skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I very much hope that some next big crypto / security library will be designed and tested in some rigorous language like Haskell, its key parts proven correct with something like Coq, and then an efficient and portable implementation code generated automatically.

A C implementation seems inevitable, but an easy-to-link Rust implementation would be very nice to have.
I'd like to know how hard (or easy) it would be to fool a PM into causing and unsafe fast heartbeat. I would imagine there are safeguards at a low level against such a fault. The easiest thing for a PM hacker to do, assuming they have close physical contact with the victim, would be to shut off the pacemaker and in most cases that would not do much more than cause dizziness or fainting.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing this with me. Looks great.
This looks like a way to beta test the drivers with enthusiasts who would likely have an Xbox One controller already. People who don't have one yet likely wouldn't go buy one to try early drivers, so it seems reasonable to reach out to the community through the Xbox channel.

(Disclaimer: I work at MS, nowhere near Xbox.)
Given that people are working on a high quality package manager, what do you gain when you "flip the switch" and make it official, rather than just having it be the most used HTTP package?
What is the upside to an amoral Andreesen of broadcasting an opinion that is extremely unpopular with the people who make up his dealflow?
> Sounds like compatibility is fine? Honestly, I'm okay with the 360 pad support taking over--Almost every controller had a standard button layout, but with the buttons oddly numbered from controller to controller. Newer controllers all mapping to 360 buttons has simplified everything.

It was indeed annoying that the pad manufacturers couldn't get their shit together and agree on a button ordering, but that doesn't excuse Microsoft inventing an entirely new and unnecessary standard instead of just declaring their own canonical ordering.
Hey Adrian, thanks for the honest feedback. Very much appreciated. Prior to building this landing page to further validate my own assumptions on the need for this type of product, I conducted some user testing and interviewed 10-12 UXers and asked them a series of questions about their current use of personas in their workflow, time allocation to them as deliverables, feedback and iteration process, and pitfalls they experience while developing them. The takeaway for me was learning that UXers value personas as a tool for driving design decisions, but would welcome a faster more efficient way to create them, a better way to share and collaborate with stakeholders and speeding up the iteration process. So that's ultimately what led me to the MVP feature set.

Obviously no product is a good fit for everyone, but if it solves a problem for enough people, its worth pursuing :)
Traitor is such a strong word… To think the NSA is worried about Snowden, really at all, is kind of comical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6y4vjADwY

I started college at UIUC in 1995 just after Andreessen took the NCSA Mosaic code and turned it into Netscape, and I remember several of the older CS students and TAs were miffed at him for doing so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

I’ve always taken that story as a sign that if you want to get rich in tech, theft (er, borrowing) is a surefire way to do it. Maybe Andreessen is jealous that someone stole the spotlight for the public good instead of private gain.
Let's remove the comments for a more visually fair comparison:

class Person {
String name;
Person(this.name);
}

vs

class Person(val name: String)

Ok, you save a line. I don't think that's a big deal. Also, the Dart version is very clear about what's a field or not. The first example I found of Scala classes on their site is this:

class Point(xc: Int, yc: Int) {
var x: Int = xc
var y: Int = yc
def move(dx: Int, dy: Int) {
x = x + dx
y = y + dy
}
override def toString(): String = "(" + x + ", " + y + ")";
}

With text that says `x` and `y` are the fields. What about `xc` and `yc`, I thought those were the fields?

Another thing I like about Dart is that the possible variations on the constructors fall into place, consistently:

No constructor args:

class Person {
String name;
}

Optional constructor args:

class Person {
String name;
Person({this.name});
}

Super call:

class Person extends Animal {
String name;
Person(this.name) : super() ;
}

The short Scala form may do that as well for all I know,
Apple’s desire to provide open source products (none)

This trope drives me nuts. Go here: http://www.opensource.apple.com

You'll find a bunch of open-source projects that Apple has contributed code to (LLVM, WebKit, CUPS), as well as a bunch that they wrote and released (launchd, clang). They've recently released their ARM64 backend for LLVM.

I will be surprised—extremely so—if Apple choose not to open-source Swift. It has no downsides for them, and it's obvious that many people will simply refuse to get involved with it if they don't.
> [...] the Russians and Chinese governments now know what the NSA is up to [...]

I really fail to see which part of the Snowden revelations does directly help foreign agencies. They probably knew most of the things he disclosed years before, because it's their job to know in contrast with the average citizen who has other things to worry about.
Twitter to acquire Namo Media
I really, really think we need a new breed of 'venture socialists' for the lack of better term that will optimize investment BOTH for potential returns and social good.
Someone else addressed your third point but I wanted to address the first one as well. I write code in C++ almost every day for work. I wouldn't teach C++ to a child as their first programming language. I'd probably want to teach them a simple language that focuses on the building blocks of code that allow problem solving. Things like loops, conditionals and variables. I wouldn't want them to ever need to worry about things like integer overflows, floating point arithmetic, memory allocation, preprocessors, templates or any low level details. This doesn't mean the ideal teaching language would be stodgy and useless. It just needs to offer an appropriate level of abstraction for the current age and experience level of the learner.
Seth Lloyd: A Turing Test for Free Will [9:15]
DesignFinder – Find every design asset on your system
I am not surprised that the NSA is spying on US citizens. I am angry.

