skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Should be titled the Banality of Google Strawmen for the often repeated conspiracy theories of Google working with the NSA

>How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get.

For one, Google doesn't offer any cryptography (except HTTPS, which doesn't matter on their side). For the billions that use it, they might have no privacy at all.

What's that hard to understand?

>I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight.

Because there are others doesn't mean Google is not one of the top offenders. As for what VISA/Bank/etc has, are mostly purchase lists and inferred whereabouts (very crudely). As for the ISP, with HTTPS that most sites use, they don't have much. I don't think they MITM Google, Facebook or your Bank.

Google, on the other hand, with their Search, Docs, Gmail and Android (which also includes GPS location data), has almost everything there is for an individual that uses it.

>Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for.

It's a naive marketing slogans for the press and the daft -- people have got over it for at least five years.
One from new yorker :
http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/06/occupy-...
So you embrace the idea of catering to and selling to idiots? What's the difference between what you do and what a conman does?
Project site: http://gamelab.mit.edu/research/openrelativity/

GitHub: https://github.com/MITGameLab/OpenRelativity
Software Freedom Law Center effectively blesses Microsoft's Android/Linux deals
As a European, and depending on both your personal circumstances and the European country you live in, you should also ensure you adjust for non-salary items, such as healthcare, childcare, education, unemployment insurance, etc. For most people, a US salary needs to be approx 50% higher than a German or Swiss one, for example, to accommodate these additional factors.
You're not just losing performance but also static type checking.
> Muslim democratic state.

There are very, very few religious democracies, and if you only consider those both officially and effectively religious, I won’t be able to name a single one.
I've heard it repeated quite often on HN, that if you want to make 100s of dollars per hour, you need to bid on projects instead of charging an hourly rate. The idea is that many people will spend x amount of money on a project without a second thought, where x will equal $200-500/hour when you figure out how long the project will take you to complete, but if you ask for an hourly rate that's three figures, they will generally turn you down.

I'm just a network security guy with aspirations of becoming a developer some day, but from my observation that seems to be the accepted theory with freelancers on HN.
> Why is there no pilcrow, paragraph symbol, dagger and double dagger in it?

> Why no symbols for not equals, subset, intersection, union, (no) element of, AND, OR in it?

Which characters would you like to replace?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCII_printable_character...
Why is it 7-bit and not 8-bit?

The 8th bit allowed for various charactersets, encoded in Extended ASCII. The one most people know of is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin-1.

It's more complicated than that, I wrote about it once at length here:

http://www.randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unic...
true, but the mainstream press (guardian, nytimes etc) has not confirmed the fatalities, and it's been a while. they might just be rumors that get distorted, that kind of thing is pretty easy to happen. i too rereported them, but now i am beginning to wonder if it has really happened.
The difference would be that the iOS interface is built for touch, even if drawing apps would support a stylus.

Microsoft didn't even build their interface for a stylus. It was built for a mouse, and the stylus was a crutch for making it work on a tablet.

But using a mouse based interface with a stylus is really suboptimal. I had a Wacom digitizer for drawing, but I would switch to using the mouse as soon as I needed to interact with the interface, because it was so awkward.
> The point is, Google as a company opposes giving the data

That's great and much better than some of the other tech companies who silently hand it over.

However Google doesn't oppose collecting the data, it doesn't seem to worry about the implications of that for oppressive regimes or future radical laws enacted after the next big terrorist attack. Are there real objections within the company to the real name policy? Is it addressed by management?

Demanding better government is, of course, important. I spend a lot of time and money doing it - working with citizen lobbying groups, contacting my representatives and attending meetings. But you can't demand better government and ignore how one of the biggest corporate collectors of personal data is acting, and changing.

"A single unified beautiful product" - linked to your real identity (to set a positive tone "like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter") - and one that doesn't interoperate with other products because they're "milking off of just one company for their own benefit".

That seems to be the core of Google these days and it's very different from the company many Googlers joined.
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I really think Basecamp's homepage does a very poor job of communicating what it is.

> Last week 6,033 companies signed up for Basecamp to manage their projects. Today it’s your turn.

This is not a description of what Basecamp is.

> For all of my projects, I use Basecamp to keep track of every file, discussion, and event from beginning to end—all in one place.

This pretends to describe Basecamp but I could also use it as a description for Dropbox, MediaWiki, and Eventbrite (seriously, what the hell is an event?).

> 97% of customers recommend Basecamp.

COLOR ME IMPRESSED!

