skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Encryption is not the silver bullet, I agree with that.

All the points he makes are possible scenarios. After Snowden, almost nothing that can be done seems unlikely to have been done. Heck, even the movie "The Net" looks like prophecy come true now.

It's weird to think that encryption is not as secure as we all believed but it still makes it more difficult for the Big Brother to watch over all of use.

In the end, encryption is only completely useless if each and every provider reports to the government. It's a shame and disgrace for the western world that we even assume that this could become a reality.
P.S. but even before this update, with 250+ ratings visible, there wasn't really a noticeable difference in installs.
The argument seems logical as far as it goes. But having a piece of code which may or not run seems to introduce inherently greater mental complications into the programming process.
Okay, let's say someone is suicidal, and you know this, _and_ you do something heartless and stupid to them. They subsequently commit suicide.

Would it be correct to say that whatever circumstances existed where the person was suicidal to such an extent that you _knew_ they were suicidal... were _not_ responsible for the suicide? I mean, doesn't the definition of "suicidal" imply that suicide is a distinct possibility even if no one takes further negative steps?

Or perhaps to put it another way... would this ridiculously shitty conduct be any less so if Aaron were alive today?

Seriously, the notion that things like suicide are controlled by _anyone_ is pretty ridiculous. Sure, sometimes people can make a conscious choice that changes outcomes, and there are no doubt things one can do that improve or reduce the odds... but definitively laying culpability on someone's shoulders is rarely possible.

I think it is enough to say that doing shitty things to people who really don't deserve it is bad, and it is worse when you know those people are already fragile and/or suffering. Engaging in histrionics and scapegoating, if anything undermines the argument.
Boy, Hacker News has gone in a strange direction. Killer new product from legendary engineers. Let's all get together and shit on it!
I agree that a political solution is strongly preferable, but I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen. The only reason that the NSA can listen in on your Facebook, Google, Skype (etc) activity is because:

1. These communication tools are operated by a company under American jurisdiction, that can therefore be strong-armed into cooperation

2. These communication tools store your data unencrypted

3. The world outside that company has no way of figuring out what is happening inside (i.e. no transparency)

I am therefore of the opinion that the only viable technical solution to Prism has to be

a. Completely decentralized

b. Fully (end-to-end) encrypted

c. Open source

If our communication tools were decentralized, encrypted and open source, then the NSA would have had a much harder job listening in. What needs to happen is that we need to build those systems, and basically divorce Facebook the company from Facebook the tool.

We need to change the playing field, and remove the capability to listen in on our communications. The internet is an amazing tool, but it's still in its infancy. It could very well be that, decades from now, we will look back at this period and wonder how it was even possible that the NSA was listening in on every single person in the world. We're not there yet, but it's not impossible.
If it did I would be very happy. That would mean I would have found a news source even better than this one.
How would you convince a happy google docs user to switch, what's the key selling point?
calendar.google.com got changed too recently.
I don't think they're responsible for his suicide himself. They're responsible for putting him in a miserable situation where he likely had no other escape, but their responsibility would not be diminished had Turing chosen to suffer through it.
"if a nation-state decides that somebody should not have privacy, then it will use whatever means available to prevent that privacy."

One thing a lot of these discussions miss is that the entire point of doing privacy and anonymity correctly is that you are never on a list of people that any particular nation state wants to deny privacy to. That your True Name (to borrow the idea from Vinge’s story of the same name) is never the target, is never even interesting.

I personally don't advocate a world where everything I do is encrypted and anonymized, I think that that is as unachievable and sacrificing as living an entirely private life. Use gmail, skype, facebook, twitter, send non-encrypted messages about christmas to your friends and family, etc.

But what we do need is an online equivalent of a private life as well. And people need to be educated in the tools and techniques that can make this possible when necessary. Use tor, hidden services, pgp, i2p etc Use completely different online identities, ways of speaking and never login to a HN account associated with your real identity from that private space. Create and participate in hidden online communities, but don’t center those communities around your real life family and friends (ie facebook-esque hidden service would be a very bad idea).

The idea is not to challenge, fight or oppose nation states with surveillance capabilities, that's a losing proposition; the idea is to create a space away from them.
I think it depends on the reason why they were tasty.

If it was based on what they ate themselves, we might not have that available, and end up with a sub-par product.

Then again if they are inherently delicious, with the recent advancements around In Vitro meat, we might get fantastic mammoth meat forever.
thanks, I'm a developer, so I should get a designer.
What if it modified the program text, instead of some external load-able value? Self-modifying code could allow explicit branch prediction.
The QT C++ framework consciously decides to not deallocate the stuff that only get allocated once. The result is that running leaking catching tools is very hard. Not necessarily the greatest outcome despite being a logically defensible move.
Ekspedisi ke Medan - Ekspedisi ke Jambi - 021 6628028
Sadly, I think this suffers from one of Facebooks greatest and worst issues: "WHO WOULDN'T WANT TO SHARE THIS, NOW!!!"

