skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The choice of words tends to be a good tipoff.

When someone answers a different question than the one asked, or uses different terms that are more flexable in scope or definition. Originally they focused on 'no direct access' and ' no back door'. As a computer person you can understand that there are lots of ways to get information in or out of a system that can be characterized differently than the above phrases. It's like talking to child about a how they got the cookie they have in their hands, did they take it, did they pick it up, did they steal it, did the find it, did it fall off a truck, did a guy name Vinny give it to them because hes a nice guy, etc. And what is the legal definition of 'cahoots' anyway?

A lawyer is talking, so you have to be extremely careful with what they say. "I’m not sure I can say this more clearly: we’re not in cahoots with the NSA and there’s is no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported."
Okay, so it's not a program, maybe it's a project, or a NSL, or and executive order, or a collaboration. Having shown themselves to be complicit in a lie of omission (not saying anything because of gag orders) And having changed their statements a few times their word is suspect and needs to be examined.

It is imposible to prove a negative. That kinda sucks for Google because they have brought into question our trust in them and it may take a good long while to rebuild that trust, even if they tried to.
Sorry to bring this up but this type of thinking seems to be running wild lately on HN regarding anything NSA related....
But it must be said that: Your Logical Fallacy Is: Burden of Proof.

You said that the burden of proof lies not with the person making the claim, but with someone else to disprove.
The burden of proof lies with someone who is making a claim, and is not upon anyone else to disprove. The inability, or disinclination, to disprove a claim does not render that claim valid, nor give it any credence whatsoever. However it is important to note that we can never be certain of anything, and so we must assign value to any claim based on the available evidence, and to dismiss something on the basis that it hasn't been proven beyond all doubt is also fallacious reasoning.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof
To be fair, there was plenty to pick apart, and there was the eerie similarity to the letters from other companies. And they (all) refuted "direct access" but weaseled / legalesed out of any kind of actual refutation of excessive access to data.

This is much clearer. This is what everyone very obviously wanted at the very beginning, and it does seem strange that they didn't do this then, or at all sooner. What took them so long?
On the flipside, their no self-publish policy and required publisher agreements (which need to be able to publish 4 titles a year on the device) is pushing a horse (old market) over going to a car (new market).

They would have been better off just applying discounts to titles that can't be resold or shared (who wouldn't buy the same game for 20% off that way?). Change people with the market and benefits, don't try to change them with bad PR decisions. Apple's customers always liked the virtual keyboard due to the benefits of more screen.

A big fail on the always on 'feature' was for many soliders overseas, they wouldn't be able to play in many cases: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JayJohnson/20130611/194155/The_Xb...
It was written in 1863, you can't expect the author to have the same view on women that we have today.
Iphone resale value
-1000 parroting sycophant empty echo-chamber plastic bobbing head nodder. Reading HN posts last week touched on far more questions and controversies then this writer's twenty minutes of superficial and bent rehashed googling.
> We (hopefully) wouldn't see a huge spike in legitimate prostitution if it were legalized, but we would almost certainly see an uptick.

Maybe in the short-term; it would probably somewhat increase the rate of entry. But removing the powerlessness that comes from illegality would probably also make it much more common for people to be able to move up and out of it and one to other things once they'd entered.
The difference is that ripping a DVD continues to be a pain in the ass for most people, while "ripping" the game disk will presumably be something the XBox makes seamless.
But of course one can't mitm all google traffic without someone noticing.

(Discussion releated to this topic is getting quite redundant on HN. Same discussion in every thread.)
Ask HN: Clojure vs Go
I'm really wanting to get proficient in one of these languages.

I'm a fan of python. Go is really attractive to me for this reason. I feel like it is a language that I could really love.

Clojure is still a bit alien to me. I've gone through tutorials and have built small dummy programs. I feel like this language can make me improve more as an overall programmer. However, I am still skeptical if it will benefit me as much as go.

I'm attracted to both languages because I'm trying to improve on my knowledge of concurrent/parallel programming.

Any reasons to choose one over the other as my next language? For reference I feel like I'm proficient in Python/Java/JavaScript/C++.
Its not the job of government to handle transit alone.
I'm using http://yoleoreader.com which was mentioned here a few weeks ago. It has a couple bugs and lacks mobile but I really like the aesthetic and the attitude of the developer. I'm betting on it.
> They would have been better off just applying discounts to titles that can't be resold or shared (who wouldn't buy the same game for 20% off that way?).

Yes. I feel that MS's Xbox division has forgotten, when they chose to focus on the publishers instead of the consumer and developer, that price is what makes DRM stores like Audible ($15 or less for audiobooks that normally cost $25-$50) or iOS (most games are 0.99 or FREE compared to 19.99-29.99 for mobile games on other platforms) successful. Price is also what keeps people coming back to Steam.

