skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Please share your vision of that party's platform.

"It's like libertarianism meets communism but with promiscuous transparency and cryptography instead of classlessness.

Get ready people, Libercommusharepunkism is about to disrupt!"
He is a smart kid. He has to position himself as a bargain chip, that`s one reason he picked HK.

You can number the countries in this world who would be powerful enough to withstand US pressure.

Never forget he is only 29 without an escape plan you dont make this kind of journey. If he has to live his remaining life in China/HK he is probably fine with that.

And please step out of your box it does not matter where someone is from.
Now everyone is screaming "traitor traitor" and you all forget what he uncovered and brought to main media attention.

But soon he will be forgotten marked as a traitor and everything will move back to square one.
And secret courts will grant agencies powers nobody knows about :).
Whether you agree or disagree, this is a non-starter in the US due to the entrenched two-party system. Best option is to build a "digital activism" caucus in one of the two parties.
well neither does a javascript/rails/go/node/closure library that will fall out of fashion in a couple of years only to be replaced by something that does the same thing with a "fresh, new and more fun" syntax.

The point being; it's valid to think through and create articulations on all of these things that we have no control over anyways.

I'm just tired of doing it exclusively for tech things that ultimately don't matter.
There's always the thriving black market for things that MS doesn't even know about.
The German Pirate Party should be seen as a try to institutionalize as a political party what was there before in other forms. The protests that made people aware of data retention policies and legislation were organized by (subject focused) civil liberty unions. Matters that touch technology issues are discussed by hacker (in the good old positive meaning) groups like the CCC. Those groups do get reputation and traction.

Trying to institutionalize this protest and form a political party was what the PP was about. I'm not sure they succeeded (here in Germany). While they managed to form political positions regarding policies touching technological matters, information acts and data retention, they fall short on anything else on the political scale. They were able to gain traction in state parliaments, but the outlook for the nationwide elections coming up in fall aren't good at all. They have immense personal problems - often connected to the fact that in the areas not covered by their agenda, they are quite diverse.

Building a political party makes sense only if it can influence decisions in parliaments. I fear the PP won't get there here in Germany. Special interest parties don't work in many democratic parliament systems.

A much better fit are in most cases civil liberty unions who can gain public recognition as experts and make it hard for parties in the parliament to ignore their statements.
> there is almost nothing in computer sciences.

Or you don't know them or don't realize they are French…

- OVH (Biggest server host in the world) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH)

- Ubisoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft),

- Capgemini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgemini),

- STMicroelectronics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STMicroelectronics),

- Bull (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Bull),

- DailyMotion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dailymotion),

- etc.
Welcome to javaland, where simple things take lot of time and lot of working time is spend doing java and not a real work. </sarc>
No, it's conditional in whether they have popular support and/or represent a change for the better, or are just thugs that want to enforce a Taliban style rule.
Ouch, sorry for that --- CTRL/CMD + CLICK ftw :)
I was reading this very interesting thread, and had to jump in here as well. I actually worked (briefly) on a very similar idea last year - basically an Exec clone for the UK. We scrapped the idea after a month, since we realised that you're basically competing directly with existing service firms, and the unique niche of a "mobile tasks marketplace" is tasks that are:

- not doable by a specialised company (cleaning, gardening)

- have a physical component (else they could be done by a VA)

- are more efficient to outsource than do yourself (which seems to rule out pretty much everything)

I came to the conclusion that the only way to go would be to build a specialised services firm, which seems to be what Exec has done (they now seem to just do cleaning). Which is cool, but maybe I'm missing something, since I don't see how they're really a tech startup as they don't really leverage tech in the way that Uber does. But straight services firms make tons of money anyway, so Justin Kan deserves applause for persuading pg to invest in a cleaning company.

Anyway my points to grandparent are:

- I agree, figure out a niche skillset first, then expand

- don't get seduced by the "on-demand mobile workforce" element. It sounds cool, but your target market probably doesn't care about cool. You have to answer the question "who really wants a dogsbody to do generic tasks?"

- Though the social aspect of this kind of business is nice, nailing the supply side is really easy. Unskilled and semi-skilled labour is really cheap, if you haven't noticed. 90% of your focus should be on nailing the demand side.

- read everything you can get your hands on about Exec/TaskRabbit/all their many clones.

- agree with parent's plan. Most local services firms probably suck at online marketing. If you can figure out a way to reliably get online customers for service X, you can then go to all the local firms that offer service X and offer a 10% affiliate deal. I'd focus more on nailing the marketing channel before the product (SEO, AdWords, whatever works - find out if there's underpriced search terms like "best window cleaning firms in Cambridge" and go from there).

And yeah, I've become a big fan of the patio11/tptacek approach. Just need to put it into action myself...
>>But his views on politics and world affairs are extremely eccentric, and have remained on the fringe for a reason.