>"Uhm... because; Fuck You, that's why"

I would suggest a much more clever way to virility; Help me actually MAKE something I WANT to share...

How about a tutorial on how to build an utterly awesome [document] thaat I just must share!

An invite, a how-to, op-ed...something!!

Here is an app that is looking to re-define how word processing is done, with a social context built-in - yet fails to provide a compelling reason, way, example, on how that should be done.

If word procs are so broken, give me an exciting example of how you fix it.
Just because you rewrite some of the slow bits in C, doesn't mean you get don't get a big win using python. I would bet the parts in C don't need to be as agile as all the other parts; the GUI, rest client etc.

So you can iterate fast, and drop to C when you need to.
There was an article on HN a few days ago about how the Digital Mars D compiler was using the null garbage collector and modified its allocation strategy to take advantage of this to yield a major speedup.
And the alternative is? This article does a good job of complaining while proposing no other solution.
I recorded my thoughts while browsing your site.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26816257/railyo.mov
3. Simple & safe family life that yields happiness and the supportive environment and mental health necessary to complete long-term projects.

4. Difficult & lonely life that leads to depression and not achieving anything at all.
Buy yourself a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit. $200 USD. The LEGO NXT programming environment is a scaled-down version of LabVIEW.
1. Works exceptionally on mobile.

2. Works offline. Whether spotty 3G connection or completely offline, our mobile apps work and sync whenever you come back online, even when multiple people are collaborating on the same document. The tech behind this is really cool. And everything is available offline automatically, not just stuff you "mark for offline"

3. Diffs, presence, notifications

More details at https://quip.com/about/features
Many many years ago I was a specialist in satellites for a major European broadcasting company. We had a problem with couriers who used radar speed trap jamming devices. They had really noisy oscillators which leaked huge quantities of out of band noise into the dished which were located near the courier drop off point.

We initially used an expensive spectrum analyser attached to a spare LNB (pointed at the parking area) but that needed you to notice the noise. So I used a USB enabled RF power meter interfaced to Excel (so sue me, it was a rush job and we weren't equipped for development). A script ran which fetched values, when there was a spike in received power it played an alarm and flashed the screen.

The next step was to ask security to hold anyone in the carpark while a large angry engineer went to give the courier a piece of his mind. It worked, courier companies were informed, people were shouted at and I believe it stopped.

There are probably better ways of doing this, but it was effective and built from spare parts.
Avoid the bad guys at startup
That's a curious lesson to learn seeing as Aaron Swartz was not a student at MIT.
Ask HN: How is the tech scene in Canada?
I guess I am specifically wondering about Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.
I agree that if the privacy laws are strong, and anyone from any agency breaks those laws, he should be severely punished. In such a society and such an environment, you'd still be free to use services however you want.

Unfortunately, the current environment lets even the intelligence chief get away with blatantly lying to Congress about who's he spying on and why. I agree that a policy solution is definitely preferable in the long run, but for now we should protect ourselves however we can, until we get to turn the "surveillance state" into a "privacy state".
This is without a doubt the niggliest point ever: Your Twitter app description just says 'Quip application'.
Like you say, for a well built app the pixel density does not matter because you design in dp.

> if you try cram too much on-screen assuming 1280x800 means a 7" device your app may be difficult to use on 4" one.

For the reason above, this just doesn’t follow. A 7" device would be about 600dp wide (in portrait), while a 4" phone would be about 320dp, regardless of pixel density. That’s not too different from iOS – the original iPad and the iPhone 5 have a similar number of pixels.
Such policy would lead to an explosion of fragmented patterns in routing, expanding the global routing table. That mean latency and costs would go up while throughput would go down.

If I remember right, there doesn't exist hardware for backbone networks that can handle a fully fragmented global routing table at the required speed of today. They are thus unlikely to also handle the increased speed of tomorrow without quantum computers.
1) That's just an example.

2) If you with in with Facebook you get to play the actual game, where you have to decide between two friends, likewise, if your friends were signed in, they can play it too. If you get saved or you don't, you can actually see that in your feed.
My grandfather, a retired academic chemical engineer, is in his late eighties and applied for his latest patent late last year, along with publishing some papers in academic journals.
That makes sense - certainly I agree that there is a fundamental human desire to be treated equally. (And not just in humans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=b_L... )

But:

1.
When given a free hand to segment their customers, businesses will generally set a higher price for people who can afford to pay more. This might be less equal but it is more equitable. For example, let's say Paramount Studios releases the latest James Bond film - they will want to charge an Australian cinema more for the right to screen the film than an Indian cinema. My sense of social justice says it is fair for someone whose income is £4/day to be charged less to see a film than someone who earns £100/day. If Paramount was forced to charge the same price then it would mean that Indian cinemas simply cannot afford to buy the rights to screen the film, and Indians would miss out entirely.