To quote myself: I want something concrete like "Basecamp lets you write words, puts checkboxes next to them, then moves them around randomly" (I'm not a fan of the product so my summarization may be biased).
Are Torrent Sites All About the Money?
I've gotten an offer via a who's hiring. I didn't took it, but yeah I'd say it works :)

ps: it was for London.
One of the most challenging aspects of learning about important, under-reported events is correcting for the biases of individuals who are reporting on it

For example, while there are no doubt many shopping malls in Istanbul, I doubt there is "at least one in every neighborhood!" (unless that word is better translated as something more like a suburb)

This makes it harder to trust all of the details of the more serious accounts of police aggression, or the simplifed context of things like "The whole country is being sold to corporations by the government". As another commenter has pointed out, even photos can end up being from unrelated events.

This is not to say that this person's perspective is not extremely important, or that the Turkish state is not committing indefensible acts of aggression. It's just harder for outsiders to piece together a full and accurate picture of what is happening. Fortunately, multiple individual perspectives can help corroborate and enhance the picture to quite a degree.

Edit: Certainly media has biases too, although there are at least in theory standards for verifying reported facts, and the bias is (often) more about what they choose not report or what context is not given.

Edit: good points by buro as well. This account and others may well be very reliable, I'm more speaking from experience with past events that were reported in similar ways where key important facts turned out to be wrong or missing. (I know, that happens sometimes in traditional media too)
It's worked out very well for me - I got my first (=current) job through one of those threads.
Yes it definitely works. We hired a very talented remote c++ dev using this method.
I agree, but I wasn't suggesting that they abandon the touch screen, just that they develop a version of the iPad with a digitizer for people who like to draw/take notes. These people number in the tens, if not hundreds of millions, so clearly there's a market for it.

The iPad was created as a content consumption device, but the popularity of productivity apps seems to indicate that quite a few people are trying to use them as laptop replacements. My laptop weighs just under 10lbs (I like games) so it's helpful to have something that gets me 80% of the functionality of an ultrabook when I don't feel like lugging it around.

I myself have two cases, a normal protective case for when I want to read / watch movies / play games, and a Clamcase Pro, which basically turns the iPad into a macbook air clone with a mobile OS. The keyboard is as nice as a real Apple product, and I can type about 90 WPM on it without any problems. I've written dozens of term papers and even a bit of code on it. I just wish I could also use my iPad for drawing/design without it being an absolutely horrible experience.
> One of the most challenging aspects of learning about important, under-reported events is correcting for the biases of individuals who are reporting on it.

This is true for well-reported or over-reported events too. It's always an individual who reporting things, and thus the process of reporting itself involuntarily bakes in the opinion or ideology of the agent reporting the issue. It's up to us to take whatever we'd want to as credible.

Also in the context of Internet it is more likely to be the absolute truth, after Streisand effect and everything else is done with.

My assumptions in situations like this: No smoke without fire.

Just did a small search on Youtube and found out that reports of civilians been crushed under Panzers is TRUE [1]. And now the discussion on testing credibility and stripping out emotions from reporting standards sounds bullshit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H...

[Edits: Added a link to a video of individual being crushed under a anti-riot Panzer vehicle. Not very graphic, but serious.]
While I understand your point, and can agree in part I don't think it applies here. Reading what I've read today its not about single incidents, its about continuous incidents by a government that doesn't resonate with the people. And infact what is considered a growing fascist dictatorship in guise of a government that is routinely commented on for its human rights abuses.

I'd bet that the reason this has grown so quickly doesn't have much to do with individual gripes but that lack of trust and a feeling of disenfranchisement from that government. Compounded with rumours that government they don't have faith in could very well be going to war against a country with stock piles of nerve gas capable of hitting major settlements. Offering the crowds some security within themselves that the government is no longer emanating.

Ask yourself in that scenario, with the risk of sarin gas hitting your home, families home, government cold and distant,would you also go protest? I know I would.
The article mentions that at one point the ASCII standard moved the alphabetic characters one space to the left, because the author happened to have examined a phone directory while visiting Copenhagen and noted that Denmark sorts its three accented characters at the end of their alphabet.

An interesting trivium: the IRC protocol lets users choose their own nicknames, and demands that nicknames be compared in a case-insensitive manner. For the purposes of IRC, you must treat {|} as the 'lower-case' versions of [\], because IRC was invented in Scandinavia and it did indeed use those character-codes for accented characters.
Not really. If the passed-in or default value doesn't convert to the field's type, SetupArgs panics.

Edit: Variations on this that offer compile-time type checking of passed-in values are possible, too. My use case wouldn't work well with that, though, because the function needs to be called by other functions that would have no clue about the FArgs struct.

You could instead do a version that just swaps in a default for any nil fields.

