skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't have a problem with symmetric encryption. We have a problem with the key being stored on your servers, effectively nullifying encryption.

Now, I'm not saying it's an easy problem; kudos to you for tackling it. It's just that

- if you have the keys to the payload

- if you don't provide open-source client code

then no one can honestly trust your service. Don't forget that what you're primarily doing with is trust.
Reasonable people can argue about what information should be available to the public in a free society.

Should court records about individuals and corporations be public information? What about government and police actions? Political contributions? Photographs of personal residences? Realtime lat and long of your smartphone?

But once we decide what can be public, it seems that only a luddite would try to control where that public information can appear. The very nature of truthful public information is that it is very difficult to control, direct or contain.

It requires authoritarian power and repression to manipulate public opinion by controlling public information. Is that really what we want in an open society?
Use a Crypto Currency, End a War
AppleScript was originally conceived to be easy enough for non-professional programmers to read and write, with the history of Hypercard behind it. This is for those rare occasions when they needed to automate something that they do with multiple applications manually. At one point, you were able to hit "Record", do the things that you needed to be automated and boom you get a script that you can begin to massage into something reusable. You didn't need to be a programmer to read this recorded script and you didn't need to know English to read/write it either (it was available in other languages). It looks like Apple realized that automation is the core problem they need to solve and made .. Automator instead, which is based on the same underlying piping - OSA.

edit: Back in 1998/99, I even wrote a web server entirely in AppleScript - it was a platform for our research lab to share, debate and record ideas.
> No, I don't have any solid data, but I do think the majority of people posting about Go on HN have either Python or Ruby backgrounds.

Right. I find it odd because I don't get why Go is a supposed replacement for Python. Does Go have a framework like Django, a good SQL API/ORM, numerical computing packages, scientific packages, machine learning? This is where I see people using Python the most.

> And yes, there's a fine line between conducting needed optimizations and wasting time prematurely optimizing, but people would clearly rather spend a little more time up front in exchange for a big speedup

Yeah, fast by default is not only acceptable but desirable, I don't think using a modern compiled language counts as premature optimization. It doesn't look like using Go is a lot more complex/time consuming than Python, you lose some flexibility but win others (e.g., being able to distribute binaries).
> As a european, a find this downright insulting and imperialist.

Suggesting Europe go literally copy the language of American documents was poor form, granted.

As to the broader issue, though, I worry there's less room for polite deference. The situation is basically equivalent to a European citizen calling me up and asking me a question, asking if I know something, and the European government insisting that I lie.

An offline analogue would be if I had a friend in Germany asking for dating advice. The friend might ask, "I can't get a sense of if this is a good idea or not. You know Jeffrey, has he ever, say, raped or murdered anyone?"

"Why, no, I have no information to suggest Mr. Dahmer is not a fine upstanding citizen," I'd be forced to reply of the infamous Milwaukee Cannibal.

I don't feel like a foreign government should be allowed to compel me to lie to its citizens, even by omission.

I've heard Stephen Fry rather charmingly suggest that Americans maintain an unhealthy obsession with free speech. Typically, that man can convince me any premise through simple assertion. But on this, I live up to my American stereotype, and stubbornly differ on the gravity of the issue.

Mostly, I find the ground sufficiently covered by Milton's "Areopagitica" and Mill's "nearly everything." Speaker's corner seems a fun European embrace of the concept. I'm not sure where in Europe you're from, but I'm sometimes surprised at concern from the UK. It reminds me of this cheesy anti-drug PSA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Elr5K2Vuo&t=17

Beyond Mill and Milton's plentiful arguments (mostly in the vein of there being little to fear from rebuttable conversation), I've yet to see anyone who is against freedom of speech lead by example. It all seems a bit hypocritical for someone to embrace restrictions on speech, with the tacit, "Except for on my points here, which are doubtless correct and vital to everyone's understanding of the issue."

You might cite the right to be forgotten as a case where we're really trying to protect the little guy, but would you fully embrace this principle and trust state power to determine who gets to be forgotten? How long until political scandals are all erased from Wikipedia by court order, while the identities and any embarrassing personal conduct of any peaceful dissenter is preserved for perpetuity under the guise of having relevance to a matter of public debate?

The issue of forcing the internet to forgive and forget is especially relevant in early June. Officials in Beijing have a similar rule forcing everyone to forget one of their youthful indiscretions from 25 years ago. Is that really a model policy?

