skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> equal signs

I fail to see how using equal signs for assignment (or for defining assignment methods) is a problem with syntax, rather than an enhancement to clarity.

> unquoted regular expressions

What's wrong with that? Regexes are a different type than strings. Why should they look like strings?

> exclamation points

...again, so, what?

> absolute value bars

vertical bars used to set off block argument lists aren't absolute value bars. (Neither are vertical bars used for logical-or.)

> at signs

Again, so?

> You can't even sort-of follow what this code is doing without searching through the manual every third character.

Yes, I can, and not just "sort-of follow" it.

> Ruby syntax is worse than C++ and almost as bad as Perl.

There's no accounting for taste, I suppose.

> there are a large number of syntactical ambiguities, so writing a parser for it should be completely impossible

As Ruby does exist, and is parsed, this is clearly not the case. That said, ruby's syntax is not optimized for machine parsing, its designed to be ruby-developer-friendly rather than ruby-parser-developer-friendly.

If you want something optimized for the developer of the language's parser, look to Lisp.
12 months including places like NZ and AU for $15K isn't terrible though. Costs in SYD/MEL/AKL are higher than somewhere like BKK or KUL. $7k on flights sounded pretty high though.
Well, it would be possible to make the ad-thing part of displaying the message. That's the moment when you have to decrypt it anyhow.
"At Facebook, we take people's privacy seriously..."

I'm afraid they lost me at that point.

I doubt anyone there is going to lose sleep over exposing a mere 6 million pieces of personally identifiable information. No one will get fired.

"Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg, referring to Facebook users who sent him their personal details
In fairness, if it's only accessible via VPN then your Roundcube instance is not part of the web.
How should we go about identifying the federal prosecutors?
It's a pun... cooler heads prevailing doesn't mean peoples' heads are actually cooling down. The title was a play on words about the upset about global warming dying down.
I am surprised to see you compare the OS X and Windows experiences. They seem completely dissimilar to me.

With Windows, it seems like every little thing needs some complex installer procedure that splats files all over the system. Every program needs dozens of DLLs, and the only way to get rid of it is to run an uninstaller that hopefully remembers everything it created, and even more hopefully doesn't break anything else on your machine.

With Mac OS X, there's generally no installation process at all. You download the app, and you put it where you want it to go, and then you run it, and that's it. Nothing goes anywhere and you don't need any special process to manage it.

The experience I've had on Ubuntu is sort of midway between these. There's a complex installation process, and everything has to deal with it, and shit gets plastered all over your machine and there's no way you can keep track of it all, but at least things generally mostly work most of the time.

But really: why manage complexity when you can do away with it?
Looks cool, the link to Pricing on the homepage is linking here though:
http://d1jbsbf1vyg6lk.cloudfront.net/cloudcannon.com/raw/pri...
Delivering Two Kinds of Quality
Cheqbook gives 6 months free to stranded Indinero customers
It is really scary to think that you could have drowned in swimming class. I will definitely be attentive of my own children when they are learning. Glad you survived!
So far this year, there has been more sea ice worldwide than average. (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily....) Mostly on account of there being more than average in the Antarctic, and a little less than average in the arctic.
Antarctic has been setting records(maximums, not minimums) in the last few years in terms of sea ice extent.
Nope it is inaccurate. There never was a consensus about exactly how much the earth would warm up in the future. Scientists always had different models showing different projections.

The consensus was that (1) the earth is warming (2) if not stopped this will have catastrophic effects on the human race soon. Both of those things are still true and there is still the same consensus about them.
The animals one obviously doesn't count [1], since the petition was created September 27th, 2011, and the order halting the use of animals was issued September 20th, 2011.

[1] Barring time travel
No, it's not wrong. You are reading it at its simplest level. Further, you have 3 replies saying the exact same thing. The quantity of saying something by the same person does not increase its quality.

As of right now, you have 30% of the comments in this submission. It really seems like you have a strange bias here to argue over something so trivial.
I agree, re. makes no sense; the man wrote a fine article. I have read one of Tucker Max's books and I am not proud to admit it. But this was one heck of a well-written article.
> OS administrators want a maintainable, supportable system that minimises the number of security vulnerabilities they're exposed to and packages software in a consistent fashion.

