skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On contemplation of Archive.org, I actually do agree with your first point. There wasn't 10 stories about the libertarian case du jour, but equally there wasn't a flood of interesting compSci stories. I guess my memory is selective!

>That makes no sense. Except if you take it to mean: the guys that were there earlier don't get what they like anymore, and more (and newer) people get it. Which is a pretty hipsterish sense ("Oh, that band was cool when only I liked it").

I really can't agree with this. In 10 (12?... Getting old I guess) years of online participation, I've seen time and time again relatively small forums and websites grow in user numbers and the quality of the popular submissions/threads/posts decline.

Perhaps a good example is Reddit. At one point it was a site for submitting links to news articles. The userbase was fairly heavily skewed towards tech and programmers. Looking at Archive.org from 2007 the front page is perhaps 1/3 programming related, 1/3 "interest" articles and 1/3 current events. There's not a single link to an image.

My belief is that when a site grows in popularity, and so the interests and backgrounds of the users expands, the posts that consistantly attract more interest or votes are those which appeal to the largest common aspect of the community - the community itself. Once Reddit was large enough to have its own in-jokes and themes, submissions related to those tended to receive lots of attention. I think many people enjoy belonging to online communities with injokes, and so once it started that shift the demographic of new users changed as well. In 2007 nobody would have strongly defined themselves as a "redditor" in the way that people do today because at that point it was nothing more than a site for sharing interesting news articles.

As someone who enjoys reading thought provoking articles (and sometimes commenting on them), I find it frustrating to see websites I like move towards lowest-common-denominator submissions. I'm no fan of "it was better in my day" baseless nostalgia, but Archive.org provides us a fairly effective window into the past and it is clear that many sites are today demonstrably different than they were a few years ago. I don't think it's elitist (or "hipsterish") to want to maintain the spirit and submission quality that was the basis for this sites popularity.
Crypto software that doesn't work potentially puts people at risk.

If a car mechanic only used half the wheel nuts to fasten the rims on your car, would you stay calm and give constructive criticism?
Looking for feedback for new tool to present artists on the web.
How does one get a complete list of all packages and descriptions from Bower?
You're right, it's an excellent comment, worth re-posting for posterity. Here it is...

'Martel wrote:

'In New Zealand the actions of the government’s domestic spy agency (the GCSB) is governed by law. Clearly there are very good reasons why the powers of such a government agency should be limited by the law. There are certain things that government agency cannot do. Actually it is more properly said that the GCSB must not do certain things, because for them to do so would be illegal, in other words those actions would be criminal, in other words those actions would constitute a crime. Sorry to be so pedantic but some seem to have a real problem with the idea that the rule of law pertains to all, including government agencies.

'When the GCSB spied on Kim Dotcom their actions in doing that were against the law. Yet, the author(s) of this Washington Post article attempts to sanitise and trivialise the illegal actions of the GCSB by calling them a “misstep”, quote unquote. Is that the euphemism you use to describe all crimes? A misstep?

'Let me make it clear to you that the GCSB knew what they were doing was illegal. Further more it is known that the Prime Minister was at a meeting where the question of its legality was raised. They knew that what they were doing was against the law and you choose to characterise it as a kind of OOPS. It was not an oops, it was a premeditated crime committed against a New Zealand resident by a government agency. Why do you seem to have such a problem calling it what it actually is? A crime. A crime has been committed and a New Zealand resident has had his whole life and that of his family practically destroyed and you call the criminal actions that brought about this egregious situation a “misstep”. Your characterisation of this is simply defies belief. To whoever wrote this article, if this is the best you can do with this and if you honestly cannot see the gravity and greater significance of what has happened in this important case then you have no right to call yourself a journalist?

'All around us right now so many of we, the people, are increasingly alarmed at the outrageous and unlawful intrusion of governments into our lives and the compromising of our freedoms by them and yet you seem to want to characterise this as a trivial matter. A crime has been committed by precisely those who should have known better and yet the government tries arrogantly to simply set it aside, to ignore their complicity or (with the assistance of articles like this one) to restyle it as in, it was all just a “misstep”. Can you even begin to justify your position here? A “misstep”? Give us a break.'
A sobering thought: Milk powder in China is probably one of the safest local products currently.

Think about it: There have been death sentences over the matter, no government agency will want to embarass themselves again over the same issue, and with low prices for Chinese milk powder there really isn't a lot of profit to be made by cheating.
You're right. However, the guy actually did write a patch for Cryptocat, so you have to give him that.
Perhaps they should have to solemnly swear to read it as well.
Inside the EFF
I find this really useful – one for Google Now and two for remembering where I was on certain days for invoicing/just personal interest.
Postpwnium Writeup
I only enter Youtube to follow videobloggers gamers. I understand the point, but well, usstream I guess its wide open compared. I just gave an example.
I think anyone in the position to leak things truly damaging now already knows sufficient fear.

