skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If you have zero physical security, that means that anyone can come up and just knock you down and take your things, your woman, whatever... Not my idea of "freedom".

What you're describing is total freedom in a causal society - the only constraint on what people do is what they _can_ do. It may not be your definition of freedom, but from an unbiased observer, it is arguably the most free a society can be.

You (and a lot of other people, I think) are conflating freedom (being able to do whatever you can) with rights (a guarantee that certain conditions will exist in a governed society). Granting rights necessarily diminishes the total freedom of a society.
I am there.
Bitcoin is not yet established enough that a few warrantless wiretaps can't drive it into the ground (of major exchanges) [1]. The likelihood those wiretaps are already going on increased, and the market is pricing that in.

[1] Edit to clarify: Currently, I'd estimate at least 25-50% of bitcoin transaction volume is exchanging with other currencies. Shutting down the major exchanges will prevent BTC getting over the hump from a temporary medium of exchange to an actual currency.
Software fix for scarce items in Venezuela
Back in the days when physical bookshops mattered, you wanted a thick spine on the book to take up more shelf space, and give you more room for a bold title to attract the eye.
Why would you close Twitter, Github and onther similar services? All the data there is already public, so moving somewhere else and make it public again won't change anything regarding privacy.
Because it's fast enough or close to it now and this should only improve over time: it's often much harder to improve accuracy depending on the shortcuts made for performance.
As a biologist, the "All GM is bad!" stuff drives me crazy. But you do yourself no favours by ignoring legitimate concerns.

Case in point: Monsanto. Their notorious Roundup-ready plants have been GM'd to be resistant to herbicides that will kill off all other plants.

I would cheerfully eat a plant that had just been GM'd to have such resistance. But I would be rather more concerned about it after it was used as designed: repeatedly sprayed with massive doses of toxic substances.

Even if they're completely correct about all traces of that gunk being gone by the time their plant winds up on my plate, you still get the herbicides and/or the breakdown products washed into the water table; you still get farmers skipping crop rotation and fallow seasons in favour of just growing the same crop over and over and fixing the perceived problems by dumping yet more fertiliser and yet more herbicides onto them.

And you still wind up encouraging the evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds requiring yet-more GM and yet-more poisons. You still get yet-more need for yet-more poisons of questionable safety being dumped into the food chain.

I've no problem with eating a plant that's had its genes tinkered with. But I'm totally against Roundup-ready crops and the like. And that's a perfectly rational, informed position to hold.
Microsoft's Robot Touch Screen Lets You Palpate a Brain
I think it's useful on this topic to consider things from the NSA's perspective. If you were them, would you rather have:

- direct access to any of Google's backend servers, and the need to decode GFS and BigTable bits to reconstruct a user's data, times 9 companies?

- an API provided by the companies that gives you the data in a common format when requested?

One is much harder for the government than the other.
The Telegraaf has had a pretty public beef with the intelligence agencies over source protection and phone taps.

They're actually quite decent when it comes to investigative news into the police, justice and the AIVD.
Sure, Apple is playing catch-up in some areas. They are inspired by Android, which certainly took ideas from the success of the iPhone (and both have been influenced by WebOS, Windows phone, etc etc). Not a story, really, it's simply good competitive pressure at work.
The Black Swan ...of Absence of Secrecy
(Unlinkable note from http://fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm)

Note 99

In the past, pre-Web days, people used to stash money in Switzerland. They felt safe --the last spot in the world where they could be found out is such a place with a long tradition of banking secrecy. Today, UBS –who lured many into concealing assets in its “safe” harbor – is going to hand the names of the clients to the US Justice department. All clients. Weakened by the subprime crisis, UBS (and other banks) are vulnerable. Now... surprise. The clients were not paranoid enough. For hundreds of years, Switzerland was a black hole of information. Then, suddenly...

This extends to the Web. People do not realize that EVERYTHING they have done on the web, in the illusion of anonymity, has traces. And these will remain for 5, 10, 100 years! Everyone was shocked to see Yahoo handing over to the Chinese the name of a dissident (now in jail). A simple subpoena can make any entity deliver all details about a web subscriber. But that is not even necessary: the weak point in any organization is the employees. Just as the Germans bribed employees in Luxemburg banks (and the French have been getting anything they want out of Geneva), I AM CERTAIN that you can bribe someone at any web server to deliver anything (Web detectives?).

The other problem is that someone who wants to sue you can arbitrage forums. If I want to sue someone for libel in the UK, all I need to do is prove web hits in the UK –so a US resident can sue another US resident in the UK, the Philippines, or Lebanon –wherever the laws are more favorable and the definition of defamation is broadest.

