skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice article! I'm English and work in China, so for once an English person struggling with language :) I've experienced the same things you've experienced, but with Chinese native speakers.

But there's also benefits of being non-native which I think you overlook:

- I can be 10x more blunt in Chinese than I can in English. The language itself is blunt, but I also get much more leeway because I'm not expected to have perfect language.

- I can concentrate on what people are actually asking me to do, rather than getting distracted by the subtleties of language or tone of voice. I get less annoyed with people's personality, and more engaged with what they want.

- Other people don't get distracted by your accent, and give you more credit than you're due. Think of a Russian speaking English - I might have negative cultural perceptions (eg. because of movie bad guys) but I also think of Dostoyevsky. You might be from the worst council estate in Russia, but I'll think you're a philosopher because of the accent.
Isn't the issue more that Mega portray that they CAN'T see what files you're storing (plausible deniability regarding pirated content) while this proves that they actually could see your file contents if they wanted to?

Which in turn really means it's no more secure than, say, DropBox.

At least that's the impression I have regarding why this is somewhat important.
Smart move by google. Potentially they've regained control of their platform past, present and future...

In one fell swoop they can resolve fragmentation, keep everyone up to date on functionality/APIs, bypass OEM/carrier update issues (be it carrier QA, OEM lack of interest, or just crapware). Most importantly google can keep any OEM's (ie samsung) in check and prevent them branching away from android.

The downsides: what happens when google break an entire range of phones/functionality with an update? Are they going to QA every android product in existence?
Will older models slow down and become unusable as the baseline resource requirements increase? (I'm looking at you IOS7)...
Best text editor for writing a technical document or programming book?
What are some good text editors that will help aid in writing a book about coding. I am worried about formatting as well as my code samples staying intact when publishing to print. Any suggestions?
It would be logical to do that if it were a section that would see some measure if high speed use.

The section which would see that would be from Martinez to Davis. That segment sees many capital corridor trains daily and would immediately benefit from high speed service. What they are working on now sees a small fraction of the ridership, iirc.
PG has been off his game in this discussion. It is important to be fluent both in understanding and in communicating, both in English and in techspeak. I threw together http://www.strategicmessaging.com/fluency/2013/08/30/ to spell that out, and it's the first time ever I've just banged out a post that much improved on what Paul Graham wrote.

antirez adds to the discussion further, by pointing out that there are various different kinds of language fluency. Excellent observations.
The problem isn't Play. It's that people are being bound more tightly to the ecosystem.

As a developer, one of the things that was more appealing to me about Android was that Android seemed to be a more level playing field. But this approach tilts things substantially in favor of Google.

In particular, this solves fragmentation for Google, and maybe for Google trusted partners, but it doesn't seem to do so for any other Android developers.

I don't think anybody's saying the Play app should be open source. But if I were making my living from Android apps, I'd worry that Android improvements would be few and far between. Both the technical and business incentives push to improving Play Services, not the base OS.
I called your name as I reached out for you but when I opened my eyes I was alone...waiting for Raine...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
Thought tptacek's link on Javascript crypto, linked to in the article (and sort of a motivator for the experiment), was well worth a read.

http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/
A Linux Desktop Chroot on a Rooted Android Tablet…
We do have programs that write programs. Who's using them?

I like your optimism, but the average guy with an MBA definitely can't throw a MVP together, especially not in 2013 when the low hanging fruit have been steadily picked off. The bar is continuously being raised, and it'll be cheaper for the MBA to hire a developer to throw that MVP together, using highly complex and abstract components.

If I'm getting the second half of your reply right, you're saying it's the availability of high-quality low-complexity zero-cost solutions to mundane problems that's going to put software developers out of a job. But that's exactly what I address in my post - these things were going to be automated anyway. And don't be disappointed by a user base attracted to glossy boxes - some of them will get curious eventually.
That being said we've had many times more deaths from bad software than from bad spacecraft(http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~nachumd/horror.html vs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...).

I understand your point that you might write software that has few consequences if it fails, but thats not always the case.
AKA Give us your facebook login in exchange for telling you about BTC.

No thanks.
> We have software "robots" that write software and many of us use them frequently. They're called compilers.

Compilers automate a simple but tedious translation process. They do not "write programs", they merely translate (hopefully in a deterministic way) one stream of text (PL code) into another stream of text (machine code). They apply no creativity to the problem, and indeed was once done by hand with what were essentially secretary pools (Grace Hopper got her start there, thankfully she moved up pretty quickly). Compilers eliminated this work, but the persons handing the high-level programs to the "human compilers" (the former usually men, the latter usually women, the 50s were pretty sexist) still had a job that was relatively the same (just now they had to deal with punchcards).

> Programming is still challenging. That won't end in the next 50 years.

