skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "The reason people don't seem to be ganging up on Facebook, Apple, etc. in a similar way is because they never really earned that faith. Take Facebook: from the very start their founder was known to consider their users "dumb fucks" for entrusting him with their privacy."

Not really. We only learned of FB's attitude to privacy when they started changing defaults and were being sued by the Winklevoss bros. Otherwise, we may never have known what he thought of his early users.

Apple never claimed "Don't be evil" as a motto and they do appear to care more about security. There is encryption in some of their products (even though they can likely still gain access - a point that is made in the article). Arguably, they've done more than Google to demonstrate that they care about my data.
Many people here on HN never took compsci in school, so strictly speaking it's just a translator - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translator_(computing) .

It's more a showoff of a js idiosyncrasy - they found an ugly looking subset of characters that is Turing complete and wrote a translator to it.

If you're new to the concept of Turing tarpits, then this should blow your mind. On the other hand, this is a sufficiently advanced bit of CS thinking that no future employer should question the author's basic competency. I certainly have never written a translator.
Being aware in general terms of widespread fraud in the mortgage industry and selling mortgage backed securities anyway does not arise to the level of a crime. Say everyone in the tech industry knows that those Instagram guys are sketchy as shit. But there's still nothing illegal about me turning around and then selling you Instagram stock while telling you it's a wonderful investment.
No, the same point can't be made against Apple.

Apple encrypt WiFi passwords and never store them in plain text – not on their servers and not on the device. The encryption requires your login password to decrypt which Apple also don't store in plain text on their servers (although it is accessible on the device if you don't use a PIN or password, it is not backed up to iCloud).

The reason why this allegation is levelled against Google: they don't encrypt backups and they don't encrypt WiFi passwords on the device.

A little more specifically about iOS WiFi passwords: the Keychain (which is where WiFi passwords are backed up on iOS and the Mac) is AES encrypted and requires your login password (or your Apple ID password) to decrypt. Unless Apple is also stealing plain text versions of your login passwords (there's no indication that they are) then it is not possible for Apple to read your WiFi password. Yes, theoretically, they could steal your Apple ID password too but there's no indication that they do (and they've talked about the exact security on Apple IDs following the developer.apple.com breach recently).
I don't know why one would define "forked" rather than "fork."

* Fork: A copy of a repository. It is copied it can be edited independently.
IE 10 gives me "alertr1(" clicking on the "run this" link (eval source deactivated).
But interesting nevertheless!
When the government doesn't do a bailout, as it didn't in the case of Enron, public bloodlust over lost capital makes heads on pikes in the public square practically a requirement.

When the government does a bailout, there's no acute sense than anyone is suffering too acutely, and therefore there's no need for prosecutions.

Bailing out Enron would have cost less than other recent bailouts.
https://www.propublica.org/special/government-bailouts
No, Google flew 155 missions that were claimed to be for NASA. The Alphajet is a German military trainer from the early 1970s, not a research aircraft. I would like to see some documentation from NASA about what these "missions" accomplished. NASA is always whining about budgets, but on the surface, it looks like they were just shilling for Google. Next thing we'll see is Larry Ellison getting research money for flying his MIG jets...
FreeBSD 9.2-RC4 released
As far as you know. Firstly, the study is about the onset of addiction from one single experience with the drug. People that take a drug once and decide to not do it again don't attract the same social and media attention as heavy users. Similarly, if functional users of hard drugs exist, you are unlikely to hear about them. This is one of the effects of the drug prohibition: it hides a lot of data.

More worryingly, science becomes compromised when researchers cannot attract funding to explore unpopular hypothesis.
Sure, it couldn't be that any of the Googlers liked flying a high performance jet for thrills, could it?
There is an argument for his view on water to avoid the 'tragedy of the commons' problem. But replying to multiple comments with the same reasoning is tantamount to shouting your point.
"Holy web slut" I think ill skip out on the business stationery with that one. However the title is pretty close to the truth.
> The mistake this and other articles like it make is it attempts to aggregate this blame upward.

