skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After fiddling with gnunet for too long I'm wondering if the code you don't write will or will not solve the NSA spying problem. I'm in the will not camp so far because gnunet isn't working, and even if it connected to some peers I wouldn't know how to verify my anonimity. They also say something like you might be protected from the law if you click Y here. But I don't want a not guilty verdict, I don't even want to go to trial.
> An important note here: an active attacker can silently downgrade client connections to turn off PFS.

Are you sure this is true? SSLv2 didn't have any protection of the handshake so downgrade attacks were possible, but since SSLv3 the client and server send each other MACs of the handshake traffic so any tampering should be detected.

Quoth Wikipedia, TLS and SSL 3.0 provide "Protection against a downgrade of the protocol to a previous (less secure) version or a weaker cipher suite." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security
"I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these."

WOW! It's one thing to ignore competitors, it's another to not know who they are. I thought (by reputation) that Microsoft was a competitive place.

"It’s hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do."

Seems obvious, but hindsight is 20/20.

It was a risk for them to post an article that could be considered critical of the mothership.
How Secure Is GPG?
Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks this is going to kill usability. The reason old people can figure their way around <=iOS6 is that everything that can be tapped looks like a button. A more "mature" audience isn't what apple's good at appealing to.

This article seems to sum up some of my other complaints fairly well: http://wolfslittlestore.be/tasteless/
Strictly relying on 3rd-party code without understanding the algorithms and complexities can lead to just as many problems. In my opinion you still better be a very good coder when relying on libraries, just plug and play will fail you sooner than later. I have seen my fair share of this.

When requirements slightly change and you have to adapt a library, suddenly you have to deal with 20k (or more) lines of code and have no idea where to even start. You may just need to use a tiny part of that library but the code is so tightly bundled and abstracted (for good reason) that you have to dig through layers and layers just to make a simple change.

You should at least understand the complexities when relying on 3rd-party code, the Go dependency hell of the game "Haunts" comes to mind (but I don't remember the details, so probably not the best example).

A few additional thoughts:

1. I said "plug and play will fail you sooner than later" -- for most startups that "later" never happens or is not of concern. How often has a startup's code-base made into an acquiring company's production systems without a complete rewrite?

2. Also, when reading some of these posts, I tend to look at the author's motivation/background. This is a somewhat controversial claim (on HN) -- so it is bound to stir up some interest/pubilicty. And also, this is probably not the worst way to court some new clients ("hey, we write less code and waste less of your money"). But I do believe that the re-use approach would be well-suited for short-lived marketing campaigns, as opposed to some other software -- think limited scope and fixed requirements. I'd do the same if I had to work on several campaigns that are probably all similar to a degree.
I think OP skips over a whole class of attacks:

* References to his "Pole dancer girlfriend" will be used to suggest poor moral character. [1] [2]

* It will be suggested that he's gay. [3] (Interesting contrast to the previous point)

* His "inability" to finish high school will be cited as a character flaw. [4][5]

I'm sure there will be many others along the same lines.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/11/lindsay-mills-edwar...

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2339980/Jonathan-Mil...

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-nsa-is-...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/brooks-the-solitar...

[5] http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/10-things-to-know-abou...
It is certainly possible to de-clutter without making it look like complete shit. It's the odd decisions all over that just don't make sense, for example using red for primary actions or providing no contrast. Those are basic things even non-designers would know.

I think the reason for the backlash, and rightly justified, is that these seemingly capricious design decisions would seem to underpin a larger fundamental flaw with the overall direction - one that Apple historically is not known for. You can justify the goal, which is of course a good one, but there is not way in hell you can justify the implementation.
Leslie Marshall has accussed Snowden's girlfriend of being a stripper in US News and him lying about it:

He lied about his girlfriend. He said she was a ballerina, but she was a stripper who pole danced. (And as someone who took ballet as a young girl, I can assure you that there was no pole and we kept our clothes on.)

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/leslie-marshall/2013/06/...
So now that Apple has moved on it's acceptable to call the old UI dated and ugly. Cool, glad we can be honest about it now.
You're right, but I'd still like to see us make a giant collective bowel movement on the spilled toothpaste, and generally make it so undesirable for a government agency to use the toothpaste that they'll only do so when no other alternative exists, or only when it's actually very important to do so.
Sometimes money and being a privileged government institution is not enough as long as free speech is still allowed. What these groups have is an audience.

It's not a big audience, but it's important to recognize that a lot of people do follow EFF, Reddit and the others in the list of 86 [1] - and because of this the effects can multiply exponentially, because this trial will get news coverage.

You see, government agencies and politicians that violate our rights do so hoping either (a) that people don't find out about it or (b) that people forget about it in a week. But if organizations and companies keep the issue relevant and in the news, then it persists and things can quickly escalate, just as it happened with SOPA or ACTA.

