skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>He decries one aspect of the evolution of language, the aspect which just hides meaning.

But that begs the question of whether meanings are in fact hidden, or simply changed -- at least as far as language as a whole is concerned[1]. There are of course individual cases where people are, as you point out, incentivized to do all sorts of weird things with language to accomplish some goal. Thus was rhetoric born.

1. Many insults, for example, shed their original sense and persist only as generic attacks. Does that mean that the original meanings are hidden? Or are they simply no longer relevant? Like 'Scumbag': http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28253/origin-of-s.... (Note the several possible etymologies, none of which really bears on its use today anyway.)

>And it seems to me, that objectively there is a incentive for many stakeholders to disguise the inherent meaning of their message, either to appear more disruptive in whichever space they move, or to straight out lie by misunderstanding.

Well said. "To appear more disruptive" is particularly apropos on HN, where 'disruptive' is so perfunctory an adjective as to have lost all meaning (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality).

Edit: To Doctorow's point, I doubt that's quite true. In the West at least, solo pieces (particularly piano), quartets and quintets of various kinds (particularly brass and string), and so on have been popular for ages.
Heroku-wtf
Ask: A post on sites for launch
Hi:

A few weeks ago someone had posted a list of websites useful for launching your startup. Unfortunately, I forgot to bookmark it and I'm unable to find that post. If someone recalls or knows about the post I'm talking about, I'll appreciate if you can please share the link.

Thanks,
Shalen
I think what really happens is that the complexity of each modular component increases over time. It's kind of like Sutherland's Wheel of Reincarnation. When microprocessors were first created they didn't have any internal RAM, then SRAM became part of the microprocessor die. A machine with four cores used to require four sockets. Now you can do it with one, and that one will have a GPU on it.

But we still have external RAM, we still have discrete GPUs, and multi-socket motherboards, etc. The modularity doesn't go away, it's just that some applications require only one of the increasingly powerful modular components.

But when the increase in power doesn't come with an increase in price, Jevon's paradox kicks in and we start coming up with new applications for the increased power. So now Seagate has announced a hard drive which uses Ethernet as the primary interface -- they've effectively integrated a (simple) database server into the disk drive and made that into the new modular component.

So the real question with phones is whether they're yet in a position to become the new modular component. For that you have to answer the question of whether they can integrate with the other components to do what the user wants. How do I add storage to it? How do I make it faster? How do I make it take better pictures, etc.? What you want is to be able to do these things somehow without throwing away your entire existing investment, and until the common user can do it easily (e.g. by syncing the phone to a NAS device that provides bulk storage) there will be a market for modular phones that let people walk into the shop and have the tech insert another 8GB of memory or storage or upgrade the camera etc.

Interestingly the trend toward integrated devices has been held together in part by The Cloud allowing network storage and processing to take place off of the device and therefore reduce the demand for on-device capacity. If the trend away from trusting third parties with your data continues to gain steam then we could see changes in the market demand for modular devices.
> Rails was part of the old paradigm
> where a webapp runs on the server

Web apps no longer run on servers? They insert data directly into databases from the client? Isn't that insecure?

The developers of Rails::API should be informed about the new paradigm so that they stop wasting their time.

https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api
unless you happen to be one of those sickos who thinks significant whitespace is a terrible idea....
GP is expressing a personal language preference. I also find JS horrific to work with (and I've worked with it a lot). But that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't enjoy it.
Problems with Scala's Type System
> What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a language worse?

In this essay it seems to be the a poor signal to noise ratio. Metaphors that have lost the power to move and habits of speech that go against concise expression.

> 'Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.'
Ruby: too slow. Love the language, makes me happy to code in, but compared with other languages I use (Common Lisp, Java, Clojure) it is slow. That said, for many applications execution speed does not matter.
He's not trying to do this by himself. From Brendan's post (https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/ciscos-h-264-good-news/):

"Mozilla has assembled an engineering dream team to develop Daala, including Jean-Marc Valin, co-inventor of Opus, the new standard for audio encoding; Theora project lead Tim Terriberry; and recently Xiph co-founders Jack Moffitt, author of Icecast; and Monty Montgomery, the author of Ogg Vorbis."
Twitter Sued for $124 Million Over Private Share Sale
> large hands

Can't they make the piano keys a little smaller (narrower)?
If privacy is a human right, it's not (to me, at least) of the same caliber as "life, liberty, and security of person". People behave best because they have internalized social norms, those arguments and attitudes that we proudly expose.
I've not used Meteor. How exactly does "insecure" help speed development? Certainly any code you write with it is worthless, right? I mean, before production you need to remove it and rewrite it using another method, so what's the point? Or do you mean it's useful on the sysadmin side, as a REPL-like data access console?
http://assistant.io/ :