I am the administrator of the machines I use. I am also the user of the machines I use. I care far, far more about my experience as a user than I do as an administrator. The less administrating I have to do the better. As the administrator of my array of personal computers what I want is for everything to work, and to stay working, and for new things never, ever, under any circumstances to break old things.
Upstream developers don't know best, either. Packagers sometimes make bad decisions, just like upstream does, because we're all people. "Install our software the way we think you should" is a point of view, but not a very smart one unless it's accompanied by a willingness to be persuaded otherwise. This particular upstream developer clearly hasn't seen an OS-agnostic cross-platform package manager like pkgsrc, where one of the packager's tasks is often to make software more portable than upstream cares to bother with. To take one obvious example, we make sure libtool works on all our supported platforms, and then we make sure software with its own precious all-the-world's-a-Linux way of linking shlibs uses libtool instead. Do we try to feed back our portability fixes upstream? Of course. Does upstream always want them? Of course not. Are they wrong to not care? We sometimes think so. Are we wrong to patch their code? They sometimes think so. They have their goals, we have ours. If anyone reliably knows best about anything, it's users.
Awesome pure CSS spiral animation
It's featured on the front page of http://codepen.io/
Well, for what it's worth all we have at home are HP calculators. I taught my oldest kid to use them. He's the only kid in his school with an HP41. His math and science teachers didn't know how to use it.
Our planet just had the third warmest May in recorded history
Which is why I said they should start there. I did not say it was a completed solution. Right now, Google is not even trying to protect their users by any technical means, relying instead on the courts.
I postulate that it would be a good place to start.
Android smartwatch is loaded with wireless
I was asked how I would roll out a kernel upgrade to a datacenter on the Moon. I thought that was a little silly (though I get that it was an easy way to provide strict constraints on a problem).
Indian government 'sets up' system to tap phone calls, e-mail
This is exactly the reason the fourth amendment was written. Not to learn the secret recipe behind your grandma's cookies. But because it's extremely tempting for those in power to want to abuse their power to avoid being accountable to the public for their actions. After all, they're human, and in cases of stress, like potential embarassment some folks would be facing under Wikileak's releases, it's easy to justify bending the rules in your favor.
but the consensus on how much it is heating up is 'cooling'.
> it's not a single cause, and will not be simple to fix, and is not just about the insecticides.

Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence indicating the insecticides as a substantial contributing factor that banning them seems a reasonable precaution. Once we do that, we can see how well the bees recover. It's certainly possible that banning neonicotinoids will not be sufficient, but the odds seem pretty good that it will be necessary -- perhaps one step of several.

In short: don't confuse a scientific question with a public policy question. Sometimes the risk of not taking action outweighs the risk of acting on incomplete science.
You can't separate the two. The reason why foreigners are uploading their data to the NSA when they use Google is because of the way Google makes its money and engineers its services.

Compare this to Apple's iMessage or FaceTime - Apple cannot decrypt the contents of the messages, and therefore cannot give the contents to the government.

They designed the service this way because their users pay for the service as part of the cost of the devices they sell so they don't require access to the data for behavioral profiling.
If you really want to think like a conspiracy theorist, then they would LET him win so that they had a completely controllable puppet in office.
wow, guys, the argument that the article is aimed at is not a scientific argument but a political argument.

FTA : "This isn't a crisis for climate science. This is just the way science goes. But it is a crisis for climate-policy advocates who based their arguments on the authority of scientific consensus."
I think the US government showed in the last ten years that they don't care much about those "basic human rights". I'm pretty sure torture, drone killings, locking innocent people away without due process, and silencing dissidents also kind of violates the IBoHR.
Just for fun, what is 0/0?

Mathematicians often assign definitions to things that are undefined in other contexts to make things more self-consistent. The fact there is a good case to be made that c/0 is undefined for all c doesn't mean it must always be so in every possible instance.
An unbreakable code! Or we can send around 'encrypted' messages that are completely devoid of meaning, but incredibly suspicious...
Isn't the more important point not the rate of increase, but the effect current temperatures are having on the ice caps?

For example, I can sit a turkey in my oven at 20 degrees (c) and raise the temperature 20% per minute, but that rate of increase doesn't actually cook the bird. Once the temperature gets above 140 degrees, then cooking starts to take place (I'm not completely sure of the temps, but go with me). The temperature doesn't have to continue rising, every minute that the bird is held over a certain temperature, that bird will continue to cook. May be slow, may be long, but the damage is being done.

Same with your reference to ice core measurements and melting ice caps. It doesn't matter if the temperture continues to increase at the current rate, or the rate slows. As long as the average temperature is kept above 0, the ice will continue to melt. And the article doesn't say temps are decreasing, just that the rate of increase is less than expected.
We're going to have to switch the title to 6K here right away.
I absolutely agree that they aren't even trying, but starting there would reduce the effectiveness of their ad business and hence reduce revenue, so I don't see that happening.
for science? maybe; for pushing policy? nope -- it's very important that the numbers be the same (have a consensus) and that they be higher.
This.

Very few people understand the importance, and benefits, when they have never seen anything other than .msi[1], .dmg, or worse, .zip.

