skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google also had a class-action suit by AdWords advertisers many years ago. They settled. This required messaging all members of the class. Typically this is handled by postal mail. Google also delivered messages over email and, in the bargain, decided if your email address ended in gmail.com they'd take a peak at certain information in your Gmail account to make sure you had gotten it. We know they did this because Google's lawyers bragged about it to the court in a legal filing.

I was not thrilled about this, more of the principle of the thing than for any major harm caused by that particular disclosure. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/07/28/googles-lawyers-admit-to...
It shouldn't be a secret... Engineering is the best job ever
Many things are valuable. Conciseness per se is valuable (I don't think you will argue in favor of unnecessary verbosity in programming). However, of course this is just one of many factors, and any programming language will have to find a balance between these many factors, depending on how important each is, and so on.

If you think you are getting conciseness by decreasing readability then you probably have a balancing issue, but if you can get more concise code without decreasing readability then that's good news.
> both sides

Because every story has exactly two viewpoints, with the truth somewhere in between?

It's certainly easy to end up thinking that, and that's yet another reason reporting "both sides" is actively harmful.
Google is right: we work better when we're happy
Thanks for the information.

Interesting to note that the datastore isn't really deleted when one revokes Dropbox access to the app, even though it's no longer listed on the datastores page - relinking the app to Dropbox resurrects the previous data.
Show HN: I made an iOS Puzzle Game
A fair point. I guess I feel as if he had some sort of responsibility to let his potential sources know about these risks, but didn't because it wasn't in his self-interest. That's actually exactly what he says, come to think of it.
Sorry about the caps. Copied and pasted the title. Mods please fix.
Writing Idiomatic Python: The Video Series
What opinions would those have been?
Especially important since it is clear the two had physical contact at some point, which is one of the best ways to exchange and verify keys.
The employee used a non-google account according to the article.

Are you saying that it's 'normal' that companies log everything going out over smtp/submission and log it?

Even if that is

- legal (really?)

- part of the contract (no idea why that'd be okay)

that sounds like something you shouldn't do, period. I'm reasonably sure that this would never work in Europe, for example.
If the company is comprised of people who would make the decision to put that stuff in their job listing, I would prefer to know upfront by simply reading the job listing. If such job listings are strictly prohibited, then there's a chance I would waste my time applying to such a company.
Whenever HN "hivemind" thinks something is bad because they wouldn't personally use it, that's a good sign that it will be successful with consumers.
Uplift: a 'proper' RPG for mobile (and PC)
http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else
As the domain is somehow associated to their brand, they prefer to keep it.
Couldn't resist optimising the script.

<html>
<body>
<script>
setTimeout(function() {
var page = ["http://bluestatedigital.com",
"http://microsoft.com",
"http://ngpvan.com",
"http://mongodb.com",
"http://comcast.com",
"http://scientology.org",
"http://timewarnercable.com",
"http://godaddy.com",
"http://loggly.com",
"http://php.net",
"http://eclipse.org",
"http://intuit.com",
"http://mysql.com"];
window.location = page[Math.floor(Math.random()*page.length)];
}, 1500);
</script>
</body>
</html>

Any good ideas for compressing the array? At the expense of legibility, obviously.
I was hoping this would be something like "lessons learned" on how to build a better startup, perhaps some that just happened to be from female founders, and perhaps others that come from the different perspective/approaches. It hints at this, with the example of women expressing confidence differently from men. It also mentions diversity - but as something to not prevent finding the best founders, rather than as a resource of new perspectives/approaches.
A few paragraphs in I realized that is surely must be uniquely human to wonder what it is like to be another creature.

I would think bats don't spend much time thinking about being bats or not being bats.
Same problems:
1) Some men already starting startups aren't interested in doing Y Combinator.

2) Some men who could be great founders don't start startups.
I'll give this Telephone thing a try...
Also, if there is going to be a visual software development revolution, I think it will look something like a visual data flow language. Something along the lines of yahoo pipes meets rails or django.

How it would work is you would have something like ActiveRecord that can pull data into the first step, then visual steps for mapping, calculating, etc.. and spitting that data into a HTML view or whatever in the last step. You could design the HTML in a WYSIWYG kind of thing or just as a tempting system. Doesn't matter.

All it would be doing would be replacing a lot of the computation that programmers do with some functional lego block able logic in the middle. Once you had the mechanisms in place for this kind of system, I think you could swap out the data sources from a CSV file to a database to a restful service, and your design bits from HTML to iOS or whatever pretty easily, giving you the ability to work in a pretty general purpose way.