And then you'll also see the online giants protesting it, because first of all, it's bad for business. And then you'll also see street protests, even from other countries. And then you'll finally see the real shit-storm that no amount of money can quickly wash away (although such issues tend to reappear, because those in power tried shoving too many things down our throats at once, who knows, maybe people will grow a social conscience after all).

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/86-civil-liberties-gro...
Why the Facebook innovation machine doesn’t work on mobile devices
Can American technology companies be trusted?
Very nice. I posted up a similar-ish project earlier today, a raspberry pi gaming emulator stuffed into a gameboy case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5867562
I'm not going into politics. People cannot be convinced. Only practical solutions can make certain moral claims irrelevant. E.g. internet makes it irrelevant to discuss "is it good for people to read these heretical books". People will read them anyway. With Bitcoin it will become irrelevant to discuss if money should or should not be inflated. It simply won't be. (If Bitcoin succeeds, of course.) If it's impossible to collect certain taxes, it would be irrelevant to discuss if it's good or bad. People will pay them voluntarily if they like, not under threat as of today.
We Should All Have Something To Hide
> In the field of user experience, there’s a huge and unhelpful overemphasis on similarity, familiarity, and the ability to formally reason about interfaces. People are more nuanced. We respond based not only on experience or reason, but also on emotion and intuition.

So, it's okay to sacrifice similarity and familiarity because you can force people to understand a UI through emotion and intuition? Without familiar cues, a user will have to blindly poke around the interface until they understand it, and then rely on that experience to use it in the future.

There's nothing wrong with a visual overhaul (even if it does make the system look like a cheap Android reskin), but it's not right to throw users off the deep end of the pool because they are used to interactive elements that look... interactive.
> I think the author is just butthurt about being banned from GNOME's bugzilla

I'm not, that happened two years ago, and the only one that lost something there is the GNOME project.

There's no point in answering the rest of your comments, because apparently your mind is not capable of understanding that people are different, and why a project should not piss its current users.
If you're looking for a useful critique of the Gnome 3 desktop, look elsewhere. Here's ts;dr: Gnome developers are dumb. Every decision they ever made was stupid. I'm the smartest. They should listen to me but they don't because they're stupid.
why couldn't they coerce all CA's into sharing the keys?
Ah, so if I don't like it, I'm not a "mature consumer" and don't understand digital surfaces.
Your matching algorithm is about as accurate as a name match for a TSA no-fly list. Regarding the cartoon likeness, the only similarity I saw was the hairline... ok, that and two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth. To be honest, the cartoon image looks more like Ben Affleck.
If we were writing a Constitution nowadays, I would certainly support explicit protections for the right to privacy in all forms of communication and the right to use encryption technology. The principles of the Constitution are very good but the language is too outdated to withstand the concerted effort of cynical men seeking to expand their power.

Of course, I also support the right to bear arms. We need new protections from our government. Now is not the time to be wolves, not little lost sheep in search of a protector.
I can't believe anyone likes the old one. I think the IOS audience just might be getting a bit old and stodgy.
For anybody in the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, there is a new Cypherpunks meetup / group forming.

See: http://www.meetup.com/Triangle-Crypto-Cypherpunk-Meetup/

Or follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/trianglecrypto
I'm volunteering at a center that teaches senior citizens various computer skills. One of the courses we teach is on how to use their iPhones. I'm dreading the moment that iOS7 is released: all of these people are going to have to start right back at the beginning in their understanding.
Your comment adds nothing other than expose your bias. Do you have any constructive criticism of the article itself?
Well there is a third alternative; the NSA has agents within these companies that covertly acquire the information requested and/or give direct access to the NSA without these companies' knowledge.

For some services such as Google, a single network administrator and a single fiber drop close to Google HQ would probably be all that is necessary. At that point, their own hackers could go to work.

It isn't like a well-trained NSA employee would have trouble getting a job at any of these companies.
IE provides free testing VMs and other tools for Mac
I find that statement hard to believe. The Azure Insiders mailing list has multiple threads mentioning other competitors such as Heroku and Rackspace.
Projecturf 4 Promo - Project Management Software
"guns" are just part of the guns-gods-gays social trifecta. it's reactionary language joyfully kindled by gun manufacturers. the "second amendment", etc is an appendix for the sake of politics
Avoiding writing code is quite often a "cool hack".
A few notes:

1) We are obviously aware of XMPP, having been developing client-side interfaces to it for years.

2) We started this project in 2001 - around the same time Jabber was in its infancy - and as smacktoward notes, the main reason we're not using XMPP today is inertia. XMPP is great, but XML just isn't our personal preference.

