skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cryptographic communication tools have a network effect (just like any other communication system), so it's kinda pointless if only the few high-profile activists use it. Also, that would make them stick out, thus reducing their security in some ways. If you can detect the important people by the communications protocol that they are using, you already have the most important part of the information without any need to decrypt anything. Them being buried among bad cryptoraphy most likely won't work - making cryptography indistinguishable is one of the hard parts, so it's one of the properties that bad tools are unlikely to have.

Also, a part of the social/political problem is that people tend to not know that the crypto they are using is bad, and political activists tend to not necessarily be cryptography experts either, so how would they know that they are in danger when everyone around them tells them that the broken crypto they are using is the thing to use?
That's true! It's another protocl.
"Most people are not willing to risk their job to find out."

And that's the part that makes me sad about all of this. People are all about "Consider the woman's feelings here!" but no one wants to consider how men feel about it because they're "privileged."
Unlike the OP who was playing the Stack Overflow game, I use SO like a typical programmer: I type my question into Google which often returns results from Stack Overflow. Sometimes I'll come across an unanswered question or one with a better answer, so I'll submit an answer. If I can't figure something out after a few hours of trying, I'll ask the question on SO.

Such questions and answers represent hours of effort on my part. That's fine -- I needed to spend most of those hours for my work anyways, but crafting a good answer does add a significant amount of time. They usually don't result in many points: they're pretty obscure. But often it's the only place on the interwebs where the question is answered.

But the answer that has earned me the most points is a stupid throwaway CSS answer that's technically wrong: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1817792/css-previous-sibl...

What does really annoy me are the badges. I've got a bunch of necromancer badges, which I'm proud of. But the value of those badges is really degraded by cheap silver and gold badges, such as yearling.
I don't see how it could possibly be a tragedy. An ordinary user should never have to care what platform she is running on.

I agree with everything else you said.
OTR is as close to this as you'll get for IM at the moment, and even the most popular implementations like OTR for Pidgin (or Cryptocat!) haven't been vetted very thoroughly (not to mention Pidgin itself has a fairly spotted security track record.)

The people at heml.is are looking at implementing something like TextSecure as an IM, and its interface does look quite attractive, but it's a no-go as long as they're not open source (especially given that none of its authors are cryptographers), and thus can't receive a thorough review. (Actually getting qualified people to perform a review once it's open source is a challenge in itself, but perhaps people will spend more of their energy on that than writing blog posts saying they could do it better.)
I got curious about something: What are then the OP's favorite languages since he hates Java and C++?
Yes! The point could've been made honestly, but Thiel used several different 'how to lie with charts and statistics' techniques instead.

My respect for people naturally declines when they've gone out of their way to deceive me. This happens regardless of whether or not I agree with the goal of their deception.

The Bible doesn't say 'Thou shalt only lie if it helps you further your personal agenda', it says 'Thou shalt not lie.'
I think there'd be a market for a third-party glass or clear plastic case, which I believe would serve the same purpose but show of the awesome internals.
I was just reading this last night and thought you might find it interesting: https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/12/5/21

Con Kolivas, author of a CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel, had a very similar idea.
This might be a "LMGTFY" type question, but having never used SQLAlchemy, what sets is apart from something like Hibernate?
Sosyal Medya Uzmanlığı
I think "the worthiness of the question" is proxied by the upvotes on the answer.

Imagine two good answers, one on an advanced question and one on a very basic one. The basic answer gets way more upvotes. Is that unfair? It helped a lot more people, apparently, which is the goal of the site. It more readily demonstrates that the author creates content that helps a lot of people, which is the goal of points.

As long as you don't imagine that more points means more knowledge, I don't see the issue.
i would love to hear from our libertarian friends on what they think about copyright and the public domain.
I thought tptacek's response to my question here was interesting, WRT crypto dick waving:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5776111

Edit: another thought, looking at the incentives involved:

* If you, as a security guy, spend your time breaking stuff, you win some points for that if you score a 'hit'. If you don't, well no one is really paying attention. Pretty much all systems - even those written by really bright guys like cperciva - have flaws, so if you look enough, you'll probably find some.

* If you write your own system, you attract the attention of all the people out to break it. And eventually they probably will find some problem and write Comic Book Guy style posts about how the system is badly flawed. And your reputation will suffer.
"Still, I wonder at what point primary legislation is going to become necessary."

Could end up with a market based solution, once the MBAs know that paying more than three digits for business critical single source software that could disappear at any time is insane, which the techies already know, the market for extremely highly priced software will simply dry up and blow away in the breeze. This seems like a fairly inevitable outcome, which should be considered by devs and businesspeople thinking about entering that market space today. There's a "use by" date on that business model and once its time is up, its gone.

