skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fabrice Bellard is french.

He is the father of FFmpeg (which pretty much makes online video possible), and QEmu (which is one of the most versatile emulator/virtualization software).
> Off the top of my head, vitamins and vaccines are the only side-effect free wonder drugs for healthy people.

Vaccines have well-characterized death rates and is why things like the smallpox vaccine stopped being administered as soon as possible even though it'd be comforting to have built-in immunity against that nasty biowarfare possibility; and some vitamins have been shown to increase mortality in RCTs.
I can understand why Instacart may be of value in suburban or rural areas where people likely don't have trivial access to grocery stores, but it seems entirely superfluous for city-dwellers.

Grocery stores are fairly abundant in cities. Within a four-block radius from my house, there is a Jewel, a Whole Foods, four corner stores, and a Trader Joe's under construction. I honestly don't know how Instacart maintains business in San Francisco proper.
The worst case is that it takes a full generation for skills and customs to adapt

The worst case is that increasingly large percentages of the human population cannot perform any task that a computer can't do better and cheaper. It's fairly obvious. I admire your optimism though.
> I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems like the increased intelligence (or more accurately, cognitive performance) may not have had all that practical a benefit until just recently in our history anyway.

That's obviously wrong, because the brain is so metabolically expensive that if it was not pulling its weight, it would long ago have shrunk considerably. More intelligence is always better - if the intelligence is not too expensive. (I cover this in the link.)
The American Civil War was largely centered around the issue of slavery, which the economies of the rebelling states relied on. The American Revolutionary War was a response to increased taxes that took a heavy economic burden on the colonists to pay for the Empire's wars.

While widespread starvation might not have existed, it was certainly the threat of economic issues that sparked both conflicts.
Flash Runtimes Update
Apple Maps was a regression in functionality. The design of the home screen is a subjective opinion. Whether good or bad, it seems to have created more self proclaimed graphic designers and experts on the Internet than anything else in recent memory.
This is a common story: "I went into the store and asked for ______. The sales guy just laughed." Has it ever actually happened to anyone? That's not how retail employees work at all.
Plenty of them are outright harmful too, of course, and this is even after a century of randomized experiments and 'evidence-based medicine' weeding out the worst of the crap. But the medicine that works falls handily under one of the loopholes laid out (exercise for the reader: vaccines work amazingly well. Why hasn't evolution already done the work of a vaccine in humans and what loophole does this argument fall under?)
Hey Raymond,

I have a fairly specific question. My interest in T-shirts has become refined in recent years. I only like T-shirts that are super soft. Have you guys tested a niche of super soft T's at all? I might be interested in using the API if I could brand a custom T-shirt site focused first of all on the softness of the T, and if you could guarantee the softness.
Truth be told, we'll never really know. Oh well. Just because we're paranoid doesn't mean there is no one spying on us.
Instacart's inventory is not shoplifted and not "...used."

I am always surprised at how willing people are to make false allegations that have no basis in fact or observation. What can be gained from such a thing?
Is there any practical way for them to actually prove this is the complete number, rather than the number they're allowed to tell us about?
In the US, we have more than 10 different income levels and a basic consumption guarantee of about 20k/year (i.e., even people earning $0/year tend to consume about $20k/year).

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

This doesn't stop large chunks of our society from opting out of work.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2010.pdf

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
It's not a terrible apology, I suppose, but I'm with Tim Maly on calling blaming the algorithm a bit of a dodge, in this brilliant critique/analysis of the whole situation:

http://quietbabylon.com/2013/algorithmic-rape-jokes-in-the-l...
You could file a FOIA request and find out.
I wonder if this is something that Google and Co. will also be allowed to do?
I went back and finally noticed the date. Still didn't see the time. Took me much more than three tries.
The purpose of chainsaws is to cut down trees, not kill people. The purpose of Facebook is to stalk you, know matter who is using the tool.
No idea. I wouldn't dare to risk it.

For me, I just have always assumed that electronic communications are easier to compromise than old traditional ones. In the end, you connect to an ISP and packets can be inspected. OK, you might have encryption, but there have been too many schemes cracked or broken. So, why ever think that electronic comms can ever be secure? In the extreme, if the spooks get your encrypted data and they really believe that the data contains the "ticking bomb", they'll just torture you until you give up the key. So, you're still stuffed. Why give them even that much?

More over, the one big issue I have to electronic communications, is that it is very hard to know if you are under surveillance. The old methods give you a better chance to discover that you are being watched. It is also easier to hide the fact that you are communicating at all.

The clincher for me was that a while ago an "amusing" story appeared in a British news paper. Essentially it "exposed" MI6 spies in Moscow using actual drop boxes to pass along information. Now, if MI6 are still using pre-WWII methods, that has to tell you something, right? They don't trust the electronic methods.

