skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you define "listen in"?

There is software and hardware involved in encoding/decoding the analogue signal, and compressing it for transmission across a digital network. That involves automated processing, without which the system can't function.

I'm very much opposed to surveillance and other forms of privacy invasion, but I think the discussion needs to be based on a clear understanding of the nature of the processing involved, and the debate to be around which forms of automatic processing fall into the "acceptable" and "unacceptable" category.

Examples of the latter, in my view, would include storing a copy of your content for longer than necessary to transmit the call, doing speech-to-text analysis and using the extracted words to build up a profile on the caller/callee, and making the recorded information available to government agencies for surveillance purposes or corporate entities for advertising purposes.

"Listening in" is an insufficiently-defined term, which doesn't provide enough information for us to have a proper debate about exactly what's going on.
Breaking Bad as Metaphor for Entrepreneurship
OH YEAY! HN found a new excuse to wail on its least favourite language!

I don't want to come off as a spoil sport, but can you please edit your comment into something insightful and/or constructive?

As for myself, I will spin this into a question:
What existing javascript library or program would most likely benefit from being able to run on this device? Is it just appealing to web devs? the presentation doesn't really get into what compelling use cases this device enables.
I frequently run into an Instagram photo that I want to view inline on Twitter and can't. As a user, it is extremely frustrating. An interesting side affect of this is how easy the embedded web browser in the mobile app makes this feel fairly seamless anyways. It falls apart on a laptop -- for some reason I can't muster the effort to open and switch to a new tab. Losing the context sucks.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I have no problem with the people who wrote Tessel programming my oven. Even in Javascript.

I also have no problem with a Javascript Kiddie programming my oven in Javascript. AS LONG AS HE/SHE COULD HAVE ALSO DONE IT IN SCALA/OCAML/CLOJURE/HASKELL.
This is pure insanity, the emails are also "read" by code that determines whether it is spam, promotional, social, or another type of message. The emails are "read" by code that determines how to render them in the browser. They are "read" by code that writes them into a search index.

Why one of these things constitutes an "intercept" and not the others don't is ridiculous- whether the action is in the "normal order of business". The definition of intercept as the "acquisition of the contents of any wire, electronic, or oral communication" simply can't apply to just one of these things.

By the Plaintiffs' arguments, any system on the internet that forwards an SMTP packet is an unlawful intercept, because it has to acquire the contents to copy them from one channel to another.

All of the decisions on this seem to be based on the scenario where an intercept involves a person listening to a phone call. I would submit, that if it is just code reading the email that was intentionally sent to the system the code is running on, it is not really being intercepted.
This seems like it's going to bugger up LastPass and it's ilk completely. That would be annoying to say the least.
How to get bias into a Wikipedia article
I was the OP of the Friday morning thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455391

It hit the top spot of front page for a while, then was silently taken down, and my HN account "wenxun" was soft-banned.
*its ilk
I know there's more, but the numbers are still far from even in many hard science & engineering degrees. I started out in Civil Engineering and even there, the ratio of guys to girls was scarcely better than when I transferred to Computer Science (this was in the few degree specific courses I took as well).

I do consider Bio and Medicine to be hard sciences and you are correct the gender imbalance is significantly less than some other science fields. However, it seems to be more acceptable in American Culture for parents to accept their daughters going into those types of degrees perhaps due to the relation to traditional career paths women have gone into (such as nursing). If that's true, it's rather sad and hopefully such preconceived notions die out in the near future.

I'm curious though as to how many female students end up going into Computer Science or Engineering because a family member or parent was in one of those fields. I have a few female friends either pursuing or have obtained a degree in Computer Science and each had at least one parent that was in a related field.
There is already a strong effort in Ruby land - check out http://artoo.io/. Artoo was developed with robotics in mind but it is not limited to that domain.
This is probably good to avoid general low-hanging-fruit spam, but anyone who spends even a second manually configuring something to spam your exact site will be able to get past this with extreme ease.

So for most sites, it'd probably be a good idea to put things like this in place but then to also be ready to roll out reCAPTCHA at any given moment, in the event a serious spam campaign begins.
A tale of two MVC's by Yehuda Katz
> They do that only for the purpose of delivering the mail safely. Not to further their own arbitrary business interests.

Intent is irrelevant, if one is wiretapping then the other is also wiretapping
Requirement to statically link against CDDL elements, which is still not permitted by the LGPL.
Leveraging the Kano Model for Optimal Results
> People buy stuff in functioning markets without full knowledge or transparency all the time.

but just the threat of consumer reaction made possible by consumer watch dogs is enough to enforce good behaviour. Sure, the average consumer does not need to know the inner workings of their toaster, but if a manufacturer made a shoddy design, they will be soon found out.