A tool like that could be very interesting, but it's quite a different approach.
> The latest Chrome browsers for Android and iOS can significantly reduce cellular data usage by using proxy servers hosted at Google to optimize website content

Ah, I was wondering why Chrome on my Android was so broken lately. I checked "Request desktop" like usual and refreshed and just couldn't get a broken page to give me the working desktop version at all. That always used to work. Eventually I had to switch to the Dolphin browser, change my user agent, uninstall Dolphin Jetpack which was similarly broken, and finally I got the working desktop version of the page...
Journal pulls paper due to “legal context” created by climate contrarians
That's only half of the equation though. What if his potential sources are using gmail? He says he wasn't willing to share this important information because he didn't want to scare away sources. In doing so he prevented sources from taking the same security steps he was taking himself.
I am working on a sales CRM made with Node + Angular. Things are going pretty well but still a lot of work to be able to compete with Pipedrive. I hope I can release it soon and see how it goes.
Just because you are a predator, just because it may be "natural," doesn't make our current system of meat production morally acceptable.

I generally am sympathetic with what you're saying, however, I'm mostly pescatarian due to the issues you completely overlook.

So, without getting into the arguments about whether or not humans ought to eat meat (for argument's sake, let's assume we were carnivores, and could not survive without eating mammalian flesh).

I cannot think of a moral framework, besides the laughable "other mammals are not conscious," that would justify the inhumane conditions our mammals we feed on are kept in. Solitary confinement, often not seeing the sun their entire lives, fed corn in buckets rather than they would feed on naturally. For what? So we save a dollar or two on each burger or pork chop we eat? When you really stop to think about it, it's abhorrent.

It may be natural to eat meat if you are a predator, but i see no reason why it's natural to torture. And i think that is what the future will look back on and be ashamed of.
> Why do we assume we need a compiled language? Why not an interpreted language?

When will people learn this is an implementation issue?!
Out of further curiosity, would it really be so bad if that were legal? I wouldn't think a black person, or for that matter anyone who isn't a white supremacist, would want to work for that employer even if the law forced the employer to hire without discrimination.
If anyone needs placating, it's those developers, managers and executives who pushed hard for the use of Node.js in business settings, not expecting a serious security incident like this one to happen.

For those who are especially serious about their careers, reputations, budgets and power, incidents like this involving the technologies they hyped and pushed through can be disastrous. Now they're seen as being very wrong about something very important, and this in turn makes them extremely angry.

They know that their competitors within the business will use this incident against them. Their next initiative will surely face comment like, "Why should we listen to you after the npm disaster?", and they will face a much harder battle if their decision involves any controversy or doubt at all.
Related to your point, the snip.ly website has the following user testimonial:

You can essentially advertise
on any website for free!
--Lucille Danks ― Deloitte
Is that (part of) the reason why your profile lists no gmail address, but directs us to your own domains instead?

Also: Thanks for sharing that. Another nail in the coffin.
Founders and employees get common stock. Investors will get preferred stock. This is not something you'd get to choose for joining
Prisons originated in the 18th century.

Before then "prisons" were more or less temporary affairs, usually just a makeshift holding chamber where people were kept before the actual punishment was meted out (death, torture, or mutilation). But the idea of a building where people are isolated and placed under permanent bodily control for months or years on end by the State (for the betterment of society, or fixing of the individual, or punishment, or whatever) is very much a product of the Enlightenment.
> However, we are so far away from producing anything remotely close to that level of AI, that I fear their work is ungrounded. It strikes me as fun quasi-SF rather than serious engineering.

Why do you think this? The idea behind the Singularity is that even an AI that starts far below human-level, but is capable of recursive self-modification, can bootstrap itself to superintelligence. We don't need to understand the human brain to create such an AI; we need only to:

A. create a the simplest of "digital animals", and

B. give it the capability to push itself into self-directed Lamarckian evolution to satisfy its preferences;

C. and have this all happen on electronic time-scales (e.g. successive "generations" being created in milliseconds or less),

and we'll likely see a Singularity.

> look at existing economic and social systems where disparate individual goals are coordinated into cooperative or conflicting action, and how the results are related to human goals and human flourishing.

"Existing economic and social systems" allow humans to cooperate with humans. The whole point of FAI research is to figure out how to make an AI that is "human"-enough that it would have cause to participate in such systems with us.

A paperclip-maximizer has nothing to gain from participating in a stock market, or an election. People do not want to be turned into paperclips, and it does not want paperclip-resources turned to human ends. Its goals are not disparate, but rather incompatible with our own.

A non-Friendly AI should not be conceptualized by your intuition as a certain kind of human that we can possibly learn to "live-and-let-live." It can, at best, be conceptualized as something like a Baby-Eating Alien[1]. Usually, though, it would seem to us something more akin to a supermassive black hole: an unlimited force that consumes many things we want and outputs nothing useful to us, that we must keep away from, and especially must avoid creating in the laboratory.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/
Seems curiously parallel to the story of snooker and darts' popularity in the UK from the 60s through to the 80s - similar non-athletic 'leisure' sports that seem an unlikely candidate for professionalization. I wonder if the ease of televising it (it's in a small, indoor venue) has anything to do with it?

