skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really share most of jwz's specific complaints, but I've been trying to use feedly, and boy .... it's really hard to believe so many people are recommending this as a general Google reader replacement.

Besides its somewhat quirky UI, the main problem I have with feedly is that it seems predicated on the assumption that you will more or less read through all articles, one by one, in order, and finish them.

That's not how I use reader at all. I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category. Yadayada.

Feedly basically flattens and linearizes everything, and doesn't give any summary information, so I constantly feel unsure what's available without looking, and once I look, I quickly get lost in the undifferentiated flow of articles.

Of course Google reader also allows a more "feedly-style" one-big-stream mode of operation via its summary feeds. Except that it does a better job of it by allowing multiple different views, and provides summary information for all of them too.

And despite all that flexibility and power, Google reader's interface seems far simpler than feedly's... it's really just a tree-list-view thingy like we're all used to from a zillion apps, and everything just sort of works like you expect it.

It does all that, and because it's web-based, everything's always in sync no matter where you read. It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps, but it works pretty well on smartphone browsers (and even on dumbphone browsers, although it started to flake out during authentication a few months ago, presumably because Google wasn't keeping it updated).

So basically reader's about a zillion times better, with one glaring exception: it's going away... TT

[The closest free replacement I've found so far is "yoleoreader", which kinda gets the vibe right, although it's a bit rough in places...]
> Obviously there is a very large risk to civil liberties in the wrong hands if that system is simply left as-is, but it is at least possible to put procedural, legal, and technical safeguards if the people decide that kind of system is worthwhile.

No, it is not.

It is not the least bit possible to both collect and protect this massive amount of wide net and graph data for our lifetimes.

Even if you believe that our government is completely benign to you and your family, governments change. I want my kids to live to be 100 years old. It's not possible to have lived 100 years without having lived through either the Civil War or McCarthyism (or both).

> For instance, keeping terrorism from becoming so prevalent that the people act for the police state we all want to prevent is a pretty big motivator by itself.

I get your point but this is basically Battered Spouse Syndrome you're arguing.
> What's to stop the Combatant Commander in charge of USNORTHCOM from taking over the government by force?

Are you serious?! The US armed forces are comprised of AMERICANS. They're hardly going to turn against their own democratically elected government, it completely goes against everything they believe so strongly enough as to take up arms to protect. That is what is stopping it, not some regulatory checks and balances.
"why DO we continue?"

To be is rare, to not be is not. Rare things are precious for their novelty if nothing else. We are going to die in any event, so we might as well live while we can.
I liked reading that. More people need to voice their true opinion, unhidden being politically correct sentences.

Else we end up with various shitty software that we end up thinking are the gold standard.
Where did 1/90,000,000 come from? Is that per-lifetime, per-person-yr, something else?

Going just from 9/11 a rough estimate give 1:75000 U.S. citizens died, which is significantly different.

But besides, you're looking only at body count... do you think that if major terrorist events were happening with regularity that people wouldn't eventually start to take matters into their own hands?

Even with just 9/11 we in the U.S. saw a wave of anti-Muslim violence, which never really fully stopped. Just ask the Sikh worshippers in Wisconsin.

So part of that risk evaluation needs to include the propensity of the people themselves to lapse either to vigilantism, or to erect the police state themselves, in response to high-frequency terror attacks. The problem being that such a thing will hopefully never have enough evidence to fully support one assumption or the other.
"I have learned that people decide what they think based upon narratives. A good story always has better results than merely listing out facts. Every good narrative has both characters and a plot."

I was listening to a podcast the other day where one of the people said that if people were solely interested in facts the phone book would be the most interesting book in the world.
You realize that the NSA is a branch of the military don't you?

When the NSA breaks the 4th amendment, goes before Congress and systematically lies about their activities, it is in a very important sense an extra-constitutional military coup happening before our eyes.
Immigration reform passes key Senate test
jwz's blog is't a product, doesn't exist to sell a product, or to sell jwz as a product -- which is why his ugly green color scheme is fantastic.

His blog's color scheme also has no bearing on evaluating actual products' UX.
Yes, the whole fights of people confused about "var" and avoiding it shows that a fair amount of MS's target group is simply not interested in proper language research or design. I'll admit that I love the ideas behind the CLR (the VM design is pretty slick, although it's stagnated the past years). I think some parts are really excellent (the generics), but when I approach a vendor and I hear they're using .NET, it is a slightly negative flag.

