skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: PongFace - a fun way to give a gift card
This article is just a regurgitation of a part of a bloomberg article[0] that is already on the front page[1].

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-t...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5878365
http://pinboard.in/ without hesitation
My understanding is CD Baby was never a 'label'. They chose a service model and operated more like a fulfillment service. E.g. we will store and ship CDs to customers for a fee, we will upload your stuff to iTunes for a fee, etc. Charging $40 to upload to itunes seems very reasonable. If Apple wanted to allow anyone anywhere to upload to iTunes with no quality control, they wouldn't use partners like CDBaby.

Furthermore, it makes no sense to think Apple was pissed about the $40 since that happened after Apple got pissed.

You can see CDBaby's pricing here: http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx

It looks like a very fair deal for small artists to me.

> Everything the guy did just screams amateur.

I disagree. At the very least, he is very smart. If you read those notes, it is clear that he has an incredible ability to distill and communicate what was important.
It's time for a new political party. Forget the people who say it can't be done. Now is the time. We are stuck in a rut and its time to get out. You have a choice, be lazy and accept what is happening or step up and make change. Its clear our current system is rotten.
A checked exception is one that the compiler forces you to write a check for. An unchecked exception ("the good kind") is one that you could write a check for if you want to.

You probably want to have at least one exception "catch" block somewhere, such as within a message/event handler loop, but checked exceptions force you to write the error catch at the place where a routine is called, and MANY such checks for other calls, rather than at one place at the top of an operation.

While this might make sense in a GUI/AWT/Swing app, it does not make sense in a batch processing app (or web app). In that case, there is no user to get a dialog box, you simply log "it did not work due to ..." and move on. Checked exceptions make you write a bunch of extra code.
Piecing Together A Quilted Social Network: Does M&A Work for Social Nets?
> Watching common Americans being abused by their government and corporations for a decade now, with very little that came out of it, except a few protests / shows / petitions - I highly doubt a serious uprising is possible.

I think you're watching the wrong people.

> Right now, most people, especially young (what's saddening), are conformists and as long as they feel relatively safe and well fed, they won't go far than writing a comment on HN... like this one :)

This has always been the case - it's human nature. It was true in 1775, it was true in the 60's and it's true today. It's the minority who stand up that change the world.
Thanks! This is a good read.

https://medium.com/about-work/1cd9fbf8ca15
This is most definitely true for Microsoft and Adobe. Hence, they're both switching to subscription models.
This has been going on for years. It's a program that Microsoft created for passing along 0days to AV Vendors and companies so they could create detection mechanisms for it.

http://www.microsoft.com/security/msrc/collaboration/mapp.as...
When reading this site on an iPhone, after about five seconds a "Share" button appears right in the middle of the screen. It covers the text, is unmovable, and cannot be closed.

Does this happen to everyone or just me?
They really just need something to remind us once a generation or so. Then we all rally against whatever new bogeyman is presented. A huge chunk of our money is spent 'neutralizing' this new 'threat', and things go back to some new 'normal' for a little while.
Snowden’s Leaks on China Could Affect Its Role in His Fate
Diigo...wish the search was a bit better but I suppose if I was better about tagging that would be less of a pain. Would love to know if someone has a tool they use with powerful search capability and ingestion of content (diigo does this, but for a fee)

Edit: Just looked at http://pinboard.in/ - looks great.
I don't think discussion here is particularly going to contribute to the voice of the public that would actually do something to change it.