We figure being more open with our protocol can't be a bad thing and so it's out there for folks to pick apart and send us feedback, which we'd love! Alot of our protocol was built with an eye towards XMPP federation as well; I actually had Trillian interoperating with Google Talk one afternoon but it seems like that ship may have sailed. :-\
My Yogurt Tells me Stories: Content Marketing Beyond the Sale
"Are you trying to say that it's inherently silly to question the integrity of a comedic organization?"

Yes. Jon Stewart has scoffed, in more than one interview, at the notion that he be held to any standards whatsoever, other than the standard of being funny.

"a valid point about bias"

I respectfully disagree. I see nothing wrong with any sort or degree of bias from the Onion, Daily Show, or any other "comedic organization".
The screenshot function is quite a handy tool too.
Note that 16 USC § 3373 makes it pretty clear that you cannot in fact be sent to prison simply for possessing an undersized lobster.
Cancer Therapy: a hopeful new class of drugs
the best data i can find is here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-bo...
I'm a clojure newb but I've given it a serious try. The thing I feel most uncomfortable about is the development pipeline and how to debug errors (not necessarily with a debugger). I hope the cookbook has sections for this.

For example, once you get started, I can type my program into the repl piece by piece and copy the working parts into my source file. Or, I can type my code into the source file and evaluate it with the repl. I imagine one choice has more pros/cons than the other.

Emacs... I'm not using it, and I don't know what I'm missing. It seems like the majority of the hardcore clojurists are though and I'd like to know why.

With debugging, I feel like the clojure error messages are not very helpful. I'm pretty sure this is just because I'm new to the language and the programming paradigm. Maybe that can't be taught and just takes time. But I also feel like there are a lot of debugging techniques out there I don't know about.

I've documented my debugging complaints in detail on Stack Overflow here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16901836/how-do-i-get-bet...
> Not giving back to the public domain is a norm.

Uh, this is Microsoft, they may have a slightly more close-minded view of the open source movement than, say RedHat or Google, or hell, even Oracle.
> The larger Gnome diaspora has been pretty instrumental in draining the swamp of hardware problems and dumb broken things.

True, but not particularly more than KDE, or any other environment.
It reminds me of the Windows Phone. The specifics of the UI are different, but the philosophy behind the UI seems to be the same.

It seems inevitable, when I first saw the original WP7, I thought it made the iPhone look old and that one thing that Apple does not like is looking dated.
Old or not, I really don't get the whole "flat design" trend. Its ugly, at least to me, and reduces usability overall.
I am pretty interested this kind of functionality since my company is building an "ambitious" (to borrow Ember.js's favorite phrase) thick client, so there will be many more errors on the front end than the back end. Does anyone want to chime in with their experiences with this library or similar libraries?
Are you going to get the President's party to support the impeachment of his elected officials?

USGov is broken.
I agree, the default type is too thin to use for body text. I have a real problem with the gmail app doing just this.
People can make money creating open source software because firms making commercial use of the software, offering professional services around it, etc., are willing to pay the software developers, either by hiring them, by funding non-profits that pay them, or by purchasing non-software materials (e.g., books) from them. This makes it a viable economic choice alongside creating closed-source software.

How does this work for literature? I see where "free" benefits those creating derivatives and readers, I don't see how it would be viable for authors, except, perhaps, with a ransom/patronage model.

Infrastructure-wise, existing systems that work for software (e.g., github, bitbucket) are already optimized for text-based content and would clearly work well for literature (in fact, they are already used widely for documentation accompanying software projects, which is [technical, nonfiction] literature.)
Taskbar – Windows 8 Style for Android
I'm glad someone wrote a blog post like this.

It's getting to be somewhat annoying how many people are whining about Windows Phone and Android similarities. Design and engineering decisions are not made in a vacuum. Android copies from iOS and vice versa - they each follow the cultural trends of smart design.

I would much rather see blog posts like this - where the author considers the iOS in its own right instead of insisting on nitpicking what's original. Now I can actually see the innovation that went into designing the iOS 7 interface. And as someone typing this comment on iOS 7 beta, I've come to a deeper appreciation of what's already in my hands.

It's not helpful to accuse large design houses and engineering teams of copying each other. That's like saying supercars aren't original because they universally use sleek, aerodynamic ("sexy") design features. No, that's just what sells and what makes sense. It's a natural maturation and trend towards intelligent design. It's just iteration.

It's true that touch interfaces no longer need to be "taught" really. We intuitively know that gestures will do things in the same way (and more efficiently) than buttons. It's all about reducing cluttered design and adding more functionality without reducing usable space. I'm glad we're moving towards this.
Do you mind if others contact you as well? I might be looking for Django work soon.

Also, the "email" section of HN profiles is private, so if you want other people to see your email put it in the "about" section.

