skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given how in bed with the USA my country the UK is, yes, I would suggest that. I might be wrong, but I would very much make that suggestion.

My problem ultimately, as a Brit, is that it seems that we are more and more becoming a satellite of the US, bound by US law and ideals we never ever voted for. We had a referendum on the EU, but never a referendum for all this. But of course that is a British matter and not something the US should be concerned with. If we Brits want to suck up to the US, why would the US turn it down?

I think that what has happened is a nasty mission creep with regard to intelligence. Its used to be all about threats to a given country. The basic point was to understand the intentions of one's enemies. This was and is vital in preventing mistaken action based on not knowing that an enemy has no plan to, say, invade, or what ever. It was based on the idea that knowledge helps prevent paranoia and fear. All of which is not just OK, but vital. It is why in the cold war, both sides accepted this in a gentlemanly way. Both knew it was vital to both to stop both nuking each other. If the USSR said it would not start a war, the West could verify that by spying and have confidence. And vice versa. Now it seems that a lot of it is about gaining advantage in commerce, and local law enforcement. Its fine to say that the NSA has nothing to do with this, but we know that they give access to the FBI and police. We can reasonably believe that its quite possible that the NSA also gives intelligence to large businesses like Lockheed. What has happened is that economic and local criminal issues are now redefined as matters of national security. The lines have not just blurred, but completely crossed over, perhaps gone completely.

As a result, I think we need to re-examine the role and scope of intelligence gathering. Spying needs credibility. And yes, there is a severe danger of throwing out babies in the bathwater. But ultimately, if the people lose confidence in intelligence gathering, we are in a whole lot of trouble. It is vital to get the balance right.
I don't see how you make the leap from a syntax you don't like, to the language lacking cohesion. In my experience Rust code looks perfectly cohesive, and once you have the sigils in your head you simply parse them as what they mean.

To give an example, I don't believe that this code:

https://github.com/chris-morgan/rust-http/blob/master/src/ex...

is any less cohesive than this:

https://gist.github.com/thisishugo/8433714

Obviously each to their own, but I'm finding Rust a very enjoyable language to work with.
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I like Bitcoin. It's odd that I even have to say that to be read correctly.

None of the things you mention are uses, they are features. Great features, sure, but it's not something that you actually do with a currency. It's like saying dollars are used by paper, or for central bank. Bitcoin - right now - is not used much for commerce, aside from black market type stuff.
It's very interesting to see an Android Laptop. I've wondered why Google hasn't merged the Chromebooks with Android yet.

I believe that for many of my family members, Android would be a great OS to have on a device with a touchscreen, mouse and keyboard.

They mostly use Facebook, Youtube and Gmail, and the occasional game. Right now, too many websites target Windows with malware / adware, which gets very annoying for me to clean up later.

It's a shame that Google isn't more proactive on making sure the Play Store and the Chrome Store are malware-free, by the way. A missed opportunity there.
How do iBeacons work?
>Go is also a systems programming language

No it isn't.
Type with your feet? Is there a foot mouse?
I made that 25 years ago. I've just downloaded it onto my MacBook Air, changed the shebang to reference /usr/bin/awk, and fired it up ("./walk walk.w p -"); it works as advertised. You can still format the doc with "nroff -ms walk.ms", too.
IBM rules 2013 US patent charts for straight 21st year
Side question: what about an active MITM attack which changes the ciphersuite preferences?

So e.g. if I know as an attacker of a weakness in scheme X (which is advertised by both server and client), but server and client would prefer scheme Y, then I'd just have to manipulate the initial handshake to include only scheme X, right?
CodeCraft by Funding Circle
I really hope Hy catches on as the way to add DSLs to Python projects. I did this to one of my small projects and I'm very happy with the results: http://pyzmo.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#usage-hy
New health care regulations significantly complicate the lives of those trying to start or grow a business (at least businesses smaller than big corporations).

At the very early stage, the cost is high. I'm obligated to pay overinflated prices for insurance to support the life choices (pregnancy, drug addiction, fatness) of others. The cost is also highly unpredictable - it's based on my future income and the exchange website is designed to obfuscate it in order to avoid sticker shock. Good luck predicting future income if you don't work for the government/bigcorp.

And there are all sorts of edge cases where the regulations don't even make sense. For example, I live outside the US, but if I enter the US for 31 or 36 days (different websites give different numbers), I'm obligated to buy 365 days of obamacare or pay the obamacare tax. This drastically curtails my ability to make sales visits.

At the growing a business stage, it makes your 50'th employee very expensive.
Monopoly's and collusion are a clear counter examples where individual freedom and institutional freedom are at odds.
Fun fact and objective analysis. However, irrelevant in countries like The Netherlands, where freely downloading copyrighted music is not illegal.
I think writing C extensions (using raw C, not Cython) for Python is not easy and will never be easy. For one reason alone: writing C is never easy.
Re: the dispatch periodic table. This is from a library in Scala (a web client called dispatch) that was someone's first project in Scala and went very overboard on the use of operators. It is generally considered bad design.