> Uncaught Error: Must set options.password
> 62afa287c8fae43c43f745c9f43dbcd4b875e531.js:14

> Uncaught TypeError: #<Object> is not a function

When trying to add attendees,nice UI though.
Accountability and Realism
Yet, with such emphasis on security, how did they manage to "back up" Wi-Fi passwords on Android as clear text on their servers?
Neat - earlier today, I was just experiencing the pain that assistant.io apparently alleviates.
Hah, I went to the website and it just sat there refreshing itself. After me manually refreshing it a few times it eventually loaded. Can't say I would bother touching Meteor.
Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah, used those guys when I was starting BitMover, very quickly moved away from them. They act like they help startups, my experience was they provided nothing over any random bank and they charged more.

That was ~15 years ago, maybe they are better now, I have no idea.
From darling to struggling: Keek grapples with cash crunch
Grenade! Take cover!!
I fail to see how meteor helps build these sites. These can be built by normal CMS can't they?
I'm not sure fiber optics are particularly viable in the next 5-10 years as interconnects between hardware components. Adding photonics to a hardware component increases size and cost fairly significantly, which is why you don't see many fiber optic interconnects yet, even for applications where cable size is important. Moreover, to get the kind of miniaturization you would need for a cell phone, you're talking on-chip photonics (diodes and photodetectors integrated into the IC itself), which still looks like it's in the early R&D phase.

Of course, most of this is probably because copper is still doing just fine in terms of bandwidth. Though some big issues with forcing huge bandwidth over few traces are latency and the additional circuitry needed to translate the signal into the actual components needed to drive RAM chips or a CPU.
So if a driver uses his cell phone as his GPS he's breaking the law? If so, that sounds like a law that needs to be revisited anyway.
Combing over the content on your website, I noticed this as well. I find it to be quite charming and most people won’t read the footer text anyway. I’d say: leave it in.

I design (dead tree) books for a living. In the colophon, I always include information about the typefaces I’ve used (font families for print are usually quite costly — $1-3k — so I mention it to gloat about my purchase as well as wanting to give credit where it’s due), the paper it’s printed on (usually FSC certified), and the eco-inks (if used.) I also mention in which country the book is printed.

I don't mention it’s laid out in InDesign on a Mac and that the copy is styled in InCopy — that’s standard. For programming, there are more options. I use BBEdit and Coda, but I respect your choice and I appreciate you letting us know what you use.
From meteor.com:

>By default, a new Meteor app includes the autopublish and insecure packages, which together mimic the effect of each client having full read/write access to the server's database. These are useful prototyping tools, but typically not appropriate for production applications. When you're ready, just remove the packages.
> but most of the rest who don't agree with the practices, can't be bothered to do much about it, like even calling their representative, let alone going out and protesting.

That's b/c most Americans are caught up in an endless cycle of work-aholism to either support their consumer-addiction and/or to climb out of debt and just pay the bills.

Related to that, I know this is somewhat menial, but I have found the site http://popvox.com to be fairly useful in this regard. Create an account, and you can track all current legislation -- a couple clicks will fire a stock letter to your rep either supporting or protesting a bill -- or you can edit the letter with a custom message (better). It is certainly a step above doing nothing and makes the task much easier.
Fads are good. Being able to run everywhere is also good, but frameworks eventually need to give way to new ideas. Not everyone wants to program in COBOL on .NET forever.
Intuit Acquires FullSlate, An Online Scheduler For Small Businesses
This really has nothing to do with pizza delivering drones--that's not what's going to make the predicted $8-15 billion market happen. It's going to be "precision agriculture", search & rescue, and a hundred other things.
Open letter complaint to Air France goes viral
The critics say that the sizes of these studies are too small to yield meaningful results for such complex traits.

No worries! After all, they have a tried and true formula to rely on:

(1) Start with the assumption that such a thing as "math genius" exists.

(2) And further, is genetically determined.

(3) Gather some data.

(4) Torture the data until it confesses.
New ETF focuses on the Robotics industry
The dark future for American workers is still flipping burgers, not freelancing
Much-hyped, Moocs Maneuver Toward Version 2.0
What the SEO? Followup
"Free PayPal payment processing: all transactions fees waived for 18 months, up to $50,000 USD"

They are literally giving away free money. Why this hate?
Graphene quantum transistor for next-generation DNA sensing
This looks fairly neat. The "don't pay for a plan" part is a bit odd though... as far as I can tell you're only getting a year of free low-bandwidth data, and after that it'll cost you.

I queried the creator on kickstarter... he said $3 a month would be a worst case cost for said connectivity after your initial year is up.