Spreading the word about their inhuman practices against those who would attempt to do the right thing now serves the other goal: illustrating to people why leaking is more important than ever.

Remember, there are still hundreds of NSA sysadmins going to work every day, post-Snowden, processing this data collected on innocent people (Americans included). It's not like they didn't know before that leaking stuff would be the end of their life as they know it. We need to show them that it's the end of everyone's life as they know it if they don't; that is, to get them to question the validity of their mission in the first place.

It's about showing them the true character of just what they're protecting with their silence.
"State has right to its secrets and will bully countries to punish those that expose them. Citizens on the other hand don't need privacy, cause if you're not doing anything bad you don't need to hide".
You may give https://mullvad.net a try:

- You can pay cash

- They're based in Europe
Free definitely has its advantages. I guess it's more about awareness since many people don't really know the cost of free. But you could be right. People just don't care
Yeah, but he has some interesting recommendations (apparently, just followed the link from here now).

Here in Norway, I'm fairly confident that quite a few great books will be "indefinitely" (at least as long as I would be able to care for my own books) available in libraries. And I see no pressing need to "own" such books -- unless they are truly close to my heart in some way.

But there are some great books, that are unjustifiably rare, and hard to get hold of -- four examples:

* Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling)
* The man who walked to the Moon (Howard McCord)
* Last Chance to See (Douglas Adams)
* Literary Machines (Ted Nelson)

The three first I've bought second hand, still looking for a reasonably priced version of the last one. Such books I enjoy having on my wall, if for no other reason, after recommending them to someone, I can lend them a copy.

But while I have a nice romantic, fuzzy attachment to dead tree books, I'm looking forward to moving towards a digital library. Still waiting for reasonably sized full colour (preferably e-ink) reader that has > 250 dpi and is suitable for both reading comics/graphic novels and books though...
> NFC isn't even close to completion

And yet it is progressing. See Europe. This despite lackluster support from big banks.

> What you are missing is the massive infrastructure investment in retail terminals.

No, I'm not. Not at all. I'm well aware of it. I'm also well aware that they get replaced quite frequently. And virtually every retail terminal I've seen in the last few years is new enough that if the banks had started the push for a smartcard technology when it initially became viable, terminal compatibility would be near 100%.

Did you think there had to be some magic cutover date? There doesn't. Hybrid cards can be used for 5, 10, even 20 years if necessary, with gradual pressure applied to retailers to adopt new equipment they haven't already replaced (or received new, stores come and go) through a reduction in fees for transactions completed via smartcard.

The point is to make actual progress and eventually arrive at a reasonable destination. Right now, we're just sitting on our hands.
Interesting that a story like this should come out when groups are planning to protest over the NSA. Coincidence?
I'm doing 1. I have of course many side projects but they aren't the kind of 24/7hs attention projects. Two are gaming projects, and 2 more are SaSS.
It got an upvote from me because there has been an awful lot of windy political rhetoric around here lately, accompanied by a fair degree of personal invective.
I would suggest that the author's description of the developer(s) as "incompetent" is somewhat more reasonable than your (implied) description of him/her as a "complete and utter jerk".

Perhaps the author should have narrowed the description to incompetence in crypto and not generalized to "everyone involved", but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable given the apparent magnitude of the problems and the history of the product.
Given Google's market share, I doubt supporting new platforms would do anything more than double sales. Another 3 sales per month wouldn't warrant that amount of work.
That's a silly argument. There is a great deal of software out there in the world that operates in incredibly important roles. The software running your car, your electricity grid, your bank, your nearest nuclear power plant. Does everyone get free license to be an asshole?

Crypto does not occupy some special branch of importance above and beyond a great deal of software many of us create in our jobs.

I used to work on software in the defence industry on things that could put people at risk. I can't recall any of my colleagues behaving the way people in the crypto community do.
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If someone is engaging in murder, rape or robbery, it would make sense to call attention to this fact, and then perhaps do something about it, wouldn't it? Parts of the US government are CURRENTLY misusing the word "terrorist" as a very broad label. This is very dangerous for the reasons discussed above. It's important to call attention to this problem if we have any hope of halting it.
How do you get the dictionary file from stenographic services?
How do you get the dictionary file from the stenographic services at Boston City Council? Hard of hearing and ESL English as a Second Language folks need the plain English text stenographic record now available only in .sgstn stenograph stenonote format without a reading mechanism!
Well, you did also say "If it ain't broke don't fix it", so we might be agreeing. You wouldn't want any new programming language to roll its own SSL library rather than using OpenSSL or GnuTLS, would you?
Oh, I had good ones, and still do: things about unpopular speech being the canary in the coal mine, things like that. It's much the same explanation.