Sorry for the fuzzy expression there, nothing better jumped to mind.
There is such a law:

http://export.gov/safeharbor/eu/eg_main_018365.asp

US companies that want to hold EU data in the US have to guarantee the same level of protection the EU provides.
I tend to agree with you. It's not the engine sound that bothers me, it's little kids screaming, hearing sneezes, etc. that get to me. In fact, many people have actually found the quietness of the A380 engines to be a detriment to the flying experience because suddenly they can hear others' quiet conversations and other such noises that remind you you're tightly packed with 300+ other people.
Actually 3.5% of android clocks ARE out by one hour or more... the 15s bug effects some phones, but the problem of being more than an hour out is very general and does effect 3.5% of phones - sorry if that's not clear!
You can also use Countermail which provides end-to-end PGP security (unlike Hushmail). Here's my article with more info: http://www.greycoder.com/how-to-stop-the-nsa-from-spying-on-...
We are now using S/mime and in today's Apple+Thunderbird products it's completely built-in and pain-free. Set it up once and after that all emails get encrypted automatically, you don't even need to press a button. Provided of course that You were able to convince your colleagues to invest those 10 minutes to set it up as well.
PGP Was painful because every Mail.app update broke it, not sure about the current state-of-the-art there. But the whole point should be: it is not much of an annoyance anymore! Zero annoyance after installation, Works even on your iPhone etc.
Epic List of Interview Questions
If they have to install a keylogger, at least they have to specifically target you.
On PRISM, partisanship and propaganda
This is why I think Apple will do better with Cook, Ive, Federighi, and Schiller as the frontmen. They can collaborate and judge what's best uninterrupted by the arrogant ramblings of Holy Jobs.
"Rot13 is enough encryption for everyone." --Me
> But even then if Joe and Bill suddenly got smarty-pants and started encrypting their communication - NSA would get suspicious and will find out what you guys are up to via other channels.

Unless everyone used encrypted email.

And the only way to achieve that is to make it really easy to use, i.e. to have a zero user interface, so the program automatically encrypts it on the way out and automatically decrypts it on the way in. Key distribution can be handled by putting the public key in the header.

The only drawback is this is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Dude is going away for a long long time... He honestly better get himself at least 1000 miles deep into the center of mainland china
Especially the very end. Stephen with his pole!
My experience is quite different. I made several lasting friendships in both local and foreign CS meetings. I have a big group of friends locally, and CS just added some more.
Contemporary internet editorials.
"...If Java died, it wouldn't take long for all that code to be rewritten in Go..."

Guy...

You don't just rewrite code that's been through the FDA approval process. It doesn't work like that. If you want to replace a java or c based medical imaging viewer... you can... but you have to prove it won't kill anybody. Or make any doctors cut off the left leg instead of the right one because a transform is flipped due to a DICOM attribute being interpreted incorrectly. Or that RTP calculations are still correct, and the PET/CT fusion is registering correctly. You can't get Radiation dosage calculations wrong by even a tiny amount.

And you have to prove all of that to the FDA and sign thousands of sheets of documentation swearing to it. And the standard fine print in that documentation makes you criminally liable if a bug is found.

And that's just 1 tiny industry that java is used in.

Multiply that difficulty by every life and death or money based industry and you begin to get an idea of what a monumental task getting rid of java would be. Think oil extraction and exploration systems... uh... no excuses there... they MUST work. Think industrial control systems... software for nuclear facilities, or even software for a simple coal based energy plant, can't just be thrown together. People in a city or area depend on these facilities to meet their energy needs.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you... what is your definition of "wouldn't take long"?
> If the EU had their own Facebook and Google, it'll have their own intelligence agencies tapping data from those servers.

This is a fallacy that gets repeated a lot.

First of all, the EU is not a single entity, but rather a hydra with many heads. The competency and resources of "intelligence agencies" varies a lot by country, the privacy laws and the wire-taping/surveillance culture too.

If you are speaking about the UK, sure, but try doing this in Germany. Also, in my country (Romania) the government wouldn't have the resources for it and they are too incompetent to cooperate with other agencies without people finding out about it. I also cannot see France doing this, since the French get pretty violent when they get upset. So what EU are you talking about exactly?

Second, even if snooping of online activity does happen in an EU country, at least it's an EU intelligence agency you're talking about. This is relevant for US companies, because I don't know how much EU's governments care about our privacy, but I can assure you that they care about leaks to the US or China or other non-EU countries. Which means US companies will suffer for it.

