skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is generally how most people I know (both liberal and conservative) feel about it.

They were completely behind him when he revealed the NSA was doing a lot of spying. Now that he's basically given our enemies our playbook, they all think he's a traitor and should be treated as such. This crossing into releasing documents also gives credence to some of the conspiracy people saying he was a Chinese plant from the get go.

Someone brought up an interesting point which is the incredible hypocrisy on both isles. Republicans were ok when Bush got nailed with warrant-less wiretaps and the Democrats lost their minds. Now, it's the Republicans losing their minds and the Democrats seem to be ok with it.

Also, just an FYI, the FISA court has been around since 1978, it wasn't until after 9/11 did people finally know about it. It's also important to note they've never rejected a warrant which was brought before the court:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellige...
The original author will continue to be allowed to make money -- they will just no longer have a monopoly on doing so. The cold hard facts are that if you're not able to make something profitable within five years from its publication, you're not providing a service that the market finds adequately valuable. Do we keep startups with 1000 or 10,000 users/fans around to flounder until the proprietor has made enough startups that the small monthly residuals compound to a livable income?

Copyright is a gift which the public offers to encourage useful, meaningful art. To give it an extra, unnatural profit incentive at the expense of free culture, collaboration, and idea proliferation. We should be very careful re: how much of this we're willing to give away. Right now, we give entirely too much.
Announcing the 2013 'Dance Your Ph.D.' Contest
I used to do a lot of desktop development but for the past 4 or 5 years have mostly been doing web development. I'm quite fluent in Python, C#, Javascript, etc. I can't imagine doing a large project in Python, it feels hacky. It has a ton of great features like the "with" statement which is pretty cool but I still reach for C# and Asp.net MVC for large web projects. Maybe I'm missing something.
Www.aa2888.com
Create story books and translate into languages
Re the open source replacement for MATLAB: Octave (http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/) has improved a lot in the last couple of years. I've now used it for several large projects with no problems at all. (I'm definitely keeping an eye on Julia, too --- it looks great.)
Great example why never to link to a techcrunch regurgitation of some story originally reported elsewhere.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142412788732404950...

The TC version fails basic reading comprehension. The US subsidiaries of the Telcos in question did not defy NSA/FISA court orders - according to WSJ's reporting, their foreign ownership made it difficult for them to participate due to existing legal restrictions external to the companies themselves. Key WSJ paragraph:

Legal, practical and political obstacles are all possible reasons why the two firms are excluded from the NSA program. But current and former U.S. officials say the likely reasons are tied to their overseas ownership. Government requests for data, through special court orders sanctioned by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are classified "top secret" and "noforn," spy-talk for "no foreign." That would prohibit some T-Mobile and Verizon owners from being aware of the programs.
No mention in the article of the most interesting aspect of the Pirate Party, the Liquid Feedback software platform that they use to make decisions:

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

Read about it, there are some fascinating ideas about how participatory politics can work in the world of software.
Why should they be necessary though? Presumably the original commenter was indicating that iOS 6 and earlier worked well for him/her in their default state. So how is it better to make the default state in iOS 7 less usable thus requiring the use of accessibility settings for a larger group of people?
Way to make one feel good: "oh, you were fine using our previous product, but you're clearly not good enough for this one. There, have a look at the options for differently-able people, you're now officially in that category. Do you need help crossing the road, by the way?"
Onion Pi - Make a Raspberry Pi into a Anonymizing Tor Proxy
> The homescreen just looks half finished.

Shocking, right? Things looks half finished in a pre-release beta. What were they thinking?
In regards to Go, why do you think it feels too low-level? Is it about library availability or is it more about the language itself?
you can not only submit stories for translation and audio recordings, but also publish them as apps on iOS, Android and Kindle platforms. Really useful to multilingual books and to help kids and adults learn languages through stories, making it fun and engaging.
> minor issues

Wow, tell that to someone who can finally have all the legal rights that most married couples enjoy. Or all the folks on the other side who are convinced that their own marriages are forever ruined and the country on the road to hell because some people can get married.
They've already released their icons to the public in the form of an incredibly public keynote. Criticism is entirely fair at this point. If they redesign them, then great. We'll talk about that, too.
s/Ruby/Rails/

Rails is a heavyweight framework. I'd be more interested in a comparison with a lightweight framework like Cuba. Ruby will still lose to Go, but the difference probably won't be 10x.
I almost made it through Coursera's python course. It's a really nice language but I still find the whitespace thing annoying. Also package management seems a bit lacking but I might just not be familiar enough with the ecosystem.
Love the UI. You might want to change the text a little bit to make it more readable.
I think your comment is very offensive towards “differently-able people”.
Another good one for less urban locations is WWOOF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWOOF
If this is really an issue, the large, talented group of designers at Apple will fix it before GM.