The argument is even stronger for medicine. If a pharmaceutical company can be sure there is no arbitrage between two countries, then it will want to sell a medical treatment cheaper in India than in Australia. That is A Good Thing.

2.
If you say to a business, "You must offer your product to Person A and Person B for the same price" then you are restricting the total size of the economic pie in a similar way to saying "You must offer your product for $6". Take Paramount Studios again - if they are prevented from charging different prices in different countries then they will earn less revenue. This means they will be pay their scriptwriters less, have less impressive special effects and pay less tax. (Or quite possibly the film is not made at all).

3.
You are happy for a car insurance company to discriminate on the basis of sex if there is a real difference in accident rates between men and women. Would you allow a car insurance company to discriminate on the basis of race if there is a real difference in accident rates?
Electronic check-in at the Taipei Hackerspace
I don't remember having to 'hope' that Google accepts an app through a human review before allowing it on their store.

I like neither Apple nor Google but I believe we shouldn't overlook facts that clearly differentiate one from the other.
Actually, I thought about your CrazyEgg anecdote as I was writing my comment. Having worked for a large Japanese company for several years, I did see a cultural difference between what US and Japanese managers were willing to sign off on for purchase req's. But aside from that, I do think a $9/month CrazyEgg plan is within the scope of a true hobby site, whereas $20/month for a status page service isn't. The proof is in testing, but my gut tells me that customers could be segmented without using a plan name that is arguably demeaning.
The privacy concerns of predictive analytics - video
This situation sucks. I think the most important thing you can do for him is just leave him alone but with some encouraging thoughts. Send him a text saying you'll be there for him when he feels ready to reach out. You can get out of almost any crappy situation at age 20. You just need to take a step back and look at it objectively.
Infographic: The World’s Technology Hubs
Brett, I'm certain that as cynical, harsh and snarky some comments here might appear, most do mean well. It's a twisted form of constructive criticism to say the least, especially on HN. Some look at the details, others the overall implementation, a few will complain and some aren't even sure of what they're seeing. But I think the most important takeaway from this thread is that you have a pretty good collection of items to explore. I think a founder engaging a community of critical early-adopters is one of the best ways to polish the initial edges and perfect your product for wide adoption. There's always something to add to the feature-set.

Note: It's difficult to see from your site that you also have a desktop version (support). This might be as important as the mobile version for those of us who don't create on our iPads and would rather review on tablet.
Can Every Group Be Worse Than Average? Yes.
First Chromecast App - Phone to Chromecast
This assumes that it's possible for everyone, or even everyone deserving, to have enough money that they can afford to spend it charitably.
This author reaches pretty far. The NSA paid Microsoft to acquire Skype? You can't just materialize multiple billions of dollars on a public company's income statement.
> I was just put off by that digging into my address book experience...that's all.

There's absolutely no need for it in a word processor, this social stuff can't die fast enough imho.
Show HN: I built this website to help people with hashtags. Hope you'll enjoy it
Why on earth does this article have so many upvotes? Running time analysis is completely wrong... O(n) vs O(1) and such...tss..don't get me started..
Stealing. Sleeping. TSA employee misconduct up 26% in 3 years
>wget http://grauniad.co.uk/
--2013-07-31 09:10:13-- http://grauniad.co.uk/
Resolving grauniad.co.uk... 77.91.252.10, 77.91.251.10
Connecting to grauniad.co.uk|77.91.252.10|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ [following]
--2013-07-31 09:10:13-- http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Resolving www.guardian.co.uk... 185.31.16.185, 103.245.223.205
Connecting to www.guardian.co.uk|185.31.16.185|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 www.guardian.co.uk gets redirected
Location: http://www.theguardian.com/ [following]
--2013-07-31 09:10:13-- http://www.theguardian.com/
Resolving www.theguardian.com... 185.31.16.185, 103.245.223.205
Connecting to www.theguardian.com|185.31.16.185|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://www.theguardian.com/uk [following]
--2013-07-31 09:10:14-- http://www.theguardian.com/uk
Reusing existing connection to www.theguardian.com:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 348737 (341K) [text/html]
Energy Requirements For Star Trek-Like Teleportation Calculated
Dual-stack, proxies, and (if absolutely necessary) actual tunnels can compensate for critical IPv4 apps. You can layer whatever you need to on top of IPv6.

