skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is perhaps the best and most tech-influential spot you can gain to advertise an issue you're having with a company/product.

However, I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody at Toshiba visits HN.
It's not a technical problem it's a value prop problem. Most users don't care about privacy....

Fundamentally there is more value for the network operator to grow the network than for users to disclose their details. Email works perfectly fine without having to disclose your address book because no one owns the network and therefore do not care how many people are using email.

Alternatively one could just allow users to choose whether to make their info public and then the client can just search a directory.
It doesn't, aside from it being more difficult for them to hide behind invalid contact details, which should make it easier for others to initiate UDRP proceedings against them.

As soon as they register a new domain with a registrar under the 2013 RAA or if they update their contact details, they'll be forced to validate them.
That maybe so, but so are the people who invested in Snapchat. By the way, I am 23 myself. I'm not saying that everyone at 23 needs to be mature with their thinking of the world, but we should at least promote the ones that are.
Is this a real problem?

Is it reasonable to trust for me to trust you to you run some arbitrary binary on my phone that does some magical black box computation on my contact list and then phone home to your service, but not trust to that you will just not be a dick with the raw data?

Stated more simply, if I am paranoid about my privacy, then why am I running your apps and letting you read my contact list at all?
On the third hand, he's turned down two offers of three to four billion dollars. Perhaps he should be fired for that!
General Mills Starts Making Some Cheerios Without GMOs
"Nor did he go to North Vietnam and praise its leaders (as Snowden did in Russia)"
This is misleading and ignores the differences between Snowden's situation and Ellsberg's situation, the biggest difference being that we are not at war with China.
Processes already should be running as different uids

Docker makes that way easier.

If I want 3 instances of nginx running for different projects, I don't really want to setup 3 nginx users (nginx1, nginx2, nginx3).

With Docker, I just start the container and it's isolated from everything else.
I was with you until I saw this comment. If everything you've stated is true, why not keep what you have up and just add an update to how Toshiba fixed your laptop?
Surely you must admit that there is a massive difference between the potential of Google and Snapchat.
This is one of the things that made me really see the value of free software.

How do you mean? Is there much (legal) value to be had from image software that can process accurate scans of currency? I'm just kind of confused here, what value you speak of.
Python 3.x has to be the future, there are lots of really well articulated reasons for that. The problem here is that the transition was not, in my opinion, handled intelligently.

What I mean by this is that in five years there are a number of things that could have been introduced incrementally and with minor impact to existing libraries. For example, making range() behave like xrange() seems trivial from a user's point of view. The same with print vs. print().

Yes, some of the other important differences would require breaking code in more serious ways. This, too, over five years, could have been introduced with incremental transition tools that would make the upgrading of existing libraries as automatic as possible.

If a language doesn't have massive and useful libraries you can play with it and break it. Nobody will care and adoption will be swift. That's not the case with Python. Aside from language benefits I'd say the main differentiating reason for which Python is really valuable is that there are libraries out there to do just about anything you want. Breaking (or un-breaking, depending on your perspective) the language breaks the libraries, therefore, no matter how wonderful the language might be it is a non-starter.

The transition from one version to the next has to be automatic. Nobody has the clock cycles to engage in months' long research projects to comb through code and fix things. No, tools like 2to3 are not what I am talking about.

One non-coding example I can offer is what happens when you open an old Solidworks file with a newer version of Solidworks. The program immediately fires-up a format converter and tells you it is converting to the new file format. Once done, you save and you are done. All you have to do is open the file and re-save it. That's how it should be. Surely in this day and age there's enough CS intelligence out there to make a fully automatic version-to-version converter. Now that would be something. It would certainly bring the Python community forward in unimaginable ways.

I'll go further and suggest that this could actually be an idea that could set Python apart: No new version is released without a matching fully-automatic old-to-new converter.

Hey, ideas are easy.
are you an NSA agent?
The author of netcat must be a trillionaire.
That's really interesting, given your Chemistry focus, what has motivated you to undertake this course? The requirement to write it in Scheme seems a bit onerous to someone who's never used Scheme. Given that, it would probably still be easier than extending an existing compler. I think you'd spend A LOT of time learning some ones design and coding practices.

I always point people at this article. It's a nice short synapsis similar to Crenshaws "Let's Build a Compiler" series only much shorter in length. Plus it's Python, so may give you some ideas for Scheme:

http://www.jroller.com/languages/entry/python_writing_a_comp...
How does one get from Snapchat to Tencent? Just because Bob down in the van by the river is making soda pop in his wheelbarrow doesn't mean he's going to be the next Coca-Cola. Even the mere suggestion takes so much credibility away from Andreessen. How many thousands of messaging programs have come along already? ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc. etc. Why weren't any of them the next Tencent? Perhaps, because China is not the US. Last time I was in Japan, kids were still shelling out $40 for CDs from their favorite pop singers. Different markets are different.