And in any case, you've got a lot more safety than the original Python code, no?
Another example of an act of ego is Lamborghini. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini#Origin:

"Lamborghini was fond of the Ferraris, but considered them too noisy and rough to be proper road cars, likening them to repurposed track cars.[20] When Lamborghini discovered that the clutch on his Ferrari was broken, and actually was the same clutch that he used on his tractors, Lamborghini went to Ferrari and asked for a better replacement. Ferrari responded, saying that he was just a tractor maker, and could not know anything about sports cars. Lamborghini decided to pursue an automobile manufacturing venture with the goal of bringing to life his vision of a perfect grand tourer."
that's true but big media biases are sometimes a bigger issue. on the web, the truth is 10mins and few clicks away.
I don't understand this. You put your junk emails in Yahoo!, and the ones you care about with Gmail (correct me if I'm wrong). You have a problem with Gmail, even though that they do this has been public for years and you chose them for certain Emails. Surely the people who care about this just don't use Gmail?
I have similar thoughts. I've been here for a few years and I haven't observed any specific decline.

I'm a little confused by the perceived offense as well: it's not good to tell someone something sucks? I would much rather hear honest thoughts about my projects ("seems like a waste of time, poor implementation anyway, maybe try $x instead?") than be given a false sense of security through unwarranted praise. Of course what is not cool is downright snippy dismissals without any substantiation, but I think those are still relatively rare.

Really the most tragic thing about it all is that pointing out the "middlebrow dismissal" in a verbose comment/blogpost has become a meme unto itself. We spend so much time on meta-discussions now. So here's my idea of how to approach comments you guys feel are putting people down unfairly: neutralize the meanness by following up that very mean comment by saying something like "I don't think you're being fair, I think author of the post has made something really cool because $y". And, the $y part better be something technical, or else we're going further down into more non-substantive meta-discussion discussion.
> People protesting against that by blocking the construction process (i.e. stand in front of bulldozers etc.) are effectively overturning democracy in order to protect their personal interests.

how so? democracy is not limited to counting votes and stfu until the next election. it's not like authorities haven't been removed from office before and decisions haven't been changed due to public disapproval. getting into office is not a free pass for half a decade. acta protests were anti-democratic too?
For mouse based interfaces it is awkward. For touch based interfaces it is about as awkward as a mouse/touchpad. Ever used the iPhone simulator with Xcode? That's how it feels.

Perhaps an interface designed from the beginning around a stylus would work well. I never used the original Palm PDAs, but maybe they did it right?

Thinking about what is unique about a stylus, I can see a few low hanging ideas:

* A stylus is great for tiny, precise movements but awkward for larger motions. Use the stylus only for small, precise motions? Like circling a word to highlight it or striking through one to erase it.

* Distinguish between stylus and fingers, so you can scroll with a finger and edit with a stylus?
I think that's less of a concern than the constant medical care usually required of an elderly person. On top of the cost of a cruise are you going to pay to have a nurse on board with them at all times? How about if they need regular medical supplies. How would someone get say, insulin, delivered? What if they need dialysis? If there is senility involved, a boat is a bad place to be.

A senior who can get by living on a cruise ship is probably also healthy enough to get by living on their own. I think it really only works in cases where the person is healthy and mentally all there, but needs someone to cook, do laundry for them, etc.
I think it come down to the tone of any criticism. I don't mind honest criticism, or even opinion. One thing that always seems to bug me is a sense of arrogance around some people.
Similar thing happened in Yerevan, Armenia last year, but in a smaller scale. Group of people protected a park from construction of boutiques. It took around 2 months and the government finally gave up. There is a wikipedia article covering the story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashtots_Park_Movement
These people number in the tens, if not hundreds of millions, so clearly there's a market for it.

It'd be like a Cintiq, but actually affordable. That, and you can move and rotate an iPad around almost like a sheet of paper while drawing.

I was genuinely disappointed when I realized that the iPad had zero support for this. It seemed like quite the oversight.
Its an interesting trivia question. One of Feynman's many autobiographical books described how they had spheres and hemispheres of all manner of crazy stuff to test neutron flux and explosive lens issues. He specifically mentioned gold and silver, because normally it would be pretty insane to have giant lumps of that stuff laying around, but given the level of perceived security, using a hemisphere of solid 24kt gold as a desk paperweight isn't so crazy after all. Its probably more secure on his desk than in a normal bank vault or merely ft knox or whatever.
Works very well for me, a startup CTO in London.

Average hit rate for me (in two different roles as hiring manager) has been about one inquiry every two or three postings and one hire per year. This volume isn't enough to grow teams as fast as I normally do, so it doesn't work on its own. However, unlike broadcast methods like StackOverflow that I also use, whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding - so it is always a very important part of my hiring strategy.