Mencken is just a lot more eloquent than I was describing it, though.
It seems pretty significant to me.
It's more like Evernote for studying..
If you like it , here's the site to signup : mykitaabhq.com
> earnestly trying to build and improve on Cryptocat and shore up any weaknesses

The release an insecure product.

People tell them it's insecure, and that they don't know what they're doing, and that they should stop.

They make a tweak, and release a new insecure version.

People tell them that it's insecure, and that they don't know what they're doing, and that they should stop.

They make another tweak, and release a new insecure version.

People tell them that it's insecure, and that they don't know what they're doing, and that they should stop.

They make another tweak, and release a new insecure version.

At this point, imagine no-one tells them about any bugs. Does that mean the product is secure? Does that mean people should be using it?

Here's one thread on HN where they get mostly polite advice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855257) and the whack-a-mole game of "our software is secure", "here's a bug", tweak "Our software is secure" happens.

Here's a nice article about the hype surrounding cryptocat (which, admittedly, isn't the fault of cryptocat) (http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2012/07/tech-journalists-stop-hy...)
Why should we be polite to a person who endangered people who relied on his expertise? He had one task (that he chose), that task was extremely sensitive and had to be implemented correctly. He failed. Shaming and ridicule is the least he deserves.
My understanding is that only apps that are present in some form in flash (even if subsequently updated) are allowed to install without the device asking the user explicitly for confirmation. Compare the process with the Play store (store app prompts before download, can install from the web without prompt) with that of the Amazon store on non-Amazon devices (device prompts after download).

android.permission.INSTALL_PACKAGES controls which of the in-flash applications may install stuff: it's not available to non-built-in applications at all, and the Amazon store doesn't have (or need) it.
A font called "Source Code Pro", available here:

https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro
Coincidentally, Vimeo has just launched their first exclusive feature film: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/somegirls
Sure. Drop me an email.
Software in the industries you name is not marketable to the general public. It is written by employees or contractors of the relevant organization and extensively evaluated, tested, and certified (in some cases including by government regulators) before it is permitted to go into production.

The public is not at risk from an amateur who whips up what they think is some great nuclear reactor control code and starts distributing it to everybody.

An amateur marketing cryptographic software to the masses is different and akin to a snake oil salesman. He is dangerous, and no one has the legal authority to stop him.
> I'm not saying you write tests to protect against NPEs. I'm saying that you write tests to ensure correctness of your code, and as a side-effect NPEs are flushed out of your code. This is my theory explaining why NPEs are not a timesink for me.

You never know when you have enough coverage to rule out NPEs or any other bug. And to get confidence about lack of NPEs you want to have coverage of all lines involving dereferences, which means you need near 100% test coverage to have a reasonable level of confidence. With Haskell, I can be reasonably confident about my code with very little tests.

> but I'd wager that it wouldn't be as readable as the equivalent written as a test.

Generally types are far more concise and guarantee more than tests. I find 5 lines of types more readable than dozens or hundreds of lines of tests.

> That's exactly right. Languages with nulls, and mutable shared state are perfectly reasonable to use if programmers do the right thing by convention

I think Scala users will generally disagree with you. They'd prefer it if null was ruled out in the language itself. That said, Go convention is to use nulls, not shun them.

> I don't find myself writing much safer code when I go from JS to C++. ... Ruby to Scala ...

Your code is much safer simply by construction, so I am not sure what you mean here.

> You claim that a significantly smaller shift, removing nullability from a language would be a big deal for reliability. That doesn't seem likely to me

Hitting type errors at runtime, null dereference crashes in Java and "NoneType has no attribute `...`" in Python is pretty common IME.

I do think non-nullability aids reliability, but that having sum types, proper pattern matching and parametric polymorphism aids it even more. And Go lacks all of these.
Well, that's good. I can't edit my comment, so I accept here that I'm wrong about that.
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Helped in launching http://foodfan.com - Django,Postgres, S3 for photos, Sphinx for search, Jquery

8+ years of software development experience in dotnet and Django, open to working on other technologies. Have worked with clients from US, UK and Syria

Contact: vishalsodani@gmail.com
Every country already has a closed internet for their own domestic use. It's called the internet.

This makes the article relevant: "Stop using US services."
> what the iPhone represented

A mish-mash of other technologies available on the market? I don't doubt that it had a an impact on technology but it wasn't some epiphany, just a good iteration.