I thought the web would make us anonymous... we are no more anonymous than if we lived in a small pre-industrial settlement where almost nothing you do can be secret. We just don’t know it.
Verbal IQ of a Four-Year Old Achieved in AI System
Her site is fun. I remember a while ago, you could go to the site map and it'd been laid out like a concentration camp. The visitors at various pages/camp locations would be little humanoids with the relevant browser logo for the head.

She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one.

Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention.
"Because it destroys the natural heterogeny of the wild gene pool"

I'm not sure I understand this. By adding a plant with different properties and specific trait you're interested in, you add to the heterogeny of the wild gene pool, not destroy it. It's not like majority of wheat was suddenly replaced with that one ideally cloned plant. If it survives to the next year, it will just mix even more.
Indeed. It's not quite as cheap as steam (75% off), but if you keep your subscription up you'll get a bunch of free games that puts the subscription into "great deal" territory.

I was on the fence about it for a long time, but after the second time my console died and lost all my game saves, I wanted the cloud save feature. It ends up that since I bought the PS Plus subscription, I actually haven't bought any games. I'm a infrequent gamer - I play games, but not every day. My back catalog of good games is pretty big, so there's a lot of good stuff that comes through the freebie channel.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/06/10/playstation-plus-e.... If you scroll down you see the discounts on purchases.

This month they gave out Uncharted 3, XCom, LBP Karting (I bought it when it was $10 for PS+ subscribers), and Deus Ex Human Revolution. Previously they've had Ratchet and Clank, Spec Ops: The Line, Sleeping Dogs, and a bunch of other big studio titles. If you bought just the titles for this month you'd spend at least $50, even at the cheapest retailers online.
If other countries want to nuke us, it's probably a better idea to find out why they want to nuke us

What will your next step be, when you learn that the answer to your question is "Religion"?
The problem is one of scope. With GM, traits are introduced in plants that stem from different kind if life, often bacteria that would never naturally be accessible using selective breeding. Plants that are resistant to herbicides for example. This is on one side a blessing - you can just spray roundup on your fields and the crop lives while the rest dies. On the other side, no one can predict the effect these changes will have on the ecosystem.

I'm not very much concerned that GM food in itself is dangerous to consume. I'm far less certain that growing gene manipulated crops is as safe as it's made to be. What happens if two gene modified plants inter-breed? We've had enough accidents with "naturally" [1] selected plants and ruined a couple of ecosystems. We don't have that many ecosystems left.

Add to that the whole economical dimension: Gene modified plants prevent farmers from creating their own seeds for limited gain. The ones profiting big time are monsanto and friends.

[1] as in "not gene modified"
How to work with fragments in Android Applications
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html
I thought so too - I've been an Opera user for nearly 12 years. But genuinely, I know think this is for the better - Opera15 is bloody fast compared to Presto. I can see that they are trying. It's still long ways to go, but they have had a decent start.
The lawsuit has been posted here previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5856829
I'd like to hear the full story on how Opera self-destructed as a company. Someone should write a book or something.
That was one of my favorite funny examples, where people with enormous amount of money built such a simple website.
Correct me if I'm wrong - looks like it can be used as a desktop document DB?

That'll be very very cool, since MongoDB gives up 32bit systems.

And I wish it'll support Windows.
I think the fact that the US is now a country that people seek political asylum _from_ is going to globally change people's perspective on the country.
These are reasonable arguments. My biggest problem is that all GMO gets lumped together. Legit GM that helps increase drought-hardiness in water-starved Africa gets lumped with Roundup-GMO.

I agree my post was way over the top, but damn, you never hear anyone advocating for GM. It is all going to kill you, spread to every other plant and sterilize the whole world.

As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. :)
Mozilla Talkilla: real-time communication in the browser
> Given Snowden's claims, they may well not know.

If they didn't know about the NSA accessing their servers, they damn well better treat it like any other serious breach of their security instead of denying it is going on!!

Different sources from all over the world come out with credible information that the NSA and various other security agencies are routinely accessing your data. If a company truly did not know this was going on, they should now be in alarm code red, figure out which of your systems are compromised, try to find out which employees did it and fire those involved.

FB, Google, etc, if people got into your systems without your knowledge, then you got hacked. Not being aware of this doesn't make it better. Flat-out denying it within hours, before you even seriously looked into the matter, makes you complicit or at least suspect.

Did Google deny anything was going on when Chinese Intelligence infiltrated their servers? No, they rang the alarms, investigated and tried to fix it.