Programming ends as a profession of course once we hit singularity, which is anywhere from 20 to 100 years away depending on who you ask. We already do not code many systems by hand, but instead meta-code algorithms to generate these systems from corpus training inputs (aka machine learning). No one would try and build a speech recognition system by hand anymore. We will see machine learning increasingly encroaching on what used to be pure programming tasks.
So Rubin departs leadership of Android just before Android becomes "not open". Seems like there's a backstory here that I'd love to hear about.
Someone writes an article about Facebook being bad once every couple months....but more recently it's been more like once every couple of weeks.
The thing where Australia banned porn with smaller (A/B) breasted adult women because it "contributed to pedophilia" was amazing, too.
Seven over 70
I couldn't wait for the new Mac Pro
It's one thing to set test records with test equipment, and another to set them with production equipment -- this model is the actual train they're going to run on the line. Kind of like how the Bell X-1 was the first supersonic aircraft, but the Concorde was the first commercial supersonic aircraft.

(And I have a sneaky suspicion that Japan's maglev, running in a depopulating country with economy in a terminal downward spiral, will end up as marginal and unprofitable as the Concorde, but that's another story.)
This didn't need proving. They send you JavaScript code, which you trust to encrypt your files. Without a built-in, well-audited, static browser mechanism no web service can ever be trusted with confidential data.

If the Feds decide to raid MEGA again they can simply modify their server side script to recognise your IP and serve you bad JavaScript from the MEGA domain, revealing your keys the next time you login. Nobody would be any the wiser.

Personally I'm waiting for JS crypto to take off big time and idiots to start using it from a CDN.
Doing 5 is rarely cheap enough. It's well known that the earlier in the process errors are fixed, the cheaper they are.
Since you "hate everything about FB" then what, exactly, do you use Facebook for and how often?

> "Therefore I don't post anything and keep my best photos up".

You don't want pictures of you and girls, and you don't want facebook of you and other guys so.. pictures of just you?

If you have professional contacts, writing about android apps you're working on seems like a good idea - it shows your expertise, shows your productivity.

Overall your post makes me think of this: http://deoxy.org/media/The_Social_Network_Scam
Sneaky advertisement. I'm just curious and before I realize it, I gave them my facebook ID and spammed my friends. Could work. I mean I won't spam my friends but hey, facebook is evil, so why not make the facebook-experience for everybody just a little worse and nag them with something actually cool.
Things like this are why I like filesystems that can reliably detect corruption, like ZFS.
Huge!! It's crazy how something so deceivingly simple took so long to invent.
So because we can't study it we assume it's perfect? That's the essence of the fallacy of security through obscurity.

As a corollary, just because you can't do a quick Google search for 0days in iOS or Windows doesn't mean they exist. In fact they do, and they're bought and sold on black markets or are kept secret by governments and the like.

You don't assume something is secure because you can't readily access documented flaws. You assume something is secure when it has undergone rigorous peer review, which, as you stated, does not exist.

Your argument seems to be that you can't simply find a laundry list of Skype flaws floating around. This is true. But it says positively nothing about the security or lack of security regarding Skype's protocol.
Correct me if I'm wrong. From 4.0 Play is mandatory if you want drivers. That's why Barnes and Noble had to put Play on their devices.
I was off Facebook for a year and felt as free as you described. The problem is that girls use FB as a vetting tool. It's weird to not have FB and introduces a barrier to entry in the dating world (pun absolutely intended).
Hacking the coding interview
I do not mean to be an ass here, but I am going to sound like one... You must live a shallow and trite life if you're THAT concerned about keeping up appearances.

Are you sure you have friends and not just acquaintances you're tying to impress?
I first head of Mr. Pohl work by playing that game (and its sequel)

And indeed, it is really impressive and interesting! Lots of food for thought on them.

And considering a game cannot have much story as a book, it is only a glimpse of Mr. Pohl full body of work, but it still is really, really impressive and awesome.
> Excuse my language, but fuck all of that. Fuck those people and fuck whatever system made this a profitable enterprise.

Sure. Who do you think made this system possible? Your answer lies in your own rant above… those same investment bankers you think are less evil than these subcontractors.

Think of it as tactical greed (i.e., on the ground, personally playing Mephistopheles' part) vs. strategic greed (i.e., altering the rules of the game such that conditions like this are profitable - in the meanwhile, gaining untold profits for themselves).
We've had the tools to automate software development for years and there's been almost no movement in that direction.
Moving some functionality into the Play Services package is a direction that Google have clearly been going in for at least a year: last year both Google+ integrations (understandably) and an updated Google Maps SDK being released.