How is it so many people feel we can't trust a state with a microphone, but we can trust it with muzzles?
How to Spy on WhatsApp
The Drug War was started at a Federal level, with the Controlled Substances Act and the creation of the DEA (US Drug Enforcement Agency). [1] Approximately 1 in 10 Americans have been arrested on drug related charges since then, and even just looking at Federal prison facilities, 0.5 million people are incarcerated every year. [2]

And that's just drug policy. Abuses by Federal agencies are numerous across history into the present day, and have often taken place on a grand scale:

FBI misconduct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fbi#Controversies

CIA misconduct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia#Controversies

US Military Interventions since 1890: http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...
Open Garden: Not open source. Nice one guys.
> The problems with google's approach have been pointed out almost immediately after their policy became known.

I've been the devil's advocate til now, I will not give up so easily. If people knew about this policy, then they couldn't have opt out of the service and look for something more amenable to their needs of privacy, couldn't they?

>For a hamhanded car analogy, if someone parks in a parking space for the disabled out of laziness, and now some guy in a wheelchair has to cover another block's worth of distance because he had to park elsewhere,

The policy there wasn't that someone took that reserved parking place, it's that the place simply disappeared from that parking lot. So yeah, it does suck, but there are other parking lots to use (which also mean other shops, if that guy in a wheelchair liked Google's ones, tough luck).

> I think that's really unlikely. I might conjecture a hypothetical culture where insults are expected and polite, but I think it's sufficient to look at the actual cultural context. Correct me if I am missing something, but "jerkface" is the blandest, least serious insult I can think of. It doesn't invoke gross body parts, religion, sexual language, the subject's intelligence, morals, looks or status. In fact, I cannot imagine anyone using it without irony, going intentionally for a weak and childish insult.

Really? Do kids use that insult? Well, I don't speak English fluently enough (especially cursing), and I'm not going to pull a dictionary definition to verify it. If indeed it's as you say, then that's a misunderstanding on my side, and I clearly deserved a downvote for that. I'll take your word for it.
Not a specific format as such but most use at least similar versions of markdown - grab the markdown source of the page and paste it into another engine, it should turn out similar for the most part. If the destination wiki has a wysiwyg editor you might get away with just copying the text as is and pasting it in. All depends on the software though, so no there isn't a specific wiki format that I know of

The issue you'll probably come across is things like categories or custom boxes (MediaWiki) moving to another site.
I'd have to agree. Just tell someone "there is a fully functional digger down, it's free, but you have to get it out."

Hell, people will come and haul away scrap steel from the bottom of a lake. A digger worth $10,000? 4 guys and 8 hours and each of them just made $2500 for a day's work.
Lots of speculation.
Wouldn't it be illegal for an American company to export strong encryption to Iran? At least, that's the gist I get from the JCE unlimited strength policy file. If not illegal, it would definitely go against the agreement for distribution of that.
Can I give. Money. To have that?

-The internet.
You don't think you would, but there were a whole lot of people saying that about the keyboards on their Blackberries 5 years ago as well.
I could see the cost/benefit trade-off going that way, after all one of the multi-million dollar tunnel boring machines digging the Chunnel was left entombed [1].

That said, I have to wonder if you couldn't use a balloon to extract the digger or even a simple gantry crane over the excavation. A bit of prep before you start digging and you'd save your $15K.

[1] "In December 1990, the French and British TBMs met in the middle and completed the Channel Service Tunnel bore. In all of the tunnels the French TBM was dismantled while the U.K. TBM was turned aside and buried." -- http://www.therobbinscompany.com/en/case-study/the-channel-t...
It would work for future patents, but I'm afraid it wouldn't work for future software -- the theory being that any non-trivial software will likely infringe on any number of patents. A collection of patents might help force cross-licensing, and so protect new (Free or not) software against existing patents (the assumption being that also holders of non-trivial software patents develop new software, and might infringe on one or more patents in the collection).
You mean, like they publicly stated they would when the Googlrola Android lawsuits were settled just recently?
As I read this, I'm sitting in Los Alamos. Wow.
Wikimedia just released the new Wikipedia Beta on the Play store yesterday, if you haven't checked it out.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia....
Am I the only one who immediately thought of vas deferens upon reading the name?
You call that hosting? :P

Well I used to offer people on forums to host with me instead of the terrible 000webhost... in theory I could set things up for you (free of course), though I'd have to see how I want to arrange things, haven't had users other than myself on my server in a while now.
In this overwhelmingly depressing article, I saw a ray of hope, an enchanting possibility .. a silver lining if you will:

> Instead, two other mysterious companies came forward seeking to challenge VirnetX's patents. First was a shell company called New Bay Capital, which filed an IPR and then reportedly asked VirnetX for 10 percent of its massive jury award in exchange for backing off. New Bay dropped its case on April 4 without getting any money—and without revealing who was behind the claim.

Then came RPX, a defensive patent aggregator that has become increasingly well-known, and increasingly profitable, in recent years. RPX works by selling memberships to companies that feel harangued by patent trolls, including Apple and many other tech companies.

How wonderful it would be if the ultimate demise of patent trolls was brought about by other patent trolls :)
Okay, I'm looking at 6502135...