The "I can't believe people are surprised..." trope is dismissive and condescending.
Open Mesh
I think you guys are in a great position now to implement a server/client solution in Swift. Effectively re-create Parse in Swift but I imagine CloudKit may have these aspirations? Any comments on what sort of competition the CloudKit brings to the BaaS table?
What parts of Swift (a compiled, statically-typed language) make it YADSL?
I don’t know much about Haskell, but I looked up `let`’s documentation, and I think it already does support embedded structures like you ask for. You can just write `p2 = delay (1/4) $ p1` (and you can also leave out the `$` because `p1` is already atomic). I think the site’s example repeats the definition of `p1` just to make reading the example clearer, not because you are forced to code like that.
I would never claim that Apple is a fervent open source company, but here are a bunch of their open source projects:

http://www.macosforge.org/
Apple hasn't so much contributed to LLVM and Webkit as fundamentally enabled them, right? Chris Lattner is an engineering lead at Apple, for instance.

I agree with your prediction about Swift being open sourced. Among other things: as nice as Swift might be, its #1 value proposition is "easy to build iOS applications in", so the more people using it the bigger the developer base for iOS becomes. I can't see the downside to opening it.

That doesn't, however, mean they'll open it up on HN's preferred schedule.
Decline of Monarch butterflies linked to modern agriculture
Test a JPG for Progressive Rendering
Very much what i've been looking/waiting for but how does it handle things when i share the link to a mailing list like a yahoo group for example?
I like my Swopper http://www.swopper.com
Sperm-inspired microrobots controlled by magnetic fields
He did give up on GPG, and instead used Cryptocat, at a time during which it appears to have been possible to decrypt Cryptocat conversations from network traces due to key generation bugs.
As far as I am aware no information has been revealed that is specific to a national security target only information that targets millions of innocent civilians. I would hope and expect that the intelligence community has much more invasive and targeted tools they deploy against genuine national security threats than what has been revealed so far.

Edit: To clarify, I'm sure Al-Qaeda already knew not to trust any computer, or cell phone that they used because they were probably completely compromised. So nothing that has been revealed by ES would change their behaviour.

Edit 2: Also, it doesn't matter. The most important thing for our civilization is not personal or national security but our democracy. A 'security state' is never democratic. Its people are never free.
I think one of the gifs is the facepalm scene from Naked Gun 33 1/3.
I'm an European and treason and espionage are political crimes (they not against universal ethics in any way). If Snowden is a traitor, then he spied on my behalf against U.S. government. For me and many other citizens of so called free word he is a hero. He should get a medal.

In U.S. media the discussion centers around Americans being spied and if that is illegal. As a non-American, I see U.S. UK and other mass surveillance countries as constantly attacking me personally. As more and more people feel the same way, it will eventually have real consequences to U.S. interests. It might take generation or two, but it will happen. Why would U.S. want to make new enemies?

First world countries are very interdependent on each other and this kind of attacking harms us all. Even in the cynical machtpolitik world view this can be seen as shortsighted strategy.
Again, by running out of money before the market comes to its senses. I'm not sure what's confusing about this.
Milky Way may bear 100 million life-giving planets | Cornell Chronicle
This is an extensively amended and much weaker claim than your first.
I think the people behind TrueCrypt deserve some recognition - they solved an extremely difficult problem much better than it had ever been solved before. It's unfortunate they never got Windows 8 compatibility before shutting down.
Clang comes to mind. You can see all their opensource stuffs on the Apple website

https://opensource.apple.com/
Ask HN: 10 questions to test myself?
I have been studying python for quite a while now.. After some weeks of initial studying, I felt confident enough and started to learn frameworks (Flask), and started to work on a project for practice..

Last week, suddenly it hit me that I am not even proficient in Python itself to begin for a project, so I got back to the learning and doing the practice exercises available in PySchools and coderbyte.

I have already completed 140 exercises out of 211 in pyschools without much hiccup, but I still feel that I am not proficient enough.., I am seriously not sure, how much knowledge do I actually have on the language..

If you could give me any 10 questions in python or in programming general that an programmer could answer and that if i could get the answer without much effort, i will get some confident..