The USA was and is still seen as the benevolent dictator of the Internet. That's why we've been accepting your governance of TLDs, or your online services. That's why we've been blaming China for their tight control of online access. But if the US government keeps jerking around much, things will change.
I see, thanks. I have to say I'm not a big fan of checked exceptions, but it is what it is... Thanks for the information!
An aggressive, expansionist power with nuclear weapons pointed at us was not a "made-up" threat. Neither is international terrorist organizations conspiring to attack us. Both are factually verifiable threats.

Reasonable people can disagree about the appropriate responses to those threats, but it's factually incorrect to say they are "made up."

As an aside, for those claiming that terrorism poses no threat because it kills so few people, I'll offer the example of the Beltway Sniper attacks. More people probably died in traffic accidents in the D.C. metro area than were killed by the Beltway Sniper. But the chilling effect on everyday life was so much greater. It's hard do convey to someone the feeling of putting gas in your car on a sunny weekend day with the hair on your neck standing up because even though you know that there is a negligible chance of your being the victim of a sniper attack, the possibility scares you in a way that the possibility of death through heart disease, or hell the certainty of death through old age, cannot.
I can't support arstechnica anymore after the hatchet job done by joe mullin against snowden.

http://arstechnica.com/author/joe-mullin-2/

How would you feel if your hacker news posts over the years were trolled into a very personal post about you on hacker news, done by a hacker news employee? The whole thing is creepy.
I feel something as commonplace as making a HTTP GET or POST should be standardized at this point. There are many implementations which still require a decent amount of boilerplate.
This is the biggest story in tech, period.

This is about the revealing of a surveillance state that the Stasi and Gestapo would have wet the bed over.

I'm glad that people on Hacker News have their priorities straight and these NSA stories are rising to the top rather than some banal discussion over the color of iOS 7 icons.
Confidential by default? Says who? Just because you say so doesn't mean everyone assumes that.

It's not as though the people there didn't know that Derek represented a bunch of independents who would all be able to make their own decisions. And if they somehow did not know, then they're fools for not spending 5 minutes to understand how CD Baby worked and what it meant for Derek.

They could have said in less than three seconds "This is all confidential." And then Derek would have had a conversation with them about what he could and couldn't say. I don't think he was at all in the wrong to not assume confidentiality at the get go. People sharing information have a responsibility to set expectations on it's use. Not the people receiving it.
CBS News confirms multiple breaches of Sharyl Attkisson’s computer
Yep, even Clojure does, but have never tried it really for Android, but it's just as possible as Scala. Jython has been possible in the past, but I haven't seen any recent projects updated to use it in the past 1-2 years.
Thanks for the write up Sieuwert, which was your favourite?
I expect BlackBerry apps would be first, since they still have the larger market share [1].

[1]: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2482816
I'm surprised more people haven't read between the lines: the NSA is in possession of quantum computers and interference based decryption is probably already in standard use. Insiders also have dropped hints the Tor networks is, in fact, a trojan horse. We basically have two * extreme * options: 1) a trusted courier with a sealed envelope (don't underestimate this Game of Thrones like scenario as the US Military defeated itself in the largest wargame in the gulf by using courier, sealed envelopes, and motorbikes) and 2) quantum cryptographic communication. The latter is still only the realm of university labs and down at LANL but I read a paper which stated it's physically possible to pass keys along ethernet cable, but all parties need a device which acts as a gate. This in turn opens up Alice and Bob to traditional decryption methods if they're not air gapped from the web.
I can't fault MSFT for this at all.

"Hey your systems have been vulnerable for a week; here's the patch!" just doesn't fly too well with major customers with very real needs for security.

