skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not even abuse in the sense that it will be done with evil intent.. It is, in fact, a natural consequence that even good people will do 'bad things' when put in the position.

Imagine the following: You, mtgx, are put in charge of protecting the mid-Atlantic states from an attack. You have been given complete access to all of the legally obtained intelligence that the nation has about the region and potential conspirators for said attack.

Do you not use it? What are your options? If you don't use it, and the attacks are successful, it will be your fault. You will have to live with the knowledge that your inaction, for whatever higher purpose, cost those lives.

I posit that even good people like you would take all of the steps you have available to do your job. Even if by day you are writing letters to the editors begging the nation to take those powers away from you.

For a reak example, look no farther than what happened in the case of the Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. It turns out that we had a lot of intelligence on him; the Russians even alerted us that he was trouble. And yet, we did not feel we had enough evidence to invade his privacy. We didn't stop him (this is why I think that the people doing this are basically trying to do the right thing). And when we found out after the bombing that this could have been stopped? The shit hit the fan: People were declaring the FBI/CIA incompetent, etc.

The main reason to act on this privacy issue is to help the good people who have to do these jobs, not to stop evil people. The rules are now such that good people have to do evil things in order to be good.

We want to keep this in mind so that we solve the right problem.
Thanks. HN usually notifies of duplicate submissions.
I'm using blogger for my side project (http://higherordergo.blogspot.com). It is nothing special but it gets the job done for close to zero time configuration.
Probably worth buying for the patents, sales channels and manufacturing bits. Cut most of software dev and turn them into an Android phone maker...maybe specialize on low powered, ultra long battery life phones of something.
That's a good point. Ok, so maybe MS would be the one to bite. If only to beat out a potential competitor to windows phone and to pick up that slice of the market.

Consider me convinced, that might just work out well for them, if they're going to switch anyway it might as well be to a company that is already well represented in the enterprise. How they're going to give those users the blackberry experience is beyond me though, but that would probably not stop an acquisition.
Apple plans new iPhone launch for 10 September
Thanks for that nice guide! I was actually expecting to install GHC by hand eventually (for now, 7.4 is sufficient).
Interesting, i must admit, if i look inside myself keenly i fully agree with this.
After Guantánamo, Another Injustice
How do you successfully build an audience? Posting to reddit and HN is nice and all, but one or two popular posts rarely builds a ton of repeat users in my experience.
GitHub Pages is really great because they will host it themselves at a domain like username.github.io, and when you decide you need a new side-project, you can easily port everything over to your own server. Jekyll static-site generator can be used on GitHub Pages, or you can literally throw .html files in there. I like it purely for the flexibility it provides me.
TIL: Push to and pop from the stack in IRB
Blackberry is Up For Sale
Killer App for Glass - Does Google Dare Pursue It?
I have a very similar experience as you. Public speaking doesn't phase me, but the one on one exchanges with strangers or people I rarely interact with are exhausting.

I've thought that perhaps it's because the public speaking is more defined. Either in topic or format. When public speaking on a particular subject I'm more concerned with whether or not the audience is getting the material than I am about whether or not they're interested in me as a individual, or their critiques of my performance ability.

With on-one-one conversations the topics can meander anywhere and maintaining interest can be tiring if there are discussions on topics I frankly couldn't care less about.
How LinkedIn has changed the way you might get your next job
How a great San Francisco independent bookstore is dealing with e-books.
Using Both the Waterfall and Agile Methods
There are plenty of automatic differentiation libraries out there for C++, python, Matlab etc. Not sure how you spin that as a unique feature of Haskell.
Make it easy for people to discover when you post again. This could be anything from a mailing list (overkill IMO) or providing an RSS feed of your blog for people to subscribe to.
SpongyCastle is a repackage of BouncyCastle specifically for the Android platform, an unfortunate necessity due to Android shipping with a cut-down version of Bouncy Castle (see https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3280 & http://rtyley.github.io/spongycastle/ ).

...I'm the packager of SpongyCastle (a task a well-trained monkey could do, I don't alter the code other than package-renaming it), and I confess some relief that the issue is with Android's in-built SecureRandom class, rather than anything in (Bouncy|Spongy)Castle.
Does anyone else suspect that Blackberry/RIM's troubles might be something along the lines of what has happened to LavaBit? Wasn't their device/architecture similar to LavaBit's at least in that comm's were sent encrypted to a server either controlled by RIM, or by a third party (individual companies, gov't agencies, etc.)

Then, some time in the not-too-distant past, various world governments started making a big conspicuous deal out of getting "lawful access" to those servers.

Then, there were a few widely reported reputation damaging service outages.

Then, they became unable to design and manufacture a new phone, despite years of experience making Blackberry phones.