So, if secure communications really mattered to me, life or death type mattered, then I'd be looking at things like one time pads, drop boxes, people, etc. Of course a lot of it depends on what you are trying to communicate, how many people are involved, and frankly how much money you have to use.

One thing I do know, electronics would be something I would work very hard to avoid.

Lastly, if I were going to whistle blow to a journalist on this scale, the first thing I would establish would be several methods of communication. Times, places, codes, etc. I suspect that, given the nature of this exposure, that will have been done, and none of it will be electronic.
> I was under the impression that no one was above congressional subpoena.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_privilege

[..] members of the executive branch to resist certain subpoenas and other interventions by the legislative and judicial branches of government.
I think one of the worst things I've seen is the State/Province version of this. I try to scroll down to "B" for "British Columbia" but lo and behold, there's nothing listed between Arkansas and California. I double-check the country dropdown... still says Canada. Yeah, the genius web developer decided to list all 50 US states before the Canadian provinces, regardless of what country was selected.
Apple Maps was trying to replace a service that had almost a decade of engineering and data powering it. It's kind of a miracle they were able to ship anything at all, IMHO, when you consider the weight of what they were trying to accomplish.

Now, some time later, it's disappointing to see that Apple Maps fails to work well in a lot of places. I'm not so sure this says anything about Apple per se, or is more of a testament to just how advanced Google's technology is.
Annoying, maybe, but I don't think it really fits with the theme of the rest of the list. Providing the user with a potentially helpful shortcut to an app doesn't really compare to breaking deep links for the mobile web.
I'm waiting to see what the EFF says about this. Is all the information there? I hope that's the case.
Universality particularly seems to be unnecessary for electoral systems, and I'm unconvinced that IIA is an appropriate criteria though it has some intuitive appeal.
I imagine they're all getting the go-ahead.
The trust is gone. They shouldn't have waited until they were caught red-handed to come up with some numbers. Doesn't even matter if it's correct now. No one will believe them.
The first version became popular because for by far too long, the IE's failed to properly handle the second, nested, version. The textual label would stubbornly refuse to click the input unless the id= and for= attributes were applied.
A fraction of a percent of US citizens are wrongly incarcerated. I'm not sure what relative numbers even mean here. 19,000 people under scrutiny is still scary to me.
Ridiculous. You do realize that you don't need to have your micro-camera and microphone in your glasses if you want to record people unknowingly. A watch could do it, or a belt buckle, or whatever. They already make this stuff, its virtually invisible, and you can buy it today.
Ah, thanks. I learned something new today.
I am not sure what your point is?
What would you accept as proof?
ctdonath has it right. Because of a flaw in our system there can be only two viable political parties. Congress must agree to fix the flaw to get it done within our system, and Congress has the incentive to never fix.

The fix is instant run-off voting, like Australia has.
garry - fwiw - the whole team cracked up when they saw the comment.
> And if I ever get a glass, that little feature is being hacked right out one way or another.

Why would you bother when you can just by a micro camera today that is already easily concealed?

Honestly, Google Glass is being unfairly crucified here, the cat was already let of that bag a few years ago.
I've seen you go to great lengths to defend and assist Instacart on HN[1]. I'm asking why you do that.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5482154
I think this is intended to be comforting, especially for corporate entities as they feel scrapegoated into bad light by the government, but there's very little for the public to acknowledge these numbers. I'm not saying Facebook is lying, I'm saying the people giving Facebook the numbers are probably lying. There's no way to tell.
16MB runtime is really painful. Having to pack a huge amount of the standard library (List is backed by a lot of other traits for example) into the js is going to be very difficult to reduce.
my theory on this "secret" price savings.

Instacart asks if an item is out of stock if it ok to replace with similar items (might even default to this). Instacart has negotiated deals with product manufacturers directly. Instacart replaces "out-of-stock" products with the discounted products. The manufacturer issues coupons that can be used at the till. Instacart takes most of the savings themselves but also shares a little with the consumer. Win-win-win.

2nd Theory. Apoorva has developed the largest coupon clipping operation to date. Puts "extreme couponing" TV show to shame.
Friedman favored a negative income tax, which is not the same thing.

Also, if properly calibrated, a negative income tax can (assuming diminishing marginal utility) actually create incentives for work. A basic income never does [1].

I don't understand your claim that there is an "opportunity cost to society". Could you explain in a little more detail?