Claim 1 is a joke. How does this not apply to HTTPS? I would toss it and all its dependents.

Claim 13 is almost as obvious, but in this case I am not sure about the dependent claims. Some of them sound to me like they might be inventions.

Claim 10 seems stronger to me. Networking is not my field, so I am not at all sure there is not prior art, but at least it seems to contain an actual idea.

I'm not going to read the whole description, but a quick scan seems to support your contention that there is a lot of material here that is not referenced by the claims.
Yah isn't it just selling or distribution that gets the law involved?
The mirror does not seem to work just gets stuck on Calibrating.
Mystery over pig virus origins contributes to spread and anxiety
I tried using Firefox 29.0.1 on a Mac OS 10.8.5 and didn't work.
Just shows Calibrating and never starts processing.
> Let’s get this straight: UI-wise, Wikipedia teleports its audience into the year 2004.

Yep, and it feels wonderful.
I disagree. Writing down the important parts of a lecture can keep you focused on what's important. If your goal is to write down the important parts of a lecture, you're going to constantly be asking yourself what's important.

Also, by writing something down, you're repeating the fact in your head a second time. Once when you hear it, the second when you rephrase and write. I find notes improve comprehension, because notes force this kind of comprehension.
Very slick. The creation process is very nice, but editing an existing account is less straightforward.
Automator even has the same "record" functionality for repeating tasks in a UI[1]. The direct Automator actions like "scale image" are cleaner when they exist, but including Automator actions with 3rd party applications didn't catch on as much as it could have.

Some apps have them (Pixelmator comes to mind), but for the most part it doesn't have the support that AppleScript used to. It's a bit sad that we now have easier automation (via IFTT) in a huge pile of webapps than many native programs where it hasn't improved in the last 10-20 years.

[1] http://www.macosxautomation.com/automator/features/virtual-u...
So this might be an interesting combination of approaches to building watches: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/ He isn't doing watches to my knowledge, but some of his stuff looks pretty fine-grained.
I actually hope the trolls win.[0]

I believe that the current state of IP law does far more to stifle innovation than to support it, and I fear that it will only change when sufficient monied interests become inclined to support a change.

Put another way, I believe change will come when the juggernauts like Apple stand to lose more than they gain from the current state of the law. Until then, I suspect that the status quo will continue.

[0] Others have made similar arguments, including Mark Cuban in re: Yahoo's patent suit vs. Facebook: http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/13/i-hope-yahoo-crushes-face...
I watched the constant contact video and its actually kind of ironic, She does in fact say that partnerships are a mirage at the start but if you wait until 38min in at the Q&A part she starts discussing how they partnered with local chambers of commerce and the huge value exposed to them in that they had access to their target audience through those organizations. Realistically, this is the same sort of partnership that a SaaS company would be after. Have a listen at the 38min marker!
That's very good to hear, I retract my speculative accusation given in the absense of facts.
If we're going to be reductionist, why skip over the obvious answer that these are all photoshops?
I'm setting up a paid GoDaddy host as we speak...
A strong signal would be if Apple raised prices for affected products (iPhones and iPods) by exactly 0.98% and send out a press release that this is necessary to offset increased patent-related costs and will only affect US prices.
Further increases are not expected, but can't be ruled out. Foreign pricing will not be affected.

I'd like to see politicians react to that...
I know several people in the SF Area that take Uber almost everyday, multiple trips. It's not unreasonable to think that $/user in such cases is a few thousands.
It doesn't seem to work on Firefox. Well, it used to.
2014 India's IIT entrance exam (quant section)
Up till my early 20s, I used to lucid dream so much, I thought it was the normal state of dreaming (for everyone). Over the last few years the frequency has declined to maybe a couple times a month.

Of course, you never know how much you'd miss a thing until its gone. In this case, I didn't even know it was a thing before it started fading away.

I'd certainly let my brain be zapped to get this superpower back.
At some point, the patent trolls will force software companies like Apple, Google, and IBM to admit to themselves that software patents themselves have no value and cause more bad than good.

So we need more of these patent trolls to win substantially more and more revenue from these companies, until the pain is so great that the big companies do something about it.
Alternatively take a 5-10 minute break every hour and step into the sun. Your body will feel better, and your mind will consider new perspectives.
Agreed. Wikipedia doesn't need a redesign, it's fine as it is. I have some issues with its markup language, but other than that, it's easy to use for reading and editing.

Wikipedia: please don't change. I'm not sold on the cult of Newer Is Better.
Free SSL certificates are completely undermining Internet security. The whole point of certs is that you have a certificate authority that verifies the identity of the person you are issuing the cert to. By giving it away for free and doing zero of the backend work, all you're doing is creating a false sense of security and poisoning the ability to trust https.
I used to dream and lucid dream a lot. My email signature was "Traveller by day and dreamer by night, or the other way around, I don't remember."

