skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know a little about this situation, but not the legal
proceedings. Aaron downloaded JSTOR documents (bulk
scrape) over the wireless network, and was blocked
by the sysadmins (rate ban).

So he spoofed his MAC address, and the cat and mouse game continued. When wireless was throttled (and the ban/spoof game reduced the rate of download to something too slow),
Aaron then accessed a data closet and plugged a cable into a switch, leaving his notebook in the switch room with
a USB drive.

The admins traced the JSTOR downloads to the switch port,
and installed a video camera to see who was accessing
their switch.

Aaron would access the closet to retrieve his USB drive full of downloaded files, saw the camera, and on
return visits he hid his face with a bike helmet. (He could see through the air slats on the helmet.)

These facts, called "atmospherics" by some, really
changed my mind about the case. Prosecutors call
this "intent" to gain unauthorized access to a network
(the cisco switch and data closet, after repeated
attempts to ban access).

I've also heard the prosecution was aggressive, and
read this everywhere, mostly focusing on Ortiz as a
person and her judgement (which worries me, since
I don't know if we'd use the same 'aggressive'
adjective for a male prosecutor). I think 'zealous'
is the word lawyers use generally for being tough.

I don't know enough about computer crime to
judge, but if this guy behaved this way on my network, I
would call the police, frankly. A few events evading
a ban? Ok fine. Account jigger and email or
in-person discussion to get them to stop.
Accessing a data closet to keep it up, and installing a cable to my switch, and installing gear?
And then wearing a mask to get the hard drives? Wow.
In my mind, all I can think of is: "he knows it's wrong".

So I think Aaron should have answered for this.
What degree of prosecution would be non-"aggressive"?
(And isn't the whole thing like an auction where the state
starts high and pleas down?)

I think Aaron really just lost perspective (about
access. Suicide is a whole other thing).

It's very sad, how it ended in Aaron's death, but for me,
I just can't put that blood on Ortiz.
Yes, precisely, at which point the low-resource entity has just given them an extra weapon to terrorize the world with.
New fuel cell tech that'll power up Internet of Thingies
$title =~ s/Released/to be \l$& today/
I think one of the points from OpenBSD is that 32 bit systems will be around. Legacy system are one thing, but how about embedded systems.

Manufacturers will want to use 32bit processors in new system for a long long time, simply because they can save a few cents.
I'm-on-the-subway-and-don't-know-anyone-so-I-better-not-look-silly kinda app

Hmm, what does this mean? I really don't understand, sorry! Sounds interesting though.
If I can ask a stupid question. Why Julia? It seems to me that if you are not going to be using Python, then why not use a language like Java?
http://beta.howtox.com/ or someone else with a similar idea?
oh, 32 bit systems, I do remember those good old beige boxes :)

yeah, I know, those silly ARM chips have been bit on the slow side getting on the 64bit train.
> One very key architectural decision for a system is the degree of reliability that it should possess. This is an explicit trade-off between the rapidity of development (in particular the level of indoctrination needed before new contributors are able to augment the feature set) and the operational stability. By preserving state explicitly to memory backed files, several classes of unexpected events causing the program to crash can be recovered from with minimal disruption. The benefit here is that the system can be developed rapidly with code reviews focusing on data integrity and paying less attention to complex interactions that can lead to crashes.

The mmapped files are going to break every time you make the smallest change to your data structures. This strikes me as not terribly useful for rapid development.
Don't you mean taking the snap out of snapchat?
I enjoyed this. I also agree with the author that it has no chance of adoption.

For me it comes down to varying definitions of "fair". The mathematical approach we have here is inherently fair because percentages have the concept of "fairness" encoded within them; all incomes will treated equally.[0]

However, when talking about tax reform "fair" tends to be used to mean the opposite - taxing larger incomes more severely[1]. Sure there's a problem there, but it's not being marketed honestly: using separate scales compounds the effect of the usual more scientific scaling. I'm not saying that this isn't sensible - but it's certainly not the same as fairness.

[0] Fair is just a word. I'm not talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax but the concept is similar I suppose

[1] For example: http://www.bnn.ca/News/2014/04/30/Canadas-wealthy-take-bigge...
“Therefore, it is all the more important to ensure that top earners contribute their fair share of taxes” is fine in principle, but it doesn't mean that to "increase effective taxation paid by top income recipients" makes it more "fair".
This is a climate change denialist upset that Wikipedia has a bias to verifiable reality.
Not to mention it's plain stupid.

What if there's actually a legitimate need to use a cell phone like a big car accident.

Or all the data connectivity some devices need for navigation.

If you want to jam signals jam it on your farm/house but keep it out of public range.
CSS isn't really all that bad, and the trope is getting boring now.