HMO...
Also, FYI, most Unix-like systems have a correct 'magic' file so that running the command: file filename.jpg will say whether or not the image is progressive.
I have walked non-technical people through the process of setting up GPGMail on Macs without much problem. I buy that GPGMail is hard to use reliably, and that its user interface is cryptic in ways that make it likely that users will slip up. I do not buy that GPG is particularly hard to get started with.

Unfortunately, all the glamour and the money and the code seems to track vanity crypto projects, and not so much of it goes to projects that make GPG more usable for normal people. Kudos to Google for taking a stab at correcting this.
To make them immune to the ARP spoofing in the general case is hard, but as I understand it, to make them immune to the specific case of clients other than the gateway impersonating the gateway (which is what people want to do for most MitM) is pretty straightforward. The access point is probably itself the gateway most of the time, so it knows the gateway's MAC (its own), and it can reliably refuse to forward ARP packets for other MACs claiming to be the gateway.
In other news; Pope is a catholic, bears shit in the woods.
is this affiliated with stack overflow?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.3225
US immigration didn't allow us to build a team here, so we built one in Colombia
Number 3: http://media.disquscdn.com/errors/img/3.gif
Andreessen hits a point when he says what foreign government knew full well that they where spied upon. We have to remember that those revelations are for the public.
Given how easy it was for Snowden to acquire these documents it's not far fetched to think that the other groups of power already had access to them. And they are collaborating with the US anyways.
Politicians cry outrage to calm down the public. As if they where the victims. Funny how they never talk about what counter-measures could be applied. Shouldn't it be our countries responsibility to ensure that the Internet is not bugged at least in the realm of the country ?
First, I think that last tweet is actually pretty funny. What's wrong with a little black humor?

Also, because of the Torvalds mention earlier in this thread, I thought it'd be interesting to compare the people you mention here to him. Almost all of them look quite tame when you compare their behavior to Torvalds's. Kane's online persona does run toward being a jerk, and is probably the only one that could stand toe-to-toe with Torvalds in terms of brashness and hostility.

So why do these "very aggressive" people bother you so much, when Torvalds is generally seen as something of a hero? Are you willing to rate Torvalds's behavior as being just as "toxic" as theirs? The fictional QA report you describe in a later post actually sounds quite a lot like some stuff Torvalds has written. Do you have a similarly dutifully-annotated post in storage that details all of Torvalds's sins? Does his behavior set OSS back in the same way you claim these people set their communities back?

Maybe we should start referring to Torvalds as a "very aggressive programmer" ...

Note: I realize this post relies quite a bit on things I can't know. "ta140604" may very well think Torvalds is just as problematic as the people he discusses here. The point is to add a little context, and give you something to chew on the next time you see a post like this, where "a wild pseudonym appears!" expressly to smear a group of people that question the status quo. Yes, it's entirely likely that these people are all huge jerks. Most of us are jerks. But why are we so concerned with the fact that they, specifically, are jerks, when we don't give a shit about it in most everyone else?
Paul Graham on how to make startups succeed
I'd give about 95% odds that Swift will be open sourced relatively soon. That's just how Apple works at this level. They kept WebKit open source. They adopted LLVM and kept their contributions open when they could have easily made a closed fork. They built and open sourced clang even though there was nothing requiring them to.

But another aspect of how Apple works is that they love secrecy and hate making promises. They built an ARM64 backend for LLVM in private, and the first time anyone found out it existed was when they announced the iPhone 5S with an ARM64 CPU. They still ended up releasing the source code.

Right now, even the Swift compiler binary isn't publicly available. You have to have a paid developer membership to obtain it. They wouldn't open the source at this stage regardless. They most likely will, but they also most likely won't commit to anything until the initial public release.
Here's what I said up above

"As it stands I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of nodes were operated by various national intelligence agencies simply because they have vastly more incentive to do so than anyone else.
Potentially being able to profit from this changes things dramatically and gives people who wouldn't consider themselves stakeholders actual reason to 'sell' their bandwidth to the tor network."

It's possible that most of the nodes aren't run for altruistic reasons at all. And are in fact run to datamine the network to discover the identity of people using it.

Paying people won't affect the people who are doing it for altruistic reasons alone, their price is already met. It's just an added bonus for them. But it will have the affect of bringing in additional people who wouldn't have considered it before. The only problem with the daycare's solution is the fact they didn't charge enough to offset the "cost" of feeling bad about being late. To the customers it was a worthy exchange.

Similarly, the tor coin needs to have a value that will offset the 'cost' of feeling bad about not contributing to the network which I know is extremely low.
"This is something people have got very upset at me for saying this. I think if you actually follow the NSA and read the books and the articles and understood the history, I think you generally assume that they were doing pretty much everything that's come out."