Given the surveillance controversy, BB ought to be "killing it" as some say, except that new BB10 devices are more like BB branded commodity smartphones, the data is no longer encrypted en-route, and the cost for "secure email" has gone up dramatically, and is licensed separately where it used to be a built-in feature.

/tinfoil
Show HN: Visualmarks - markdown/html round-trip editing and publishing services
Games legend Chris Sawyer hates on freemium, hints at RCT for iPad
Great, thank you for the tip. It worked!

I ran in to a few speedbumps along the way, but it turns out I just needed the HEAD version of FFMPEG installed first.
Holder proposes changes in criminal justice system
But you haven't presented anything that is special about lenses. For example, your lens expression would be trivially translated to this Python:

for o in obj["aKey"]: o["3"] = 4

The OP:s point was that lenses seem like a workaround for Haskell's lack of mutable state.

EDIT: What I'm meaning is that to show lenses unique benefits, you would have to come up with an example in which the code is more succinct than the equivalent code implemented without lenses in another language.
Every time I see the phrase "open source", I mentally add "but not open binary"; how do I know that the service that is run uses binaries that are compiled from that open source alone? with trusted libraries? After all, anyone can employ a site-specific patch in their build process that adds additional "features" to their normally open source project.

Is there a reasonable way to have trusted individuals intermittently audit the service?
TomTom has this as well. The core map contains something called "disputed border". It's up to the manufacturer licensing the map to use this attribution of course.
Adobe: "Prompt the user for their EchoSign email and password"
> This is compounded by (and in large part caused by) the fact that they waited so long - their legacy BB OS has rendered them largely irrelevant to most people, and that's a huge hurdle to overcome.

BB users are also a strange lot. The ones I know at least tend to be very conservative about their equipment choice. Hauling around 6 or 7 year old BBs because newer ones move the icons around or they don't like the keyboards or what have you. They want exactly the experience they have right now and nothing else. I've known a half dozen who bought and returned both Androids and iPhones (trying to get with modernity a little) pretty much because they weren't BBs...or at least all of their problems with the other two phones were why this or that wasn't like it was on their BB.

This has been a very big problem for Blackberry. They invest in finally modernizing and updating their hardware and software, but everybody who's not already a BB user has moved on, and the ones who've remained don't want the new stuff because it's not just exactly what they already have.

Their only chance would have been to capture the non-conservative parts of the market before they left years ago. That boat set sail long ago.
Defeatism. Mass surveillance can be blinded. High-intensity efforts at cracking encrypted communications and storage don't scale up.

Mass surveillance is only worthwhile if you have comprehensive visibility into potential high-value targets. If the 20% of people who are actually doing something more meaningful than cat videos routinely use encryption, then mass surveillance only gets you cat videos.
Anyone know this Racist Dick's name? 
He should face the same consequences as the other people who uploaded a racist video to youtube like Alexandra Wallace, Sam Hendrickson, the racist Arizona girls, and Kyla Pawis.
RAGUEL (weekend project) Friend for Shell Script God ~ yet to grow lot more
I use Blogger - you can amend the HTML to include google's https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/ in nearly no time at all. And it just works! Lovely.

I found myself in a similar position to Mr Swanson. I just started writing about things and found that good things came out of it. It makes life more interesting. And it helps other people. This is me:

http://icanmakethiswork.blogspot.com/
What Every College Student Should Post on LinkedIn
So you think people should be able to just waltz right onto an airplane without identification? Someone could easily just have their ticket purchased by someone else, use that ticket, and get on the airplane, which would be a security risk. It helps you by helping you not have someone who stole your ticket get on the plane in your place. And how do you expect age restrictions to be enforced without ID? Some people look a lot older or younger than they are.
It seems to me the article takes the same approach to prevent someone from stealing your car. You can take certain measures like locking your doors and installing a car alarm which will thwart most thieves who are looking for an easy mark. However, if a professional car thief wants to steal your car, guess what? They're going to steal your car.

In a sense, it makes it harder for government to eavesdrop on you, but if they really want to get your information, they can.

All your doing by using these tools is making your private information harder to get at. Which I don't think is a bad thing. Outside of the government, these tool will do wonders to thwart identity thieves and other malicious hackers from getting at your information so it's not completely worthless to use them.
Dude, most people would cry if you took their Instagram from them, and they won't forget it about it tomorrow. You're shoving the realities of the market under the table as if they didn't matter. Go ask someone who pays for apps to tell you what Instagram is.
If we connect electrodes (or use non-invasive potential and current measurement techniques), we can reverse engineer the functionality. We see that electrons hit the screen. Where do they come from? The emitter. What controls its voltage? The amplifier. What are the inputs to it?
We can see that there is a measurable signal coming to the television through the wire. There is nothing supernatural or even quantum level stuff going on.
"Coffee shop sounds boost creativity"

Is there any science behind this? The reason I find coffee shops less distracting is because there is usually nobody there I know to distract me. At home my housemates distract me, at work my colleagues distract me, in the coffee shop there is no one...
Tech hacks are part of the solution. They are not the only part, of course, but tech solutions help to ensure that the other part of the solution, politics, does not fail. It is not hard for laws to change; it is hard for technology to be replaced, especially when it is standardized and widely used. If the law forbids the government from reading our emails without a warrant, then the email system should be designed to support the law -- e.g. by encrypting messages.
If you can live without great code formatting support and you don't mind paying for it, then I really can't recommend Squarespace highly enough.

