skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's definitely a decent list, but the problem for me is that you are also forced to have EVERYTHING ELSE! It's all nicely required in the for you in your app and there aren't straightforward ways to remove 90% of the stuff you don't want.

I work with rails every day for the last 6+ years and it was a revelation when I started. Now I still think it works decently well for large web-apps, but it's just grown way to big over the years. Basecamp is awesome and a great proving ground, but I'd wager the vast majority of apps written in RoR come no where close to needing most of what's included today.
Well some radio stations do provide information about a song with the right equipment. HD Radio has that capability, as well as RDS (radio data system) which may be found in more modern radios before HD spectrum. That said, many radio stations that broadcast an RDS signal may not actually provide correct information.
Pandora, Spotify, Google All-Access, et al., certainly do a better job about informing the listener and as such I'm better informed about the music I now listen to.
I think you are confusing two different issues: publicly threatening to arrest and prosecute him for capital offenses while he is outside of the practical reach of the US government and seeking to arrest and prosecute him.

You can do the second without doing the first; indeed, the first can be actively counterproductive to the second, since he cannot be arrested and prosecuted without first being brought within the practical reach of the US government, which the public threats to him (and the public threats to other sovereign states) have made less, not more, likely.

> Look at it from a game theory perspective; the US government 'lost' the first game to Snowden. The only reason they are still engaging with him is that the US is playing a repeating game. They need to make the penalty for leaking high enough to persuade other potential leakers to stay quiet.

Making public threats that make acheiving the stated goals of those threats less likely, thus demonstrating impotence, is not a particularly effective method of doing that.
Really, a million eyes on it? Okay, lets go with that,

to compile OpenSSl you need a compiler and an entire toolchain, an operatingsystem, microcode and hardware. In any layer it is possible for an organization such as NSA to do its dirty deeds.

They dont fabricate their own chips/hardware for fun. Well, maybe for fun too, but not only for fun.
Say no to synching and RSS
That update is "for backers only" so if you did not back the project, you can't read it.
SourceTree 1.0 Released, including Mercurial support
You're welcome to make any argument about PRISM. But if your goal is to discredit the program and ensure others like it won't be established, the legal argument is stronger and more direct: Government programs can't violate constitutional rights, regardless of their efficacy. Period.

Why dance around your opponent when you know where to place a powerful right-hook?
I'm very open to suggestions and improvements - just hope this helps some people! I was just kind of sick of developing WordPress themes with just PHP, HTML, and CSS and this made things a lot more fun for me without having to use a plugin or anything.
Somehow that's not nearly enough.

Amazing that he was able to buy his own island and donate $100MM+ to Oxford University.
For a VC your company is just 1 of 1000 they have invested in and so they are focused more on the numbers game. But for you it could be your life's work. It seems taking VC money early on is a big mistake for serious founders.
True, it doesn't protect from every threat model in existence, I've been considering setting up some kind of third party reflector model, but the problem there is that the termination point for the plaintext recipients still requires trust at some level.

I recognise this isn't perfect, but the very fact that in various stories a fuss has been raised about data retention times indicates it might not be completely useless to close the window of vulnerability, another comment in this thread mentions monitoring the incoming messages via IMAP IDLE also which is another idea, but once again there is a non zero window of plaintext messages on the server.

And if nothing else, the thousands of spam messages this will armor with strong encryption will give the fascists something to waste their time on.
I think it's about the metadata. Sending PGP encrypted emails still leaves info such as where you were when you sent it.
Just how many lives has terrorism claimed in the past decade?

Smoking has probably claimed more lives just today than terrorist attacks on US soil in the past decade. So I don't think it warrants any action at all.

Let's face it the aim of terrorism is to scare people and if we are so scared that we're giving away basic human rights (and correspondence secrecy is a basic human right) then the terrorist won.
Agreed, it has to be battled at both ends.

I tend to assume that Microsoft Windows has backdoors, given their track record and their corporate culture of bending to the will of the government. This means that anything you run off of Windows is already compromised. Open-source operating systems are one way to remove this unknown. The largest ones have the eyeballs of thousands of people scrutinizing them at all times.

I can't speak to hardware backdooring because I know nothing about it. Would this be able to affect end-to-end encryption like GPG? I'm assuming it would have to have extremely complicated analysis to understand the "bigger picture" of the instructions being run on the CPU...and logging every instruction is beyond the capabilities of built-in hardware for most computers, I would think. Are there any good articles on this?

On the other end, the American public needs to wake the fuck up and realize that just because one of us isn't a terrorist doesn't mean this doesn't affect each of us, individually. The government works for us, and we wrote the constitution, not the government. It is ultimately our job to enforce the constitution.

