skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear this one a lot. "The military is so big, they have missiles, drones, etc etc etc, you could never defeat them in battle." This argument has several flaws:

1. This is just more proof that we (the people) need to hold on to whatever arms we can get. We've mistakenly let our military accrue a cache and kind of weaponry that we have not allowed even ourselves to possess. If the powder keg does explode, less arms is not better than more.

2. Many service men and women take their pledge to uphold the constitution very seriously, and would not take up arms against the American people (and most likely would take up arms against a tyrannical government, should it come to that). This is why many veterans are proclaimed mentally incompetent and disarmed (http://www.benefits.va.gov/pensionandfiduciary/fiduciary/ben..., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NlBgtIeU1s).

3. There are 1.5 million active military personnel and 850 thousand reserves (Wikipedia). There 311 million Americans, not including the roughly 3 million that are active or reserve military personnel. We are a bigger force by far.

4. "You're going to die if you fight." Appeal to emotion.

5. "How can you even say that with a straight face." Appeal to ridicule.

6. There are many reasons to "want a gun" beyond protecting yourself from tyranny, including self defense from criminals, sport, hunting and recreation. But "wanting" has nothing to do with it. You don't need to explain why you want a gun and you don't have to show a "need" for it. It is your inalienable (seriously, look this word up, ponder its meaning) right. It cannot be taken from you (though you can give it up willingly, I suppose).

EDIT:

7. In 2011, Ron Paul received 6 times (http://ronpaulronpaul.com/) more in contributions from active military personnel than all of the other republican candidates combined. For those that don't know, Ron Paul ran on a campaign of small government, less war, etc. That should tell you where our military stands on this matter.
This is a really cool article in that it shows the transition of one developer into an architect. I think the grief the author is taking in some of the comments has more to do with presentation than content.

The weekends of clever hacks that he mentioned were essential to his development as they are for all of us. The weekend is a good time for clever hacks. If they have useful business implications all the better. Exciting, innovated packages often sprout from a developer's desire for a more elegant, stable, focused, or powerful solution for a problem or a problemset. These innovations should be abstracted into reusable packages and reused.

However, in a business environment, developers need to be focused on solving problems for users. They need to do so in the most stable and sane possible manner. That means that code should be a last resort when a solution has not already been written. If you miss your weekend hackathon, contribute back to the packages that you found helpful. This way, you can get your kicks from clever new hacks and improve several of your existing projects in one fell swoop!

Writing code (and lots of it) is essential to growing as a developer. Unfortunately, it's often a detriment to software projects.
i actually wish it executed regular searches so it could be used instead of google.com
I can't speak for other CDNs, but I know Akamai at least takes this extremely seriously. By seriously, I mean, machines that serve SSL are in locked racks with cameras and when unauthorized access occurs, the machines automatically wipe themselves. That's not complete protection but it gives you some assurance.
Corrupt politicians might inflate the currency and buy votes with newly printed money. Bitcoin prevents that.
I would re-word that to:

He took a massive risk, to prevent further degradation of our society
You will, however, probably find that it feels more fluid, responsive and modern.

Sounds like someone who hasn't actually installed it yet. Perhaps it will feel more fluid and responsive when it ships, but that is not the case today.
Well if you don't like Dart, then this obviously doesn't mean much to you. If you do like Dart and have existing Angular projects, then you'll have an easier path to migrating away from JS.
Then you should make sure you don't have sex with it, or, if you do, don't write emails about that or talk on the phone about it.
"it might be good for some other people," says
every writer in the world, "but not for me."

-bowerbird
This is not a fair response to the industry in my opinion.

iOS 7 is not just "flat" - at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, it's so much more than that. You're judging it based on the most obvious first impression - the icons and such.

Those can be improved, yes (especially Safari's...) but you're not reviewing the actual interface. I'm typing this comment on iOS 7 and I assure you it feels smoother. There are kinks to be worked out but the operating system's interface is more intuitive, which allows for more usable space and memory dedicated to features.

You sound kind of bitter about bloggers being fickle; getting past that, I think the design's interface actually looks very polished. It's "smarter" and only has a very small learning curve. Even apps like news:yc (what I'm using now) feel faster and "lighter" despite not yet being optimized for the iOS yet.

The whole thing feels like a more lightweight, versatile experience. I encourage you to download iOS 7's beta and try it out if you can.
I don't care about flatness or skeutransmogrification or whatnot, but the damn thing must WORK.

Look at his iMessage screen comparison [1]: yes, the old screen looks a bit geocities, but you can actually read text very well; the new screen is almost unreadable. The prime aim of iMessage is to make people read text, not to look cool.