[1]: Lets just pretend for a minute that Windows software only comes as plain MSI.. all the various .exe's which splatter stuff all over the disk simply doesn't exist.
But that's why you have to fight whatever government collects your taxes for those very rights on your own.

Why? It's not the government collecting my taxes that is reading my emails and generally spying on my communications, it's the US'. How does fighting it help me?
Key quote:

"This isn't a crisis for climate science. This is just the way science goes. But it is a crisis for climate-policy advocates who based their arguments on the authority of scientific consensus."
I agree.

(And it reminds me too much of baby formula, which is proven to be less healthy than the real stuff)...
There are a couple of plausible scenarios -
(1) the NSA was running surveillance on all political challengers,
(2) Obama was running against Alan Keyes who had ties to the state department and served on the staff of the National Security Council under Reagan so he could easily have had spook connections, maybe he called in some favors looking for dirt on his opponent.
Still, you do want to remove that dangerous war zone itself. The problem is, to do that, a few group of people at best needs to stick their neck out for the benefit of everyone else.

The way I see it, the problem is that mass cooperation just isn't going to happen. Incentives and benefits must be found at the individual level (altruism counts as a weak incentive), and drawbacks must be dealt with, starting with the gazillion trivial inconveniences that an otherwise privacy aware citizen would have to put up with.

There's a reason why I don't encrypt my hard drive: my OS doesn't do it by default, and taking the time to set it up is just such a drag.
I remember reading several points(Wikipedia)
98% Grand Juries return an indictment, rarely narrowing or broadening the charges;

90% of Federal Criminal Cases are Plea Bargained before trial;

90% of Federal Criminal trials result in a conviction;

This is why the Aaron Swartz was so wrong, once the prosecutor decided to overzealously present the charges to a grand jury, the odds were stacked against him.

Snowden is in big trouble, because in this case its highly unlikely that President Obama will pardon him, although popularly requested to do so.

So yes, the whole prosecution process has runaway from the original goal of justice.
I am pretty sure the CISPA veto and the open access rules were only tangentially affected by the petitions. The open access rules were a response to the treatment of Aaron Swartz, which was creating a media storm that was causing more people to notice the general abuses of power by prosecutors in this country. The CISPA veto threat followed pressure from lobbyists and well-connected corporations.

Did the petitions matter at all? Maybe, but they were not even remotely close to being sufficient to get the administration to do anything. The Obama administration already knows how people feel about the Snowden situation; the petition is basically irrelevant.
If you think OS X's approach has done away with it, you're wrong. Maybe you've found it a worthwhile tradeoff, but flattening each application's dependency tree is still a tradeoff: you get truly independent applications, but you pay for it in duplication, the costs of which are well enumerated in binarycrusader's post. Maybe you mostly don't encounter those costs. Maybe you even believe most people mostly don't encounter those costs. But they do exist.
it was a notable omission to date

That's the reason I submitted this.
"Creative". No.

"Creative and willing to invest financially". Yes.
Why, that's almost as easy as remembering the new number to dial emergency services!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
Criminal DEATH PENALTY complaint filed against Edward Snowden
Presumably, if "A" (male) is pushing forward and initiating sexual action, he's consenting ... the question is whether "B" (female) is also consenting.

The question I'm asking is that if both parties are expressing 'forward motion' in terms of their actions and their body language, is it necessary to have verbal consent?

Or are you violating consent if you assume their apparent physical interest substitutes for verbal consent?
> It could create the exact private service that you are looking for, but it intentionally does not.

Most of Google's products are "webapp" equivalents to traditional desktop software. It is not possible to create webapps which are private against the webapp's host.

What you are essentially arguing is that Google ought to shut down its current business in favor of writing security-conscious desktop apps. The result would be that users would all jump ship to another provider, and then Google would go out of business and people on HN would be complaining that $NEW_COMPANY doesn't respect user privacy.

If you want to suggest a course of action that will improve user privacy, it must be one that users will actually be willing to support.
Personally, I would want him to stand trial on two conditions:

(1) He and Glenn Greenwald are allowed to have an open, public televised debate with President Obama, the congressmen that are members of the intelligence committee, and the judges that sit on the FISC court. This would be done in 3 sessions Frost/Nixon style.

(2) He is promised fair just treatment, that is made public so that he cannot be subjected to solitary confinement and other torturous conditions.
> you install a package with apt, it pulls in all dependencies, and it Just Works

And what happens in the case of a package not available through apt? ("Sorcery! All applications must be packaged! All shared libraries must be packaged individually!")

And there went your afternoon installing some just-slightly-uncommon piece of software
vannevar, could you take a moment to explain why you are so intent on understanding this article as an attack on science instead of what it really is (namely, an attack on politics)?
You are correct:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/8/congress-deal...
we should all dedicate a percentage of our bandwidth to spewing random numbers at random listeners

providing endless cover to actual chatter

a crypto tithing
It would be (relatively) trivial for congress to decide to make it so that "rounding up every red haired and freckled person and putting them in a concentration camp" would be legal.