The Dispatch periodic table is here:

http://www.flotsam.nl/dispatch-periodic-table.html
> Go is also a systems programming language so I don't know what you mean. I would like to use Go, yes, and I do when I have a chance.

Go is a fully garbage collected language that doesn't offer a lot of support for manual memory management (and that isn't intended to attack Go—it just wasn't one of its goals). Rust is a low-level systems language that allows full control via zero-cost abstractions, but is safe. Achieving that goal requires some new machinery and syntax. Systems programming often entails writing for environments in which you can't use a GC (or even any runtime at all) for performance or other reasons.

> Also your point about syntax vs safety and correctness makes no sense, since it implies that those are mutually exclusive so I'm just going to ignore that one.

Rust has a unique feature—manual memory management with safety—so it needs syntax for it. It's not just syntax for its own sake—it's what gives the language a niche all its own.
The Web Development Landscape for 2014
This is one of the biggest reason I just can't move away from my regular DPI laptop. Every time I have tried a HiDPI display with Windows it is painful. Text looks great but icons and widgets look like shit. Things get better with every new version of Windows but Microsoft have been promising true DPI independence since Vista yet things are still crap.
Dogecoin's cheap/jokey nature means that what I call the barrier to experimentation is practically non-existent.

Let's say you're interested in cryptocurrencies. The hassle and expense you have to go through to get your hands on some Bitcoin is significant enough to put most people off.

By contrast, to get your hands on some Dogecoin, just post to /r/dogecoinbeg and you've got a pretty good chance of being tipped some.
Report: US Spy Agency Infiltrates Personal Computers Worldwide
Just to avoid any misunderstandings: The linked page is a (very nicely done) joke. These are not Scala operators, but (by now retired) operators of a particular third party library for Http dispatch.
How To Bootstrap A Tech Startup In India?
The main purpose of Rust is to be a practical, safe alternative to C++. Go and D are NOT such languages, because of the mandatory garbage collection. From time to time there's been efforts to replace C++ with safer garbage collected languages such as Java or C#, and every time it basically failed. Direct control over memory has been proven pretty much essential in high-performance software. Thus, we're still stuck with C++, and we're still suffering for it, having nightmarish bugs and myriads of security holes and whatnot.

Rust at least tries to make an honest effort to change that. If and when it gets really fleshed out it'd be a boon to all those poor developers. And please forget your awfully subjective qualms about syntax (seriously, go and program in Haskell if you're all for pretty syntactic and cohesiveness - though I can't guarantee you won't find it "disgusting"). Memory management in the C++ way is bloody hard, and it's a dirty affair. It makes no sense to be repulsed by all the complexity there, because it's unavoidable, and it's a job that has to be done. Of course there's going to be a smattering of syntactical constructs to make memory management less tedious, just like there is extra syntactic baggage on bigger Haskell programs to accommodate the fine control over side effects.

Having a memory safe high-performance language with C++-like memory management is a HUGE thing. A while ago I would have dismissed such a thing as a pipe dream, and when I became convinced that Rust could work it was a moment of great rejoicing. Even if Rust ends up on the dumps, there has been at least an effort, and maybe someone will make a better Rust some day.

So please try to understand the purpose and rationale behind Rust before dismissing it in a superficial way.
In all the ways that matter, asm.js is a bytecode with a funny encoding and peculiar semantics related to that. Denying it doesn't really help.

We're all wishing for a sane bytecode for a change. It's not just syntax.
Setting up an OwnCloud Personal Cloud
That's quite a few things to learn in one year.
Fraud protection ? Are you joking ?

Credit card companies almost unconditionally insure their customers against fraudulent transactions. Bitcoin does not. Banks will actively monitor accounts for suspicious transactions and lock the account if necessary. Bitcoin does not. Banks provide a friendly, easy to use and traceable list of your previous transactions. Bitcoin does not. Banks provide a mechanism to reverse transactions. Bitcoin does not.
All sizes in dialog templates are indeed specified in "dialog units", which are based on the metrics of the dialog's font. So in theory if you are to double the font size, all dialog elements would just double in size and all will be well.

In practice, this is not sufficiently accurate to accommodate text size differences when going from one font/size to another. It's just too crude.

For example - http://imgur.com/STtd8OQ

Top is SegoeUI/9pt, standard for DPI of 96.
Middle is SegoeUI/10pt, standard for DPI of 125.
Bottom is Tahoma/8pt, standard for XP at 96.

See how bottom two trim "practice"? That shouldn't be happening, but it does.
What about Singapore - #2 on that list of economic freedom but it ranks pretty poorly in press freedom:

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-falls-to-record-low-place...

