skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like the side-by-side comparison, buy why use a dark, non-default background for the iOS 6 home screen and a light one for the iOS 7 home screen? It looks like you're tossing objectivity to push a point.
Snowden is irrelevant. The NSA is the one claiming "direct access". Their credibility is what matters.

Cole's point (that you attacked) is that personalizing the debate into a discussion of Snowden's crebility involves distracting from the important matter at hand. In this he is absolutely right. Either you understand this and are a shill, or you do not understand this and are an unknowing dupe who is getting played.
Thank you for posting. I think you will inspire a lot of younger devs to seek more meaningful employment than working for big corp. However I fear that you will lose your job over this post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_n...
It doesn’t work for me, either. Maybe it takes time to propagate changes to every Facebook user? No clue.
I think you're the one who's trolling, and are also frankly acting like an ass. More to the point, none of the passages you cited even support your original claim. You're making unsubstantiated claims about the scope of the surveillance, and obfuscating away the barriers between the federal agencies and the data being collected.

Specifically, you have made and defended the claim that the NSA & FBI have total access to joe anybody's Facebook account. You then went on to cite passages from Wikipedia detailing the PRISM mailbox put in place by [FB / Google]. What you did not mention is how the mailbox is actually populated.

> The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. [1]

> FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before. [1]

This is from the NYT article cited in the Wikipedia page, which you indirectly cited twice. These requests are routed through a FISA court and limited in number, which is a far cry from "total" access. Your claim is incorrect.

Either way, this is a pretty unproductive discussion and I doubt we'll see eye to eye on this. You're also being belligerent and rude. Have a nice day.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...
In regards to point 6, how do you figure?

I don't have that right, ergo it must not be inalienable. I might as well say it is an inalienable right to possess pipe bombs and molotov cocktails. At least those things are easily obtainable.
Bipartisan Group of Senators Introduce Bill to Declassify FISA Court Opinions
I understand his experience. I've been mainly, (70% of the time), a third party Windows developer and admin for the last two decades and have spent thousands of hours working with and talking to Microsoft folks. Even have a few family members that work for the corporation.

NIH: Many Remondites live in the "bubble" where technology from the outside doesn't exist or doesn't matter. (It reminds me of the hard core Republican base.) This extends to much of the user base as well. There is a strong denial of OSS and there used to be taunting of Apple. (Until the iPhone kicked the smartphone market in gear.)

Future: Redmond has some serious issues to deal with: dysfunctional management, growing OSS usage, rejection of Win8/Xbox One and how to get people to use Azure when it's known you are the NSA's bitch.
How long ago? Do you think it was different when you were there, that it was better in your group specifically, or that it's better in most other groups?
Depending on your definition of "real world", Benjamin Pierce (of TAPL fame) wrote a book about typing semantics using Coq. Of interest to compiler designers. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/toc.html
2. Snowden will be called a defector. Peter King, Chairman of the United States House Committee on Homeland Security and member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence did exactly that on CNN on Sunday.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/10/king-defecto...
I shouldn't be concerned about wastage in one area because there's wastage in another area? Doesn't compute.

> Not to mention the fact that many foreign PhD students have strong desires to live and work here...but Uncle Sam apparently thinks it's better to shove them out.

Yes, I believe this. As long as Uncle Sam is cutting off its nose to spite its face, maybe we shouldn't be educating these foreign students. Maybe wait until Uncle Sam is smart enough to first give the students a green card.
Every minute of Star Wars gets 15 minutes of fame.
The angry response of the head of the NSA means his credibility is far greater than anyone in Congress or in the three letter agencies.

I can't believe we are even discussing his credibility, when you hear about the actions of our public officials.
The liberal use of fluorescent colours makes it an eyesore. Apply (or Ive) simply does not understand graphic design anymore. It's a disaster of epic proportions.
+1, the old screen seems much more usable to me as well
Colorblind people can tell the difference between color and black, which is how color is used to indicate interactivity in iOS7.
Although things were done differently than they are done in Silicon Valley, the difference is not necessarily bad, perhaps more eye-opening. This is how MOST computer science majors spend their careers. Not mastering MongoDB, collaborating on Google Spreadsheets, or posting things to HN, but using Windows XP, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Word 2003 on a 2008 Lenovo laptop. And MS is perfectly happy taking their money.

I think this is a dangerous line of logic that leads to equating 'new' with 'important.' I think once you get to the point where you judge someone for the tools they use or the sites they browse you go down a pretty negative path. It's shockingly easy to forget how much of the world runs on J2EE and ASP.net.
The use of Deep Learning in Google+ Photos
I feel bad for you and actually considered simply advancing you $300. But then I saw this:

"From start to finish [name redacted] wasted my time for nearly 6 months, teased me with a demo, then went AWOL, then came back from holiday without advising me and then still didn't provide any communication. I chased him for two months and been very patient but the lack of comms on his part was very frustrating. I would never deal with him again, as I cant trust his judgement and would not be confident for him to complete any work on time.”