I think you need to dedicate the next 1.40.53hrs of your day to watching The Mother of All Demo's, it truly is one of the most amazing human technological feats - to even conceive these things let alone manage to produce and develop them and then demonstrate to a large audience and record the whole thing still blows my mind. Pretty much everything you are doing today on your laptop harks back to Dougs boundless imagination and execution, he deserves total utmost respect - not comparison. There is none, let alone with a phone.
Abortion of a foetus with an identifiable disability is considered acceptable today by many people, which is similar in spirit if not in practice to eugenics.
Give RetroShare a try: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

It's:

1. Decentralized (real p2p, no central servers)

2. Encrypted communication

3. Easier to set up than encrypted email: Install -> Exchange "certificates" -> Done.
I really can't stand any of the fonts I've found and tried. Every single one of them has an offensive appearance.

The only font I can find that is both consistently readable at small sizes and doesn't drive me stark raving mad with Lovecraftian shapes is Inconsolata-g. And I hate Inconsolata-g.

Consolas is simply offensive, and Proggy has got to be the ugliest thing I have seen in my life.

Clean is moderately tolerable (and marginally better than Inconsolata-g on most entities) despite being Lovecraftian, but it has so many broken characters and interferes so badly with my graphics driver (terminals on Linux under some versions of the `nvidia` driver behave very badly when using a bitmap font), that I can't use it.

I'm still looking for a font that doesn't make me want to raze several small towns.
> So my question is: is HTTPS over open wi-fi trustworthy?

As trustworthy as it is otherwise, so generally yes.

Since Android supported arbitrary VPNs (as of ICS) I use OpenVPN to home on my tablet (as I always did with my netbook) - that way I should be no more unsafe, even for unencrypted protocols, than if I were sat at my desk. It does add latency of course, which in less than ideal conditions (an iffy 3G/GPRS connection) affects throughput too (on top of the small amount of packed wrapping overhead in the VPN protocol itself), but I've not found that to be noticeable for my use pattern.
Development is under way.
No I am not..
What if they steal it.. because it is the execution that matters.
Tell HN: Happy Independence Day.
Try Chart.js (http://www.chartjs.org/). :)
Ban Ki-moon, on visit to Iceland, says Snowden abused his access to information.
Ban Ki-moon criticises Snowden at a meeting with the Icelandic foreign-affairs committee.

Pieces of the story:

"He said that his opinion is that Snowden is guilty of abuse and that that more access to information couldn't be abused like Snowden did."

Birgitta Jonsdottir asked for an explanation for those words to which Ban Ki-moon replied:

"More access can be good for the public, but sometimes bigger problems arise because of abuse by individuals."

It seems that Ban Ki-moon doesn't understand the case and/or is under orders from someone else.
Do you find the selling of used cars to be a moral grey zone? If you weren't able to sell your used car ever, would you be more or less likely to buy another car? Do you think that people who resell their used games buy more or less new games?

When you buy something you buy a license to use that item for as long as you own it. If you sell it you no longer have the right or ability to continue to use that item anymore. I think that the argument that you are making is that a game is an experience and that once you have played a game once you have reaped the full benefit of ownership from that game. However, I believe that you are mistaken. The full benefit of owning something is that you can reuse it as often as you like. You can read the same book as many times as you want for as long as you own that book. The same is true for a game. The benefit of owning a game or any software is that you can use it as much as you want for as long as you own it. When you sell it you are giving up your right to continue to experience that game until you buy it again.
It's somewhat undermined by the statement directly above it:

"LGBTQ activists use Cryptocat to keep private matters private. Journalists use Cryptocat to keep their stories and research confidential. Cryptocat is made for everyone."

which suggests that it is secure and reliable enough to be used in sensitive situations.
Interesting question - I hadn't gotten around to checking the numbers yet myself. So,

Indexes are stored in S3, data is on Glacier
~450GB of data stored
316,189 Requests to upload it all (main cost)
$17.39 to upload it all
$5.09 to store it last month (but upload was incomplete)
Expect closer to $6-$7 to store it this month
~$120 to restore it all (that was a back of the napkin figure before I started)

Arq has a number of good things to recommend it. The creator lurks around here, which is always nice to know. The design is very sensible - it's basically a git index on S3 with the data blobs in Glacier. The storage format is open and documented. All the data is encrypted using your own key locally and then pushed to your own AWS account. It works out really cheap if you use Glacier (only planning on restoring in catastrophic circumstances).

It all just works. The interface is easy and intuitive. I pushed my data to the EU region since it's closer. The more I think about it the happier I am with my choice at the moment. Even if I changed my mind and stopped using it - it's nice knowing that for a few dollars a month I have a huge snapshot of my data in a reasonable format in my AWS account.