And they have rather brutal corporal punishment for quite trivial things (swearing on an airline flight??):

http://www.news.com.au/national/beyond-excruciating-when-it-...
Looks like this was done before in Green Goose project in 2011 http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/23/green-goose-sensors-monit...
I think the point being made is the blunt nature of the regulation - "entire industries" are being regulated.
More regulation doesn't necessarily mean better regulation.
Brix io
Inconsistent preferences can be preferred by natural selection
Just like McD's is a nice form of bbq. Got it.

What's next, dial-a-bomb? You do realize you are justifying tyranny with precisely the mechanism of the tyrant: this 'elite' state is 'better' than 'anything else'.

I can think of a 1,000 better ways to solve the peace problem than dropping bombs on kids. The US invests in Death machines. That same technology, with different people, could be just as easily used to deliver tools of life...

But, 'war happens', right? The right to murder another human 'just happens', out there in the big world.. sorry, but no. If you claim sovereignty, then you must not be sad when others disavow you of it. That is the price. The USA respects no sovereign but itself: tyranny.
It's probably possible to write a full application in JavaScript or Lua as well.
There is a lot of politics in these debates, but surely you don't think that as Internet users and technology professionals these revelations hold zero meaning for the HN community beyond "politics"?

I think the current system is fine, where NSA-related stories are (apparently) assigned a handicap to begin with. So those that make it to the home page are usually more significant pieces. And the best way to avoid the "debates" is to not read the comments (if that is what grates you) but just read the story. If even that's too much just read the headline, shrug at the needless brouhaha people are making about it all, and move on to the next news item.
One should be concerned about privacy and digital footprints , but more or less it depends on how many people are looking forward to adapt this concept. People still use Gmail and facebook .
Sure. I ran windows (presumably 2000?) with high DPI back in 2002 (on a good ol' 2048x1536 CRT - it's pathetic how long it's taken vertical resolution to catch up to where we were. But I digress). But apps weren't written to support it, and many of them had the kind of problems you see in this post.
The sole reason for basing Android on Java was its popularity, which grant it good tools and familiarity. The creators said as much several times.
Why are names like "High-DPI" used?

There was a time when 320x200 graphics with 256 colors was amazing. Would 800x600 have been considered "high DPI" back then?

Or in the time were people were playing Duke Nukem 3D at 640x480 pixels, would they have considered 1920x1280 to be "high DPI"?

Windows has transitioned all the way from 640x480 in Windows 3.11 to the resolutions of today, why would there be a problem with just another step up?

What is "high" DPI today? What will it be tomorrow?
I couldn't find anywhere if it said participants had to be local, and if so, where?
Well I didn't know the OP is in the EU & when he said "I travel a lot" I assumed he meant international travel in general.

So yeah there are a lot of countries you can see inside Europe but most of the world is still outside of the EU :)
Secure? They're rewriting the baseband, then? Color me skeptical.
It would be nice to order Chinese food anonymously with this phone. Looking forward to the release!
Why is this getting flagged?
It's not exposed in the settings, but it can scale to any apparent resolution. There are various 3rd party programs that can set any apparent resolution for you.

And of course, you can see this without any 3rd party software if you connect it to a monitor or projector with a weird resolution and enable mirror mode.
Well, then you fix it. It's better to try than coding around code of unknown origin, likely defunct.
Except the US public debt requires growth to stop a very nasty hard landing when it comes home to roost. The article's assertion that economic freedom is tied to economic growth should cause worry in that regard. Germany and Sweden have anaemic 0.7% GDP growth for the year, Japan is at the end of a lost decade where there have been significant economic consequences.

It isn't about what the quality of life will be like tomorrow or next year, it's the consequences a decade hence.

Those countries all have significantly better social security safety nets. The US does not because it is supposed to be economically successful for the majority, if that ceases to be the case things like a lack of public healthcare is going to become a significant problem.
This is very good, on problems with lionising 'treps', expecing people to work for nothing and why all of this makes for bad politics.
Honestly don't know what you were expecting, Windows devs have NEVER cared about UI.
Show HN: Passport-Steam - Steam (OpenID) auth for Node.js/Passport
I used to manage an engineering team, and probably did spend that much time coding. Often, it was protyping or proving concepts to then pass on the engineers on the team to complete.
No mention of the thing being completely open sourced - or did I overlook something? If not, seems like something they should mention (I am assuming it IS open source?)...
Are the (few in percentage) "good patents" the carrot so that we the pull the cart and accept the whole patent system?
>> Side question: what about an active MITM attack which changes the ciphersuite preferences?

Part of the protocol involves exchanging checksums of all data passed between the server and client. Can't remember off the top of my head exactly when this takes place, but effectively the whole handshake process is fed into a hash algorithm and if they don't match then the connection won't be established. The hash itself will be protected from MITM by some sort of signing/MAC.
> D is not a garbage collected language. If the standard library is improved one will be able to ignore the GC.

