skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In general, as I have said in other recent comments here on Hacker News, I can be appalled by several of the recent allegations about NSA activity without applauding Snowden's actions.

I think this needs some further explanation. Without explanation it seems hypocritical to me, since you would not know about those NSA activites without Snowden.

> That said, I find that whenever I get out of the Hacker News hivemind, and deal with any of my friends from around the world who have actually lived and worked in multiple countries, and especially those friends who have children of their whose futures the friends are working for, there is remarkably little regard of Snowden as a hero or a freedom-fighter.

It's obvious that you do not have friends from Germany. Having suffered through multiple surveillance states in the past, Germans are very much aware of the dangers that are caused by massive surveillance. New technologies enable surveillance in an amount that has never been seen in history before. If your friends do not seem to care, they just haven't realised that there is a sword dangling right above their heads.
Why do you think that every single constitution of "free countries" (and also the human rights) have passages about the confidelity of spoken words, the confidelity of messages and so on. This is no coincidence. So many people paid with their lives for it. It is the only way of making sure that a democracy stays a democracy. You cannot organize an opposition, if the current rulers know all your moves, all your communications and all your contacts. This has been proven in history again and again, yet this is vital for a healthy democracy. Yet people seem to forget, because they "have nothing to hide" or their "life is not affected". But guess what, once you are affected, it is already too late and nothing can be done anymore. I would not want my children to live in a fascist surveillance state and I am very grateful for Snowden actions. Please talk to your friends and try to raise awareness. It's their children or their children's children who will have to pay the price. I know it's a little abstract, that's exactly why people fall for it again and again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders is the link in case anyone has not heard of the case.
Did you notice that "let" is coming in through ecmascript?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
I worked on staff at a very similar camp in the southeast for a few summers as a teenager, taking 2-3 cool showers a day was the norm to get some relief. Even though staff tents had a 110v outlet that we all had box fans hooked up to sleep was never very restful, afternoon naps were cherished when possible.
MIT is no exception when it comes to the current class of inverse heroes. Recent events have shown that every person or organization will stoop as low as they can go to protect self-interest while preaching ethics and accountability to others and expecting them to follow in any condition.

"While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the “rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price.”

Excerpt From: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.”
I got to play with a prototype simulator at a Navy base where a Kinect was used to allow cross training of helicopter pilots and those signaling guys who direct the helicopter from the deck of a ship.

The signaling guy stands in front of a large wrap-around projector screen with a Kinect to capture his arm movements, which were sent over the network to a central server which ran the simulation. The pilot in the heli cockpit simulator would see the guy on the ship. The pilot and signal guy could be training on different sides of the country (or world).
Well thinkpads might as well be reference hardware for Linux, this isn't surprising. Personally I can't stand the keyboards.
> This is how everyone is calling Clojure a Lisp, for example, while it is a language of its own, which happen to use parenthesized syntax.

Well, the official website doesn't help much by itself calling Clojure a (dialect of) Lisp.

http://clojure.org/

The only other time I heard someone saying "Clojure is not Lisp" it wasn't in order to say something nice about the former.
In particular I was bothered by the author's separation of scoping and closures. For example, if you look at what Objective-C has in terms of closures, and what JS has, then you're practically looking at completely different animals. But if you just say "closures ✓", "perfect lexical scoping ✗", you completely miss that point.
GPL is viral and imposes restriction which you can't foresee. A recent example is the AppStore fiasco VLC had. It required a complete rewrite and additional development years to get it in the store just because the original code was GPL. Please think twice before using (A)GPL and make sure you have checked all consequences.
Got that email earlier today. Really hope she doesn't get reelected to serve another term.
I think this is an excellent example of a meme outside the scope of Internet pop culture jokes. The idea that back doors exist has such wide appeal, and is so easy to believe, that few people ask for evidence beyond allegations. Skeptical remarks are disregarded. The confidence people have in their own extrapolations from a few words in a single deck of PowerPoint slides[1] is astonishing.

1. Unless I've missed some crucial evidence
Jerry Brown vetoes privacy bill for California
Elon is not the only example. John Carmack is another one. Video Games, Rockets, Cars, you name it. When you are curious AND efficient at learning & developing solutions, you often end up breaking new grounds. There are tons of examples out there of people successful in many fields.
From the article:

"'[The new rules] makes our job more difficult,' Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the N.S.A. and the commander of the military’s Cyber Command, told the Aspen Security Forum, an annual meeting on security issues. "

If nothing else this is an excellent demonstration of how leaking information makes it harder to maintain conspiracies.
A Life-or-Death Situation
Apple handheld projector in our future? +3M Unboxing
>If you prefix them with var they're function scoped, but there's no way to make them local to the curly braces of an "if" statement.