[1] See this previous HN discussion where I do the calculations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926061
Encryption: The high cost of real online privacy
If there is no way for them to regain trust, or make people whole in any way at all, then what reason do you leave for them trying to improve transparency? What should the Zuck do, commit seppuku? Is that what would make people happy going forward?
The issue to me is if the so-called "upstream" actually stores all the raw SSL data, and how fast it's decrypted. This is apart from any corporate cooperation, except for the Mark Klein AT&T splitter variety. (Unless of course Google, Facebook, etc are handing over their private SSL keys.)
Facebook know how many requests they've responded to. If there is any dishonesty here, it's coming from Facebook. They might have been told to give false numbers, but they've got the correct numbers.
The medium is irrelevant if you're using a OTP that has already been securely exchanged.

You can broadcast your message to the world, like number stations do. To anyone without the OTP, it's quite literally impossible to decrypt.
Could you be more of a tool? Literally: the only way you can conceive of someone disagreeing with you on HN is that they must have an undisclosed financial interest? Go fuck yourself.
I think I am in the minority when I say I am looking forward to continuous backup of my day to day activities whether it be through sousveillance or from others.

I am not in the "if you don't have anything to hide crowd..." in the least and am certainly aware of the ability of those in power to abuse it. My take on it however is, I am going to just slough off the mores which I would have previously been concerned with privacy about.

Catch me swearing when I shouldn't have? Oh well. Maybe I'll be less inclined to do it next time. What if I whisper a dirty idea to my wife? Well, what's wrong with a happily married couple doing what they like after all?

After you have kids the idea of going to the bathroom in privacy slowly drifts out of the window - and why shouldn't it? It really doesn't make any ethical impact on me for someone to know if I am doing a biological process.

My hope is, all of this will make us much more honest people. You can't embarrass/blackmail me if I cannot be embarrassed/ashamed.
Show HN: C library of generic, reference-counted data structures
That's the problem. I don't think I we can accept anything at this point. We literally cannot trust our government, or the corporations under its control, to be telling us the truth.
What people would be giving Facebook the numbers? Those are Facebook's own stats, compiled by their own legal department.
FindIDP Tech Choices
I wonder if this incline coincides at all with the fact that one of the largest(Mobclix) isn't paying people and hasn't been for most of this year. Thread on Mobclix payment issues:

http://iphonedevsdk.com/forum/business-legal-app-store/10516...
Yeah!
App is web(-framework) agnostic.
Easy testable.
No fat controllers!
Same app used from web, email, CLI, irc, you name it...
Web framework is a glue, not a cage. :)
Ecuador Legislature Approves Curbs on News Media
I completely agree that there is a huge problem that this whole situation had to be leaked, but in all fairness to these companies I seriously doubt they'd have got anywhere attempting talks to achieve this sort of transparency before it leaked.
I think the exploration of the answer to this question is about the most frightening implication of this whole mess
Facebook Releases Full Requests It Has Received From The U.S. Government
But how many of those were collected directly?
"the only way you can conceive of someone [defending a company and later posting positive statements about that company] on HN is that they must have an undisclosed financial interest [or other connection or affiliation to the company]?"

Certainly not. That's why I phrased it as a question. A question you have still yet to answer.
Try looking at it from the point of view of a Thai guy, who lives in Thailand like most Thai folks do, and who has to put up with all the websites written in English, because webdevs like to assume only Americans access the Internet. Like everyone else, his OS language is set to en-US because nobody likes to mess with system defaults.

Chrome does this guy a huge service by translating a lot of websites to something he can read. So what if it pisses off a few travellers? There are a lot more native Thais in Thailand than there are foreigners.
You can't believe anything these companies say. If they are ordered to misreport info to the public, they will. Remember that companies are not monolithic things. They are made of people, and if anyone or a group try to make a stand they will be hunted down. It's easier to follow along than be honest.

Personally, I won't trust any of these companies until the entire Homeland security dept is dismantled and its component agencies restored to their pre-9/11 statuses.

And although the TSA is not directly part of this spying issue, they need to go away as well. It's all part of the same shadowy cabal and its time for a clean slate.

I'm not against the principles of the FBI and NSA. They do a lot of good work. But there's too much dry brush and weeds cluttering up their mandates and it needs to be burned out.
Intellectual Ventures sells patent, keeps 90%
I'm with you.

The complete lack of any standard for evidence here, so long as it confirms preconceived notions, has been stupefying. People trotting out his high pay as proof of competence, when in any other context such an argument would be considered so stupid that it's beyond need of retort. His flimsy and dubious claims about being able to expose every secret of the entire intelligence community sound so unbelievable that no competent engineer could accept them. And the slides themselves -- for fuck's sake they say, at a maximum, almost nothing actionable. Do we even know if those were created by the NSA, or by Booz contractors?

A sober, rational look at his claims would have to yield the conclusion that he's confused about what he thinks he knows. He certainly sounds like it.
We're still waiting to hear back from your tech support team. Last we checked the API didn't provide a response to colors on American Apparel shirts. Has this bug been fixed?
Also highly recommended is htp://www.warmshowers.org/‎ 'a site for reciprocal hospitality for touring bicyclists ' others listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_service#Example_web...
The cycle works the other way too. I helped my dad remodel an entire three-story house, including digging foundations for an extension.