This applies to software as a service, too.

More than likely any .gov changes would be purchased by businesses currently in the dying legacy business model to support their obsolete business model, not to help out the general public. Think about it... when was the last time .gov did anything of any significance to help the general public, anyway?
I don't really post on StackOverflow - people have tended on the rude side a little more than should be the norm there from my experience. I use IRC heavily though for my programming help needs. SO is nice for its searchability though, and how many solutions to problems are posted there. It has its utility.
> There's an old cliché in English: give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. StackOverflow is filled to the brim with people giving fishes.

This hits the nail on the head, imo. While the SO system is (presumably) meant to reward "karma" based on the quality of answers, more often than not it seems that quantity is just as important. And it's not hard to see why this is the case -- there's an inherent risk in typing a well thought-out (read: time consuming and potentially long) answer, when a simple one-liner is probably all the questioner is really seeking.

On the other hand, maybe that's what StackOverflow is really for -- getting things done, NOW. Even if that "getting things done" answer is just a band-aid, and the questioner hasn't really learned anything.

In my experience, people who find themselves applying band-aid after band-aid to their code (myself included) rarely connect the dots all the way back and realize that all their subsequent problems were largely due to their initial "fix".
Yes but Google has plenty of money so it is ok.
Same to you! Have a wonderful 2014!
Right. If I ever need to do any low-level programming, I'll have to look at something else (probably C).

Mobile and desktop are not something I focus on heavily either. It's nice to know that if that were to change, Clojure at least offers some decent options.
ShowHN: Grab your free #YearInRecap
On a happier note, here is a list of authors whose works will be entering the public domain tomorrow in various parts of the world.

http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/12/10/class-of-2014/
Population, population density, automobiles, and lingering effects of recent poverty.

London's metro population peaked around 9 million right around 1940, although it's back up to similar numbers. The population of manhattan peaked around 2.3 million in the 1920s. The population of Beijing, Guangzhou, or Shanghai are all about 20 million plus.

There were fewer automobiles in London even in the mid 20th century than there are in the big Chinese cities today (there are over 5 million cars in Beijing alone). Many of those automobiles are either diesel powered trucks, buses, and cars or 2-stroke scooters and motorcycles, all of them highly polluting. Add to that the heavy reliance on coal for home heating and cooking and you have the pollution nightmare that is now quite evident. The population of the entirety of the UK was only 50 million in 1950, and the population of the US in 1950 was only 150 million.

Today in China nearly 50 million people live in Guangzhao alone, and over 100 million people live in the top 4 largest municipalities, within an area that is in total similar in size to Los Angeles county. And the pollution contribution from the population of more than a billion who often live near the major cities is also not inconsequential.
From the letter:

The clear purpose and/or design of this application is to encourage, _facilitate_, and/or cause its users to stream and/or download popular sound recordings, the vast majority of which are owned or controlled by RIAA Member companies and are not authorized for distribution in this manner, while at the same time providing you/your company with _certain financial or related benefits_.

This is how a lot of Dutch sharing websites were closed: Facilitating copyright infringement with monetary gain. They got TV links (a site very similar to OP's site, only crawling for and posting links and embeds) for trademark infringement. Later on some Dutch ISP's were forced to block The Pirate Bay, because by allowing access to the site they facilitated copyright infringement(or so the court ruled). A Dutch blog was charged with republishing copyrighted material by placing a link. This later was overturned and became a fine for "facilitating".

Placing some links as facilitating copyright infringement sets a dangerous precedent for net neutrality.
This dumb year: The 47 lamest moments in tech 2013
A successful - 20 year old - crowdfunded impact investment project
Google+ does not make it into the top-five mix — not because of its lack of popularity; but because Pew says it did not include it in its survey questions.

BAM! :-)
i left so a month ago, and while i agree with one point here (creeping authoriarianism) i am completely opposed to "teach a man to fish".

for me, as a professional programmer, that site is useful because it has direct, simple answers.

but it seems to have been taken over by students who are resentful that there should be simple answers without some evidence of suffering (it really seems to be that).

why should i have to explain "what i have already done" to a bunch of schoolkids when all i want is for someone who has solved this issue before to post the right answer so i can get on with life?

i'm an adult. i can make my own decisions about when i learn and when i want an answer. i don't need someone else's priorities - from a completely different context, apparently motivated by jealousy over grades - shoved down my throat.

but anyway, while that bugged me, it was the dismissive mods that finally drove me away (at 19k points).