This isn't true in SaaS(S). A security vulnerability can and would remain a secret but for public disclosure of various watch dogs (and even then, these things are hard to verify). ANd this is just one example.
> Those vendors aren't using the content of your email to further their own interests other than the expected function of delivering the mail reliably.

And? The intent is irrelevant
We're comparing worst-case scenarios here, no?
Instagram is also stabbing itself by making it difficult to share an Instagram photo's URL with people outside of the service. Instagram for Android does not support the OS's native 'share' functionality (an option to copy a URL to the clipboard was recently added but is hidden behind an overflow menu). I'd like to drive traffic to their service by sharing a URL with friends but Instagram deliberately makes this difficult.
For example, the TPP could stop future governments from making their own decisions on important issues including how long copyright lasts and how Internet service providers do business.

This is important: Congress must obey treaties. This is one of the discredited tacticts of lobbyists: slip small changes for special interest XYZ into a treaty. This makes a mess of the legislative process to amend, repeal, and alter shady business practices. Clinton got suckered into agreeing to put parts of the Glass-stegall repeal into the WTO, and its one of the reasons why we are stuck with a f/cked up financial system. Congress (not a partisan issue) may be now boxed in (not be able to unilaterally regulate the issue). In essence, this is a special interest attack vector that can do lasting damage. Its worth paying attention to similar mechanics when you see them arise.
Totally agree. Bots vs humans is not an issue of security at all in a cryptographic sense (which that phrase refers to). For this particular task all we have are tricks that have practical value. It isn't even clear if the problem is meaningful in an absolute sense, while cryptographic protocols can be clearly defined and reasoned about.

Would it even be possible to solve this problem in a serious way? If you could then would that mean strong AI is not possible? If not then why don't we figure out something better like asking users to actually pay for things and then we don't have to solve these philosophical quandaries. If it's too hard for people to pay for things then lets focus on that problem instead. If you don't want money and just want to rate limit then look into proof of work puzzles.
This is also an argument against using a standardized module like this, at least once it gains wider adoption.
"Good cultural fit" is code for "white, male, and willing to take a smaller salary than they would get anywhere else, and willing to work copious overtime without pay."
> Currencies have their value because of the law

Fiat currencies have value because their issuing institution has a local monopoly on violence. Your phrasing is much more palatable.

> Control of currency is important to governments in the same way that control of speed is important to someone driving a car.

Citizens are cars to be carefully driven by central bankers? How delightful!

> The control is inherent and the issue is really about not completely screwing things up.

The average age of fiat currency is about 27 years old. I don't understand where your warm tingling sensation is coming from.
I am sure those high caliber gurus will have no problem learning javascript overnight. That wll be excellent addition to their toolbx for that rare case when their internet enabled fridge gets hijacked
No.

If you were a stockbroker, that message would contain less information - and you probably would know it already. It's useful information to a stockbroker, but it would be more informative to almost anyone else, who doesn't encounter such messages daily. As another example, the information in the Rosetta stone was diminished - if more accessible - to its carvers, and a 700 MB disk holds 700 MB regardless of what those bits are.

What you're referring to is compression. High information density is indistinguishable from noise to any recipient who cannot translate it, which is why compression contests regularly require the extractor to be included in the message.
I get it. And its a start. But its so huge and expensive its like considering the rest of the car an API to a tire.

That's a crap-ton of computer and the sysadmin that goes with it to flip a switch. I don't have a beef with programming the 'net of things in java or lua or even pascal. What I'm saying is that that's way too much computing too far down the stack. The closer we get to the GPIO pin, the less computer, expense, and electrical requirements there should be.

I'm just saying that the thing that should be hitched to the actual GPIO pin ought to look and function more like an RFID tag and less like a mini rack server.
"An intruder only has to find one way in, you have to find all the ways in."
Your point is moot. You switched it from commercially viable to good or bad. Javascript really is not a good language, no matter how you put it. He wasn't arguing whether it was a good business decision.
The whole article of theirs is nothing but a rehash of Hitchens' book. This is just character assassination and nothing more.

http://www.catholicleague.org/canadian-atheists-rip-mother-t...

It is also telling that Hitchens' book had no citations for any of his claims either.
You can use CoffeeScript or ToffeeScript which are both fairly superior languages in general.
Interesting perspective, in relation to your "swarms of emergent behaviors" vs. "tiny stand-alone ... servers", are these things mutually exclusive?

Everything involved in moving servers downstream is getting smaller and smaller and less and less expensive. Why not have the end node with as much computing power it needs so that it can control and communicate with swarms, rather than the swarm being controlled by a centralized server.
We used to. We stopped when transportation costs came down far enough.

