skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just like possessing a key means you were associated with the safe and its contents, though. Again, there's still a real-world analogy so I suspect the courts will treat it as they do in the real world and try to determine on a case-by-case basis whether simply being able to decrypt the data could be considered incriminating or not.

For instance, it's not self-incriminating if the government can show that they already know you're associated with the key/lock. Likewise with an encryption key...
Weird, the iPhone 4 test devices in my office on iOS 7 are sluggish to the point of unusable. I guess they get used in a different manner than a normal user since they are test devices, but still, I'm shocked to hear an iPhone 4 being called 'fast', even with iOS 6 - I would say extremely slow with 7.
Numberphile did an episode about Sloane's Gap [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YysNM2JoFo
It is known that Bach improvised about his works during performances. That means he even left the written notes.
In a way I actually agree with nearly everything you say, I just think you haven't taken what you say to its logical conclusion.

The thing you seem to be missing is that there are no “neutral” beliefs. There's no “middle” in terms of ideology. Doing “nothing” is de facto maintaining the status quo, and acting to maintain the status quo is a positive action just as much as acting to abolish it is. The belief that the status quo should be maintained is a positive belief just as the belief that it should be abolished it is. Right?

The thing is, by the very nature of ideology, those who wish to maintain the status quo rarely have their beliefs subjected to the same level of scrutiny as those who to abolish it. Therefore it is very easy for those who wish to maintain the status quo to believe that their beliefs and actions are sane, rational, reasonable, etc., because everything seems to reinforce that, while those who wish to abolish it are often portrayed as insane, irrational, “extremist”, etc., and as someone who does wish to abolish the status quo, it's very hard not to internalise some of that. Being constantly bombarded with that, having all of your beliefs constantly scrutinised from every angle inevitably manifests itself as incapacitating self-doubt that's very difficult to overcome sometimes. Sometimes the only way to cope with this is to temporarily suspend this constant questioning of everything you believe in.

It is far more common that people who wish to maintain the status quo are slaves to dogma than that people who wish to abolish it are. Often, the latter do not have a choice about whether or not their beliefs are rigourously questioned every five minutes. But the former can comfortably go their whole lives without ever having their beliefs rigourously questioned by anybody.

Edit: I think an NSA agent participating in these programs out of a belief that they are “serving their country” and who refuses to question what “serving their country” actually means is a slave to dogma. I do not think that somebody who believes that their communications should not be monitored or recorded without their consent and who refuses to question that belief is a slave to dogma.
Next they'll have government controlling our water and electricity.
Not all advertisement is scummy.

You could easily change the tone here.
"I joined a bunch of very specific types of groups so I could manually write a post that tells them about a free app that I built for their demographic."

I felt the "scum" right away, but then I thought about the source of the feeling. Scummy is when you write bait. Telling people about your app - sometimes that requires a door to door cold call.

I think this app deserved to be shared with that group, and it's particularly un-scummy considering the fact that it's brand new, free, and isn't trying to mine for email addys.
Between this and the recent stories of mass elephant poisonings and high-tech rhino/elephant poachers, I find it increasingly hard to relate with the "We should dampen our judgement of these people, because they are poor and their families are starving" argument.
After a quick skim, I found a few things.

It's full of SQL injections, to start. (I really like using the subdomain name from the HTTP_HOST environment variable in a SQL query. That's a new attack vector I hadn't considered.)

It's full of silly inefficiencies, such as iterating over an array and preparing distinct but trivially parametric queries for each element.

It has a strange mix of effectively package global lexical variables and block-scoped lexical variables, which means that running this in any sort of persistent service model would be very buggy.

It looks like it ignores parts of the CGI standard.

It looks like it takes database connection information from cookies (except it never uses that code).

The `find_node` function looks like it's using the wrong data structure entirely, but that's okay, because that pattern's repeated a few times. That's doubly suspect, because this seems like the sort of thing a WHERE clause in the SQL query could handle (though to be fair, it might require a subquery, and the version of Mysql Facebook had deployed in 2005 might not have supported those very well; I don't remember).
Well, the older Android will receive Google Play Services which includes many API updates. New OS functionality will be missing of course (as is Siri on older iPhones) but that's just what happens.

That said, I feel like the Galaxy Nexus should be more than capable of running a release specifically created to handle lower end devices, let alone a flagship not even 2 years old.
Yes, and there is a special class of "unpleasant facts" that Orwell was particularly adept at facing: facts which contradict one's preferred ideology. In this he was remarkably strong and remarkably rare; a refusal to face such facts practically defines political discourse.

Compare that to someone like Hitchens (who comes to mind because he wrote a book-length homage to Orwell and clearly identified with him), who was more typical (and more shallow) in refusing to concede so much as an atom to his enemies.