EDIT: Soon as in "a couple weeks from now". Not trying to compete with the OP.
I for one think the icon design (especially Safari) looks great.
He sounds like someone who is significantly lowering his standards. Seems like working at a big corporation is killing his spirit and energy. That is just sad.

Edit: Unless he is being sarcastic?
Your Google-fu is lacking. Here's a picture of [name redacted]. It doesn't match.

[link redacted]
I thought Feinstein called him a traitor? I believe Boehner did as well. So #1 is not propaganda.
Started a company... failed. Came crawling back to the corporate world, regretfully; it hasn't been all bad but I've experienced most of your pain points.
> The thing is, we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. [...] iOS 7 foregoes borders, instead relying on colour to indicate interactivity

Relying on color to indicate interactivity... like we've done on the web forever? That's been a best practice since I-don't-know-when.

I disagree with the "we've grown up" idea. I'm not sure there's a Platonic ideal for UI/X, but clearly we're moving away from the idea (created by whom?) that a touchscreen phone needs to harken back to its button-clad counterparts. Think about it, we've made calls, drawn pictures, posted Facebook updates, & sent emails with our computers for ages, why is the phone interface so different?

The new design is a function of current style combined with a smidgen of better understanding about HCI. Everyone and their grandma was putting plastic shines on their buttons in 2008, now everyone is going "flat".
To be fair, part of the US government's job is to protect its citizens against outside threats. Given that, I can't imagine anyone inside the US arguing that they should stop spying on other countries' citizens. I'm pretty sure that's the NSA's actual job.

And anyway, there's a huge difference between being spied on by a foreign government versus your own. My own government actually has some amount of authority and influence over me and my community, whereas some place like the UK has little to none, so it's less of a big deal.
Cartoon BabyBoomers
Eight Questions We Deserve to have Answered (PRISM/NSA)
New design is nice. What makes me wonder is that Apple used all their resource for past 6 months for this graphical redesign and no new future came out of iOS teams. That seems inefficient.
It is pretty secure. Get it?

If one uses GPG on linux with blowfish or twofish and a pass phrase not made of words in the dictionary one has a high level of privacy. Enough to stop the NSA? I speculate not.
Tips on Avoiding Infertility
I want them to open an API for this, maybe I want to make edits my own way, or write a tool for others?
The New uberX: Better, Faster, and Cheaper than a Taxi
Assange can help him there too. Oh wait...
Navy to drop All-Caps Communications
The American people would never stand for a dictator in name. But they would stand for powerful permanent bureaucrats that no elected official had the ability to push around.

6 of one, half-dozen of the other.
The thin fonts and thin border icons are just ugly in my opinion. They dont represent clarity or a lighter feel; they look cheap. I like flat design. It's possible to create beautiful flat icons:
http://asianmack.com/homescreens

iOS7 just doesnt get that aesthetic right. I've only been using it for two days but I doubt I'll change my mind.
Will Smith and the mechanics of a viral video
When did HN become such a cesspool of snarky low-quality comments?

Every time I see a Glass/iPhone/WindowsPhone/etc article nowadays, I prepare myself for a deluge of shitty YouTube-caliber posts.

Embarrassing.
I work at a big enterprise and yes, lots of things are familiar. Then again, I work on a project that's about 5-8 years late, and migration will finally be completed next week. People are figuring out documentation matters, and large parts are being properly documented and/or rewritten. There are corporations where people get it.
I agree. I think my parents can easily use iOS 6 on the iPhone or iPad while they have trouble with other computing devices. Same goes with my toddler. I actually thought Apple purposely kept this style because they're aware of the great usability it was compared to what other manufacturers are doing.

It turns out that perhaps I was giving them too much credit.
I think Apple would be happy to lose all the "silver surfers" and regain their cool with teens, tweens, and young adults. Teens don't want the same phone that their grandmother has and they don't want the same tablet they're forced to use at school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation#Enemy_of_the_...
Most Clojureists write code they want to keep in their source file, and then evaluate it by using their editors tooling to send it to the REPL from there. I usually just type things into the REPL for one-off exploration or experimentation.

What editor are you using? Emacs certainly has had the most mindshare so far, but it's a beast to get started with. I recommend CounterClockwise for non-emacs folks: it's got all the features you need to be effective, and has full integration with Leiningen.

As far as errors and error messages; yeah, it's hard, and a lot if it is just getting experience. But one thing that will really help you out is to write your program in very small chunks, and test each part as you go. That way, when something goes wrong, you'll have a very good idea about where to start looking.
Totally accurate. But he also replied to my question about why he needed the money in the context of the money being a loan rather than for work performed, so I continued the discussion.

Personally, I'd trust somebody with $300 before I'd trust them with my codebase.
Snowden: US govt has been hacking HK and China for years.