[link redacted]

Noting that the other reviews by the same person don't fit that pattern:

https://www.elance.com/e/public/Co5ig7n7zvxc7ns%257EoswA82UF...

Most of the other work for which you have positive reviews are for smaller dollar amounts.

Reason for the negative feedback?
This is the first article I've read that has a mostly positive view of iOS 7, so I'm not sure what articles or comments you've been reading.
My guess is this is because of the separation between engineers and product managers (PMs). Engineers are supposed to focus on development and PMs (and more businessy folks) are supposed to focus on the competition.
You're missing the point of the snarky comments though. Everyone copies everyone, that's a given. The snarky comments point out "Apple did it first" (eg multitouch phones, click wheel, etc) or point out "Apple did it best" (portable music player, etc). First/best are innovations.
I was under the impression that federal crimes of this sort are only actionable if you are aware of the legality before it comes into your possession.

That would correlate with your statement that it isn't actually illegal, is that why? There are some crimes where it seems as though the public domain has enough knowledge that you should know better without being explicitly told so. But for something like an under-sized lobster, I think you should get a pass on not knowing.

This also presents a problem of enforcibility - will a law be enforced, and under what conditions, if it's a "silly law"? I think this is what really makes it important to have things to hide - you could be tried for what they find if they are pursuing you for other reasons.

In other words, I sure hope Edward Snowden doesn't have an under-sized lobster.
I can't tell if you're trying to troll or not, but I, too, think that the new icons are at least as good as, if not better than, the old ones.

The old Safari icon reminded me of the Netscape Navigator 2.0 splash screen.
It took him becoming a manager to figure out what the Programmer's Virtues* are about?

* http://threevirtues.com/
It's not just managers vs. coders. It's also experienced coders vs. novices.

You get tired of writing a pile of code that solves the problem the wrong way, so after 10 or so iterations of un-appreciated or un-used code, you learn to try to look at the big picture instead of always trying to isolate the problem into a fun programming exercise.

There is a management lesson here in being sure the right people are working on the right stuff. If you may need process improvement to generate the nightly reports by the next morning, don't send someone who loves to re-implement scripts in C. Or, if you're the person who loves to re-implement scripts in C, realize that your prospects may be limited.
I may be able to help explain one factor that hasn't been mentioned, and might be related:

Imagine that at a previous company you worked for - and one where you signed a standard confidentiality agreement - you were privy to a sensitive legal matter.

After you leave the company, there is much public speculation about that legal matter.

You can weigh in, and share the sensitive legal details that you were privy to - that are not publicly known. Would you? Should you? Can you?

Does this help explain?

I doubt anything new is going to be found by continuing these discussions. I can say what will be found going forward - exciting new observability made possible by DTrace on Linux.
As someone who created a startup around a hashtags search engine (1), I'm very glad of this development from a business point of view - the more hashtags are used, the better.

As I already wrote (2), though, I'm not sure if this is a great move for Facebook in the long run. Facebook owns the incredibly compelling core expectation of "easily sharing with friends and family through the Internet". But, for obvious reasons, public posts and comments are preferable for advertising purposes, so Facebook is also trying to eat Twitter's pie.

Problem is, can you be both the place where people connect with their closest connections, and where public discourse goes on? My guess is that you can't, and if this move really succeeds - which is entirely possible - this could be the start of the end of FB's domination of the "privately sharing" space - which is less easily monetized, but much more compelling than the "publicly sharing" one.

(1) http://hashtagify.me

(2) http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetiz...

EDIT: some corrections
How To Create A Website For Business
But at least battery life is also dramatically worse.
This is perhaps a bad example then. I was referencing James Duane, a law professor, who's quote was:

"People have been convicted in federal court for violating this statute because they brought back a 'boney fish' from Honduras, not knowing that Honduran law, not American law, but Honduran law forbade the possession of the boney fish. People have been been convicted under this law because they were found in possession of what's known as a short lobster."

In general it seems to me that there are a lot of laws, many of them are confusing and esoteric, and their enforcement is often selective. I've seen court cases where people were acting 'normally' under constant surveillance, and it doesn't go well.

However, I'm actually more interested in the question of how celebrated legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
For the life of me I cannot comprehend why they din't use a CSS & HTML based button with native text for the "Create a free account" button. Or is it supposed to look that cheap?
I've used Gnome since version 0.9 - or whatever they called that first hackish alpha release.