I personally don't mind them being used in real targeted surveillance either. That surveillance is going to happen anyway.
Doesn't Libre Office do pretty well in the Linux space?
At one time America was England's colony, fancy that.
More like, "ha ha, only serious"

Object fields = Data Division; Bean = Copy Book

Practices that actively discourage functional style programming in favor of procedural style programming with widely scoped variables.

I'm glad Java is more widely used than C++, but it's a hard language to really love, despite being (mostly) how I earn my living.
This could have been a great article about drawing lessons in design and usability from unusual forms of media and unconventional user experiences. Or about when and where it is appropriate to experiment and deviate from established norms, and how best to do so without sacrificing standards and quality.

Instead, it's an embittered response to a question I never asked in the first place.
One day we'll have the teenage posts of a major presidential candidate. Should be interesting.
I would like a clear documented case of vitamin E hypervitaminosis. That article, "Meta-Analysis: High-Dosage Vitamin E Supplementation May Increase All-Cause Mortality", hardly answers my request.

What I have found are obfuscated cases: cases where Vitamins D or A are taken simultaneously with vitamin E, or cases where the patient is in a disease state and/or is taking (often multiple) drugs, especially anti-clotting drugs.

I increasingly tend to believe that the only way a normal person can overdose on Vitamin E is to choke on it or slip on it.
I experimented with Scala for a while but got turned off by 1) very slow compilation 2) complicated and unelegant syntax.
So is this his strategy for why he chose hong kong over iceland for the initial leaks, he believes he can get china on his side to offer him protection?
Is this much different than the current system of life + every changing number when Mickey is going to expire?

This small change wouldn't impact the big corporations, but it would start letting smaller things fall into public domain. Then, after a while of acceptance, you do something like limit the number of renewals, make it price prohibitive to renew more than 2-3 times, or limit transferability.

Or you could go for a big bang change and hope you have a critical mass of votes.
Set-up can be daunting, but I always found that entering one's password every time a new mail comes in is unbearable. They should highlight that the pgp password timeout can be changed to something less intrusive.
Java has polymorphism, your type can implement (I think) comparator and that should be it.

Of course, that doesn't work for int, float, etc because those types aren't objects, but then you typically don't have an array of those.
Sometimes lack of response is quite telling. Sometimes telling garners severe consequences. That doesn't leave alternatives.

"Honey, are you cheating on me?"
Twitter bot hasn't updated in about 2 days. Sadness.
America does have a Pirate Party: http://uspirates.org/
on a UK PRISM... Clegg: It's still no
Luckily for the publishing business, most would-be authors do not realize that.
This. No government should be allowed to become so large in power that its people cannot rise against it. The government is for the people by the people. With all the greed and fear mongering, it just feels like it's not going to happen this way though...
I too am sick of seeing medium.com links on here.

However, I stress seeing medium.com links. I really like how HN puts the domain after a link, and having so many and so varied articles listed under the "medium.com" umbrella is irritating when the quality is, to put it mildly, rather mixed.

There are a few writers on there I wish would choose to publish on their own space, rather than in this - ahem - "medium".
Feedback for our new Productivity/Team Collaboration web app
We've just launched our web app about a month ago and are in the early stages of working out who to focus our efforts marketing 'allthings' to.(Mobile apps being developed here at our HQ in Scotland and ready in early July hopefully!)

What we have established is that with the 600+ users people love writing lists, be it for personal or business use. We're also seeing that of the companies that are using it, the ones who are logging in a lot and sharing lists with each other are marketing types. I guess due to the nature of working as a team, having mini projects within big projects, Snr marketing people through to marketing juniors etc. Not to say there aren't plenty of other companies that could make use of it.

Anyway, I'd love it if some more of you could spare some time to sign up for an account, check it out and feedback here or using the Feedback button. All very much appreciated! www.allthings.io
Please share your vision of that party's platform.
AHEM* RANT AHEAD*

I would prevent the NSA from backdating warrants.

I would prevent the NSA from being able to wiretap for 7 days without a warrant.