I'm starting to wonder if Americans even deserve free speech if all it's used for is to take pictures of your lunch and post it on instagram, or free press if it only covers a useless string of mundane sludge while dancing around the issues that are defining us as a people.
Yeah, it is both. It does seem a little counter-intuitive to some people, and I get made fun of a bit for it.
The 3 Month Challenge: Write a book & build a list of 1,000 email subscribers
For anyone who is interested in this, I highly recommend listening to the podcast of Richard Pogge's Astronomy 141 course at Ohio State Uni.

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast141/#lectures
(iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/id559775126 )

Here's the overview:

Astronomy 141, Life in the Universe, is an introduction to Astrobiology. The topics covered in this course lie at the interfaces between astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, and the earth and planetary sciences. We will learn about scientists' ongoing quest for answers to some of the most fundamental human questions: How did life originate on Earth? Is there life on other worlds? Are we alone in the universe? What is the long-term future of life in the universe?
Why would you expect the US government, or ANY government to respect the right of privacy of citizens of other countries?

I want to see what the reaction is when we find out that some foreign country is spying on all communications of American citizens and retaining all their data. For sure it is happening. Someone else mentioned GCHQ UK possibly has the same kind of program running with agreements with NSA. Let's just wait for that one to be exposed. Or maybe China. Or Russia. Or N Korea.
As of right now we don’t want automatic memes on the home page. Working on something even better as we speak.

We’ll keep you all posted (@DropMeme)
Thanks for your feedback @vinhboy
You don't get $250k in exchange for the napkin. You'll be able to possibly convince someone to pay $25k for ~9% of the napkin, contingent on you devoting the next months/years of your life to exploring napkin-like directions until it either burns or blossoms. (If you already have a product with revenue/traction, there's plenty of reasons to counsel AGAINST taking the money at those terms, by the way. Or any terms, for that matter.)
"Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism.".

Hahaha. You made a funny.

On a serious note, do you have anything to back that statement up besides your own opinion?

The primary goal of these programs and of the government is to control a population. If they die its not so much too control, but rest assured these agencies have no qualm of taking or ruining a life or 100 000 lives to further their own interests.
Whistleblowers do indeed need protection. Unfortunately for Snowden, current whistleblower laws only protect him if he leaked to his agencies IG;

Disclosure of information that is required by law or Executive Order
to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or the conduct
of foreign affairs is unprotected, unless made to the agency’s Inspector
General, to “another employee designated by the head of the agency to
receive such disclosures” or to the Office of the Special Counsel.

Obviously these laws need to be improved, but selective enforcement leaves a ton of room for politics to infiltrate the whistleblowing. It was only a few years ago that Bush's special council at the OSC was arrested for doing precisely that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Counsel#Scott...
Well there are issues of where you do the computation and what can be done in parallel. A language could help by having well defined semantics that makes this easier. Embedding one language in another (as with SQL) is a pain as a programmer. Although no solutions that caught on emerged here despite some promising research.
I wonder if any Rubyists said something similar pre-Rails.
Barnes & Noble to stop making Nook tablet
> That pmap is a drop-in for map giving instant speed gains?
That's odd. I've never heard that.

That was just an example of how programming without state makes it easy to scale it over multiple cores.

> Like anything pmap has its tradeoffs.

No one said anything about pmap being a drop in replacement for map. If pmap didnt have tradeoffs there wouldnt be a 'map' and just pmap.Common Sense. I am not sure why you are even mentioning that. As I said that was just an example of ease of writing multithreaded programs in clojure. Which was one of the main points in the blog post. Did you get a chance to read the blog linked to this post?
A reply does no such thing. They can say that your request is denied without even looking to see if the information exists first.

They're not saying, "It's there, we're just not going to admit it." They're saying "We're not even going to begin looking for it."
Why not start such a site yourself? Even if you are unable to dive too deep, you can leave questions and people can answer.

OTOH, I think SO covers a lot of ground if you have questions. I also like the annotated source code movement in the JS community with annotated source codes available for many libraries. http://www.explainjs.com/ is helping people deep dive quickly.
Oh, cool.
Clearly the right-hook hasn't knocked them out yet - which is perhaps why even the strongest boxers supplement their fist power with at least a little foot movement.
I agree and disagree:

GPG has a sucky API and crazy CLI. It's a stack of eggs that everyone is scared to improve.

People don't even try to understand the bare basics of PKI or even security because they are fundamental lazy and not required too. No one expects them to understand the math, just the few processes required for basic usage. If you can understand the arcane rules of baseball, or how to drive a stick, or solder, or field strip a pistol or basic cooking, you can learn how to "use" encryption.
Hmm what would happen if the entire (US) Hacker News readership sent in an FOIA request at the same time. Maybe we can destroy their photocopiers?
"...I knocked up a lot of stuff which I wanted to write about."