Hindsight is 20/20, and it would have been difficult to foresee that the web would become an application platform in 1994, when the concept was being introduced to the web. CSS was primarily intended as a specification for styling documents, and not for implementing application layout - I would wager that most of the objections actually focus around it's unsuitability for this role.

That said, it's obvious that CSS is not currently optimal for the use cases that emerged. That's why we've had so much work on new versions, which attempt to solve some of the long-standing objections. From my perspective as a developer, it's working relatively well; even minor changes in the general availability of things like border-box sizing have made a huge difference to the ease of doing application layout in CSS, and the situation only continues to get better.
I don't know, but unless your photo collection is really small (few GB) you'll quickly have to pay for its Dropbox storage at which point Flickr will be much cheaper (25$ unlimited per year).
It may be completely unrelated, but it seems like development have increased in speed since they successfully collected the $150.000+ in donations.
(shameless plug)

> I've found that state machines are much easier to understand when they consist of actual gotos, with labels for each state

I completely agree, so I made a C# library that makes this easy: https://github.com/eteeselink/YieldMachine

The underlying trick is not entirely unlike the coroutine trick in this article. The idea of YieldMachine is that even though you have gotos and very clear state machine code, you don't have to keep a thread alive just to sit and wait in a current state, like you would have to if you just have a bunch of ifs and gotos in plain old code.

The big disadvantage is that unfortunately there's no simple/DRY way to ask the state machine in which state it is, because in C#, goto labels aren't first-class citizens.
I think this will be big, specifically the video aspect. Removes the biggest problems with video chat (Skype, hangouts etc.) feeling 'weird'. My immediate thoughts:

A) Don't feel like you're getting roped into a long conversation (you have to hold down on the screen, so of course it will be short!)

B) Doesn't feel like you are bothering people by calling them without knowing if they are free to videochat (they are clearly using snapchat at that moment so they're probably not too busy)

C) No need to have something specific to talk about; can just say hi quickly and see what your friends are up to.

D) As a bonus, if you are messaging with someone in the text interface and get to a point in the conversation where you need to communicate something complex, just use the video chat feature for 20 secs. and then go back to the more async g-chat style text messaging.
The tone in that comment thread is just poisonous. I'm not sure that reddit has really gotten worse with age. If I remember correctly, there was a period of 1-2 years when there were so many mean comments on AskReddit that I almost gave up the site.
One problem I'd like to see solved across platforms is the case when you click an app deep-link for an app you don't have installed. Currently we're having to do some crazy hacks so that a single link goes to the relevant app store if the app is not installed, or opens the intended app if it is. Solutions for iOS and Android are also currently quite different, and it's a PITA. Do AppLinks solve this problem?
I just got the update now. Check again. I'm really liking the new UI.
It means people will user Facebook messenger when they are not comfortable with the place they are in.
If I'm at home, at my university or my cousins' I will chose Snapchat over Facebook messenger, because I'll feel free enough that I can talk and goof around with that app, in a way that is not possible with Facebook... yet!
Also, I think there are people less boring than me who will not give a damn and will use Snapchat's Chat everyday, everywhere, and that's going to be awesome. As clichéd as it might sound, they really are changing the way we communicate.
These snippets are not even remotely equal. Leave the former untouched and modify the latter to this and you have somewhat equal semantics:

function doSomething(null, pushEight);

function pushEight(err, res) {
if (err) return error(err);
try {
res.push(88);
pushNine(res);
}
catch (e) {
error(e);
}
}

function pushNine(err, res){
if (err) return error(err);
try {
res.push(99);
showResults(res);
}
catch (e) {
error(e);
}
}

function showResults(err, res) {
if (err) return error(err);
try {
console.log(res.join(', '));
}
catch (e) {
error(e);
}
}

function error(err) {
console.error(err.stack);
}

If you attach a `.catch(function(err){...})` at the end of the promise chain, then replace that function's body with the body of the error callback that just logs the trace.
Huh, what upside does Java have?

Julia is specifically designed to be a great high-performance high-level language for scientific computing. See http://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/
> 64-bit devices are much more complicated (bus size, peripherals, part count) and therefore more expensive

I don't see why 64 bit core would imply any additional external complexity? Didn't 68k have 32bit core and work just fine down to 8bit external bus?
Agreed, it's pretty scary. On the other hand, I'm sure similar problems were tackled for y2k with the 2-digit fields everywhere. If we built it, we can rebuild it. Although a lot of software and hardware will need replacing/upgrading/switching over to new protocols.
I've put a warning that suggests to users to use a local app!
Graphene is likely to cause negative environmental impacts if spilled
Hong Kong’s Taxi Booking App, TaxiWise Has By Acquired By IKKI
No one educated on the issue is criticizing that governments are able to effect positive change. It's that our governments are setup in a way that ineffectually compromises balance with shortsighted popular political stunts & corruption via dealings in secrecy.