So if we already suspected/knew what NSA was doing, then what harm did Snowden cause by basically only verifying our suspicions?
It's really helpful when people stand up and identitfy themselves as being enthusiastic members of 'Team Police State' without having to drag it out of them. There are definitely traitors to the cause of freedom in this whole affair, but Snowden is far from being one.
lets not forget nacl/sodium :)
"Compiled" is a pretty tricky thing, even Python and Ruby are "compiled".

How about "Yet Another Syntax Without Any Interesting Semantics, With a Bonus of Being Proprietary" (YASWAISWBBP)
Hey ediblenergy. Nope, it's just a coincidence.
Using Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest usually means you are broadcasting content you want everyone to see and like.

When you want a more contextual and relevant conversation with an individual or group, or you want to annotate with highlights on a page, we believe Kifi is a great solution.
How Hubspot's VPE Hired First 40 Engineers
(Redesigned) Google Docs
Few people already admitted to using upvotes as a way to save interesting stories to be revisited later (heck, I did it myself a few times), so I think this situation doesn't have that much to say about anything ;).
Google makes money on GMail by reading your email and serving related ads. They will never support built-in encryption.
>Joda-Time doesn't copy 100% java.util.date but I don't know what the threshold is.

I think they're safe, especially given that the process has actually come full circle now.

The new date time package in Java 8 (java.time) was developed under JSR310, whose spec lead is none other than the developer of Joda-Time, Stephen Colebourne [1]

For those that are interested, he wrote an interesting blog post way back in 2009 on why they chose to develop JSR-310 instead of using Joda as is [2], as well a more recent piece on the bits that didn't make the cut (and are thus now part of a separate project) [3].

[1] https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=310

[2] http://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda-time_4941....

[3] http://blog.joda.org/2014/02/new-project-threeten-extra-for-...
Exactly, Andreessen is upset that the government is doing things that affects his investments, end of story.
Does anyone know if they are planning perspective (affine) transformation? Specifically, relief maps drawn at the correct (or exaggerated) elevation, with the labels still drawn upright?
I'm not a good person to argue with about Snowden's status as a traitor or a spy, because I don't think he is one either.

As for the rest of your comment: I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them. Obviously, people in the UK have the weakest argument here (there's an argument that the UK's SIGINT programs are even more aggressive than those of the NSA), but the arguments for, say, Germany and France aren't that much stronger.

(Also: If there's a SIGINT conspiracy theory I do buy into, it's that every modern country in the world is culpable for SIGINT, because they leverage their partners for access to SIGINT that they cannot lawfully generate themselves, on a quid-pro-quo basis.)

You see this manifest itself all the time with supposed privacy startups launching from the "safe confines" of Switzerland, a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.

An assertion I believe to be true that would I think be helpful if more people understood: NSA surveillance --- however unwise much of it is, and I think there's a lot of unwise and unlawful stuff happening --- is not a secret effort to create a New World Order headed by the NSA. It's a means to an objective shared by most (if not all) of Europe. European companies don't cooperate with NSA because they're afraid of NSA; they cooperate because they have shared interests --- both in security (terrorists are a greater threat to Europe than to the US) and politically (China and Russia have as much if not more influence over the economies and geopolitical status of Europe as they do to the US).
Whereas i'd say it should definitely be based on Stephen Colebourne's ThreeTen, which is the successor to Joda-Time:

http://www.threeten.org/

http://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda-time_4941....

The language constructs might not be as close to Rust's, but the semantics benefit from years of additional experience and thought.
I thought they were compelled to open source WebKit since it was based on LGPL code?
> I find it odd that Andreessen seemed most upset about effects the disclosures have had

Why? Silicon Valley VCs know exactly what they are building - massive repositories of user information to datamine for the highest bidders.

The NSA does not require exclusive use, is independently funding datamining research, and has subpoenas - so they are a natural early client.

These facts have been plain as day to anybody who thinks about the implications of their technology choices. Most don't, so the services become widely adopted and even quite hip (unfortunately).

Snowden comes along and ignites the media in a way that Binney and Klein hadn't, just as the pendulum is starting to naturally swing towards decentralization. It is now in the public consciousness that perhaps these companies are not to be blindly trusted with the contents of your life.

Of course Andreessen is pissed. The entire business model of modern SV has been illustrated.
For the first time in ten years, I no longer covet a position at CCP. Thanks for that.
It seems like the author was able to discover the vulnerability while in the process of specifying it in Coq (understanding the handshakes better during specification).

From what I read the Coq specification itself wasn't complete or used to discover the vulnerability.

Would be great if the author shed some light here.
Glad you like it! Thanks for replying and let us know what your friends think about it :)
>Which I doubt a lot; it's too interesting, and the most boring narrative always wins.

Ptacek's razor?
Then why is so much whitespace in the .html? I mean, there doesn't seem to be a Easteregg encoded in Whitespace …
Swift is a lot like Scala