I would prevent the NSA from using Vampire Taps in Fiber Optic networks.

I would allow the disclosure of National Security Letters and I would block indefinite duration gag orders (10 years is fine; infinity is not).

I would hold our intelligence organizations accountable for lying to the public.

I would enact a new wiretapping act to prevent these domestic abuses.

I would only apply these changes to domestic surveillance.

Would I trade security for this liberty? In a heartbeat.

The punchline for all of this is simple: all of the ridiculous intelligence and security apparati we've developed since 9/11 don't make us any safer, and, in fact, inspire the very terrorism we seek to disrupt. The $X0Billion dollars we spend every year could be used for much better purposes, like going to Mars.
The Ethical Flap Over Birdsong Apps
Edward Snowden: Don't fly NSA whistleblower to UK, airlines told
It is a horrible solution, but it does work.

IMHO, go was right to get rid of exceptions (stack traces are useful) and just return two values.
I have some ideas and some plans in mind for getting around this. If anyone in particular would be interested in helping to set up or back a privacy-oriented startup aimed at defeating a lot of what's been going on, then please get in touch via my profile.
Thanks, i'll take a look
Always be simplifying
3 billion grains of rice volume
This.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/05/0...

(Local discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5880156 )

Lawrence Lessig for President?
It would be inadvisable if you were down there for any length of time, but survivable.
The $40 was a service fee to cover the cost of having someone at CDBaby go into the warehouse, pick up a copy of the CD, put it into the CD drive, type in all the album, artist and track info and hitting "scan" and then putting it back when things are done. Doesn't sound like that big of a deal, you could do it for "free" yourself at home. But if CDBaby had to do 5000 of them there's a real cost associated. For a lot of people it's worth $40 to not have to think about anything and for it to "just work".
Brazil is under war, don't come to the world cup
Let's talk about the awesomeness of HBO's DVDs. They get so many things right. For each episode, there is usually a "previously on" and a summary. And thank sweet-lord-baby-jesus, when you start and episode and hit the "next chapter" button, it skips right to the end of the opening credits. Why all DVDs aren't this way, I don't know. The GOT DVDs are especially cool because each disc in the whole set includes a full "who's who' guide to Westeros.
I don't think anyone's blaming him for starting the company. The reason I raised this line of questioning isn't to criticize him, but rather to figure out if this is a new idea, in a space that hasn't been explored before, and thus worthy of our interest and excitement... or just an age-old idea with a bit of new marketing.
Some people may disagree with me, but I think 350 replaces 340. 350's got a long range and it's extremely fuel efficient (more so than the new 787). 340 is a four engine airliner and it's not fuel efficient at all. That fact alone makes 340 pretty much obsolete. Operating costs for both 787 and 350 is probably much less than 340 (totally speculating here) so it's hard to justify operating 340s when there are much better airliners out there that can save you a lot of money in the long term. Operating other 4 engine airliners like 747 and 380 is justifiable because they carry way more people than 340 does AND their new models (380 is already a new plane and 747 has gotten an upgrade) are fuel efficient as well.

340s are already out of production and I'm pretty sure it's gonna be rare to see one of them in the skies over time. Which is a shame. I like 340s.
I work for 2600hz, which is literally the number 1 keyword on the CyberTerrorism watch list. I guarantee I'm already on every list.
Quantum computers do not allow you to break all public key cryptography, they only allow you to break the common forms in use today.

For some example algorithms that are not vulnerable to quantum computers, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

Also, it would be quite remarkable if the NSA had quantum computers capable of breaking 2048 RSA or PGP keys. Possible, but extremely unlikely.
No, but 1 bar air in your lungs can be quite a proposition at any significant depth. Not for the faint of heart.
"...Who says that some of top Stanford CS grads are not working as undercover agents..."

Some of them may be...

but the others will undoubtedly spot what's going on. These guys are not dull. They REALLY ARE the smartest guys in the room.