There is; it's just ugly. You just have to use an immediate function as the body of the if statement.
Why are you surprised they are reimbursing overdraft fees? That is the bare minimum that I would expect from any company which made this mistake
It is pretty slick! Although I'm pretty sure it happens the same way with FB ... at least for some apps (for instance: Words with Friends)
I learned JavaScript before "The Good Parts" was printed and more importantly after I had been writing a lot of Common Lisp. I remember being really shocked and excited when I realized how much JS had in common with lisp given that my expectation when learning it was that I was in for an awful time.

I think the origins of the "JavaScript is Scheme!" meme have more to do with the fact that you can pretty trivially re-implement all of the code from the Little Schemer (including the applicative order y-combinator) in JavaScript, than any of the reasons mentioned here. JavaScript still, imho, has nicer closures and lambdas than most mainstream programming languages.

Actually, thinking back on it, I remember having a conversation with Prof. Daniel Friedman about how similar the two language are and I believe his response was something along the lines of: if you have the lambda calculus, what else do you need?

Final nitpick: most of the "Y isn't really a lisp!" (another meme) articles I've read always miss what I think is the biggest thing missing from all languages compared to any lisp: symbolic expressions. To me this is the single most underrated feature of lisp that almost no other programming languages offer.
Very well and funnily written, among other things. Thoroughly enjoyed :)
Jobs never planned on leaving Earth, and shall remain, stuck as dust on this planet, as Elon makes his peace with the universe on Mars.
> Your debating skills suck.

"Debating" 9/11 truthers is a form of reasoning with people who have none.

My point is that diminishing the credibility of the US government doesn't enhance the credibility of 9/11 truthers. Have you made a point yet?
I have an honest question that I hope you won't take offense to (your two products look great, btw) ...

Did you consider that doing a startup with your boyfriend/girlfriend might be a bad idea? Startups are hard enough on co-founder friends and non-involved SOs/spouses. It seems your situation adds more possible bad/awkward outcomes.

I'm curious if you guys discussed this at all (not that it's any of my business of course).
Hmm. I've always wondered if giving a candidate a computer (with anything the candidate would need) and telling them to make something would work. It'd give the interviewer a good idea of their thinking process and what they feel their strengths are.
Cyborg 2 a free bootstrap theme
There are vendors that create dedicated Linux hardware (I got my laptop from System76) and it does work out of the box very well.
As a front-end developer who has been in the game for about 7 years now and completely self-taught, I think you're not asking straightforward questions. Sometimes it's the simple stuff that can paint an accurate picture. These 10 questions should weed out those who aren't proficient in Javascript.

Here is what I would ask:

1. How do you query an element with the ID of "amazingelement" in conventional Javascript without the use of any framework?

2. Write a simple loop that increments a counter from 1 to 50 (bonus points if you can show 2 different ways of doing this), you need to show a conventional pure Javascript implementation of this and any other examples can be framework dependent.

3. How do you add an element to an array in pure Javascript?

4. How would you round 6.42 in pure Javascript?

5. What's the difference between ECMAScript and JavaScript?

6. What is JSON?

7. What's the name of that guy who wrote jQuery?

8. Show me an example of Javascript that replaces all occurrences of the word "test" to "quiz" in a string.

9. What does an anonymous function in Javascript look like? (bonus points for accounting for jQuery as the framework in use)

10. How can you accurately test if a variable is defined in Javascript?
I use Linux Mint, and it has been running for a year now without maintenance. It was convenient to use and pretty to look at out of the box, and all my hardware worked.

I assume the same is true for other Ubuntu derivatives and probably other major distros. Linux today is not Linux 10, 5 or even 3 years ago. They've improved a lot.
Grab is the money
I agree, but I'm wondering what you think is missing or broken in Clojure to prevent it from being a Lisp? Sure, it sits on top of the Java type system and one major thing I can think of that is lacking is the condition system (although, isn't this a only Common Lisp thing?). I don't think it has to be Lisp all the way down to be a Lisp dialect, if that's what you're getting at.
I assume he means that Javascript has lexical scope at the function level, rather than at the block level. It is much nicer at the block level, both for human users of the language and for optimizing JITs.
Facebook iOS auth can be done with SSO as well.
Yes: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
Docker 0.5.0, including external volumes, released
Every other Lisp happens to have TCO, so if you try to port other Lisp programs to Clojure you generally get stack overflows.
Apple weren't bothered with the GPL, the GPL has a problem with FairPlay encryption.
There's no such thing as 'non-profit'. Every human being has to fight for 'profit' to survive. Profit is calculated after administrator or executive compensation is subtracted from revenue, so therein lies the motive of the non-profit.
>Edit: zoom out on the island.. and think about this: somewhere under the green down there there are living people like me and you that do not know what internet is... or cell phones.. or ipads.. cable TV... anything..