Couple of differences: in the UK, snooker was originally picked out as a good demonstration of the potential of color TV broadcasting; later on, it was boosted by tobacco sponsorships following the TV advertising ban - surprised in a way to see that the same didn't happen to bowling...
You're mixing up the two meanings of technical.

It is not a lawyer's job to understand technology; it is the lawyer's job to understand the law. The lawyer understood the law and the technicalities of the law just fine--the problem is that he admits that he may not understand some, most, or all of the technology at issue in weev's case.
Well, "they" are the employers, so they are choosing what the qualifications are.
'algorithmic peaking' in order to verify a message's spam flag isn't really in the same ballpark of the accusation thrown here.
Should be a law against crybabies like you? Yes!
I've just submitted an update request to DuckDuckGo, thank you for the feedback!
> Not sure this is what Go needs though.

Yep, a generics prototype would be better spent time.
Hugely important. Even without any employment agreement terms, "employers probably [have] the legal right to read employee email messages sent using their equipment and network."

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/email-monitoring-can-...

Read a wrongful termination case where an employee's abusive outgoing emails were accessed/grounds for dismissal. Employee lost.
You can argue that given how English is the default language of programming it makes sense to stick to it when discussing programming-related things. That applies to sciences too to a lesser degree.
Anyways - first I'd suggest to get close to these people. If they really like you they'll have a good reason to speak English (-;
Ask HN: Snip.ly security issues
The Show HN for Snip.ly was on the front page for a few hours and it stirred up a big controversy (penalized once it hit 40 comments). Now I'd like to specifically Ask HN for solutions as opposed to feedback on the product.

Summary: http://Snip.ly is a link shortener that lets you embed messages into any website.

Side A: Powerful tool for extending your brand, providing commentary, and provide relevant resources.

Side B: Potential for spam, malicious use, and phishing.

The HN community provided some great ideas, such as requiring a certain follower:following ratio to register, automatically blacklisting malicious links, etc.

Please share your suggestions!

Reference to the original debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7444094
The CMOS and CCD sensors in digital cameras are sensitive to infrared and (near) UV. These sensors nearly always come with infrared and UV filters to keep them from recording things you don't see. If you are willing and able to hack your camera you can remove this filter to create a camera sensitive from near UV to true IR, ca. 200nm to 900 nm. You'll have to change the lens to make use of the UV part of the spectrum as optical glass blocks most of it.

This answer on PSE gives a nice overview: http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/2262/are-digital-se...
How We Came to Misunderstand Meritocracy
In the US you should assume a company examines/logs everything over their network, not just email. There's a whole "data loss prevention" industry.
Project MINARET Illegally Monitors American ‘Subversives’ (1967)
totally unrelated..but how was your experience with the Python/GAE combo?
People seem to be thinking hard about this game.. but if you're spending 1+ second/move it'll definitely take forever.

Think about it like shaking a jar of pebbles, where the heavier ones fall to the bottom.
Now simulate this by press Z->A & X->D back and forth
You can get a high score pretty quick. And if you see a situation where a low number is stuck at the bottom, make specific moves to get at that one, then go back to shaking the jar!
The major problem is that everyone\* likes to believe that—while they, of course, are not perfect!—they are fundamentally, in the end of the day, a basically decent and good and rational person. Likewise that their friends and loved ones and co-workers are too. And that their lifestyle, and the society they live in, and the institutions they belong to and identify with are fundamentally okay as well, not out-of-control nightmare carnivals. And that in so far as things are seriously screwed up, it's the fault of those other guys, a clearly-identifiable outlaw, villain, or oppressor group which does not include me or mine.

Of course, this is basically never true. But the unhappy realisation that it's not true in your own case is so agonising that the human mind distances itself from it like a cat from a hot stovetop. Cosmic-horror stuff about how many stars there are or how many metres you are from the centre of mass of the universe are is just an amusing trifle in comparison. Even people who are rationally aware of some of this (often because they recite it once every week) are protected by powerful psychological defence mechanisms from actually having to confront the realisation very often. (Often the upshot of the weekly exercises is that the person simply becomes more confident than ever that they're a great person and they have it all figured out, in much the same way that developing a self-image as a lover of truth and rationality so often makes people markedly dumber.) Add to that the fact that, of course, changing your behaviour to become less of a scumbag often comes with serious or very serious costs to your well-being and relationships with others, and it's not even close.

