The Product will satisfy corporate clients in ways no other product has. The Product will deliver integrated solutions within tight deadlines and boost company morale by over 200%. The Prodiuct will make employees want to work through their lunch break and stay late after work.

The Product is for you. For Everyone. For the future.
Great idea. Really, sincerely - I love it. All the conversations I have with people considering entrepreneurship start with "what are your goals... ok, what are your real goals." Goal clarification is incredibly important.

I did have a problem with almost all of the rest of the article though - the Author dismisses offhandedly many, many goals which are quite legitimate, and tries to build a case that money is not really necessary for most of the things people try to achieve. Maybe that's true, but there are plenty of cases where money is important:

- I know several "effective altruists" [1], who work hard to make the most amount of money, and donate as much of it to charity as possible. This is to help other people, not to achieve a personal sense of worth, and very much depends on making as much money as possible.

- People who want the freedom of not having to work, but don't yet know what they could do that won't feel like work. It's always a nice sentiment to try and work at something which you love doing, and is even possible in many cases... but ask many 25 year olds what kind of work they'd still enjoy doing at 40, and not many will be able to tell you for sure.

etc.

[1]: See e.g. http://80000hours.org/
I can only speak for how it is in Sweden.

We used to have free university education for anyone in the world. But that's now changed so that anyone not in the EU, European Economic Area or Switzerland have to pay tuition.

A three year Bachelor program would cost about 63000 USD for anyone not in those countries that are part of the above organizations.
Logo Evolution of 25 Famous Brands
> cperciva is a well known and respected HN user too.

Irrelevant.
Did you just assume the source code wasn't available? It's not linked from the front page of the site, but if you go to the 'Download' page, it's right there for your review:

https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html
Craigslist isn't popular in my country. There's nothing on it and I've never heard anyone mention it. We have a couple of similar sites that are popular though.
Well, there's only one way to find out if there's a solution -- contact cperciva and ask him :)
I'd say they're a little of all of those things and more. They are, after all, human. They get paranoid and worry, they make mistakes, they grasp for power when they can. It never works out like they want though, because they are human.
> The iDVD team spend weeks working on a user interface that they think works. Jobs comes into the meeting, stops them halfway through, ignores their complicated workflows, and draws a simple rectangle which has a single "BURN" button on it. His great skill wasn't design, but editing and empathy.

That's not editing, that's literally throwing everything away and forcing his vision on them. Precisely what I'm talking about. And "empathy" is not a word I'd use to describe Steve Jobs, who by all accounts was a terrible jerk.

> Design being architecture and the implementation. Vision != design.

Maybe a better title for this post would have been, "The cult of product leader dictatorship." When I wrote design, I didn't mean industrial design or UI design, but product design and leadership. My fault for being unclear.

> WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

On reading this post again 6 months after I wrote it, those are indeed strong words that don't really reflect 37 Signal's attitude. My words, not theirs.
Losing 1-3 years of career development by working at a failed startup with other 20-somethings from whom you have nothing to learn is a very expensive career choice -- unless we do actually live in a bubble of vapid startups in which actually being good at your job (whether it's programming, business development, or otherwise) doesn't actually matter.

That's not even factoring in the broader opportunity costs, actual cash outlay, etc.
I think people have the FBIs motivations misunderstood. And I don't mean in some evil conspiracy theory sort of way, but in one that is pretty consistent with their mission.

Their main mission nowadays is to stop terrorism, etc... I I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations.

The article theorizes that people with data to hide will use encryption, or otherwise would be so stupid, that one can find them easily in any case. In the real world a lot of these cases are broken on a "lucky" break or two. Someone improperly or not using their encryption software once, for example.

I think it seems foolish to accuse them of being dumb, evil, or incompetent. Given the stakes they deal with, and the amount of data they have to sift through, I think its very reasonable that they try to reduce the amount of work they need to do to find credible leads. And I'm sure they try to institute methods to minimize abuse, but I'm sure they are also aware that some abuse will happen.

While some of this feels like it may cross the line, I think it's a line that a rationale organization, with their mission, should push against.
It's layering information which may or may not be correct, and given people's natural laziness of decision it only increases the odds of filter bubbling--that is not a deeper experience.

All you are doing is being empowered to ignore things which don't match your advertising profile most closely, being empowered to ignore things outside your comfort zone (in 10 years, I'm sure this will be popular with the yuppies in SF who would like to even more easily ignore the homeless refugees of gentrification).

A basic part of the human experience--of being a complete person--is learning how to interact with other people who may or may not be easy to get along with, and exploring new things and perspectives on life. Nowhere in this vignette is there a suggestion that the Glass will help you learn to interact with other people (because it is set to minimize the presentation of those you aren't predisposed to get along with) or encounter new things (that aren't carefully cultivated by the big data engines).