Snapchat is a one-trick pony and about as special as a snowflake in an avalanche.
No. That wouldn't constitute verification and validation of contact details, and registrar are required to verify and validate any contact details provided to them. It's the registrar that's contacting the customer, not some other third party who they deal with.
No kidding!? I did not know, nor expect that.
As I see it, the biggest current threat is bruteforcing of this service, at least based on the recent snapchat attack. And implementing rate limiting would solve this issue.

And given that this is a very hard problem to solve this kind of solution could be a good bandaid. Anyhow, this is at least my 2 cents on this issue.
Google's VP9 Video Codec Gets Backing from ARM, Nvidia, Sony And Others
You may want to look up the difference between a symptom and a diagnosis. I am also curious about the argument you want to make, because your comment is just a proposition without motivation.
Not to mention Apple in Australia. That kind of warranty protection is enough to make me want to move there! ;-)
Well, that's a completely different problem. If you travel frequently and your gear gets stolen for a few days at every border crossing? At the very least, I'd look into a laptop that was easily field-strippable, and figure out how to verify non-volatile storage with an external device, at least on return. And never fully trust the machine again either. Note that this problem is what TPMs purport to solve, but that doesn't help you against a major government which will demand a backdoor from the manufacturer.

My laptop was never touched by customs - had it been, my plan was to never trust the machine again.

Most people are in my situation - never actually getting hassled but wanting to protect themselves now that the gloves are coming off. In the future we all may have to deal with device quarantines of a few days at every crossing (what a boon to local sellers!) but that's not now.
Is is possible to leverage some sort of peer-assisted discovery? Where you ask some sub-set of your trusted contacts already on the system, to call the server on your behalf. So that the server is less likely to know whose contacts are being sent to it.

Of course, this can only be part of the full solution.

Disclaimer: just throwing a wild idea out there. don't know anything about the field.
If that's the takeaway you got from my post, then I'm sorry: I was not able to articulate myself well.

There's no doubt that he's talented and gifted. And it's possible that I'm absolutely wrong and Evan and Snapchat are planning some amazing features. But I highly doubt that, and I would propose that it would be more pragmatic to take the cash offered and do something more meaningful.
Wait, inflation allows wages to keep up with inflation? Care to rephrase that one?
... in Guatemala
Hindsight is 20/20. What was Google when Yahoo turned them over?
Maybe you could use it for something, like a reminder to stop browsing internet sites and do some work :) There was a write recently of someone who got a ton more work done by hiring someone on craigslist to slap them in the face if they ever go off task, like spending a lot of time on facebook.
I (try my best to) do research in molecular electronics. I need to write software to perform calculations. The reason I chose this particular course is simple: I have no other choice. Either I already have taken the other available classes or they aren't given in winter. My department doesn't offer many graduate computational chemistry courses. Thanks!
They provide the source. Examine it and build it yourself.
I'd imagine it would be sustained. Every year more and more money is poured into technology R&D as it becomes increasingly important. This helps match the difficulty of further development. Far in the future this may be an issue, but I doubt it will be an issue within the next decade.
Hacker News has also been called depressing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5744224

I think it's generally a cool place but negative and nasty comments definitely seem to get traction. Watch for newer accounts that I'm assuming are harvesting karma. They always seem to start out with some negative comment.
Happy Birthday, Bitcoin – Bitcoin Turns 5
The problem is that it's easy to upload 1000 randomly generated phone numbers and get back results. But I think you can distinguish random or sequentially generated numbers from a real user's actual contact list, by looking at the distribution of friends among the contacts. A real contact list should have a high density of friendships between contacts. The system should only return results if the uploader provides a subgraph that's more highly connected than a random one would be.

You'd need to look at real data and tune the parameters to make this effective.
Campaign for Better Transport used to be Transport 2000, which was set up by the rail unions.
That sounds like an absolute blast. I want to play with my son immediately.
Yes.

Independent developers without the money to fork out for several hundred dollars of software just to rough out some flows for their small site can get more mileage out of something they probably already own.
Sometimes management prioritizes the open plan aesthetic above enabling concentration. One office had hardwood floors which allowed every conversation to bounce around the entire floor: the suggestion of carpeting was rejected because it would ruin the look of the office. In another, management felt different teams–working on completely separate projects–could collaborate if they overheard each others’ conversations. They even planned to pipe in music to raise the decibel level high enough so that it would instigate conversation between distracted teams!