I know this is a major tangent but if we want government to represent us, we have to change it in simple ways.

- Force living standards of the middle class onto them. No special treatment like elevated healthcare and huge pensions. They're not kings, the world won't end if they die a shitty death like the rest of us.

- Tie their wages to the average middle class citizen. That way they're rewarded for improving the living standard of most of the country.

- Retirement after office. No chance for lobbying. No bribing them with cushy jobs+bonuses after their term of exploitation.

- Creating a voting system that actually works. Stop this popularity contest BS and genuine altruistic leaders.

- Mandatory factual education per-requisite for voting for specific areas of expertise. No one should be able to vote until they meet a threshold of competency and comprehension of the candidates. These tests should be by a unbiased third party non-profit.

- Make the lives of representatives activities completely public, in real-time. It was their choice to represent hundreds of millions of people. They need to sacrifice their freedom for our own.

Bet this would fix a lot given most of these issues we're getting ourselves into are human problems rather than ideological problems. I would also like to see basic income be tried on a large scale for once, that'd be interesting.
I think he's referring to lot of people that spend their time mindlessly sifting through their smartphone in order to avoid eye contact with a stranger.
Aurora Player update 2.1.4
I don't follow - it is /not/ clear to me which underlying API it is that will get implemented by voting for "sublime-style mini-map".
Was it the SCATS system by chance? http://www.scats.com.au/
Even regular users want to select & copy the URL, and paste it elsewhere. How to accomplish this task when the URL is a button is unclear (source: I showed the screenshots to my wife and asked her what she thought).

For this reason alone, the change seems like a big usability fail.
I like this. It'll give me a lot more reason to use Snapchat. Currently I've sent only a few snaps but I use Facebook Messenger all the time. If my friends started using this I would become more active on Snapchat.
I still can't believe they turned down $3bn.
It's probably still rolling out to all App Stores (it can take a few hours).
Chrome add-on lets users annotate the web
All the two stroke engines I have used (light aviation) have been terribly unreliable and painful to maintain. Won't start, often fires just on one cylinder, stops randomly, leaks oil everywhere. Is this a "shitty design" problem rather than an inherent problem with two-stroke engines?
public class Answer {

public static void main(String[] args) {

System.out.println("That's why");

}

}
* Both text and HTML parts

* All of the power of templates in Go (conditionals, etc)

* Some SMTP providers will complain if there are too many
emails in BCC (generally >1000)

* Sends emails concurrently
WikiSummaries
I fail to see how this is related to hacker news?
Red Hat – Infographics
Startups Are You Measuring The Wrong Metrics?
Interview with Charles Simonyi (1997)
Graphene Could Be Dangerous To Humans and the Environment
I'm more interested in the cross platform thing from avocode than css generation.

As an webdeveloper on linux, doing the frontend development work from psds is always a pain, as gimp has only partial support (mostly : can't work with text and still have mis-rendering issues) and I don't see myself buying the overpriced photoshop and opening a virtual machine (or uploading any psd I may use) just to get font sizes and names.

I don't know anyone using sketch, but I suppose for what I see it's macosx only ?
Provided you get this far, it's enough: Setting up a dev environment takes a day. Sometimes you need one in a minute, like if you're interviewing somebody and need them to demonstrate coding ability on a company laptop. We turn any browser window into a fully-functional dev environment.

Once you are that far you've framed your offering.
This is amazing! I love the subtle swipe down to change from back camera to front facing camera.
> > It's already preventable -- we came with a sufficient supply of antimalarial pills, but they're so expensive it's obviously not a solution.

> There's just one problem with that one — aside from costs for third-world regions: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/25/can-we-be...

Good point -- the expense is serious, but also widely using low levels of drugs that are effective treatments as antimalarials means giving the parasite lots more great opportunities to evolve resistance (which is already happening, and is a serious upcoming problem).

> At the social level it is debilitating...

Yup, I agreed with Gates' conclusions; I was trying to share some direct experience.
I like Leonard Eisenberg’s tree of life the most: http://raszl.com/sites/default/files/tree-of-life.jpg
clearing messages when you leave the chat window will make people not use it
To me, the question wasn't so much "does it make Youtube more succesful", but rather "does it allow people to notice patterns in the URL and deduct things useful to them from that".
Krill Oil May Kill Heart Disease
I respect that Google is disciplined about shipping features like this only after extensive testing, but it troubles me that despite obvious problems with this approach - like the external appearance of funneling users to Google search for all their web navigation (regardless of whether this was an intentional purpose behind the design) - it made it all the way through design, implementation, testing, and code review without anyone realizing what the reaction would be. It seems likely that if a noisy user hadn't noticed and blogged about it, this could have made it through multiple channels and gotten close to the release channel.