They are employed by probably the most design-sensitive company around precisely because they're at the top of their game – they won't be oblivious to blundering inconsistencies.

If it's not, it will be forgotten about within days of the OS's release by nearly all users.
It's also a pain if you are new to the platform. For evidence, go to any website which uses light grey (or worse, red) to indicate links (instead of the standard color).
It very much depends on the application.

What is the size and scope of the project?
What feature-set are we looking at?
Anything realtime?
Performance critical?
Large team building components at the same time?
Maintainability?
Scale?

If you really must pick a one-language-fits-all (and i think this poll reflects this logic) it would have to be python.

So, choosing tool before job; python. But also, you would be an idiot.
Yes, I'm aware that typical Republican voters typically believe a number of obviously-false things, like thinking "big government" doesn't include a bunch of things that it obviously does include.

Including spending almost as much on military as the entire rest of the world put together (44.5% of world total, and btw twice the per-capita budget of any sane country), and using that enormous military to invade countries that do not pose a threat. I'm not even arguing (here) against this military budget, nor the adventurism. I'm arguing against calling it small-government, and against calling it "defense", because it's obviously neither.

Anyway, that got off-track. To return to the point, I'm perfectly "careful to distinguish between subjective and objective elements", thank you very much. But given that the subjective elements, on this particular subject, are laughably disconnected from reality, it's pretty cynical to exploit that.

I understand the "two parts to [your] argument". I would have thought that was clear. And I'm agnostic on the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. However, I think both parts are cynical.
where is the translate option?
I see a sync audio option, which I am assuming is for text highlighting and syncing. The UI can be made a bit better.
Overall, decent stories. Can anyone recommend more use cases for this ?
Not sure if you are joking?
That's pretty much the impression I've always taken. It doesn't seem like he is taking himself seriously when he speaks those words.
I love the idea, but I wonder how robust such a system would be to large scale use. At the scale of a country, could it withstand the attacks of all the people seeking to game the system?
I love this. It brings back many memories of my own grandfather, a former railway engineer teaching me how to set up model train tracks, how to properly hammer nails, how to drive and so many other things.

I definitely don't regret choosing software for myself, but I cherish all he taught me.
I made no reference to Obama, I was speaking to the point that people whose communications would be included in this subpoena are not in the same position that Nixon was in when he knowingly and approvingly recorded his communications.

Logs of all communication on the private lines of the IRS and White House employees could expose some very embarrassing or otherwise "culturally sensitive" activities that have absolutely nothing to do with the intent of this subpoena. To repeat the point made by peterwwillis: "Politicians can use their position to go on fishing expeditions and publicly persecute whoever they wish with flimsy reasoning."
SketchMine: a repository for free Sketch.app templates
Speaking of laying floor, I'm putting in my own wood floor (I am 25 years old), and so far all of the neighbours I have met have looked at me like I had grown a third eye in my forehead.

Yes, I am doing it myself. No, I've never done it before, but how hard can it be? I've got the Internet, and that what I can't learn online I can learn from friends or by calling family. While I already feel like my house will never be done, and I will never be quite satisfied, I am extremely happy that I get to learn all kinds of new things I wouldn't have otherwise had the opportunity to learn.

My grandpa, on both sides of the family, were always fixing things, building things, and engineering new solutions to problems. I hope that even-though I have become a software engineer I never lose touch with the physical side.
Early Waze backer maps out investment thesis
Or, save ourself some money and get a package of disposable earplugs at a pharmacy.
Thanks you for pointing out the font issue. I'll look into that
Do you have any evidence to back up your first paragraph? Anything that has stood up in a court of law? Or are you just regurgitating talking points you've heard from the mainstream press?
This is structurally brilliant. All of those complaining about hypocrisy or partisanship are missing the point.

Ignore the specific issue. The critical question this raises is this: if, as the administration says, the NSA needs all this data to find terrorists, who gets to say what it's used for or not? Ignore the entire privacy argument. If the executive branch is keeping records on all of this stuff, is it also claiming unique and sole access to it?

Because if they are, anybody with a brain can see the problem. In fact, the partisanship of the Congressman spells it out in clear relief. Just picture that guy as the next president. If you give that much power to the executive and they alone make the decision how to use it, then by definition such information will be used for political purposes. Who gets to decide what is so evil that requires this special, and extra-constitutional, treatment? Everybody doesn't want terrorists, but how about supporting congressional investigations? Helping wrongly-accused people get out of jail? Divorce proceedings? Civil cases?

Are we going to have a system of law and order where certain evidence is presented or not solely depending on the decisions of the executive branch?