They have remained on the fringe because most people would rather tell themselves that things are generally okay.
> They're more afraid of terrorists than having privacy. Look at the polls: Hacker News seems to be in quite a bubble in this regard.

Debatable. See polling at http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/12/us-usa-security-po... as discussed on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5871423

Of course, the people who support him may still think that the spying is a good thing, just shouldn't be secretive... and maybe the 46% undecided will end up against him. But certainly doesn't seem as clear-cut as you suggest - do you have any examples of the polls you reference?
The government would probably like to avoid having its servers rooted. Seems sensible.
so were problems found with the tech so it was abandoned or what? hard to know where it's going if anywhere with no followup...
Kind of surprised this isn't on the front page of reddit right now.
It annoys me to see F/L/OSS projects like Linux and Hadoop used for ends like "NSA surveillance" but I don't like the idea of adding "Fields of Endeavor" restrictions to OSS licenses. In fact, if you go by the OSD[1], "Fields of Endeavor" restrictions are specifically not allowed. Of course, not everyone agrees with the OSD, but still...

And anyway, how would you enforce this against a group like the NSA? At the end of the day, adding something like this would just make licenses longer and more complicated, and would probably have no impact on surveillance.

[1]: http://opensource.org/osd-annotated
It's very unlikely. Just look at who they are hiring, still mostly mathematicians. Quantum computing is mostly physics, chemistry, and a lot of painstaking engineering.

Unless they are secretly borrowing people hired on at e.g. the DoE, I just don't see it.
3D Printing Directly From Thought
You're right, and I believe you pinpoint the problem with the US political system. It's pretty much impossible for anybody with out of the ordinary political views to be represented at a high level in the US democracy. It will take a revolution for a bipartisan system to break.
Google moving to 2048-bit is probably an indicator of what they see as vulnerable.

Because of the current developments int the press this challenge is being viewed in the context of the NSA, but other foreign intelligence services also pose a threat to user data.
I wonder how much the use of methods to avoid detection by the NSA triggers warning flags that puts you under more individual scrutiny.

Sure, you can encrypt most things, but then maybe you look suspicious so you get special attention. Can you encrypt everything? Of course not.
I cannot say enough good things about Firefox Aurora. I've been using it as my primary browser for a few months now, it's awesome.
You will, no doubt, find plenty of people who trust Obama to not do this. You'll find plenty of people who would have trusted Bush, and you'll even find a lot of people who don't trust either one of them. But there's a fourth corner to that square, and I don't think you'd find many people in it at all: people who would trust both Bush and Obama with data like this.

That's the thing about governments: people have successors. People like Bush and Obama have been elected before, and given enough time, people like them will be elected again. Trusting one administration with a given power means trusting all future administrations, sight unseen, with that same power, and that is rarely a sane thing to do.
You remind me of a true story from the 1990s. Woman, on her way back from Canada, is pulled over in NY for speeding. She's got a plate of home-made cookies in the seat next to her and offers the officer one.

About 200 miles later, not speeding, she's pulled over again. As the officer approaches she says, "What did I do wrong?" He replies, "Nothing, but I heard that you've got the most amazing cookies!"
It's not like they've done it before: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080422/234401923.shtml
This requires some kind of subscription or account to view.
State of Web Inspector
Beautiful.

For those playing at home, the answer to #4 depends mostly on diet, and for a typical Westerner it will most likely be 0.8. That is, slightly more O2 is used than CO2 is produced, representing a mixed metabolism of carbohydrates and fats.
Ask HN: Switched from Programmer to Product Manager - What can I expect?
One immediate thing that I've discovered is that I have much less control over the quality of my 'work'. As an engineer, I was always very confident as to the result of my code as I had total control over it. As a Product Manager, I've had to collaborate with multiple people from different departments with different agendas and ambitions, all working together shaping the idea (even in ways that I'm unsatisfied or uncomfortable with). The end product is usually different than my vision (for better or for worse), and as a result, I've been super nervous about the results of each project.

I know many readers on Hacker News have done both engineering and product management. What other things should I expect? How have you been able to secure the same level confidence as you did when you were an engineer? What tools and/or resources helped contribute to your successes as a Product Manager?
Show HN: Ultimate DevOps Academy - ultimatedevops.com
My understanding is that it works kind of like the No-Fly List: you don't find out if your name is on it until it's too late.
Of course. But if you don't exhale deliberately you still risk barotrauma (I am a diver too see).
This looks like Part 2. Part 1 was whistleblowing for the US audience. This is for HK/China, probably intended to help keep him from being extradited to the US for his efforts in Part 1. Interesting strategy. Kinda unexpected imo.
That's nice. That isn't what the article is about nor has there been any intentional holes or backdoors found in Windows.
The core java library has mostly been kept unchanged for a decade now (I think?). Java 8 is doing the largest change to it in a long time by changing the collections to work with lambdas.