Rewards accumulate upwards, so surely blame should too.

> Would their example have served to convince others to behave better? Certainly not.

I think it would. If CEOs were going to jail then other CEOs would put more of their company's resources into making sure they are running stably and not taking on too much risk. I'm sure none of these people wanted to run their company into the ground, but the rewards outweigh the risks, so bad decisions were made that might not have been if those in charge had had a more cautious approach.

I agree with you that with the current laws there is not a reasonable thing to prosecute these people for. Personally I would like to see laws that could cover these types of things, not just for banks and finance, but for any large organisation that causes human suffering.
For most casual personal computing, anyone reasonably smart being after you already means you lost. If they also know your own software better and have a big computer, you never had a chance.
> As we look at ways to improve and update educational systems, does it still make sense to have kids grouped by age rather than by their level of intelligence?

You need to learn how democracies work, and learn the political implications that accompany ranking people by intelligence.

First, intelligence is a very poor social measure -- it's an unreliable gauge, it has been abused countless times for political ends, and it's not well understood. Read "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould to find out why.

Second, even if IQ testing were reliable, it would still be politically unacceptable to rank people by IQ -- I mean, more than we already do. Certainly not in public schools -- can you think of why?

People with different IQs pay the same tax rate -- intelligent people aren't taxed at a different rate. And public schools are run on tax revenues. Given that, would it seem fair to tax everyone at the same rate, but then spend more school tax dollars on intelligent kids than average ones?

The final reason is because a democracy like this one tries to honor the principle of equal opportunity. Equal opportunity means the same treatment for everyone, regardless of personal differences including IQ.

How people turn out depends on their differences. But how they are treated in school cannot pay attention to those differences without abandoning democratic principles.

So, little or no attention paid to IQ, in the early grades, in public school. In college, especially privately funded ones, different story. And in adult employment, completely different -- there the rules are different.

We're all unequal, in a bunch of ways including IQ. But in school we should be assured equality of opportunity.
Adobe no longer support (except for security updates) the NPAPI (not NSAPI) plugin on Linux, which also has a habit of crashing a lot and randomly hanging… If you want Flash to work under Linux, one practically has to use the PPAPI plugin.

Note nobody except Chrome (and those based on the Chromium Content API) has any plan to support PPAPI, so in that sense NPAPI is alive and strong.
Ehem, and later this year Apple gets your finger print!
About 4 years ago the government tried to prosecute an employer for having illegal immigrants using that basic logic. The employer said he suspected that about half his employees had forged documents, but he obviously didn't know of any specific case. (The Feds trapped him by telling him they were doing a murder investigation and asking him for information about his employees. Don't talk to cops.)

IIRC the prosecution failed, although they did put the guy through the wringer in the meantime.
At some point I'm sure the OH&S arm of the governments will ban all manual-driver cars on the road...

I agree. It's interesting to think about how the morality of owning and driving a vehicle will change. When the majority of vehicles are self-driven, driving a car may be considered similar to smoking: those who do it are threatening other people's lives to indulge in a risky personal freedom.

The New Yorker wrote an interesting piece exploring the potential moral changes in greater detail:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/googl...
What stuff could they do? Log into your AP to torrent Breaking Bad episodes?
This remembers me of the "Spiegel-Online" jobtitle-generator which came in a "casino-bandit" style.

This one: http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/berufsleben/jobtitel-generato...
I'm in NYC (which also means that my definition of not being an asshole might be a bit more lenient.)