Android Community's original description of Play Services as "In a nutshell, Google Play services allows app developers to integrate other Google services, like Google Plus, into their apps" is still accurate today.
in my opinion, the internet. most, if not all of humanity's knowledge at the tip of my fingers. it's with me 24/7 and almost everywhere.
>It's not that one day programs will write programs that write--oh wait, that's already happened

Hi, I write software for a living. Just replace the most tedious part, please: debugging.

Say what? You can't even give me a probability [1] that my program has an infinite loop in it?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant
Wars mean lots of money is spend on stitching up people (and blowing them up in the first place).

Without wars, we could save the resources used for the blowing up part.
Arthur Ganson's Machines
I wish you'd say a little more but thank you anyway I forgot that book existed, now I have a stronger desire to read it.
A lot of employment lawyers will take cases on in exchange for a portion of the damages if you have a valid case. Almost every employment lawyer will listen to you enough to figure out if you might have a case.
The dashboard is an Ajenti fork. :)
> Only those whose programs might “endanger the public health or safety, security, property, or the economy will need to be tested,” continues Thornton.

It's perfectly sensible to introduce this when Software Engineers will be working alongside people who are also licensed and accredited. So, software engineers in safety-critical fields -- writing firmware medical devices, or shutdown routines for nuclear power plants, or pacemaker firmware -- would definitely benefit from this. Whether software engineers working on consumer-grade electronics need something like this is more hazy (Pebble smartwatch firmware? Probably not. But what about the people writing the iOS app for a diabetic's glucose blood monitor? Hmm.)

I'm under the impression that Software Engineering has been licensed by certain local engineering bodies for at least a few years now (Professional Engineers Ontario comes to mind), so this is nothing new. Not going for the accreditation won't harm your chances of being hired by a Google or Facebook, nor will it prevent you from starting your own company.
I'd like to know what technical benefits there are, if any, from this roundabout approach by Google. I suspect there aren't many, if any, and this is more of a tactic to 'circle around' and retroactively gain tighter control over the OS. (Also, see Google's purchase of Motorola with the intention of making phones with better hardware-software integration...)
Edit1: A poorly written app could impact the ability to call 911. Even by draining the battery unexpectedly.
...and nowadays in the US: HomeSec
Interesting. Everyone put it as an attempt to keep the Nook relevant (because you get all the google apps with it), but I'd be interested in seeing more on that side of things. Which drivers, though? Usually you'd get the graphics driver from the chipset manufacturer, for instance, who they would already be contracting with because they make the device.
I'm not sure what drivers you refer to, but Play definitely isn't mandatory to use the AOSP. Barnes and Noble presumably had all the drivers they needed to make the Nook functional without Play?
Turing machines are not infinite. There are merely big enough for everything you want to do. (I.e. actual infinity vs potential infinity.)
Again, I'm not going to argue the point, but it does seem like Play has gained a lot more significance after Andy's sidestep.

I found the Google memos from the Java trial absolutely fascinating… I imagine the story (going back a couple of years) on this would make great literature.
Cool blog post! From your resume it looks like you worked at Blackberry earlier this year. Do you have any thoughts about the differences (cultural, technological, etc) between working for a large company and working for a non-profit organization?
Debatable. 3DS is doing very well. I agree that the WiiU is not doing so fine, but I expect the games shortage to end soon... The 3DS also had the same problem in the beggining.

Also, this is the "nintendo is doomed" cycle that repeats itself everytime..
> Now I chuckle whenever I hear some idiot snapping shots of their receipt or food, it's not the camera shutter, it's the sound of insecurity.

It's common to take photos of receipts for business purposes. Is there a situation where that type of behavior indicates insecurity?
Play Services having a custom updater and the ability to silently gain more permissions is definitely not something available to average 3rd party developers.
The G+ post links to the original discussion on Github, it seems to still be going on. https://github.com/angular-ui/community/issues/1
... until that software controls an actuator that does deal with gravity, wind, light, or the human body.

Things like control software for elevators and pacemakers.
Sure, but don't you think it's important that they make this clear?

So far they market heavily on the fact that it's secure when this is simply not true.

If you read their security page, they do say you shouldn't use it if you don't trust them. But that's about it for any warning that you're basically sitting there naked.

I know no security system is entirely secure, but they aren't generally targeting security minded folks, they're targeting the layman who reads what they say and then thinks they're secure due to their weasel worded security page.
My parents gave me his last name as my first. I still have yet to read his work.
I hope the 10ms quote is for a localhost connection, otherwise I'll read it like I do huge fish weight on my father's last fishing trip.
There is still one major difference between play service and osx or ios -it is free and can be installed on any compatible devices, so I wouldn't call it "totally" closed at least not as close as iOS.
The article isn't proving anything, it's an example of how a known problem affects MEGA. It's saying encrypt your files first, because trusting MEGA (or anyone who uses that kind of encryption) is not enough.
Thanks for the answers everyone. One more question:

Can maglevs use jet propulsion to go faster?
There would be a huge benefit from a high speed rail network in California, for sure.