This is priceless.
I wonder if the author's stance would have been the same had he been offered 6 months severance.
try calling Toshiba laptop support for North America and press/ask for a representative in Spanish, they do laptop support for (some?) Latin American countries out of Mississauga, Ontario
Bing (still) does not support SSL
in my opinion it's not popular because its private, its just easier to use to send pictures/videos to other people. the time limit makes it seem more "in the moment" good for a quick laugh and then its gone. a big plus is it lets you easily caption pictures and draw on them.
I was confused by this for awhile until I started hanging around a group of people who use SnapChat almost as much as texting. For the most part they share innocuous "here's what I'm doing" type photos. They use SnapChat because it's a really easy to send a photo to everyone on their list at the same time individually when they want to share a photo of what they're doing at that moment, with no feed or wall or comments to maintain later.

Thus, they really don't care if the photos are saved anywhere because they're not concerned with the privacy of their photos--at worst the snaps they share are unflattering. Their main concern is that they don't want to maintain any photos later, they just want to tell each other 'hi, here's what I'm doing' and forget about it.

In other words, to them SnapChat isn't a platform to share photos secretly, it's a platform to share photos momentarily. SnapChat even sells it as this:

>The images might be a little grainy, and you may not look your best, but that's the point. It's about the moment, a connection between friends in the present, and not just a pretty picture.

I get it now. I still don't like SnapChat at all (the UI is ugly, the UX is par, and I don't like the attitude of the company), but I see the user appeal and I see why the users SnapChat wants most will continue to use the app even though one of their friends may be keeping that picture they took of their thanksgiving turkey permanently.
"leaders, go out in public and express intense indignation over the fact that the privacy of their citizens is being systematically breached, and genuine indignation when they learn that their privacy has also been targeted." - Glen Greenwald https://github.com/poppingtonic/greenwald-30c3-keynote/blob/...
To the end user probably not but if the encryption is performed on the client and the client code is open sourced and you don't auto-update your application then you'll know exactly what is happening to your data when you let it access your contacts.
> With Overwatch, players will be able to attach their iPhones to their paintball or airsoft guns and then track the real-time movement of other players on the battlefield

Seems like it could be an expensive game of paintball if you're putting your phone at risk of getting annihilated. Are they planning on making their own components eventually or are they set on the "app" status of it?

Pretty cool idea though.
That's not what the article said. Are you hurt because you fit that stereotype and you're angry?
>Perhaps they've got some cool stuff going on underneath somewhere

They definitely do.

>they just seem sort of lackluster to me for much the reasoning that you've mocked above.

Not everyone is capable of being Elon Musk and creating SpaceX and Tesla. These types of products are low-hanging fruit for people with 0 initial capital.

>Assuming that a startup's early state is little indication of what it eventually turns into, why would somebody invest in any one over another?

Engagement and growth.
This is an interesting find. And unlike new weapons in the war on virii and bacteria, there's no way for evolution to "win" this: a cancer cell that evolved a better defense would almost surely wind up killing its host before it could reproduce.
Snowden should not be given clemency of any kind. The content of his disclosure is not relevant to clemency. The act of disclosure itself is what justifies prosecution. Precedence and all that.

Having said that, my provisional opinion of Snowden is that he is a self sacrificing hero. Insufficiently judicious, as the Slate article well covers, but still heroic.
It's great to see pre-college students pursuing technology and entrepreneurship. I didn't even view it as a desirable or viable career path until I started college. I would've appreciated a chance to get started in it at an earlier age.
Here's the actual venturebeat article this post is referencing - http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/30/startup-aims-to-bring-call...
Not really. I will only want to join a social network if a lot of my friends are already on it. The fewer of my friends on it, the lower the value I get out of using the service (cetris paribus of course).
So then, how is having an answer on record going to be useful?
Evan Spiegel is just another talented but arrogant, unaware-of-his-own-privilege guy.

To his credit, he's aware of it:

I bring this up because I want to acknowledge inequality. At Stanford, and in Silicon Valley, we perpetuate the myth of meritocracy. We believe that the harder we work, the more we will achieve. The more effort that we take to craft ourselves, and our brands, the more opportunities we will create for ourselves.

But in Cape Town, and in America, and across the world - This is not true. I am a young, white, educated male. I got really, really lucky. And life isn’t fair. So if life isn’t fair - It’s not about working harder; it’s about working the system.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/135235429/Design-Yourself-Conferen...
It would be interesting to turn the tables and draw up a termination of contract when you quit, and demand 2 weeks severance in exchange for a non-disparagement clause which you agree to.

I have a feeling that would raise a lot of hackles.
Your site isn't "banned" in any sense: you are leasing your domain, and as part of the lease agreement, you are required to provide accurate contact detail. That was the case even before ICANN brought in the 2013 RAA.