Let's not even go into the privacy concerns here (because clearly nobody gives a chrome-plated fuck about that anymore), or the unfortunate, darker sides to this.
Note that "they" are one person, Colin Percival. That's all Tarsnap is; one person, some backup code he wrote, and data stored on Amazon S3. As the sole owner and only person working on a product aimed at a niche audience, I don't think it's unreasonable that he has a little fun with the way he runs it. If this kind of thing bothers you, this service probably isn't for you.

But also, you picked out only one of the three reasons he listed (http://www.tarsnap.com/picoUSD-why.html); the other two are also important:

If prices were listed in dollars per GB instead of picodollars per byte, it would be harder to avoid the what-is-a-GB confusion (a GB is 10^9 bytes, but some people don't understand SI prefixes). Picodollars are perfectly clear — nobody is going to think that a picodollar is 2^(-40) dollars.

Specifying prices in picodollars reinforces the point that if you have very small backups, you can pay very small amounts. Unlike some people, I don't believe in rounding up to $0.01 — the Tarsnap accounting code keeps track of everything in attodollars and when it internally converts storage prices from picodollars per month to attodollars per day it rounds the prices down.

And finally, the price in dollars per GB are also prominently displayed, right after the price in picodollars per byte. So really, you're just being bothered that he's having a little bit of geeky fun even though it has absolutely no effect on you.
String is immutable for good reasons. It's explained in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java, which should be mandatory reading for all Java programmers.
There's a Panasonic SX-series ToughBook that seems like it would fit all of your demands nicely, it's available with a 12.1" 1600x900 matte display, i7-3540M, RAM upgradable up to 16 GB and up to 18 hours battery life (the larger battery has almost 100 Wh).
http://www.dynamism.com/top-notebooks/panasonic-sx-series.sh...
https://tent.io/ ?
http://www.tarsnap.com/legal-why.html#BCPSTISSTUPID I see what you did there :)
Regarding the multiple tab issue, you can use the Page Visibility API [1] to determine if the page is still visible before firing the timeout event. It's a pretty handy API for other things, too.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/User_expe...
Is that all for a dystopia? Technologies used to came with a risk incredibly higher. Nuclear warfare, etc. We are now talking about "cyber warfare". I've yet to see the first American killed by a Chinese or North-Korean hacker. And I think the term "cyber warfare" is entirely inappropriate, and does not do justice to the atrocities of a real war. If this is all what can be thought up about the negative impact of Google glasses, we have nothing to worry about.
One of the things I love about Tarsnap is the bug bounties, which range from $2000 for being able to decrypt user data right down to $1 for cosmetic issues.
Walks And Walking - Gower Walking Festival 2013
What is a valid e-mail address?
I didn't reply to peterkelly.
try crashplan with boxcryptor
Yeah but on the homepage it says in brackets the cost per GB. $0.30/GB.
The source code is available; it's available under a "shared source" license rather than free software/open source (you can look at it, but not modify it), but it is available for review. https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html

He also has a bug bounty http://www.tarsnap.com/bugbounty.html, and several substantial security bugs have been found and fixed due to the bug bounty (http://www.tarsnap.com/bounty-winners.html). In fact, the first of those, the AES CTR nonce bug, was found before he had offered the bounty program; the bounty program was inspired by that bug, and has since led to the discovery of several other more minor issues.

So, the source is available, and there's a bounty out for discovering bugs ranging from cosmetic issues to major security issues. Feel free to review it and submit any bugs you find!
Interesting but two years old and out of date....
I've read that quantum computing is picking up, so please correct me if I'm wrong... it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes, right?

This push to "stop terror" via reading the general public's email/chats/etc. seems more like Big Bro and less like a viable method to stop the next 9-11. Sure, the bros from Boston weren't exactly sophisticated, but I find it hard to believe nobody in Al Qaeda knows how to use PGP.

Still, I'm voting for incompetent. If they want to know what kind of porno we all like, fine.
Commodore C-64.
I know a guy who slept in a car and worked out of a coffee shop. He made a million dollars the following year.
What happens when the FBI becomes infected with people like Lerner who use their power to persecute political dissidents?
Overloaded moments
Not sure about the affordable housing. From what I've read, in many parts of Europe (for example in Germany), life-long renting is very common. In many other places (where the rental market isn't as developed or where people believe that they "must" own the property they live in), for many it takes a 30-year mortgage to buy a flat.
Having said that, I don't know how the situation looks in Austria in particular.
Bad design and bad designers is never the problem. If you have bad designers you have bad management.