I've worked with plenty of seed and A-stage investors in SV, though, and found most of them to be focused on being helpful to founders--you have to be, and have more opportunity to be, when you're working with people starting their first company. In my experience it's the later stage firms that are harder on founders. Their attitude--not to be an apologist--is that everyone at the table is an adult and can look out for themselves. The best thing you can do as a founder or startup exec when you start talking to Series B and later firms is

(a) Have a seed or angel investor who can give you good advice (and who, since they were early investors, has an economic situation closer to the Common than to the Series B Preferred) and ask them for advice; and

(b) Have options, including: other Series B firms, the potential to get a bridge or extension round from your seed and A folk, possibly being acquired, and extending your runway by cutting burn.
Don't worry, Google already knows EVERYTHING.
They should be protected by additional means anyway.
Ask HN: Could Snowden still be a U.S. agent?
Was just thinking to myself that Snowden:

1. Only gave away enough information to make people respect how much power the NSA and U.S. govt has.

2. By giving away that information it gave the NSA/U.S. govt reason to put money towards ensuring secrecy of its information, which may have been in danger after cutbacks.

Reasonable?
As long as they don't install that automated robot in the taxi from Total Recall, I'm all for this.

I can see how traffic flows would dramatically improve if all cars were automated. Biggest factor for traffic is human driving.
Security is about tradeoffs. How bad would it be if someone else got this information? How helpful is it to me to give it to this third party? Wireless passwords are a huge pain: visit someone's house, ask them for their password, and then feel guilty while they look through various papers to find a long string of hex digits which are so annoying to enter on the phone. This pain makes the tradeoff well worth if for me (and I suspect for nearly everyone) when balanced against the low risk of Google doing something nasty with the saved passwords.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but if I had an iPhone I'd want the same functionality.)
Who was also the village idiot.
Engineers are held liable for failures after an investigation that uncovers say an undersized bolt that led to the failure, plus a showing of negligence on the part of the engineer for undersizing the bolt.

The causes of the financial collapse, on the other hand, are systemic and amorphous. Lots of things had to go wrong at the same time for it to happen. People selling mortgages were not checking to see if people could pay, people where buying houses they couldn't afford, Wall Street sold mortgage-backed securities knowing both of the above. If any of these groups had acted differently, the collapse wouldn't have happened. Why should bankers be the ones to get put in jail? Because we don't like them?
This one is really funny too :D Thanks for sharing!
I just tried it with ZIP format using WinRAR. "alert(1)" encoded and zipped ("best" compression) is 216 bytes vs. "alert(1)" zipped is 162 bytes.
Collective Minds & Machines Exploration Challenge
Nicotine itself (without the byproducts that happen when burning tobacco) is not even that bad [1] (deadly in relatively low amounts but unless you take it concentrated it's very hard to reach those levels). Unhealthy? Yes, but probably not much worse than caffeine [2].

Besides, Nicotine itself is not that addictive "Technically, nicotine is not significantly addictive, as nicotine administered alone does not produce significant reinforcing properties. However, after coadministration with an MAOI, such as those found in tobacco, nicotine produces significant behavioral sensitization, a measure of addiction potential." [3]

[1]: There are a few studies that look at nicotine excluding cigarettes on Google Scholar.

[2]: Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Pharmacology and http://www.energyfiend.com/harmful-effects-of-caffeine

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Psychoactive_effects
You may notice that the ADM-3A didn't have a CAPS LOCK key. A common mod involved soldering a couple of jumpers so pressing CAPS twice in rapid succession switched caps lock mode on and off. I did that to mine; back then it was fairly common for some systems to only accept uppercase commands. The Teletype ASR-33 didn't have CAPS LOCK either.

I don't know if Bill Joy modded his ADM-3A, but for anyone who wonders why vi uses esc instead of caps lock to switch modes it's because there was no caps lock key back then. I believe Bill Joy and the vi cartel deliberately suppressed the caps lock feature on early terminals to make vi users miserable in the future.
Please, add comments to explain why you are moding me down so much.

I love when Gerald Jay Sussman explains the difference between recursion and iteration (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...), but I really feel this is history of computer science, not hot news.
Amen. Furthermore, if diversity in thought is the goal, surely diversity across nationality and even age produces the greater aggregate effect, no? I.e., if the starting point of discussion were only ever how best to increase diversity of thought, one would undoubtedly expect nationality/age to come up more frequently than they do, compared to gender. It's almost as if certain parties are feigning genuine inquiry while merely paying hollow lip service. But what could their motivation possibly be?