As wtallis wrote, this only applies when you initially register a domain or modify the contact details associated with a domain. While registrars are required to re-validate contact details, they only need to email you to notify you that you should check that your contact details are still accurate, which they currently have to do already. Of course, if the email bounces... but if that's the case then you've seriously screwed up.
You don't even need to pay for S3.

http://pages.github.com/
For Pitcherific (http://pitcherific.com/) we began asking friends in the Startup Weekend community, some of them organizers of the event, if they would try out the app with their attendees. This lead to us being invited as coaches, doing workshops etc.
This is nothing to do with Google. It's the Law Enforcement Agencies who were pushing this with ICANN, not Google.
Yes, governments and corporations hate whistleblowers (and critics who know in-depth what they're talking about). I agree that leverage is important, and that's why people should band together in groups which increase leverage. Not to mention making these things de facto unenforcable.
Ask HN: Saas pricing features vs usage?
Given a Saas with features that can be grouped by level: basic, intermediate, and enterprise and usage that can be throttled to light, medium, heavy (ie 1M, 5M, 10M req per month, peak?), what are some thoughts, considerations, or best practices?

For example, is it better to let all the users have all the features, but price by usage, since it seems that hardware resources are the largest monthly expenditure (ie hosting, storage, etc), or is it better to price by features, thus enticing users who want desirable feature X to upgrade?
The quote you're giving me leads my response and I describe it as "not ridiculous".

"The essay reflected that ______" reports someone else's point of view, not my own. I agree that something is wrong in our culture; it cannot be shown that this represents a change from that of Classical Greece, but it can be supposed to varying levels of certainty. But if I exhort people to stop contributing to a problem of today, whether that problem originated in the recent past or the ancient past is of no relevance. We should still stop it today.
If the companies didn't want you to do this, then they wouldn't let you do this.

They do not want you to do this. What your friend did is considered to be a form of return fraud and abuse. The industry term for it is 'wardrobing' or 'renting'.

It's a big enough problem that there is a company, http://www.theretailequation.com, that helps large firms blacklist people like your friend, though these defenses are fairly recent.

Returns require a receipt.

Not always.
> This seems impossible. Returns require a receipt. I don't know what you're talking about.

1. Buy item #1, obtain receipt, take it home

2. Go back into store, find identical item #2, take it past checkout counter and up to return counter

3. "Return" item #2 using receipt for item #1

4. Profit

For big ticket items there's usually a unique serial the store will scan to prevent this sort of thing, but not always. Pretty deplorable.
I am the highest skill level assembly language programmer with 5 years asm work experience on 6 different instructionsets and I started in 1983 with a 6502.

If you know assembly language you can probably write a compiler. If you don't know assembly language it will be really shitty.

I have 5 assembly language courses on my transcripts.

http://www.templeos.org/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf

CSC226 CSC326 CSE421 CSE422 CSE523

----

I have been paid to program in the following asm instruction sets : VAX, 8051, x86, 68000, PIC, and Atmel AVR.

You are not me. You cannot be me even if you try. I have 20,000 hours of asm experience. I am an expert.

----

Yes, I have a compiler course I took. I wrote Ticketmaster's report generator expression byte-code compiler.

I made SimStructure, a C interpretor in 2000-2001

http://www.templeos.org/files/SimStrSetUp.zip

----

Go to internet archive http://www.simstructure.hare.com and get May 27 2004, HOPPY download. It has my compiler in turboassembly before it compiled itself.

----

This is why I am the best asm programmer on the planet:

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/Lectures/64BitAsmQuiz.html
This must be a gag, or the worst example of western opulence I could possibly think of.

Seriously, an electronic gadget made to disrupt your day every 5 minutes. I think this requires a better explanation of the purpose before I take it seriously. Right now all the marketing speak combined with the banality of this device makes me think it's the perfect april fools but a few months too soon.

Let's assume it's for real, why would you want to get reminded that 5 minutes have passed when you've lost yourself in a fun life moment? Or when you're waiting for something a long time, that would be even worse.
> "If the companies didn't want you to do this, then they wouldn't let you do this."

That is a poor assumption that is likely incorrect more often than not.

A Chinese restaurant that I go to occasionally has a bowl of mints by the register. I could take a handful of them, they would not stop me, but that would be a dick move. I could go hang out at library and pass the time by taking their books off the shelves and building castles with them on the desks, but that would be a dick move. I could go to the shoe store and try on every single pair of shoes that they have, leaving them all in a massive pile in the middle of the store, but that would be a dick move.

Generous customer-friendly policies like this can exist, for the benefit of the customer, because there is an understanding that most people will be respectful and not abuse the privilege. If everybody acted like your friend, then we would not be able to have nice things.