A few weeks ago I've switched to KDE (Kubuntu). Gnome was just unbearable. The reasons are described in the article.
Zynga is poorly managed, but so are the market's expectations
Browser tool that can modify css/html/js and refresh a page with changes intact?
This would be useful as a web developer when I try to remove things one by one until I find what's causing an issue.
I believe child porn is the exception. Mere possession even if you didn't know it's illegal (or even unknowing possession) seems to be a crime.

(IANAL, especially not with respect to anything underage.)
| Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander under your real name while being junior developer is not a recipe for stable employment. These guys tend to freak out over minor stuff like that.

Agreed. This is not something you write publicly WHILE working for the company. I know his intentions weren't to slander the company that is paying him, but it will most likely have bad consequences within his team.
:-) Everyone's inbox gets flooded. This highlights what people self-select to ignore.
From a fellow know-nothing when it comes to "flatness" and skeu-something I was a little bit surprised when the author complained that the old "receive a call" interface was full with alert-like buttons. They are supposed to be "Alert" buttons, for crying out loud, as in you're asleep in your bed, the phone starts ringing which means you have been "alerted", you're now woken up and ready to answer the call or deny it.

Which brings me to my second point, that is where is the "Deny" button/action in the new interface.
? I could only see "Answer" and "Remind me later".
Forgive the crudeness of the example, but there's a huge difference between the following two sentences:

I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.

i had to help my uncle jack off a horse.
It's a common mistake on the web to take entire groups of individuals, with varied and nuanced individual opinions, and to group them together and then complain about inconsistency and hypocrisy.

People say things like, apple users are foo or the new york times is bar or americans are baz. Well, of course any large group of people with divergent opinions will be self-conflicting when examined as a whole.

I understand why we do it; our brains pattern-match people into camps and construct narratives on our behalf to make sense of the world.

But, in general, I think it's a waste of everyone's time to complain that Apple bloggers all hated flat design before Apple decided to use flat design. Instead, perhaps you could show an example of an individual who has frustrated you in their inconsistency.
> I complained about GNOME 3 since day one

Maybe you need an attitude change
The "dribble crowd" isn't going to like the new iOS because it's going to make their role in app development mostly obsolete. Developing apps is going to require much more programatic design, instead of chopping up photoshop comps.
I'm worried about this.

My experience of Windows mobile is Windows 8 on a tablet, and I had pretty much nothing but contempt for it. And failed to see anything stylish about it at all!

I want links/buttons/actions to stand out. That doesn't mean it has to look like a button. It could be text with a halo, a shadow, or an effect that comes into play as you begin to interact with the device so the controls jump out at you, or are overlayed or something. Don't just present raw text at me. Though having said that, I'm sure Apple will make it work, where others haven't.

iOS 6 looks pretty infantile by comparison, but the new screenshots and icons don't look that nice or that cohesive either.

(I was hoping that they might just drop the old school 'i' from iOS and just call it Apple mobile OS or something, it grates my ears and eyes, the name is like soo 1999.)

The thing that I notice from the stills is that the typeface appears quite weak. I had the same issue with Windows 8, my eyes just can't read it comfortably, I'm not sure why that is - and it looks more diluted now - and there is less contrast in general. Though perhaps it will look okay on a retina display.
Let's say you're applying for an incredibly basic credit card with a line of $1000. Would you expect the bank to obtain a copy of your credit report? Probably; that's standard practice. Would they also try to determine prior convictions? Maybe. Would you expect them to search for a mugshot of you based on a cartoon they saw, pick a totally unrelated image file, then factor what that person looks like and what they've been accused of pre-trial into the decision? I hope not.

If you're planning to spot a fellow HN user some money, and you can't show them any trust, at least show a little professionalism. If you just did that for your own amusement, please don't ever do it again.
I'm colorblind and as long as the contrast is good (i.e., it doesn't really on red/green differences) it's not a problem per se. But the thin font might present a challenge because it reduces effective saturation.
OWASP Top for 2013 released
As others are saying, Microsoft is a very large company with a great deal of variance in the quality and maturity of teams. I wouldn't consider this description representative.

Azure is still a comparably new team, so I'm not surprised if it is still sorting out its processes. I've hear similar descriptions of Bing teams, and other "startup" divisions in the company.

But there are definitely some brutally effective teams there that far outshine any other non-Microsoft team I've ever seen.
This is the first time I've seen an article posted on HN with the original title to start with - and then the title is changed by a mod?