>Tickets for All Your Base are on sale now, and we look forward to seeing you in October.

John, you rascal!
I first read Sithlord as Shitlord...
Yes, there's a strong case for further study. That's why there's an extensive and growing literature on the subject: http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=pornography+effe...
They do that to some degree in Germany, which has a 3-tier secondary education system ought to group students based on their (perceived) academic aptitude. It has however been accused for being biased toward social status.
Create Your Own Custom Facebook Pages
> For that reason, it is unlikely that we will see these powers used by the NSA, or other government.

The "parallel construction" mentioned above is how they do use these powers while obscuring the use of these secrets.
Win VIM  (hacks)
My camera takes about 6 seconds to launch compared to being near instant before iOS 6.
> I like what they are doing with Windows Phone, Skydrive, Outlook.com, and web-based Office

I don't. It's entirely possible that you confound the company-directed hate with the product-directed hate, simply because you have neither.
This is why we have regulators. It's the regulators and the people's elected representatives who allowed the big banks to grow "too big to fail". You can't expect banks to self-regulate. The competitive, zero-sum nature of the financial markets means that a company that voluntarily hamstrings itself will likely end up being eaten by those who don't.

We need regulators to establish the rules and set the boundaries. The problem is that we have them but they failed to do their job.

It's like sending a man with a rifle to protect a herd of goats from a leap of leopards. If the man decides to go to sleep and the leopards come along and eat some of the goats, who do you blame? Do you blame the leopard for being a leopard or do you blame the man for sleeping on duty?
For ThinkPads Lenovo has "Thinkvantage System Update", a program that you can download that allows you to automatically install all the drivers (& bloatware, if wanted) for your system.

Fujitsu has Fujitsu DeskUpdate that's similar.

They're pretty sweet, much better than downloading everything separately, but of course not as good as Linux with its package managers.
It doesn't, although storage needs for me tend to grow over time. The problem for me was that paying the premium for the storage was mooted by the iPad becoming essentially a useless brick because of the OS upgrades.
Yes, 'pass on' is especially tricky, as it depends on context and emphasis. If I say 'I'll PASS on that opportunity' it means I'll decline it; but if I say 'I'll pass ON that opportunity', it means I'll offer it to someone else.
I think these job titles are more likely to show up in a HN job post.
An Investigation of World of Warcraft Character Names
Two words: fiduciary duty.

Whenever a megacorporation decides to act like a total shitburger, we are told their executive team has no choice, they are compelled by law to act like total shitburgers if it maximizes shareholder value. Keep workers part time to avoid giving benefits? Fiduciary duty. Export jobs to countries with no environmental or labor protections? Fiduciary duty. Charge customers a daily overdraft fee when an undeclared fee for checking their balance from a foreign ATM puts them in the red? Fiduciary duty. Lobby to change laws so they can act like even bigger shitburgers, legally? Fiduciary duty. Don't judge them, we are told, they have no choice. They are not bad people, they are just bound by fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. You should feel sorry for them, really.

And then a complex, perhaps admittedly fraudulent scheme (the mortgage crisis) comes along and kills giant megacorporations, wiping out shareholder value entirely. Any WAMU shareholders in the audience? What happened to this fiduciary duty? What happened to these terrible consequences which would arise if shareholders were not appeased? Shareholder value has been minimized ... and nothing happened.

Wall Street wants it both ways. A bailout with bonuses. Reward with no risk. License to act like a shitburger.

Fine, don't prosecute people for bad decisions. But don't pretend like you have no choice but to act like a shitburger, that doing so is anything but screwing the rest of us for personal gain.
> mortgages were not checking to see if people could pay

> Wall Street sold mortgage-backed securities knowing both of the above

Sounds like negligence then?
Amazon's one goal is to increase short term profit?
> Why on earth are people getting worked up about this?