I have lost it and it is something I would like to get back.
At least from the screenshots, I couldn't see links to such options (including discussion and history). While most people would consider these unimportant, I was quite surprised to see that I simply couldn't find them on the official mobile app (not even behind a hidden menu). While most people just want to read content, hiding the features that, (it could be argued) define wikipedia, isn't what I'd call the best design. At the same time, you have to start somewhere, and they may plan to add those features later.

Besides all that, I think it's a good bit of work. Well done devs.
notes aren't necessarily about material.

They can be about structure, or about your own mental process. Or they can simply be a way to transfer spoken material to a visual (written) format -- some people learn better with their eyes than their ears.
Ave, Cæsar!
While this is a crowded space filled with personal tracking apps, I quite like the approach you're taking. Open source enables me to completely trust the app.

My personal favorite app for this use case is Hey Day (http://www.hey.co/) – it has superior design and pulls in all of my photos. Even though Hey Day has a privacy option that doesn't save any data in the cloud (entirely on my phone), I'm always a bit concerned about what is shared and what may get leaked.

The easiest way to prove the privacy controls of your app is with open source, so if you could improve the design & functionality of this app, it might be a worthy competitor in the space.
Besides the terrible and pointless abuse of "Das", i find myself amazed that these people purport to be interested in typography, use the article about Gutenberg as their header, and then fail to use "text-align: justify;" as the default for paragraphs.

Edit: On reading further, i find that they did consider it, but decided against providing something that looks great and is helpful to the reader in 99.99999% of all cases, because the remaining 0.00001% don't look perfect. Instead they opt for a solution that is decidedly mediocre² in all cases. Brilliant.

² Note how in the header, Buchprodukti-on is hyphened very awkwardly, while Buchdrucks, a prime candidate, isn't at all.
Why can not you tickle yourself?
Yes, because the paid cert industry has a long history of preventing people from pretending to be other entities.
I've found this essay eye opening for UX design http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/
Lincoln seems like an odd choice for a libertarian role model. He suspended habeas corpus and expropriated the Southerners' private property (their slaves, plantations, etc). If he hadn't been assasinated, all of that plantation land would have likely have been divied up among the former slaves. Spreading the wealth, the horror!
This is very subjective, but I think your resume would look better if you made the background white and set the line-height to about 1.5em on the whole body. You might even play with removing the list bullets and padding (list-style:none, padding-left:0px). If you try this, I would be interested to hear if you think it looks better or worse.
PyPy 2.3.1 – Terrestrial Arthropod Trap Revisited
I think small l libertarians see liberals as supporters of both empire building and social welfare, so they'd align themselves with the lesser of two evils.
Getting interrupted partway through the edits. I call this the "working out of your home office when you have kids" error.

I'm interrupted by my boss far, far more often than I'm interrupted by my kid. A dozen times a day isn't unusual.
The website is now working, hosted on GoDaddy instead of the free 000webhost. I'm sorry for the downtime, I wasn't expecting a lot of visitors.
Test Markdown Based REST API Descriptions using Dredd
Indeed, it's evolved over time as I've needed more from it but the UX has wound up pretty awful. Adding a personal statement for example involves finding and pressing the oh-so-very-intuitive "add block" button at the bottom of the edit page.

For reference you can drag and drop any of the sections to reorder them, and most of the fields will happily accept Markdown.

Any feedback appreciated for next time I have a weekend spare :)
While I hesitate to add to the speculation, it's interesting in retrospect to think of how Japan might have used bases they seized at Attu and Adak, Alaska to help with the problem of making strategic bombing of the U.S. west coast possible.

Of course, that wasn't the reason the U.S. bothered to eject Japan from the Aleutian Islands in 1943, but if Japan had really been able to develop a bomb that would certainly be a useful defensive move.
What's this thing of using German words or expressions wrongly lately?
No, it's not uuuuber. It's Über. And hell no it's not 'Das Referenz' either, it's 'Die Referent'.
And while I'm at it, a Wiener Schnitzel surely isn't a hot dog (hello American fast food chain!). Might as well call a chicken soup 'hamburger' while you're at it...
Turkish? I'd say American. A lot of people here know 'Das Boot' and have used 'Das' multiple time to try to describe German nouns to me
Speaking of A-Bomb and Japan. It seems modern Japan would be on one those countries that should have nukes. I know legally they are probably prohibited (just like they are supposed to have only defensive military forces). But technologically with nuclear reactors and the level of industrial and scientific development, it wouldn't take them very long to build one, it seems to me.
Good points, all. It would probably be easier to argue about particulars if EFF had suggested any (though maybe they've made such feelers already in private).