D isn't safe if you don't use the GC.
I skipped right past even trying to be objective and thought of this Body Count song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3CYTwpLhVY
Cool.. Is there a service that let's me tip email addresses, twitter users etc? (Without registration first..)
For a project concerned with privacy and anonymity the news subscription form is asking way too much.

Also, why is domain on .ch ?
Vector rendering is still not advanced enough to completely (or even mostly) replace bitmaps. Until they are, we'll have to redline our bitmaps for each resolution manually. It's not just a matter of laziness.
Yes, your are right. That is the weakness. That is the reason why it his highly advised to look at your supported cipher suites on the client side and disable the weak ones.

Many people say: "No problem, it is anyhow a decision by the server and this side will choose a strong encryption." But the weakness here is the problem you described.
Yes, exactly! It's all just a network effect of value. Read my post here: http://simondlr.com/post/70089813484/in-the-future-everyone-.... I believe, if go forward with what this entails, everyone will have their own cryptocurrency in the future.
I think he meant fraud protection for sellers. "Bitcoins up front." and you are 100% protected from fraud as a seller.
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Did anyone notice this:

"Cookies immediately send everything they capture to the nearest Mother."

For me, that's a bit of a scary statement considering how intimate the product is meant to be in someone's life.
SetProcessDPIAware was added in Vista. I haven't done any Windows programming in quite a while so my knowledge was hopelessly outdated (XP level).

Hence I've removed my comment - no need to spread misinformation.
+1, the phone won't really be private if they won't deploy a new baseband chip that allows for this privacy (and is open-source, so that we could check it).
One cool thing about the way that Apple do drawing is that (at least on iOS, I think on OS X too (CG* APIs) - I'm making the assumption this is a PostScript/Display PostScript holdover) the drawing APIs use floats for positioning instead of integers. So a retina pixel is just a whole number pixel+0.5. This was a pain before retina screens appeared, since anything not positioned on a whole number would render blurry. But then retina displays appeared and the reason for it clicked.
Germany returnee in Bulgaria: Berlin annoying, Sofia rocks
JVML is not a bytecode. The bytecode syntax is just a disguise . JVML is a high level language that prescribes a certain object / method / inheritance model. Methods are associated with objects according to specific vtable / vinterface rules.

OTOH, asm.js is defined in terms of value types + function pointers. Just call the function pointer with the right arguments. Bring whichever objects / closures you like.

PS. Gripe of the day: 64bit computing is here (even ARM supports it) and asm.js doesn't seem to be prepared.
Perhaps because we reaching a point where our eyes can longer perceive the individual pixels that we really have reached maximum resolution. Is there any benefit from higher resolution displays?
So basically an Android tablet with a keyboard attached.
How does this protect me from my carrier? No matter which phone I use they still need to record who I call for "billing purposes" and know which cell is closest to route my calls.
>> "Enabling revolutionary communications"?

Eh? Wouldn't "Enabling secure/private communications" be a better, albeit less grand, descriptor?
>> Yes, your are right. That is the weakness. That is the reason why it his highly advised to look at your supported cipher suites on the client side and disable the weak ones.

You absolutely should configure all endpoints only to use adequate cipher suites, but that's simply because the bad ones shouldn't be used and as a client you don't want to rely on the server being well configured (and vice-versa).

HOWEVER - that does not mean a handshake MITM is possible, the protocol accounts for this, please see my parallel reply to yours.
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I believe the company is Swiss.
To even have the theoretical possibility of "privacy & security", both software and hardware must be fully open. And then there must be some way to check that the hardware and software you got in that box is actually the hardware from the spec, without extra chips. Those are pretty hard to accomplish.
Perhaps baddox meant Fraud protection for the vendor - chargebacks are impossible with Bitcoin, so once the vendor has the money/bitcoin, it's theirs.

As a consumer though, I much prefer the fraud protection that the credit card companies provide. And as a vendor, the 1% or less of chargebacks is probably outweighed by the number of customers who do buy because they feel safer using their credit card online.
Well, this is just a splash page and says very little.

It's in partnerships with http://www.geeksphone.com/ which is FirefoxOS based. But yet the Blackphone splash has an image of a phone with Android buttons.

They claim no hooks to vendors, so if it's Android I can't imagine this is going to carry the Play store.

I'd be interested in knowing how they will secure and make private the core functionality of being a phone and sending email and text, all of which are insecure.

On that, I'd speculate that this is just pre-loaded with Silent Circle apps, and maybe will be announced as having DarkMail and a choice of RedPhone.

But... there's no info at all really, so who knows what this is.

The only problem they really have to solve is the eternal question of: Is it possible to provide real security and privacy whilst providing convenience?