(am i the only one that thinks that good questions - interesting ones - are no longer getting quality answers because people that could have answered them have left? and that they're no longer being asked as a consequence? the time when i wrote answers like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7076349/is-there-a-good-w... has long, long passed)
Different tools for different purposes. In my experience, the laptops have not required opening for quite some time, speaking about my retina MBP and Air experiences.

I could upgrade the storage (just 256GB seems small) but I don't really need to... I have all the music I want in the "cloud" (Spotify, Rdio, Pandora) and I keep my video on my home server on an external enclosure I can mount anytime through SSH or watch via Plex.

I could upgrade the video card, but I never have before in a laptop; if I wanted to do things like that, I'd get a desktop.

I could upgrade the memory, but I maxxed it out at 16GB anyway and it won't fit any more.

I could open it to fix things, but there are few moving parts and nothing seems to break.

I might someday need to replace the battery, but on both my rMBPs so far (one owned 1 year, one owned 6 months) the battery has not notably declined in capacity. Even at the end of its life, a reduced 4 hour battery life will be plenty sufficient, and when it finally kicks the bucket, I'm happy to have Apple service it.

In my original 2008 aluminum macbook pro, I replaced the hard drive once, upgraded the memory, and replaced the battery; but none of these things are as relevant or limited as they were in 2009. I have no need for the equivalent upgrades anymore. The machine just works, exactly how I want it to.
print(varname) is one extra keystroke -- and a whole more convenient than a statement when you want to do it in a lambda for debugging.
Things that use OpenPGP or libOTR. At the level of an organization where you can run your own CA, X509 might be easier (it's integrated into outlook IIRC).

I don't know what the accessible frontends are and no doubt there's work to be done there, but the basic primitives are a solved problem, and I'm pretty sure a better frontend on top of either would be very welcome.
Show HN: 5 Challenges to win before 25
Again, having a gun increases the likelihood of succeeding in the attempt. It allows for snap decisions is also true. But I do not agree that it contributes to the act in of itself.

A perfect example of this someone pointed out elsewhere; Japan has an incredibly high suicide rate. It is apparently the leading cause of death of men and women in the younger age brackets. Japan has little to no gun culture. From what I've read, people there are attempting to address the why's of the situation instead of tackling the how's as it would change nothing.

People who talk of restricting people's access to guns because of other people's choices of using those gun on themselves is attempting to tackle the how's of the problem and not discussing the why's. It restricts people's rights without actually solving anything.

I have no problems with restricting access to someone with suicidal thoughts, although that's tough to determine how to go about that fairly. But it's a completely different thing to restrict a person's rights because his neighbor is suicidal.

As for guns designed for things other than killing. The easiest examples are shotguns. There are a number of shotguns specifically designed for clay sports. There's even a difference in designs between a shotgun intended for trap and skeet. In trap the clay flies away from you so the shotgun is designed to sling lead as far and as accurately as possible. In skeet the lead doesn't have to travel far but you often have to be able to swing the gun from left-to-right rather quickly, so it is designed with that in mind. Then there are shotguns designed for you to carry in the field and shoot birds. There is often overlap in these designs and the guns designed for clay sports can of course be used to kill living things. But that's not what they are designed for.

There are many other examples, such as the very one you describe.

If you want to discuss the aspect of something being designed to kill, a better and more accurate discussion is about ammunition. A gun is something designed to sling a projectile at high speeds. You can take any gun and insert blanks to make it useless for just about anything.
> The author wants Cryptocat shut down, but if that happens, what will the people using Cryptocat do? Communicate in plaintext? Isn't it irresponsible (and in line with your own reasoning about putting people in danger) to not present the users with a better alternative first?

First of all, I personally think that if you have to use Cryptocat that you might want to exhaust all other options before using it.

Second of all, if you're already in a compromised situation, do you want to use a compromised communication medium? It doesn't seem sensible.

Lastly, there are alternatives to Cryptocat:

https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/

This is actually created by someone with a clue and isn't full of cutesy icons and faux Amiga designs.
Why I still contribute to SO:

- I've gotten a lot of help there

- It's nice to help other people in return

- Any answer I put there will be available via Google in 5 minutes, so I can definitely reference it myself in the future. (I'll even ask and answer questions I just figured out so that I can find them later.)
Crypto can't be easy and safe. You need to check fingerprints (attempts to make this "friendly" with images and the like have tended to have vulnerabilities). Beyond that, what's your issue with OTR? A separate network has the advantage of not having to do the negotiation step of OTR-over-jabber/AIM/etc, but it will have bootstrapping problems (or maybe not; maybe a well-designed app that just used OTR all the time, on a new network, would be enough).
Another data point that suggests that voter fraud is a real problem: The New York City Department of Investigation reported that their undercover agents were able to obtain fraudulent ballots with a 97% success rate. It's likely that fraud is happening and we just aren't aware of it:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/367278/report-new-york-...
He should have made decent revenue with banner ads or interstitials at this point with that large user base. Getting a lawyer to at least look into it would have been an option.
We've been approached a handful of times for funding as well as potential acquisitions into larger networks/sites throughout the years. However, the logistics have never made much sense, if I am being honest, so we've always declined.