I fancied blogging, but I already have so many god-damn side projects on the go (my eternal problem is too much started - too little finished) that the last thing I want to do is keep a linux vps and a Wordpress installation up-to-date and configured securely.

With squarespace I think I pay $16 a month (less actually as discount codes are in healthy supply online) instead of $5 for, say, a vps on DigitalOcean, but I get my pick from a set of nice responsive template designs, unlimited traffic (in case I ever write something that gets HN'd) and a drag and drop interface that most of the time exactly meets my needs. They do all the updating of the back end for me and I can just write. I can inject code and other stuff onto the page if I need to, but I've kind of come to the realisation that I don't need most of that bumf anyway.

I did just have a look at the in-post code writing tool out of interest: It has HTML, CSS and Javascript formatting, which isn't much help if you do most of your work in c# like I do, but then I'm sure I'll survive. Their customer service is why I'm so damn enthusiastic about them, so no doubt if I REALLY feel I need it I could just email them and request it.

Reading this back sounds like I work in their marketing department. I promise I don't, I just really think you should check them out.
Fully agreed - I think the main problem of NoFlo is that I'm not sure who they're trying to get on board. Developers will be put off by the appeal for "popular" platforms and the dumbing down. But I'm not sure who else but developers is supposed to care about this stuff?

That's why I highlighted the "jargon" bit in my other reply - It seems like they have identified "people who manage or contract developers" as one (or maybe even "the") target audience.

I think that's worrying - at least if it is carried out in this tone. A good developer shouldn't need fancy flow charts to convey to you that she can or does deliver what you pay her to do. It might be what people want to have - "If only somebody would solve this problem that I cannot understand developers and they're always misleading me" - but that doesn't mean that you should pander to it. Because at its worst, you're simply giving out fancier tools for misleading clients.
If you don't care about metadata then imho the approach presented in a blog post[1] linked in your firespotting thread is most reasonable. Most importantly the private key never touches the mail-server.

If you do care about metadata then you could do some lavabitesque tricks in addition to encrypting the message bodies.

[1] https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...
Bloomberg: The Hidden Technology Giant
J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance mania was pretty low-tech by today's standards. As was the Stasi. These were clearly political problems first and foremost.

Maybe technology can help, but, it shouldn't be overvalued.
I thought Steve's post was insightful and well written. The article would be even better if the author made two small improvements to spelling and grammar:

1. "1960's" should be written as "1960s." It's incorrect to use an apostrophe.
2. Semicolons should separate complete, related sentences, not fragments such as "an hour from Stanford on the coast, but that hasn't helped."

I'm taking a moment to offer this feedback because I know that all good writers can benefit from constructive criticism. I look forward to reading more of the author's insightful posts.
> Apple or Google should make this purchase just for their federal salesforce alone...

That wouldn't be a good reason for Apple to buy BB, it'd be a money losing proposition for them. The Feds have already moved on to Android phones and reversing that would take years.
To further this line of thought though...

They won't always be living with "techno-dad", so it behooves them at some point to get some of that knowledge. The onus is eventually on someone to want to figure this out. To bring up a scenario from the article, I know I wanted to play Super Nintendo, so when I got one, I made damn well sure I know how to hook it up & operate it in case something went wrong. If my job relies on being connected to the Internet and editing proxy settings, it's even more important that I know the ins & outs of that...

At some point, it is clear that people don't want to learn, whether they think it is beneath them, outside of their expertise, too hard, or, in this case, they know they'll always have someone else to do it for them.

Just like I don't need to be a certified mechanic to change my own oil or a headlight, you don't need a degree in CS, CE or IS to figure out how to remove preinstalled bloatware from the computer you just bought at Best Buy or to understand that a suspicious link in an email from an unknown sender shouldn't be clicked. In any case, the answer is always a web search away...

There's nothing wrong with saving your brain power for something you like, but I think there is a knowledge divide around computers & the Internet that leads to people getting scammed out of money because people refuse to learn the basics. Or maybe they never get the opportunity to learn, I don't know. They still teach kids how to write checks in school, why not teach them about this sort of thing too?
When Code Review Audit Trails Pay Off
Four Online Brands That Are Building Their Reputations Offline
Listen asshole,

Can we meet for coffee next week?