BTW before anyone points it out, I am aware it's pretty naive to expect the above behaviour. It's an intentional hypothetical example to illustrate they are complicit even if their CEOs are unaware of what is going on, by not treating it as the serious breach in security that it is.
Totally agree. We have (essentially) all of the military might, start putting up defense shield, then invade the wrong country, against the better intelligence of the Russians and some Europeans. I also sympathize a bit with the Russians for wanting their own checks and balances against the US, as our attitude was clearly "we're going to do whatever we want and don't really care what you think."
Methinks your irony detector could use a little adjustment.
Mozilla TowTruck: experimental web collaboration project
China Launches 15-day Manned Space Mission
The funny thing is that they look more professional since the site redesign.
"For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures."
two-way street
I hear these stories every month, just make your apps for a different OS if Apple don't want your business.
Also, I think that "every citizen in America" is too broad to be considered a "class". If the "Female Employees of Walmart" class-action suit was rejected for the reason of being too broad and diverse, this will be too.
Same as your reply really...
To be fair, the trouble with a name like Hacker News is that the uninitiated don't know it's for programmers and entrepreneurs.

And I never get people having a go about stuff like concurrent connections at amateurs, that's completely our fault.

Why can't web servers stop acting like babies that need constant attention with some sort of mystical knowledge to stop them falling over when something new happens? Why is our software so brittle?
Top Apps Banned in the Office
There isn't a huge amount of features in this release that are taken from Andriod that I can see. There is certainly an inspiration in the look and perhaps some of the feel, but most of the similarities they raise here are just obvious extensions to existing features (sometimes from things they did actually borrow, like Notification Centre).

Command Centre is a pretty obvious implementation of something people have been asking for since pretty much the first iPhone release.

Lock screen notifications is again an obvious feature, requested since the notification centre was released.

The multitasking UI is a relatively obvious UI if you're going to show app shots. It's as similar to WP7 as any of the other features are to Android, but they don't seem to be aware of that.

iOS has had swipe gestures on list items since forever. The new style looks a bit like Mailbox because that's how a flatter Google/WP7 style is going to look. Mailbox isn't swipe gestures to reveal menu items, Mailbox is swipe gestures to move between inbox states. They're completely missing what makes the swipe gestures in Mailbox so good.

The swipe left bevel to screen gesture isn't about revealing a drawer, it's about navigating back. It's useful, it's not revolutionary, but I didn't think they played it up as such.
It's a pretty funny, retro looking site but as far as I can tell she does pretty well out of it. She might not be an artist but she's great at marketing in her own way.
Country Music or Folk?
Was the strain of wheat you're eating now, that was cross-pollinated with another one, safe to eat? Is it more or less safe than the GM one? Was it studied by the FDA?
Spending Quality Time with Your Smartphone: The Difference between iOS & Android
And what are the good email alternatives for an civilian that wants a good service and privacy?
Good. But what I want to see, is Opera web browser _without_ an email client (and all the other stuff I never use.) Opera browser badly needs some slimming down.

Call me old fashioned, but I deliberately use a prehistoric email client _precisely_ because it does not know anything about active content. Barely even handles html. And I like it that way.

Now if Opera's email client had a big master switch, to totally disable all features beyond strictly dumb ASCII, and a means to import huge old mail archives from Eudora, then I'd be interested.

Edit: Correction: to disable anything beyond dumb ASCII plus UTF-8 foreign language support. But NOT html or any other active content.
It's possible to use both Twitter and Github in a less public fashion.
I’m an Android user but these kind of articles are terrible. The tone is very us-vs-them and belittling, and it looks like the author didn’t even do proper research before writing.

Take the swipe to delete gesture. This has been in iOS since the very beginning. Or the snarky comment about slideout navigation drawers – I wonder if the author bothered to watch the presentation, because it’s still a plain old navigation controller with an updated animation. It’s not the Facebook drawer.

And don’t get me started on “stealing”. It’s clear there is a lot of inspiration here but that goes both ways.
1 | 5 Ideas Apple Gleefully Stole From Google, Twitter, And Microsoft
Bitcoin can handle this by cash for bitcoin.
Cross-breeding is fine, inbreeding is not. When you identify A+B makes a taller plant, you start breeding the children C with each other to isolate the "tall" gene. Soon you are inbreeding the descendent's of A+B.

Most "breeds" of dogs are horribly inbred so that they maintain their traits. Same goes for "heritage" vegetables, "fancy" rats, or any other organism that humans have selectively cultivated.
Dear NSA, let me take care of your slides.
Dear NSA, you can do whatever with my data. But not with my eyes. Those slides are hideous.

So here's a quick revamp of your #PRISM slides.
I currently contract at 2 different companies. I have the machines I was given at both running headless and just bring my laptop in and SSH to them to do work (my workflow is tmux/vim based). I then keep 2 separate user accounts on my laptop to separate the 2 environments. Leaving work is as simple as logging out and going back to my personal account.
i wonder if JS will empower any embedded hw projects soon. writing the next mars rover in js anyone?
I should have been clearer in that my underlying premise is that the government should be doing less.