Or books, for that matter. Such things probably aren't as important if everybody you will ever have the chance to meet in your life numbers 400 people.
I used to feel this way as well (except I'm a Windows user), until I read the `man` page for `xrandr`. Wrote a little script to automate everything, and I don't even remember the frustration I had before.
I guess you are one of the main reasons why they really don't appreciate our appearances there.
I suppose if the repost gets a lot of upvotes, it was a good thing that it was reposted?
Ask HN: Should my app's landing page redirect mobile users to App Stores?
I have been going back and forth trying to decide if I should automatically redirect users coming to my apps landing page from a paid campaign.

In short:

- Automatically redirect iOS and Android users to the proper app store

OR

- Leave them on landing page, and hope the extra information and screenshots there drive more purchases than are lost from people not clicking through

I can see it could be annoying, but I am thinking when a user clicks on our paid ad, they are interested in the product. In my mind, the fewer clicks from that point to being able to purchase the better?

Sources:

- http://TakeoffAviationWeather.com (landing page)

- Apple App Store page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/takeoff-hd-aviation-weather/id603332374?mt=8

- Android App Store page: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.realcasualgames.shouldifly

Thanks for your opinions!
But if your customers don't understand the product then all bets are off and you have a moral (and, frankly, self-serving) responsibility to explain the product to them.

The way it sounds to me, SJSU and Udacity and are going to take the time to study the data and figure out why it is that so many students failed. If, and this seems pretty likely to me, it turns out that the students were confused about the product (the courses) then I would imagine that steps will be taken to clarify things so that people can make choices that will lead to the best-possible outcomes.

Many price points, many products doesn't work if people don't understand the products.
No, you have to apply for a position.

'liberal arts' doesn't have a meaning in Australia, but I'm not aware of PhD applications being treated differently in different fields (or rather, the rules differing)
Some remarks about the article:

1. you can't make information always for pay - why? - because it costs nothing to copy it and it's cheap to store terabytes of it

2. it is impossible to monitor all copying and make payments for everything - imagine how intrusive this kind of monitoring would be and how much overhead

3. the idea that everyone should have an unique online identity for tracking and payments is stupid - we'd lose all privacy, even as little as we have left; we don't want to be like China where you need to show your ID at the internet cafe

4. Yes, there is a problem with "power law distributions" of content like Google and App Store, but that needs to be changed by allowing customization, making of lists, and aggregation - I appreciate this insight

My rant on the subject:

I think he is fighting the future. Instead of total tracking and micropayments for everything, why don't we make a flat copyright tax and distribute it by popularity of content? It would be so much less overhead - we only need to track the number of views and divide.

Instead of trying to maintain monetization as it was in the past, into the future, why not embrace free culture and go ahead with basic human income? People create for love a creation too, not just for money. I'd say the best creations are works of love, not just works for money.

His power-law vs bell-curve insight is great but I think I got one that is even better (contains his insight and goes deeper still): we need to apply two criteria for improving society

1. differentiation - we need to maximize it by empowering creativity; why should we all see the same news? that would make for a monoculture. Instead, we should to pick and choose our feeds, each one of us differently. Similarly, we're better off with unique skills, unique perspectives on life and technology, and so on. We should encourage the variety.

2. integration - this is complementary to the 1st. The idea is that people need to be brought together to communicate, travel, make commerce and so on. As long as we are integrated, the system self regulates and can better cope with problems.

An anecdote: what is the difference between Facebook and Reddit? I'd say that the main difference is network topology; FB works by keeping you in your bubble of "friends" while reddit always exposes you to new people, on every page - that makes for better integration. The ability to subscribe/unsubscribe from subreddis improves personalization. Also, the comment history makes each user differentiated because the user will reply to different people. That's why we have such a higher level of creativity and participation in reddit compared to FB, that's why people get involved in deeper, more thoughtful discussions on reddit - it has more differentiation and integration.

Disclosure: I didn't invent this integration-differentiation idea. It comes from Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness (I reused the concepts on society instead of the brain). This is a video presenting the theory: http://vimeo.com/53787308
You seem to be one of those people who make bad arguments, and as soon as those bad arguments are debunked, you immediately switch to a completely separate bad argument without ever acknowledging that you were mistaken in the first place. Most likely, you're unwilling to listen to other viewpoints and just want to hear yourself talk on the internet. Have fun with that. I'm not inclined to play along.
I'm sure you're not the only one who feels that way, but this is one article that really has approximately nothing to do with the US government.
That's kinda what binary logical operations are for. Typically AND is denoted by the symbol '&', and OR is denoted by the symbol '|'
"To me, it seems a lot simpler and more reliable (not to mention safer) to simply evacuate your tube, which, I believe, is the original hyperloop idea."