The main goal behind the standard Java library (from what I have gathered) has always been to provide a mid-level API to most possible functionality in an OS so that library developers can develop simple Java libraries that work across all platforms supported by Java. The big changes to the JRE libraries in the early years of Java was really what caused all of the big problems Java has had. Since the JRE stopped evolving, (server side) Java has really thrived with most code being very easily deployable anywhere and everywhere in the enterprise.

If you're going to program in Java, you should use libraries for commonplace tasks, and you should use an IDE to autocomplete package names and 'run' blocks. If you do this, Java really does work very well. For huge classes of coding tasks, the excessive boilerplate and compile time checks / exceptions can make it possible to tell very quickly if code is correct or not even without tests which is a major boon for code review purposes in enterprise.

Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that Java really does work very well and has come a very long way in creating a very productive environment for large projects, and it's why Java is so popular and heavily used even when at first glance it looks terrible.
Brings back memories.

After a series of emails with Steve Jobs --all while I was coding at four in the morning!-- my then partner and I flew to Cupertino for a meeting with VP's directly under him and about thirty engineers and managers from various areas of the organization. We brought with us nearly a million dollars of equipment to put on a good demonstration and illustrate our technology. Apple asked us to develop a product they needed. We threw a ton of money and effort at the task and got it done in three months (a redesign of an existing product). They started to promote the product, gave us a direct link on their website to ours. It was amazing.

Six months later a cheaper (20% of our price) bad quality product (among other things, there were reports of it catching fire) came into the scene. Apple dropped us like a hot potato. We lost a ton of time and money on the deal.

Am I angry? Nope. I have enough experience dealing with large companies to know you should go into these deals nearly expecting the worst corner cases. This, I think, is certainly true for small companies. Besides, I had a conversation with Steve Jobs at four in the morning. Perhaps that alone was worth the cost of admission...and I am not even close to being an Apple fan boy.

As for the OP, I don't think he was very wise in posting meeting info as he did.
Brazil protests and the decaying moral of the established media
I think one of the ways this bullshit is solved is liquid democracy. Allow people to transfer votes to people they feel are experts via a bitcoin like system. 90% of people have only an interest in a very small subset of topics that they vote on. They aren't qualified to cast a vote, why not allow them to delegate to an expert? Of course buying votes would be highly illegal.
I wish I had some numbers but I can't look them up right now. How many American's are currently not even voting? I bet most of them are younger voters who believe their vote doesn't matter for one reason or another. Perhaps engaging them could be a good first step. And also a huge shift in party power could take a lifetime but does that mean it shouldn't be attempted?
>I'm wondering how people deal with this issue

Using an IDE in Java is almost a necessity. With that, people mostly just get use to it.

I recently had to return briefly to Java (also for android). All I had to do was recursively chmod a directory. This is something that once seemed simple to do in Java, and indeed it is still simple. However now when I write that code I am painfully aware of how unnecessarily long and complicate it is. However, the larger project involve cross compiling python with c-extensions (and external c dependencies), so I do appreciate the relaxation that comes with Java boilerplate.
To what rayiner said, I'll add that feeling part of something (the EU, in this case) is not silly - it's a basic human need. And if you feel part of something, it's also human to feel good for its successes and bad for its failures.
Yep, they're still rather vulnerable. I guess their approach would stop a dumb MitM which just replaces any .exe download. It also protects against the download server being compromised, assuming the original server is fine and your connection is clean.

The best way is to check the signature, but that requires GPG in the first place (and trust on the key remains hairy). At least they could serve the site with HTTPS (GPGTools does this right).
Firefox is really aggressive about memory leaks. In fact in recent versions they kill off certain extensions that leave too much unused data in RAM. You should ask in the #firefox channel on irc.mozilla.org, they would help you track down the problem.
How Much Do Celebrities Who Get Paid To Tweet Earn?
My Android phone (a Motorola Atrix) has issues when I cross timezones. For the past few months, I've been travelling between Chicago and Raleigh on a near weekly basis, and I find pretty consistently that when I land in either city, my phone doesn't update the time from the network, to reflect the local time zone. So, if it were showing the time on the East Coast when I left Raleigh, I could land in Chicago and 2 days later my phone will still have East Coast time, unless I physically reboot it. And vice versa going the other way.

I don't know if it's a reflection of the same problem(s) talked about in this article or not, but I know it's incredibly annoying.
Yes. With many two-factor authenticator applications, your codes won't work if your clock is wrong.
It has been alleged that the WMF vulnerability was deliberate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Metafile_vulnerability#...
again, have you read "The Biology of Cancer", by Weinberg? There is strong evidence for what I'm saying.
Hmm, yeah, it did so-so on /r/politics, maybe it'll have more luck on /r/technology -- most of the time I'm happy there isn't a Kevin Rose <-> digg relationship between me <-> reddit, but every now and then it'd be helpful.
Couldn't agree more. As a developer I can't stand their review process. http://k2xl.com/wordpress/ios-is-the-worst-platform-for-deve...
And lest we forget the Concorde as a French / English engineering marvel.