It's an Apple release. The tech press is _required_ to act like any Apple release contains at least one thing that is the second coming of Mecha-Hitler; it's the law.
2013 Ig Nobel Prize winners: from opera-loving mice to stargazing dung beetles
Quite possibly, but that's a civil issue, not a criminal one.
I you root your Android phone, there are apps to do that for you.

But I do agree that it's a form of UI-fail that there is no legitimate way for a user to recover his own passwords.
How to become a good writer
I don't know about LXC, but back in the day, the impact of linux-vserver was within bounds of measurement error. Since then I have been using it reflexively on any server I touch, even if it ends with only one container.
How independent you'd have to be to be secure? Quite a whole lot.

If you use a VPS, you can (will) be owned by your VPS provider and any Internet provider your traffic goes through.

If you use colocation or self host, you will have to live without or self host/mantain/develop many alternatives for usual tools AND you can (will) be owned by all the internet providers your traffic goes through.

Not a very nice scenario.
Clojure Cup Tips
Seems like it would be interesting to use as a cheap form of JS obfuscation.
A startup accelerator for the world’s poorest
Ratpack Framework is a Sinatra-inspired framework for the JVM worth noting:
http://www.ratpack-framework.org

Groovy:

ratpack {
handlers {
get('hello') {
response.send "Hello world!"
}
}
}

It can also be used (with somewhat less brevity) in good, old-fashioned Java.

An 0.9.0 release is expected in a few weeks and the project is undergoing rapid (and sometimes API-changing) development, but it looks very promising.
Mapping Tor Relays and Exit Nodes
Stop Watching Us: Rally Against Mass Spying
The government didn't dare let GM and Chrysler fail, either. Should their leadership be prosecuted for mismanaging them into the ground?
Effort: An In Memory Entity Framework Data Provider + database for testing
>"Any port in a storm." as the saying goes.

Love the humor, usbcondoms crew! Another one I hope you find a place for in the future: "In the dark, all cats are gray" -- Benjamin Franklin. Yes, really.
They would use it to cast dreadful spells which would make peoples' tinfoil hats melt.
I have, but I'll try the lastter e-mail - thanks.
New GetGlue for android
For this to be a worry, every person up both branches of a very large hierarchical organization tree--all the way up to where a Google Ventures employee and a Gmail developer both report to the same person--would have to agree to it.

Google Ventures, no matter how spectacularly they might do as VCs, will always be several orders of magnitude less important to Google than Gmail. Google Ventures invests $300 million per year. Say they are always, every year, one of the top VCs so they--every year--deliver 3x on the money invested a few years before. They are still delivering less than $1 billion, less than 2% of Google's revenue.

In reality, it will probably be more like 1%, plus or minus 4%. And also, in reality, it won't be considered revenue, it will be Extraordinary Gains from Non-operational Events, or some such accounting gibberish, and nobody on Wall Street will give them any credit for it.
That's why there was federal malware that captured MAC addresses on tormail when it was shut down. Easy for them to get Google to match it up to an identity
Parsing JSON the hard way
See also "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... (This falls under point #6)
Because the NSA hasn't proven that they're willing to go through nearly unimaginable lengths to procure any and all data that they can get their hands on.

NSA hires hacker to install monitoring devices on all the samsung charging stations at O'Hare airport? Not out o the realm of possibility.

Six months ago, I would have called a comment like mine a little too tin foil hat, but not today.
I don't know why they would define any of them - it's nothing to do with the story at all, but I thought I should stick with the ones they chose.

Well, actually, I can guess why: "repository" sounds a bit like "suppository", and "forked" and "pull request" sound vaguely sexual. It's the kind of thing that would appeal to some people as being a bit risqué. sigh
Happy Programmer Day Here Is Some Funny Jokes
so does any eval'd code