I'll be damned if I chip my nail polish on manual labor these days. Not because I'm "above it", but because I hate it with a passion. If I can pay somebody to do it for me, awesome. If they actually enjoy their work (and many contractors do), it's a win-win, as far as I can tell.
There's the shared-private-keys argument, by which they wouldn't actually know how many requests were made. I haven't been followed very closely so I don't know if private keys thing was specifically denied - was it?
Build full-stack for MobileWorks (remote work from anywhere in the US)
... or so says Facebook's legal department ;). How can we tell?
I don't think we can accept much as proof now seeing as the trust between client and service has been broken. Hopefully this whole debacle will drive new zero-knowledge services to take over. Let us use your servers and tools, we can handle the contents of our data.
I've known for decades that Roman concrete was much better than what we have now. I would love to see it come back into common use.

The article is, of course, blogspam for http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-con... but the submission of the latter got lost in the shuffle and blogspam is better than nothing.
I use RawDog, but it's HN that is sending links that look like this:

<link>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stockman.house.gov&#x2F;media-center&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;stockman-requests-subpoena-of-nsa-s-white-house-irs-phone-logs</link>
Actually, I would argue that perhaps it gives us two indistinguishable candidates, whose differences are only there for show. I still have the side I favor, however.
I hope Edward Snowden sees this. He and Glenn Greenwald should be proud.

The economics of surveillance have now changed because it comes with reputation effects on US based companies.
[Might I hijack this thread? Yes? Thank you.]

OT: I looked at adding a TOR proxy to my personal VPS and pretty quickly decided against it* since it's tough to limit the proxy to legitimate traffic. By "legitimate traffic", I mean traffic for people who really need privacy. By "really need", I don't mean Bittorrent (yes, I use it, too, but I'll deal with the consequences), porn, etc.

I'm really not interested in running a bunch of not-mine-but-pisses-off-Comcast traffic on my cable modem, but I'd love to run a TOR proxy. Anyone got any pointers on running an effective, not-annoying proxy?

Back on topic: if I can sort the question of how to limit not-awesome traffic, I'd happily run a TOR exit node on my Linode and I'd buy a Rasperry Pi to run one at home.

* https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?t=7328
> a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months.

Nice try, Facebook. Key words, in the past six months. The NSA could've requested a continuously updated copy of all user data more than six months ago.
Exactly, does the NSA really need to know what the contents are of a message to a known political activist to know what you're discussing?
What are neutrinos, and how do they come from beyond our solar system?
Donate his fortune to the EFF and start from scratch. Of course, that will never happen so for now, if you're concerned with security, you need to find new services to use.
MultiMan 4.10.00 - Unterstützung für Rebug REX und kaputte Laufwerke
Too <REDACTED>!
Verax is the recipient, not the sender. Messages are encrypted using the recipient's public key. You can confirm this yourself by encrypting a message to someone else and checking to see what which key it shows under "encrypted with".
Well, I live in SF. As you say, I have several grocery stores within 0.5 miles of my home. The problem? I live on top of a hill; the stores are at the bottom. There is absolutely no way I'm lugging grocery up the hill on foot or on my bike. What about public transport? There is a long wait (muni sucks, esp where I live), and then there is still a bit of lugging to/from the bus stop.

Grocery shopping is literally the only reason I still own a car and pay ridiculous city insurance rates. I don't use it to go to work, meet friends for dinner/drinks, or anything else for that matter.

And then of course, there are times when I couldn't be arsed to go grocery shopping :)
And it's very easy to release misleading statements like this. It's great to know about all the "user data requests" from law enforcement, but they mention nothing about the allegation that NSA didn't need to submit these requests.
This simple question raises so many interesting problems.
How do you regain trust in any relationship? Usually it's a combination of time and repeated demonstration of truthfulness. Right now, no one knows what happened behind closed doors, and the suspicion is still high.
I absolutely hate it when I'm paying with Paypal and you make me enter my shipping address. It's not only a waste of time, but if I have to type in something over and over for every order, it's much more likely I'll make a mistake than if I only have to do it once through the Paypal site.
I'm a little scared because... yes, that's sort of the whole point privacy advocates have been trying to make since I learned about the internet.
Say a company builds a drone. US government buys it and then uses it to kill the employees of that company. Can we shift the blame to the company ?

There is nothing wrong in building surveillance software. We would all love to see the boundaries of that technology pushed.

Government's use of this software is questionable.
There is no way.

The government has already shown us how they are fully capable of lying, and even worse - forcing companies under their control to lie.