Yet I am surprised that it was that element of my statement that people ran with. For me having a built in shelf life of a law is not nearly as important as having clearer legislation and the cessation of co-mingling unrelated laws into one bill.
On the other hand, they've both killed tens of millions of their own citizens. Each.

And the U.S. killed more people using conventional ordnance in a single night in Tokyo than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined from the atomic bombings, so what is it that you're actually upset about? Because it's obviously not the number of Japanese killed.
By "gang", I mean any organized group of people which systematically initiates force against others, or coerces them with the credible threat of force.

What "anarchist"? Nobody I even know is an anarchist.
Are the intel services (DIA, CIA, NSA, NRO, etc...) considered actual LEAs? Part of the issue here afaik is the collection of data for intel, not actual LEA. Or else the FBI would be getting all this juicy NSA data to o after actual criminals.
They aren't, and even the little layer effect on the home screen is nothing but a gimmick. I don't wave around with my phone while I use it and would never have noticed the iOS6 volume slider effect if blogs hadn't pointed it out.
Especially with the cheap car insurance promo.
I'm not talking about Nellis.

Edit: I can't say what I am talking about, but I will say that we (the U.S.) ended up having to lease usage of the U.K. facility even though it was physically located here in the U.S. and protected by U.S. forces.
IOS 7 design is an inconsistent mess
opera browser without e-mail client:
http://www.opera.com/developer/next
Not for linux yet, though.
Designing the interactive chopping board
FYI @CERN they do store all your emails indefinitely and do read them without informing you (it is an international organization with its own "laws" and is tax free). And they do use it when manipulating (against) you. They aren't above making use of private (ie. non-CERN) phones either. Tim knows this too.
ScummVM ported to HTML5 - play old games in your browser
Well I think the Point is that a self-made solution won't be directly parse able for the $NSA. As a minimum some type of scraping Spider would be needed that indexes the content. Then it would need classification.
If everybody were to do this then the job of automatically indexing social relationships wold be much harder.
A social pedometer to get you into ‘quantified self’
Some countries carefully restrict imports of certain plants, animals and foodstuffs to avoid upsetting their ecosystem. This essentially boils down to the restriction of import of genes. Are you opposed to this? Can't genetic modification essentially amount to the same thing?

(I'm happy with genetic modifications in general, but I think that it's prudent to be cautious because of potential upsets to the ecosystem.)
How to Write a Better Case Study
I don't know the author and what trust means for him - but my level of trust in humanity increased after I read the Snowden story.

Have you guys noticed that the whistle-blowers of late are geeks? Snowden, Manning and before that Stockwell.
the point is not that its public - the $point seems to be that its too easy for a spy agency to directly access the data. yours and the data of many many many (ok everybody) others who use these services
In a key-value store like Redis, it's actually quite useful to be able to generate an atomic query that says something like "If List A contains B, return C. Otherwise check whether List D contains E, and if so, return all the keys and values of Dictionary F, but otherwise return zero."

But of course, Redis already has Lua scripting which is a nearly perfect fit for its use case. JavaScript looks terribly cluttered by comparison. Some sort of V8 integration might make sense if the goal is to make Redis even easier to use with node.js, but I don't see anything in the documentation to suggest that this is what's happening.
Black seems to still remain Apple's ‘pro’ signature. Note that MBPs (and, interestingly, iMacs) have black framing around their screens.
Thanks for this cool tool. FWIW, older versions of Opera with included mail client have the same problem.
Nothing I've said is extraordinary. "But it's safe already!" is an extraordinary claim. "The only thing that's different is..." is an extraordinary claim.

"Methinks" is pretentious snark
- eksith

...That's an extraordinary claim too, so feel free to call irony on that.
I find the framing of Snowden's actions as "unilateral" to be suspect. He's a whistleblower at the NSA, not a union organizer at a trucking company. What else would he do, see if any of his colleagues want to join him first?

I also feel like you're loyalty to an employer should be based on more than a $200k salary and an office in Hawaii, as Brooks suggests.
The site is really cool but to me feels too much like a fancy Flash page of old, just made with HTML. It's simply not as effective at presenting information as a traditional, scrollable webpage, for instance you can't use your browser's in-page search to look for keywords.

Also it doesn't really work in the mobile browsers I've tried (works very poorly on iOS, falls back to a normal page on Android, doesn't show anything at all on Windows Phone).

A normal webpage plus a cool demo video, while certainly not as creative/innovative as this, would probably be more useful.
Thanks for replying here.
I couldn't find other links to the Mac version so I inferred that there was only Windows support. It would be nice to have "Linux coming soon" page instead of "Download for Windows" by default :)
Honestly, i liked it more before.
The copy right next to the download link explicitly says you can't. Blogs report otherwise, but that is a very fragile "of course".
? -> English?