There are great designers who have a fantastic intuition for aesthetics and horrible intuition for anything else.

They are a problem because they seem to be solving problems (because they make things look good) but are really just making things pretty.
I say all of the above. There's basically one reason to work for law enforcement: Authority and its slutty sister, Power. People who are attracted to these things are susceptible to logic failures in pursuit of their interest in exerting Authority and Power.
Or twisted.
Ereunitiko: Βυζαντινό Λεξικό
Apparently FaceTime [1] and iMessage are end-to-end encrypted with unique session keys. Whether Apple has access to those keys is not known though (the key exchange isn't documented as far as I can tell).

1. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/facetime-calls-are-encrypted...
Well, all the information we ever use may or not be correct. We use it nevertheless and accept a certain false positive rate. It probably does increase filter bubbling, but that is generally something people accept. One can expose oneself to different viewpoints quite readily, and that's a personal choice people can make.

I think that statement about getting along with difficult people being a basic part of the human experience doesn't have to be true. It just happens to be part of the human experience now. And in any case, while the story didn't offer any glimpse of Glass helping you to encounter new things or learn to interact with other people, there's no reason why it couldn't.
As I skimmed the article, I naturally read the headlines:

#2: Readers are far more valuable than writers.

#3: Valuable content is king.

Well which is it? You don't get content without writers, do you?
Suddenly, there are strange things in the hotel bar with you. Cartoon animals, talking monsters. Is that a human-sized preying mantis cuddling with a buxom triceratops girl? And wow, check out that pack of wolf-things. They're flickering with colors and lights, all synchronized to the same beat. They're a walking rave. And none of these strange-looking people have public profiles.

Must be one of those freaky avatar conventions going on in the same hotel.
Can't destroy your life?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57579765-93/google-loses-au...
Tarsnap works really, really well. Just make a consistent snapshot of your data (I'm using UFS snapshots), point Tarsnap at it, and you're good to go.

The documentation is thorough, and Colin (the owner/operator/author) responds quickly to emails.

Finally, compression and deduplication is amazing:

[nick@home ~]$ sudo tarsnap --print-stats
Total size Compressed size
All archives 348 GB 76 GB
(unique data) 34 GB 6.3 GB

Yep, I've backed up 350GB of data, but since most of it is duplicated, I pay for storing 6.3GB. Win.

One word of caution though - this isn't a mainstream consumer backup service. If you lose your keys you lose your data. No chance of recovery. So make sure you back those up properly too, ideally in a different geography.
> Do they arrest you now, or do they wait until the quantum computers predict it's 10%?

The movie Minority Report revolves around that idea (in case you haven't already seen it).
37signal's 2nd paragraph of that book chapter (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Make_Opinionated_Softw...) still says it the best:

> The best software has a vision.

...now just make sure the vision is not too narrow and that it's a vision and not an edict (now about Linux DEs, the Gnome 3 and Unity teams OP is referring to just keep turning a narrow copy-cat vision into a bunch of edicts... while the KDE vision tends to be so freaking all-encompassing that you get lost in it and so full of corner use-cases for bugs to hide that no developers can keep up with the bug hunt... sigh, and thanks god for xfce)
If you are talking about magazine pages then I totally agree, flat is preferred. But magazine pages are not interactive. Apps are interactive. Users need visual clues as to what they can manipulate and what they can't. This is where flat design fails. Flat design does not provide adequate perceived affordances.
>> There's basically one reason to work for law enforcement: Authority and its slutty sister, Power.

I'm against government surveillance, but your statement is way too broad.

Only one reason? Really? You don't think anybody goes into law enforcement to protect others, curb violence, and generally do good for the world?

I doubt you'd want your profession to be slandered so casually.
Parenting Tip: How to control what your child watches on YouTube
Many people are drawn to law enforcement out of the desire to help others and do good for the world. Being an FBI agent is a very honorable and well-respected profession, especially outside of an internet forum.

Your comment pisses on every person who ever went to school to study criminal law, many of whom did so for noble or at least neutral reasons.
Kanban Development Oversimplified [2009]
BTW: there is no such thing as generic sanitized string. There may be SQL-escaped string, HTML-escaped, JS-escaped, JS-in-HTML-in-SQL-escaped, etc. It always depends on context (I'm going to invent format that uses ASCII 'a' in escape sequence — sanitize that! ;)
it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes, right

Depends on what you mean by this... There are no practical systems which will do so. But the reason why quantum computing became interesting was because of Shor's work showing that they can factor large primes quickly (in theory).
The Magic Lever: How the Banks Do It