Most recent hire was in March and we're _really_ pleased with him (hi Ben!)
Kim dotcom is working on a secure, easy to use email[1].And until then , if you're interested in security , it's probably best to use a secure messaging app like textSecure.

[1]http://www.itnews.com.au/News/342446,kim-dotcoms-mega-workin...
Strange kneejerk reaction since the commenter is from Pakistan. If he has some actual reason to believe this I'd like to hear it for discussion's sake.
I would love to know who the Microsoft employee was...
@Brown_Moses (https://twitter.com/brown_moses) is one of the best people to follow on these subjects.

Eliot is an interesting example of one a single well-connected individual can accomplish in the digital age: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-brown-moses-blog/x/255....

His feed is a bit of a firehose feed, so I recommend you only follow him, whenever you need to immerse yourself in an ongoing story.

The things going on in Turkey are so insane, they have to be seen to be believed.

EDIT: His YouTube playlist with videos of the clashes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvUktDH-OBM&list=PLPC0Ude....
Jawbone Up vs Fitbit Flex
LOL, did you mean in-breeding within a limited pool? We are talking about UK high class, right?
Im confused by the use of the occupy lingo. Is occupy just a meme now for any protest?
http://www.quora.com/Istanbul/What-is-happening-at-Gezi-Park...

Append "?share=1", and the dumbass registration wall goes away.
"You're probably referring to me"

No, your comments were informative while politely avoiding direct criticism of the author. And you make another good point here.
It's about 6-800€ for a recent grad with a bit of experience.
Between the First Amendment and Right of Publicity
I thought this was excellent.

And not only that, but it was also written and sent back from the future. Epic.
First let me clarify that instead of ‘overturn’, ‘ignore’, ‘overrule’ or ‘disregard’ might have been better, as I wanted to say that such protests overrule one particular democratic decision and not necessarily the whole form of government.

Then, as I said, the matter is difficult – essentially you have to weigh the predictable functioning of the democratic process against the damage that can be done to people if this process ‘goes wrong’. Unfortunately, this has a whole bunch of problems:

- we do not have a universal definition of when a democratic decision is so wrong it is acceptable for someone to stand up against it

- that someone has to judge objectively whether his rights were violated in such a way that he is justified to stand up against the democratic will

- in many cases, we do not know what the majority ‘really’ wants

- even if a given system/constitution has securities that allow people to stand up against democratically made decisions, these might be seen as either too lax or too restrictive.

For example, the German constitution would allow the people to overthrow a democratic government that wants to cut back on social security in such a way as to violate article 20 of the Basic Law[0] – in the US, on the other hand, people apparently sometimes feel obliged to oppose a government that wants to introduce such social security. If even two relatively similar western societies cannot agree on when it is acceptable to overrule a democratic decision, how can we expect to find universal rules for that on a global scale?

In essence, it is a philosophical discussion on how much you respect democratic decisions as compared to the rights of individuals, and whether or not you only accept positive law or also include some ‘natural’ law in your decision-making.

I tend to like both democracy and positive law, but YMMV, of course. :)

[0] It defines Germany as a ‘social federal state’, does not allow to change that definition, and allows everyone to take up arms against those trying to change it, provided that all other means have been exhausted.
I did not find a replica of the bridge posted.

Perhaps it is a popular crossing that gets filled up whenever major events are happening?
It's a really nice demo, and I really like the idea so far (although precompiling to JS would be awesome), but I really don't see Python taking over Javascript as the scripting language.

It's way nicer in my opinion, but I think its fussy white space is likely to be an issue for this use case. All the large Javascript libraries get minified etc, and Python really isn't open to that sort of stuff. It's a great language to use normally, but I don't see it replacing Javascript. I'd much rather write in Python and compile to Javascript though.
The same holds true in virtually every content-oriented field: try making a room full of comedians laugh.
16 ways to torture developers - nice read
And your bike example is given ready to manipulate refined materials. Its a much bigger problem if you're given a mountain containing some coal and some iron ore and told good luck. Oh and when you're done with that, to paint it, here's some land where you could probably dig an oil well and build a refinery and a complete petrochemical industry.

I've been interested in this topic for a long time and it seems the biggest non-obvious problems relate to the initiator design.
> Structural typing is nothing like duck typing. People
> saying that don't know what they are talking about.

Structural typing is at least facially similar to duck typing. People contesting that are being pedants.
It's hyperbole. I think most people can see through "at least one in every neighborhood" as an emotional response to what is happening.