It doesn't matter if there are options to thicken the font -- the whole point of OSX/iOS UI was that you should not need options, because defaults should be good enough for most people. This is clearly not the case with what we've seen of iOS7, and that's a problem.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgemmell/9023510971/
It seems to me that if you've got double the clock, the likely explanation is that half the transistors are switching per clock, and power consumption should be orthogonal to clock/IPC ratio.

Nope; a lot of the latches are switching every cycle, so power is higher at higher frequency. This is what doomed NetBurst-style design.
As someone who is colour blind, I don't see this being much of an issue. If the colours are strong and stark enough (which it looks like they are) the vast majority of people who are colour-blind won't have any issues.
I just tried it with a post that included #nsa and it's not clickable. Not rolled out yet or am I too dumb?
I'll admit I didnt' finish it... how could I? it was too painful...
I'd be interested to know whether the lawyers in the Apple vs Samsung 'rounded corners' court case would agree to that being the status quo.
PyCon UK 2012: Create beautiful command-line interfaces with Python
> This would then enable a man-in-the-middle SSL attack.

We know they are not doing this en-masse though. It would be noticed by now if they were. They undoubtedly do it, but almost certainly only targeting individuals, or all users of obscure sites.
Ask HN: Looking for a web app that annotates PDFs and syncs w/Dropbox
I've been Googling all afternoon and I'm about ready to raise the white flag.

I'm looking for a web app that uses my Dropbox credentials/has access to my .pdf files on Dropbox. I'd like to annotate these .pdf files in a web browser. I'd like for this file to be saved back into Dropbox, so that I can view these files across my devices/computers when I'm not at work.

The closest thing I've found to something this is GroupDocs, but tldr; it refuses to save back into Dropbox. I've attempted to contact their support but their user registration email for support (which is separate from the product credential) has yet to hit my inbox three hours after registering. Trying to register on their forums takes me back to my file dashboard (wtf?)...I'd like to give this group/developer the benefit of the doubt, but my experience has been a frustrating one thus far.

Surely there has to be someone out there who's meeting this consumer interest? I can't be the only person interested in this type of workflow/functionality.
PRESS RELEASE
I agree, it’s all very wishy-washy and full of contradictory statements. My point was simply that there was more text than “Free to download and use”.
He definitely plays it up for entertainment value, but he's been a true-blue believer for a long time. I even agree with most of his principles and small portion of his facts (I don't like to use the word "crazy", which can equally apply to all of us or none of us), but he's missing proper barometers when it comes to skepticism, empathy and tact.
Because this isn't a new project for us; if it was, we'd absolutely be using XMPP. Our choices were to dump 10+ years of engineering and spend another two trying to wrangle XMPP to fit our needs (and do so across Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Web), to keep our protocol but publish docs, or to continue to run yet-another-walled-garden.

The maker of an interoperable IM client not running an interoperable IM protocol just felt silly to us, so we decided to spend a week and publish something.
> If you are passionate about the right to bear arms, because you view it as a vital protection against a tyrannical government, I'm curious how you feel about surveillance/collection of all your phone calls, movements, and internet activity.

I support both the 2nd and the 4th amendments.

I think the reason you don't hear as much of an outcry about surveillance is because it is usually not noticeable, whereas weapons restrictions are very noticeable if you're someone who takes an interest in them.
> It doesn't matter what causes the NSA to go looking, what matters is what they find.

Sorry, but I disagree with that. It is very much about what causes them to go looking, because NSA analyst time is finite. If you remember from Snowden's interview, he said this:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/06/edwa...

> “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the President, if I had a personal e-mail,”

Note the qualifier at the end. He's claiming that the NSA can read the emails of anyone once they know the address. The implications are that investigation and surveillance are done when a target is specified. If President Obama doesn't use barack.obama@gmail.com from a known IP address, then his emails are essentially hidden from the NSA.

If you are in a situation where the NSA knows of the identities you are using, no matter what service, and they choose to target you, then you are screwed no matter what.
Analyzing the Data Your Customers Provide
I spent 5 years at Microsoft as a dev and share almost none of the author's sentiments. I had very few meetings, my manager went out of his way to make sure that I was not blocked, code reviews were mandatory, blogging on technical aspects was ok, had ample free time to work on any side project I wanted (even encouraged to work with MSR on things that were more researchy), etc etc... I could go on for a while.

Sure, there was a huge emphasis on shipping rather than spending days space architecting the codebase and sure, not every piece of code was a stellar example that would show up in a college textbook but I'm having the exact same problems while doing my own startup, where at times I knowingly incur some technical debt in order to ship on time.
A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett is usually for me a good way to step back from everyday life and work. It's funny, there are many references to scientific and nerd culture and it helps to reconsider some "serious" things...
As a fellow happy Gnome 3 user I think the problem is no one complains about what works for them. It took a bit to get used to, but now I find all other environments lacking.
Compulsory licensing of trademarks is a stupid idea.

Patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc, are different things. (What do you mean by "etc"? Database rights? They should be abolished.)

What's wrong with a patent being owned by a person or company that uses it?

Why the insistence that patent trolls must be "100% public companies with 100% stock available for sale on the open market"?
Reporters Attacking Snowden (ad hominem)
The analysis of "Minute 8" is 16 minutes and 14 seconds.
One of cerulean studios' has actually answered this question in a comment on the blog:

http://blog.trillian.im/?p=2746#comment-31043

Mikael: Mainly inertia; we started this 10 years ago as well
and have massive amounts of development energy to consider.
What we lack is the peer review that a proper standard
can boast, but switching to XMPP at this point would
be a huge, huge project.
We decided to do the next best
thing (instead of doing nothing and running another walled
garden), which was to publish the documentation
to our protocol; we’re also going to consider building
a federation layer that uses XMPP in the future.
This way we get the best of XMPP in terms of
federation but don’t have to throw 10 years of
client and server work out the window.
Doesn't the Pi have HDMI out?
People on here are nuts.

How are the new gradients any different than the old gradients?! Any more "childish"?! (Look at the Messages app for example.) Is there any consistency between the old Voice Memos, Apple Store, Videos, iTunes, and Stocks apps? Do these icons really strike you as fundamentally better than the new ones?
ASCII Welcome Mats for HTML
There is a high contrast mode. And the entire web mainly uses color to differentiate between links and normal text ie. many omit the underlining. So not sure what makes iOS so different in this regard.
This would seem to assume that the contents of the leak are 100% true and 0% ambiguous. It doesn't seem that way to me.

And the questions of a personal nature seem relevant to helping judge some of the extraordinary claims that Snowden has made without documents (yet) to show as evidence - like that he had access to tap anyone, that he had access to find out every undercover asset everywhere, that they would send assassins after him, etc.

There is still a lot of this story that we don't know or can't yet understand yet and unfortunately it seems that some of this will rely on understanding the leaker and not just the leaked documents.
Event: A bunch of schoolchildren are brutally murdered by a guy with a gun.

Conversation in the media: Maybe citizens shouldn't have guns. At least not guns that can easily fire lots of rounds in a short period of time.

Massive well-funded response: Don't even think about it. This is a violation of a constitutional right (2nd amendment) which is a vital protection against a tyrannical government.

Result: Attempt to pass a bill in congress fails.

Event: Guy with access to highly classified information concerning massive surveillance programs leaks some of this information to the press, which makes some of that information public.

Conversation in the media: This sounds like George Orwell's “1984”. The government is monitoring everyone and lying to congress and to the people about it. The laws, interpretations and court rulings are all secret, preventing accountability. People should know what their government is doing.

Pitiful response from lots of people with no clout: Stop tracking all our calls, movements and internet traffic. This is a violation of our constitutional rights (1st and 4th amendments) which are a vital protection against a tyrannical government.

Counter-response from establishment people with lots of clout: This is necessary to protect you from terrorists.

Result: TBD...
#beautiful
Anandtech discussed this in their Bulldozer review:

AMD's architects called this pursuit a low gate count
per pipeline stage design. By reducing the number of
gates per pipeline stage, you reduce the time spent in
each stage and can increase the overall frequency of
the processor. If this sounds familiar, it's because
Intel used similar logic in the creation of the Pentium 4.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd-...

And since I read this, I really wondered what trick AMD has up its sleeves.
I can't decide if this post is a joke or not. Yes a lot of what he describes goes on in many large corporations (although rarely ALL of what he describes unless you're one of the unfortunates stuck at one of the REALLY dysfunctional companies), but the way this article is written makes it sound like you should expect and be satisfied with all the things he describes. If the company you work for suffers from about half of what he describes that's probably about "average" for the industry, but that just means you've got a mediocre job. If your company checks 3/4 or more of that list, your company sucks, look for something better. If your company exhibits none, or only a couple of the problems, that's a pretty good company, consider yourself lucky (although try to fix the problems if you can).

Just because something is dysfunctional in the company you work for doesn't mean you should just accept it, you should try to change it if you can, but depending on how far down the totem pole you are you probably won't be able to make that big a difference. In general, the better the company you work for, the more likely you'll be able to fix what problems there are. If a company is so dysfunctional that there's no hope for change, start looking for something better, don't put up with a horrible working environment just because the company is "big" or well known.
I think that is happening because Apple is usually the one to cry foul, and now everyone wants to expose them for the shameless hypocrisy. That is all.
Why does it matter that he doesn't understand everything about what he's disclosing?