My main issue is the way they are going about it, which is a highly politicized construction process along with some really out-of-order prioritization.

It would be much better to start with the low hanging fruit, like grade separation and electrification of Caltrain. That line would benefit immensely from some major upgrades, such as longer station platforms. To be fair, the most recent round of upgrades (ctc, quadruple track sections, new rolling stock) have been very well done.
Uhm, pardon? They "recommend" coinbase to claim the 500µBTC in my wallet but don't let me give them just any other receiving address? So for me the 2nd screen where they say they give me 500µBTC is a lie and they are scammers.
Congratulations. You've officially been spoiled. :) You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome. :P

The plus side is that you can use that anguish to effect change.
"We do have programs that write programs. Who's using them?"

If you count things like Weebly, the answer is: a "whole bunch of people", heading rapidly toward "everyone". Not that long ago, every Weebly customer would have meant a programming job for someone. That kind of work is gone.

Then take a close look at AWS, Heroku, Rackspace...those were all systems engineering jobs. Startups don't have to hire people to do that now. What used to be thousands of jobs is now maybe a tenth of that.

"the average guy with an MBA definitely can't throw a MVP together"

You're wrong. It happens all the time. It happens so often that's a cliche. You can't go to a meetup in the valley without being assaulted by ten brohans looking for "feedback" on their "MVP".

The important thing to realize is that the need for software engineers doesn't scale with the maximum complexity of software projects; it scales as a function of the average complexity: think of a bell curve, where the X-axis is "complexity", and "need for engineers" is the area under the curve to one side of some vertical line. We keep moving that line further and further toward greater complexity. So far, the distribution has shifted to keep up, but there's no guarantee that will keep happening.

Are we going to need people to write complex, novel software in 2050? Absolutely. Will we need more people than we need to write complex, novel software today? That's not a question with a predictable answer. It might well turn out that the "average" programmer (say, the ones who know how to use Rails and jQuery and are fond of complaining about interview questions involving algorithms) is a doomed creature.
The Busy Trap
What's dishonest? I don't think I follow.

Do you mean that housekeeper and radiologist were cherrypicked and that in reality laborers are at higher risk of automation than knowledge workers?
SEEKING WORK - Mexico / Remote 3+ years of experience in web development.

What I can create and work with:

- Wordpress themes and plugins

- Drupal 7

- Responsive websites

- CSS3 / HTML5 compliance

- Offline web applications

- Javascript frameworks (jQuery, Underscore)

What I'm working with right now:

- Node.js

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Success stories:

I've worked with brands such as Bimbo, Marinela (http://www.marinelausa.com), Procter & Gamble, Johnsons Baby and Campbell's.

Email: aurelio at bernalr.com
> because there is no current requirement for any software to be certified by an engineer

Certifying software is difficult, even under the best of circumstances.

Edit: Er, I didn't substantiate the first sentence. So here's an example. Apparently the reason that most medical devices run on Windows NT (as opposed to, say, Linux) is that Windows NT is already certified for that use, so it becomes easier to certify your custom MRI scanner because you can just include the pre-certified Windows NT part and only have to get the new code your company wrote certified. Similarly, seL4 is the only OS I can think of that has been formally verified (i.e. proven correct mathematically); I'm quite certain none of {Windows, Darwin, Linux} has been formally proven to be correct.

When I attended a recent talk at my local university, I found out that the shutdown routines for a local nuclear power plant were running on 40-year-old mainframes because those mainframes were certified to survive earthquakes and things. Work was in progress to find new hardware and rewrite those routines, although the Engineer I spoke to was under the impression that none of the hardware made in the last decade was certified to operating under the same level of confidence.
I am OEM app developer and can confirm this.

One of our apps rely on GPS, and the manufacturers that bought that app from us could only make it work after installing Play Services, and they could not figure a way to make it work without Play Services.
Meh. Should every site using HTTPS make it clear that hundreds of CAs whom you've never heard of have the capability to perform a MITM?

At least with MEGA you know the security framework is something they've engineered themselves, so you know you have to trust them. With SSL/TLS you're deferring to authority simply because it's convenient.
I don't follow your math here -- their revenue increased by $2982/week after installing the monitoring software, not decreased, due to the effects of employees who felt observed being more conscientious.
As always, everyone forgets to mention the poor, slow and by now outdated Android WebView - which by the way will finally be getting a very important upgrade in the form of WebViewFactory. This may allow using alternative WebViews, such as a chromium-based webview - another important step towards defragmentation.

Some more info is available at http://danosipov.com/?p=572
One important note: the Chinese HSR is also operating at reduced speed for safety and rail wear reasons.