It's great that you vet these changes on Canary and do user testing, but it's troubling that a change like this isn't first extensively vetted from a perspective of 'does this hurt our users? does it compromise their privacy? does it increase the odds that they will get sent to the wrong websites? does it hide important information in some cases?'

I suspect that this UI change is actually going to make people more vulnerable to phishing in cases where the domain is not a guarantee of identity; for example, an XSS on a google-controlled domain (where the full URL would make the attack obvious, but only showing domain hides it), or an attack hosted on a 'user content' domain that uses subdirectories to distinguish between different users/sites.

A more straightforward example is that all my gmail accounts have 'mail.google.com' as the domain in my browser, regardless of whether one of them is an Apps domain (thus security sensitive) and another one happens to belong to a sibling or significant other or something.

This feature just seems intrinsically misguided and poorly considered. I appreciate that your UX team is trying to aggressively improve things, but they seem to be acquiring a long track record of poor decisions.
Sountrack is outstanding. Great work.
> (15) Calling software features 'technologies' is [non-]transparent ... (Easy rule: technology's physical, software's not)

If we're going to be pedantic about it, let's consult our friends at dictionary.com.

Technology, n.

1. the branch of knowledge that deals with the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment, drawing upon such subjects as industrial arts, engineering, applied science, and pure science.

2. the terminology of an art, science, etc.; technical nomenclature.

3. a scientific or industrial process, invention, method, or the like.

4. the sum of the ways in which social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization.

I have highlighted the bits under which software counts as technology in one sense or another. (EDIT: I have now.) There is also an aspect of common usage with an Arthur C Clarke sort of definition - "that which, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic". When my techno-semi-literate parents gaze with wonder at their iPhones and say "It's amazing what they can do with technology nowadays", are they talking about the hardware or iOS? Both.

I agree with much of the rest.
Wow. Downvote. Just, wow.
I've also added a Later Edit (LE) in the article and I hope some things are clear now.
Antibiotics are done, and they've been failing increasingly for at least two decades even though nobody cared to report it then. The speed of our transition to the "post-antibiotics era" is certainly our fault, but the phenomenon itself was always inevitable. Biology is an arms race, and it will always be one. In fact, biology overall is one of the worst substrates imaginable for hosting conscious entities, and that means this and many other problems may never be permanently solved.

However, it's not all hopeless. There are a lot of bacterial infections that will continue to be treatable with antibiotics for some time to come. So it's not like we'll lose all of our capabilities at the same rate. It just means that gradually the number of strains that are panresistant will increase.

To see what complete powerlessness over an infectious agent looks like you don't have to look further than viral infections today. The reality is we still can't do very much to treat them, so over time we'll just add significant bacterial adversaries to this list of diseases for which there is nothing else but symptomatic treatment available.

This will all change, because medicine has to change. In the future, it won't be enough to hit an unspecific infection with an unspecific antibiotic. It will be necessary to analyze individual infections and their interactions with individual patients in detail - and then very specific biochemical treatments will have to be tailored on a case-by-case basis.

The recent rise of monoclonal antibody drugs is a bridge to that future. We're still not knowledgeable enough, and we're still using these treatments with all the finesse of a 3-year old hammering huge lego toys together, but we'll get there eventually. We have to, it's the only hope against a lot of other diseases as well, including cancer.

In the mean time, there is a lot of research that needs to be done. We're also missing the actual technologies, both diagnostic and generative machines, but the most important obstacle to overcome will probably be the culture of medicine. This culture will change only when there is enough pressure for it to change. The FDA will have to change when its primary role becomes denying treatment to people who are going to die instead of keeping the population safe. Medical professionals will change when it becomes a big factor that they lack the scientific background to effectively devise and apply advanced treatments. But first, all of these disasters will probably have to actually happen, and we're already seeing the first signs of that trend.

So, there is definitely a path forward - it's not an inevitable descent into the dark ages. It's just that due to inertia and time spent waiting for basic scientific advances, there will be a period with less protection overall. Drugs may become available to plug some of these gaps, like insect-derived antibiotics, which will eventually fail too but will buy some additional time.
Knock-off Jackson Hole Outside Beijing, China
It appears that was introduced here, while "fixing" another bug:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1455

I don't quite understand all the concern with "width flicker", when the real problem is that important information is being hidden. Maybe they've always been attempting to deemphasise URLs, and thus are trying to divert attention away from that...

(Comment 37 seems indicative of their general attitude: "we get to decide what you want, and you will like it.")

There's an extension available to fix this, but it just feels terribly absurd that you have to use one to remove something that was deliberately introduced to slow down the browsing experience, on the browser that Google loves to advertise as being the fastest.