Even more remarkable is that Orwell could critique ideology without slipping into "on the one hand, on the other hand" wishy-washiness. If you look at contemporary discourse, that's what nearly everyone who isn't a strong partisan does, and it's a false note of its own.
Don't forget that when they provide legal support it doesn't just help that person: often cases they take are setting legal precedents that will help future cases. Because new technology is new, a lot of its interactions with the law haven't come to courts (or haven't come to federal appeal courts) before.

In effect, they're contributing to making present and future US law. And they're on the side of civil liberties.
> That they will lose customers because people demand privacy and will stop using their services if they cooperate. This hasn't happened yet...

Apparently it's already decimating IBM hardware sales in China. http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2013/10/17/nsa-revelatio...
Flying a Drone around The NY Public Library
Would you recommend doing my own thing or helping out on a high-visibility project? Both?
Creating your first HTML
The notes used in the book are available for free, too:

http://startupnotes.org/
I like the app idea, but not a huge fan of your methods of attracting users. Because this is a highly localized app, I think the key takeaway is that you need to really push a single (or multiple) locations at once, rather than "everywhere" at once.

The app will do far better with 1000 users in one location than 1 user in each of 1000 locations.

Also, could you onboard users with no registration required to get them using it, then ask them to register if they want to use across multiple devices / retrieve their login?
Aye, the Numberphile video is fantastic; that's actually where I first found out about this. :) All their videos tend to be great; they're done by the same film-maker that does the "Periodic Videos" youtube channel, Brady Haran.
I strongly disagree with some of this advice. No detailed term sheet, no access. No one gets to interview team members before "It’s at this point the buyer should come to you with a pretty cut-and-dried view of exactly how they’re looking at the transaction."
And if it thinks I'm in Montana? I don't get that message, and assume since in the past it knew I was in Calgary so I must be safe to add it to my cart.

At least I know right now that I have to log in all the time to be sure I can safely add items to my cart
Yes, let the government own the monopoly on the "pipes" and let private enterprise compete on the type of "water" that flows down the pipes.

We will never have meaningful competition for pipes anyway so we gain none of the benefits of the free market by handing them over to private ownership.
Free in this context usually means free at the point of purchase (with contributions being based upon ability to contribute; which, in particular, means that for the unemployed it can be entirely free). Employers contributing is actually pretty common (see e.g. Germany or the UK). The key part is that healthcare is not contingent upon employment (or being able to pay for it independently).
I used ownCloud for both the CardDav/CalDav/etc. and the dropbox-like stuff for a couple of months now. Sadly as you say the dropbox functionality doesn't work well. It takes up to several days until every file is synchronized everywhere and I want to synchronize almost my whole /home directory between my ThinkPad and my iMac.

A couple of days ago I installed btsync and tested syncing one 130 MB big directory. I added it both at the same time to btsync and ownCloud. After about 2 minutes btsync had its copy on the other computer. After one hour ownCloud had cpied about 50 MB to the server when I canceled it and removed the ownCloud dropbox-client from my computers.

I still use all the other stuff to synchronize my calendar/address book between my computers and mobile devises and I even use their RSS backend but with my own Firefox OS app https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/feedmonkey/
It's not about helping "the government", it's about fixing a problem which is going to keep millions of people from getting decent healthcare.
Male professors, female students: a tricky power dynamic
Show HN: Live Bespoke - Personal concierges now available to everyone?
What if there were 1,000 developers with similar apps, each who thought their offering could be useful for the students in question? Even just one post from each of them would likely flood a community.

If you post like that in a community of mine, I generally delete your post and blacklist your link preventing people from discussing it even if they discover it organically. There is just too much spam coming through to give benefit of the doubt.

If you want to announce something in someone else's community, I think fairer and more polite behaviour is to speak with an owner/moderator about what they think is fair - it might be that they allow such posts or they ask that you advertise, etc.
To note: The spain blue card info says: Proof of adequate training and, if applicable, professional qualifications to practise the profession.

http://extranjeros.empleo.gob.es/es/InformacionInteres/Folle...
Would say that a company would be equally well protected by having all computers on their network with reachable IPs, with no filtering whatsoever?
Actually yes, I think it was patched to not traverse file systems afterward. It was around 2005 when this happened.
I rather like XKCDs "Lucky Ten Thousand" on this subject.

The idea is that simply because of birth rate for everything "everyone knows" there are an average 10,000 people per day are discovering it for the first time.