He leaked something that hints to the government doing unconstitutional blanket surveillance of their citizens.

Let's investigate that and leave Snowden's life or level of understanding out of it.
I wonder if he's been to one of those back stabbing Microsoft Performance Reviews yet, probably not since he's only there 8 months.
There's Picade, a kickstarter project with Integrated screen. They're a late bug give regular news on the project.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/picade-the-arca...

However, the linked project should work if you're TV has an HDMI or DVI connection.
If you go to the Apple Developer forums (https://developer.apple.com/devforums/ Dev account needed) the "Getting Started" sub-forum is filled with devs, from just signed up to veterans with multiple apps under their belt, asking usability questions.

I think it's telling when your own developing base has to post to forums asking simple questions like:

Where did my spotlight search go?
How do I rate songs?
That's pretty interesting. I wonder how smileys fit into our grammar.
I often wonder what our typical grammar will look like in 50-100 years or more. I'm sure something will survive.
Care to elaborate? I don't see how publishing a list of fingerprints of trusted certs would facilitate an attack. Especially given that the underlying certificates are public knowledge, sent as part of every HTTPS session.
Seems like a good alternative for online pairing or even interviews!
and it will take another 20 years before we realize that in most cases we don't really need upper case letters. now burn me for heresy.
Hated it at first, but recently switched do Gnome (3.6) and loving it.

> There’s no other way to put it; GNOME 3 was a mistake.

There’s no other way to put it: your blog post is a mistake.
HN is full of UX antipatterns, I really wouldn't recommend using them as a template for what works.
Clean Out the Dust Bunnies In Your Computer Case
Well, sort of. Users of an existing application tend to cling to the old version in the event of a major UI overhaul, even if the new version is easier to use.

For example, Microsoft Office 2007 came out just after I started university. I'd never used Office before, and I spent a lot of time digging around in Office 2003's menus looking for things. I'd googled for help using programming languages before, but googling for help about an office suite seemed strange.

When I tried Office 2007, I thought that the tabbed interface was fantastic; I had a far easier time finding the options and features I was looking for. The more I used it, the more impressed I was at how intuitive Microsoft had made it.

My father had been using Office for decades. I excitedly showed him the new version and installed it alongside his older version so that he could open the docx files that people were starting to send him.

He _hated_ it. For over a year afterward, I heard about how terrible it was and how he had to unlearn everything and how he couldn't find anything. I even heard that all his keyboard shortcuts were broken, even though that wasn't one of the things that changed and even though he couldn't demonstrate any that no longer worked.

Users know what they don't want, and they really don't want change.
Other forms of colorblindness are incredibly rare.
SMTP is old. XMPP is at best adolescent.
How do you act on Product Feedback? - by Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo
I completely agree. Even late stage startup will begin to look more like what the blogger has described. The blogger should gain some exp and move on to a small/early stage startup or find a way to move in to R&D role within Microsoft -- these positions normally offer more freedom and greefields.
Out of curiosity, which division were you in? Given the size of Microsoft, I'm not surprised there would be some major differences between different teams.
Why you shouldn't use a toss for overtime
MVC's "fat model, skinny controller" is a load of rubbish
I spent two summers interning as a Program Manager at Microsoft (Xbox and Office), and his statements are nearly 100% accurate:

- Literally any piece of documentation was always 1+ years out of date. Setting up a dev environment could take days when it should have only taken hours.

- A lot of my coworkers were over 35. Starkly different from my experience later at Google. Working past 6 was considered absurd, and a lot of people were perfectly happy just riding the Microsoft wave. There were plenty of engineers who had been at the company 12-18 years with only a single promotion or two.

- I actually was able to do some open source work with Codeplex

- Not a single person I worked with read HN or Reddit, that I knew of.

It's a bit depressing reading the post, but at the end of the day Microsoft was and is still an amazing place to work. I was paid well, the engineers are well taken care of, and the consumer offerings are still fun and exciting.

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.
That documents retirement of an API. Someone visiting "search.twitter.com" in a browser wants to see a web page. It would seem sensible to redirect them to a place where they can do that.
Dear Silicon Valley: Meritocracy Is an Ideology Too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(novel)

written by the same author as 'Brave New World', Aldous Huxley, the book details more of a Carrot approach to big brother.
What I've found most useful about writing Puppet recipes is it forces me to think about why something is configured the way it is. I'm not really certain Puppet would give me the same advantage if I were just using it clone existing machines (where I have no idea why things were setup the way they were).

Also, how does this differ from BluePrint? http://devstructure.com/blueprint/