The question isn't legality, per se - it's whether we believe that it follows the values and principles that we want our country to have.
huhtenberg and jzoidberg noted that I'm talking about a different program than what Tesla's offering.

That's true, I'm talking about what role battery swapping would ideally play in the infrastructure long term, vice supercharging stations or home charging.

If 20 years from now Tesla's battery swapping operation means they control the entire fuel delivery system for transportation in the US, then we have other problems.
Show me a new laptop that isn't a netbook that is lower than 1024px wide. This guy is living in '99 designing solely for 800px wide screens.
Did you miss the new documents published yesterday? They've been all over HN today, and they contradict most everything Obama and the NSA have been saying for the past week.
Yes, and my /usr/local isn't a freaking .git repository. Homebrew, bikeshedding what MacPorts achieved a decade previous (and getting it horribly wrong) since 2009
Yes, if what you reveal is unethical but legal. Laws are not handed down from the heavens; laws are created by a notoriously corrupt set of human beings (politicians), and can easily become disconnected from morality.
One of the key questions is, can consent be given via physical actions and body language?

Or does it have to be given via verbal instructions?

If a girl is touching you back, tugging at your clothes, unzipping your fly - is that some form of communication? Or is it meaningless?
<insert name of fallacy here>
Every browser seems to implement its own password management scheme. None of them are as good as the same functionality that already exists in the operating system. Browsers should request access to passwords from the OS when needed, perhaps once per session.
What about sending email to <facebook-username>@facebook.com? Then it just ends up in their "Other" box in Facebook messages, but at least (I suspect) it won't bounce.
The Mac OS X Keychain[1] acts as a gatekeeper and has fine grained permissions so you can let one application have default access to certain passwords (e.g., web passwords) but not other (IMAP/local file shares), or even to require the app to prompt you each time the app wants access to a password.

Of course, that's assuming all the software is well-behaved. You could have local malware that pops up a fake master password dialog, trick a user into filling it out, pulling the keychain out of the user's Library, then decrypting the whole keychain file manually.

Once there's malware running as the user himself, all bets are off. This is why iOS is probably the most secure OS out there - there's no chance for malware to get on the device.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keychain_(Apple)
What's difficult about that function? It's terse, but very understandable.

Oh, the inability to parse Ruby shouldn't be held against it. It has (at the least) a context-sensitive grammar. So do lots of languages, including HTML and perl.

Not being able to parse it doesn't really mean what you think it means. It just means that in order to figure out what it does programmatically, you have to evaluate it. Its unparseability makes certain things impossible, like writing a perfect syntax highlighter. Also makes building certain tools you'd normally see in an IDE difficult.
CSS Hat converts PSD layers to CSS | Webdesigner Depot
I've mentioned before something like "Yeah, I feel old, cause I know what a TSR is (was?)" and some younger kid in the room said "oh, my uncle used to have a TRS80, yeah, those were crap.".

The LOL was strong with that one, but not for the reasons he thought.
Interesting, because I would look at the UPS box as the equivalent of the packet headers. Looking inside box or packet would be forbidden if I had my way.
I might be able to comment better if the term "projects" were better defined. It just depends on, well, the nature of the dependencies. Most libraries depend on other libraries. Often at least three layers deep.

If you could explain how your philosophy would deal with, for example, nginx and Apache both depending on libssl, which itself depends on libcrypto, which depends on libz and libc (both of which are also separate independent dependencies of Apache and nginx) then maybe we could discuss it better.

Oh, and in theory I should be able to swap libssl for libgnutls arbitrarily. How do we handle that?
Yes, because the most criminal thing you can do is reveal criminal activity by the government.
I love this story. It gives a strong impression of having interesting philosophical implications, but I have no idea what they are.

I hope I can offer a little advice without being too annoying: if you are going to use justified text, especially with narrow columns, you need to implement some kind of hyphenation. There are JS libraries that do this now, I think.
Complying with search warrants would not be nearly as problematic if Google didn't capture so much data about its users, or made a bigger effort to prevent itself from reading it (and hence be unable to provide it).

See http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...
There was a lot of illegal activity, or at least potential illegal activity, uncovered. Most notably perjury by officials, and violation of a FISA strikedown (which the EFF is trying to dig into).

The level of illegality is unclear, because we cannot investigate and the only court that can determine that consists of government officials, in secret, and no oversight. Almost every action they are taking could be completely illegal, we have no way of knowing or assessing.
ShowHN: GatedBox - Secure and private online everything