> On the flipside, their no self-publish policy and required publisher agreements

This is something else I don't understand. It's easy to see that self-publishing is what made Apple, Google, and Valve app stores so successful. MS even has a Win 8 app store. I don't understand how they couldn't see that this should apply to Xbox as well when both Sony and Nintendo already realize this. Why cater to large video game publishers when their days are numbered due to the app stores?
Doesn't everyone just fill in 90210?

or does give away my age...
It isn't the job of government to handle transit alone.
I lived in Seattle during the time that you're describing, and you're massively overstating the case.

Even the dirtiest line in the free-ride zone was cleaner than your average SF MUNI line. Maybe that's not a fair comparison, but it's fairer than suggesting that free buses are bad simply because someone might abuse them.

Also, a $2 fare isn't a huge impediment to someone who wants to turn the bus into a shelter. In fact, the worst buses in Seattle for that sort of thing tended to be the airport lines, because you could hop on one of those, and sleep for an hour or two for only a few bucks. By comparison, the free-ride lines were always packed, and made for poor places to sleep. Cost isn't the only consideration.
>It's incredible how the Xbox team thought, "Look at that money over there. Let's take it!" What's next, Wal-Mart charging Ralph Lauren every time a customer comes in wearing a Polo shirt (because why should other clothing companies get free advertising in their store)?

Could you explain this analogy because it makes zero sense to me.

>The other issue? For the author to be completely honest, every "benefit" mentioned in the article should have "for a fee" added to the end of it. It's not very fun or innovative to get nickeled and dimed every step of the way. The fact that the public received 3 different messages about digital sharing costs (the three being no cost, a small fee, and the full price of the game) didn't help matters, either.

Could you link to the three different sharing cost messages?

>Compare that with Xbox One, where games are likely to be in the 10-20GB range and $60.00 (formerly with fees for sharing and resale). If you consider sharing to be going over to a friend's house, entering your password, then waiting 3.5 hours for a download to finish to be in some way innovative or interesting, then you are clearly not the target market for this device. Gamers want instant gratification, not waiting around for downloads and jumping through hoops.

I would imagine they would allow you to play parts of the game without needing to install the whole game, similar to Steam.

>The DRM-laden, no-money-left-behind nature of Xbox One in the context of tech in 2013 (a jungle of price fixing, nickeling/diming, credit card storing, and "convenient" subscription modeling) is precisely the status quo that consumers are finally revolting against.

How is it different than Steam, other than speculating that Microsoft would never aggressively discount games as much as Steam does now (even though it took them several years for their store to be well-liked by gamers)?
How Canonical's CLA prevents others using their code to compete against them
Too little, too late, for Google. If they really cared, they would have spoken up before the leaks.
Saudi Arabia has one of the largest and well supported Air Forces in the middle east, other than Israeli AF. The RSAF has 250+ fighter/attack aircraft in service. F-15s and Tornado's mainly. Also another 120 F-5E/F fighter "trainers" available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Saudi_Air_Force#Current_a...
FreeBSD: 20 years and still running strong
Every time i see a post from medium.com on hacker news it always has some dramatic headline. But then the content tends to be poorly thought out, and more contrarian than insightful.
Dear hacker news gods, please don't feed into tabloid techno-journalism.
Not untrue, but analogous to saying someone wouldn't have died from a gunshot if the ammunition hadn't been sold. It misses the bit where someone pulled the trigger.
A Quantum Computing Problem Solved
I just got a message on twitter that 214.11 might be a DDoS mitigation service.. have emailed linkedin to find out what is what.
>You can easily get to that conclusion by gauging the HD storage shipping with each unit. Add to that the average speed of Internet in the US, and you have a poor situation for over the net gaming.

You can add an external hard drive (supports USB 3.0) and it can act as storage for games.
Many people want to run a certain piece of software in its own machine and docker allows that. Some people thing OpenStack is the right choice for that. OpenStack is great if you are running your servers through AWS, but you want to transition to a self hosted system then you would use OpenStack. In other words its great for building a IaaS but not a PaaS
I am using http://www.feedsapi.org for now in combination with Evernote to forward all my RSS News stories there and with Feedly for ready RSS, works quite good for me and supports Hacker News Ful content RSS.

Disclaimer: I am involved in http://www.feedsapi.org
My team and I have implemented what you call Ultimate Tic Tac Toe as what we call Tic Tac Toe Ten. We put it out for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and have made board game sets to go into school districts with starting in 2008. If any of you in this community are interested in helping us to build out the backend analytics infrastructure to help us make the academic breakdown of this game useful for teachers and students please visit our community at https://www.facebook.com/tictactoeten and drop me a message or DM us on Twitter (@tictactoeten) ... we are also always looking for volunteers at our school tournaments where we pit kids against each other March Madness style with brackets and give out prizes to the winners ... we are here in the Bay Area, hope to meet some of you guys soon :)

cheers,
@bware218
At this point, it seems more plausible to me that Google is telling the truth here and the Prism slides are either inaccurate or refer to DPI reconstruction or just a live hosting/presentation environment for conventionally-delivered dossiers. I can't see Google intentionally making statements which are both incorrect and falsifiable to this degree, especially since it looks like more leaks are coming, or actual official declassifications.