What this shows is that this NSA data thing just isn't bad, it's bad on multiple levels. It completely breaks the way our constitutional government is supposed to operate. Even if somehow the political weasels in DC get away with keeping the lid on it, the criminal and Congressional cases alone are going to cause a nightmare. Can you imagine how Congress is going to act if some pet cause of theirs could have been supported by evidence NSA refused to release? How criminal defendants are going to react if, years later, they learn that the government was holding exculpatory information?

And it's just going to go on, and on, until they finally open it all up. Then there'll be a hell-storm.

ADD: And I'm willing to bet 20 bucks that part of the data NSA is collecting is the location tracking information from our cellphones. (accurate to within 50 meters). Can you imagine the number of places in the rest of government operations where such information would be useful?
100% security is impossible and that's the way they like it
So I just remembered that I actually have some personal experience with this issue. My girlfriend is getting her PhD in computer vision, and one of her labmates was working on summarization algorithms (imagine a program that could take 6 hours of continuous footage, and spit out a 1-minute highlight reel). She volunteered to wear a camera for a day to gather data for him, and she asked me permission to do so while we were out & about during a weekend. I agreed (with conditions--blurred faces in the final paper), we took the footage, he published his paper, it was fine.

Like a year later, someone else who is working in a similar field reached out to her labmate to ask for the raw data. Thankfully, he asked us if we were ok with it, because I kind of wasn't. I had agreed to let one person that I kind of knew already to see footage of me. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of 6 hours of me conversing with my girlfriend at a brewery being passed around between who knows how many labs, and appearing in who knows how many papers, over a period of who knows how many years. Cuz I mean, once you lose control over who has access to that data, even just a tiny bit, that genie isn't going back into that bottle. Not that there was anything to care about, it was just a brewery and playing with some legos at home, but I didn't like the idea of becoming The Guy, and data sets have a way of becoming institutions in that field.

And it wasn't just me, either. We were in a semi-public space, there were other people in the background. I have no idea if they would be cool with being in an academic paper. Maybe they would be, but they never even knew they were being recorded, so it seemed kind of unfair to make that call for them. We eventually decided to not allow the data to be shared.

So then her labmate asked if he could just send over the audio data. To which our response was "why are we only finding out now that thing was recording audio?" That left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

So I don't know if I have a point really, I'm just sharing my experience with this. The big issue for me is loss of awareness and loss of control. I know who or what is seeing me, because I can see them back; I can be aware if someone is setting up a camera, and leave or hide my face or ask them what they're doing. I'm (approximately) aware of who can observe me, and who has or will have access to those observations in the future. The troubling aspect of Glass is that it introduces an asymmetry that I feel is to my disadvantage: if someone observes me with Glass, access to that observation is potentially unbounded. This feels to me like a loss of control, and that's why Glass makes me uncomfortable.
It really grates on me to get to the end of a heartfelt article like this and smack right into a corporate plug like "…and that's why I created iFixit.com - your free repair guide for everything!"

I'm not begrudging the founder of a company the opportunity to talk about who he is and why he created his business, but the way you do it matters. Is this an article about iFixit.com? Fine, I'd probably be interested in that, go ahead and let me know, then tell me about your grandfather who inspired you.

If it's an article about your grandfather, then just say something like "he inspired me to create my own business that helps people learn to fix things." You don't have to give yourself a plug. Lastly, if you absolutely must plug your company name, at least try to do it without making it sound like a line of ad copy. After a few hundred words tugging on my emotions and making me care about your personal story, it feels like a betrayal of my trust at the end to leave me wondering if I just read an advertorial.
You guys should talk to Teespring.
I think you underestimate how much of a time sink fixing the first leaky plumbing fixture can be. There are a dozen things that can go wrong, and a dozen things to think about that someone who has never done it will discover by trial and error, with each iteration requiring a trip to the hardware store. If you didn't gain such handy expertise incidentally to "helping" someone else, every such task can be a comedy of errors. The worst is if you manage to mess something up badly enough that it requires far more work and material to fix than the problem you started with.
There should be nothing in the way of requesting both, I suppose. You could write the NSA and the FISC a motion to provide a copy and then destroy. shrugs
Beyond my knowledge, sorry.
Had to scroll down a long way to find this comment, but I agree with you that these suggested alternatives are not necessarily improvements.

The "poor color choice" Calculator, for example, his alternative is worse than iOS 7 which is worse than iOS 6. Dark keys with a colored totals key are recognizable as a calculator at a glance. No idea what his suggested alternative is smoking.