From http://xkcd.com/1053/

I've come across the archive before, but it's still neat.
I would argue that this point is irrelevant. The leaked materials have shown complete disregard for the spirit of the law and the spirit of not being an asshole (see smiley-SSL-breaking-trollface): questioning the motives of those involved is not just acceptable but necessary.
> the government doesn't like to get the public riled up by terrorist threats

I'm quite sure that's exactly what the government likes to do. That's the very reason that "terrorism" is in the headlines as much as it is: it serves the government by allowing them to extend their powers and budgets enormously. Feed scary stories about "terrorism" to an uncritical public and they'll beg you to take away their "freedom" in exchange for greater "security".
I agree with this.

At the same time, I'm quite glad the OP reposted a few times. I may not have seen this app otherwise. The hustle required to delete and repost doesn't feel spammy to me. And, furthermore, the original post made it to the front page and retained its location per the algorithm, which gives a lot of power to time.

I think the value prop for a lot of HN readers here isn't so much about whether or not this was an ad - I think it was more about "this is a cool idea that could spark other location-oriented ideas" in the thread, and quite a few folks did treat this as a Show HN.

It's a fine line, for sure, but it's also a gamble - will people look past the outer layer of "spammy" to the inner layers that can be learned from? I felt this way about the Envato article today too. Disclaimer, I write articles for their tuts sites periodically. But I knew when that article hit the front page, it would be received as spammy.

We need people like you (benologist and the clear-headed readers of this comment) to maintain a strict hold on what is considered valuable on HN, certainly while simultaneously appreciating and giving space to the efforts of other programmers in the space.
I live in DC, and work intel-community adjacent in the infosec industry. I'll stipulate up front that I've never worked as a government employee, and despite doing some assessment work (like being hired to break into the Department of the Interior without their knowledge, or breaking hardware/software that was being deployed in far away places) everywhere I've worked has tried very hard to steer clear of government work (not for any ethical reasons, it just pays much worse than equivalent commercial work, and is almost always boring). In fact, the last two places I worked had distinct government and commercial divisions (where I ran the commercial divisions).

That said, I've built and run several security consulting practices in the DC area, and consequently have done hiring interviews for dozens of people who were NSA employees (1 of which we ended up hiring). Absolutely none of them have even the slightest apprehension about the nature of the work they were doing (so much as they were able to comment about it during interviews).

In fact, prior to the Snowden leaks, the NSA was pretty much at the bottom of my list for government agencies doing shit I disliked. They have a pretty clear scope and charter (which we've come to learn has been muddied).

But no one I've talked to, either who works there or works at a contractor in the DIB, thinks they've done anything wrong. Did you read those batshit NSA talking points that came out yesterday from Al Jazeera's FOIA request? They believe those things.

They think they're doing important, valuable work to protect the country. I can only imagine that internally within NSA there has been dissent about some of the stuff that's come out. Maybe people have resigned over it, maybe they've sent strongly-worded emails to their bosses. I really hope there was a great deal of dissent about the "intentionally fuck up crypto standards that we push to other branches of the government", but I doubt we'll ever hear much about it.

Your questions could just as easily refer to people who work on SEO spam, or targeted advertisements (I'm not saying those things are equivalent, but they're also jobs I've heard people on here posturing morally about).
Thanks for that link, really interesting stuff.
It would be nice if more of these chart libraries implemented box-plots: http://informationandvisualization.de/blog/box-plot
I really can't adjust to keyboards that have the keys in each row perfectly aligned. I know it's not used the same as a full sized keyboard, but it still always drives me mad.
Also, we will lie about what we are actually doing. I can understand taking some drastic measures to prevent epic disaster, however, I see no good reason to cover up what is actually going on; threats and countermeasures. By lying, they are forcing us to assume the worst.
Probably because the testers aren't experts in all frameworks and languages and deployment options, and don't have infinite time and resources to try all combinations of options to test stuff.

Maybe suggest some updates to the people doing the benchmarking. Or, god forbid, do the testing yourself and post some results for people.
Scientists Smash the Li-Fi Data Record, Achieving Speeds of 10Gbit/s
This is going to be mostly speculation. There are a couple of members of my family who work in government. I've had long conversations with them in which my goal was to understand their distinctive point of view. A few things stand out to me. They speak as proud members of a larger ethos that very obviously has a separate existence. They see themselves first as part of this big something. As a loner, mercenary programmer, I can barely comprehend that kind of belonging to something. And it isn't at all that they can't think for themselves. These people are brilliant, highly educated, and can debate their views intelligently for hours. But still, they are part of this enormous establishment that has an identity, a way of thinking, a way of living, a way of being, and specific things it cares about. It's more like this: imagine that you had a really good, strong, close family. They make up a large part of your life. Together, you form a culture, with traditions, favorite things and places. You agree about most things. That's how it seems with these people in my family, except that 'family' is huge, and it's the government.
Hey Andy, I'm Ben - the product guy in Layla's team.