...you did... what?
The Ruby on Rails Tutorial for Rails 4.0 final
I starting to get the feeling that the best way to "encrypt" my data and stay safe from the watchful eyes of all the various agencies around the world is to just to go back to good old fashioned mail that physically gets posted in a box!
Gliese 667, the triple star system hosting the new planetary trio
For anyone else that's about to fire up a search...

MRI: "Matz's Ruby Interpreter or Ruby MRI (also called CRuby) is the reference implementation of the Ruby programming language." (with thanks to Wikipedia).
With ng-animate, angular completes the circle of defining HTML DOM behavior in a pure declarative way. I can't wait for this to go to the stable branch.
To whomever it concerns: Pressing a downward arrow is easy, if you can, also put your words where your clicky clicky is. Lest you want me to think you're pouting or something.
I personally do not think that Concerns are a good idea, so I probably will not include anything about them. I wrote a blog post a while back: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-05-07-mixins--a-refa...
The article starts off with the English problem description, but it seems very clear that wasn't the logical starting point. It was framed in Haskell first and then worked back to the English.

There's nothing wrong with that. But I think it's a bit disingenuous for the author to say he started with the English first. Who would describe cooperative threads that way without having a deep understanding of how they were about to implement them in Haskell?
Give those monkeys some respect please. Name any other species that have gone from walking around to flying in less than 100 years; gone from just barely flying to flying to the moon, walking there and flying home in 70 years; have completely eradicated a disease that killed millions of their numbers over the years (Smallpox); doubled its average lifespan; domesticated a competitive apex predator (Canus Lupes); build up a planet-wide network of invisible signals of lights such that a message can be send from one place on earth to the other in less time than it takes to say it out loud; build a bomb that can level a city - and used them as a basis for creating peace.

Yeah, we are not perfect, why would we be? We were the monkeys that were thrown out of the trees, that were forced out of Africa and into the icy Siberia and semi-cold Europe, we were the sure bet to lose and yet not only did we survive, we flourished.
I didn't downvote you but the only significant advantage of the lisp syntax is macros. I was always under the impression that the syntax is a price for macros. If macros aren't really used, I don't see reasons for the lisp syntax.
I'm curious as to why having that stuff available is a bad thing?
I agree. In fact, I wish that HN users wouldn't post links to Vice at all. The quality of research and reporting is generally poor, and the tone is sensational.

Plus, the reporters' motives are questionable because Vice is a strange hybrid between a news outlet and an ad agency. Its executives have publicly acknowledge this. [1]

Whenever I point this out, someone always says, "Well, yeah, but all news is messed up." As a former investigative journalist, I find this to be a stupid argument. Americans have an incredible number of news sources to choose from. There are plenty of independent outlets with greater journalistic integrity; those who feel that all news is on par with Vice need to realize their options.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/08/130408fa_fact_...
There isn't consensus on what the vague term "startup" means. Here's a different definition, from Steve Blank:

> "A startup is an organization formed to search for a
> repeatable and scalable business model." [1]

[1] http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...
Agreeing with everyone else here: there's no magic, but macros and metadata are fairly late topics in Clojure, and starting on a piece of code responsible for distributing code across a network... well, it wouldn't be my favourite place to start.

Of course, the power of Clojure is that you actually can express this concept in the language. RMI looks pretty ugly by comparison.
Startups are not about growth. People have to stop thinking that way. Startups are about an idea that's new and not tried before. That's why you can have a medical startup raise $10 million and produce NO GROWTH for 5 years while they work in the laboratory solving a problem and creating a business that didn't exist before. (shameless plug I wrote about this last October: http://jmlite.tumblr.com/post/33443330774/startup-idea)
You are free to disagree with PG. Doing so doesn't change the fact that he is the sort of authority who gets cited in Wikipedia articles on the topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company

The term "startup" originated during the dot-com bubble. The very origin of the term means it is supposed to apply primarily to new tech companies who are designed to grow fast.

A barber shop is not a startup. It is a small business. This doesn't make it any less legitimate as a venture. It just distinguishes it in terms of the nature of its business and industry.

edit: if you're going to downvote, at least have the courage to voice your disagreement as a reply.
Microsoft Ventures
it's a lisp. This is 2013, compilers can deal with +-/, I don't need to.*

Modern Lisps use homoiconicity not because it is easier for the compiler, but because it is easier for the human. In languages with syntactic macros, (as opposed to string-interpolating macros), one manipulates the program's AST directly as a data structure. Making the code's AST regular, predictable, and explicit facilitates code transformation, which is an integral part of programming in a Lisp dialect.
Yes, it is easy to defend you side because, that is politics. The majority defend their interest. and if there's enough segmentation, there may even be a close to fair compromise.