We do not ship raw materials to the space station, because transportation costs are high.
I thought that ts was going to be a security feature in that I have a piece of software on my computer which I use to challenge a site to make sure that it is what it says it is, or that the customer service rep I'm talking to is a human...
I think some of your points raise legitimate concerns. 5. is wrong though, out of curiosity I googled the site, and registered my bike -- and no payment was required. Where did you get the information that it would be paying? Is that after the kickstarter is funded?

Registration of all new bikes is probably a good way of solving the problem once and for all, although I'm dubious it would work correctly without the legislator involved, and you don't want to involve the legislator, because it wouldn't be free.
where this bitterness comes from?
I don't want to be a naysayer, but isn't this just another Internet Of Things board for the umpteenth time? I fail to see how it's anything new.
Start a business or buy a business so that you can make that $750K into millions. The barrier to entry in many businesses is startup-capital. So I would look for businesses that have that barrier and start one OR you can buy a business and expand it. Many examples include: you can buy a hotel, restaurant, real estate, and many more. A good place to look for businesses is craigslist (believe it or not).

It all depends what kind of entrepreneurial spirit you have. I know that if I had $200k right now, in a year or two, I could make that into millions (this will involved lots of hard work). If you are not willing to do work then you can buy "absentee business" where the owner does not have to be there.

You can also become an "Angel investor" in a startup. But there are many startups and very very few make it big, so big risk if you do not know what you are getting into.

Just my thoughts, it all depends how hungry you are and how hard you are willing to work.
I think JS is very similar to the English language as they both have lots of imperfections but are also both wildly used across so many fields and countries.

By the way, the DOM part of javascript is to what's used in a browser. The rest of the language can't be more agnostic.
It seems to be back 25 minutes after the original post.
All I want to know is, when can I take a ride on the space elevator?
Or ssh (putty or your favorite windows ssh) into a vagrant box and use PuDB or whatever you like.

I'm beginning to see vagrant as cygwin's competition. Not quite a killer, because you can't run windows progs from vagrant/linux like you can from cygwin, but for most cygwin scenarios vagrant with a real *nix is much nicer.

Best of both worlds, ssh into vagrant from cygwin.
That's ridiculous and contributes nothing to the discussion.

Javascript is a good programming language, in that it's expressive, fast (much faster than Python), and more importantly it runs everywhere. No ecosystem can grow without developers, and the success of Node.JS clearly shows that developers like a system they can dive into without much prior effort, using skills they already have.

Tessel allows web developers to use skills they already have to do new things. How could that possibly be a bad thing? Just because Javascript has '==' and '===' and both 'null' and 'undefined' and {} + [] !== [] + {}? I swear, everybody seems to have seen the 'Wat' talk and thinks they're now experts on Javascript development.

Javascript, like many languages (even PHP!) can be written in a 'good' way and a 'bad' way. Thankfully, it's not very hard to write in a good way and it lends itself very well to I/O bound applications like webservers. Embedded devices, depending on the application, could also be very I/O bound, waiting on sensors, cameras, wifi, etc.

Javascript is actually one of the fastest interpreted languages in existence and thousands of new programs are being written in it daily. It's easy enough for a total beginner to use yet powerful enough to port Unreal Engine 3 to it. Get over your biases and recognize that JS brings with it something that Haskell, Scala, etc., will never be able to match: large numbers of ready developers.
Yes. It is easy to insert ads to the embedded video(YouTube). It's not the case with embedded Images.It only helps to improve the Twitter experience. I don't remember clicking on the images(when they allowed it) to go the Instagram site. Nowadays, I sometimes click on the Instagaram links based on the info provided.
I hear this a lot, but it seems like the most commonly used languages are all around 20 years old (with C, C++ being even older).

I suppose if you went to college in the mid-90s this may be true since you would have seen the invention of Java, JavaScript, and Ruby.
I agree with you but I am thinking that your point on bolting training wheels might be more valid than sarcastic.

See getting into full EE is a serious amount of work (I get it, whilst I work on ML stuffs I have spent time in the embedded space; and the web crowd could learn a lot from the embedded folks). I do however wonder how many people would be willing to undertake the effort if they had a toy to hook their interest at the start.

Me, I will happily stay with my FPGA's and verilog, but then I grew up on computers that were meant to be messed with (e.g. the spectrum), in an era where my parents encouraged me to take apart, _understand_ and mend electronics.

Today it feels like this is no longer the case and that bugs me.

Maybe as a toy this fulfills that niche ?
The Indian and his insatiable appetite for the college degree
You could - but V8 is actually much faster than Ruby or Python, and JS syntax is quite good for I/O. Better than that, a ton of people know JS and the more developers find this accessible, the better.
You would be surprised if you saw what kind of code powers the hardware surrounding you. Javascript is actually beautiful compared to some of those atrocities.
Thank you, I think it is ok for now.