Non-critical applications where people aren't willing to jump through any hoops... Well, it's not exactly news that sometimes old apps get left behind in technology transitions.
> POLITICS, NOT ENCRYPTION, IS THE ANSWER

And how would author convince Russia or China not to spy? Or some people who are not government at all? (terrorists, scam...). Also NSA lied several times and said it would lie again.

Lets just treat it as any other security issue. Banning XSS in parliament is ridiculous.
Dropbox used Python for client portability?
Apple is probably a bad example.

Presumably, as the good in question becomes scarcer, its value will increase to the point where it makes sense to sell it, or use alternative solutions.
> In most cases in which I need a while loop, I use a tail recursion instead. You can keep your code free of side-effects that way and the compiler generates code equivalent to a while loop.

Hear, hear! I can corroborate this statement and have benchmarked it quite a bit in the past. If you can mark a method as @tailrec in scala and the compiler does not complain, it will go as fast as if it were written with a while loop. And in many cases it will feel cleaner as well.

Of course, not everything writes itself nicely in a recursive style, for this you should use while if you need the performance. Don't be afraid, scala is after all a mariage between OO, functional and bits and pieces of everything nice. It's still there for a reason.

* the @tailrec attribute is not necessary but forces the compiler to complain when your recursive method is not, in fact, tail recursive. It's also good documentation that a developer who makes changes should keep it tail recursive because it's sensitive.
QT is big and popular enough that I would expect tools to have support for it.
What makes you think the onus is on the complainer to provide solutions?
You can indeed. The figures are very large and you cannot view item level detail in the financials, only general concepts. The NSA may be propping up the Azure division or one of countless others through backroom deals over this type of thing.
I just checked it out and really like it. My primary use case would be a tool to replace or augment a wiki.

What types of feedback are you most interested in receiving?
The reason why open plan offices are here to stay is because they are much more space efficient than traditional offices and therefore cheaper. Traditional offices use up lots of space for corridors, door swings and duplicated circulation routes to desks etc. Also, only the offices on the perimeter of the building have a view to the outside so it limits the depth of the plan, unless you run the kind of business which has miserable employees. They also require more complicated a/c, fire alarms, lighting.
I have to disagree with you.

It is not just about effort. It is also about opportunity cost. Imagine you work for someone else and then you tell them that for the kind of UI we want I can ensure it works for 95% of Android devices if you give me another three weeks and access to these 30 other devices (maybe on some website that offers paid access to them for a bit of time). Right now it works well for 75% of the devices.

Now, the person who owns this business may consider his/her money better spent when you implement some other feature on both Ios and Android rather than ensure you support almost all of Android devices. It may not be the developer who chooses. Many times it may not be so clear cut too. It may be that some features get shot down during design because they are hard to get right on all the various aspect ratios and screen sizes that Android offers.

So, yes the 'fragmentation' is a problem but in my experience it is mostly only to do with the variations in aspect ratio and screen size.

Nevertheless, like one of the first replies to this topic (by bookwormAT) says, it is not as bad as having had to code for various Operating Systems if the manufacturers hadn't agreed to go with Android in the first place. So, Android does help us develop for a wide range of manufacturers' phones but it doesn't help much to ease the pain of accounting for the variation in displays.
re: "compatible to another" - this is definitely not always the case. it certainly may be the intention, but is not always the case.

Random example: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.phonegap/3631...

I work for a very popular cross platform mobile application (ios, blackberry, android), and we have dozens and dozens of test devices, a qa department just dedicated to finding differences between devices, and let me tell you that most of the time, special tweaks are required for android that are not required for ios. Surely this is hugely due to the fact that there is less variety in the ios world, but you simply wont find that "manufacturer xyz decided to implement this differently so now the developer must account for that".

Finally, in your analogy of adapting from Android->Android, is similar to adapting from say ios5->ios6. Having been through this several times now, I can tell you with confidence that the initial time of adapting is very similar with equally skilled developers, but the delta of "code complete" to "ready to ship" is much larger on android, due to all of the testing, double-checking, and edge cases. So in summary I would say that you do "adapt a little" with ios, but you end up adapting a lot more than a little for android, if you want to support more than a couple phones, in my opinion.
Practical Common Lisp is great. ANSI CL by PG is so so. For example PG explains CLOS without examples - instead he implements his own object-system. That's WRONG in a book about ANSI Common Lisp, but PG never liked CLOS anyway. CLOS plays an important part in many CL based software libraries. PG's book provides nothing more like an expanded dictionary for it and the pointless other object system can be forgotten instantly.

PAIP is one of the best books about programming ever. Generally loops are preferred over recursion in CL - it is not Scheme.

'Piratebay' pays also for the Lisp authors and encourages them to write books? Wonderful, let us know how it works.
Nashx allows trading using Nash equilibrium and mutually-assured destruction