Musk has said on the record that it's not an evacuated tube.
That’s roughly what I was thinking, but it seemed a little ridiculous to me — Javascript has lexical scoping, it’s just not required.

It seems like this argument conflates lexical scoping with the requirement that variables be lexically scoped. Lexical scoping (even if optional) is extremely useful for closures. Requiring lexical scoping would very useful for safety.
But afaik TCO is only a requirement for Scheme implementations, not for e.g. Common Lisp (i.e. you don't need to implement TCO to satisfy the Common Lisp standard). I don't see how the lack of TCO prevents it from being a valid Lisp dialect.
Is there a way to access from a NAS or other network share? I see options for network stream but its rather cryptic.
I didn't realise they had cross-app authentication (I haven't really seen anyone use it), but that's awesome if so.
The points in the article are still not addressed in your comment. The exercises in TLS can be programmed in pretty much any one of the mainstream, dynamically-typed and lexically scoped languages (beginning with Ruby, which I have partially done). The author is right; the hype around the phrase is unjustified and js programmers should focus on the true merits of Javascript alone.
Schrödinger's Drip doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
New Views On Emotive SEO
Maybe the OP does not know much about programming.
I personally found the quote to be in poor taste to a certain extent. He's talking about experimenting with people's lives. Yes, the students agreed, at least in some sense, to be a part of the experiment, but it is still a rather callous response in my mind.
Ah, right, cobbal mentioned this, too. I hadn’t thought of that — I’m used to languages without that feature.

(To be strict, that seems to be more a matter of what a scope is, rather than if the scoping is lexical or dynamic.)
What software do you use for note-taking? I also have a surface pro and am also very happy with it despite a few minor problems. For me there is occasional poor response to multitouch scrolling on the touchpad, and sometimes the cursor stops responding to the touchpad until I press escape. Also no middle click on the touchpad is annoying, no right ctrl bugs me, and not having separate pgup, home etc. keys is not convenient. Nowhere to put the pen when charging either. I hope at least some of these problems will be resolved by driver updates, e.g. nothing to stop Fn+F acting as Ctrl+F.

Despite the above, the specs, design and portability of the surface pro were better than anything I found when buying it . I get a tablet while still being able to work, which for me requires access to MS software including office. It's comparable with ultrabooks but with the stylus support and detachable keyboard it's just about in a league of its own, though some products are close nothing seemed as well designed, featureful or portable at the price.
Doesn't work for me in the USA (Chicago/Comcast). http://cl.ly/image/1a3e2L2x0M19

"The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. store."

EDIT: stock_toaster's link works for me! Much thanks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vlc-for-ios/id650377962?mt=8
SSO has been the main auth method for apps integrating Facebook for a couple of years now. I haven't seen the dialog in use in a long time. I'm surprised there's people still using that method.
For now, I am leaning towards automatically redirecting them.
Ah, the joys of doing UNIX development in commercial UNIX systems with the vendors compilers back in 2000.
On Android, depending on how the user's phone is configured, this leads from ad -> Chrome -> Play Store, which is really jarring. In some cases, this leads to a double pop-up to select an application to handle the intent, which is confusing at best.

Use a landing page. Put the CTA buttons at the top; make sure the landing page is mobile-friendly.

Also, if you haven't seen it: http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/l...

Edit: On iOS, use a Smart Web Banner. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AppleA...
Does this mean Oracle will eventually ditch SunPro for GCC?
Quite the contrary. Javascript has a strange, ugly hybrid of lexical and function scope that is not that of Scheme, which I suspect that Bob understands very well given his interest in languages (and that he works on a language that compiles to JS).

This is not lexical scoping:

function example(k) {
function ugly() {return i};
for (var i = 0; i < k; i++) {}
return ugly;
}
example(4)() // => 4
I think this is a simplification. Many non-profit groups do manage to differ from businesses by not focusing entirely on the bottom line.

There are definitely non-profits with really high administrator and executive compensation that don't spend money optimally to meet their stated goals. I'm interested in discussing the degree to which colleges resemble this type of non-profit.

What are all the high tuitions being used for, and how efficiently are they being used? To start to answer that question, I think I need to understand more about the goals of non-profit colleges and who sets most of the policy (high-paid administration? professors?).

My guess would be the high-paid administration, which definitely seems to be a problem.