Perhaps more importantly, he indicated that it would be possible to not use their server as a middleman, but that they need to get their analytics right before allowing that. Currently going through their server allows them to maintain sane data rates, apparently.

Personally, I couldn't find a one-off GSM data only SIM for less than $8 a month in my searches... even at multiple year prepay... so this sounds like a pretty good deal. I'm maybe more interested in just the cheap dumb pipe option, but really their "middleware" server does sound handy.
Virtual-reality goggles go beyond gaming
Neuroscientists discover new 'mini-neural computer' in the brain
I certainly don't wish to justify espionage. I'm saying that it's a reality of life today and has been for centuries, and the US is only one of many countries (perhaps not Belgium or the Netherlands) that are engaging in it. So the anger directed at the US should be directed at all the other countries engaging in espionage as well (and it is clear that there are many).

As for the US being allowed to get away with it, I do not have any simple prescriptions to offer the US government for replacing it with something better, although I too wish it did not engage in it.
It doesn't really add that much complexity to the gimbals. Rotary encoders are extremely inexpensive, and the information would just be interpreted by the central controller.
I certainly agree that spying on friends like that is distasteful, but revealing that can't possibly be said to have helped the American people.

Yes it can. I'll say it right now: It has helped the American people. It has helped us, by giving us knowledge we need if we are going to hold our government accountable. Lest people forget, government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. This ain't a monarchy, pal. Here we can, and should, hold our elected officials' feet to the fire when our government screws up or does things we don't approve of.

Now, in the end, the American people might decide to keep "Baaaaah"ing like mindless sheep and let our government off the hook, which is, I suppose, their right. But what Snowden did was absolutely the right thing, as you can't even think about having accountability unless you have transparency.
Pluralsight acquires Tekpub
If you remove speculators from the picture, Bitcoin's userbase is mostly:

(a) People trying to avoid the fees associated with other forms of electronic payments, who basically rely on services that exchange Bitcoin payments for fiat currency.

(b) The services that people in category (a) rely on.

(c) People who for various reasons want a currency without any government, bank, or legal code.

You are not seeing the ludicrous claims about Bitcoin being the greatest innovation of our time from the people in categories (a) or (b). It is either the people in category (c) or else the speculators who want to promote the hype because it makes them money.
Good luck to Kim. I really liked his simplicity redesign of the Microsoft brand. Looking forward to more of his stuff in the future!
Are we talking PHP before or after CakePHP?
It makes it easy to run DB calls from the chrome console to insert and modify test data
Have Fun at Work – EasyPost Hiring
I thought it ironic that the author was talking about 'bitcoin being the greatest innovation of our time'...

... over the internet.
I haven't had flash installed for years. For videos, I made a key-binding that extracts any URL's in XA_PRIMARY, launches https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl and then plays the video with mplayer. Looks better (because the vid is full res) and never skips.
I bet they called it the 'deep' web, which is what it has been called for years.

Otherwise they were just wrong.

That being said, caring that the name might 'sound negative' seems ridiculous. Anyone who wants to rely on a form of secure communication wouldn't base their judgement solely on a name and ignore the context like who founded it. People who are willing to make those snap judgements aren't interested in the service.
> We’re talking about people who are employed part-time but would rather work full-time.

Right, so they don't want to be freelancers. If you want to be successful at freelancing, you have to go full bore and focus on it like you would any other business. If it's just a second class citizen in your life, then you won't get anywhere with it.
I think this is of endgame for network security, I don't see a way out -- the Sony Rootkit[1] should have been the point where I realized but it is just sinking in for me now since the Snowden NSA leak.

Any network connected computer will be running an OS+Applications which are typically a gigabyte or more. This is produced by companies which are beholden to a nation state, and the companies can be coerced[2] or compelled[3] to use the software against the user. The software is also constantly being probed for vulnerabilities, which can also be exploited by law-enforcement / military [4][5].

So, if you turn on auto-update you have to trust the software maker is not being coerced by someone, or being compelled by a secret court to trojan you. If you don't turn on auto-update you can still get trojaned by any vulnerability. Lose-Lose.

[1] Sony Rootkit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...

[2] Qwest CEO Nacchio's claims: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...

[3] FISA court

[4] German Govt. Trojan from 2011: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-world-from-b...

[5] FBI's TOR trojan injection: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi...
when you run over a pedestrian or cyclist because you are distracted, I suspect the outcome will be significantly more costly, like life-altering. The data on distracted driving is incontrovertible. If you can't bear to be without your g-glass, take the bus...
Dismissing or deriding a project because it is not completely novel is unhelpful.