I found and removed the spammy links, and it passes
http://www.avgthreatlabs.com/website-safety-reports/domain/t...
and it came out clean after I removed those Viagara links in header.php.

I also upgraded to the newest version of wordpress and changed passwords. The hackers might have left a back door, so I will need to reinstall everything.
exactly! This is a good effort and if people have a problem with JS, why not make something like this in their language of choice? I mean i understand why people are hating on JS for this application, but I don't think "robust, mission critical systems" are the aim here. this is just for hobbyists and to let a larger number of people bring their ideas for life. Once you get those ideas out in the open, use some of u veterans could make it in a "proper" language. Currently people dont program embedded systems because the task seems daunting. This project is just an attempt to remove that initiating feel of hardware. Their motto is "Don't teach webdevs abt hardware, teach hardware about webdevs!" and it's a pretty nice way to bring a massive number of brain power to the domain of embedded systems that interact iwht the internet
To take it a step further, once you're equipping soldiers with sensors, you have the ability to build workflows around the data. You'll assign medical teams to people as the damage occurs, and have them standing by when the person returns with all the data necessary to perform whatever treatment is required.
I don't even understand the point of Instagram these days. You can just take a picture with the default camera app, apply a filter from within it, and then tweet it using Twitter's image hosting service.
I mean, for small runs.
25 minutes, and 19 seconds of downtime caused by Cloudflare according to my uptime monitor
Not that this thread needs any more opinions, but I think it'll work, because the market and the people who want to build stuff with it are there.

No matter how flawed their concept might be, or how shitty JS is as an embedded language, people are out there that want to run with this idea. And when they run with it (one of Tessel's major goals seems to be getting their users to be able to get up and running fast, to boot) -- things will get made. When things get made, lives change, markets get shaken up, simple as that.
I strongly disagree. This is why I usually skip instagram photos when I see them on twitter. If I didn't skip them I would be less inclined to check my Instagram feed inside the Instagram app. This would lead to less double-tapping on photos I like, which would mean less incentive for the people I follow to post photos to Instagram.
I don't know anything about conferences but Defcon should be one of them I am guessing
I believe it's the same reason why people are sticking with facebook--their friends are there.
Upgrading an iPhone 4 to iOS 7
The user experience isn't as good with the default camera + filter, and upload process.
If your friends are on Instagram, aren't they also already on Twitter?
Everyone on this thread is so dismissive about the language that they forget to credit the accomplishments of these wonderful boards.

See, Javascript maybe a 'bad' language according to many of you, but it has massive adoption unlike other languages. These board creators just want to ease the path for most web developers to become hardware developers. It not only opens up a whole new industry to work with, but also it creates a good 'filter' to filter out the bad ones. I will explain.

The thing about hardware products is that most people dont care about internals. Most of them care about the experience. I am NOT an Apple fanboy, but in this occasion I would like to cite the iPhone's sales as a good example. If you suck at programming in Javascript, it will show up, especially in the Hardware world, easily, and you/your product will be rejected.

Also, when you develop, say, a DSLR Quadcopter[1] with this board, people aren't going to ask you "What language is it running on?", "How slow is your language?". People are going to be asking about the footage you're going to film with it. Let's not dissolve ourselves into the hatred of a language. Instead, let's take the time to appreciate what these developers have achieved and what we can build out of these boards.

Cheers.

[1]A sample DSLR quadcopter for reference:
http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6225/6868828438_e6d798c68d_b.j...
You won't necessarily find yourself happier - it's a choice. If you go right back and make the same mistakes at a new job, you'll hate that one too.

I got fired a few months ago and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Until then, I'd changed jobs every so often because I never liked where I worked. But when I got fired, I thought long and hard about what I needed in a job. Only after acting on some well thought-out conclusions did I find an excellent job that's absolutely a perfect fit for me. I probably wouldn't have thought that hard about my next step if I wasn't fired.

So while that comment is true for me, I can't imagine that it's always true. If I was a dumbass and took a job exactly like the previous one, I'd hate that one too. I might not get fired - I might quit before they fired me. Honestly it doesn't matter which happens first. If you don't put in the introspection to find a place that fits you and vice versa, you'll hate it in no time.

Figure out what you need, figure out what you can do well, and find a job that matches that.
It doesn't solve the problem.

time_t x = ...;
printf("%lld\n", (long long) x);

The above code works on any platform, as long as time_t contains no values that do not fit in long long. Using a macro for the format specifier would require defining such a macro on other systems, because they have to be able to compile much of this code on Linux, OS X, or even Windows in some cases.
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