We'd love to share notes on experiences, learnings and the rollercoaster in general!

I'll reach out on the email machine.
Why is it a surprise that where there's money to be made there's smart, motivated, savvy, ruthless people trying to get in on the action?
>Most of us aren't here to be the audience for whatever startups and sites that treat HN like a marketing tool.

In a very literal sense that's exactly why we are all here. HN is ad supported just like most every no-cost website.

Never forget that HN is YC's marketing apparatus. HN is incredibly valuable to YC the VC firm (an incubator is a sort of specialized VC firm), to the YC startups, and to Paul Graham personally. HN is one of their most valuable strategic assets. And that value is derived from us, their adoring audience-participants.
I imagine Obama calls you. Most of these guys may have been on his re-election engineering team.
I find this similar to the endless push to buy gold from people who are supposed to be the exemplars of common sense economics.
I don't understand the whole 'don't host in US'-thing. It doesn't make sense. The NSA/US gov made it clear that they have WAY less regard for foreign privacy vs. US privacy. If all major services move their data centres/servers overseas the NSA will do the exact same thing only this time they won't be dealing with spying on Americans issues as they're targeting overseas companies.
I think your maths is wrong. I just paid $399 + $34.91 sales tax for the 32 GB model here in California. $426.51 means you get it for about $7 less. Enjoy it!
These are the type of posts I come to hacker news for (sorry meteor evangelists and NSA watchdogs).

I'd also like to recommend the Spark Streaming Paper[0] for people interested in real-time distributed architectures.

0: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~matei/papers/2012/hotcloud_spark...
> Rights (such as the bill of rights) are generally expressed as belonging to "people", not just the citizens of the US.

Erm. Are we reading the same Constitution? There's only one instance of the word in there and it's talking about IP ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"). The understanding of IP law that I've seen is that American patents don't apply internationally: they have to be converted over to the other governments' systems.

> It's also in the spirit of the declaration of independence that "all men are created equal", which would lead one to believe that they all have certain inalienable rights, citizen or otherwise.

This is the same Declaration of Independence that didn't bother including slaves and women as "men", yes? Just to be clear on what the "it" you're referring to isn't being changed by modern times.

> It also doesn't mean that Russians are subject to American law (at least not while in Russia), but that for things such as rights, they apply to everyone.

The essential claim here is that rights granted by American law apply to Russians.

What you're not saying, but perhaps are meaning to say, is that there ought to be legal structures that transcend national boundaries to apply to the entire human race and that we can in turn derive American law from such a structure such that there are situational effects at a national level. The UN, and the UNDHR, come closest to this but American law does not recognize the UNDHR as anything but a set of suggestions. Judges do not use it as a guideline. Legislators do not use it as a blueprint. (And further, the UN does not have in its membership the entire human species.)

That would make sense. It would reduce Americans' sense of sovereignty, and thus would be fought tooth and nail by the xenophobic culture you reference, but it would then make sense to talk about universal human rights.

It's funny. I've been of the mind for the past decade and a half that we need a species-level government precisely in order to achieve effects like this, but it's also specifically the people who want these effects who are most horrified at the prospect.

So perhaps that's not what you're meaning to say. Maybe you're suggesting that there's a moral Lawgiver who hands down rights and everyone should listen to Him for a change? That's what the Founders largely thought, after all.
Couldn't agree with this more, but what about Twitter?
In an era when VMs are bought by the RAM size, this benchmark still does not show RAM usage, or performance at a specific RAM limit. In such a benchmark JVM is allowed to take advantage of its weakness. :)
I'm on a business trip to Singapore (I live in Redwood City ,CA)- apparently Google isn't interested in selling me a Nexus 5 either.

Oh well. Apple seems to have no issue with me going to their US store and purchasing for my US address.
Could you be more specific? What exactly annoys you about downtown Seattle?
I don't do more than a 40 hour week... there's no point in overworking, becoming emotionally strained, physically weak, risking depression, taking time away from socialising (networking), reading for pleasure (which rewires my creative processes)

Honestly, the amount of times I see entrepreneurs flaunting a badge of honour that they work 5am to 11pm, and then they wonder why they're fat, have spotty skin, no girl to warm their bed and only 6 friends to call on when times get bad... Working in a startup takes SO MUCH MORE soft skills and attributes that come from being out there living in the world.

If you're never in the world, how are you going to fix any of it's problems?
One more thing: I love the benchmark! I love to see every new issue...
Close-up of HIV virus could ease AIDS vaccine research
> It stands to reason, then, that this is standard industry practice.

It only looks like this because people who have no intent of publishing their papers probably don't register the trials at all, rather than registering them late.