I too had a boss (new owner after acquisition) say "no you're not allowed to use lambdas".
How do you propose to upgrade the standards from "least untruthful?" Our current safeguards are the butt of that particular joke. The reason you need to beg people not to dismiss the idea out of had is that dismissiveness is all we gave gotten regarding this matter so far.
So is Russia running the NSA or am I missing something then?
Yeah, we're actually working on a couple of things which will largely solve the trust problem (which is a bigger thing than just VPN service); stay tuned.

For now I'd like to think we're more trustworthy than a large/general purpose company because we have a lot less to lose in fighting (and much more to gain).
You should see the ridiculousness in the Santa Barbara/Goleta area... Same cost of living as Silicon Valley, Less Pay. Higher cost of living than LA, San Diego and Seattle but engineers get paid less than those areas.
Also, I think console makers count on license fees from games to recoup losses on hardware.
Did you seriously just try to give jwz 'get coding' open source advice?
This is not a JS library!! This is coffeescript. Stop calling coffeescript stuff .js it is really misleading for people that actually develop in JS.
I've been looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing!
a welcome refresh
doit doit
> It is not the least bit possible to both collect and protect this massive amount of wide net and graph data for our lifetimes.

Then just don't retain it for our lifetime?

Put all the data for a given year on a given set of drives. Melt them with thermite after the retention period is up. Done.

Given that the data should be encrypted you could almost get away with just destroying the smartcards holding the master decryption keys, but it's probably best to be on the safe side with this.
> I find someone to pay me to build something using it.

Sounds good to me. Where do you look for this person? And how do you sell yourself developing in a tech in which you have no experience?
Exactly. Pretty much from the beginning of the Readerpocalypse, I'd decided to go with whatever the developers of my apps did.

Both Press and gReader decided to support Feedly, so that was simple enough. There were a few hiccups in the transition (initial bugs, creating my Feedly account in-app was confusing), but now everything is working as smoothing as it did with Google Reader. I can even directly compare that, since I've switched to Feedly on my phone but not on my tablet (yet).
Richard Matheson passes away
Ask HN: Name an established product that is begging to be disrupted
I'm asking for a specific product that currently has marketshare, not an industry. Begging for disruption could be any number of reasons like outdated software, high cost, poor customer service, etc.
It's already started. Tonight, on stage at the Verizon center in DC, Mick Jagger said "I'm not sure if President Obama is here tonight, but I'm sure he's listening in."

Maybe it's just me, but this comes across as far more damaging than garden-variety mockery. It's like the authority and mystique of the office are just evaporating. And forget about "repairing relations with the rest of the world." Unlike the cock-up in Iraq, this effects everyone, everywhere, directly.

Backfire squared.
Mechanics don't even charge how long it actually takes. They charge a standard (arguably, over-inflated) amount for a job regardless of the actual time.

So it does take 3 hours to fix your car, and they charge you for 6. Then you care.
Flying train concept unveiled: Trains that clip to planes
When I first read about these uninhabited islands, I had the same thought. The ultimate status symbol: private island in sight of Manhattan.

And I imagine commuting isn't a problem if you can afford to get around by helicopter.
I've looked into Saiku and it has a very pretty and usable interface but, as you say, it requires the OLAP server. Not very useful if you plan on doing ad-hoc reporting with django as a backend for instance.
Syncing feeds is a little bit harder of a problem than the author lets on. It's not just about storing a state file in dropbox. It's also about efficiently pushing the delta of what's new. A central service is vastly more efficient at that than millions of clients pulling their own feeds.

But I 100% agree that Reeder is (was) the awesomest client and all I need to be happy is a backend replacement that just Makes Reeder Work. I don't have to care about Feedly's UI if it's just a backend.

There was a press release at the beginning of the month about Feedy & Reeder collaborating.. what's the ETA? We're really down to the wire here. http://www.macstories.net/news/reeder-to-add-support-for-fee...

Oh, and F U Google. Thanks for the 4 months heads up, dick.
A small presentation on Ember-JS
Collection initializers also do not need to be collections or anything. They just need to be init'ing a type that has IEnumerable and an Add function:

class Heh : IEnumerable {
public void Add(object x) { Console.WriteLine(x); }
public IEnumerator GetEnumerator() { return null ; }
}
static void Main() { new Heh { "a", 1, DateTime.UtcNow }; } }

Prints out:

a, 1, 6/25/2013 4:51:38 AM,

It might have been the right engineering approach all things considered. But having these special things that only the language can decide is annoying. The fewer the language primitives, the better.
Less ugly, and yet not less ugly enough.

jQuery might've over-done it a bit with their most recent refresh, but that's a better example of what could be done.