Only problem now is that it's not about majority, but accumulated power. Those policies were never to defend the country (and by believing that you make me question my judgment to even start to argue with you). They are there for specific interests.
But, but, but we know for certain that
there's nothing to worry about, nothing
wrong, no violation of the Fourth
Amendment. How do we know? Because
the FISA court, all bow down, assume
an appropriately servile, submissive, obsequious,
respectful posture, told us so!

And we all know that the FISA court is
infallible, the great Wizard ("pay
no attention to the man behind the
curtain"), deserving of all our trust, right?

Thank you; thank you; thank you, oh
wonderful, all knowing, all seeing,
all wise, all powerful, wonderful
FISA court watching over us and
taking such good care of us!!

FISA court, I don't know who you
are, where you are, what you do,
or how to contact you or review
your work, but I know that you
are now watching over all of us.

What a new day! For 200+ years we've
had the restrictive Constitution
from those skeptical founding fathers
and suffered under such paranoia
as

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance"

when all we needed was the wonderful
Father FISA court! Why didn't the
founding fathers think of this????
I can believe that Hitler, Stalin,
Mao, and even Pol Pot thought of this --
why not our founding fathers?

At a secure, undisclosed location in the
private chambers of the FISA court:

"Darn, why can't we keep those
ink pads for our rubber stamps in stock?

Oh, well, the rest of the day is shot.
Back to watching those SnapChat
intercepts from Sweden!".
Here's how I interpreted the letter: "We cannot confirm or deny the thing you requested exists because that thing you requested is classified". Unless all FOIA fail, it seems to me, in some broad sense, that they just confirmed the existence of the requested material.
Yup, and that makes it harder to do in secret.
> Were tens of millions of Germans really involved in a conspiracy to industrially murder millions? Of course. They just weren't aware of it.

This isn't true. There has been quite a bit of research and when Germans say they didn't know anything they were just making excuses after they lost the war.

I picked this out because it seemed to be quite central to your argument.
I deactivated last year for 4 months.. Then logged in and began exactly where I left off.
> What if the next "national traitor" uses his Top Secret clearance to use that data stream to his own financial benefit?

Who's to say this hasn't already happened? I wouldn't put it past the 'Gang of Eight'[1] to use the NSA as a means to maintain their seat in power by quashing opposition, especially since it's been widely reported that the thorough congressional oversight has as many holes as Swiss cheese.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence)
What bazillion is trying to get across is that people are people. They tend towards that which is most convenient and least painful. Sure, HN could come up with the worlds most secure, least detectable, most effective means of communicating with anyone, anywhere at anytime. It will also be a PITA for people to use. Hence, when your mind is occupied with blowing people up or kidnapping someone or hijacking a plane or stealing state secrets, you end up not spending a lot of time on the aforementioned Perfect Comms Path.. you use gmail and pgp the contents (maybe)
Its tough this guy was such a legend and so I thought "Creator of Rapid Application Development" would probably pique most people's interests amongst Hacker News' demographic.

I had also considered this:

Largest Benefactor to Oxford University, Dr. James Martin, dies at 79
I remember reading someone say that much of the class-based OO written in the wild amounts to little more than a function namespacing convention plus a way to jam in a bunch of hidden arguments. That hit home to what I was doing.
I think you're mostly on the point, but unless you have serious inside knowledge, I don't know if you can really assume PRISM is about national security and not about other nefarious purposes.
I have a special arrangement with AW to publish independently via leanpub. Book will also be on sale via traditional retail channels once the hardcopy is ready later this year. We view it as separate channels. Traditional retail hits a different customer segment, especially when you start taking into account corporate subscribers to Safari and companies that do bulk purchases, etc.
No. GPG doesn't use the public key to do the actual encryption, it generates an intermediate key, uses that to encrypt the message and encrypts that intermediate key with your public key.
You're missing the first rule of any bureaucracy like the NSA, it has nothing to do with catching terrorists, but far more to do with perpetuating the bureaucracy and increasing it's budget. Catching anyone is a distant second.
> And this is why we all need to start encrypting everything. Every HTTP request, every email. There's strength in numbers and privacy in a crowd.

And strength in numbers is not the only reason to do this. The more people expect that their Internet communications are private by default, the more outrageous it will seem to the general public that encrypted data is an exception to whatever rules there are against storing and targeting data from U.S. citizens. "Encrypt everything by default" is a good policy for changing social attitudes, not just a technological measure to defeat an unconstitutional practice.