I'd like to discuss our shared synergies around online advertising. I believe you could be a huge value-add to our preliminary discussions.
Show HN: Simple way to generate music with cellular automatons
At Toronto Music Hack Day I built a simple, yet sleek grid based interface to generate music with cellular automatons. Tap on the grid to add more atoms.

http://tap-pad.herokuapp.com

It's rather beautiful as although the music is random sounding, it's actually 100% deterministic.

I made a web version and an iPad app. You can also share the state of the grid and share it via link:

http://tap-pad.herokuapp.com/661621

Code is all open-sourced on Github under MIT:

https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-web

https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-ios
How else do you verify you're who the ticket belongs to? Do you really think the person checking people's IDs memorizes them all to put into some database?
Thanks for this, I had been looking for a good/simple ID generator in Python and was about to resort to building it myself.
Couldn't it simply be that drinking coffee in coffee shops increases productivity, not the sounds?

In all honesty, find a quiet place or get some noise canceling headphones, coffee shops are incredibly distracting.
Armstrong's Right to Lie
That seems like a case of determining what the API should check for. An explicit check for e=1 seems stupid, the reasonable check would be to make sure that e was a valid exponent, which I believe means confirming that it is primes, which can have a non-trivial overhead (although in the case of RSA, the exponents are gennerally small enough that it doesn't matter.) The real question in this case is why the API let you select the exponent in the first place.
Jeff Hawkins: Where open source and machine learning meet big data
links:

http://tap-pad.herokuapp.com

example grid:

http://tap-pad.herokuapp.com/661621

code:

https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-web

https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-ios
I used blogger (blogspot) for many years, and liked it. Eventually though I decided to switch to hosting my blog as a menu/tab on my own main web site and use Jekyll to generate static pages. Either using Google Analytics, or on your server set up awstats (an apt-get install, and 2 minutes of setup) so that you know which blog entries people actually read.
I'm struggling towards this end myself.

I have http://www.mikadosoftware.com, which is the main supposedly commercial site. Its self hosted on rackspace for various reasons.

For documenting side projects I use readthedocs.org and CNAMEs to put up any and every github project - so I get http://pyholodeck.mikadosoftware.com, generated straight out of docs in the github project. Good syntax highlighting is a breeze, look at `literal-include` in sphinx for an idea. I have maybe twenty CNAMEs like this.

And http://blog.mikadosoftware.com is a wordpress site, I pay about 5 bucks a month for, mostly because I did not want to write my own blogging software for the 3rd time.

I know it sounds a mess but the theory is I used to have "ideas" and would mail myself with a sentence or two thnking "one day" I would write it up into that world changing post it deserved. Well now I just open the Wordpress app and put those sentences, plus a couple more because I am publishing and I have a "thought" out there.
Basically every random thought that used to languish on my inbox is tarted up with an extra 30 seconds work and actually contributes to my capital.

I have no idea if it is SEO good or bad, or frankly if anyone actually reads this stuff. But I am glad I am slowly building up my online capital. If any of the blog posts actually get attention, I guess I will tart it up a bit and republish it on www.

(As an example, I often bang on about software as new forms of capital here, but this link (http://blog.mikadosoftware.com/2013/08/06/software-capital/) is an example of me putting a quick thought into existence. I would not actually consider that an acceptable docstring for production code, but its OK to throw out there.

Anyway - I agree with the main thrust - and for less than 50 bucks I have blogs, code documentation, and proper length articles from ReSt (a python form of markdown)
> How do you successfully build an audience?

Just keep writing. Don't worry about building an audience, focus on improving your own writing ability and finding your voice. I wouldn't even really say I have much of an audience - but it has grown from only co-workers and friends to local developers to occasional HN/Reddit success.

When you think about bloggers that have a real, influential audience (PG, Joel Spolsky, etc) just remember how many years and hundreds (or thousands) of posts they've written.
How's your math? A disproportionate amount of financial software comes out of Paris. Usually the math requirements for these jobs are pretty high. (Hence they like hiring French mathematicians)

Many firms like Google and Facebook are setting up in Paris too to take advantage of the tech talent.
Yes, the science was pulled from a peer reviewed journal:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665048

From the University of Chicago.
I think the only reason people may see a standard problem with this is because they see it as a web browser first, and as a phone OS second. If it was built as a platform and did not have the capability to view web pages, would anyone complain that they took JS and extended it to offer the local app capabilities they needed?

I think it depends on how you view it. Is it a browser that also happens to power the core of the OS, or is at an OS that also happens to be a browser? I don't think where it came from originally has any bearing in the answer.
Having state does not mean a function/algorithm is not pure.