There is absolutely some horrible shit going down -- backbone sniffing and DPI, mass telephone metadata (and either OTA or carrier-delivered copies of content for "interesting" numbers and maybe areas), etc. And, there are serious future trust issues with cloud computing. But, at this time, I don't think NSA has pervasive access at Google -- I'm sure they (and the Chinese, Israel, and others) have Google staff who they know are likely to be "friendly" if they actually did need to do something (much much more applicable to non-US agencies), but even that doesn't need to be formalized until used.

Because NSA has so many other tools (legal and technical) to use, I don't think they do high-odds-of-being-detected stuff, certainly not on a widespread basis. Active MITM of connections, or really intrusive requests to companies, seems unlikely.

This is not the case for China, Israel, etc., so they are far far more likely to use external or internal attacks (other than legal) to get data from companies. And, guess what -- look at the news or your own networks -- lots of attacks from China, some quite sophisticated and successful.

I'd actually say there are higher odds of a given Google SRE being purely commercially evil and selling access to crime organizations than that NSA is doing this actively against Google.

This all means the threat is every bit as real as if NSA were doing it pervasively if you're likely to be a target. I don't think we ever thought NSA was using its pervasive monitoring for anything other than ultimately going after some specific targets, not for general law enforcement risk, so the situation is no different either way -- you can mostly trust Google if you blend in, but can't if you're "interesting".

Against some kind of pervasive secret program involving many people: The odds of a single Googler on any team being a "whistleblower" are far higher than the odds at NSA, and we've had a lot of espionage leaks over the years, plus actual leakers.

Occam's razor is that Google is telling the truth here.
I read it as a response to the line:

> that same exact logic would also justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq...

and it argued that justifying the Iraq war is on a different scale, not comparable in either death toll or long-term effects to what has taken place thus far in the Arab Spring.
Yeah, as much as I love the aesthetics, I'm predicting poor sales unless the price is comparable to other desktops. It's precisely the reason I avoided the Cube back in 2000/2001 and opted for the Tower.
It is professional quality, as "professional" is not by definition a qualitative word up for debate, one is either paid for their work or not. And I'd like to see your work that you consider "more" professional. This is hacker news, a site that celebrates people making what they can with what they have.
Kickstarter Thinks Creepy Dating Book Is ‘Abhorrent,’ But Declines to Remove It
But that's my point: If you're trying to write about the future but are getting held back by the narrow views of your present, you may at best produce an entertaining curiosity, but not something of lasting use. The other works discussed here have prevailed because they contain still-valid insights on human behavior and do a pretty good job avoiding falling into period-conventional thinking.

That said, I actually think not being sexist in storytelling is pretty easy, it's about thinking about people instead of genders, and good writers have known that at all times and put characters first.

Basically, I'm not saying Verne's views (or perhaps that character's views -- I'd like to hear more from someone who's actually read it) can't be explained in context, I'm saying if that's representative of how the work tries to extrapolate into the future I'm not getting the vibe it's any good at it and actually still relevant today.
For anyone watching the EM Markets space, the RMB's rise has been one of the most discussed topics of the year. With economic growth focused on exports, a weaker yuan was integral and the source of much scrutiny from the US. So there has been confusion as to why the government has made moves to strengthen the yuan when economic data has been deteriorating.

The real reason is that saving the exporters is no longer the priority. Exports have been falling and the trade surplus has shrunk, and global demand is still weak. Instead, the government is focusing on investment/capital flows. With a strengthening RMB, flows/hot money is less likely to leave the country and the government is actively courting capital inflows. If they were to let the yuan appreciate now, the amount of investors running for the exits would be unprecedented and cause widespread panic in the market, and stability is their current goal.
Not even close. They come out at about 1/2 of the new mac pro: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/search?utf8=%E2%9C...
People don't want the hassle of owning a gaming PC vs a laptop for many reasons.

It's much easier to just buy a console that will last for 8 years rather than worry about your computer getting out of date in 3 years.

It's easier for groups of friends to play on a console because there is local multiplayer support on console games.

Many gamers want to game on their couch and use their game console for other media (video streaming and music).

People will buy what their friends have (hint: it's consoles)
If the NSA was using our webcams to spy on us, someone would discover it within hours.
Magnesium Diboride’s Superconducting Properties Enhanced by Carbon Atoms
When I worked in retail we asked everyone for their Zip code regardless of their payment method. We were told that it was so that the store could determine where their customers were coming from. Half the time we would just type in the store's Zip Code so that we didn't have to bother the customer.