The search feature, for instance, is complete garbage. If I'm typing in a method name, give me that method, not this: http://ca2.php.net/results.php?q=mysql_query&l=en&p=all

Is it so hard to do something like auto-complete? Wikipedia and many other API references do this.
Google doesn't seem to realize that one of their most valuable assets is trust. And that trust has eroded a great deal in recent months.
Slavery, World War II and Prison Camps in a time of peace!

How are they comparable?
I was considering various things, with a strong desire for something simple and likely to stay around for awhile. I thought about emacs gnus, Thunderbird, and some of the new entrants.

I realized that I would be as happy with something that just sent me a filterable email for every entry in all of my fields, since I already have good interfaces for reading and culling mail on all of my platforms.

So I found one. http://blogtrottr.com/ It seemed nice and had an easy import. If something happens to it, I'm sure I can find another.

For now I'm filtering it all into its own folder, though I try to keep my feeds pretty low-volume, so it wouldn't even be a huge deal if they all landed in my already-pretty-noisy inbox.

I just did that this weekend, but so far I'm quite happy
I'm well aware of where NSA falls in the government hierarchy.

What part of the 4th Amendment are you saying they broke? It's not PRISM.

It might be 641-A style interceptions, except that those aren't actually covered by the 4th Amendment.

The Verizon phone data might be close, but that's also considered fair game according to the courts. And besides, that has a separate court order anyways, doesn't it?

Remember when the Daily Show played and they ended with the idea that it was surprising that what the NSA was doing wasn't illegal (i.e. that it should be illegal)? Hard to call following the law as it's been explained to them a coup...
A hierarchical organization that centralizes so much unchecked power as the NSA will attract a good share of sociopaths. Sociopaths seek power over others. Then it's a matter of time until a sociopath manages to climb to the top, and then you have a full-blown tyranny.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2013/05/centralization-...
What about more use of one-time or ephemeral email addresses? The info we have so far seems to suggest NSA likes to track email addresses. Compare tracking an email address that was only used to send or receive one or a few messages with one that has a long history of use.
I'll go first on my own question: Microsoft Outlook. While products like Google Apps for your domain have somewhat penetrated, Microsoft Outlook still has a strong corporate foothold while having super clunky software. It's expensive, and it requires infrastructure to use in most cases. Also, a lot of clients still want a native solution which things like Google Apps for domain don't provide.
As a fellow GT grad I sadly couldn't agree more.

Unless you already know stuff or find a good group you're largely on your own.
Almost nobody uses feed readers, which is why Google shut down Reader in the first place. You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority.
Commuting still would be a problem because you have to land the helicopter somewhere. There are only 3 heliports in Manhattan.
If you had to pressure your team to over-deliver against the first under-promise milestone, you completely failed Project Management 101. The point of "under promise, over deliver" is to give your customer a risk-realistic timeline that you can likely exceed, but which won't disappoint them if your project runs into speed bumps.
>>Yeah, on the coasts we don't take kindly to physical assault in retaliation for minor perceived slights. What the hell... I hope you are exaggerating.

I hope he doesn't treat his kid that way... holy hell.
the Print Shop/Print Master

With today's technology such programs an be almost entirely on the cloud. Printable output being received back in PDF.
You know you can opt out of those scans? I do it all the time. I'm sure you know, but in case, it's no big deal to opt for the pat down. Just show up fifteen minutes early (yet it has only taken at most an extra 5 minute for me -- many times faster e.g. when a false positive on the machine shows up and you're instantly considered a terrorist even if you're a 45 year old fat ass going to the beach).
One big benefit of using structural (rather than nominal) typing in the foreach construct is that value types don't need to be boxed.
In C# you need to go pretty far out of your way to implement an exploitable codepath. (It's not _hard_, and I even found one due to the JIT.) But for almost all apps, the better security (and tooling), better turnaround, and, without opening an escape catch, verifiable type safety - that's pretty fantastic.
Well you could make the system(s) themselves report the truth and take the human analyst or supervisor out of the loop completely.