Is it opposite day?
I, too, would love to see wider adoption. However, Bitcoin's value is still extremely volatile. A person could convert their life's savings to Bitcoin and see its value halved overnight... As the article mentioned, the Kenyan shilling has gone through some bad inflation cycles but nothing close to Bitcoin's volatility. Why do you think they have very little to lose? Seems quite risky to me.
Why Facebook’s investors find Facebook so baffling
Interesting. I thought that Oracle was hyper-competitive too. Is it because they are now the defacto standard?
pg, when will HN be getting hashtags? This is an essential feature!
Nemo.
Facebook now supports #Hashtags
I was in Online Services (aka Windows Live) about two years ago. Some groups are obviously better than others, that can be said for any company. I think the problem here is that the author does not realize that unlike college, corporate world requires you to be a bit more proactive. Large companies may suffer from bureaucracy but on the upside, they have vast resources and smart/accomplished people you can tap into if you check your ego at the door, don't expect everything handed to you in a silver platter and tone down the poisonous attitude.
This was _the_ thing I was looking forward to most in the release of Debian 7. A sufficiently recent version of OpenSSL to do ECDHE.

Plain DHE is _killing_ our first load times...
In my opinion, they could have gone into "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away" a bit more...
I like this idea, but it would work better for films that actually have some substance.
I'm only throwing my opinion, I'm not really into security but I spend some time studying networks and low level stuff as a hobby, any specialist will probably point my errors below.

Depends on the device no? Suppose you have a chip with a backdoor, if said chip depends on a OS to operate and you can for example block connections (using a packet filter, either blacklisting the undesirable ones or drop all except the whitelisted ones), then whatever backdoor is there will need an unblocked connection to be activated.

As I see it the majority of hardware backdoors would only be useful if you can have some sort of access to the device, either remotely in a network the device is connected, physically (as far as I understand that's how Stuxnet spread in Iran) or if the user willingly executes some code that exposes the backdoor to you over some routing.
Glad to see you're using my image :) PiMAME is built on top of Raspbian, so you still have the Pi Store available.

-Shea
As an introvert I really enjoy articles like this. This world really considers us inferior in many ways, and it's easy to let that get to you. Seeing other introverts speaking out and thinking to myself "yeah! that's me!" is very refreshing.
It reads as sarcasm - "that is acceptable" meaning people in the group/team/culture accept it.
Very good points. Listening is a HUGE part of leadership. It's very easy to fall into the charisma trap, but speaking is just a small part of the overall leadership puzzle. It's much easier to learn, think, and get the pulse of an organization when you're not the one doing the talking.
Snowden saw what I saw: surveillance criminally subverting the constitution
A man-in-the-middle attack done this way would be easy to detect. You just need to compare the site's key with the one you received, and they'd be different.

Or, in simpler terms, that kind of attack would require the cooperation of several employees of the attacked companies. While just putting a mole there and copying the private key would require cooperation of only the mole in one of the positions that would need to cooperate at the other attack. (And breaking the key would happen only if the NSA wanted to give some easy money to computer manufacturers.)

Rougue certificate authorities are the biggest weakness of SSL from the point of view of a user that wants to be sure that it's really his bank that is asking for a password. But the endpoints security are still the biggest weakness against a powerfull oponent like the NSA.
Retina Mac External display problem
4 hours and still down....
Has he been asking anyone to take those claims at face value? He claims to want to start a public discussion, and explaining his own motivations is a part of that. So here's how that might go:

Public: Is it true that an arbitrary analyst at a government contractor has the technical ability to read anyone's personal email?
NSA: No. That would be illegal.
Public: Given the scope of what has already been revealed, and your demonstrated commitment to lying to us, what assurances can you offer to us that this is NOT taking place?

How is Snowden's credibility relevant to this discussion at all?
You should check out some of the new and upcoming developer tools in chrome. Paul Irish has made some good videos about the tools available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdsummsTeLo
By LowKarmaAccount/David Wheeler's definition, no. If you browse the list in Wheeler's article, the only things that jump out at the "application feature" level are word processing and the spreadsheet. Clearly, Runkeeper, Dark Sky, and the like are not going to make that list. It really is focused on the "pure CS/EE" side of things, and since smartphone app development is mostly business as usual with a few different quirks, none of it is likely to qualify.

I'm thinking that something like "robust speech recognition and parsing" might fit on there (though it's tough to determine when such a system would be considered mature enough, and simultaneously differentiated from full strong AI). But that's not a smartphone innovation, it just happens to be a good use case.

It really comes down to the definition/interpretation of "innovation," and I think many people (myself included) would feel a slight when certain things are excluded, but I can see how "taking things that already exist and putting them together in new ways or usefully extrapolating on them" (which is what any "innovative" app has done) doesn't really fit. As he explained about the smartphone, something can be world-changing in a very real way, without necessarily being innovative.