Since 'retroshare' hasn't taken the world by storm, maybe that wheel needs to be reinvented.
Hey, maybe Bitcoin will be bigger than the Internet. IP over blockchain anyone? :-)
QuickSite Responsive Template
> GMail won't update to 3.0 in any meaningful way, no matter what

Perhaps this problem can be addressed by having a plugin/add-on/extension that decrypts the mail within the browser. GMail, Yahoo, or other mail providers that don't adopt this new and secure email protocol won't get the plaintext of your message, and preferably not the metadata either.

This requires that the new protocol use a converter or proxy or something to be able to talk to the existing email infrastructure. I'm sure this idea has occurred to the Silent Circle and Lavabit guys.
Not to mention quantitative easing..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
I was on the streets, in I think the first set of protests, in front of the Denver state capitol building. It was a fairly sedate protest, except where it went a little off topic toward the end. ("March on the city jail! -- Wait, what?")

And I've communicated with my representatives. Udall is one of my Senators, and his staff got an email and an earful on the phone.

And these days I vote third party, which to me is "None of the above." I'm done playing into their hands by voting for one because at least he's not the other. They're the same.

I do think we're far from revolution, I hope never, but I wouldn't say it won't ever happen. The thing is, a few people are pissed and aware, and most don't care. But once the government realizes that they're getting away with whatever they're doing now, they'll do more. Eventually they'll grab so much power that we'll get sick of it and revolt.

Or maybe they'll go against history and stop grabbing ever more power.
> Hold them responsible. Responsibility is why the job even exists

Just so we're clear - how exactly does the average citizen "hold them responsible", other than our legal right to simply not vote for them next time?

It's so easy to say we should "hold them responsible" - but so incredibly vague to do.
Except the Thunderbolt device is twice the price of the equivalent PCIe card and now you have cables everywhere.
Hm, it was just a memory, probably either misremembered Wikipedia or maybe it's in "A Deepness in the Sky". Sorry

--

EDIT: Found it. It was indeed from "A Deepness in the Sky", which is fiction. There's a sentence in chapter 17 that says "The Reprise reached ramcruise, 0.3 lightspeed, and sailed endlessly across the depths."
I think institutional power is on the wane. The fact that so many institutions are flexing their muscle is a prime indication. There's a saying "when you're taking flak you know you're over the target".

I'd say the biggest problem right now is one of awareness and direction. But as people become more atuned to these latent problems that are becoming more obvious it will drive ideas and action. Since the problem is not a lack of know how or resources, it's that growing awareness which will make all the difference.

Consider the amount of work that has gone into open source projects (like firefox, linux, apache, rails) and crowd sourced projects (like wikipedia or stack exchange). With the right kind of well directed projects the tables can, and will, be turned.

Imagine, for example, a web that was designed to prevent evesdropping and designed to ensure maximum longevity of content (through duplication). Something closer to bittorrent than today's web. It would be technologically challenging, but doable. Then imagine what happens if the equivalent of the worldwide workforce developing, say, linux was dedicated to developing tools to decentralize the network.

Over the next few decades the cost of wireless APs will become trivial even as their capabilities increase vastly. It won't take long before it's possible for unregulated internetworks with wireless backbones owned by many individuals to become possible, among many other innovations. At some point centralized control over communications becomes untenable. And that's just square one.
I think you dramatically underestimate the quality of the people the NSA has on staff. I know of two people who almost certainly worked there (obviously nobody confirms anything, but when two agents show up at your office to ask about their patriotism, the implication is clear), and they are brilliant, easily as smart as anyone I know at google.
In my impression, the solution would be to create a marketplace website, in which employers and recruiters register/join, and which will automatically enforce the rules desired. From there, you can insist that all recruitment communication must go through the marketplace site. My experience is that marketplace software is tremendously efficient at social engineering ;-)
Is there anything in the world that the US Government cannot rationalize?

Are there literally no limits worldwide to their power at this point?

It is my current assumption that everything now is being logged.
"5 eyes alliance" countries are neck deep in domestic spying, it appears they are their own independent spy service, accountable to no country and all collaborating to avoid each other's laws. Impossible for any of those countries to have free elections anymore with this kind of surveillance. Everybody being watched all the time makes for easy political blackmail to avoid any serious attempts to dismantle the global Stasi state they've been busy making under our noses for the last decade
The parentheses.
Anyone who wants to rely on a form of secure communication wouldn't base their judgement solely on a name and ignore the context like who founded it.

The future of security depends on having everyone use it, including those who don't currently (realize they should) care.
There is almost always a way. But explain that to my mom/room mates/friends who don't even know what a key-binding is.
It should probably say "all 50 states and the District of Columbia"
TEDDY TWERKING