For the rest, there's all sorts of possibilities; 2-man concept, independent review by a supervisor, randomized blind audits by auditors who are themselves double-checked by randomly assigned auditors, periodic audits & surveillances of the analysts themselves to ensure procedural and policy compliance, the list goes on and on. There's not exactly a shortage of government agencies that can be raided for "best practices".

But... I think the reason I have to beg people to not dismiss the idea out of hand is that the conclusion is already mostly formed for many of us. Certainly I would hope that our default reaction to hearing that a massive Internet surveillance program is going on would be WTF??!. But that doesn't stop me from wondering if it can actually be done in a way that does not endanger free society and still protects individual liberties.

And even if it can be done, it would still need to be shown that it's useful to do. But I think many of us have foreclosed on the very idea.
If you know the method you're looking for you can just go to php.net/methodname and it'll take you right there or search if it doesn't match anything. Has done for at least a decade. One of my favorite things about their site.
Would be nice if I could see it. They have this banner at the top:

Step into the future! Click here to switch to the beta php.net site.

Page just refreshes. Tried deleting all my cookies, didn't help.

Edit: Tried in IE10, Firefox, Chrome. I've never visited php.net on this computer before. IMO site is fail since they can't even get their beta site access feature working.
Snowden is a story too. As someone who considers him a hero, and one of the rare few who I can relate to, I'd like to know more about him views so that I can learn from him. That's not irrational, unless you think biographies are a waste.

In this regard, I wonder if any potential underhanded focus on character rather than message in the media might have the ironic effect of empowering more young people. "You can do good and be brave even if you play WoW".
Going just from 9/11 a rough estimate give 1:75000 U.S. citizens died, which is significantly different.

This is cherry-picking. 1 in 75000 died on a given day, but there have been tens of thousands of days where no americans were killed.
"GT while it has a reputation on par with MIT"

This is not the case. Best not to repeat this claim.
Open-Source Licensing For Dummies
Microsoft introduces Azure for Java
>>Let me put this briefly: the pledge was used to teach children the basics of what this country values. You can argue that this is brainwashing. So, then, argue that teaching rote math and English rudiments is brainwashing. Children can't internalize the important concepts of the constitution when they're 5-6 yrs old. They can recite them for a while, but the ideas are too abstract until they get older. You say "indoctrination", I say "rote memorization until they can understand it."

Memorization != Understanding.

Nobody says that they need to understand the importance of the Constitution when they are 5 or 6 years old. Wait a bit longer until they actually can understand it, and then teach it to them.
The search does have auto-complete and shows function names. Try reloading?
Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy
Hacker News Please help me get a date on OkCupid
I'm always amazed on how much wisdom is in such old texts. People from hundreds or even thousands of years ago were still ... just humans. The same as we are. They had the same problems and desires as we have. Even tough their world looked radically different their life didn't by far as much.
> What part of the 4th Amendment are you saying they broke?

The part about "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"

and "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"

It is not OK to just "seize all the data" and "search it later if we feel it's relevant".

> Remember when the Daily Show played

No, I don't watch that show (or any TV really).

> Hard to call following the law as it's been explained to them a coup...

The US Constitution is the highest law in the US. If an action violates the Constitution, it is illegal, by definition.
It's basically been done (ish). Freenet's one, there are probably more, but you give up a lot in exchange. Freenet can be pretty slow and you need to find trusted people to bootstrap yourself into the network. You can't host dynamic content, either.
I would like to know the exact question they were asked. It's easy to induce people into answering what you want if you use the right wording.
This is definitely a welcome change. Doesn't really stray too far from the previous design really, it feels cleaner and a lot more modern. I think PHP's lack of nicely designed site doesn't do them any favours in the language wars though considering PHP is viewed as an old and inferior language to others.
Why carriers are Ffd infographic:Mobile Video Tsunami hitting
> I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category.

I was seriously starting to think I am only one who wants this from web-based rss-reader. Most of the native rss clients are built around this behaviour and I really cannot understand why web readers don't. Maybe A/B testing with bad test cases (or without enough diverse user population) or maybe we are just crazy.

> It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps

Android at least has. It was/is really nicely hidden under all unofficial, privacy violating rip-offs in the Google store.
It is legal to hang homosexuals in Iran.

Jews were legally killed as far as the Nazis were concerned.

Just become something is legal - in this case a wrong assertion because spying on citizens is against the constitution so it is illegal - does not mean that it complies with Human Rights.