The final nasty kicker is that, of course, an individual person's judgement of right and wrong isn't necessarily any better than that of his or her society. Futhermore, people who share a particular critique (good God I hate that word) of their society tend to band together into their own subcultures, partly to better resist the material and social pressures from society to conform. So now you have a new self-image, a new lifestyle and a new in-group, and the process repeats itself.

\* The few exceptions, sadly, are largely psychopaths and other people who simply don't give a shit.
This is logically impossible. Journalists selectively choose what to write about - this is an act of curation. This is further editorialised by the news organisation. What do you think an editor does and why does every news organisation employ tiers of them?

Even calling it a story is well, telling a story. Presenting in terms of two sides further frames as a kind of dramatic fiction.

There is nothing wrong with all this and it makes news interesting and sometimes even edifying. Adam Curtis is an example of somebody who very blatantly selects and uses dramatic technique in order to shine light and show new perspectives on contemporary history.

The danger is in kidding yourself that it could be any other way and that there is some kind of objective and balanced position which reasonable folk hold - that's how people get manipulated, usually against their interests and sometimes in awful ways.
I just finished an MVP of http://www.educatornews.net. It's an HN clone for the education community.

This weekend I'm focusing on implementing a "conversations" feature, similar to HN's "threads". I am also trying to increase test coverage, so I can agressively refactor my ugly MVP code as I begin to pick up users.
It is beyond me why people with a high technological competence use Gmail. I know it is convenient, but then please stop bitching that Google or the NSA will read your mails.
LOL!! Dave's awesome. If you ever get a chance to meet him in person, you'll be amazed how smart he is.
Execution is everything. An idea evolved and the seed of the idea may be the same but the end result will almost always be different. The peer is a dick for such a move but it's not something to dwell on. If you are to succeed, it will be because of how you execute or lack thereof, not because someone stole your seed idea, generally speaking
Why would we want to get rid of the .h/.m separation? It's a nice feature, Java's single file format is far worse in comparison.
Thanks for catching that!!! Proves that we're only human. -_-
Your email is sitting on a machine that they have full permission to. Their EULA explicitly gives them permission to access your account (often for any reason).

Also typically you do those kind of correspondences from home.
I honestly do not, for the reason that the cost of such a venture is simply too high. If we cannot even manage to bear the minimal costs of stopping catastrophic climate change on our own planet, then what makes you think we will ever have the will, much less the ability, to undertake the terraforming of a lifeless planet millions of miles away?
I agree with you about most of those phobias, but I strongly disagree about Islamophobia.

I think future societies will be surprised by how much human suffering we permit in the name of being "tolerant". Religions are not all created equal, and no intellectually honest person will claim that Islam and Jainism are equally valid moral frameworks (this is why few people fret about Jainophobia). We know that Islam and its adherents are generous contributors to the surplus of misery in the world. People concerned about the quality of human life will recognize that we were right to be extremely suspicious of Islam.

(Note that I'm defining Islamophobia as "deep suspicion of Islam / thoughts informed by Islamic beliefs", especially when it comes to questions of morality and ethics.)
The privacy policy exerpt you included is misleading; it's the section relating to third-party businesses. The full privacy policy [1] states that Google can process your gmail internally for almost any purpose relating to Google's business.

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/
brilliant != unique
Substantially all of my business email goes over Google systems. I like their company a lot. I also like several banks and insurance companies. Google institutionally believes, and attempts to convince other people, that it is intrinsically more trustworthy than e.g. banks and insurance companies. It has been a while since I have treated those statements as anything more than the self-serving PR of a Fortune 500 company.
Trying to make a better protein alignment for transcriptome annotation using suffix arrays and possibly GPUs. Although it's a bit of a lie, that was the project I worked on last weekend, this weekend I won't have time, moreover I have tend to start a new project before finishing the old one....
Allusions to sexual harassment or sexism in the workplace are unfair. A more apt comparison would be a male applying for a bar-tending job and being told that only females are hired. It turns out, gender discrimination is allowed in "entertainment" settings. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070603062532AA...

Of course there are countless examples from recent history about certain jobs being only for men. Combat roles in the military are the first example that come to my mind. That is wrong and luckily it's changing.
I live right near an Apple store in Surrey, UK. I rarely see anyone buying anything - it's people playing with things.
Why is that worrying? I don't read into that an implication that linux 2.6 is insecure, just the terribly vulnerable versions they were using.
Turkish tweeps fight Twitter ban with memes
Some folks do arrive at their opinions rationally, just sayin' :-)
Gates style philanthropy is like compound interest, it is small in the beginning but has outsized returns over decades. Having a few more percent of the population surviving childhood each year does not have a "little better GDP" results, it changes a country from China 1964 to China 2014.

http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/