True, it was - despite the outrageous ticket prices - a money loser of the highest order. Nevertheless, a beautiful piece of engineering and arguably the most beautiful civilian plane ever built.

I, for one, regret never to have flown in it.
Great, more government surveillance, that's exactly what we need. Maybe the Brits could just copy the language of the "Patriot Act" outright and implement that.
It blew my mind when I heard that "Happy Birthday" was copyrighted. So glad to find out that it's bullshit. Make those lousy, greedy bastards pay for being epic trolls.
Is it like a subset of Underscore for EcmaScript 5 ?
Riding Rails: docrails, back to the roots
Further, I'm not sure what the relationship of probabilities to the number of particles in the universe is. The probability of any given sequence emitted by hmmer as the "highest probability" is tiny (often 10e-50 or better, and for very good matches, 10e-138). So what's your point?
Yahoo not done acquiring - Foursquare next?
Have to disagree. If hundreds of people are "invited" it's almost like a mini conference. In fact, the entire issue was that Apple never created a relationship with him in the first place. I totally understand why under those circumstances someone wouldn't assume what was said is confidential.
Thanks for your prompt reply. Thanks for the tip on "confidentially"...by the way, please don't judge us by that pathetic Wordpress site. We just threw it up there for the time being. We are building a custom platform. Thanks!!
Testing Rails with MiniTest
He isn't. Most everything he has said he isn't right about. I'm calling it now, the internet blew itself out of proportion over a video and 4 power point slides.

This is public knowledge but never spoken about, Snowden was looking for years [0] to find something to leak. He didn't stumble across this and have an overwhelming moral urge to do "the right thing."

I'll take the very unpopular opinion: I have a very strong feeling he is almost completely wrong in what he thinks he knows. [1]

[0] If you read the timeline you will see this. I'm looking for better sources, as I read it directly, but can't find at the moment. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/timeline-edward-snowdens-life/...

[1] This tone of feeling wronged and spied upon is borne of complete ignorance. http://news.yahoo.com/edward-snowden-completely-wrong-104432...
The title of the paper is: Optically-induced charge separation and terahertz emission in unbiased dielectrics.

The news release is completely out-to-lunch (eg "Light has electric and magnetic components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored." Are you kidding? Light doesn't even propagate without the magnetic field) so I'd start by tracking citations of the original paper.
it doesnt need a revolution (that would be a very bad thing given how much power our military has). It just needs to start locally (we all understand how exponential growth works). rather than running for US president in '16, the goal should be small, eg x% of state senators from the bay area.
He can't be a traitor and extradited for treason... because treason doesn't exist in Hong Kong's basic law.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/06/13/...
HN Meeting with San Mateo Congressperson re NSA 
Hi all,

From what I understand, it's much more effective to influence Congress by actually meeting with them directly. I sent in a request to meet with San Mateo district's representative, Jackie Speier.

If you're both (a) fairly well-spoken on the NSA issue, and (b) interested in a notification when I hear back from the office, let me know.

Either reply to this thread, or email me adam+congress@adamchavez.net
StopWatching.Us Anti-surveillance Coalition AMA
First things first.

PGP is useful, but pointless on a system that may be compromised/backdoored at any time (e.g. Windows, iOS, Android ... ). So the first - and possibly most annoying - step would be to install a secure OS.
Path Is On The Path To $1B Valuation
The Intricacies of Customer Development
I wish Microsoft had decided to separate into several companies way back during the US v. Microsoft case.

Office is actually a great product and Excel in particular still is the best available spreadsheet around. But Office has been hamstrung by being part of Microsoft; in particular by not supporting iOS or Android or online (until being forced to). If Office was its own company, I'm sure these platforms would have been supported years ago.

I feel like Microsoft is one of the rare cases where the whole is actually less than the sum of its parts.
That's not a party, that's more about process (which I do agree with, btw).

A party has to have a platform -- that's the whole point of a party: shared core values. But those values have to be actionable otherwise they are just platitudes.

It's all about money: who pays and how is it spent. Gods, Guns and Gays are distractions, but they have to be addressed in some way or they will remain distractions. The "right" uses those tactics because they are very effective. It just needs reframing.
ZeroBin: pastebin/messageboard where server has zero knowledge of hosted data
I wonder why so many people believe this. Many simple and weak ciphers have been around for decades and - although they are considered to be very insecure by cryptographers - certainly can't be decrypted in real-time (!) on this scale (!).