Gas stations on the other hand use Zip Codes as a way to prevent fraud. I've had my card rejected before by typing in the wrong Zip Code.
This post reminds me of the heady days of "high-value" SEO consulting. Even if you have extensive experience despite having no external case studies, you still don't have experience doing it for real clients which is where a good deal of the value is earned.
Penetrating the quantum nature of magnetism
I find the final p Mail Chimp extremely hard to distinguish, especially at smaller sizes. Fix that and it looks great!

The p looks like its saying Chimyo
The problem is that Google's business model fundamentally makes it into a liability for a free society. The more they stockpile data on people, the more dangerous they become.

Unless we have a change in the constitution that spells out a clear limit on the government's right to access this data (and for that matter, limits google's own rights to use it), the risk of misuse will only grow. Even if the NSA's access today is somewhat limited, the risk won't get any less.

Google is like a fireworks factory waiting for a stray spark.
The OP did say "I go months...YEARS without playing video games".
>That would have been really innovative.

And a great way to lose out on billions of sales.
Kenneth Wilson, Nobel winner who explained nature’s sudden shifts, dies at 77
One of the things that I learned from studying Lean Manufacturing was to see a company's primary goal as generating customer value. Extracting enough cash to be sustainable is important, but value comes first.

In this case, I look at the 24-hour thing, and MS's apparent horror of somebody playing for a few days on a friend's license. And I say: that is value being created. Somebody had fun. That's the whole fucking point of the enterprise. They should be happy.

Now they do want to capture reasonable amounts of revenue, so I get why they don't want to sell exactly one copy of a game that gets shared around an entire city. But if some rule creates only a modest increase in revenue while destroying a lot of value (or creating a lot of customer headache), then it strikes me as dumb. And when they do something that may get them no extra revenue at all, or might even drive away paying customers, then it's shockingly dumb. It's being willing to make a pie smaller, as long as you get a bigger fraction of what's left.

There's a financial saying that I think applies: bulls make money and bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered.
You need the disc in the tray to play games installed to the hard drive (that weren't digital downloads).
First entanglement between light and optical atomic coherence
Indeed, here is the second edition: http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Piano-President-Patrick-Wensink...
How to keep up to date on UX Design
>Holy crap, that's lazy.

Isn't a lot of the benefits of technology about making things easier to do?
> For example, if Apple had listened to prevailing wisdom in 2007, the iPhone would have had a physical keyboard.

For example, if Apple had gone with their initial plans we wouldn't have Apps.
> How is it different than Steam, other than the point than speculating that Microsoft would never aggressively discount games as much as Steam does now

They don't allow developers to self-publish, and Valve is privately owned by a benevolent dictator who won't be prone to public investor pressure for short term quarterly profits. People trust Valve to do the right thing.

Microsoft on the other hand has a history of just shutting down their DRM servers without making it right for the customers who bought into their DRM'd products.
Hey NSA, the 90s called and they want their website back.
Ah, hmn, that's a more-clever plan than any of mine.

BUT I'm still a little skeptical, though maybe the details could be worked-out. I mean, if you send the emails to fake users, then the NSA isn't likely to follow the links. And if you send emails to real users, then you have trouble proving it wasn't the real user (owner of the mailbox) who followed the link. I mean, the IP addresses do help... unless the snoopers use TOR, or equivalent. (In fact, what do you figure are the odds that the original TOR developers now report to Alexander, via USCYBERCOM, via the Tenth Fleet, via NETWARCOM? Where would you assign those guys, if they still work for the Navy?)

In favour of this honeypotting idea, though, if you set up fifty honeypots, and your opponent evades forty-nine of them but falls into the fiftieth, maybe you've still got something.
You are aware that Google is currently suing FISA for the right to release that information, yes?

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/18/technology/security/google-n...
Is unlisting from Google the future of creating online brands?
Nice metaphor, but is it right? I don't think mountains ever get built by laying down layers of sediment. Sand castles, maybe, but mountains? Those need earth quakes, or at least plate tectonics.

In some sense, Jobs was an earth mover who could shake up the earth and make what previously was a sandplain into maybe not a mountain but at least a hill.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is obsessed with a certain game
confluence-networks.com is part of DirectI. See http://www.directi.com
You can play music while doing other things. With video games, it is the thing that you are doing. If getting out of a chair to swap a disc is a big issue for someone, that's really not a healthy sign.
> I would imagine they would allow you to play parts of the game without needing to install the whole game, similar to Steam.

What games on steam do that? I've literally never seen that. Unless you mean like seperatation of single and multiplayer, but those are both still rather big.
It's not about responsiveness as much as it is about self-interest and bureaucratic thinking that is inherent in all institutions.