My main takeaway from this article, like the many other "here's what they should have done" write-ups is: "This is harder than it looks."
Maybe this is just bitching and whining, but as far as I am concerned iOS 7 is another "Apple Maps"-style upgrade disaster if they don't make a lot of UI changes. I really think people are going to hate it. I know it's just a beta, but I had the same hopes that Apple Maps would be improved during its beta (and commented to people that Apple was going to have big problems if it didn't) and look where that went.

It's a shame too because they added a lot of good things like the new notifications layout, Siri improvements, control pane slide-out, etc.
Hey look a push poll from Scott Rasmussen. Shouldn't he be working on President Romney's reelection?

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmusse...

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-po...
Lua - I'm going to use it (using OpenResty) to build an API for a web application soon.
My father in law had a stroke about a year back and I looked into this to see if anyone was doing any research into stimulating parts of the brain which were harmed. I wasn't able to find much. I'm curious if you've ever seen anyone studying therapeutic uses for this technology?
I learned a thing or two about this in 2009-2010 when I uncovered a critical SSL/TLS bug CVE-2009-3555. The fix for this bug would require a change to the TLS protocol itself (RFC 5746) which would take months in the best case, so my boss and I set upon a disclosure plan. (This was long before we ended up employed at MS.)

Microsoft, like many other vendors, would need to patch. They were the most responsive, a bit aggressive even, vendors about wanting to get the full details of the bug as soon as possible.

We also disclosed the US Government. We did this as part of the planned disclose process to vendors as well as customers and other stakeholders. I felt it was important that there were customers in the process in order to motivate the vendors a bit and so we weren't the only ones taking heat from the vendors. The US Government probably had more affected systems than anybody and it could even be a nat security issue, so we disclosed them.

I think it worked. Some of the other (non MS) vendors heard about it via their Federal business and were a little annoyed at us. The US Government really wants to keep their own systems patched.

I never did hear of the bug being used in anger (not that I would have), but among the major vendors (Linux distros included), Microsoft was the first to engineer and release a patch and push it down the update channel.

We presented the full story (in our Hardy Boys sweaters) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_L9WGGEUlU
> there's plenty of evidence of things not being right

No shit!

Things were never "right", starting from the constitution defining slaves as 3/5ths of a human being. Women couldn't vote 100 years ago. In a lot of southern states, things were still pretty bad 50 years ago, and the idea of a black person being president was science fiction.

You can dig up similar dirt on pretty much any country with enough history. Did you know that in Switzerland, universal suffrage for women wasn't fully approved until the 1970ies? Italy? Berlusconi - need I say more?

Not right, however, does not mean "dead", and those who conflate the two come across as ill-informed, at best.

Having to argue that the US is not just like North Korea as part of any political debate leaves little room for any serious, nuanced considerations.
I have everything to hide until the government has nothing to hide.
PRISM Isn’t Data Mining and Other Falsehoods in the N.S.A. “Scandal”
Oh god yeah. It really sucks. This is going to be a pain with anything async right now though.
AdWords is a bad example, its probably the most straight forward product Google offers, likely because its purpose & functionanlity is discussed in detail by Google.
I don't understand why people often suggest FastMail when it comes to privacy. FastMail's "servers are located in New York City with a backup in Norway" according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail.
What was the process for getting a source for Modafinil, and what makes you sure you were getting a net benefit, beyond just the ability to focus?

For example, one of the potential drawbacks from focus drugs is that you lose creativity. What makes you sure your were getting a net win?

I'm very skeptical that there is really such a thing as a free lunch when it comes to synthetic cognitive enhancements.

That being said, I do believe physical fitness, diet, and adequate sleep seem to be massive cognitive enhancers when correctly applied.
Browserify and the Universal Module Definition
Safari 6 is useless for development and has made me move to chrome for anything more than console.log.

They're losing.

Firefox + Firebug pulled webdevs away from IE like honey. Chrome is doing the same.
If I could down-vote I would not be doing this...
Holder: Leaks damaged U.S. security
I don't respect Larry Ellison. Sorry.
Metaphorically speaking, it sounds like you're convicting the guy without even giving him a trial. The political system is by-and-large a big bowl of FUBAR, but I'd rather see a politician give the other side a dose of their own medicine when something as clandestine as this Datagate (Yes I used the -gate postfix, sue me) scandal happens. Especially given one critical notion very few people seem to be talking about: Why are phone records made by the citizenry deemed worthy of being 'classified' unless the government has some sort of interest other than fighting terrorism that would prevent them from disclosing on their own what they do on our behalf or even the results? If this is so critical to fighting terrorism, show me what you've thwarted.

Oh wait, that's classified too.

Seeing the trend/problem here? I'm absolutely fine with what this Congressman did.
I wonder if the news about Google's participation in PRISM will influence the way we (HN members) think about Glass. It certainly makes me feel less comfortable with passively revealing more of life to Google.