Currently we are talking to a group which is very promising. Can't say much more, but hopefully we can in the near future.
While it is true that simple answers get a lot of credit, it is also true that most common questions have simple answers. Sure a bit of Googling may get you the answer but sometimes it takes an experienced user to find a Google answer. Just knowing the right thing to search for requires some skill. Dead obvious questions that can be easily Googled or are repeats are flagged and often removed.

Sure in an ideal world someone answering that very specific question that is difficult to answer would get more credit but it is not perfect. That is also why the bounty system exists because someone can have a specific hard to answer question that would be very beneficial to them while not many others would be helped and thus upvote. So that person can offer a bounty.
I created CalCal (http://gum.co/IEMpg)
It's a dual timeline printable calendar.

It's something I've used myself for a while now and I created it as a digital download to learn more about validating an idea, selling digital products & marketing them.
Thanks for the cljx tip. Is it commonly used, or more of an experimental thing?
Creating Valuable Mixins with Stylus
Ask HN: Best and worst moments in 2013
What are your 3 best moments in 2013?
What are your 3 worst moments in 2013?
What is the one thing that you want to improve in your life in 2014?

I wish to you all a wonderful 2014! You are what you think. Make this year memorable :)
could you tell us something about your friends/family situation (geographic location, socioeconomic situation, education, etc). i know three (!) people who are not on facebook.
That's not true. Django doesn't install any other libraries. It simply includes them in Django itself, like simplejson or six.

I think the packaging and setup tools are getting better so maybe it doesn't always have to be that way.
Crowdfund better: reduce project risks
television brain washed by George Bush? How exactly NSA can access to everything is a good thing?
That's actually incorrect in the US. The default state of a work of art is that it is copyrighted with ownership granted to the creator, with all rights reserved.

These rights have to be waived for it to become public domain.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#102
Principles of good RESTful API Design
> Crypto can't be easy and safe.

It's not that black and white. Yes, usability tends to carry with it some measure of sacrifice in security, but Skype used to have a lot more security, and was as easy to use as it is today. They're not absolutes. You can have "quite usable and very secure" and "very usable and quite secure", things none of the apps we're discussing are.

I don't have any big concerns with OTR (aside from the inability to do offline messaging,) just the implementions, mainly OTR in Adium. OTR in Pidgin appears to be decent, but hasn't received a lot of review, as far as I know, and Pidgin has its own problems/provides its own attack surface.
Oh i did not know that sorry.
Asterank is really impressive.

I'm 22 and I would be so proud if I succeed to accomplishing such great things by your age.
Not really. Works are automatically copyrighted upon creation. It's not some limited exception. You cannot assume a work is public domain until proven otherwise. Otherwise you'll be getting a nastygram from the RIAA.
EdX on the Raspberry Pi – A Portable Classroom
I don't really see those Necro badges as devalued by other badges. I have 14 of them that I'm pretty proud of. I think each one of them represents a good answer to a question most people had ignored or forgotten about. I'd much rather have a Necro badge than 10 upvotes on a question that 10 other people were racing to answer as soon as it was posted.
How would you improve SongMeanings? What would make you visit again? Would love, and appreciate, the feedback.
It is, though if you're using PostGIS, I'd recommend GeoAlchemy2[1], which ties into SQLAlchemy a bit more naturally (because they get rid of support for all other engines). Also, seems to be more actively developed/maintained.

[1] https://geoalchemy-2.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
I don't think anyone is disputing that having a gun increases the likelihood of succeeding. I just disagree with the idea that the gun contributed to the attempt.

Most of what you just stated I have no disagreements with, but it is worded differently than what has been stated by others before.
Agree completely, there was incremental movement on the outside, but powerful forces are at work beneath the surface.

The iPhone 5s was widely derided as an incremental product, but it forced every other smartphone and mobile processor designer in the industry to throw out their entire technical roadmap for the next few years and start again from scratch. It also introduced the first consumer application of a biometric sensor that actually feels like it's part of our future here today.

Google Glass is highly controversial, but setting it's consumer acceptance issues aside, the potential for the technology in a whole host of industrial/business applications is stunning. Ditto for commercial drone technology like that demonstrated by Amazon.

I can understand a non-tech journalist looking at all this and not getting excited, but for a tech journalist to completely miss the implications of these developments is just lazy.